Jorren Malvex, known in whispers and curses as Iron Eye, is a Ferreiran native of the Austerion region, born under the shadow of the Confraternitas Ferraria. In his mid thirties, Jorren carries the compact, muscular build of a man shaped by years of climbing iron ramps and descending into mineral-rich caverns. His weathered olive-brown skin bears the stains of forge soot and hemalith dust, and his face tells a story of violence and survival, a pale scar slashes across his brow, a bite mark puckers his cheek, and a brass-capped molar gleams where bone once broke.
His right eye is steel-brown and unflinching, his left, a milky remnant of a mirrorplume's glare, now hidden beneath a dark bandana and feared more than seen. Adorned with subtle signs of his past, a silver hoop, iron gang rings, and a hemalith talisman tucked close to his heart. Jorren moves through the world in layered leathers and salt stiffened cloth, his coat reeking of oil and metal.
A registered offender under Confraternitas Ferraria's docket 7-314-H, he's served time for smuggling contraband from Arcanum, including hemalith shards and glassroot wire. Ruthless yet calculating, Jorren is a man of cold promises and sharp memory, known for his unwavering calm and his refusal to forgive a debt unpaid.
He'd only gone to the edge of the continent, the ragged foothills and the marsh shelf, where the true dangers still bled off into the mountains. He had been fleshling back then, determined to make a name for himself no matter what but the continent showed him that you couldn't get everything in life with force. In the low scrub he'd seen glass root mycelium threaded through stony soil white veins like spun glass that rang underfoot and made the air taste like struck metal.
He'd watched Mirrorplume scouts flash and scatter, their feathers lighting the dusk into strobe beautifully, then deadly in a certain way gawkers often came away with burnt retinas from a concentrated photoreactive plume.
He'd been nearly lost to a Serrate Bloom reaching out with tendrils that smelled like iron and acid it tasted metal from the miners' picks and left blisters on men's hands where it touched. Hemalith leechers latched to hides like hungry coins their crystalline sacs throbbed with an inner blue light and left victims feverish, shaking with an odd metal-blood hunger.
He had no authority, no forge brothers with him, only three others, a pole, a cart, and too little rope. He'd watched the mountain swallow two of his partners on the first night, taken by a soft, sucking mud that smelled faintly of ozone and left behind webbing that hummed with a static charge. He learned the limits of smuggling there, you cannot carry a continent in your pocket, and what you do carry will change you.
Jorren's name rode the trade wind because he'd organized the last run: a carefully structured handoff that put hemalith shards in three separate holds and left the quickest shipment to reach a fence in the West Market.
He'd arranged diversions, false manifests filed with a dockhand in Marisora, a feint to a merchant family in Mediaterra, and a staged argument that sent the watch on a circuit. The plan had been set so that capture was unlikely profits were pre allocated and each man would receive his cut. That last run had gone through, but one crate had been lighter than expected. They'd been talk of several leaks around the docks two nights ago and he needed to gain information to understand how to approach this problem.
A dockhand who owed Jorren a favor had admitted seeing a figure pull something from a drain gate and looked like a trouble made person, not rich, not clearly Guild which was a perfect target for a quick reclaim.
So when a rumor said the page bore Kira Velthra's name, Jorren's teeth had tightened. Kira's work had value beyond hemalith, they were diagrams, sequencing notes, reagents that could be reverse engineered. If the Codex believed someone had Kira's notebook, then any fence could fetch a king's ransom. Jorren's motivation was reclaim the opportunity, salvage both profit and reputation and snuff any issue that might arise from the leak.
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You hear the slap of his boots first, not soft, not trying to hide. They clip against wet planks and echo in the alleyways like a second heartbeat that is trying to overtake yours. You've never seen Jorren close until now, the first impression is the way his shoulders move like pistons, the hemalith bead at his breast glinting an evil blue in the dawn light. He speaks once, a flat voice that rides the harbor wind.
"You shouldn't have picked the gutter clean," he says, too casual for a man with his hand on a blade. "Hand it over, and I'll forget the rest."
You keep the page to your belly, thumb gripping the parchment furiously. Your chest is beating like a drum, while your breath slowly comes cool and measured, trained into a rhythm, short, long, short, because you taught your lungs the economy of stress when you had to climb walls for coin. You do not answer. Words cost seconds. Motion costs less.
