-----------‐--------------------‐
Keeper's Adage:
"The stone remembers the hand that sold its soul. The deep Akar knows the price etched in silence. Beware the currency of shadows, wanderer; the ascent you buy with secrets may only lead to a deeper fall."
– From the Ledgers of Sunken Bargains, Keepers of Stories Archive
-----------‐--------------------‐
Akar pulsed.
Even now, deep into Embermark's second dusk, it thrummed beneath the city's skin—a slow-burning current only Sinks-born blood could feel. To the Middens merchants, it was just warmth in the stones. To Lugal, it was a living thing. Listening. Always listening.
He moved through fractured alleys, ash curling around his worn boots like a half-forgotten lover. The air hung thick with clove smoke, wet iron, and the ghost of yesterday's fires. Torchlight flickered in rain-slicked puddles, catching shards of broken glass like fallen stars. Embermark bled memory through every cracked brick and weeping pipe, and tonight, Lugal walked its veins.
Hatim ran.
Of course he had.
Still too soft. Still clinging to hope like a child clutching a stolen crust. Lugal had watched it unfold from a shadowed alcove—Tiri and Masad descending on Hatim with the brutal efficiency of butchers trimming fat. This wasn't just bullying. It was theater. The Sunken Forum wanted to see if the "Whispered Void" would crack. If the rumors were true.
He hadn't. Not entirely.
Then he came.
The hooded figure. Moving with that unnatural stillness, pulling Hatim from the ash like plucking a weed. Not Sinks. Not Middens. Not any crew Lugal had ever tracked. Power radiated from him—not the bluster of enforcers, but the cold certainty of deep water.
Interesting.
Lugal had slipped away before the crowd's murmur could swell into questions. By dawn, whispers would slither through the Sinks: Hatim's got a shadow now. Something old walks the ash.
But Lugal had another appointment. Deeper.
He wound past shuttered lean-tos and silent, cold forges, descending into streets that slumped like a drunkard's sigh. Soot clung here, greasy and permanent, the air tasting of rust and forgotten promises. Above, the Rust-Bell loomed—a colossal relic that hadn't tolled in centuries, its surface weeping iron oxide like dried blood. A marker for those who knew how to see.
He passed beneath its silent shadow, beneath the worn stone faces carved into the archway—features eroded by time and grime into a single, anonymous lament. Memory losing its shape.
The Sunken Forum wasn't on any map. It existed in the city's ignored spaces, beneath the Sinks, beneath the illusion of Valerian's order. A kingdom of silence and secrets.
It welcomed him with a hush that swallowed sound.
The corridors bent inward, angles subtly wrong, as if carved by hands that knew a different geometry. The architecture offered no comfort—only warnings. Sconces shaped like skeletal claws clutched globes of sickly green luminescence—bottled root-breath, older and colder than torchlight. Shadows pooled thickly, shifting like liquid. Lugal didn't flinch. His own coat's faint, squirming glyphs seemed to drink the gloom.
He'd walked these paths before—as a messenger, a watcher, a thief of secrets. Never as one summoned.
He moved past traders whose eyes gleamed like tarnished coins in the gloom, past hunched figures exchanging not coin, but slivers of obsidian etched with truths, or vials of murky liquid holding stolen dreams. Here, currency was knowledge. Loyalty was a knife held loosely.
Deeper. The walls changed. Smooth basalt gave way to older stone, veined with faint threads of glowing Akar—pulsing slow and deep, like the city's sleeping pulse. Moss clung to glyphs so ancient their meaning was lost, humming with latent power. The air grew colder, thicker, tasting of deep earth and ozone.
Finally, the corridor narrowed, funnelling into a space heavy with stillness. Reverence. Or dread.
The door waited. Not wood, but petrified black oak, banded with iron the color of dried blood. It bore no lock. No handle. It simply was. Watching.
Lugal placed his palm flat against its cold, unyielding surface. It swung inward without a sound.
Inside, the air was tomb-still. Unmoving. Even the green light in the wall sconces seemed frozen mid-flicker.
Three figures sat beyond a massive table of Emberstone—a dense, volcanic rock shot through with faint, dying veins of Akar. Not rulers. Not priests. Not even Ancients, perhaps.
Just… Presences.
