The first storm of the season hit Brindleford three days after the Marlo incident.
It came up the river, a slow dark smear on the horizon that turned the air heavy and the town's mood twitchy. Dockhands cursed and doubled knots. Merchants shouted over each other, trying to get tarps down over their wares. The smell of fish, damp wood, and fear thickened.
Inside the Trade House, Orren Falst tapped the butt of a rolled ledger against the counter.
"Close the outer shutters," he ordered. "We lose no crates to wind. And someone check the roof beams over Warehouse Two. Last year's patch was shoddy."
"On it," Bran said, already moving.
"Al," Orren added, "you're with me."
"Yes, Factor," Al said, surprised.
He grabbed a waxed ledger wrap and fell in beside Orren as they strode into the yard.
The sky had gone from grey to nearly black in an hour. Rain advanced over the river like a marching wall, the first fat drops smacking the packed earth.
"You ever see a real river storm in Greyfall?" Orren asked, voice carrying over the growing wind.
"Once," Al said. "We mostly get ash and drizzle. The big storms break on the cliffs up-river."
"Well, it's Brindleford's turn tonight," Orren said. "Watch."
The first slash of rain hit, cold and hard. In moments, everything was slick. The river churned, waves slapping against the quay. The wind slammed into the Trade House's western wall with a sound like a giant hand.
Guards and warehouse crew moved faster, hauling tarps, checking lashings on crates stacked near the open bay.
A shout cut through the noise. "Rope! This one's loose!"
A stack of grain sacks near the edge of the yard had started to lean as water turned dust to mud under one side. A guard grabbed at it and slid, boots skidding.
"Leave it," Bran yelled. "We can lose one stack, not a leg—"
"No," Orren snapped. "We lose that, we feed fewer bellies. Shorten the stack. Top three sacks to the inner row. Al!"
Al jerked. "Yes?"
"What happens if that stack goes?" Orren demanded.
Al blinked rain out of his eyes and ran through it in his head: stack tips, sacks split, grain soaks, mud turns to soup. They'd salvage some, lose much. The wet grain might mold, ruining whatever they tried to dry.
"We lose more than sacks," he shouted back. "We lose seed. If this was Greyfall's…they go hungry next season too."
"Exactly," Orren said. "So we don't lose it. Move!"
Al sprinted with two others, feet slipping on the slick ground. Rain stung his face. He grabbed at the top sack, nearly lost his grip, then found it again and dragged it down, muscles protesting.
As they worked, a flash of light flared on the far side of the yard. For an instant, the world turned white-blue and sharp-edged.
Not lightning. Too contained. Too…intentional.
Al squinted through the rain.
Near Warehouse Two, someone stood under the eaves, cloak plastered to their form. Their hand was up, Essence shimmering around their fingers as they traced a quick sigil in the air, then pressed it to the warehouse door's iron bands.
Anchor pattern. Reinforcement. Good.
Then—on the next door over—the shimmer was wrong.
Essence ran black-edged for a heartbeat, the ward sigil warping instead of settling. The iron bands shuddered faintly, as if rejecting it.
Al's heart lurched.
Miasma? That fast?
He let go of the sack he was manhandling. It thumped down, fortunately not on anyone's foot.
"Al!" Bran barked. "What are you—"
"Something's off at Two!" Al shouted, pointing.
He didn't wait for Bran's reaction. He ran, boots slipping in the mud, rain making everything a blur.
As he got closer, the wrongness sharpened: a thin, greasy taste at the back of his throat. Nothing like the near-Weave back home, but a smear. Like bad fat in a stew.
The cloaked figure jerked their hand back from the door, shaking it once as if stung.
"Sir?" Al gasped as he reached them. "What—"
The figure half-turned. It was one of Orren's lesser contract mages, a man in his thirties with tired eyes and a thinning beard, cloak soaked.
"Ward's not holding," the mage snapped over the wind. "Old iron's resisting. It'll do for the night."
"No," Al said. He didn't know how he knew that, but the certainty was a rock in his gut. "It won't. There's something in the pattern. It's…slipping."
The mage stared at him. "Did you suddenly become a Caster when I wasn't looking, boy?"
Al opened his mouth. Closed it. The sigil on the door still glowed faintly, edges fuzzed like mold on bread.
He remembered Edran's voice: You have two choices. Pretend. Or learn.
He reached out and put his fingers just shy of the iron, not touching the sigil directly, feeling the Essence hum.
It was like brushing a web. Fine lines, tension humming between points. And in one strand, something sticky and sour.
"Here," he said. "You…you anchored across a crack. The Essence wants to flow along the old line." He pointed to where the iron bar joined the wood. "But something's in the joint. If you don't route the pattern around it, it'll catch and tear."
The mage gaped. "You…feel that?"
