Heat made the air taste like pennies. The ground was a mosaic of cracked crystal plates tilted at bad angles, their seams packed with dust that glowed the way sand does when it's been full of lightning. The sky had been bruised yesterday and never got better.
Goose put his palm to the ground and listened through the heat. The place had a pulse—slow, deep, indifferent. Between heartbeats, something else scraped bone against stone on the far side of the ridge and whispered in a voice made of wrong tempo.
Freedom went very still against his forearm, talons dimpling cloth. The hatchling's breath came fast, then slowed as Goose matched it—inhale to three, pause, exhale to five—and bit the end of the pattern off to make room for thinking.
He didn't have a weapon. He did have a backbeat. He closed his eyes. The world became an echo.
He found three loose shards of crystal by touch, still unaccustomed to sight, and thumbed them into his palm. Their edges were knife-clean. He palmed one, set the other two near his knee, and tapped the shard against the rock by his shoulder.
tik—tik— pause —tik
He waited. The echo came back thinner than he liked, distorted by heat shimmer and the ridgeline's geometry. He adjusted his hand, rolled the shard so it hit the stone a hair off-axis, and tried again.
tik—tik—tik-tik
The scrape on the far side stuttered. Not much. Enough to say the lure heard him.
Goose glanced down. Freedom's pupils were slit tight and bright; the small body coiled, a spring that only half remembered what it used to be able to do.
"Stay with me," Goose whispered. The words were still new and fragile, but they steadied his hands.
The scrape became footfalls. No—footfalls learned after the fact. It was a predator who'd eaten the idea of walking and was trying it on for size, misplacing the heel.
The interface did him no favors:
[Entity Detected: Karmavore (Juvenile)]
[Classification: Thread-Eater]
[Advisory: Do Not Engage.]
"Helpful," Goose told no one.
He slid sideways, palms flat, using the grit to keep from skidding. Crystal edges bit through cloth, into skin. Pain wrote itself in the margins of his attention and he filed it under Later.
He tapped again, moved again. The scrape followed the tap, not his body. He eased his weight, tapped behind, then rolled forward. The scrape corrected half a beat late—close enough to be hopeful, far enough to say don't get cocky.
Freedom made a sound like a kettle deciding to boil. The hatchling's throat flickered dimly, not fire—memory of fire. A hot breath, a warning.
The Karmavore pulled itself over the ridge.
It had too many joints. Not grotesque so much as unfinished: a draft of a creature someone had abandoned when they realized the hunger they'd sketched was smarter than the bones. Its head was too flat and too wide, its mouth misaligned, as if it had been modeled on a rumor of the word "bite." Its skin wasn't skin—more like burned velvet stretched over machinery that had read about muscles in a book once.
It tasted the air yet the taste hurt the air.
Goose put the flat of the shard to the stone, slid it in a long stroke, and lifted it twice. The sound skated along the plate seam, echo-bending.
The Karmavore twitched. Not eyes—he couldn't find eyes—but the not-head cocked toward the bent echo. Its mouth flexed, like a door that hated its frame.
It moved.
The juvenile was fast in that loose way of the very dangerous and very young. It covered the ridge in an elastic ripple, came down the slope without losing balance, and then, halfway through the lunge—
—stuttered.
Goose's hum knifed a half-beat into its stride and the creature lost a step the way a dancer does when the floor trap drops late. It wasn't much. It was enough to keep the first bite from taking his arm.
He threw himself sideways. The Karmavore hit where he'd been, skated on crystal, corrected. Freedom leapt from Goose's forearm and struck the thing across the snout—if snout was the word—with both claws. It wasn't damage. It was statement.
The Karmavore snarled at a frequency that made Goose's vision salt-and-pepper and struck out at the small brightness on its face. Freedom vaulted, wings beating quick and clumsy, using momentum the way a swallow cheats gravity. Goose seized the opening. He crabbed upslope, generous with skin, stingy with time.
He didn't need to beat it. He needed to arrive somewhere it didn't belong.
The ruin sat like a half-remembered promise beyond a run of broken plates: columns gnawed by heat, a roof that had lost an argument with a storm, stairs that led nowhere and refused to admit it. A slumped arch had an altar's silhouette the way a scar has the memory of a blade.
"What kind of game is this really?"
Goose drew breath tight, tapped twice on the stone, and marched the third beat out in the soles of his palms as he dragged himself through a field of glittering edges. Eyes open now. The Karmavore launched, overshot, corrected mid-air with an ugly grace, and came for his back. Freedom dropped onto its spine and raked. Sparks. The juvenile went for the noise.
"Good," Goose said between teeth. "Good boy."
He slid under the arch and the temperature changed. Not cooler, exactly. Older. The sound of the place dropped a register, the way a sanctuary's air leans down to put a hand on noise and ask it to be small.
The Karmavore hit the threshold and paused, head—not-head—low, considering. Whatever it ate, it also respected lines. It roved left, tasting the seam of shadow, roved right, tasted again, then gathered itself, chose contempt, and came through.
Goose hauled himself onto the altar and the altar accepted him the way a bench accepts a pane of glass. Polite. But aware.
His left palm slipped. Crystal edge cut meat. Blue went red.
