Rhynie, Aberdeenshire - c. 570 CE
The spring house was dark except for the water.
Forcu had never understood how the heart-stone glowed. No fire lit it. No sunlight reached this chamber at night. Yet the crystal resting on its shelf beneath the surface cast a pale luminescence across the pool, making the water itself seem to shine. Derelei said the stone had been glowing since before anyone could remember—that it was already old when the first Picts found it. Drust said nothing about it. He had stopped trying to explain what he saw years before she knew him.
She knelt at the pool's edge, her knees pressing into stone worn smooth by generations before her. Across from her, Drust sat motionless—legs folded, hands on his thighs, eyes fixed on the carved crescent and V-rod that marked the chamber's entrance. The oldest door.
Three days of fasting had sharpened his features, made him look older than his forty-seven years. He already looked sixty on good days—the gray had come early, and the trembling in his hands grew worse after each deep session. Last week he'd forgotten her name for a moment, called her Brigid. His wife's name. Dead these twelve years.
The deep roads took. Each descent cost him something—memories displaced by what the land held, pieces of himself traded for what he brought back. Forcu had watched it happen to his teacher Conall, who'd walked the roads for thirty years before a descent took him entirely. He'd come back screami…
