The city was a labyrinth, and Kai was the mouse. He moved through the winding alleys, a world of crumbling brick and the smell of refuse, the silent, grey-robed Monks always a street away, their presence a constant, oppressive weight. The Forge God's Echo was a furnace in his gut, urging him forward, lending his steps a certainty that was not his own.
He kept to the shadows, his senses screaming. Every loose cobblestone, every gust of wind rattling a loose shutter, was a potential threat. He was acutely aware of the flaws in his surroundings—a cracked drainpipe, a loose hinge on a gate, a missing brick in a wall. The world, through the god's eyes, was a collection of things waiting to be broken or made whole.
His goal was the southern gate, the one that led not to the major trade roads, but to the unclaimed wilderness known as the Blight of Forgetting. It was a perilous, half-mad stretch of land, but it was the only direction the Monks would not expect him to run. No sane person went into the Blight.
As he neared the city's edge, the alleys grew wider, the spaces between buildings more open. He was more exposed. He peered around a corner and saw it: the South Gate, a heavy iron portcullis set in the thick stone of the city wall. It was closed. And standing before it were not the passive, waiting monks, but a squad of five Hallowed Sentinels.
They were terrifyingly different. Clad in interlocking plates of smooth, grey ceramic over their robes, they stood with the inhuman stillness of statues. They held no weapons, but their hands, clasped before them, looked capable of crushing stone. They were the Proctor's elite, the physical manifestation of his sterile, perfect order.
Kai shrank back, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. There was no way through. He was trapped.
*The wall is the obstacle,* the Echo stated, its logic as cold and hard as steel. *Find its flaw. Unmake it.*
Kai's eyes darted along the massive stone wall. It was First Age construction, thirty feet high and ten feet thick. Flawless. To the god's pragmatic mind, the solution was simple: apply sufficient force. To Kai's mortal mind, it was impossible.
"I can't just break down a wall," he hissed under his breath.
*You think like a Scribe,* the Echo countered, a surge of frustration radiating through him. *You see the whole volume. I see the page. I see the letter. I see the flaw in the ink.*
The god's perception focused his own. He scanned the base of the wall again, not as a single structure, but as a collection of individual stones. And he saw it. Near the ground, half-hidden by a tangle of dead ivy, was a section where the mortar was darker, rougher. It was a repair, and a clumsy one at that. A patch from a later Age, lacking the skill of the original masons.
It was a flaw.
But the Sentinels were right there. He couldn't just walk over and touch it. He needed a diversion. A big one.
His gaze swept the area. An abandoned merchant's stall, its canvas awning tattered. A pile of discarded wooden crates. A large, iron brazier, unlit and filled with rainwater. Nothing.
*Useless,* the Echo seethed. *The materials are inadequate. We require a forge. We require heat.*
Heat. Fire.
Kai's eyes widened. He looked back the way he had come. Two streets away, in the city's main square, the pyres from last night were still smoldering, tended by a pair of city guardsmen who looked profoundly unhappy about their assignment.
It was a mad idea. Suicidal.
*Purpose requires risk,* the Echo stated, its will a battering ram against his fear. *The hammer must fall.*
The conflict was agonizing. His own mind screamed at the insanity of the plan, while the god in his soul demanded it. For a moment, he was paralyzed, caught in the crossfire. Then he thought of Elian, of the Library, of the cold, empty eyes of the Monks. His world had already burned. What was one more fire?
The decision made, a strange calm fell over him. He was no longer Kai the Scribe, frozen by fear. He was an instrument of the Forge God, and he had a task to perform.
He moved with a fluid purpose that was entirely new to him. He crept back to the abandoned stall and, with a touch, used his Aspect to mend the rusted hinges on a small storage chest beneath it. Inside, he found what he was looking for: a half-full cask of cooking oil. It was rancid, but it would burn.
He spent the next ten minutes in a flurry of silent, focused activity, driven by the god's innate understanding of physics and engineering. He arranged the crates, tipped the brazier on its side, and created a channel of spilled oil that led from the brazier back towards the main square. It was a crude fuse, but it would work.
The final piece was the spark. He knelt, his back to the wall, his heart pounding a deafening rhythm. He pulled out Elian's flint and steel. The fate of his entire world had come down to this. One spark. One story of fire.
He struck the steel. A single, defiant spark leaped into the oil-soaked kindling he'd prepared in the brazier.
The result was instantaneous. A whoosh of igniting fumes, and a line of fire shot away from him, racing down the alley.
He didn't wait to watch. He scrambled to the flawed section of the wall, pressing his palms flat against the rough, crumbling mortar. He closed his eyes and pushed. He did not pour in the will to create, but its opposite. He focused on the Echo's rage, its contempt for shoddy workmanship, and unleashed it into the stone. *BREAK.*
A furious shout erupted from the direction of the gate. The Sentinels had seen the fire. Behind him, he heard the sound of an explosion as the main oil cask went up, followed by screams from the distant square. The diversion was working.
The mortar beneath his hands grew hot. It began to crumble, not into dust, but into its base components—sand, lime, and water, their bonds violently unmade. The massive stones groaned, shifting as their support vanished.
Heavy, ceramic-shod footsteps were thundering towards him.
"There! At the wall!"
With a final, desperate surge of will, Kai pushed, and a section of the wall ten feet wide collapsed inwards, a cascade of stone and dust. An opening.
He threw himself through it, landing hard on the grey, dusty ground outside the city. He was out.
He staggered to his feet and ran. He didn't look back. He ran until his lungs burned and his legs were numb, until the sounds of the city faded behind him. He ran until the ordered streets and alleys gave way to a twisted, colorless landscape where the very air seemed to shimmer and warp.
He had made it to the Blight of Forgetting.
Only then did he dare to stop, collapsing to his knees, gasping for breath. He had done it. He had escaped. He was alive.
He looked back at the Lyceum, now just a smudge on the horizon. His home. The only world he had ever known. A wave of grief so profound and so absolute washed over him that it drove the Forge God's influence back into the depths of his mind. The cold, pragmatic creator was gone, and he was just Kai again.
Kai, the orphan. Kai, the fugitive. Kai, the boy who had just burned down a piece of his own city to save himself.
The weight of it all crashed down on him. His library was a prison. His mentor was gone. His body ached, his mind was a warzone, and his future was a terrifying, empty page.
He curled up on the cold, grey earth, the taste of ash and sorrow in his mouth, and for the first time since this nightmare began, he wept. He cried until there were no tears left, until there was nothing inside him but a vast, hollow ache. He cried until he fell into a black, dreamless exhaustion, alone at the edge of the world, a library of one, now lost in the dust.