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"To be reforged, one must first embrace the hammer. Not all fires purify—some exist only to burn away the weak. The Verge does not care if you are metal or dross. It only asks: Will you hold your shape?"
—Keepers of Memories, Verse of the Crucible
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The road to the Verge wasn't measured in miles. It was measured in layers shed, in breaths stolen, in the slow, grinding erosion of the Sinks' despair.
Kander moved with the inevitability of tectonic shift. His pace wasn't hurried; it was inexorable, carving a path through the thinning miasma of the lower city. Hatim stumbled behind, his feet– already cracking – grating on ash-laden grit that hid sharper teeth. Every step sent fresh jolts through soles bruised raw from days of relentless glyph-work on unforgiving stone. The air, thinner here, sharper, scraped his throat like inhaled glass. Soot crusted his lips, coated his tongue – the city's indelible fingerprint.
Behind them, the Sinks slumped away, a carcass of sagging walls and roofs bowed beneath centuries of abandonment. Smoke-cured rags hung like funeral banners from skeletal poles. The familiar, cloying stench of decay and despair thinned, replaced by something older, harsher.
Beneath Hatim's feet, the earth thrummed differently. Gone was the Sinks' weary pulse, the hidden, softer currents beneath Granny Maldri's hearth. Here, the Akar veins were angry. They trembled, hot and furious, like blood desperate to burst its own arteries. The land itself felt volatile, raging beneath the city's weight. Embermark here wasn't adorned; it was flayed, revealing raw bone.
The landscape twisted. Heat and memory warped the sparse flora. Black-veined shrubs clawed from cracks, their bark split by ancient burns, leaves like shards of iron, dark and brittle. Nothing grew true; everything hunched, bent, bowed beneath the relentless pressure of smoke and distant, unseen fires.
Then the wind shifted. Ash remained, but layered atop it now came the metallic tang of molten brass, the acrid bite of flux, the greasy reek of burned oils and marrow-greased gears. Each breath was a gulp of industry, of purpose forged in sweat and fire. It was the smell Lugal had navigated – "the tang of hot iron filings, molten wax, and the sharp, clean scent of ozone".
Then came the sound.
Not the Middens' cacophony of desperation, nor the Sinks' oppressive silence. This was rhythm. Deep, resonant, undeniable. The pounding heartbeat of a machine-god: the basso thoom of titanic hammers, the shrill, sustained scream of steel tortured into submission, the rhythmic groan of cranes hauling burdens heavier than sin, the constant, pressurized hiss of escaping steam. Hatim flinched instinctively at the first near-deafening clang, his body still wired for ambush in shadowed alleys. But this wasn't random violence. This was creation. Brutal, demanding, magnificent creation.
And then he saw it.
The Verge.
A city grafted onto a wound. Not built, but forged.
Scaffolds clung to sheer cliff faces like exposed ribcages. Girders, thick as ancient trees, braced towers of smoke-streaked iron that clawed at the bruised sky. Giant skeletal cranes swung arcs of molten gold – Akar-infused ingots glowing like captured suns – between gaping maw-like furnaces and quenching baths that roared with steam. Lifts, like brass beetles burdened beyond reason, crawled agonizingly slow up sheer walls, groaning under loads of raw ore, glittering coal, and unidentifiable, sigil-marked crates.
Akar itself flowed visibly here, constrained yet potent. Golden rivers surged through thick, transparent conduits snaking between smokestacks and foundries, their light struggling valiantly against the perpetual, gritty twilight. Not illumination, but a reminder – the city's lifeblood, channeled, used.
The sheer, oppressive scale hit Hatim like a physical blow. The air vibrated, thick with heat and power, pressing in on him. His ribs, still tender from Masad's fists, ached with each deep, soot-laden breath. He felt insignificant, a mote of dust caught in the gears of a vast, uncaring engine. The golden glyphs beneath his skin, faintly visible even through the grime, seemed to pulse in uneasy sympathy with the thrumming earth.
"This," Kander stated, his voice a low rasp cutting through the industrial symphony, "is the Verge. Where Embermark stops pretending to be anything but a hungry beast." He gestured with his chin towards the colossal transport gates. Reinforced with layered, angular glyphs humming with containment power, they stood like vault doors to another world. Beyond them sprawled the trade yards – vast, black plains choked with titanic freighters. These weren't ships; they were armored behemoths, hulls scarred and stitched with sigils from lands Hatim couldn't name.
Crates were disgorged from their cavernous holds: timber smelling of salt and distant storms, ice shards glittering like trapped stars even in the gloom, sacks of grain dusted with gold pollen, strange meats cured with spices that stung Hatim's nostrils with alien sharpness.
His stomach clenched violently, a hollow roar of hunger cutting through the din. He hadn't eaten since dawn – a handful of gritty travel bread.
Kander didn't turn, but his voice sharpened, laced with old bitterness. "See it flow? Wealth. Sustenance. Life. Drawn from the world. Flowing upward. Always upward. To the Crowns, behind their walls, breathing filtered air, drinking rainwater shipped in crystal, eating fruits that never tasted the ash we breathe." He spat, the phlegm vanishing instantly into the grimy cobbles. "Their children play in gardens while the Verge feeds them with its sweat and blood."
