Read Chapter 20: False Hope

The cold of the Ash Burn seeped through Callum’s boots as he knelt at the edge of the circle, the dirk heavy in his hand. Morning light filtered through the pines, thin and useless, like the hope curling in his chest.

Ishbel stood opposite him, her grandmother’s stone cradled in her palms. She had not asked questions since he’d woken from the vision in chapter seventeen. She’d only watched, her face tight with a fear she refused to voice, as he’d stumbled back to the village and returned with the dirk.

“The carvings show a counterbinding,” she said, reading from the weathered record book her grandmother had left her. “Two relics, one oath, a circle drawn in blood and ash. If we set the stone against the dirk’s true point and speak the words backward, the Ur is bound to release what it has taken.”

Callum turned the blade over. The carved map along its spine glinted, the same lines that had led them here. “And if it goes wrong?”

Ishbel’s jaw tightened. “Then we know what we are dealing with.”

He wanted to laugh. They already knew. But he had held the dirk through Alistair’s vision—felt the starving years, the desperate plea, the moment the guardian had folded and let the corruption in. If the dirk could undo even a fraction of that, he had to try. His mother’s face was already gone. He didn’t know what would be taken next.

“Do it,” he said.

Ishbel knelt and scratched a circle in the wet earth with a stone shard, mixing her own blood from a cut on her palm into the mud. She placed her grandmother’s witness stone at the northern point. Callum set the dirk’s tip at the southern edge. The blade hummed, a low thrum that vibrated up his arm and settled in his teeth.

He began to speak. The words were raw, guttural—not Gaelic, but something older, sediment from before language settled into meaning. Ishbel joined him halfway through, their voices twining until they became one voice, and the circle began to glow, not bright but deep, like embers buried in peat.

The ground trembled.

Then the trees shuddered, and the light failed—not dimmed, but *failed*, as if the day itself had been pulled through a sieve. The Ur stood at the edge of the stones. It was not the drifting shape Callum had seen before. It had form now, a towering silhouette woven from black root and pale bark, its face a hollow where the original guardian’s might have been. Roots crawled from its shoulders like a mane, flecked with something that glittered—small, smooth, rounded. Stones. Witness stones.

In its chest, Callum saw it. The tenth stone. Engraved, heavy, pulsing faintly as if it were the thing’s heart.

“You would undo me,” the Ur said. Its voice was not loud. It scraped, like branches dragging over slate. “With my own blade, and a dead woman’s trinket?”

Callum kept the dirk steady. “Release the memories you took. All of them. End the pact.”

The Ur tilted its head—a gesture almost curious, almost gentle. “Which memories, keeper? The ones you inherited? The ones you earned? Or the ones you have not yet lost?” It stepped into the circle, and the glow guttered like a candle snuffed by breath. “You do not even know what you ask to have returned. Some of what I hold was never yours.”

“My mother’s face is mine.”

“Is it?” The hollow turned toward him. “You have already lost it. You remember *that* you had it, but not what it was. In three days, you will not remember losing it at all. You will simply walk through the world with a hole where she should be, and you will think that is normal. That is the mercy of my feeding. You will not mourn what you cannot name.”

Rage flared hot and clean in Callum’s chest. He reversed the dirk and drove the point into the center of the circle.

The Ur *shrieked*—not a sound but a pressure, a weight that slammed into him like a winter squall. The dirk flew from his hand. He hit the ground hard, the breath driven from his lungs. Beside him, Ishbel cried out. He rolled onto his knees in time to see her flung against a standing stone, her head cracking against the lichen-covered surface. She crumpled, blood running dark from her temple.

“No!” Callum scrambled toward her, but roots erupted from the earth between them, black and slick, coiling like serpents.

The Ur descended on him. Up close, its hollow face was not empty—it was crowded with eyes, hundreds of them, all familiar in a way that made his stomach lurch. His father’s eyes. Morag’s. His own, reflected back a hundred times over.

“You want a bargain, keeper?” The Ur’s voice was almost soft. “Here is my counter. Give me the dirk, and I will give you back one memory of your choice. One. A fair price for a blade that was never meant to cut me.”

Callum’s hand twitched toward where the dirk had fallen, a few feet beyond the circle. The Ur followed his gaze, and something like amusement rippled through its roots.

“Ah. You think it is yours to give.”

The words landed like a stone in still water. Callum stared at the dirk. Alistair’s dirk. His father had tried to forge a false oath by making a blood replica. The true dirk had been passed down, keeper to keeper, hand to hand. His hand now.

But whose hand had carved it? And what had it been made for?

The Ur leaned in, close enough that Callum could smell the rot beneath the bark, the wet decay of a forest that had been dying for three hundred years. “The blade does not belong to the keeper, boy. It belongs to the debt. And the debt is *mine*.”

“Then why are you afraid of it?”

The eyes flickered. All of them, at once, like a shutter closing.

Then the roots lashed out. Callum threw himself sideways, rolled, and came up with the dirk in his hand—he must have grasped it without thinking, or the earth had shifted, or luck had finally turned. He held it up between them, and the Ur recoiled, just a step, just a breath.

But it was enough.

He lunged for Ishbel, hauled her over his shoulder, and ran. The forest blurred around him, branches whipping at his face, roots surging up to trip him. He did not look back. He did not stop until the trees thinned and the burn widened and the village rooftops showed grey through the mist.

Only then did he set Ishbel down, her blood smeared across his shoulder, her breathing shallow but steady.

He knelt over her, gasping, and tried to hold onto what he knew he was losing. The dog. The border collie from his childhood, the one who had slept at the foot of his bed, who had herded him away from the forest’s edge when he was small. He could see her still—black coat, white blaze, the way she tilted her head when he spoke.

Then the image frayed, like cloth pulled loose at the seams. He tried to clutch it, to press it back into place, but it unraveled anyway. Her name. He watched himself forget her name. He watched her face go soft, then blank, then simply gone.

He sat in the wet grass beside Ishbel, the dirk cold in his hand, and wept for a dog he could no longer remember.

When Ishbel stirred, hours later, he had stopped crying. He had not moved. The sun had shifted, low and amber over the hills, and the forest behind them had gone quiet. Not peaceful. Patient.

“Callum.” Her voice was rough. She touched the wound on her head and winced. “What happened?”

“It kept the memories.” He heard his own voice, hollow and distant. “It showed me the tenth stone. It’s inside it. The Ur has been holding it all along.”

Ishbel struggled upright, swaying. “Then the witness circle is incomplete. The counter-ritual—” She stopped, reading his face. “What did it take?”

He opened his mouth to answer, and found he did not know the question’s meaning. There was a shape in his mind, like the absence of a tooth, a place where something had been. But he could not say what.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, because it was easier than admitting he no longer knew what he was missing. He stood, offered her his hand. “We need to find where it keeps the memories. All of them. If we can’t take them back—” He looked toward the dark line of trees. “We destroy them. The whole hoard. Break its grip on all of us.”

Ishbel took his hand, unsteady but standing. She did not ask how they would find it. Perhaps she already knew.

Perhaps she had seen the same shadows in her own grandmother’s record book, marked with a single word he had not yet asked her to explain.

*Hoard.*