The Wilds didn't wait for them.
They stepped out of the city's broken teeth and the world changed its rules.
The rot-mist no longer clung in sheets; it broke into streamers, dragged sideways by winds that didn't match the air on their skin. The sky felt closer, the comet's tail a raw scratch overhead. The sound of chains grew distant, then warped, like music heard through water.
Kairn felt it in his teeth.
They were walking into interference.
Good, the dragon said, pleased. His song stumbles here.
"Comforting," Fen muttered, eyeing the twisted, half-dead trees ahead—bark peeled back in spirals, branches grown in loops and knots as if reality had grabbed and twisted them once.
Kairn's **chain-sight** flared without him calling it.
He saw the King's web bending around a wide zone ahead, threads curving like a river around a stone. [fablesandtables.substack](
At the very edge, some lines simply ended, frayed and dead.
"What kind of thing makes him do that?" Sia asked quietly.
"The kind that's going to be our neighbor if we keep going," Fen said.
Lysa adjusted the strap of her pack.
"Then we don't dawdle at the door," she said. "We either walk through or turn back."
Kairn turned a fraction, looking at the city behind them—its jagged skyline, its hanging rot, the faint glimmer of chains starting to re-knit in patches.
He thought of Maereth.
The night preacher's half-melted face.
The King's distant pressure.
He faced forward again.
"We go in," he said.
They did.
The first few steps felt like walking into deep water.
Weight pressed on Kairn's Brand, on his ash eye, on the dragon shard.
The Court's song grew faint and distorted.
The dragon's fire stayed clear.
Lysa's presence at his side didn't change at all.
"Still here," she said, reading his tension.
He nodded.
The ground sloped down—a shallow basin that might once have held a lake. Now it was a bowl of cracked earth and spiraled stone, with the remains of something at its center.
Not a building.
Not a tower.
A machine.
Or at least, it had been.
Kairn saw broken rings half-buried in the dirt, each the size of a house, etched with sigils that hurt his eye to trace. Pillars lay toppled, hollow cores filled with dark glass. In places, metal and bone had fused.
Chains avoided it.
Even dead, the structure radiated a kind of refusal.
"What is this?" Mar whispered.
The bone-walker shivered.
"Old bite," it said. "Before the King. Before my dragon. Before your graves. Something tried to stitch the sky and the dirt together here. It broke. It keeps breaking things."
Kairn stepped closer.
The pressure on his Brand increased, but so did something else—a pulling, like the grave's resonance, but stranger. It felt like standing near an open throat, hearing distant echoes of a song that had once been very loud and was now mostly memory.
The System chimed, its text juddering for a second.
[ LOCATION: NULL BOWL – BROKEN ENGINE ]
[ STATUS: CHAIN INTERFERENCE FIELD – HIGH ]
– Court chains weakened / diverted.
– External scrying & scanning severely degraded.
– Anomalous energies: unknown.
[ BRAND RESPONSE: ACTIVE ]
– Potential resonance: high. Proceed with caution.
"Null Bowl," Fen said. "That sounds friendly."
Lysa's eyes tracked over the broken rings.
"You're thinking of using this," she said to Kairn, not asking.
"Yes," he said.
"Do you know what it does?" she asked.
"No," he said.
She rolled her eyes.
"Of course," she said.
He stepped off the safer edge and down into the bowl.
The pressure increased with each pace.
The King's song fuzzed almost to nothing.
Other whispers took its place—not rot, not dragon, not tower-mind. Fragments of whatever had once powered this place.
He caught impressions.
Heat.
Cold.
A feeling of falling sideways.
Hands, many, tweaking dials, singing instructions.
Screaming when something went wrong.
He stopped at the largest of the broken rings.
It lay at an angle, half-buried, runes along its inner rim cracked and scorched. The metal—or bone, or both—was a sickly silver-gray that seemed to drink light.
His ash eye stuttered.
The dragon inside him rumbled uneasily.
This was not its work.
Not the King's.
Something else.
You find deep graves, the dragon said. I approve.
"Can you use it?" Lysa asked, coming up beside him despite the strain on her own senses. Sia, Tam, and Mar stayed back, closer to Fen.
Kairn put his hand on the ring.
Cold shot up his arm.
Not Devouring.
Absence.
His Brand flared, reflexively pushing fire into that gap.
The old engine didn't drink it.
It redirected it.
For a moment, Kairn saw himself—saw his Brand, his ash eye, the dragon shard—from the outside, as if the engine were a mirror tilted sideways.
The System seized the moment.
[ BRAND SYNCH CHECK: NULL ENGINE FRAGMENT ]
[ COMPATIBILITY: RARE / DANGEROUS ]
[ OPTION: ATTEMPT INTERFACE? ]
"Don't," Lysa said immediately.
Fen didn't even hear the prompt, but he still said, "If that voice in your head is giving you an option, the answer is no."
Kairn hesitated.
His own instincts agreed with them.
The dragon…
The dragon hesitated too.
This is not my fire, it said. But it hates his chains. That makes it… cousin, of a sort.
