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Keeper's Adage:
"In the gullet of the sky, where souls are weighed as resonance alone, remember: the vessel matters not. It is the weight you carry within it that anchors you against the devouring storm"
– Scroll of Sundered Threads of Virgil
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The wind didn't howl. It screamed.
Not the Sinks' gritty, coal-choked rasp, nor Embermark's furnace-blast roar. This was a keening, high-pitched thing, threaded through the bars of Lyra's cradle like spectral fingers plucking frozen wires. It sang of voids between stars and the gnawing hunger of altitude. A dirge for the condemned.
Lyra curled tighter, her spine a rigid arch against the cradle's groaning frame. Aeroweave and bonewood, threaded with glyphs that shimmered like trapped starlight, flexed like living sinew beneath her. Each gust sent shudders through the lattice, vibrating up her bones. She locked her arms around her knees, fingernails digging into the rough weave of her Middens-spun trousers. Breathe. In. Out. Like Maldri taught. Find the root beneath the panic.
Below, Embermark shrank—a festering scar of red kilns and blackened stone smeared across the horizon. The only home she'd known dissolved into abstraction, replaced by a terrifying tapestry unfurling beneath the Leviathan's impossible bulk. Rivers snaked like molten veins. Mountains wore crowns of perpetual lightning. Forests became moss stains on an indifferent earth. The sheer, brutal scale stole her breath, replacing the familiar stench of coal and desperation with thin, metallic air that scraped her lungs raw. Ozone. Rain on hot iron. And beneath it, a cloying sweetness, like decay wrapped in silk.
The Sky-Leviathan itself was a blasphemy against flight. It didn't cleave the air; it commanded it. Vast, glistening chitin plates, polished to obsidian glass, interlocked like the carapace of a god. Its wings weren't flesh, but pressure-glyphs – vast, shifting matrices of folded jetstream and luminous, recursive script that pulsed and reconfigured with every beat, singing a silent, alien calculus into the fabric of the sky. The sound it made wasn't engine roar, but a deep, vertebral groan, as if the atmosphere itself strained beneath its weight. Veins of light – Aeridorian glyphs alive and writhing – pulsed along its flanks, patterns refusing to settle, rewriting themselves in real-time. Language pretending to be anatomy. Power wearing the skin of a beast.
Lyra's stomach clenched, a knot of vertigo and cold dread. Not just fear of falling. Fear of being unmade by the sheer, indifferent wrongness of it.
Around her, dozens of identical cradles swayed like grotesque fruit. The others – children hollow-eyed with shock, adults whose defiance had crumbled into numb despair, refugees who'd traded one hell for an unknowable abyss – were ghosts in this gilded cage. A boy clutched a broken gear, thumb rubbing the rusted edge raw. A woman whispered a prayer to forgotten Embermark saints. No one met Lyra's gaze. The shared terror was a suffocating blanket.
Then the Wielders came.
They moved like currents of disturbed air, gliding between the cradles. Not soldiers. Instruments. Robes shimmered, phaseshifting between opacity and transparency, woven from glyph-threads and stolen silence. Their skin was a tapestry of living sigils – some pulsing like slow heartbeats, others crawling beneath the surface like parasites made of meaning. Their eyes were polished obsidian, reflecting nothing but the cage bars and the terrified faces within.
One paused near Lyra. His gaze, flat and depthless, snagged on her wrists – unmarked, Middens-pale. Glyphs spiraling up his own forearms twitched, a subtle ripple of predatory interest. His lips didn't smile. They assessed. Calculated fuel efficiency.
He moved on, leaving a chill deeper than the wind.
A resonant thrum vibrated through the Leviathan's belly. With a hiss like pressurized bone snapping, the undercarriage yawned open. A spiral ramp of solidified wind and woven light unfurled. Cradles lurched, one by one, reeled upwards like hooked fish vanishing into the beast's maw.
Lyra's stomach plummeted as her cradle jerked skyward. Embermark vanished. The world became a dizzying smear of color and impossible geography. Cities became scattered embers. Mountains shrank to wrinkles. She squeezed her eyes shut, biting back a whimper. Not real. It's too big. It can't be real.
Then—warmth. Dampness. A thick, coppery-metallic tang laced with that cloying floral decay.
The Leviathan's innards.
Not a ship's hold. A chamber. Ribbed walls of breathing membrane stretched over lattices of warm, flexing bone. Glyph-circuits pulsed beneath the translucent skin – veins carrying light instead of blood. The floor vibrated with a deep, organic thrum. Not machinery.