"Yes," Al said, half-frightened of his own honesty. "It…tastes wrong. Like the Blight we had near Greyfall's fields last month, but…weaker."
The mage's eyes sharpened. "Blight?" He muttered something in a language Al didn't know, then squinted at the joint.
"By the towers," he breathed. "You're right."
He flicked his fingers, adjusting the sigil's lower stroke, re-anchoring the Essence line around the joint instead of across it. The wrongness faded a fraction; the greasy feeling at the back of Al's tongue eased.
"Where did you learn to—"
"Later!" Orren shouted, appearing like a storm himself. "Is Two secure?"
"For now," the mage said, eyes still on Al. "But there's residue in the wood. Old contamination. You should have someone cleanse it before it grows."
Orren's jaw tightened. "We don't have a spare Logos priest on the shelf."
"I'll write to the temple after the storm," the mage said. "For tonight, the ward holds."
Orren nodded once, then fixed Al with a look. "You moved sacks without order. Then you ran toward a ward line. You better have a very good reason."
Al swallowed. Rain ran down his face, hiding the sweat.
"I saw the sigil," he said. "It…flickered. Wrong. Like when Edran's Sanctuary catches on something nasty. I didn't think. I just…went."
"You felt it?" Orren pressed.
"Yes," Al said.
Orren stared at him a beat longer, then snorted. "Next time," he said, "shout first, run after. I'd rather yell at you for talking over me than bury you because you stuck your hand into a cursed door. Understood?"
"Yes, Factor," Al said quickly.
"Good." Orren turned away. "Bran! Check Three—if Two's got rot in the beams, we'll be damned if we ignore the neighbor."
As the storm wore itself out over the next hour, pounding Brindleford into mud and rivulets, the incident at Warehouse Two buzzed quietly in Al's head.
The mage, whose name turned out to be Seryn, cornered him later when they were both half-dripping in the corridor.
"You from some tower-school?" Seryn asked, peering at him. "Or some wild hedge-witch line? Don't lie. I've seen half-trained sensitive brats before. They twitch at smells that aren't there and start screaming when the ley-lines kink."
"I'm from Greyfall," Al said. "We don't even have a proper mage bench." He hesitated. "We had a Blight. Small one. Edran and my mother worked a minor cleansing. I watched."
"And?" Seryn said.
"And…I saw how the wards and the taint…pushed at each other," Al said slowly, remembering. "The same way the sigil pushed at that crack. It's like—like trying to pour clean water through a pipe full of sludge. If you don't divert, it backs up."
Seryn stared at him. Then he snorted. "You're either the most annoying lucky brat I've met or someone forgot to test you with the right tools."
"They tested me," Al said, heat in his voice. "Crystals, tablets, the whole thing. It said 'fragmented' and 'diffuse.' Not good enough for your towers or sects."
"Ah." Seryn's expression shifted to something that wasn't quite pity. "One of those."
"One of what?" Al asked.
"People who see too many patterns and not enough shine," Seryn said. "Towers like shine. So do sects. Doesn't mean they're right."
He scratched his chin. "You want some basics, come by the back room when you're off ledger duty. I can at least teach you why you shouldn't stick your fingers in active sigils without warning the person who cast them."
Al blinked. "You'll…teach me?"
"A little," Seryn said. "Don't get ideas. I'm not taking on some Brindleford rat as an apprentice. But if you're going to be twitching at my wards, I'd rather you do it on purpose."
"Thank you," Al said, genuine.
Seryn grunted. "Thank me when you've not blown us all up."
Evenings changed after that.
By day, Al copied, tallied, and checked. He walked warehouses with Bran, learning how to match paper to crates, how to spot quiet theft—the extra half-sack in the corner that no one had written down, the crate labeled tools that sounded oddly hollow.
By night, two or three times a week, he sat at a scarred table in the back room with Seryn, small oil lamp between them, scraps of chalk-marked slate in front of him.
"Essence Affinities," Seryn said one night, writing the words in block letters. "You heard the terms?"
"Anchor, Veil, Flow, Resonant, Fracture, Glimmer," Al recited softly. "Selene had an old sheet."
"Good," Seryn said. "Anchor shapes and stabilizes. Veil tricks senses. Flow moves. Resonant syncs and disrupts. Fracture breaks. Glimmer tweaks chance."
He drew six simple icons: a circle with crossbars (Anchor), an eye (Veil), a swirl arrow (Flow), a set of overlapping waves (Resonant), a cracked line (Fracture), a star of scattered points (Glimmer).
"You," he said, tapping the slate, "have a Spark's worth of all of them, and a proper Caster's worth of none. That's what the crystal saw and the fancy testers wrote down."
Al winced. "When you say it like that, it sounds worse."
"Because you're still thinking like a tower that wants archmages," Seryn said. "Wake up. We're in a trade town. We need people who can see all the ways a pattern can go wrong, not people who can throw comets."
