They did not move at first.
No order was given, and no decision was made. The City of Columns stood around them like a verdict already delivered, its endless pillars rising into the grey light of the valley. Each one seemed impossibly tall, carved with a precision that made them feel less like architecture and more like monuments left behind by a civilization that had never expected to vanish.
And at the center of it all stood the Odyr Tree.
It loomed above the silent city, its trunk so vast that even the fallen Giants scattered through the valley would have looked small beside it. Its bark was not rough like the trees of ordinary forests. It was layered, ancient, its surface carved with long grooves and fractures that seemed to spiral around the trunk like the slow movement of time itself.
The tree was still.
Silent.
Yet its presence pressed against their senses like an invisible weight.
The silence was suffocating.
It was not the silence of emptiness.
It was the silence of anticipation.
The kind of silence that exists in the breath between lightning and thunder.
It was as if the valley itself was holding its breath.
Amazal was the first to feel it.
It was not fear—he had known fear since the day of his exile.
This was something else.
A pressure gathered behind his eyes, faint but insistent, as though a distant thought were trying to reach him through the stone beneath his feet. His chest tightened slightly, his breath growing shallow without him noticing.
"Do you feel this?" he asked quietly.
His voice sounded smaller than he expected.
Jadig shifted his weight from one foot to the other, glancing uneasily toward the pillars surrounding them.
"If you mean the urge to run until my legs snap," he muttered, "then yes."
No one laughed.
Vaelor did not answer.
His eyes were fixed on the roots of the tree.
They had moved closer without realizing it.
The ground beneath the Odyr Tree was not simply stone. It was layers upon layers of rock, petrified soil, and the compressed remains of forests that must have existed long before the Giants ever walked this valley. The earth itself seemed crushed beneath the impossible weight of the tree's existence.
The roots did not merely rest upon that ground.
They reclaimed it.
Each root was thicker than a tower, twisting through the broken stone before splitting apart and merging again like massive serpents weaving through the earth. Their surfaces were marked with deep grooves that ran along their length.
At first glance they looked like scars left by time.
But the longer one stared at them, the less they resembled erosion.
They looked deliberate.
Almost like writing.
Cillian stepped forward slowly, drawn by something she could not name.
She knelt beside one of the roots.
Up close the grooves were even stranger. They curved and intersected in patterns that felt almost intentional, as though they were fragments of a language carved into living wood.
She ran her fingers gently along one shallow line.
The moment her skin touched it, she jerked her hand back.
Not in pain.
In shock.
Her pulse skipped for a moment as she stared at the space beneath her fingertips.
Those grooves…
They were not merely cracks in the wood.
"It flickered," Cillian whispered.
Her voice carried a confusion she rarely showed.
"I saw a light."
The others turned toward her.
"A faint glow," she continued slowly. "Pale… like a vein beneath the surface. It ran through the wood for just a moment."
She swallowed.
"Then it vanished the instant I focused on it."
Ikida stepped closer, studying the root carefully.
"A language?" he asked.
Vaelor's gaze drifted to Cillian's trembling hand.
"Life," he murmured.
Then, after a moment:
"Or what remains of it."
He drew a slow breath.
"Some texts described the Odyr Tree as a witness," he said quietly.
His voice had lost the excitement it carried earlier.
"Others called it a judge."
Jadig folded his arms.
"And which one is it?" he asked.
Vaelor's expression darkened.
"No one ever agreed," he replied.
He glanced toward the towering branches above them.
"And no one ever agreed which of those was worse."
"Reassuring," Jadig scoffed.
A wind swept through the valley.
It was not strong.
It was not cold.
It was…
intentional.
The branches of the Odyr Tree did not sway like ordinary trees.
They moved.
Slowly.
Together.
The motion was precise and collective, like the subtle shift of a colossal creature adjusting its posture after a long sleep.
Amazal stiffened.
For a single moment he felt the pulse beneath his feet grow stronger.
A faint tremor ran through the ground.
Then
a sound.
Not from above.
From deep within the city.
A grinding noise followed, slow and deliberate, as though stone itself were being forced to move under a will it could not resist.
Dust drifted from one of the distant pillars.
They all turned at once.
One of the petrified Giants standing near the outer edge of the city had cracked.
The sound had come from its chest.
It did not shatter.
It did not collapse.
A thin fracture had opened along the surface of its stone skin, beginning at the shoulder and crawling slowly downward across its torso like a dark vein spreading beneath the rock.
Small fragments of stone fell from the fissure and shattered quietly against the ground below.
Then
nothing.
The Giant remained frozen in the same position.
Arm half-raised.
Mouth open in a scream that had never finished.
The silence returned.
But it was no longer the same silence.
"They are… not dead," Jadig whispered.
His voice was barely audible.
Vaelor stared at the cracked Giant.
"No," he said slowly.
"They are… suspended."
Ikida took a step backward before he realized he had moved.
"Suspended… until what?"
No one answered.
Because the question did not belong to them.
Amazal felt it then.
Clearer than before.
A pull.
But it was not pulling him toward the Odyr Tree.
It was pulling him away from it.
He turned sharply.
His eyes scanned the outer ring of columns, the endless forest of stone pillars that framed the silent city.
The shadows between them had deepened.
"There," he said suddenly.
His breathing quickened.
"Something… is wrong over there."
Nothing moved.
Yet the silence had shifted.
Vaelor closed his eyes briefly.
When he opened them again, the certainty in them had faded.
"We should not stay."
Jadig stared at him in disbelief.
"You are the one saying that?"
"Yes," Vaelor replied quietly.
"And that alone should worry you."
Another sound reached them.
Closer now.
Not stone.
A breath.
Slow.
Massive.
Controlled.
It did not echo.
It swallowed sound.
Ikida raised his hand, signaling absolute stillness.
No one moved.
No one spoke.
Then he whispered:
"The thing that ended the Giants…"
His voice was barely more than air.
"It never left."
The Odyr Tree stood motionless.
But for a single heartbeat
its roots
seemed to tighten.