THE HEIR OF THE FORGOTTEN GOD

CHAPTER 6:What Aldric Knows

The market hit them like a physical wall, thick with the stench of salted cod brought down on heavy timber wagons from the northern coast. Brine, wet wool, and sour mule dung cut through the mountain air, colliding with the yeasty crust of cheap loaves frying in tallow near the river crossing. It was the unwashed, chaotic heartbeat of a border town on market day: loud, abrasive, and utterly indifferent to two fugitives slipping through its gut.

​Aldric moved through the crush with the practiced ease of a man used to putting livestock and soft bodies between himself and a archer's sightline. Cassian stayed half a pace back, his left heel grinding into a sharp, white-hot throb that made him limp despite his best efforts to keep his stride even over the frost-buckled cobbles.

​"There," Aldric muttered, jerking his chin toward a timber stall squeezed tightly between a seed merchant's barrels and an old woman selling unglazed clay pots.

​Rows of cobbled workboots dangled from a cedar pole above a low, grease-stained bench. The cobbler behind it gave Cassian’s worn leather a four-second glance before naming his price with a grunt: eight coppers. Over half of what Cassian owned in the world. He paid without arguing; the alternative was walking on exposed bone before the sun hit the western peaks.

​Cassian sank onto the stall’s pine step, his knees aching as the cobbler set to work with quick, brutal efficiency. Aldric lingered a few paces back, thumb resting near his belt, his eyes casually tracking the movement of every cloak and cart in the plaza.

​"The text I mentioned," Aldric said quietly, his raspy voice easily swallowed by the nearby haggling over winter cabbage, "it belonged to a historian in Dunvaris. The one the Conclave erased while I happened to be in the ward." He kept his gaze fixed on the crowd, his jaw barely moving. "I hauled three books out of his study right before they torched the rafters. Didn't know what I had. Read them later when I was sitting out a snowstorm."

​"What were they?" Cassian asked, watching the cobbler drive a row of iron tacks into a thick leather patch.

​"Two were accounts of the Divine War—pre-Church stuff, written before the clergy sanitized the annals," Aldric said, pausing briefly as a draft horse hauling a timber wagon rumbled past, setting the cobblestones vibrating beneath their boots. "The third was different. Older. Written in a dead script I could only half-translate, but it had diagrams. Physical markers that manifest in descendants when a dormant bloodline wakes up."

​The cobbler finished hammering the patch onto Cassian's heel, spat onto the packed dirt, and tossed the boot at his chest. Cassian pulled it on, laced the stiff leather tight, and stood up. The structural relief was immediate.

​"The mark on my palm," Cassian said, falling back into step as they navigated the crowded aisle.

​"Matched one of those diagrams line for line," Aldric said, his shoulder nudging a livestock trader out of their path. "The branching pattern, the way it roots straight into the lifeline. The text had a label beneath it. I could only decipher a fragment, but the word next to your specific mark translated to First."

​Cassian processed that in silence, his fingers twitching inside his pocket as two farmers shouted at each other over the price of turnips five feet away. "First as in the first seal."

​"That's my guess." Aldric pushed through a narrow gap between two sheep pens. "The pre-Church texts claim a divine power was shattered and locked away after the war. They're vague on the specifics—either the author was terrified or working with missing folios. But both texts agree on one thing: the sealing wasn't done to destroy a monster. It was done to hide something the victorious gods didn't want anyone else reaching."

​He pulled up near a row of grain barrels, turning his cold, heavy-lidded eyes onto Cassian.

​"Valuable to who?" Cassian flexed his right hand inside his coat, feeling the steady, rhythmic thrum pulsing deep against his palm.

​"That's the real question, isn't it?" The gray morning light caught the jagged, crooked line where Aldric's jaw had reset, giving his weathered face an unyielding, dangerous edge. "The Church preaches that the Forgotten God was a corrupting blight destroyed for the good of mankind. The older texts suggest something else entirely—that he was the only divine power who refused to go along with whatever the Seven were planning."

