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Keeper's Adage:
"The ember remembers the forge. The scar recalls the blade. Do not mistake silence for slumber, wanderer; the power you buried merely gathers breath beneath your fear."
From the Ashen Codex: On Dormant Fires, Keepers of Stories Archive
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Ash still clung to Hatim—not merely coating his skin, but living in the cracks. It gritted between his teeth, lined his lungs like a second set of ribs, and filled the aching hollows between bruises blooming across his side. Each breath was a negotiation with pain.
Memory had burned to soot. What remained was weight—a physical pressure against his sternum, as if the city itself sat on his chest.
He surfaced slowly.
First: the cold. Not the damp chill of Sinks alleyways, but the deep, mineral cold of stone that had never known sun. It seeped into his spine from the uneven floor beneath him. Ancient. Patient.
Second: the pulse.
Not sound—vibration.
Thrumming up through the rock into his bones. Slow. Steady. Inescapable.
Like the city's heartbeat.
Third: the silence.
Not empty, but full.
Damp air hung heavy with the scent of wet iron, petrified moss, and the breath of something old sleeping in the dark. Somewhere, water dripped—a metronome marking time in a tomb. Closer, a measured exhale. Human. Intentional.
Hatim stirred. Agony lanced through his ribs, white-hot. He gasped.
A hand settled on his chest. Calloused. Unyielding as the stone itself.
"Lie still."
The voice was low, calm, bending the air like light through thick glass. Not a suggestion. A fact of nature.
Hatim blinked against the torchlight. Shadows danced across walls of seamless black basalt, carved with glyphs so ancient they seemed less inscribed than grown—their edges softened by centuries, their lines pulsing faintly in time with the floor's deep thrum. These weren't decorations. They were memories. Frozen voices. Trapped Akar. Older than the Sinks. Older than House Valerian. Older than names.
This place had swallowed dynasties and forgotten their taste.
The Akar here didn't burn. It breathed. Slow. Deep. Alive.
He turned his head, gritting against the fire in his side.
Beside him sat a figure draped in layers of dun-colored cloth, hood shadowing his face. Stillness radiated from him like cold from stone. The dust motes dancing in the torchlight seemed to avoid him. And there—beneath the rough-spun edge of his sleeve—a whisper of shimmering cloth. The same impossible fabric from the Middens. Him.
"Who…?" Hatim's voice scraped raw, as if he'd swallowed broken glass.
The hood tilted slightly. Torchlight caught the barest curve of a mouth beneath the shadow. "Someone who dislikes waste. And someone who felt the Akar recognize you when you hit those stones."
Recognize.
The word struck like a physical blow. It wasn't just the memory resurfacing—it was the shame. Thick. Sour. Rising like bile. He hadn't touched glyphs in years. Hadn't dared.
The chamber shifted.
Torchlight dimmed, snuffed by a sudden, blood-red glow seeping from fissures in the walls. Heat washed over Hatim, thick and suffocating. The glyphs writhed—their static lines melting, flowing like molten lead, reshaping into a scene he knew in his marrow.
Memory dragged him under.
Cold cobbles bit his bare feet. Twelve years old. Nails black with grime and dried blood. Breath sawing in his throat—a trapped animal's rhythm. The stink of ozone and fear hung thick.
Across the rubble-strewn courtyard stood Kael.
Calm.
Empty.
Akar pooled around his bare feet like liquid shadow shot through with embers. It coiled, restless, drawn to him like filings to a lodestone.
Hatim raised shaking hands. Instinct. Not thought.
Between his spread fingers, the air shimmered.
Veshan.
A shield bloomed—soft-edged, curved like a cupped palm against the storm.
Kael smiled. A skull's grin.
"I don't draw," he whispered.
Dark lines ripped open across his forearms—not cuts, but ruptures. Glyphs tore into existence, jagged and shrieking, raw as exposed nerves. Akar surged into the wounds—a frenzied, shrieking flood.
He threw back his head. ROARED.
Light detonated from his chest—a hammer-blow of pure force.
Hatim's glyph flared gold—held—
—then shattered.
Stone screamed. Dust vomited upward. Hatim skidded back, boots scraping grooves in the grit, arms trembling against the onslaught. His mind raced, cold and clear amidst the chaos.
"You're leaking," he hissed. "Your channels rupture under the flow. The glyphs collapse before they form!"
Kael's grin widened, madness glinting in his eyes. "I am the glyph."
Behind him, the air split—a jagged, feral sigil snapping into being. Kael lunged, a predator unleashed.
Hatim moved—flowed. Sidestepped the charge, dipped beneath the wild swing.
His palm swept low.
Sen'nari.
The Void's Thirst.
It drank Kael's momentum, unraveling force like thread from a spool.
Hatim slammed two fingers to the fractured ground.
Tharnel.
Golden bars erupted from the stone—pristine, geometric, weaving a cage of pure light around the howling boy.
Kael shrieked. Glyphs swarmed over his skin like angry wasps. The cage groaned, fractures spiderwebbing across its surface.
Hatim didn't hesitate.
He dropped, fingers tracing twin symbols in the ash—spiral left, triangle right. Ancient. Primal. Glyphs spun from his fingertips, weaving a dance of the Ashen Throne itself.
The Akar in the earth leapt to answer.
A spear of pure, furious light coalesced in his grasp—not summoned, but birthed.
He hurled it.
IMPACT.
Blinding annihilation. A sound like the sky tearing.
Kael folded.
Darkness swallowed the glyphs.
Silence. Thick. Accusing.
A voice, dry as forgotten bones, drifted from the shadows:
"Crude. But… precise. It listened to you."
The vision shattered.
Hatim jerked back to the present, sucking in a breath that seared his damaged ribs. Torchlight painted familiar, unmoving stone. The drip… drip… drip… echoed in the sudden stillness. Sweat stung his eyes, mixing with ash. The memory—the spear's weight, Kael's scream, the terrible, effortless knowing in his hands—burned behind his eyelids.
The hooded man hadn't moved. "It returns."
Hatim said nothing. Words were ash in his throat.
"You wonder why it haunts you now."
His gaze was drawn helplessly to the glyphs on the walls. They pulsed softly, like veins beneath skin. Remembering.
Beneath him, the Akar stirred. Not with judgment. Not with malice.
With Memory.
It had witnessed his glyphs that day.
It had heard his command.
It had answered.
And now, deep in this forgotten belly of Embermark, it waited.
Hatim pressed his trembling palm flat against the icy stone floor.
The deep hum resonated up his arm—a whisper in a language older than sound.
You see me.
A shiver, deeper than the cold, racked him.
The Akar was not a tool.
It was not a river to be dammed or diverted.
It was a Witness.
And now, after all these years of hiding in the Sinks, running in the Middens… it remembered Hatim.