The man ran.
He came off the broken crown in one motion, dropping past Eron through the branches to the ground, and the instant his feet hit he bolted, straight for the dark at the edge of the clearing where the bushes were.
He made it three strides before something came down on him.
There was nothing to see, which was the part Eron couldn't make sense of. The man simply stopped, the way you'd stop if you ran full speed into a wall that wasn't there, and then he went down. Though it did not quite look like a fall. He was put on the ground, flattened to it all at once, arms and legs splaying out under him as if a hand the size of the sky had come down and laid itself flat across his whole body.
Then it got worse. The dirt beneath him gave and cracked outward in long lines, and the man sank into the broken ground as the weight kept building on top of him. Eron could see him fighting it, his arms shaking as he tried to push himself up an inch off the earth, and he got nowhere. He was pressed lower with every second instead.
"YAAAARGH!"
The sound that came out of him was nothing like the screaming from the road. It went on without stopping for breath, climbing higher and more ragged than Eron had known a person could go, and his hands came up over his ears before he'd decided to move them. It didn't help. He could still hear it through his palms, so he shut his eyes as well.
Do not be afraid. I am with you.
The words came from inside his own head, not through the air. It was the same voice that had answered the man from above a moment ago, the white-haired stranger's voice, except now it was speaking without any sound at all, straight into the middle of Eron's thoughts, and somehow he understood it was meant only for him.
Eron opened his eyes and looked up.
The white-haired man wasn't watching the thing he was crushing. He was watching Eron. His hands were still in his pockets and his face hadn't changed at all, as though the man screaming into the cracked earth below him were nothing. When Eron met his eyes, the man smiled and nodded to him once.
Whatever was left of the fear went quiet, and Eron let his hands come down from his ears.
And suddenly, the man changed.
The purple that had been under his skin broke through it. Tendrils of the stuff tore out of his back and his shoulders, thick and moving on their own as they whipped up toward the white-haired man in the air all at once, reaching, fast.
The scream that came with them wasn't one voice. It was the man's, and underneath it were others, layered on top of each other and none of them lining up, all of them shaping the same word at the sky.
"ARCHMAGE!"
The white-haired man watched the tendrils climb toward him for about as long as it took Eron to flinch, which was to say he watched them the way a person watches something he has already decided is finished.
"Off with you." He said while taking one hand out of his pocket and snapped his fingers.
Black fire immediately caught on the tendrils where they hung in the air, and it did not spread so much as arrive, all of it at once, from the reaching tips down through the body still pinned in the broken ground. There was no time for the thing to scream again. It went to ash between one breath and the next, the whole shape of it collapsing into a fine grey drift that the night air pulled apart and carried off, and then there was nothing on the ground where the man had been but the cracks his weight had left.
The white-haired man put his hand back in his pocket and drifted down through the branches toward Eron, unhurried, still with the ground far below and nothing holding either of them up.
"Hello there."
He came level with Eron and stopped there, studying him with mild interest. Then he brought the two of them down the rest of the way, his feet finding the grass at the edge of the cracked clearing, and took his hand out of his pocket and held it out.
"Here."
Eron looked. In the man's palm were four or five pieces of candy, brown and glossy, peanuts under a hard candied shell that caught what little light there was.
"They're very good," the man said. "There's a place in Orlys that boils them properly; most other places burn the sugar."
Eron's mouth watered before he could stop it. He hadn't eaten anything since the hard bread in the cart, and the smell of them reached him, warm and sweet.
"You don't want one?"
Eron didn't answer. His hand stayed where it was.
The man didn't seem to mind. "There's no harm in them, though I suppose you've no way of knowing that. Sensible not to trust a stranger."
He turned the candies over in his palm. "I read a book once that said something sweet settles a person after a fright. Sugar gives the body a quick source of energy when it's been running on fear too long, and it gives the hands something to do besides shake. It stayed with me." He considered the peanuts as though he'd half forgotten Eron was there. "I've found it holds true more often than not."
From the grass below, the rooster spoke.
"You turned a man to ash in front of him not one minute ago, Archmage. He watched the ash blow away. Whatever state the child is in, it is not the sort where a sweet settles it."
The man paused, the candies still held out.
"...Hmm," he said. "Yes. That may be poor timing."
Only now did Eron realise how tall the man was. Standing, he went up and up, a full head and shoulders above anyone in Eron's town, so that looking at his face meant tipping his head all the way back.
Then the man lowered himself, as if he'd noticed. He folded down onto one knee in the grass, until his eyes were level with Eron's, and held out his hand.
"My name is Sael. What is yours?"
Eron looked at the hand and didn't take it right away. There was still enough of the night in him to hold back, the cart and the wolves and the ash, and a part of him knew he ought to be careful.
But the man only waited, smiling at him, warm and patient, and there was something in his face that was kind, and something else Eron couldn't name that loosened the caution in him more than it should have. He put his hand into the man's.
"Eron," he said. "My name is Eron."
"Eron." Sael gently closed his hand around the boy's. "What a fine name you've got there."
He didn't let go at once, and he didn't stand.