​"Planning what?"

​"The text didn't say. Or if it did, I couldn't read the dialect." Frustration flickered across Aldric's eyes before he smoothed it back into cold indifference. "The third book—the oldest one—had the answers, but the language was beyond me."

​They moved past the main market square, taking the gentle slope heading toward the heavy stone bridge that spanned the rushing river. Cassian absorbed every detail, filing it away with the quiet, methodical precision he had cultivated over three years of surviving in Lord Drost's household. "You said you left Dunvaris because of the Conclave. Why were you there in the first place?"

​Aldric didn't answer right away. They crossed onto the damp timber decking of the bridge, where the air turned frigid and smelled of cold spray from the white water roaring over the rocks below.

​"I served six years in the King's Guard," Aldric said finally, his tone flat and stripped of pride. "Good years, until a convoy escort went bad in the northern passes. Three men died under my command because I misread the terrain. The court of inquiry cleared me. I couldn't clear myself." He looked down at the gray water smashing against the stone piers below. "I handed in my sword. Spent a year drifting, taking work that didn't require a conscience, and ended up in Dunvaris hunting rumors of pre-Church relics a buyer claimed were worth a small fortune."

​"Were they?"

​"The buyer was an idiot, but the relics were real." Aldric glanced sideways at him. "I'm not a good man, Cassian. But I am a precise one. I don't run from fights I start, and I don't help strangers for free."

​"Then why are you helping me?"

​They stepped off the far side of the river span, where the market noise began to recede into the quiet expanse of the northern trail.

​"Because the Conclave murdered that historian," Aldric said, his voice dropping into a quiet, lethal register. "An old man who did nothing more dangerous than read dusty books. They burned him in his own bed and told the bailiff he died of an overturned oil lamp. I've spent three years looking for a way to settle that debt." He poked a heavy, calloused finger against Cassian's chest. "You have a mark on your hand that made the Conclave deploy inquisitors within hours. That makes you the best weapon I've found."

​Cassian looked out at the long, snow-dusted road stretching north toward the jagged mountain shadows. "I don't know where I'm going," he admitted, his voice barely carrying over the wind. "I don't know what this mark unlocks, or if there's anyone left who can explain it."

​"There might be." Aldric reached deep inside his woolen tunic, pulled out a slip of yellowed parchment—creased and soft from years of handling—and flicked it toward Cassian's chest. "There's a name in one of those stolen texts. A sanctuary in the Ashen Reach, maintained by a woman who collects the kind of history that gets people executed."

​Cassian unfolded the parchment carefully against the wind. Written in crude, dark ink was a single phrase: Vessel of the Seventh Record — The Ashenveil.

​"The Ashen Reach is three weeks north," Cassian said, scanning the script.

​"On foot, dodging patrols, and staying off the main road? Yes."

​"With the Conclave hunting us."

​"Also yes."

​Cassian folded the paper tightly and slipped it deep into his tunic, pressing it against his ribs right beside the second heart pulsing in his palm. He thought of Drost Manor—the freezing flagstones, the sharp crack of the silver bowl against his knuckles, the quiet cruelty of a master who viewed him as disposable stock. He thought of Maren slipping him bread in the dark, and the ancient voice that had echoed through his skull in the vault: You are the last.

​He was done being a servant.

​"Three weeks," Cassian said.

​"Give or take a few days." Aldric hitched his pack higher on his shoulders and turned his face toward the northern hills. "Let's move. Standing near the crossing makes us easy targets."

​Cassian fell into step beside him, his new leather patch holding firm against the frozen earth. The mark in his palm gave a low, resonant thrum, beating in quiet, perfect synchronization with his stride. Behind them, past the southern horizon, the Conclave was gathering; ahead lay three hundred miles of winter, a dead god's secret, and the woman who held the truth.