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Keeper's Adage:
"The abyss does not judge the climber's past;it only measures the grip of their present. One may flee the pit only to find a higher cage. Remember: the fall from grace is measured not in distance, but in the forgetting of the ground from which you sprang."
–Scroll of Sundered Threads of Virgil
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The first truth of Aeridor was not its beauty, but its lie.
The ground was a theory. A suggestion of solidity stitched together by chains of lightning and bridges of compressed, wailing wind. Towers grew in defiance of their own foundations, inverted spires dangling like fangs from the underbellies of floating islands. It was a city that had looked into the abyss and decided to build a palace upon its shifting, treacherous breath.
And yet, Lugal stood. The disembarkment ramp pulsed under his worn boots—veins of captured, humming Akar glowing faintly beneath polished crystal plates. The gravity held. It was the first and most profound act of coercion.
The air was a blade. Thin. Cold. It scraped his lungs clean of Embermark's soot, only to fill them with a new poison: the taste of ozone and forged iron, as if the very wind had been hammered on some celestial anvil. He didn't flinch. He'd breathed the rot of the Sinks, the cloying perfume of the Crowns masking decay. This was different. This was order. A brutal, beautiful, terrifying order that sought to erase the chaos of the individual.
The Sky-Leviathan's hold had been a tomb of silent dread. This was a vivisection lab.
The docking bay of Aeridor Prime was a maw in the belly of the floating fortress. Docking arms, like the limbs of some graceful, mechanical god, rotated in silent, midair ballets, guiding skyships—shaped like bone-armored rays and mantas—into ports that spun against the void's pull. Every surface, every movement, hummed with purpose. Glyphlight, far more intricate and alive than the carved runes of Embermark, flowed across walls and the skin of the Wielders—living equations of command and dominion.
No wasted motion. No wasted space. No wasted mercy.
Captives shuffled forward, a river of broken things corralled by silent Wielders. Lugal's eyes, sharpened in the Sunken Forum's dark, scanned the faces. No Hatim. No one familiar. Just debris. But within the chaos, patterns.
Some were marked immediately—collars and cuffs of searing glyphlight cinching throats and wrists, branding them for some known fate. Others, like him, were merely watched. Studied. Catalogued with a dispassionate gaze.
Outliers. Misfits. The ones they don't have a pre-made box for.
Good. Uncertainty was a crack. And cracks where shadows grew.
A Wielder glided past. His face was not hidden; it was a landscape of disaster—skin of mirror-dark obsidian webbed with cracks that bled molten silver. His eyes were pits of swirling white, captured storms gazing out at a world they deemed insufficient.
Those storm-paused on Lugal. The glyphs on the Wielder's collarbone flared, a silent, searing query. A ripple of static, cold and invasive, prickled over Lugal's skin, tasting his essence, sampling his will. He became a stone. A void. He offered nothing, not even the defiance that boiled in his blood.
The Wielder moved on.
Not flagged. Not yet.
The procession fractured. Some were prodded by unseen forces toward labor platforms suspended over the endless drop by magnetic tethers. Others were funneled toward ribbed, translucent tunnels that spiraled into the city's glowing heart.
A pressure—not a hand, but a thought made solid—pushed Lugal toward the tunnels.
It was a throat. A living, breathing esophagus of polished bone and lightning. The light within was cold, diffused, casting the ghosts of other prisoners on the curved walls as the tunnel coiled—up, sideways, then straight down toward a platform hanging over absolute nothingness.
And beyond it—Aeridor unveiled itself.
It was more than the Crowns of Embermark made manifest, perfected, and driven to a logical, insane extreme. Towers pirouetted slowly on unseen axes. Markets sold screaming colors and fragments of captured song on platforms of transparent crystal. And below, always below, the true heart of the place: the abyss. A roiling sea of cloud and lightning, an eternity of falling that waited just beneath the thin veneer of enforced order.
Lugal swallowed the vertigo, forced it into a small, locked box in his mind. This place was designed to break the spirit first, the body second. It whispered that you were nothing, less than nothing, a speck against its infinite, engineered majesty.
A sudden, sharp pressure folded the air around him, shunting him sideways into an alcove. The wall sighed open, revealing a chamber that was half-clinic, half-charnel house.
Floating platforms ringed with rotating, razor-sharp glyphs. Instruments of gleaming alloy and light hovered nearby—needle-thin scanners, prisms that fractured perception into impossible geometries.
A processing station.
The Wielder here was smaller. Perhaps female. Impossible to tell beneath the armor of living sigils that swarmed over her skin. Her hands moved, conducting the glyph-console beside her.
A command. A single symbol bloomed in the air between them: Scan.
Light erupted—not warm, but a cold, gold-threaded net that enveloped him. It did not touch his skin; it passed through it. It traced the map of his skeleton, the history written in his scars, the shape of the emptiness where hope had been. It was a violation deeper than pain. It was an audit of the soul.
Data streamed in the air, a silent, glyphic verdict: Subject: Lugal. Origin: Embermark-Sinks. Cognitive Architecture: Fractured. High Adaptability. Aggression Substrate: Elevated. Core Instinct: Survival. Akar-Resonance: Dormant. Thread-Anomaly Detected.
The flowing symbols stuttered. The glyphs representing his life-thread shimmered, unstable. Tether Integrity: Mutable. Unstable.
The light died. The Wielder made a note, etching a new sigil into the air that glowed a faint, cautionary orange. Her head tilted, a gesture of clinical interest. The verdict was silent but clear.
Flagged. Category: Fracture-Class.
A thin, wolfish smile pulled at Lugal's mouth. Fracture-Class. It didn't sound like 'ballast'. It sounded like a problem. And problems had to be studied. Studied was not erased. Not immediately.
The membrane behind her peeled open. His new home: a hexagonal cell, walls semi-translucent, the floor humming with a low, biological pulse. A specimen jar.
He stepped inside. The membrane sealed with a sound like a sigh.
Silence. The profound, humming silence of a predator's gaze.
He turned to the wall. The abyss sprawled beneath him, a perpetual reminder. And in other cells, other jars, he saw them. The captured. One, a few cells over—a girl, curled tightly into herself. Young. Her silhouette was a stark cutout against the violent beauty of the lightning-chains that bound their prison.
He didn't know her. She didn't know him. They were scraps from different worlds, thrown into the same furnace.
But the hunch of her shoulders was a language he knew fluently. It was the shape of a soul learning the weight of its own discard.
His hands clenched into fists at his sides. The cold air of Aeridor tasted no different from the cold dirt floor of the hovel. The cage was just shinier.
He would not forget the ground. He would remember the Sinks, the Forum, the cold hearthstone. He would wear his nothingness like a cloak of shadows.
He stared at his reflection in the polished, ghostly wall—a pale face etched with defiance, eyes burning with a cold fire.
The reflection grinned back. A predator's grin. All teeth. No joy.
"You dragged the wrong broken thing into your sky," he whispered to the city, to Vayne, to the silent, judging Presences of the Forum.
"I don't break. I sharpen."
"I learn."
"And when I climb out of this cage..."
"I'm taking your perfect sky down with me."