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Keeper's Adage:
"The hearth holds the roots, the dreamer strains for the sky. Between them blooms the Gloom-Lichen, fed by memory and the tears of what cannot stay. Tend the light, child, but know: the deepest roots remember the shape of the falling seed."
– From the Book of Tended Embers, Keepers of Stories Archive
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Four Years Ago
Ash fell in the Sinks like tired snow. Not the frantic swirl of a fresh burn, but a slow, suffocating drift, settling on crooked lampposts, slick cobblestones, and slumped shoulders until the district felt less like a neighborhood and more like an open grave waiting for its final shovelful. The air hung thick—damp wool soaked in iron filings, rotting root-cellars, and the sour tang of unwashed fear. Every breath was a negotiation with the city's slow digestion.
Hatim moved like a shadow between walls that leaned together like drunkards propping each other up. His boots splashed through puddles that reeked of stagnant water, old blood-rust, and something deeper—the dank breath of the city's foundations. A slumped figure in a doorway drew on a clay pipe, smoke coiling grey in the perpetual twilight. One eye was swollen shut, a purple ruin; the other, milky and distant, tracked Hatim's passage. It saw through him, gazing at the ghosts clawing behind his ribs. No greetings. No warnings. In the Sinks, silence was the first law: move unseen, or be moved permanently.
Then, the air shifted.
Cutting through the decay: a scent sharp and green. Living.
He turned the corner, and the gloom parted.
An archway woven from Bone-Reed and Wyrmgrass spanned the alley entrance. The reeds, bleached pale as old ivory, pulsed with a faint, rhythmic luminescence where they touched the ambient Akar-light bleeding from a cracked conduit overhead. It was a slow, weary heartbeat in the gloom. Beneath it, a door cobbled together from salvaged timber and thick twine spun from cured Akar-hide. Hatim knocked: twice sharp, like stone on stone, then once soft, a breath against wood.
The door groaned inward, reluctant. Warmth, thick and herbal, washed over him, carrying the scent of dried Moonpetal Bloom and something deeper—ozone and old earth.
Inside, Maldri's domain defied the Sinks.
Her hearth was the heart—a slab of volcanic stone carved with channels that glowed blue where the fire kissed them. Flames danced beneath a pot blackened by decades, casting shifting light on bundles of herbs hanging from the rafters:
Moonpetal Bloom swayed gently, releasing motes of silver dust with each subtle vibration;
Gloom-Lichen in clay pots pulsed faintly in response to the fire's heat. Jars lined rough shelves, each humming faintly—not with sound, but with presence. Dust dared not settle. They were sealed with wax etched with minute, fading glyphs, holding tinctures of crushed Star-Thistle, powdered Ember-Root, and memories too potent for the open air. The scent was a tapestry: damp loam, camphor, simmering Thorn-Root stew, and beneath it all, the faint, electric hum of contained power.
"Close that, boy. Letting the dying world in won't help it," Maldri's voice rasped, steady as bedrock. She didn't look up from the mortar gripped in her knotted hands. A stubborn Void-Root resisted her pestle, its dark flesh oozing viscous sap that smoked faintly on the stone.
Hatim shut the door. The outside world's sigh cut off, replaced by the sanctuary's intimate chorus: the low bubble of stew, the rhythmic crunch of Maldri's pestle, the soft hiss of sap meeting stone.
"You eat?" she asked, eyes still fixed on the recalcitrant root.
"Not yet."
A grunt. A jerk of her chin towards the heavy iron kettle hanging over the blue-edged flames. "Two scoops. Ladle's marked. Mind the Mistfrond shimmer – too much, and you'll dream awake."
He obeyed. The stew was thick, chunks of pale Thorn-Root bobbing in a broth that shimmered with suspended particles of Mistfrond, like captured starlight. The scent of smoked marrow beneath it was rich, almost cloying. He didn't ask its origin. Some questions in the Sinks were knives pointed back at the asker.
He settled onto the worn Coalgrass mat by the hearth, its residual warmth a phantom embrace left by its usual occupant. Lyra. She was always here before him, a lingering scent of ozone and wild moss, a half-empty jar turned upside down on the shelf, a twist of bright copper wire left on the table's edge. She moved through the Sinks like a rumour given form—always present in her absence.
"You missed her," Maldri stated, not a question. Her pestle found a rhythm, grinding defiance into submission.
"I know." Hatim's voice was flat, but the stew suddenly tasted like ash.
"Don't brood like a kicked cur. Make yourself useful. Splitleaves." She nudged a bundle towards him with her foot.
