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Keeper's Adage:
"Salvation bought with borrowed time is a blade balanced on the soul's edge. The year granted is not grace, but a debt forged in desperate hope; the training demanded is the crucible where the survivor is remade into the weapon that must pay the final price."
– Scroll of Sundered Threads of Virgil
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Four Years Ago – Part VII:
The whisperwood fire burned with a spectral blue flame, casting long, wavering shadows that danced across Kander's impassive face. Its smoke coiled into intricate, half-formed shapes – serpents, keys, weeping eyes – dissolving before they could solidify, as if the forest itself refused to commit to meaning. Hatim gritted his teeth, knuckles white as Kander pressed a thick, grey-green salve deep into the gash torn across his shoulder by the Goreback's glancing blow.
The balm didn't just sting; it hissed like a nest of awakened ants, searing through ingrained filth and knitting torn flesh with the acrid stench of burnt Ember-Root and freshly turned grave soil.
Kander worked in silence. His hands moved with the brutal efficiency of a battlefield surgeon – not gentle, but devastatingly precise. The kind of competence carved from patching too many fools who'd danced too close to the void.
Finally, he sat back on his haunches, wiping salve-stained fingers on a scrap of moss-cloth. He tossed the empty clay jar into the blue flames. It cracked, blackened, and was consumed without a sound. His flint-chip eyes fixed on Hatim.
"So," Kander stated, the word hanging heavy in the unnatural quiet. "You wandered into a sovereign-tier Golden Grove – territory guarded by things that make Gorebacks look like stray dogs – armed with a satchel of stolen Akar crystals and the survival instincts of a concussed rock-lizard." He tilted his head, a fraction. "Care to illuminate the profound depths of this idiocy?"
Hatim's fingers instinctively twitched towards the satchel resting against his hip. The stolen crystals pulsed within, a dull, insistent warmth against his skin, a fading echo of the pool's stolen glory.
"I needed Pure Akar," Hatim rasped, the words scraping his raw throat. "For someone."
Kander's gaze sharpened, honing in like a blade. "Sickness? Poison?"
"Spirit Blight," Hatim forced out. The violet shimmer under Maldri's grey skin flashed behind his eyes. "She was touched by the Unbinding. In the Dark Woods."
A muscle twitched high in Kander's jaw, a ripple of tension beneath the weathered skin. "Void-damned Sinks," he muttered, the curse carrying the weight of centuries of neglect. "The rot always sinks deepest there."
"You're noble-blooded," Hatim pressed, a sliver of desperate hope piercing the pain. " you could help—"
"Exiled," Kander cut him off, the word final as a tombstone sealing. His grip tightened on the weepingroot longstaff beside him, the cold iron veins within it humming faintly. "House Valerian spat me out. I have no desire to crawl back. I am a Vein-Warden. That oath binds me to the city's bones, its breath, its deep sickness. Not to the petty squabbles of silk-robed ghouls playing gods in their spires." He jabbed a calloused finger eastward, where the unseen Crowns loomed. "You think they would part with a drop of Pure Akar for a Sinks crone? They hoard it like dragons. Distill it into trinkets for their vanity. Let the districts below choke on Unbinding's filth while they float in baths of liquid sunlight."
"Then what should I do?" Hatim's voice cracked, raw with exhaustion and the crushing weight of Maldri's fading light. "She will die."
Kander studied him. The pale blue firelight carved deep canyons of shadow beneath his eyes, making the living glyphs woven into his silverbark armor pulse like captured, dying stars. The silence stretched, thick with the forest's watchful presence and the hiss of the balm sealing Hatim's wounds.
Slowly, deliberately, Kander reached into a pouch at his belt. He drew out a small flask.
Unassuming. Simple dark glass.
But the moment it caught the flickering light, Hatim felt it. A deep, resonant hum vibrated in his molars. A subtle pressure built behind his eyes, a phantom warmth spreading through his chilled bones. Pure, potent life, contained.
"This," Kander said, his voice low and grave, "is not a cure. It's a stay of execution. Grove Tincture. Distilled from the heartwood's tears. One dose…" He met Hatim's desperate gaze. "...buys one year. It slows the blight. Holds the Unbinding at bay. Gives her time."
Hatim's throat constricted, hope warring with dread. "A year? And then?"
"Then you train." Kander tossed the flask. It landed in Hatim's waiting palms with a weight that felt far heavier than glass should. Cool, yet thrumming with contained power. "One year. You learn. You prepare. You master the resonance within your own veins." Kander's gaze was unflinching. "You face the Trial of Resonance at the Warden's Keep. Pass it… and you earn the right to choose patronage. Any House. Even the Valerians. By ancient Accord of Ashen Thro, they must accept a Trial-sworn Warden. They grant resources. Access. The Pure Akar needed to cleanse her."
The path unfolded before Hatim – narrow, treacherous, bathed in the cold light of impossible hope. "And if I fail?"
Kander stood, his silhouette tall and stark against the whispering trees. For the first time, his voice softened, not with pity, but with the chilling certainty of a man who'd seen too many paths end the same way.
"Then the forest buries two souls instead of one."
Hatim clutched the flask. The glass vibrated against his skin, alive with promise and peril. The path ahead was a knife's edge over an abyss.
But for the first time since Maldri fell, he could see it.
Darkness.
Not the soft dark of the Rootpaths, nor the watchful gloom of the Golden Grove. This was absolute. Suffocating. The void after the last star dies.
No ground beneath his boots.
No air in his lungs.
Just—
—falling—
—the precious flask slipping from memory-fingers, shattering on unseen stone—
—Kander's voice, sharp with urgency, fraying at the edges, impossibly distant now—
"Hatim—!"
Then—silence.
A silence more profound than the Pit. More final than death.
And the terrible, yawning realization, cold as the null-space closing around his present self:
This is not then.
This is now.