The descent was a baptism of sensation. The skiff, a lumbering craft of enchanted timber and copper sheathing, dropped through layers of cloud into a world of overwhelming verdancy and scent. The air grew heavy, humid, and rich with the smell of wet earth, blooming rot, and living things. Skyreach's sterile, curated beauty was a memory.
From above, the land had seemed a uniform green. From within, it was a chaotic tapestry. Giant, bioluminescent fungi glowed in the perpetual twilight under the canopy. Vines thick as a man's arm snaked between the bones of colossal, pre-Ascent ruins—towers of strange, blackened alloy fused with rock, overgrown and sleeping.
Their destination, Fallow's Reach, was a settlement clinging to the ribs of a fallen archway from that ancient world. The buildings were a patchwork of salvaged metal, grown wood, and woven fungal fiber. The people watched the skiff land with a mixture of wariness and pragmatic disinterest. The pilot unceremoniously deposited them and their bags in the muddy clearing that served as a town square before lifting off again, eager to return to the sky.
Lyra felt the weight of every gaze. The news of an Expunged had preceded them.
"Don't mind them," Elara murmured, hefting her pack. "Groundlings have a long memory of being looked down upon. They'll judge you by your hands, not your past."
They found a decrepit but dry shelter on the settlement's edge—an old pump-house built into the ruin's arch. As dusk fell, painting the world in deep purples and the soft green glow of fungi, Elara got to work.
"Alright, Songbird. Let's meet this Suppressor." She had Lyra sit on a crate, her wrist exposed under the light of a portable glow-lamp. Elara unfolded her Keeper's Key, its parts clicking and extending. She peered at the bracelet through a series of magnifying lenses. "Hmm. Standard Convocation issue. Aetheric damping field generated by a micro-leyline loop inside the alloy. It's meant to be permanent. No keyhole."
"So it's impossible," Lyra said, the numbness in her spirit echoing the numbness in her wrist.
"I didn't say that," Elara chided, her voice full of focus. "I said it has no keyhole. But every system has an interface. A seam. A vulnerability." She began to tap the bracelet lightly with different prongs of the Key, listening to the almost imperceptible changes in pitch. "Your magic… it talks to decay, to state-change, right? To entropy. This bracelet is a perfect, closed system. It's fighting entropy. That makes its battle… audible, to the right tool."
Tap-tink. Tap-tonk.
Elara's movements became more precise. She adjusted tiny dials on the Key, the tool now emitting a faint, harmonic hum of its own. She wasn't trying to break the bracelet. She was, Lyra realized, tuning it.
"There," Elara whispered. "A resonant frequency. The frequency of its own, perfect stasis. Now…" She looked at Lyra. "I can't break the lock. But I can make it sing its own pattern so loudly, it might… waver. For a second. If there's something inside you that knows how to listen to that song and… answer back with the opposite tune…"
Understanding dawned. Elara was giving her a note to sing against.
"Close your eyes. Don't try to reach for your magic. Just listen."
Lyra obeyed. In the silence behind her eyelids, amplified by the Suppressor's numbness, she heard it. A faint, high, unwavering hum through the metal on her wrist. The song of perfect, dead stillness.
Her own magic had never been about stillness. It was about change. Corrosion. The inevitable fall. It was the crack in the crystal, the rust on the iron, the silence after the note ends.
She didn't push. She didn't command. She simply remembered the feeling. The moment the iron filigree yielded. The instant the silver blackened. She held that feeling of transition in her mind and aimed it, not at the bracelet, but at the song of the bracelet.
She offered it a different note. The note of decay.
For a long moment, nothing. Then, the humming note from the Key changed. It developed a whisper of a crackle. A flaw in the harmony.
The Suppressor on her wrist grew warm. Then hot. A hairline fracture, finer than a spider's silk, appeared on its dull surface.
With a tiny, crystalline ping, the bracelet snapped open and fell from her wrist, clattering to the stone floor.
The return of her magic was a torrent. It wasn't the gentle flow she'd been trained to manage. It was a wild, hungry, reactive storm inside her, magnified by its imprisonment. It rushed out, unformed. The metal crate she sat on bloomed with orange rust in a heartbeat. The stone beneath her feet powdered slightly. The glow-lamp flickered and died.
In the sudden darkness, lit only by fungal light from outside, Lyra gasped, her senses flooded. She could feel everything. The slow, deep decay of the ancient archway they sat within. The vibrant, short-cycle life and death of the fungi. The stressed metal of a water pump in the corner. It was overwhelming, terrifying, and utterly, profoundly alive.
Elara's hand found her shoulder, steadying. "Breathe, Songbird. Welcome back. Now… we learn how to play your instrument without breaking the whole band."
Lyra looked at her hands, pale in the greenish light. Where before she saw only the cause of failure, now she saw potential. A terrible, wonderful, destructive potential. The first note of a different song had been struck. The song of broken things, and what could be remade from the pieces.