Kaelen's purpose was not to restore, but to witness . He and his order believed that if the Scorch was a sentence, then to forget the places consumed was to accept the verdict. So he walked the margins, a hermit with a compass that pointed to magnetic anomalies rather than north.
The Well of Tears had never been a place of crying. scorched earth map
Vesper stopped. "And do what? Sing it to sleep?" Kaelen's purpose was not to restore, but to witness
The map on the tortoise shell was a record of loss. Each line represented a scorched quadrant. Ninety-three percent of the known world was now labeled Exanimis Terra —Dead Land. The Well of Tears had never been a place of crying
"Exactly," Kaelen said. "The first act of the Scorch wasn't an explosion. It was a wail. The earth screamed. The Well of Tears was the epicenter. If I can map the sound of that scream, I can find the harmonic frequency of the fire."