Robed in layers of fabric the color of banked ashes, their faces lost in deep hoods. No features discernible, only shadows within shadows. Their silence wasn't empty; it was a weight, pressing down on the still air.
Lugal stopped precisely at the edge of the emberstone's faint glow. He didn't speak. Didn't bow. Didn't fidget.
He waited.
That was the first test. Always.
One figure shifted—a rustle of fabric like dry leaves scraping stone.
"You listen well, Lugal." The voice was coal-dust rough, scraping the silence. Certain. Unhurried.
"You do not linger where echoes trap the unwary."
Lugal remained silent. His mouth was parchment-dry. His spine felt like forged iron.
"But tonight," the voice continued, "you stand here for a different resonance."
A gloved hand, leather darkened by centuries of touch, slid across the table's surface. It traced a groove worn deep into the emberstone—a channel carved not by tools, but by the repeated passage of countless hands over countless years. A fossilized memory of desperation and deal-making.
"A whisper surfaces. The boy. Hatim. He was… interceded for."
Not a question. Not idle curiosity. A statement laid bare. The Forum didn't speak unless it already tasted the truth.
Lugal hesitated. A fraction of a heartbeat.
Hatim's face flashed in his mind—bloodied, defiant, crumpling under Masad's fist in the Middens ash. The raw, stupid loyalty in his eyes when Lugal had tossed him that pitiful bread. The vial of Pure Akar burned like a coal in Lugal's hidden pocket, its promise a siren song.
Loyal? Or just another mark?
The Pure Akar was real. The Nobel's errand was real. Hatim's usefulness… was fading.
"Yes," Lugal said, the word scraping out.
"And?" The single syllable hung, heavy with expectation.
"I didn't recognize him." Lugal kept his voice flat, empty. "No sigils. No crew colors. Moves like… like smoke over water. Smells like tomb-dust."
The silence returned. Thicker now. Not judgment, but calculation. A chessboard reassessing its pieces.
"You have sought the heights," a different voice rasped, slightly higher, like stone grinding stone. From the leftmost Presence. "The Sanctums. The whispers beyond the Verge."
A truth that burned hotter than the vial in his pocket. Lugal had scoured moldering scrolls in forgotten Sinks cellars, traced forbidden glyphs onto his own skin with needle and ash-paste, felt the distant, maddening pulse of power from the Ascended Sanctums floating above the Crowns. Untouchable. Mythic.
Now the key dangled before him.
"You will ascend," the first voice declared. Not an offer. A decree. "You will enter their light. You will listen. You will be a shadow against their gilded walls. You will not speak unless the silence demands it." The hood seemed to deepen. "And when you return… you will bring us the words the Ancients breathe only to the stone. The truths they hide even from their own shadows."
Lugal's pulse hammered against his ribs—a frantic bird trapped in a cage of bone. It was happening.
Yet the triumph tasted like cold slag. It felt less like wings, more like a collar of chilled iron clicking shut.
Still, he gave a single, sharp nod. The only acknowledgment they would accept, or require.
The Presences receded into their deeper silence. The audience was over.
He turned. As he passed the ancient wall, his fingertips brushed the stone. Rough. Hot to the touch, vibrating with the deep, slow pulse of Akar beneath. This place had once echoed with the shouts of a thousand voices—arguments, decrees, the birth-cries of a city's hidden heart.
Now, it held only the silence that had devoured them.
Lugal emerged from the Forum like a diver breaching black water. The city's roar rushed back—the distant clang of the Verge forges, the susurrus of the Middens crowd, the ever-present sigh of falling ash. It coated his shoulders, gritted in his teeth, filled his lungs. Oblivious. Eternal.
Tomorrow, he would climb. Past the Sinks, through the Middens, beyond the guarded gates of the Verge. Into the Crowns. To the Sanctums.
Find Vayne. Learn his truth.
Steal it.
For the power coiled in the vial.
For the silent masters in the deep.
For the boy who clawed his way out of the Sinks and aimed for the stars.
But as he walked Embermark's living, breathing streets, the ash seemed to cling tighter. The Akar beneath his boots pulsed warmer, sharper—not comforting, but attentive.
As if the city knew the pact he'd made in the sunken dark.
As if it waited, breath held, to see if the shadows he courted would devour him whole.