-----------‐--------------------‐
Keeper's Adage:
"The glyphs of awakening bloom brightest on the ruins of the forgotten self. To carry the Warrior's resonance is to shoulder the weight of buried years. Remember this: the past you fled is the foundation of the blade you forge."
– From the Codex of the Golden Scars, Keepers of Stories Archive
-----------‐--------------------‐
The stone beneath him wasn't the fading memory of damp forest loam, but something far more brutal in its certainty—cold, coarse, unrelenting. It pressed into his spine, grounding him in a world too solid, too sharp after the formless terrors of the Dark Forest. His scream still echoed, a ragged, animal sound clawing its way from his throat moments before waking. Now, it lingered, reverberating in his skull like a curse.
He lay sprawled across the chamber floor, gasping, torchlight flickering along the rough-hewn walls like a failing heartbeat. His eyes snapped open—wide, haunted—seeing nothing of the present. Only her. Granny Maldri's face—flickering, dissolving—her breath labored, mouth shaping words he could no longer hear. Lyra, pale and trembling, clutching his sleeve, eyes wide with terror too old for her years. The smell – ozone, burning hair, the sickly-sweet decay of hope – still coated his tongue. The cold – the glacial, soul-sapping void left by the Whispered Void's touch – seemed to radiate from his own bones. These weren't dream fragments. They were real. Unearthed truths. Unearthed pain. How could he have forgotten? The betrayal of his own mind was a fresh wound, raw and bleeding.
"Granny! Lyra!" he croaked, the names torn from his chest like shrapnel. He scrambled to his knees, limbs stiff with the phantom aches of yesterday's alley fight and the deeper, older bruises of remembered terror. The memory broke over him in a merciless tide—not a dream, but a buried shard of his soul rising to the surface, sharp and unforgiving. Four years? Impossible. It felt like moments ago. The urgency was a physical thing, a cord tightening around his ribs. She needed him. Now.
His hands fumbled blindly for the passage's edge, the cool stone a fleeting anchor. He had to go. Back to the Sinks. Back to their hearth, smelling of clove-smoke and drying herbs. Back to the Dark Forest, where reality and memory bled together at the edge of the Whispered Void.
"Easy, boy." The voice struck like a steady drumbeat in the chaos—low, resonant, pulling him back from the brink. A hand, calloused but deliberate, pressed down on his shoulder. Kander.
He blinked, and the chamber's stone walls slammed back into focus. Torchlight. Dust motes drifting like dead stars in the oppressive gloom. Kander—broad frame etched in shadow, face unreadable, but the fresh, livid glyph-burns across his knuckles and palms pulsed faintly, smelling of ozone and singed skin. A silent testament to the battle fought within Hatim's own mind.
"Let me go!" Hatim snarled, twisting violently. The restraint felt like chains. "I have to go back! They're—they're still there, they need me! Maldri... she's fading!" His voice cracked, frayed with a desperation that bordered on madness.
Kander didn't yield. His grip remained, grounding, implacable. "That was a memory, Hatim. A powerful one. But time has passed. Much more than you remember clinging to that forest floor."
"No!" Hatim hissed, shaking his head as if to dislodge the truth. The denial was a shield against the crushing weight of years lost. "It just happened. I saw it. Felt it. Her skin... cold... grey... Lyra's tears..." He could still feel the mud beneath his knees, the tremble in Lyra's hand when he'd grasped it.
Kander's silence was a wall. Then, the words dropped like stones into a still pond: "Four years. At least. That memory is a wound reopened, not a present danger."
Four years. The words struck like a hammer blow to the chest. Hatim reeled, breath stolen. He stared at Kander, uncomprehending. How could four years vanish like vapor? How could he forget them? Forget Maldri's suffering? Forget Lyra's terror? The horror wasn't just the memory; it was the terrifying blank space where years of his life should be.
A hollow echo where laughter, struggle, living should have resonated. What else had he buried? What other agonies lay hidden?
Kander's voice softened, yet remained iron beneath. "You'll remember more. The Akar within you is no longer dormant. It is mending what was fractured. The pieces will come. They will cut."