"We can't stay exposed," Kairn said. "We need somewhere his song really can't reach. Somewhere I can see the web without him seeing me. This is the only thing we've found that does that."
Lysa looked up at the ring, then at him.
"If you tie yourself to this as well," she said slowly, "how much more not-you are you going to be?"
He considered.
Dragon.
Brand.
King.
Now null engine.
He would be walking around with four different songs in his bones.
It was a stupid idea.
It was also their best one.
He smiled, tired and lopsided.
"You did say you'd beat me back into shape if I went too far," he said.
She closed her eyes for a beat, then opened them, steady.
"Fine," she said. "But we do it my way."
He blinked.
"Your way?" he asked.
She held out her hands.
"Sit," she ordered.
He sat.
On the broken, cold ring.
She sat in front of him, cross-legged, so their knees brushed. She took his hands, scaled and clawed and all, in her scraped ones.
"You let this thing in," she said, nodding at the ring. "You let it touch your Brand. But you do it while I'm beating a pattern I know you can find again. That way if it tries to drag you sideways forever, you have a rope."
Fen groaned.
"This is the worst prayer circle," he said.
"Shut up," she said without looking at him.
Kairn squeezed her fingers.
"Ready?" he asked.
"No," she said. "Go."
He told the System yes.
[ INTERFACE INITIATED ]
The world vanished.
Not like dying.
Like dropping out of one track of a song into another.
He found himself standing—or something like standing—inside an endless lattice of lines and rings and crossings. Some glowed Court-chain white, some dragon ember-red, some rot gray, some tower-mind gold.
And somewhere, huge and distant, a washed-out zone where everything blurred.
The Null.
His Brand hung before him as a knot of ash and ember and chain and dragon.
Lysa's beat pulsed around it.
Da-dum.
Da-dum.
The engine's presence brushed the edges—a cold, curious touch.
You are not song, it said—not in words, but in impressions. You are tangle. You are wound. Interesting.
Kairn focused.
"You hate chains," he said—to the engine, to whatever echo was left.
Agreement.
Disagreement.
Complication.
I hate only one thing, it said.
Control.
Kairn laughed, the sound fraying at the edges in this space.
"Then we're on the same side," he said. "Mostly."
He felt the King's web pressing, always, always, always, trying to push into every gap.
The Null shoved back, bending his lines around the bowl.
He saw an opportunity.
"Help me see," he said to the engine. "Not just here. Everywhere his song runs. Help me find the weak knots. In return… I carry a piece of your refusal into his web."
He was offering to become not just dragon-touched, chain-biter, Brand-carrier.
A null spike.
Lysa's beat hammered.
Da-dum-da.
He clung to it.
The engine considered.
You are small, it said. But you are already broken in many ways. I can fit more breakage into you without ruining the pattern.
"Flattering," he said.
It reached.
Cold wrapped his Brand, not smothering the fire, but banding around it in rings—zeroes around flame.
The dragon snarled.
Kairn snarled back.
"Share," he said again. "Not swallow."
You are rude, the engine noted.
"You're late to that realization," Kairn said.
The rings tightened, settling around his core.
The System shuddered, then spat messages fast.
[ LEVEL UP ]
[ NAME: KAIRN – LEVEL 12 ]
[ TIER THRESHOLD CROSSED – HYBRID CORE ]
[ UPDATED TAGS: VAMPIRIC ASH-BORN (DRAGON-TOUCHED / NULL-SCARRED) ]
[ BRAND EVOLUTION: DRAKE-CHAIN BRAND I → DRAKE-NULL BRAND II ]
– Court chain influence: heavily reduced in medium radius.
– You now project a subtle disruption field that makes precise chain work harder nearby.
– Dragon link stabilized: less random bleed, more deliberate access.
– Null anchors added: partial immunity to pure-control effects (compulsion, paralysis) from chain-based sources.
[ NEW SKILL: WEB MAP (LOCAL) ]
– You can generate a mental "map" of the surrounding chain web (up to regional scale), including strength of lines and recent disturbances.
– Using this skill briefly is low cost; full mapping is taxing and risks headaches / temporary disorientation.
[ NEW SKILL: NULL PULSE I ]
– You can emit a short-range pulse that creates a "dead spot" in chain and spell effects for a brief moment.
– Current limitations:
– Radius: small (few strides).
– Duration: heartbeat-length.
– Cost: high – drains Brand and causes feedback pain.
– Side-effect: living beings in the pulse feel a moment of absolute silence; repeated exposure is unsettling.
[ SIDE EFFECTS ]
– Your presence is now especially "loud" to entities sensitive to absences and anomalies.
– Prolonged use of null abilities may cause emotional flattening, dissociation if not anchored.
Kairn hissed as the changes slammed into him.
Lysa's fingers crushed his.
"Stay," she said, voice a rope in the dark.
He stayed.
The lattice faded.
The bowl came back.
He sagged forward, forehead almost hitting hers.
"Still here?" she asked.
He managed a crooked grin.
"Mostly," he said. "You can hit me later to check."
She exhaled.
