-------------‐--------------------‐
Keeper's Adage:
"The Wielder who forges harmony from the fracture becomes both bridge and sacrifice. His resonance is a beacon to the hungry deep, and his very soul the anvil upon which the void stake its claim.
– Scroll of Sundered Threads of Virgil
--------------‐--------------------‐
The forge trembled beneath Hatim's knees – not from seismic shift or hammer blow, but from resonance. A resonance too profound, too fundamentally wrong for mortal hands to command and survive unscathed.
Behind him, the conduit thrummed, a living artery of steel and auricite light. Gold laced with defiant violet threads. Harmony forged from the fracture lines of reality itself. Its song wasn't merely audible; it was a physical pressure vibrating beneath the skin, humming in the teeth, resonating deep within the marrow. A melody woven into the very bones of Embermark, echoing through the Deep Veinlines Kander guarded from the heights.
But for Hatim, the song was fading, receding like smoke on a sharp wind. Distant. Unreal. Drowned out by the internal cacophony tearing at his senses.
Lady Aethel's voice cut through the lingering awe like a wire drawn taut across a raw nerve.
"Required."
The word tasted of cold iron and spent ashes. Not a request. Not a command. A final verdict. An irrevocable claim. The Crown's seal upon his fate.
His limbs betrayed him, trembling violently. Vision blurred, tunneling. The forge – his crucible, his proving ground, its familiar heat and rhythmic clamor a recent anchor – warped at the edges. Brick walls flexed like wet parchment. Steel support beams bent inward at impossible angles, defying sane geometry. The comforting amber glow of the forge-fires seemed thin, insubstantial.
The acrid sting of molten copper and flux bit his nostrils, but beneath it… something else. A scent like memory curdled in the sun. Like tombs pried open after centuries, releasing air thick with forgotten grief and the chill of the Unbinding's touch. Soured memory. Unsealed tombs.
Hatim pressed a blistered palm flat against the soot-grimed floor. The stone was unnaturally warm, almost feverish. And beneath it… he could feel them. The Veins. The massive conduits of living Akar, the city's lifeblood, threading the bedrock like the sinews of a slumbering leviathan. Normally, their deep thrum was a background comfort, a subtle reassurance to those attuned.
Now? They felt… awake. Attentive. Judging.
A pulse echoed up through the stone. Not the rhythm of blood or machine, but something older. Immeasurably older. A rhythm that spoke of presence. Of something vast… watching back.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage of bone. Not now. Please, not now—
Reality ruptured.
A soundless scream – not his own, yet tearing through his skull – knifed into his consciousness. His lungs seized, convulsing, starved of air in a vacuum that hadn't existed moments before. The forge imploded into absolute shadow, swallowed whole like dying embers vanishing into a devouring void.
Black. Not the absence of light, but its antithesis. A void that hated illumination. A gnawing hollowness eroding reality's edges, stripping existence down to raw bone and fragmented idea.
Chains. He heard them – not the metallic clink of Verge restraints, but the soul-deep groan of immense, unseen links dragging across something abraded and raw. Flesh? Stone? The fabric of being? Indistinct faces loomed from carved walls of cyclopean, cruel architecture – mouths stretched in silent, eternal screams of rehearsed agony. Grinning voids where sound should be.
Not again. Not the Whispered Void's touch! Not Maldri's fading eyes! His own voice was a trapped tremor within his ribs, a silent, desperate plea lost in the consuming dark.
And then—
A Crown.
Forged not of precious metal, but of twisted razor thorns, glistening with sap-black ichor like the mural above the Ironweavers' arch. Symbols writhed along its circumference – fractured glyphs Hatim recognized from Akar circuits mingled with others far older, shapes not meant for meaning but for binding. For dominion.
It hovered in the void.
It descended.
