They left the ruins behind and did not stop until the pale bones and the memory of the miasma were well out of sight.
Two days' walk north brought them to a place worth stopping in, a wide green hollow where a waterfall spilled off a low cliff into a clear pool, ringed by broad-leafed trees and thick soft grass.
It was not so different from the first hollow they had ever made a home in, a whole world and a whole rank ago, and none of them said so out loud, but they all felt it. A good place. A safe place. The right place to cross a threshold.
They made camp, and secured it with their woven formations, and only then did they sit down together in the grass to reckon what they had.
Erix laid the three resources out between them in the firelight. The golden fruit, heavy and warm. The silver essence, gathered in a sealed skin, moving faintly of its own accord. And the two halves of the great dark core, still ringing with an enormous Skyward weight even split and dead.
