Read Chapter 17: Visions of the Past

The cold of the stone bit into Callum’s palm before he even registered touching it. He had meant only to pick it up, to return it to Ishbel. Instead, his fingers closed around the smoothed granite, and the world tore away from him like a curtain ripped from a window.

He was not standing in the circle by the Ash Burn. He was elsewhere — another time, another weather. The sky was a different shade of grey, heavier, older. The pines were taller, their trunks thicker, a forest that had never known his footprint.

Before him stood a man. Callum recognized the shape of his own shoulders in the stranger’s stance, the same stubborn set of a jaw that he saw in his father’s photographs. Alistair MacRae. Younger than the stories suggested, maybe no older than Callum was now, his hair dark and wild, his hands scarred from work.

Alistair was not alone. He faced a figure that was both tree and man, both stone and water. The Ur — but not the Ur Callum knew. This thing had a shape that was almost gentle. Its limbs were branch and bark, its face a suggestion of features carved by centuries of wind. It stood in the center of the stone circle, patient, watchful, and when it spoke, its voice was the rustle of leaves and the creak of old wood, not the grinding growl Callum had heard at the heart grove.

“You have come,” the Ur said, its voice almost a sigh. “The land is dying, Alistair MacRae. Your people are starving. Your children will not see the harvest.”

Callum watched his ancestor drop to his knees. It was a vision, a memory stored in stone, and yet he felt the cold mud through Alistair’s knees, felt the desperation crawling in his ancestor’s chest.

“I will do anything,” Alistair said. His voice cracked. “I will give anything. My crops, my cattle, all that I have built.”

The Ur tilted its head. Its eyes, if they could be called that, were deep pools of green light. “The land does not want your cattle. It does not want your gold. It wants memory.”

“Memory? What does that mean?”

“Will you give me what you cannot bear to lose?” the Ur asked. Its voice was slow, deliberate, as if tasting each word. “Will you give me the first thing your mind holds sacred? I was the guardian of this land before your people came. I kept the balance. I held the seasons in their turning. But the balance has shifted. I am fading, and something else is growing in my place. Something hungry. You have a choice: forget your own heart, or watch this forest rot and take your village with it.”

Alistair’s brow furrowed. “Forget my heart? I do not understand.”

The Ur reached out with a hand of bark and moss, touching Alistair’s temple with terrifying gentleness. The vision rippled, and Callum felt his ancestor’s mind open like a door. He saw Alistair’s memories as if they were his own — a mother’s laugh by a hearth fire, a sister’s hair gleaming in the sun, a first kiss beneath a rowan tree. And beneath them all, something quieter, deeper. A sleeping child in a cradle. A face bending over him with love so fierce it made Callum’s chest ache.

“Your firstborn,” the Ur said. “You will give me their name. You will give me their face. You will walk through your life knowing a child is yours, yet unable to remember what they look like. When they speak, you will hear only a stranger’s voice. When they touch your hand, you will feel only a cool indifference, as though they were a passing traveler on the road.”

Alistair’s breath hitched. Callum felt the horror of it, the specific cruelty of a love hollowed out from the inside. He wanted to scream, to pull his ancestor away, to tear his hand from the stone. But the vision held him there, a captive audience to his own bloodline’s tragedy.

“You were the guardian,” Alistair whispered. “Why would you ask such a thing of me?”

The Ur’s green eyes dimmed for a moment. A tremor passed through its branches, and Callum saw something beneath its bark skin — a rot, a green-black corruption that pulsed like an infected wound. The creature was not what it had been. Something had invaded it, eaten its purpose from within.

“I am no longer what I was,” the Ur said, and for a moment its voice belonged to something older and more terrible, something that wore the guardian’s skin like a stolen coat. “The land is dying, but so am I. Something else moves beneath the roots now. It has been waiting. And if I do not feed it what it wants, it will take everything.”

“What is it?” Alistair asked. “What waits beneath?”

The vision fractured. Callum saw lightning flash across the stone circle, saw Alistair raise his dirk — no, not a dirk. A crude blade, iron-bound, meant for cutting branches and cleaning game. The Ur’s form flickered, and for a single heartbeat Callum saw what lay beneath its bark.

A darkness. A crawling, tendriled hunger that had no face but had countless mouths. It moved like a sickness through the guardian’s roots, twining around the base of the stones, reaching toward the living forest beyond. And at its center, glinting like a tooth in a wound, was a small stone — smooth, white, and familiar.

The tenth witness stone.

Callum gasped. His body tried to move, tried to reach into the vision and grasp the stone, but he was a ghost in the memory. Helpless.

“You would do this to your own child?” the Ur asked, and its voice had changed again, becoming the grinding growl of the entity Callum knew. “You would take their face from your mind, knowing they will grow up a stranger to you? Is that what you came to barter, Alistair MacRae?”

Alistair looked up, and Callum saw his own eyes staring back at him, filled with a grief that had not yet happened.

“I would do what I must,” Alistair said. “To save my people.”

The Ur had smiled then. A terrible smile, splitting bark and rot. “You misunderstand,” it said, its voice almost gentle. “You are not saving your people. You are merely deciding which ones will die with you.”

The vision shattered. Callum came back to himself gasping, on his knees beside the altar stone. Ishbel was gripping his shoulder, her face pale in the grey light, her mouth moving but the words slow to reach him.

“Callum. Callum, can you hear me?”

He could not speak. He was staring at his own hands, turning them over as if they belonged to someone else. Alistair’s grief was still in his chest, a cold lodestone pressed against his sternum.

His mother’s face. He had been thinking of it a moment ago, before the vision took him, before the stone claimed his every sense. It had been there, hovering in his mind like a photograph held to the light.

Now it was gone. The shape of it, the color of her hair, the particular way she had smiled when she saw him return from the forest as a child — all of it washed away, leaving only a smooth absence, a hole where a woman’s face should have been.

He could not picture her. He could not even remember whether her hair was dark or light.

“The price,” he heard himself say, his voice hoarse, unrecognizable. “The Ur took Alistair’s firstborn’s memory. And now it is taking mine. That is what the pact does. That is what I have already given without knowing.”

Ishbel’s hand tightened on his arm. The stone in his other hand had gone warm, unnaturally warm, as if it had absorbed the heat of the vision and was now giving it back.

“Callum,” Ishbel said carefully. “What did you see?”

He looked up at her, and realized with a cold certainty that he no longer knew what his own mother looked like. He had been carrying her face in his mind for years, a faded photograph that had somehow become the real thing. And now it was gone.

“I saw the beginning,” he said. “And I saw what the Ur gave up to make the pact. It was not the guardian. Not anymore. It was something else already wearing the guardian’s skin.”

He opened his hand, showing her the stone. It was not the oath stone she had given him. In his vision, he had seen the tenth stone, White, smooth, impossibly old. The stone he held now looked ordinary, grey and unremarkable.

But it hummed. Not faintly, as it had before, but with a deep vibration that traveled up his arm and into his teeth.

“It is not finished with me,” Callum said. “The Ur is still feeding. And I am running out of memories to give it.”