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Keeper's Adage:
"The ascent demands payment in the coin of the soul. Each step buys distance from what you were, shedding skin like discarded prayers. Beware the void that watches the climber; it cares not for the burdens you carry, only the shape you leave behind."
– From the Ledgers of Vertical Silence, Keepers of Stories Archive
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Stepping from the Sunken Forum felt like surfacing from a tomb. Embermark swallowed Lugal whole—a fever dream etched in crumbling brick and the sour tang of perpetual damp. Heat pressed like a sweaty palm against his skin. Soot invaded his nostrils, his pores, coating his throat until each breath was a labor. The air didn't just cling; it suffocated, thick with the weight of the bargain he'd just made and the secrets coiled in his chest like serpents fed on his own ambition.
Whispers bled from shadowed alley mouths, a language older than coin: "Two hours of silence for a heel of bread… A childhood memory traded for a vial of dream-smoke… A name, whispered once, buys a week without Valerian's gaze." The ash danced in the sickly green glow of bottled root-lamps, not like dying stars, but like the restless souls of the forgotten, settling on skin, hope, and the bleached bones jutting from collapsed foundations.
Above, the sky sagged—a vast, bruised canopy of violet streaked with ember-red veins where distant Akar bled into the firmament. Not beauty. A taunt. Divine light promised to the desperate, a myth spoon-fed to keep the Sinks from howling itself to pieces in the endless dark.
Lugal's boots grated on broken stone, each step dragging a different ghost. Here, he'd traded Old Man Gerren's hiding spot for a warm cloak that stank of mildew. There, he'd let Tiri's crew corner a rival, turning away as the first blow landed. The stones themselves seemed to press upward against his soles—not speaking, but remembering. The city watched. Judged.
Don't look back.
Ahead, the ascent began: stairs like a broken spine, twisting upward from the Sinks' deepest gut. Centuries of wind and grime had scoured the glyphs etched into the steps into vague, sorrowful smudges. Forgotten prayers. Warnings from an age when gods might have still listened. Or cared.
He climbed.
Each step was defiance. Each breath grew thinner, sharper, as if the city itself resisted his rise, the weight of the Sinks clinging to his ankles. The soot thickened, greasy and familiar.
Then—release.
The Sinks exhaled him into the Middens.
Chaos erupted. A sensory assault after the Forum's sepulchral quiet. Survival here wore the gaudy mask of commerce. Stalls choked the arteries of the district, their canvas awnings screaming with faded dyes—ochre, vermillion, poison-green. Spices—coriander, burnt pepper, something unnervingly sweet—bit the air. Hawkers' voices layered over the clang of metal, the hiss of steam from pipe-valves overhead, the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of slag-hammers from nearby yards. Every shout carried a deal, a threat, a plea disguised as an offer.
The ash here didn't smother. It observed, hanging in a perpetual, gritty haze, waiting to see what the struggle would yield.
Movement—a blur of rags and wide eyes. A child, no older than five, darted from behind a stack of cracked ceramic crates. Grime streaked his cheeks, but his eyes… startlingly clear. Not fear. Not even awe. Just raw, unguarded curiosity, fixed on Lugal.
Lugal stopped. The sudden stillness felt alien.
A woman surged after the boy, face etched with a weariness that stole her youth. Her hands, though, moved with swift, practical grace as she scooped him up—hands that had mended nets, kneaded dough, perhaps even delivered a swift slap.
"Ryl!" she hissed, tucking the boy against her threadbare shawl. "Forgive him. His feet find trouble faster than sense."
Lugal's reply slipped out, unfiltered, raw: "Best he finds it now. Before the city teaches him the only paths are the ones that break you."
The woman blinked. Then, for a fleeting, impossible heartbeat, a genuine smile touched her lips—a crack in the weary mask. "If you're bound north," she said, voice dropping conspiratorially, "steer clear of the ash-bakers near the lift tracks. They'll sell you a grin cheaper than yesterday's bread, and it'll sour your gut just as fast."
He dipped his chin, a fractional nod, and moved on. But something warm, unsettlingly fragile, glowed behind his ribs—a banked coal stirred back to life. He almost recoiled from it. Sentiment. A luxury the Sinks devoured whole.
The character of the air shifted as he pushed north. Soot blended with the tang of hot iron filings, molten wax, and the sharp, clean scent of ozone—the signature stink of the Verge. Here labored the Engineer-Guilds, souls unblessed by Nobel blood or Crown Academies. They built not for glory, but because Embermark's fractured heart demanded it. Theirs was the power of necessity, the magic of gears and grit.
The district thrummed. A symphony of restrained violence—the shriek of metal on stone, the groan of overloaded lifts crawling the cliff-faces like brass beetles, the deep, resonant hum of Akar-conduits running beneath the gridded streets, pulsing like arteries carrying liquid light. Purpose lived here, etched into every scorched anvil, every blueprint smudged with oil, every calloused hand guiding molten flow. Lugal walked with instinctive reverence. Here, knowledge wasn't just power; it was a loaded crossbow. The Verge didn't bow to the Crowns, but the Crowns' gilded towers rested squarely on its scarred shoulders.
