-----------‐--------------------‐
Keeper's Adage:
"The forge of truth burns brightest in the hollowed vessel. Let the Akar strip the rot, let the Babs feast on lies, and stand bare before the mirror of your essence. Only ash-born can be reforged."
– From the Vault-Liturgies of the Unmasked, Keepers of Stories Archive
-----------‐--------------------‐
Pain didn't scream. It echoed.
A dull throb radiated from Hatim's ribs, a physical counterpoint to the deeper ache resonating in his bones—the phantom sting of glyphs drawn years ago, the shame of power touched and abandoned. His fingers twitched against the cold stone floor, trembling as if seeking a blade's familiar weight, or recoiling from a memory etched too deep to scar over. Each tremor sent fresh fire crawling up scorched nerves, tracing patterns beneath his skin like invisible ink.
He drew a breath. Sharp. Ragged.
The air in the chamber pressed down like layers of soot-soaked wool. Every inhalation carried ash, iron, and the stifling weight of silence that had witnessed too many secrets. His ribs pulsed, bruised not just by Masad's fists, but by the psychic recoil of the memory-vision—Kael's shattered glyphs, the spear born of his own desperation. The ache was less physical wound, more spectral bruise left by the past's cold touch.
Then, the world didn't freeze. It shimmered.
Edges bled and softened, like ink dissolving on damp parchment. Reality slipped its moorings. The chamber itself seemed to twist, becoming a lens smeared with smoke and the residue of centuries. The ancient glyphs on the walls pulsed with a light that thudded in perfect, unsettling sync with Hatim's own heartbeat. Through the distortion, something dormant within him stirred.
Not a thought. Not a feeling.
Resonance.
A rhythm of the Ashen Throne, a forgotten song humming in the marrow of his bones. A call he'd spent years silencing.
The chamber didn't blur.
It melted.
Not from heat, but from remembrance. The black basalt walls, moments ago inert, now breathed with veins of molten Akar. It pulsed sluggishly, mournfully, like a heart laboring under grief. The liquid light moved like breath beneath skin—truth given form, slow and restless. Where the stone resisted the flow, it blistered, shedding flakes of ash-white matter that spiraled downward like snow from a crumbling god. Memories. Moments. Dust of the dead.
The silence deepened, thickening into something palpable. Not mere absence of sound.
Attention. Ancient. Undivided.
The chamber wasn't observing. It was
remembering.
And in remembering, it focused on him.
A figure coalesced at the chamber's heart.
Not emerging from shadow, but sharpening into existence, as if the world had finally recalled his precise shape.
Hatim blinked, smoke clearing behind his eyes.
The hood fell back.
Not illusion. Flesh. Time-carved.
The face wasn't merely old; it was weathered. Skin like ancient bark stretched taut over sharp bones, fissured by countless unseen seasons. Silver hair, woven into intricate knots above his temples, resembled less a style and more a ritual binding—a ward against forces Hatim couldn't name. Robes draped his frame, not dyed but seemingly stained—patterns in rust-brown and dried crimson that looked less like decoration and more like memory bled directly into the fabric.
And the eyes…
Amber-gold. Not burning with overt power, but holding something infinitely more unsettling.
Recognition.
They didn't pierce Hatim's soul; they bypassed it entirely, gazing through him to the raw, unformed memory the world held of him before he became Hatim. Before the Sinks, before the running, before the forgetting.
Hatim stumbled back a step. Heat flooded him—a cocktail of shame, bewildered wonder, and a spark of old, buried rage.
Then the man spoke. "Hatim."
The voice was soft. Familiar. Wrong.
Not the timbre. The gravity. The profound ache beneath the word.
Granny Maldri.
Not her voice, but the echo of her defiance, her fierce warmth, her bone-deep grief. The hands that stirred thin broth over a meager fire and could strike with startling force lived behind Hatim's eyes. Her scent—boiled roots, damp wool, smoke from cheap prayer sticks—filled his nostrils.
And now it lived in this man.
Hatim's breath caught, sharp as a shard of glass in his throat.
Torchlight guttered wildly.
Shadows writhed, losing their forms. Time itself convulsed, the chamber stuttering between the solid present and the dripping, ink-like smear of the past. One moment, the stone was firm beneath him; the next, it felt fluid, treacherous.
The man smiled. Gums dark. Teeth cracked like old river ice. Utterly familiar in its wear.