Hatim wrenched free—not in defiance, but in a surge of panicked energy that overrode reason. Kander's words were a storm he couldn't weather yet. He needed proof. He needed home. His feet found the corridor, and then he was running.
The Middens swallowed him. Stale air, thick with the reek of unwashed bodies, boiling glue-pots from the tanneries, and the ever-present, gritty tang of ash, burned his lungs. Sunlight hadn't kissed these stones in decades, filtering down only as a perpetual, grimy twilight through high, soot-caked vents. Hatim didn't care. He needed to see. To know the truth written in stone and absence.
He tore through the familiar-yet-alien warren. Laborers hauling sacks of pulverized Sunstone paused, their soot-rubbed faces turning to track his frantic passage. A vendor selling skewers of roasted Gloom-Rat meat gaped, tongs frozen mid-air. His limbs throbbed, a cacophony of old pain and new adrenaline. Blood sang a desperate song in his ears. Beneath the city's grime, a deeper note hummed – the low thrum of countless lives, the groan of ancient foundations, the dissonant whispers of forgotten places. The city's hidden Akar, previously silent to him, now vibrated just below the surface of perception, a chaotic symphony he couldn't yet decipher.
He rounded a corner slick with runoff and caught his reflection in a brackish puddle. He froze, breath hitching.
Glyphs.
Not imagined. Not dreamt. Golden, swirling, luminous patterns – intricate, alien, yet somehow deeply familiar – curled beneath the surface of his skin on his forearms and the backs of his hands. They weren't painted, not inked; they looked grown, birthed by the light of memory and the surge of awakened power. They pulsed gently, alive, whispering secrets he couldn't grasp. The Akar moved within him, no longer dormant, no longer quiet. It was here. It was him.
"Wielder…" The voice was a dry rasp, filled with awe and fear.
An old woman, hunched over a basket of wilted Ghost-Glow fronds, stared at his arm. Her eyes, pale as river glass, widened until the whites showed all around. "A warrior… walking among us…"
The whisper spread like spilled oil. Laborers froze mid-task. A child clutching his mother's ragged skirt pointed a grubby finger, mouth forming a silent 'O'. Hatim saw it reflected in their eyes: not just curiosity, but a deep, superstitious dread mixed with a flicker of desperate hope. They pressed themselves against the damp brick walls, clearing a path as if he carried plague or prophecy incarnate. The space around him became a vacuum of fear and reverence.
He ran harder, the golden light beneath his skin flaring with each pounding heartbeat, a beacon in the grimy twilight.
He reached the place. The narrow cul-de-sac where the scent of clove-smoke and drying Wyrmgrass had once marked Granny Maldri's door, nestled beneath a distinctive arch woven from bleached Bone-Reed and vibrant, resilient Wyrmgrass.
Gone.
Utterly, devastatingly gone.
The woven arch was dust, scattered fragments bleached grey by time and neglect. The wall behind it wasn't just crumbling; it was broken, partially collapsed, devoured by a creeping moss the color of old ash and despair. Gloom-Rats, sleek and bold, skittered among the rubble, their tiny claws scratching on stone. The hearth, the heart of their home, was a cold, dark hollow filled with debris. The herbs, the laughter, the fierce, protective warmth that had defied the Sinks' gloom—vanished without a trace. This place wasn't dormant. It was dead. A tomb for his past.
The reality was a physical blow. Hatim staggered, the frantic energy draining from his limbs like blood from a wound. A low moan escaped him as he collapsed to his knees, hands digging into the broken stone, feeling the sharp edges bite into his palms. The golden glyphs flickered erratically, mirroring the chaos within. Four years. The words finally found purchase, cold and heavy. He had abandoned them. Or they… A wave of nausea threatened to overwhelm him.
A shadow, long and familiar, fell across the ruins, blocking the dim light from a distant phosphor-lamp.
"You can't go back. Not yet."
Kander. He hadn't followed; he had known. Known where the memory would drive him. Known what he would find.
