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Oddly enough Cassie found it easier to see the bluffs in the growing darkness than she had during the day. As the sun slipped behind the hills she found it easier to make out the low scrub brush and the subtle differences between the color of grass and open dirt. It was probably wiser to wait at the campsite for someone to find her. Yet the discordant echoes rising from below the dirt made her more and more anxious.

So she set out to follow Marius’ path through the earth via sound, carefully picking her way over the bluffs while occasionally pausing to press an ear to the ground. Thankfully, the Tetzlani man had conjured a particularly large elemental and it was easy to hear. Far easier than crossing the bluffs herself.

As she picked her way down the hill Marius had chosen for his campsite Cassie found her mind wandering. The mercenary had told her the ground below Oakheart Manor resisted his calls. This reluctance to answer him he assigned to her, which was a very curious conclusion to reach in her opinion. She didn’t know the bluffs very well. She hadn’t stayed in the vicinity long and, in the time she’d spent there, she hadn’t invested any of it in walking the hills or singing to the stones in the way she might have in Avalon.

Yet there was no reason to doubt Marius’ assessment, either. The man was clearly a very skilled lithomancer, perhaps the best she had met in person, and that was a much more formal school of magic than stonesong. He undoubtedly did a lot of book study in the process of mastering his craft. He didn’t have a reason to lie to her about it, either. Perhaps it had something to do with the bluffs themselves or some quirk of their history. She would have to ask Roy about it at some point, when there were less pressing issues to deal with.

However the issues of the moment left little time for her musings. As she made her way across the valley between one hill and the next an incredible racket rose up from nearby. That made it very apparent which bluff Oakheart Manor stood on, although with her vision clearing more by the minute she could probably have made her way there without the sound to guide her in another half an hour or so.

Whether going to the Manor at that moment was a good idea or not was an open question.

In point of fact, it wasn’t. As Cassie’s foot fell on the worn dirt path leading up to the Manor house she heard the distant whine from Marius’ blood funnel once more. This time it rang clarion through the open air, filled with a deep, heartbreaking hatred. Layered through the long, keening note was a story of loss, of broken bonds, of a fellowship once strong and nourishing now reduced to dust and ashes.

With the sound came a wash of hot, dry air. It smelled of warm stone, beat on her skin like sunlight and sucked the moisture out of her mouth and nose all at once. A lifetime of experience warned her this wasn’t real. It was a revelation, an echo in the earth so powerful it moved beyond sound and became a full sensory apparition. Stone song at its most powerful and sinister.

Not even her weakened vision was immune to the influence of the wail, the view shifting from dim shadows on a dirt path to the sharp stone edges of an early morning mountainside. Cassie’s head spun with vertigo as the rocks rushed past her. It had been a long time since the song had brought her an apparition like this and her body hadn’t been prepared for it.

Somewhere else, Cassie sat down hard on the ground. In the vision, she ran over the rocks, looking around frantically as she scrambled down the mountainside.

Brennan!

It was Roy’s voice, high and desperate, coming from her. Cassie had never seen a vision from a living person before and briefly wondered why this would be her first. Seeing through his eyes it was impossible to tell if this was a glimpse of the past or the future.

Their shared vision latched onto a patch of pale blue cotton that stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the brown stones and brown dirt of the mountain. They turned and ran towards it at full tilt, skidding around brush and leaping over rocks with reckless abandon. At first Cassie thought it was just a jacket. Then she realized her mistake.

It was a jacket wrapped around a strangely misshapen pile of rock.

Brennan!

They dropped to the ground and grabbed the jacket and one edge of the stone within it then heaved it up and over. The ugly thing resisted their efforts for a moment then finally rolled over as they let out an anguished groan. As she’d feared, it wasn’t just a rock. It was a man whose body had hardened to stone, his eyes blank and unseeing. The individual hairs of his neatly trimmed beard were clearly visible for a moment before the movement broke the delicate rock threads apart. The most surreal part was his mouth, half open as if to say something, with the teeth and tongue clearly visible inside.