The scent intensified: roots, rot, sacred smoke. Maldri's ghost, imprinted on the air.
Not illusion. Imprint. Memory made dense enough to rot. Real enough to make his eyes sting.
Hatim's knees buckled.
He hit the stone floor hard, palms scraping against warm, pulsing glyphs. A fresh wave of pain—physical and psychic—rolled through him.
The old man didn't move to help. He simply waited. Witnessed the fall.
Hatim curled forward, clutching his stomach. The pain wasn't sharp now; it was a yawning hollow. A void shaped like a name he hadn't realized was missing. A loss he'd carried blindly.
He choked on the thick air. "I need… to go," he rasped, the words scraping raw. "Bolun's Forge. The Verge. He owes me a meeting." He pushed himself up slightly, defiance flaring amidst the wreckage. "I didn't crawl out of that alley for ghosts."
The old man—Kander, the name surfaced like a bubble from deep water—tilted his head. A slow, deliberate motion. "And yet they followed you down."
Hatim shook his head, ash drifting from his hair. "Coin. Food. That's all I need."
Kander's amber eyes held him. "And when you find them? What remains after?"
Hatim froze.
Not because the question was cruel. Because it slid into place like a key turning in a lock he hadn't known existed. It fit the hollow space inside him with terrifying precision.
Kander turned. His cane, gnarled wood fused with dark metal, tapped the stone floor once.
Thud.
Akar rippled beneath them. Golden light swelled from the cracks, not summoned in obedience, but rising in recognition. Not power displayed. Witness acknowledged.
"Come," Kander said, the word resonating in the charged air. "One trial. One truth. Then you go. Then you will understand why Akar remembers the shape of your name."
The descent was a journey into the city's dreaming heart.
Spiraling steps, hewn from the living bedrock, wound downward. Slit windows opened sporadically, revealing veins of liquid Akar flowing like sluggish, luminous blood through the stone. The light pulsed—red-gold, primal—casting long, dancing shadows. Heat radiated in waves, thick as breath. They passed glyphs half-consumed by time, their meanings lost, their forms now only mourners at the edge of comprehension.
Ash thickened the air the deeper they sank. Not the airborne grit of the upper city, but something heavier, older—like the shed skin of forgotten dreams, clinging like grief.
At last, they reached it:
The Vault.
Hollowed marrow of the world. Sacred ruin.
The air had tangible weight. Breathing felt like inhaling centuries of whispered confessions.
At the center sat a basin of seamless black stone, encircled by carved glyphs that didn't glow. They waited. Their shapes belonged to the Old Tongue of Cultivation—not commands shouted to the Akar, but prayers murmured with it. Stories too ancient for words.
Kander knelt before the basin, movements reverent, deliberate.
His hands moved in slow, spiraling gestures—not commanding the Akar, but inviting it. Beckoning.
Akar rose from the basin's depths.
Like smoke given purpose. Like memory coalescing.
It formed the shape of a gourd—blackstone, etched with glyphs that pulsed with a light like breath held between lifetimes. The liquid within shimmered, pure gold veined with threads of profound shadow.
Then came the Babs.
They emerged from hidden crevices, drawn by the Akar's purity. Winged, beetle-like, yet utterly alien. Their carapaces shimmered with captured starlight and fleeting thoughts. Delicate tails hissed faint steam near the Akar's radiance, a proximity of reverence without consumption. Creatures not of hunger, but of curation. Memory made manifest in insect form.
One drifted near Hatim's cheek. Its eyes were twin voids, depthless yet holding a strange, unsettling kindness. It hovered, tasting the air around him, the outline of his recent pain and older grief.
Kander swatted it away with a gentle, almost affectionate motion. "Even ash-born hunger for memory's taste," he murmured, his voice echoing softly in the vault. "But not all feasts are theirs to share."
He extended the Akar-gourd towards Hatim.
"Kander," he said, the name resonating through the chamber like a bell struck clear after ages of silence. It wasn't an offering. It was an invocation.
"Drink."
Hatim hesitated, the liquid gold swirling with shadows that seemed to gaze back. The hollow within him ached. The promise of Bolun, the Verge, the scrap of hope Lugal had tossed him… it felt distant, brittle. Here, now, was a different kind of threshold.
He took the gourd. Cold seeped into his palms. He tipped it to his lips.