Hatim surged to his feet, whirling, eyes wild, desperation hardening into something sharper, angrier. "The Forest—I have to get to the Forest! They might still be there! Trapped! Waiting! Maldri needs—"
"You cannot," Kander interrupted, his voice firm, final. It held the weight of absolute certainty. "The Forest is closed. Bound by wards older than this city. Its deeper paths, where the Whispered Void walked, are sealed. Its truths are not ready to be unearthed. Not by you. Not yet."
"Why?!" Hatim's voice cracked, raw with grief and fury. He gestured wildly at the ruins. "What happened to them? Where is Lyra? Is Maldri...?" He couldn't say it. The image of her grey, translucent skin, the terrifying absence in her eyes, choked him.
Kander's silence stretched, heavy and profound. He looked at the ruins, then back at Hatim, his amber eyes holding a depth of sorrow that silenced Hatim's next outburst. Then, carefully, precisely: "That answer, Hatim, belongs to your memory. Not my tongue. The path is yours to walk back. But know this: you buried it. Hid the past from yourself. Deliberately."
Hatim staggered as if struck. "Why? Why would I do that?" The thought was monstrous. To forget this?
"To survive the weight of it," Kander said softly. "Or to shield them from something that hunted you. Or... because the pain of remembering was simply too great to bear while living. Only you can know the reason buried with the memory. It will surface. When the time is right. When you are strong enough."
Kander gestured, not dismissively, but pointedly, to the golden glyphs swirling beneath Hatim's skin, still pulsing with agitated light. "Your cultivation has begun. The glyphs you see—they are your Akar made visible. Unique. Golden. Shaped by memory and will and the resonance of your spirit. Most cannot see them. Fewer still awaken to their true meaning in the crucible of remembered pain. But you... you stand on the threshold."
Hatim looked down, not just at his skin, but through it. The glyphs shimmered, and behind them—in the crumbling walls, the cold stones underfoot, the very air thick with ash and despair—he could feel currents of light, threads of resonance, faint but undeniable. The city hummed with unseen music, a complex, discordant symphony he was only beginning to perceive. The Unbinding's dissonance was there too, a sour note beneath it all, but so was the stubborn pulse of life in the Sinks.
"You are Unmarked no longer. Soon, you will step fully into being Touched. And that path," Kander's voice dropped to a near-whisper, intense, "begins with resonance. With knowing what you are. And who you fight for."
A memory surfaced, unbidden, cutting through the panic – Granny Maldri's voice, warm and steady by a crackling hearth: "Feel it, child. Don't just see with your eyes. The true Akar is seen by those who listen... with their soul."
Hatim closed his eyes. He could feel the faint, resilient pulse of the Sunstone Moss clinging to a nearby wall. He could almost hear the dissonant shimmer of a patch of Ghost-Glow blooming defiantly in a crack across the alley. His breath hitched, then slowed. The raw, tearing fear didn't vanish, but it flowed around a core of burgeoning focus. The glyphs on his skin seemed to steady, their light deepening, becoming less frantic, more purposeful.
Kander's hand rested lightly, briefly, on his shoulder. No restraint now. An anchor. "The Warrior Class. That is the resonance shaping within you. The path of the guardian, the shield, the blade against the Unmaking. The glyphs will sharpen with your clarity. They will become your strength, your focus. But first, Hatim, you must ask yourself: who are you fighting for? And what are you willing to remember to protect them?"
Hatim opened his eyes. The ruin lay before him, a stark monument to loss and forgotten time. The Forest waited beyond, veiled in silence and ancient wards. The golden light on his skin was a promise, and a burden.
He would remember.
He had to. For Granny Maldri's sacrifice. For Lyra's tears. For the life stolen, not just from them, but from himself. The weight of ash and memory settled on his shoulders, heavy, but no longer crushing. It was a weight he would learn to carry. He turned from the ruins, not towards the distant Forest, but towards Kander, his gaze no longer wild, but grim, resolved. The first step wasn't into the past, but into the terrifying, resonant truth of the present.
"Then tell me," Hatim said, his voice low, rough, but steady. "Where do I begin?"