He felt its touch – not as physical weight, but as definition imposed. As if every fracture in his soul, every violet thread of the Unbinding's legacy within him, was violently sutured into a pattern not his own. Memories that were never his flooded in – betrayal on a cosmic scale, grief for fallen stars, the shattering collapse of structures too ancient to name. The thorns bit, threading lines of pure, conceptual agony into every nerve. Not the burn of flame, but the icy comprehension of an inescapable design.
A ragged sob tore itself from a throat he no longer recognized as solely his. "No—no—no—"
The Crown did not heed. It settled. It claimed.
Another pulse. The grinding chains roared—or was it the Veins themselves protesting?
Then—
Air. Heat. Hammered stone. A burst of coppery forge-light seared his retinas.
He was back. Kneeling on the familiar, unforgiving floor of Kael's workshop.
But he was not the same.
He stared at his hands, still pressed against the soot. Skin. Bone. But subtly wrong. Fingers seemed elongated in the flickering light, the skin translucent, stretched thin over cords of violet-tinged energy that pulsed just beneath the surface. As if reality hadn't quite managed to reassemble him correctly after the Crown's touch. The vibrant gold of his disciplined Akar had faded, drained, but the violet thread within him now coiled like a sleeping serpent in his nerves, a cold counterpoint to his exhaustion, intimately woven into his being.
His gaze, heavy with dread and residual vision, dragged upwards. Lady Aethel stood precisely as before. Impeccable. Unruffled. Her face wore the mask of detached interest, as if the shattering of his reality had been a minor fluctuation in atmospheric pressure. Or worse – as if it was an expected result. Data confirmed.
Kael hadn't moved, his face a mask of slack-jawed awe warring with profound dread. His soot-smeared hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists, but his eyes, when they flickered towards Hatim, held only fear and a refusal to truly meet his gaze. He saw the wrongness.
The crushing weight of what he'd done pressed in, far heavier than the conduit's song. Not just bending Akar into impossible harmony. Not just revealing the Convergence within him. But opening a door. Revealing himself to the depths. Inviting the gaze of things that should have remained dormant.
Deep beneath – beneath the forge stone, beneath the pulsing arteries of the Veins – something else had stirred in response to his resonance. Not the Veins themselves, but what lay beyond them, cradled in the bedrock darkness.
A call had gone out from the conduit's song.
A response had echoed from the abyss.
A knowing had passed between Hatim and the deep, ancient dark.
He shuddered, a full-body convulsion. He felt* it thrumming beneath his feet, a resonance as subtle as a buried chime miles below, yet paradoxically as close as the frantic beat of his own heart. Not hostile. Not yet.
But awake. Aware. Listening.
His eyes, hollow and shadowed, locked back onto Lady Aethel. Her gaze glittered – not with wonder at the miracle, not with fear of the abyss he'd touched, but with ruthless calculation. She didn't want his skill at the anvil. The forge was merely the stage. She wanted what the Crowns always hungered for: Control. Ownership. His unique resonance as leverage against powers they barely understood. Her gaze was already dissecting him, transforming flesh and soul into transaction, theory, weapon.
And beneath it all, underpinning the dread and the calculation, the conduit still sang. Its perfect, impossible harmony of gold veined with defiant violet pulsed steadily. A testament to a power that shattered the world's binary rules. A harmony that would change everything. A beacon he had lit, now drawing eyes from both the gilded spires and the hungry depths.
Hatim wiped a trembling hand across his mouth. It came away streaked with gritty soot and – he blinked, a cold dread settling in his stomach – something darker. Not blood. Something viscous, shadow-touched, tasting of void and old stone. A residue of the Crown's ichor.
His body was a trembling ruin, his Akar drained and frayed, hollowed by something deeper than mere exhaustion – the toll of touching the impossible and being touched back by the abyss.
Yet, beneath the tremors, the Veins still pulsed. Steady. Relentless. A constant reminder of the city's heartbeat, and the ancient thing now stirring to its rhythm and his own.
In that moment, clarity struck him with the force of Kael's hammer: cold, hard, terrifying.
This wasn't over.
This was the beginning.