The Healer Who Silenced the Gods

Chapter 5 — The God in the Dark

The Mirewood thinned as the caravan pressed north, trees shrinking into scraggly brush as if afraid to follow. But Erynd couldn’t shake the feeling that the forest wasn’t retreating it was watching.

Every breath of wind felt like a whisper at his back. Every shadow felt one second behind him. Ressa kept him at her side, one hand always resting on the hilt of her curved dagger.

She was alert. Too alert. Like she expected the road itself to rise up and attack. “How much farther?” Erynd asked, desperate to fill the silence.

“Half a day to Denfar crossing. A healer’s guild there might take you in.”

Erynd doubted that deeply. “And after Denfar?”

Ressa shrugged. “Depends if you want to keep running.”

Erynd didn’t answer. Because he didn’t know. As they crested a rocky rise, a scream tore through the air.

A guard slumped against a wagon wheel, clutching his skull. Blood streamed from his nose, and threads, faint and bright, flickered at his temples.

Erynd’s vision sharpened before he could resist. His life-thread isn’t breaking… it’s being pulled.

Erynd knelt, pressing his palm gently to the man’s neck. The threads quivered like frightened birds beneath his touch. “Stay still,” Erynd murmured. “Just breathe.”

The guard choked out, “It—hurts”

Erynd’s power surged, eager to be used. The divine seal burned beneath his skin. He could fix this. He should fix this. But a warning echoed inside him: Every life you touch remembers what you are.

He pulled his hand back, trembling. Ressa knelt beside him. “Can you heal him or not?”

Erynd swallowed hard. “Yes. But if I do… they’ll find us faster.”

“Who?”

He met her eyes, terrified of the answer: “The ones who want me dead.”

Ressa stood slowly. “Then make your choice, healer.”

It wasn’t really a choice. Not for him. Erynd reached again, and the world of light swallowed him whole.

Threads coiled and sang beneath his fingertips. The pain siphoning through the guard’s life wavered, crumbled, dissolved.

The man gasped, shuddering into relief. Erynd collapsed back, pulse racing, ears ringing, the forest’s whispers returning: He undoes. He awakens. He consumes.

High Healer Kael descended into the Hall’s forbidden vaults, a place older than the empire itself. Torches sputtered against walls carved with the same seven-lined seal now burned into Erynd’s flesh.

A sentinel followed carefully. “Master Kael, the council demands an answer. Reports say the boy has power”

“No,” Kael snapped. “He has sin.”

They stopped before a cracked stone door. Pale light seeped through the fracture like spilled moonlight.

The sentinel whispered, “This chamber… It was never supposed to open.”

Kael pressed his hand to the seal. The stone groaned, splitting wider.

Inside lay a room lined with chains. Those chains held a figure neither dead nor living, its skin pale as marble, eyes hollow, a gaping void where a voice once lived.

The First Healer. The god the Hall had silenced. Its broken jaw cracked open, and a voice like gravel and stars rasped: “He lives.”

Kael’s composure shattered. “That monster must never remember what he was. We buried him. We ended him!”

Chains rattled. The figure’s head tilted. “You ended nothing. The Silence rises.”

Kael staggered back. The sentinel blanched. All through the vaults… bells began tolling without being touched. Kael hissed a single word: “Erynd.”

Erynd sat alone after the guard’s recovery, staring at his trembling hands. His fingertips sparked with brief, fading gold. Ressa approached, softer than Erynd had ever heard her. “You saved him.”

Her voice held awe. And fear. Erynd’s throat tightened. “Every time I do, I lose myself a little more.”

“Maybe,” she said, “you’re not losing yourself. Maybe you’re finding what was taken.”

He wanted to believe her. He couldn’t. Before he could answer, the little girl peeked from the wagon, hugging her blanket tight. “Are you an angel?” she asked.

Erynd’s heart clenched. “No,” he whispered. “Angels don’t get thrown out of temples.”

She frowned, thinking hard. Then said, simply: “Maybe they do. If the temple is wrong.”

Erynd stared, the truth in her voice like a blow. The wind shifted. Far behind them, a ripple of black smoke slithered along the road, Threadwraiths tracking the trail he’d left in the guard’s restored soul.

Coming fast. Ressa saw them too. Her jaw locked. “Looks like we run.”

Erynd stood, darkness closing like a mouth around them. “No,” he said quietly.

He stepped toward the encroaching shadow, the seal burning molten gold across his palm. “We fight.”