Akar touched his tongue.
The world—shattered.
No floor. No vault. No Kander.
Only strands.
Countless threads of shimmering gold, raw and vital, weaving a vast, intricate web. A tapestry spun of self. His essence laid bare.
Akar flowed through it. Not attacking. Testing. Tasting the strength, the truth, the weakness of each strand.
First strand: Kander's Teaching. Humility before the Flow. The Akar brushed it. The strand held firm, resonating with a low, pure chime.
Second strand: Maldri. Her calloused hand smoothing his hair. Her fierce whisper: "You carry more than hunger, boy." The strand shimmered, vibrant, alive. It held.
Third strand: His Oath. Protection. Vowed over Kael's broken form. The Akar touched it. The strand wavered. Hollow at its core. A lie wrapped in desperation.
It snapped.
No sound. Only silent, white-hot fire.
Ash—pure, emotion-laden ash—rose from the severed end like a scream finally given form.
Fourth strand: Coin as Salvation. The Middens dream. Escape bought with copper. The Akar flowed over it. The strand twisted, revealing rot beneath the desperate hope.
It burned. Vanished.
The Babs flitted through the dissolving wreckage, delicate proboscises extended. They drank the shed illusions—the ash of broken promises and hollow dreams. Not parasites, but cleansers. Gentle as fingers wiping sweat from a fevered brow, erasing the debris of the false self.
Kander's voice echoed, not in his ears, but within the collapsing web itself: "Akar does not judge, Hatim. It reveals. You… you have been erasing yourself."
Then—a pulse.
Deep within the unraveling web, a strand untouched by the Akar's flow glowed with a steady, unassuming light.
A memory: A scrawny boy, younger than him, trembling before a Valerian enforcer over a stolen loaf. Hatim stepping forward, not to steal, but to shield. Taking the blow meant for the child. Terrified. Doing it anyway.
The strand held. Solid. True.
Another: Starving. Fingers inches from a merchant's purse. Maldri's hand clamping on his wrist, not in anger, but sorrow. Her voice, rough as stone: "Your soul, Hatim, is the only weight you carry across all the bridges of time. Don't trade it for bread." He'd pulled back. Emptier, but whole.
Held.
The web trembled violently. Not collapsing.
Convulsing.
Then—
Reformed.
Not restored to its former shape. Reforged.
Where lies had burned, new strands spun—thinner, stronger, gleaming with hard-won clarity. Memory was no longer a cage of shame and obligation. It was a mirror. Stark. Unflinching. Revealing not who he wished he was, but the raw material of who he could be.
Hatim collapsed back into his body.
He didn't shatter.
He settled.
He had been hollow.
Now he was hollowed.
A vessel swept clean. Ready.
Forged in the fire of unflinching truth.
The Babs didn't scatter. They converged. Their iridescent wings beat a soft, humming rhythm, forming a rotating halo of living light above Hatim's chest as the last strands of his Akar-web settled. One delicate creature landed on his sweat-damp brow. Its needle-fine legs tapped gently, tasting not his sweat, but the resonance of his reshaped self. For a fleeting, vertiginous moment, Hatim saw through its thousand-faceted eyes: a kaleidoscope of his own memories, each wrapped in threads of gold and shadow. Then, with a soft chittering chorus, they lifted, their tiny bellies glowing faintly with the consumed echoes of his shed illusions.
Kander stood. Watching. Silent. The same immense gravity clung to him, but Hatim now sensed its nature. It wasn't power imposed. It was the weight of seeing. Of bearing witness.
"You endured," Kander stated. Simple. Final.
Hatim pushed himself up, muscles trembling but obeying. He coughed, his throat raw, but clear. "I lost… so much."
Kander nodded slowly, his amber eyes holding the dim light of the vault. "Only what never belonged to your true shape."
Hatim drew in a breath. Deeper than any he could remember taking. The air, thick with ancient ash and the scent of liquid stone, bit his lungs—but it was clean. Unburdened.
The vault no longer felt like a prison of stone and memory.
It felt like a cradle.
The Akar pulsed steadily in the walls, in the basin, in the deep veins below. And now, something within Hatim's own core pulsed back. A quiet acknowledgement. A thread reconnected.
He didn't remember everything. Names, faces, the precise sequence of his fall… they remained shrouded.
But what remained within him now—
Was true.