His gaze, heavy as slag, shifted towards the true heart of the district: The Ironweavers' Forge. It wasn't a building; it was a fortress dedicated to heat and force. Walls of blackened, heat-warped stone pulsed with contained fury. Glyphs crawled over its surface – not the elegant geometry Kander taught, but harsh, angular, brutal sigils of containment and amplification, etched not for beauty but for sheer, unyielding control. They shimmered with restrained power, holding back a contained star.
Spanning the monstrous entrance arch was a mural, its paint shimmering unnervingly. Crowned figures, stylized and cruel, harvested Akar nodes from the bowed necks of kneeling workers with sickle-tipped staves. The thorns on their diadems seemed to *
twitch, their painted eyes seeming to follow Hatim as he passed beneath the shadow of the arch.
"That forge," Kander growled, the sound vibrating in Hatim's chest, "feeds the war machines. Feeds the markets. Feeds the Crowns' excess. Feeds the world. And it feeds them with us."
Hatim stared, a cold dread seeping into his bones alongside the pervasive heat. The forge wasn't just a place of work. It felt sentient. A vast, hungry mouth. And it was aware. He instinctively touched the faint golden tracery on his forearm. No glyph felt like enough armor here. This was a different kind of power. Older. Cruder. Utterly merciless. Not manipulation, not finesse.
Will.
"You need more than pretty lines for the Trial of Resonance, Hatim," Kander said, finally veering away from the forge's oppressive aura towards a smaller, fiercely active workshop wedged like a burr between two larger guild halls. Steam wept from its vents; sparks spat rhythmically from a chimney stack. Inside, shadows moved against the glow of hot metal – figures bent double at anvils, muscles straining, skin slick with sweat and soot under the punishing heat. The rhythmic clang-clang-clang was a counterpoint to the forge's roar, intimate yet demanding.
"They won't care about the elegance of your Veshan," Kander continued, stopping at the workshop's open threshold. The heat radiating out was palpable. "They care about what remains when the Akar gutters out. When your glyphs fracture under strain. When your channels scream and bleed. What's left in the silence after the light fades?"
He turned, his eyes like chips of iron fresh from the quenching trough, boring into Hatim's.
"Flesh. Fire. Will. That's what's left. That's what the Trial burns down to. That's what they test."
A figure straightened from an anvil near the entrance, silhouetted against the furnace glow. Sleeves were rolled high on corded forearms. In one grease-blackened hand, he held a glowing iron rod, its tip a molten orange eye. Muscles were lean, wired tight. His posture spoke of coiled energy held in ruthless check. A glyph tattoo, stark and functional – lines speaking of discipline, control, endurance, not power – shimmered faintly along one forearm. As he turned, the light caught faded, intricate lines on his shoulder: Sennari. Identical to the one Kander bore.
Kael.
Recognition, cold and sharp, pricked Hatim. Lugal's voice echoed: "Bolun's crew? Thought he was hunting work?" This was the apprentice. The one he was supposed to meet for scrap work. Before the alley. Before the Babs. Before the memories shattered everything.
Kael's eyes swept over Hatim. Sharp. Assessing. Not cruel, but devoid of the awe or fear Hatim had seen in the Middens. Utterly unimpressed. He dipped the glowing rod into a nearby quenching trough. A furious hiss, a plume of steam.
"Smaller than I expected," Kael stated, his voice carrying over the workshop's din, calm and matter-of-fact. He wiped sweat and grime from his brow with the back of his wrist. "Lugal made it sound like you were hunting coppers, not calluses."
Heat flooded Hatim's neck, mixing with sweat and ash, streaking his skin grey. He felt exposed, a ghost haunting the wrong life, clad in rags that marked him indelibly as not of the Verge. The golden glyphs beneath his skin seemed to flicker, agitated.
Kander's smirk was a fleeting shadow. "He'll grow. Or break. Teach him the hammer's song, Kael. And how to listen when the anvil answers back."
Kael's answering grin was a knife-slash in the soot-streaked light. He hefted a hammer – its head dark, scarred iron, the haft worn smooth by generations of grip. He tossed it towards Hatim, not gently.
Hatim caught it on reflex. The weight was shocking, solid, real. It jarred his already aching arms, settled into his palms with demanding familiarity. The handle felt alien yet inevitable.
"Come on, then," Kael said, nodding towards a secondary anvil glowing dull red near a smaller furnace. A rough-cut bar of iron lay beside it. "Let's see if that Akar of yours can keep this hammer from shattering your spine. First, you learn the weight. Then you learn the swing. Then, maybe, you learn the song." He tapped his own temple with a soot-blackened finger. "If you're lucky, your bones will learn the rhythm before your spirit breaks."
Hatim stepped into the furnace heat of the workshop. The roar of the Ironweavers' Forge was a distant thunder here, replaced by the intimate, demanding chorus of hammers on hot steel. The air seared his lungs. Ash and the scent of scorched metal filled his nostrils.
No words. No defiant glare. His jaw clenched until the muscles stood out like cables. His hands tightened on the hammer's worn haft, knuckles whitening around the scars already there.
Let them hammer him.
He would learn the rhythm.
He would find the song.
He. Would. Not. Break.