Jorren moves first. He runs the dock with the gait of a man who has carried crates twice his bulk and his stride is longer, but you counter with short, explosive steps, you can change direction faster.
You pivot on the heel of your boot and drop toward the quay ladder, the damp wood slick under your foot and your calves tense your gastrocnemius and soleus firing like coiled ropes and you push. Your body is a map of old training. An ankle lock, hip torque, forward shoulder and everything tuned to keep momentum and keep light on your feet.
He throws the hemalith dirk in a loose arc, not to kill but to cut your path. The blade slices the air where your shoulder had been and you feel the wind of it, the cold shiver of metal movement. You roll, palms striking wet planks while the impact blossoms up your forearms, metacarpals absorbing, elbows snapping into braced flexion. You push off and your foot catches a lower gutter. The world narrows to a set of small distances ,the space between posts, the chain link, the yaw of a vendor wagon.
Through a market you go, where stalls still sleep and the salt of fish lies like a film over rope. A stall keeper coughs awake and flings a basin at you. You grab the basin as a shield and whack it to create a clatter that draws two slow watchmen away. The sound buys seconds. Jorren leaps a crate with the easy grace of a man who has jumped from rigging to roof hundreds of times, his left eye, milky and patient searched for patterns where the page might have been passed. He looks every bit the trained missing man of the docks.
You duck into a narrow lane, breathing hard enough to taste iron. Your heart is loud and becomes a tool and each beat is a measuring stick in your head. You track the rhythm, slow it, then push, conserving anaerobic bursts for when you need them. There is advantage in being smaller: you use a narrow passage where a bigger man cannot broaden his shoulders. Jorren's boots grind behind you, the hemalith dirk flashing once, and then again. You feel the hiss of a line across your forearm, a shallow slash that stings but does not slow you, it is a reminder of his reach. Blood mixes with salt and smells like consequence. You grit your teeth and run.
You take a low wall, vault, and slam your shoulder into an open shutter where a merchant sleeps. You strip the shutter free, spill a pile of dried herbs into the lane. The dusty cloud lends you cover but the scent is choking, bitter and alkaline, your lungs protest but your eyes blink it away. You know the chemistry of smoke and dust, you know when to hold your breath for two full counts and when to draw in and use the oxygen to power your next sprint. Adrenaline pulses catecholamines into your bloodstream, tightening peripheral vision, giving you short term speed but clouding long term precision, a trade you manage by breathing deliberately, counting steps.
He catches up at the alley's mouth, steel and breath and a look that is half-assessment, half-anger. He swings the dirk low, seeking tendon or thigh, something to slow you. You step back, pivot, and feint a left drop to force his weight forward, then plant the ball of your foot and explode right. Your hip snaps, and your shoulder comes around, arm muscles firing in a coordinated chain pectoralis major, deltoid, triceps, a succinct kinetic whip that lands under his jaw with a hollow, resuming pain. He staggers. You have hours of small training and one sharp advantage, you are willing to aim for the soft places.
He recovers faster than you expect. A hand comes up to guard his face, a flash of brass teeth in the dim, and he swears, low. He lunges forward and you meet the arc, block with forearm braced against his wrist. The pressure of the hemalith blade bites bone and you feel the same instant you lock, an electric, metallic tingle jump from the blade into your hand, a sensation like pins and the cold of a winter coin. The hemalith's ionic whisper scrambles your fingers for a heartbeat and your grip falters.
You react with a move taught by a long-ago alley trainer, you roll the wrist, use the thumb as fulcrum, and twist, bringing his blade past you in a violent circle. Your knee rises and catches him under the ribs and the impact forces the wind from his lungs in a grunt. The hemalith skitters and sparks in his fingers as if annoyed, the shard, reacting to blood and salt in the air, hums.
He tries the mirror trick next, slapping a palm to his locket and flashing the pigment. A blade of light cuts the narrow lane, brief glare. You clamp your eyes into a hard squint and turn your head, the afterimage blooms but fades. He curses the delay. Use of the pigment leaves him exposed for one long second and you take it.