A heartbeat.
The air hung heavy, thick with ozone, iron, and the sweet-rot stench. The ceiling vanished into shifting banks of shadow that seemed to fold in on themselves, suggesting impossible heights or crushing closeness. Lyra stumbled from her cradle as it dissolved back into the floor, the aeroweave strands retracting like tendrils. She pressed her back against the wall – not cold metal, but yielding, warm flesh pretending to be architecture. Beneath her palms, the embedded glyphs twitched. Patterns shifted, nested, recoiled.
Resonant anomaly detected.
The wall shivered. A localized pulse of warmth radiated where her hands touched, the glyphs flaring briefly brighter, tasting her unshielded presence. She snatched her hands away as if burned, heart hammering.
It knows I'm here. It knows I don't belong.
Time dissolved. Days bled into an endless, suffocating present. The Leviathan traversed nightmares made geography: Mountain ranges clawing at a bruised violet sky. Jungles breathing like vast, green lungs below. Cities built into the hollowed ribs of things larger than comprehension. Rivers of molten glass reflecting distorted, screaming faces. Archipelagos drifting and reforming like a mad god's puzzle.
Food appeared without ceremony. Crystalline orbs that burst into acrid vapor on the tongue. Hardtack that crackled with static, leaving her lips numb. Water that tasted of lightning and old blood. Sustenance, not nourishment. Fueling the cargo.
The Wielders were silent sentinels. Their rare utterances were not speech, but sculpted sound – vowels that vibrated in the marrow, consonants that brushed against the skin like cold silk. Meaning bypassed understanding, lodging directly in the lizard brain as unease or dread.
At the dimming of the Leviathan's internal light – a slow retreat of the glyph-pulse into a low, ember-like throb – Lyra sought the warm seam where floor met wall. She curled there, a small creature in the belly of the impossible. Through patches of thinner membrane overhead, unfamiliar constellations wheeled. Cold, sharp, indifferent points in an ocean of black.
Hatim.
The name was a flare in the suffocating dark. Was he staring at Embermark's smog-blurred stars? Was he searching the Verge's grimy skies? Or was he… gone? Swallowed by the Sinks, or Masad's fists, or the crushing weight of his own forgotten pain? The thought was a physical ache, sharper than hunger. She buried her face in her knees, inhaling the faint, stubborn scent of Sinks-soot still clinging to her clothes. Her last tether to before.
Then, a presence.
Not a step. A shift in the chamber's pressure, in the quality of light. At the center, where the ribbed walls converged, a figure coalesced. Robes flowed like captured stormfront and abyssal trench, colors shifting beyond Embermark's spectrum. Lady Caedra. Or her echo. Her hands moved in slow, precise arcs, unraveling sigils from her sleeves. Glyphs bloomed in the air – intricate, three-dimensional constellations of light and meaning that spun, pulsed, and collapsed like dying stars.
The voice wasn't sound. It was pressure. It shaped the air itself, vibrating in Lyra's teeth, pressing against her eardrums.
"You were harvested for resonance," it intoned, the meaning bypassing language, imprinting directly onto her awareness. "Not survival. Not understanding. Few vessels retain coherence. Fewer still achieve purpose."
The glyph-constellations flared, searing themselves onto Lyra's retinas. Afterimages of impossible geometry danced behind her eyelids, promises of dissolution or transformation. Terror threatened to freeze her solid.
"Your soul, is the only weight you carry across all the bridges of time." Maldri's voice, a ghost from the hearth, cut through the psychic onslaught. "Don't trade it for bread."
Lyra's fingernails dug into her palms. A small, sharp pain. A tether. Her pain. Her breath. Her weight. She wouldn't dissolve. Not yet.
Slowly, deliberately, she pressed her bare palm back against the warm, pulsing wall. The Leviathan's heartbeat thudded against her skin. Slow. Deep. Inexorable.
Embermark was ash on the wind. A memory already crumbling.
This pulsing, living horror, this sky-gullet traversing a world of teeth and wonder—this was the bridge she had to cross. Her soul, scarred and Sinks-stained, was the only weight she had. She would carry it. She would remember. For Maldri. For Hatim. For the girl who once dreamed of the Verge and now stared into the gullet of the sky.
The glyphs beneath her palm flickered, tasting her resolve. The heartbeat drummed on. The journey into the impossible had only begun.