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Keeper's Adage:
"In the pit where mercy dies, the price of survival is paid not in coin, but in shards of the soul bartered for the blade. The healer's hand learns the hunter's grip, and the first lesson etched in blood and broken bone is this: to walk out of the darkness, you must first become a debt owed to it"
– Scroll of Sundered Threads of Virgil
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Four Years Ago – Part V:
The wind died east of the Sinks. Not faded. Strangled.
Hatim knew he'd crossed into the Hunter's Guild's shadow when the city's familiar thrum vanished. Beneath his worn boots, the Akar veins didn't just feel dormant; they felt drugged. Numb. Suppressed by a will heavier than stone. The borderland wasn't guarded by walls, but by absence. Rusted refinery gates stood open like skeletal jaws. Chimneys coughed thin, ghostly smoke into the bruised sky. The few souls haunting this liminal space moved like puppets with slack strings, eyes glassy, skin waxy—men halfway to corpses, hollowed out by Akar-dust and despair.
A feeble firepot's glow drew him to the only sign of life—a potbellied man hunched over a spit of unrecognizable, blackened meat. His pupils were wide black voids, swallowing the weak light, fingers twitching incessantly, plucking at invisible threads only the dust revealed.
"Hunter's Guild," Hatim rasped, throat raw from ash and exertion.
The man didn't lift his head. "East 'til your shadow forgets its master." A gnarled, grease-slicked finger stabbed towards the gloom. "Smell the forge-blood. Count the hanging teeth. Turn back when the stones taste fear." His voice was a phlegmy rattle.
Hatim's hand drifted to the hilt strapped across his back. Maldri's cleaver. The shrine-metal blade hummed faintly against his spine, a low, resonant vibration the drugged earth couldn't mute. The glyphs etched along its volcanic edge pulsed once, a soft amber warning reacting to the unseen oppression.
The dust-eyed man noticed. His turning of the spit slowed. A wet chuckle bubbled in his chest.
"Shrine-steel," he wheezed, a knowing glint in his dilated eyes. "Oh, they'll peel you like ripe fruit for wearing that past the teeth."
It wasn't a fortress. It was a monument to slaughter.
Massive jawbones of creatures Hatim couldn't name—some sporting fangs longer than his forearm—hung from a crude archway of fused scrap metal, hollow sockets staring blindly. Chains, thick with rust and older stains, swayed in a wind that didn't touch the ground, some ending in hooks dark with dried sacrifice. The gates weren't closed; they yawned wide, an invitation written in bone and iron. A challenge.
Two hunters materialized from the gloom within. Their leathers weren't stitched; they were scarred – patched with trophies of hide and chitin, etched with kill-marks, not thread. The taller held a glaive, its haft notched with deep grooves, the blade itself etched with a spiral of tiny, grim symbols. The other sucked marrow from the splintered spine of something serpentine, his teeth filed to vicious points that gleamed wetly in the forge-light leaking from deeper within.
The glaive's cold tip tapped Hatim's collarbone, a promise of puncture. "Lost, little gutter-rat?" The voice was gravel in oil.
"I'm here to join," Hatim stated, forcing his voice level.
The marrow-sucker paused, a wet pop as he pulled the spine from his mouth. He laughed, a sound like stones tumbling down a metal chute. "With that on your back?" He jerked his chin towards the cleaver's hilt. "Wardens carve their curses deep into stolen steel. That blade reeks of the old ways. The protected ways."
Hatim's fingers flexed. The golden glyphs beneath his skin, still faint, itched with suppressed energy.
The glaive pressed deeper, a pinpoint of cold pain. "Pit or pavement. Choose quick."
Hatim chose neither. He lunged forward, driving his forehead into the glaive-wielder's nose.
They didn't just throw him in. They earned it.
The glaive came first—a brutal, backhanded swipe that ripped across Hatim's ribs, tearing cloth and skin, painting the air with a hot spray. Hatim twisted, agony flaring, but the marrow-sucker was a blur of filed teeth and wiry muscle. A knee drove like a piston into Hatim's gut, folding him over, all breath exploding out in a choked gasp.
"Shrine-rats die here, they don't join!" the glaive-wielder snarled, blood streaming from his shattered nose. The pommel of his weapon slammed into Hatim's temple.
White light detonated behind Hatim's eyes. Iron flooded his mouth. His knees hit the unforgiving stone. But instinct, honed in Sinks alley brawls, flared. His hand shot out, grabbing the marrow-sucker's ankle, and yanked. The hunter yelped, crashing down. Hatim drove an elbow hard into the exposed throat. A satisfying gurgle.
Then a boot, heavy as a forge-hammer, cracked against Hatim's spine.
Then they really got to work.
Fists like stone mauls. Boots studded with scrap metal. The glaive's haft cracking against kidneys, ribs, shoulders. Pain wasn't a sensation; it became his structure, wrapping his bones in white-hot fire, reducing thought to a single, desperate pulse: Hold on. Hold on. He bit down hard when hands clawed at the strap holding Maldri's cleaver, sinking teeth deep into a hunter's finger. The scream that tore through the archway was primal, satisfying.