Hatim picked up the bone-handled dagger. The Splitleaves were vicious things, edges serrated like tiny knives, oozing a corrosive yellow sap that stung even on calloused skin. He began to slice, the motions precise, ingrained. Separate the edible inner vein from the toxic flesh. Maldri watched his hands in her periphery, silent, until the root in her mortar finally yielded with a wet pop.
"Good," she muttered, the word a rare benediction.
They worked in a silence woven from years of shared survival. The only sounds: the hiss of sap, the stew's low song, the rhythmic tick-tick-tick of Maldri's left foot tapping the packed earth floor—a telltale sign she was blending something volatile.
"You feel it?" Her voice was low, scraping the quiet.
Hatim paused, the dagger hovering over a leaf. "The… hum? Underfoot?"
A sharp nod. Her eyes, like chips of obsidian under her wrinkled brow, met his. "Forest's stirring. Deep roots waking. Gloom-Lichen's dreaming of bloom."
His knuckles whitened on the dagger's hilt. "Too early. Weeks early."
"Time's threads fraying, boy. Things wake hungry now. Don't wait for permission." She wiped her hands on a rag already stained a hundred different shades of earth and effort. Standing, her knees cracked like dry timber, but her presence seemed to expand, filling the small room with the immovable weight of ancient stone. She ladled stew into a chipped bowl.
"Lyra wants the Crown's life," Hatim said into the renewed quiet. The words felt heavy, dangerous.
"She breathes sky-dust, that one. Always has."
"She wants me to go with her."
Maldri didn't answer immediately. She blew steam from her spoon, sipped. Her gaze fixed on the blue heart of the fire. "I carried dreams of leaving once," she said, the words slow, dredged from deep silt. "Before the Sinks sunk its teeth. Before I learned the price of breath weighed differently down here."
Hatim watched the flames dance reflected in her dark eyes—a captured, restless spirit.
"Why stay?" The question escaped, raw.
She lowered the spoon. Looked at him, truly looked, the weight of her years pressing down. "Because the light needs tending. And someone had to remember how."
The fire snapped. A log collapsed in a shower of blue sparks.
The door groaned open.
Lyra stood framed in the entry, arms laden with bundles of pungent Shadow-Mint and a satchel bulging with polished Whisper-Bone fragments that gleamed like captured moonlight. Her cheeks were flushed from running, strands of dark hair escaping her braid, clinging to her temples. Her eyes, wide and the colour of storm-lit moss, found Hatim's instantly, bright with unspoken adventure.
"Told you he'd be stirring Granny's cauldron," she announced, her voice a clear bell in the thick air.
"You're late," Hatim countered, but a smile broke through his guarded expression before he could smother it.
Lyra flinched back as a Veil-Wasp, droning on wings that hummed at a frequency that vibrated Hatim's teeth, zipped past her head. Where it flew, the air rippled. The lichen-covered support beam behind it momentarily fractured into twin images before snapping back into one warped whole.
"Eyes down, Hatim!" Maldri barked. "Their lies sink hooks into unwatched minds!"
Hatim blinked, tearing his gaze away. When he looked back, faint, pulsing glyphs now traced the beam's surface like infected veins. Illusion made manifest.
Lyra dumped her haul onto the crowded table and leaned against the wall beside Hatim. Close. For a breath, her shoulder pressed against his. Warm. Real. He didn't pull away.
Maldri's sharp gaze flicked between them. "Gloom-Lichen dreams awake. Bloom comes with the false dawn. I'll need both sets of hands. The forest won't ask twice."
Lyra's bright energy dimmed, replaced by a focused intensity. She nodded, her fingers already straying to a jar of thick, greenish paste. "I'll decant the shielding balm tonight."
"Use the old recipe," Maldri emphasized, her voice gravelly with warning. "None of your shortcuts. We'll need the marrow of it. The thick silence."
As the hearth-fire burned lower, painting long, dancing shadows, Hatim watched Lyra. Her fingers were already stained emerald from the Shadow-Mint, her lips moving silently as she calculated ratios only she fully understood. She hadn't changed. Still a spark trying to ignite damp tinder. Still too loud for the Sinks' suffocating quiet. A treacherous part of him, buried deep, was fiercely glad she hadn't yet flown.
He caught her gaze flick upwards, past the hanging herbs, to the narrow smoke-vent in the ceiling—a sliver of bruised, ash-hazed sky visible beyond.
Dreaming.
He didn't know if his feet would follow hers when she finally leapt. Not yet.
But the forest waited, ancient and hungry. And the Gloom-Lichen only bloomed once, its pollen a key that unlocked doors. Tomorrow would demand its price.