Fen walked around the ring, eyeing him.
"You look the same," he said. "Which, honestly, is a nice change from the last two power naps."
Kairn didn't feel the same.
The world was quieter and louder at once.
The King's song was thinner here, but where it touched, he could see its structure more clearly than ever—a pattern overlaid on reality.
One thought, and a dim web-map flickered in his mind's eye—the Court's chains in this region, broken, bent, rerouted. The Null Bowl as a hole. The dragon grave as a hot knot. Maereth as a moving bruise. The city as a wounded node.
He cut the view before his head split.
"Don't do that too often," he muttered to himself.
Smart, the dragon agreed.
The Null engine said nothing.
It had given what it would.
It was tired.
So was he.
He pushed to his feet.
Lysa rose with him.
"I hate this place," Fen said.
"Good instinct," Kairn said. "We won't sleep here. We just needed this." He tapped his chest.
"And what does 'this' do, exactly?" Lysa asked, eyes narrowing.
He considered how to explain.
"Think of me as… a walking bad reception field now," he said. "Chains near us fuzz. Clean spells stutter. When I push, I can make a little dead spot—a blink where their tricks don't work."
Fen whistled low.
"That's going to make Maereth's day," he said.
Kairn's smile showed too many teeth.
"That's the idea," he said.
Tam tugged on Sia's sleeve.
"Does that mean he's like… a hole?" he asked.
Sia wrinkled her nose.
"A very cranky hole," she said.
The bone-walker sniffed him again.
"You smell wrong," it said approvingly. "The King will not like touching you. Good."
"We still have to leave," Lysa said. "Before this place decides it wants more of you."
He didn't argue.
They climbed out of the bowl, moving toward a ridge where the Wilds rose in jagged steps.
The King's web resumed more normal density as they left the worst of the interference zone, but his song skated off Kairn in odd ways now, sliding around null-scarred patches.
He used **Web Map** sparingly to pick routes that threaded between stronger lines, keeping them in thinner weave.
It was working.
For about half an hour.
Then the world hiccuped.
He felt it—not as pressure this time, but as a glitch, like a skipped beat in a song played on a damaged instrument.
A piece of the broken chain he'd ripped out of the night preacher's core twitched somewhere behind them.
He turned, ash eye narrowing.
Something was coming up the path they'd taken.
Slow.
Wrong.
The dragon rumbled.
You did not crush the hand clean, it said. He is coaxing it back together. Different.
Lysa saw his posture shift.
"What?" she asked.
He didn't answer with words.
He flared chain-sight for a heartbeat.
Everyone near him flinched at the sudden static in the air.
He saw the **preacher's signature**—a warped knot of chain, rot, and now a thread of Null where his bite had torn it.
The King was reweaving his toy with whatever scraps he could gather.
The Null was fouling the work.
The result was limping toward them.
"He's bringing it back," Kairn said. "Half Court, half… this." He gestured back toward the bowl.
Fen swore.
"Of course he is," he said. "Couldn't let us have one clean kill."
Lysa's jaw set.
"How long?" she asked.
Kairn gauged.
The preacher's new form was unstable. It jerked along lines, sometimes overshooting, sometimes lagging.
"Not now," he said. "Soon. He'll need a while to get it fully under control. It's messy."
"So we use the head start," Lysa said. "We don't fight it here. We find ground that doesn't make everything worse."
Kairn nodded.
He thought of the dragon grave.
Bad idea—the ribs were cracked and still humming from Maereth.
He thought of the Null Bowl.
Worse idea—too many unknowns.
He thought of the Wilds ahead—broken, bad, but at least not already claimed by gods or engines.
"Forward," he said. "Always forward."
They moved faster.
Kairn could feel the preacher gaining clarity behind them, each step it took letting the King's pattern settle more, Null-scar and all.
It would not be exactly the same thing.
It would be angrier.
More resistant to simple chain disruption, now that the King had patched some of those leaks with whatever he'd learned.
Kairn's new **Null Pulse** would hurt it in different ways.
He filed that under "problems for very soon."
They reached the ridge as the first hints of dawnless light brightened the ash sky.
From the top, Kairn saw the land ahead—a sprawl of twisted forest and black stone, a river of gray glass cutting through it where some old accident had fused sand and magic.
The King's web there was thinner, stretched.
Good.
Behind, the city and the Null Bowl and the dragon grave sat in his mind's map like scars.
Between them and those scars, a new knot moved.
The preacher.
He had leveled.
They all had changed.
The next time they met, it would not be a quick ambush in a plaza.
It would be something else.
Lysa came up beside him, breathing hard.
"So," she said. "New plan?"
He watched the web for another heartbeat.
"Same plan," he said. "Break his toys, stay alive, get somewhere he doesn't own."
She snorted.
"At least you're consistent," she said.
The dragon chuckled.
The Null hummed cold.
The King's web trembled.
Behind them, in the wounded city, a half-broken night preacher pulled itself fully upright, eyes burning with chain-light and a flicker of dead silence Kairn recognized as his own.
They kept walking.
The next fight was already on its way.