"I knew an Eron once. A long time ago now, closer to four hundred years than I'd like to admit. He was one of the finest men I ever had the luck to stand beside. Truthful to a fault, honourable when it cost him to be, the sort you could set your back against and never once think to check." He looked at the boy with something quieter behind the smile. "You share good company in that name."
Eron's eyes went wide.
"Eron the True," he said, the name coming out before he could think better of speaking. "You mean Eron the True?"
Something shifted in Sael's face. "Oh? You know of him, then?"
"Yes, sire." Eron's caution had slipped without his noticing it go. "I was named after him. He was from my village, the same one I'm from, hundreds of years back. There's a stone with his name on it by the well, and the old people still tell it, how he stood up when no one else would. Everyone knows him where I'm from. My mother said she gave me his name so I'd have something to grow into."
Sael was quiet for a moment, looking at the boy as though the shape of something was settling into place in front of him.
"How fateful," he said softly. "Of all the roads, and all the boys on them, the one I find at the top of a tree carries his name and his village both." The smile came back, warmer than before. "He would have liked that a great deal. He never did think much of himself; it would have delighted him to know a boy was still being named for him this long after."
"But…" Eron looked up at him. "Then who are you, sir? Really?"
"Oh, I'm Sael." He said it as though it settled everything. "I thought I told you that already."
"Uh…" Eron said.
"He's Sael the Great." The rooster had crossed the grass to them and was looking up with an air of having waited too long to be consulted. "Archmage of the Age of Ash. And I am Ozyrathes the Magnificent, First Flame of the Emberwastes, Terror of the Nine Skies, Devourer of Kings. You will use the whole of it, boy, every syllable, and you will not shorten one word of it to suit your small human mouth."
"He didn't ask for your name, Oz."
"He asked who you were. The two are related. A person's standing is context."
"I believe he asked me. Not you."
"And you gave him 'I'm Sael,' as though that were an answer. The boy has watched a man burned out of the world tonight and been dangled off a tree; he deserves to know whose lap he has fallen into, and it is a considerable lap, Archmage, whatever modesty you insist on performing."
Eron had stopped following the words. He was staring at the tall man on one knee in front of him, the white hair and the blue robes and the hand still loosely holding his, while somewhere off to the side the rooster kept talking.
"Y-you're Sael the Great?"
"Why, yes." Sael glanced at the rooster, then back. "Oz just told you so, didn't he?"
It hit Eron all at once. The man had been in front of him for whole minutes before the size of it caught up, and then it did, and it took his breath.
Eron didn't have room in him for all of it. He didn't understand a tenth of what had happened tonight and understood even less of what it meant. But he knew the name. Back home, around the fire, the old storyteller who told the tales of Eron the True said this man's name in nearly all of them, Sael the Great, the one who'd stood beside his namesake, and Eron had sat through every telling waiting for it. And now the name was kneeling in the grass in front of him, holding his hand.
"You're really him," he said. It came out breathless. "The real one? From the war, and the mountain, and the— you did all of that. That was you?"
"It was, more or less. The stories tend to add things." Sael looked faintly amused. "You seem to know a good deal of them."
"Everyone does. There are songs." Eron's words were coming faster than his caution could catch. "There's one about the mountain that my— that people sing it at harvest, and I never thought... aren't you supposed to be... dead?"
Was he a ghost? The word went through Eron cold before he could stop it, and for a terrible second he believed it, because that was the only shelf this fit on. But the man's hand was warm around his, and ghosts didn't have warm hands, and then the man spoke and Eron didn't get to think about it any further.
"I get that often." Sael' smiled. "Though it seems the news of my return hasn't reached this far. Word of it has been running ahead of me for weeks now, east of here; whole towns had heard before I arrived. But out here—" he glanced past the broken clearing, to the dark country with no lights in it anywhere "—out here I'm still a dead man in a harvest song. This is a long way from everything, isn't it."
He let the boy run out of breath, watching him with a patience that had no hurry in it anywhere, and when Eron finally stopped, he said, more gently, "Eron. I want to tell you something, and I'd like you to hear it the way I mean it."
Eron went still.
"I came here for you."
The thrill went sideways into something Eron couldn't place. "...Me?"
"You. I've been travelling a long way to find you, and I did not fully know it was you until tonight." Sael said. "You, specifically."
"But... why?" Eron's voice cracked in the middle of it. "Why would you come for me? I'm not— I'm nobody, sir. I herd— I don't even—"
"I'll tell you. All of it, and gladly." Sael's thumb moved once over the back of Eron's hand, steadying, and his eyes stayed level with the boy's. "But let me ask you something first, and I want you to tell me true. Where are your parents, child?"
The question landed somewhere soft and unguarded.
"And why is it," Sael went on, "that I found a boy your age at the top of a tree in the middle of a wolf pack, this far from any town or village or soul who ought to be looking after you? A long way from anywhere a boy should be." He didn't let go of his hand. "Start wherever it's easiest. I have all the time there is."
And Eron, who had not told the whole of it to a single person, not once, opened his mouth and began.