The marrow-sucker spat a glob of blood and phlegm onto Hatim's face. "Should've picked pavement, rat."
Hatim grinned through split, swollen lips, tasting his own blood. "Fuck your pavement."
They dragged him by his ankles, his body a broken thing scraping over rough stone, leaving a dark, smeared trail. The sinkhole behind the guild compound, known only as The Fold, gaped like a wound in the earth. Its walls wept slimy algae over older, darker stains. Shackles hung from rusted chains bolted to the rock face, the cuffs themselves lined with inward-pointing, yellowed teeth.
Hatim's shoulders screamed as the hunters wrenched his arms behind his back, forcing them into the cruel embrace of the shackles. The cleaver was ripped from its strap, clattering onto the stone ledge just beyond his reach. Its glyphs flared once, a defiant amber pulse against the oppressive gloom, then dimmed to near darkness.
The marrow-sucker leaned close, his breath reeking of raw meat and dust. "Last shrine-thief they tossed down here," he whispered, the sound slithering into Hatim's ear, "lasted three days. Started begging for fire by the second. We burned him anyway." A final, sharp kick sent loose pebbles skittering down into the darkness. Then they left him.
Time dissolved. Became thirst sanding his throat to bloody ribbons. Became the grating agony of broken ribs with every shallow, necessary breath. Became the slow seep of cold from the stone into his bones. The cleaver's faint glow, his only companion, faded like the last ember in a dead hearth.
Maldri's face swam in the suffocating dark behind his eyelids—her hands, steady and sure, stitching a gash on his arm years ago, her voice sharp with exasperated affection: "Stubborn boy. One day that thick skull will get you killed."
Teeth ground against grit and blood. Fingers, numb and torn, clawed uselessly at the tooth-lined shackles.
Not yet.
On the third night (or was it the fourth? The pit stole time), the scent came first: acrid bitterroot and cold iron. The sharp, clean smell of Maldri's strongest poultices cutting through the Fold's stench of decay and stagnant water.
Then smoke. A figure crouched at the pit's edge, the ember of a pipe casting his face in hellish relief—a man sculpted from scar tissue and grim survival. His left eye was gone, replaced by a fist-sized chunk of raw Akar-crystal, its internal light pulsing with a slow, deep rhythm that seemed to sync with Hatim's own struggling breaths.
The man exhaled, a plume of smoke coiling between teeth filed flat, Hatim now saw, likely for biting through cord or bone. "A Warden's blade," he mused, his voice a gravelly rasp. He nudged the cleaver with his boot. The glyphs flickered weakly. "Means only two things down here. You killed one of the old guardians…" The crystal eye fixed on Hatim. "Or you're even stupider than you look, boy."
Hatim spat, a thick glob of blood and saliva hitting the stone floor of his prison. "Who's asking?"
"Name's Gorran." The crystal flared, bathing Hatim in a momentary, cold violet light. "And you're leaving this hole."
Gorran didn't offer a hand. He simply dropped a knotted rope over the edge.
Hatim forced his broken, stiff fingers to close around the coarse fibers. Every muscle shrieked in protest as he hauled his battered body upwards, inch by agonizing inch. He collapsed onto the ledge beside Gorran, gasping, the world spinning. The cleaver lay between them, its volcanic metal reflecting the pipe's ember.
Gorran crouched, the smoke wreathing his ruined face. "Maldri's stray pup. Knew the scent of her work on that blade." He tapped the Akar-crystal in his socket. It pulsed. "She dug the old one out with a spoon after a Veil-Wasp got me. Charged me three vials of pure Blackmarsh venom for the privilege." He snorted. "Stingy old root-witch."
Hatim's breath hitched. Three vials. The exact, impossible price Maldri had demanded years ago to cure the Rotting Pox that had been killing Gorran's brother.
Gorran's calloused, scar-knuckled hand closed around the cleaver's hilt. The glyphs flared briefly at his touch, then subsided, recognizing… something.
Hatim pushed himself up on trembling arms. "I need that blade." The words scraped raw.
"Need," Gorran scoffed, standing, tucking the cleaver decisively into his wide belt. "Need's got fuck-all to do with survival down here, boy. Or up there." He jerked his head towards the Sinks. "You want out of this pit? You want past the teeth? You pay. Coin, blood, service. Same as your Granny taught every soul that crossed her threshold. Nothing's free. Not even mercy."
The words hung in the smoke-thick air, heavy as the shackles Hatim had just escaped. The truth of them, Maldri's harsh, loving pragmatism, settled on Hatim's shoulders.
His fists clenched, pain flaring. Slowly, deliberately, he met Gorran's crystal eye and gave a single, sharp nod.
Gorran's grin was a knife-slash in the gloom. "Good. Now get your broken carcass upright." He turned, pipe clamped between his filed teeth. "Try not to bleed on my boots. Leather's expensive."