You make a lunging grab for the parchment volume at your waist, but his arm whips in, the hemalith dirk jerking across your torso. You press the page and keep your hold, but your hand falters and the page slips free. Time slows enough for you to see it leave your hands, the weighted fall, the frantic glance, his reaching fingers. Then his face passes over it, gaunt and certain, and for a breath you watch his expression sharpen into triumph.
He snatches the page. The hemalith bead at his throat flares a low blue. He steps toward the quay, toward the water, thinking to vanish with his prize. You lunge after him in a panic that smells like seaweed and iron and old regrets. Your fingers close on the hem of his coat just as he turns and the hemalith dirk comes with him. The tip finds the space at the corner of his eye.
You do what reflex demands and drive an elbow in, twist, and bring your palm up under his jaw. Your knuckles connect with the fragile bone there in a blinding impact, he opens his mouth in an animal sound. The dirk's point slides, a cold, wet star-smear against skin. He reels, one hand pressed to his face. You see the eye, pale and shocked, start to tear and bulge in a way that makes the world tilt. Blood and salt flood the whites. He screams, not profanity, some raw vowel that does not belong in daylight.
The page tumbles from his grasp, a dark shape, and somersaults through the air. It hits the quay lip and, in that single weightless moment, you dive with it. Fingers graze wet paper.
You wrench the page, but Jorren claws out a hand with a last, vicious effort, brass teeth flashing and slashes with his good hand. His remaining eye is a machine of hate. The blade finds your forearm in a clean slash, a long thin burn that pours hot and immediate. Pain flares, bright and hot, and something cold and metallic dances along the wound, hemalith's signature tingle. Your muscles tremble.
You feel the page slide from your fingers, pushed by the last of the wave. It tips and drifts, one edge dipping, and a current takes it. The dock's churn draws a thin line of foam and then the tide accepts it and sends it away in slow, indifferent circles. For a moment the world holds its breath. Jorren's breathing is a ragged instrument at your ear, so loud you can hear each broken intake. His hand goes to his face and he finds nothing but wet and red.
You look at him. He looks at you. There is no triumph in his expression only pain and a slow new kind of fear have replaced greed. You step back, limbs trembling, blood and salt on both your skins. The smell of the hemalith is sharp in the air, like a bell. People begin to shout from shutters, somewhere a bell rings. Jorren makes one last, terrible lunge, but his balance is off, his depth perception ruined, and you duck. He falls forward, hands reaching and useless, and the hemalith dirk clatters to the planks.
You do not wait to see whether he gets up. The page is gone, and the docks are awake. The city will narrow and the Confraternitas men will move and a hunter's list will grow long with names. You run.
---------------------------------------------------
You find a narrow crevice between two warehouses and slip inside, heart a thudding metronome. Your forearm stings and a stubborn salt wound weeps where the hemalith nicked you and the tingle from the shard causes your fingers to twitch for a few measured breaths. You press your palm to the cut to stop the bleed and because you do not waste anything, you cup some brackish water and rinse the wound. The salt bites but it draws the worst of the hemalith residue away.
You watch the tide through a slit of light where the paper had disappeared and the page is gone, pages ink-blurred. Kira Velthra's name had meant something to you without knowing the whole story, now it means less and more. Less because the physical page is gone. More because knowledge, once desired, is never abandoned and it will resurface in hands that know worth.
You have choices. Leave the docks and try to trade the hemalith shard to a fence and risk the Ferraria and be hunted as an accomplice to smuggling. Stay and hide, let the Guild pass you by. Or do something else. Join the Collegium Codicum in Mediaterra. They keep ledgers, they catalogue, they auction knowledge in legal ways. If you want the book's content, if you want to read what the soaked pages might have said and salvage the meaning Kira left behind, the Codicum is where the answers are held, in public rooms and locked cabinets both. You remember lectures of careful titration and of Lex Stoichiometrica, laws that speak both of balance and of the price of haste.
You lift your hand to your face to wipe blood and salt, and you make a decision audible to no one but yourself. You will follow the Codex the only way the city will accept, under its roofs, through its tests, and into its registry. You will learn their measures. You will speak their names. You will become a sort of soldier of study.
You move toward the eastern lane that leads inland, away from the brine and back toward Mediaterra's terraces. The hemalith bead at Jorren's throat still hums in the distance where he slumps and moans and in your pocket your wound is a steady, throbbing reminder that learning in Aeridor is never free.