A single drop hit the altar stone.
The sound it made was too loud for a drop that small.
Something woke.
The altar's face lit—not light, not yet, but heat shaped into a lattice. Lines of crimson traced in the stone the way threads catch sunlight in an old tapestry. The pattern wasn't a picture so much as an argument, an old one, settled in a language too tired to keep its vowels.
Freedom chirped—high and fierce—and flared, a little. The baby's heat kissed the lattice and the lines brightened.
The Karmavore crawled onto the dais, slow now, misjudging the distance by inches, hunger baffled by math. It lowered itself the way crocodiles do when they mean to pull something off a shore and into themselves. The juvenile's mouth unhinged wrong and kept going.
Goose put his bleeding palm flat on the pattern and pressed.
"Hey," he said through a dry throat. "If you think me worthy or something—now'd be an excellent time to help."
The dais answered.
Not with light at first. With pressure. The air thickened the way a room does when someone beloved walks into it after a long winter. The lattice lines brightened from ember to coal to heart of forge.
A voice spoke from the stone under his hand. It didn't have to be loud.
"Welcome, O Forgotten Flame."
Everything after that happened fast.
The Karmavore lunged. Freedom threw his tiny body at the side of its jaw and shoved. It wasn't mass. It was will in a smaller shape. The juvenile's aim bent a handful of degrees.
Crimson carved itself out of air: a sigil rising like a bloom between Goose and teeth. It wasn't a wall. It was a decision written in one stroke and the room obeyed. The Karmavore struck the sigil and the sigil decided no.
Impact stung Goose's teeth. The juvenile hit the stone so hard the plates under the dais cracked outward in spiderwebs. It skidded, howled, tried to fold itself up around the wrongness to hide from it, and failed.
The lattice under Goose's palm ran hotter, then cooler, then settled like breath after running. Text ghosted into the air, like letters written in ash.
[Shrine of the Heretic Flame — Prologue Accepted]
[Mark Imprinted: Ashen Memory Fragment]
[Full Access: Locked — Requirements Unmet]
[Prologue Boon: Sanctuary Seal / Minor]
The sigil held. The Karmavore gathered itself, tested the edge of the decision again, thought about wanting to be older than it was, and chose to live. It wheeled off the dais with a snarl that felt like being looked at from outside the concept of food and fled back over the ridge in an elastic blur.
Goose exhaled. He hadn't noticed he'd stopped breathing.
Freedom landed on his chest and pressed forehead to sternum. The hatchling's body buzzed a little, like a new engine being polite.
"Hey," Goose said, hoarse and grinning and fifteen again with a midnight dare. "You were ridiculous."
Freedom made a pleased chirrup that translated as obviously.
The altar dimmed. Not dead—resting. The lines fell to a banked glow. Goose turned his hand and watched the cut ooze, then slow. Had he bled on rules and had the rules take exception on his behalf?
The sanctuary's air shifted, like a page turning in a book he hadn't known he was reading.
"Okay," he told the stone, because it had listened. "Okay. I hear you."
Prompts again, his only reminder that this world wasn't real:
[Warning: Administrative Reformat Imminent]
[Anomaly: New Player Touching Celestial Shrine]
[Evacuation To Safe Zone: Involuntary]
"Wait," Goose said, because of course, the moment he'd found something, the world would try to put him somewhere sensible. "No—give me a second—what does this—"
A tone rang through the ruin. It was the exact pitch the radiator made when winter finally admitted defeat and clicked off for spring.
The air pulled tight. The sigil snapped out. The lattice hoarded its light and went to sleep.
Freedom's claws tightened on his shirt. The world put a hand on Goose's shoulder and tugged hard.
Outside, on the ridge, dust lifted where a predator had fled and a new storm line stitched the sky with thread that remembered the shape of a sword.
Goose had half a heartbeat to press his bloody palm flat against the altar stone in stubborn gratitude.
"Thank you," he said, to the room, to the pattern, to the idea that had decided to like him. His voice cracked and held anyway.
Then the sanctuary let him go.
He fell upward into light that felt like water.
The last thing he heard before the Barrens released him was a voice that wasn't a voice, from under the altar and over the hills, from a thousand miles ago and a tomorrow he hadn't earned yet:
"When you're ready, come back.
Rage must be taught to love, or the sky will break again."
Light took him.
He woke up coughing, his lungs filled with the taste of the First Sky. Freedom's claws dug into his chest, the dragon's heartbeat pounding in time with his own. Goose blinked and squinted against the glare of a midday sun in a sky that shouldn't have been above them.
They were no longer in the Echoing Barrens.
A city stretched out before them, its spires of glass and iron glinting like an armored maiden in the harsh light. Towers that must have once reached the heavens now jutted at odd angles, as if the world itself had convulsed and been frozen mid-spasm. A river of milky green divided the city in two, its banks littered with the bones of things that might have once been boats but now seemed more at home in nightmares.
Somewhere far away, someone watching a city from a roof flicked a knife off a trajectory with two fingers and didn't smile.
Somewhere else, a bard played a phrase that locked with a stranger's heartbeat, and she didn't know why her hands were shaking.
Goose and his dragon surfaced in sun.