Three days passed like the wind through the rafters—quiet, tense, threaded with anticipation and strain.
The workshop became a fortress in miniature.
Wards were carved anew—etched into floorboards, woven into lintels, buried beneath salt-packed stones. Ashra led the defense: rethreading wire traps with cruel precision, coating knife-points in a paralytic balm she'd ground from the seeds of shade-tulips and old fungus spores. Her expression never cracked, not even when the traps snapped shut on her testing dummies with the force to crush bone.
Liran drilled the rest of them, slow at first, then faster, until Corwin could duck, feint, roll with a blade in hand and keep his breath steady. Hester, though still recovering from her fractured rib, practiced quick escapes—smoke-drops and spark-tricks, laying false trails in the alleys around the district.
But Corwin worked alone.
He stayed deep in the back room, where the old clockwork frame still sat like a skeleton of the past. He wasn't repairing it. He was feeding it something new.
Metal, yes. But also memory.
Fragments of equations only partially understood. Theories Verin had hinted at in his annotations. Arcs of alchemical language that curled into his mind at night and refused to leave.
Each night he slept less. Each morning he awoke with ink on his fingers and a sharp, painful clarity that something beyond him was beginning to unfold.
On the second night, Dren returned with a package from a contact near the hollow docks. Inside: obsidian shards with traces of binding gold, scavenged from what was once a Guild Arcanum vault. Liran declared them cursed. Ashra said they were perfect. Corwin studied them in silence before carefully aligning them into the spine of a new channeling wand.
No one spoke much of the Carrion Order in those days. Not aloud. But every glance to the street, every whispered phrase behind closed doors, carried the weight of that threat. Hester kept a black stone under her pillow now—a warding talisman gifted by Magra Vale. It buzzed with static each time Corwin neared it.
Even the air felt different.
Thicker. Like something waiting just beyond the curtain.
On the fourth morning, Corwin emerged from the workshop carrying a flat, velvet-lined box. Inside, nestled among fabric, were three slim vials. One glowing faintly blue. One red. One pearlescent white.
Ashra lifted an eyebrow. "You trust those?"
"I made them myself," Corwin said simply.
Liran took one, held it to the light. "What do they do?"
"The blue one will shield your nervous system for sixty seconds. You won't feel pain. You won't freeze. The red one—adrenaline rush, almost violent. You'll burn through fatigue and hit like a hammer. But it'll cost you after. The white one... is a guess."
"A guess?"
Corwin nodded. "It might allow you to see into the inlay of glyphs. The patterns. Like reading the world's wiring beneath the surface. Or it might blind you for an hour."
Ashra smirked. "So a gamble."
"All alchemy is."
They each took a vial. Said nothing more.
By evening, the map was spread on the floor. They sat in a rough circle. The names etched on Verin's parchment stared back at them—half of them crossed, half untouched.
Ashra pointed to the next one. "Thalwyn Mare. North. Into the bones of the old city. No safehouse, no contact since the Rupture."
Corwin nodded. "We leave at dawn."
Hester looked to him then—not as a rival, not as a tagalong smuggler—but as something close to a comrade. "You're not who you were a month ago."
Corwin glanced down at his hands.
"I'm not sure I ever was."
Outside, thunder rolled faintly over the city. Not from the sky.
From beneath it.
Something was shifting in the deep.
And Corwin Endren, last scion of a ruined guild, was ready to face it.