"Lugal."
He turned. Kael leaned against a soot-streaked pillar, wiping grease from a crystalline lens with a scrap of chamois. Young. Eyes too bright, too hopeful for the grime of the Verge.
"You missed the dawn-forge chant," Kael stated, calm as ever.
"Not my hymn to sing," Lugal replied, his voice rough.
"Hatim?" Kael asked, lowering the lens. Its surface caught the sickly green light, fracturing it. "Thought he was hunting work? Bolun's crew?"
Lugal met Kael's guileless gaze. The lie tasted like ash. "He'll come."
Kael simply nodded. Belief, pure and uncomplicated. It felt like a weight.
Lugal slipped into the shadowed mouth of Niya's stall—a cave of rusted curiosities and lanterns casting fragmented, dancing light. Niya herself was a figure carved from smoke and dry wind, her eyes holding the depthless patience of stone.
"Ascending, shadow-walker?" Her voice was the rasp of stone on stone.
He slid the pouch across her scarred counter. She didn't open it. Her fingers, knotted like old roots, brushed the leather. Then, from beneath the counter, she produced garments: a tunic the exact, shifting grey of smoke before it catches flame, and a scarf woven with threads that seemed to drink the dim light. "This weave remembers shadows," she murmured. "Wears them like a second skin."
"That's the one."
Dressed in the Verge's muted twilight, Lugal dissolved into the crowd. No longer Lugal the Sinks rat, the Forum's errand-boy. Just another shape in motion, purposeful and anonymous. Eyes slid over him. Recognition died before it sparked. Purpose was his armor now.
He moved with the ingrained knowledge of the unseen: the alley that bypassed the Valerian sentry post, the service lift whose operator glanced only at the token, not the face, the ventilation shaft humming with warm air that led to the lower Crowns promenade. His forged token, cool and heavy in his palm, pulsed with a sliver of embedded Akar—a lie singing a convincing tune to the gates that mattered.
As he navigated the invisible pathways, Hatim's face surfaced in his mind. Bruised in the Middens ash, defiant even broken. Lugal had dangled the Nobel's vial, the Verge job with Bolun—a lifeline, or a noose disguised as one?
"That kind of job... it burns more than it pays," Hatim had rasped.
Lugal hadn't argued. Just offered that bitter bread and a smirk. But the echo of Hatim's words, the raw truth in them, hadn't faded. It scraped against the grand purpose the Forum had bestowed.
This was supposed to be his payment? His absolution? Redemption in Embermark was a one-way street paved with someone else's suffering.
Yet the path remained. And Lugal walked it. Not towards the myth-shrouded Ascended Sanctums floating in impossible defiance of gravity high above, lit from within by an unwavering golden pulse. That was for later.
Tonight, his destination was a lesser spire—House Vayne's administrative annex. Marble-clad, not Akar-infused. Power, yes, but the diluted, bureaucratic kind that still relied on locks and ledgers. The kind that got its hands dirty.
The air at the base of the private lift shaft changed abruptly. Gone was the clinging soot, the organic rot of the lower city. Here, the air bit—clean, cold, sharp with the scent of crushed winter-mint and something floral, faint and undoubtedly imported. An expensive mask over the city's true breath.
Two Crownsguard flanked the ornate gate. Impeccable in polished cuirasses the color of storm clouds. Swords sheathed, but their eyes were naked blades, already dissecting him.
No words. Lugal extended his hand. On his palm lay the stone token—unmarked obsidian, humming faintly with its captive sliver of Akar.
The taller guard's gaze flicked from the stone to Lugal's shadow-cloaked face. A fractional nod.
The gates sighed open.
The lift ascended.
Steel cables groaned. Runes etched into the brass cage flared with cool, blue-white light.
Embermark fell away beneath him. Layer by suffocating layer.
The grime and clamor of the Sinks.
The frantic, colorful struggle of the Middens.
The purposeful, grounded thrum of the Verge.
Silence descended. The light clarified, turning hard and sterile. The damp heat bled away, replaced by a dry, artificial chill.
He rose through a city built on memory and fire, its veins of Akar humming beneath polished onyx floors and vaulted corridors lined with tapestries depicting tamed gods and curated histories.
Lugal didn't look down at the receding city.
He looked up.
Not at Vayne's spire, nor the distant Sanctums.
At the vast, starless void between the towers.
A space that watched back. Cold. Implacable.
Where secrets weren't whispered, but excavated.
Tonight, Lugal didn't climb to escape.
He didn't climb to hide.
He climbed to arrive.
To etch his name onto the stone ledger of power.
To become something even Embermark's relentless memory couldn't erase.