The mountains screamed.
Gard dropped to his knees, pressing his palms against the stone as pain lanced through his earth-mark. All around him, the Valley of Lost Giants trembled. The ancient statues’ faces, frozen for centuries in their eternal surprise, began to glow with the same geometric patterns that now burned across his back.
“Easy,” he whispered to the shrieking stone. “Show me slowly. Show me what’s wrong.”
The mountain’s voice filtered through his bones, no longer the steady grandmother’s teaching he was used to. This was urgent. Panicked. Images flooded his mind in torrents:
A temple rising from the sea, its walls carved with the first language of earth.
Fire and water twining together like lovers reunited after a long separation.
Four spheres pulsing in harmony – obsidian for fire, coral for water, crystal for air, and living stone for earth.
The elements dancing together as they were meant to, writing their true names across the fabric of the world itself.
The vision shifted, diving deeper into memory:
Great cities where earth-mages shaped stone alongside fire-wielders who kept the rock molten and flowing.
Water and air working as one to bring rain where needed, to keep the world in balance.
The spheres acting as translators, helping each element understand the others’ songs.
And the giants – not statues then, but living beings – who guarded the knowledge of how all elements could dance as one.
“Gard!”
He turned to see Lira racing up the valley path, her druid’s cloak rippling with fragments of stone embedded like stars. The earth-marks on her hands blazed with the deep green-brown of growing things – a different manifestation of their shared element. Where Gard heard the voice of stone and mountain, Lira spoke with root and soil, the living face of earth’s power.
“The roots are trembling,” she gasped, reaching him. “Every tree in the Evergrove is reaching deeper, touching old stone, remembering things that—” She stopped, seeing the glowing giants. “Oh.”
The nearest colossus, a figure frozen mid-step with one arm raised to the sky, began to hum. Not with sound, exactly. With memory. A new vision gripped Gard:
The day it all shattered.
Dark figures carrying weapons that sang wrong songs, that forced the elements apart.
The spheres being torn from their wielders’ hands.
Fire forced to forget water’s dance.
Air and earth made to turn their backs on each other.
The giants, trying to protect the ancient knowledge, frozen in mid-movement by magic that denied the elements’ unity.
And beneath it all, a wrongness. A fundamental breaking of the world’s true nature.
“They weren’t surprised,” Gard gasped as the vision released him. “They were trying to stop it. To preserve the memory of how things should be.”
A tremor ran through the valley. In the distance, horns blared from the Granite Council’s fortress – they’d felt it too. The stone was speaking to everyone now, ready or not.
“The patterns,” Lira said, her earth-marks pulsing as she pressed one hand to the stone, the other to a nearby sapling. “They’re the same in root and rock. Like the earth itself is trying to remind us it was never meant to be divided.”
Gard touched the giant’s base again, and the final vision took him:
Four new wielders, their marks growing with remembered knowledge.
A water-mage with singing spheres of coral.
A fire-wielder who moved like the tide.
An air-caller who read starlight’s ancient script.
And earth-voices who could hear both stone and root.
All being drawn to the place where the first dance began.
Where the elements could remember their true nature.
Where the world could begin to heal.
“The elements,” he said, understanding at last. “They weren’t meant to be separate. That’s what the giants were protecting. The knowledge that all elements are part of the same dance.”
More horns echoed from the fortress. Wheels grinding, gates closing – the Council following through on their threat to seal the passes.
“They’re afraid,” Lira said, her connection to earth’s living aspects letting her feel the trembling roots beneath the fortress. “The Council, the elders, all of them. They feel the change coming and their only answer is to hide from it.”
The ground shook again. Through his palms, Gard felt the mountain’s message, clearer than ever. The same patterns kept appearing – peaks and valleys, currents and winds, flames and floods. A map. A calling.
“There’s a place,” he said slowly, reading the stone’s memory. “Where it all started. Where the elements first learned to dance together.” He looked up at the giant’s face, understanding finally dawning. “That’s what they were trying to protect. The memory of the last dance. Before everything was sundered.”
“And now it’s starting again.” Lira’s earth-marks pulsed as nearby plants grew in sudden, explosive patterns matching the giant’s glowing scripts. “There are others, aren’t there? Others who can read these signs?”
Thunder cracked overhead, but the sky was clear. In the distance, toward the sea, strange lights danced on the horizon. The wind carried the taste of salt and smoke, and something else. Something older than all of them.
The giants hummed louder, their patterns blazing like stars fallen to earth. Through the stone, Gard felt the tremors of temple doors opening deep beneath the waves. Felt the fire learning to flow like water again. Felt the air beginning to remember its ancient songs.
More horns. Closer now. The Council would be sending guards soon, to bring back any scouts still in the valley.
Lira gripped his arm, her earth-marks resonating with his own. “We have to go. Have to find the others. Rock and root are singing the same song – this is bigger than Council orders. Bigger than keeping the elements pure and separate.”
“The Council will hunt us,” Gard warned, but he was already standing, reading the map the giants had waited so long to share. “They’ll see this as betrayal.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they’ve just forgotten how to listen to earth’s true voice – in stone and in soil.”
The nearest giant’s pattern shifted, pointing the way with lines of living light. Toward the place where mountains touched sky, where fire met water. Where the first dance began, and where it had to begin again.
Gard felt the truth of it in his bones, in his blood, in the ever-changing patterns of his birthmark. The elements were done being separate. Done being silent.
“We’ll need supplies,” he said. “And we’ll have to move fast. Once the Council realizes what’s happening—”
A new tremor shook the valley. But this wasn’t the mountains speaking.
This was the Council’s answer to change.
The fortress gates were closing. The passes were being sealed.
They had minutes, at most, to choose: obey the Council that feared the future, or follow the giants who had waited centuries to share their truth.
Lira smiled, sharp as mountain peaks in winter. “I’ll tell the roots to cover our tracks.”
Above them, the giants glowed like beacons in the gathering dark. Behind them, the horns blew one final warning.
Before them lay a path written in stone and starlight, leading to others who could read the elements’ ancient tongue.
The mountains sang their blessing as Gard and Lira ran, stone and soil working together as earth itself helped hide their passage.
The dance was calling.
And every aspect of their element would help them answer.