Brackengloom Book Two

The Hollow still carried the scent of the dead.When the wind moved through Vaelmiren’s highest branches, it carried quiet echoes across the city, soft as dust settling on bone. The Roots remembered every life woven into their ancient veins, every spirit that slipped from their cradle of living wood. Some memories were gentle. Some were jagged. The Serathi too, remember their losses, many lives were lost, but the few that hit hardest were those closest to the King and Queen.Kael Durness, the Mountclaw Handler.Dame Morra Lyshenne, sister of the knighthood.Their names drifted through the Rootspire like petals that refused to fall. The city whispered for them in the half-light before dawn, when the canopy glowed faintly with sleeping sap and grief lay heavy in the air. Vaelric often stood at the eastern terrace in those hours, when light gathered slowly, careful not to disturb the night’s long silence. He rested one hand against the warm living bark and let memory move through him like a bruise touched once more. Kael’s laughter in the training courts, the Mountclaw Handler’s steady patience with beasts twice his size. Dame Morra Lyshenne final prayer beneath the collapsing spire.Gone.The Rootlight that once answered their breath had faded. Only thin traces remained, curling through the city’s memory-vines like threads of smoke.Beyond Vaelmiren’s branches, other realms mourned as well.The Elf-kin of Thornlight Vale had sent offerings woven from moon petals, drifting across the sky like pale spirits. Their glow dimmed before reaching the Hollow, swallowed by the strange violet shimmer rising from the depths. The Elder Gnomes placed small bronze bells along Whispering Bridge, each one forged for the fallen. The wind touched them rarely now, as though the air itself hesitated to disturb the grief stitched into their metal. All across the Five-Rooted Lands, mourning felt incomplete, unfinished, as though the world held its breath, waiting for another loss it already sensed coming.Vaelric carried these deaths in the quiet space behind his ribs. Some nights he pressed his palm against that place, feeling the echo of three lives he could not save. The Veinmark beneath his skin pulsed faintly, a reminder that survival often demanded a price no king wished to pay. The Hollow had survived the battle. The Serathi had endured. But the cost had not been buried. The world still bled beneath them. The Vein still stirred.And the dead had begun to whisper again.