It was not a word; it was a curse. A sound carried on war-torn winds and whispered through crumbling cathedrals. Children spoke it as a dare, and elders refused to speak it at all.
Lamenthorn.
A peak beyond the edge of the known world, where the sky hung low like a shroud and time festered in the rocks. No maps dared name it. No songs celebrated it. For what melody can tame a place where gods go to die?
But one did not go to Lamenthorn by accident. No, you were *called*.
And Rhiannon Stormbraid had been called.
She was not a child of chance. She was forged like blade and lightning, born with the thunder rolling through her veins. Her people—the Ebonvale Riders—spoke of her as legend even before her twelfth name-day, when she tamed a wildfire drake with nothing but a whip made of her mother’s braid and a heart full of fury.
But none of that mattered now.
Not her titles.
Not her dragons.
Not her victories carved in pyres and blood.
Because the sky over Ebonvale had cracked.
It didn’t shatter in one loud scream—it wept, slow and ruinous. A poison sun rose on the horizon and turned the rivers to ash and the wheat to bone. Children woke crying with black tongues. The Seers’ eyes bled. The ancient wards sang like breaking glass.
And in the silence after that great unraveling, the wind whispered one name:
Lamenthorn.
The elders begged her not to go. They told her no one had returned. That even the bones of the boldest warriors had turned to smoke before reaching the summit. They said not even the gods dared linger near the place.
Rhiannon only smiled, the way stars do before they fall.
She left that night, clad in leather soaked with runes and memories, sword strapped to her back and a single obsidian coin clenched between her teeth—the toll for the bridge between worlds.
It took her forty days.
Forty nights of clawed trees and wrong winds. Of shadows that asked her name and offered her peace if she’d only forget it. Of mountains that blinked and valleys that breathed. The path twisted like a serpent having a nightmare, and still, she climbed.
Her dreams betrayed her. Every night a little more. She saw her mother’s face aged backward into a stranger’s. Her own reflection melted into water. She forgot the sound of her brother’s laugh, the name of her first mount, the scent of fire-ale. But still she climbed, fingers bloodied, boots torn, heart defiant.
Along the way, she found echoes of the old world—a rusted helm caught in the roots of a bone tree, a feathered pendant glowing faintly with the memory of fire. She whispered a blessing to each, not knowing if they had belonged to foes or friends. All that mattered was that they had once dared.
One night, she stumbled into a clearing ringed with stone faces—giant heads carved with open mouths, as if screaming into the void. She camped beneath them, and they whispered all night: her failures, her doubts, her worst fears in voices stolen from people she loved.
And still, she climbed.
She reached the summit on the dawn of the forty-first day.
And what she found there was not what she expected.
No beast waited.
No throne of ice or altar of doom.
Just a girl.
No more than fifteen winters old. Pale as frostbitten moonlight, with eyes like dying stars. She sat on a stone outcrop with her feet swinging into the abyss and a lyre made of bone resting on her knees.
"Are you the Guardian of Lamenthorn?" Rhiannon asked, voice sharp as sleet.
The girl smiled. "Once. Now I am the Choir."
"The Choir?"
"I sing the End."
Rhiannon stepped closer. "What does that mean?"
The girl strummed a chord. The air around her shimmered like heat off a funeral pyre.
"It means I sing what was lost," she said. "And I keep what cannot be unmade."
"Do you know why I’m here?"
The girl nodded, fingers dancing again over the strings. A breeze stirred, and with it came echoes of screams, the sound of thunder cracking stone, and the weeping of stars.
"You seek the undoing," the Choir said. "To bind what broke. To silence the sun-sickness in your homeland."
"Yes."
"Then you must pay."
"I brought the coin."
The girl didn’t move. "Not that kind of toll."
Rhiannon narrowed her eyes. "Then what?"
"You must give up the thing that makes you *you*."
"That could be anything."
"No. It is only one thing."
The wind howled then. Not like a wolf, but like a mother grieving. Rhiannon staggered but held her ground.
The Choir stood, placing the lyre on the stone. "You must sing with me."
"I don’t know the song."
"You do," the girl said. "Every hero does. They carry it in the part of themselves they never speak of. The quiet part. The wounded part. The part that remembers the lullaby before the battle cry."
Rhiannon hesitated. "What happens if I sing it?"
"Your name will be forgotten. Your face, uncarved. Your victories, unwritten. You will no longer be legend. You will be peace."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then the sickness will take the sky. And the world will end in a whisper."
It was no choice, really.
Rhiannon closed her eyes.
And she sang.
She sang the first time her brother fell in war. The way her mother’s hand used to stroke her hair after a storm. The time she buried a soldier she never knew but mourned like a friend. She sang her regrets. She sang her joys. She sang the sound of a homeland crumbling and the hope that maybe, just maybe, it didn’t have to die.
She sang of the sea. Of her childhood friend Maren, who drowned chasing a starfish. Of her father’s silence when war came knocking. Of the rider who gave her his last arrow so she could take the final shot. Of love that could never speak its name. Of nights with her dragon Zephros, curled under moonlit sky like a second heartbeat.
The Choir joined her.
Their voices spun through the summit like thread through needle, stitching the wound in the sky. Lightning bled backward into the clouds. Rivers ran clear. The black sun coughed and became a gold star again.
Ebonvale healed.
But no one remembered why.
They told stories, of course—of brave queens and cursed peaks. But Rhiannon Stormbraid’s name faded like smoke on a winter wind.
She stood at the summit still, now a girl with eyes like dying stars and a lyre made of bone.
One day, centuries later, a young scribe climbed Lamenthorn. She had read fragments in forbidden texts and traced charcoal drawings in the back pages of lost books. She sought answers, not power. Clarity, not glory.
When she reached the peak, the girl was waiting—older now, perhaps, or maybe just more silent. The scribe asked for her name.
She only whispered:
Lamenthorn