Dust and ashes. They reared up to their feet, gaze fixed on a familiar, pitted hunk of stone cradled in the statue’s hands. Coalstoking cult!

In that moment, as Roy stood up, rocked back on one leg and stomped Huaxili’s cornerstone out of Brennan’s hands, Cassie felt herself separate from the vision. As the apparition faded one last whisper drifted down the side of the bluff to her. But it wasn’t Roy’s voice this time. It was deep, husky and feminine, full of contempt and desire, and it said one word. Mine.

The mountainside faded into the shadowed bluff once more, leaving Cassie shivering and confused. The rumbling, crackling cacophony on the top of the bluff was still going but she ignored it. Dread gripped her again but she was starting to understand it. There was a difference between this and the mindless panic she’d experienced at the top of the lighthouse but they both felt unnatural.

One was the work of a deranged man’s conjurings, the other the influence of Huaxili. The fact Roy hadn’t mentioned the Tetzlani god was, in fact, a goddess annoyed Cassie, as it probably had something to do with why she was the only one Huaxili had influenced. When she was young she’d spent a year with the Heath Keepers. Her father believed developing a closer connection with the Lady in Burning Stone would give her songs greater force. However it was possible it had also made her more open to other earthly elementals like Huaxili.

The other possibility was that Huaxili herself disliked Cassie. Though their connection had been brief and veiled in a vision of Roy’s past, Cassie could sense the deep bitterness and jealousy of the entity. She suspected it had little of it was directed at her but rather originated from the nature of the goddess. Where the Lady was a warm, nurturing creature who balanced her husband’s cold, distant nature; Huaxili was grasping and possessive and, if she had ever had a relationship to balance her flaws, it was now long gone.

Clearly, when Roy had claimed the cornerstone the goddess had marked him in some way. If Marius was right about how the artifact’s malicious magic lived in some blindspot inherent to firespinners that made matters worse, since he had no idea Huaxili had staked a claim on him. For a split second Cassie saw another vision.

Roy Harper, turned to stone, wedged into the base of a sprawling temple complex built on the backs of countless people transformed to statues, aware of their fate for millennia as they slowly wore away to dust. She wasn’t sure if this apparition came from Huaxili or her own talents but she knew it was unacceptable. As it passed Cassie scrambled to her feet, trying to clamp down on the unnatural panic.

She managed to stagger a few steps up the trail but quickly found herself gasping for breath, heart racing, physically unable to continue. Frustrated, she stopped and forced herself to breathe slowly and deliberately. She had performed in front of hundreds of people, sung to ghosts on behalf of death and seen the faces of creatures from beyond the horizon. She should be able to master this. 

She felt a spark of annoyance at the waves of unnatural emotion and seized on it with a flash of inspiration. That was how Roy did it, after all. Whenever he wandered into a situation where normal people might get discouraged or afraid he would stoke up a disgruntled fury in himself to replace that feeling. She’d seen him do it time and again.

Of course, Cassie wasn’t nearly as irritable as he was but when she contemplated Huaxili’s constant meddling she got more and more angry. Inhaling deeply she slapped the side of the bluff with the flat of her hand. “This is my stage, Huaxili. Get off. Your whining is a terrible tune to begin with.”

A shrieking crash came from overhead as the sky lit up with a boom then everything went quiet. Cassie wasn’t sure what had happened but she took it as an opportunity and started towards the top of the bluff. Another wave of panic washed over her but she muttered, “What do you want with Roy, anyway? Annoyed that he’s ignoring you? He’s quite good at that you know, gets caught up in his work and can’t think about anything else. You’re more used to ignoring people than being ignored, aren’t you?”

A final wave of panic, the weakest yet, broke over her but now she could ignore it, her march up the path picking up speed as she gathered her skirts in one hand. “He’s not yours, Huaxili,” she muttered, “and it’s high time you left him alone.”