He tapped Anchor. "When you felt the ward line at Warehouse Two, what did you sense?"
"A…hitch," Al said. "Smooth, then sticky. Like a song going off-key for a beat."
"Resonant vocabulary," Seryn noted. "Interesting." He tapped Glimmer. "When the wolfkin's spear slipped in Greyfall?"
Al hesitated. "Like…a thousand tiny possibilities all humming. I grabbed the one where he slipped and dragged it closer."
"Glimmer-adjacent," Seryn muttered. "No wonder elder types sniffed around you and left. You're a headache."
"Thank you," Al said dryly.
Seryn grinned briefly. "You're welcome."
He leaned back. "Look. I can't give you a clean courtrank in any one Affinity. But what you have, if you live long enough to not misstep, is a Spark in all of them pointed in the same direction: noticing when things don't fit. Wards. Trades. People."
Al thought of Marlo. Of Warehouse Two. Of the way Toren's shoulder dipped before a punch. Of the way Qingshan had walked through the square and the air had made room.
"Is that…useful?" he asked.
"It is if you don't go mad from watching," Seryn said. "And if you learn when to speak and when to shut up. People don't like being told their world is built on cracks."
Al looked down at the little icons. His finger hovered over the Resonant waves, then the cracked Fracture line, then the Glimmer star.
"What about Malice?" he asked quietly. "And Miasma?"
Seryn's face changed. Closed.
"Who taught you those words?" he asked.
"Father Edran," Al said. "A little. And…we had Blight outside Greyfall. Once. And the raid leader—he…" He remembered those too-bright eyes, the way people's fear had thickened around him. "Edran called it Malice. Not much. Enough to make my teeth itch."
Seryn rubbed his temple. "Most people in towns like this pretend those are stories," he said. "It makes sleeping easier. But you already saw them. Fine."
He drew two more icons. A black smear (Miasma). A thorny knot (Malice).
"Pneuma and Essence are rivers," he said. "Malice and Miasma are what happens when you dump all your poison, lies, and grief into them and let it stew. Malice rides inside—on oaths, fears, obsessions. Miasma rides outside—on places, spells, breeding pits."
He stared at Al. "If you can feel wrong notes in Essence…it might mean you can feel Miasma earlier than others. That's useful. It also paints a target on your back for anyone who prefers their corruption subtle."
Al's skin crawled.
"So…don't do that too openly," he said.
"Now you're thinking like a survivor," Seryn said.
He blew out the lamp. "Go sleep, Greyfall. Tomorrow you'll be back to counting fish. But remember—this"—he tapped the side of his head—"is work too. Don't let the ledgers eat it."
Weeks passed.
Al fell into a rhythm.
Mornings: dock checks, warehouse rounds, ledgers. Midday: quick meals, brief glimpses of Brindleford's streets—a Logos shrine here, a small Eastern tea-house there, a Beastkin-run tannery that smelled worse than Greyfall's ever had. Evenings: more ledgers, or Seryn's reluctant lessons.
He wrote letters.
To Greyfall, describing Brindleford's noise and stink, the way the river looked when it was full of trading boats, how Orren had nearly come to blows with a Central banker over a line of credit.
To Arlen, c/o Azure Dragon Heaven Sect via Greyreach and a dozen intermediary scribes and caravan routes. He wrote about stacks of crates instead of stacks of stones, about Bran's temper and Seryn's grudging lessons, about catching Marlo's bad steel.
If his quill lingered a moment over the phrase I miss kicking your ankles in drills, he didn't admit it to anyone.
Some nights, when he lay listening to the river and the snores of other apprentices, he closed his eyes and pictured the map in his head.
Greyfall to Brindleford. Brindleford to Greyreach. Greyreach to Aurelion. Eastward streams to Hanyue and then Xianwu. Thin lines down toward Sula's deeper war zones. Lines north to colder, harsher places. South to dangerous jungles and seals.
Somewhere on that map, Arlen climbed toward a peak. Somewhere else, Demon Kings and Devil Lords pushed against ancient bindings.
And here he was, in a creaking loft, holding a quill.
"Not nothing," he muttered to the dark. "Just…different."
He wasn't sure if he believed it yet.
But when, one damp morning, a Paragon Adventurer League scout in a battered blue cloak strode into the Trade House and asked for manifests on all caravans heading toward Sula's deeper front over the last year "because something's not adding up with the missing runs," and Orren called, "Al! Bring the files," and Seryn raised an eyebrow with a look that said, Told you the roads are where the interesting rot starts—
—that was when he realized:
His path might be slower and less glamorous than Arlen's.
But it was taking him exactly where the world's threads were thickest.
And for a boy who once thought his only future was dying in ash with a dull spear, that was…a start.