The crowd pressed close as we reached the portal's base. The air thrummed—low, bone-deep, like standing inside a struck bell. The five-hundred-yard-wide ring loomed overhead, its alloy surface already shimmering with the promise of blue. I could taste ozone on my tongue, sharp and metallic.
Jin stepped forward first, staff tapping once against the stone. She didn't look back. Kai gave my shoulder a quick squeeze—firm, brotherly—then followed.
I was last.
I told myself it would be nothing. Just a step. Just light. The gift my mother had passed down—the one that let me touch old things and feel the echoes of who had held them—rarely worked on thresholds. The portal's frame was ancient, yes—black Precursor stone carved with symbols no living scholar had fully translated—but the surface itself was maintained by Guild workers who cycled through shifts every few hours, deliberately keeping it clean of accumulated memory. Too much residue in a crossing surface and the transit became unstable. No one held it long enough to leave a mark.
That was the theory, anyway.
I stepped forward.
*
The wave hit.
Blue light poured from the crown, not blinding but alive, washing over me in a cold, liquid rush. It didn't burn; it entered. For one terrible heartbeat I wasn't standing in Ramos anymore.
I wasn't me anymore.
I was smaller. Younger. A boy of maybe ten crouched behind a dune, sand stinging my cheeks. The sky was the color of old blood. I smelled smoke, horse sweat, iron. Voices shouted in Zephyrian—harsh, frantic. A woman's scream cut off abruptly.
These weren't my hands. This wasn't my fear.
But I felt it.
The arrow took my father first—through the throat, sudden and complete, his body folding over mine as he tried to shield me even as he died. His weight. His silence. The way his hands kept trying to hold on.
*Ku.* The name came from somewhere outside me, the way names do when you're inside someone else's memory. *That's Ku. That's Kai's father.*
My mother's hands—Geraldine, always calm, always steady—yanked me upright. "Run, Kai! Run!" Her voice cracked on his name. Then the second arrow found her chest and she crumpled, eyes wide with the shock of it, still reaching for me as she fell.
My sister grabbed my wrist with one hand and Jin's with the other—Jin, who was also thirteen, who was also there, whose face was white with terror. Kat. Twelve years older, always laughing. "Come on!" We ran. Sand burned our feet. Arrows hissed past. One grazed my calf—hot line of blood, sharp sting. Then a third arrow found Kat's back. She staggered, fell to her knees, looked at us both with something like apology.
"Go," she whispered. "Protect her. Live."
I grabbed Jin's hand and we ran until our lungs caught fire.
We didn't look back.
The memory released me.
I crashed back into my own body, gasping, palms pressed to cold stone. Huanan. The air smelled of pine and distant cook-fires. My face was wet—tears I hadn't known I was crying.
Jin stood ten paces ahead, eyes closed, staff planted like an anchor. Her knuckles were white around the wood. She'd seen something too—or rather, she'd *felt* something. The same thing. I understood that with sudden, terrible clarity: she had been there. She was in Kai's memory because she had been in the actual event.
Ten years and the portal had handed it back to her in full.
When she opened her eyes and met mine, there was a flicker of recognition—and warning. *Not here. Not now.* Then she turned away and her spine straightened and her breathing steadied and she became Jin again: composed, purposeful, already scanning the arrival plaza with the calm of someone who had crossed a hundred times.
I didn't know yet how much that composure cost her.
I would learn.
Kai knelt beside me in an instant, hand on my shoulder.
"Pete?"
I looked up at him. Really looked. The same crimson eyes, older now, steady. The same broad shoulders. The same quiet strength that had carried him through every ambush, every loss, every year since the day his family died and left him alone.
I had known the story—everyone in the family knew. But knowing it in words was nothing like feeling it. Nothing like tasting the copper in the air, hearing the wet choke of a dying father, seeing a sister's eyes go dull.
My voice cracked. "I'm sorry."
Kai's jaw tightened. He understood immediately. "The portal opened the door, didn't it?"
I nodded, throat too tight to speak.
He pulled me to my feet, steadying me.
"Portals amplify your gift." His voice was careful. Measured. "Especially old memories. Strong ones." He didn't ask what I'd seen. He didn't have to. "That's why they don't let children cross until they're thirteen—most gifts don't settle until then. Even now, you're still too open."
"I'm sorry," I said again, uselessly.
"Don't be." Something moved through his expression—there and gone, like a fish under dark water. "You carried it for thirty seconds. I've been carrying it for ten years." He pulled me to my feet. "At least now you know why I hold my shield the way I do."
He didn't explain what he meant. He didn't need to.
Two Kanlian soldiers approached—tall, armored in the deep green and silver of House Loyem. They saluted sharply. "Lady Jin. Prince Petras. Lord Kai. Welcome home."
Jin's voice was steady, controlled. Whatever she had seen, she'd buried it. "Thank you. We're expected at the estate."
*
The city of Huanan rose around us—white stone towers, tiled roofs catching the late-morning sun, banners of Han green and gold snapping in the breeze. It felt older than Ramos, heavier with memory. Every street corner seemed to hum with the weight of centuries.
The Loyem estate appeared on the western slope—sprawling white stone walls, tiled roofs, gardens heavy with jasmine.
My mother's childhood home. She had left it behind when she went to Garvos—sent to Ricardo's court as diplomatic surety while her brother built his career, though she never spoke of it in those terms. To hear her tell it, she had chosen. She always said she had chosen.
I had believed her. Standing in the shadow of the walls she grew up inside, I wasn't so sure anymore.
The estate was smaller than I'd imagined from her stories. Or perhaps grief had made it larger in her telling—the way people expand the homes they can't return to.
Now I was finally here.
And it felt wrong.
The gates stood open—not welcoming, but abandoned. No servants waited to greet us. No banners flew from the corner towers. The courtyard was too quiet.
Jin stopped, staff raised slightly. "Something's off."
Kai's hand went to his sword. "Stay close."
We crossed the threshold.
The receiving hall was empty except for a single man—the chief steward, white-haired, ramrod straight. He bowed deeply, but his hands trembled.
"Lady Jin. Prince Petras. Lord Kai." His voice was hoarse. "Master Elric regrets he could not greet you himself. He left before dawn for the ruins. He said the site could not wait."
Jin's brow furrowed. "He went alone?"
"With a small escort. Two guards. A cartographer." The steward's eyes flicked toward the eastern wing. "He left instructions for you in the library. But first—there is someone you should see."
Before we could ask, a door opened at the far end of the hall.
A woman stepped through.
Tall. Olive-skinned. Dressed in the layered robes of a Zephyrian alchemist, though the fabric was worn and patched. She moved with the careful grace of someone who had been badly hurt and was still healing. A faint scent clung to her—desert spices, smoke, something faintly metallic.
The same scent that had lingered on Yaheed's cloak last night.
She stopped when she saw Kai.
"Khaleed," she said softly.
Kai froze.
The woman—Adelheid, I realized, piecing together fragments from family stories—looked at him with something between relief and sorrow. "I didn't expect to see you here."
Kai's voice was rough. "You're alive."
"Barely." She lifted one sleeve. Bandages wrapped her forearm, faintly stained with blood. "I've been tending to someone who needed it more."
She stepped aside.
In the next room, a man lay on a low couch—pale, sweating, breathing shallow. His robes were black, hooded. Shadow agent's garb, the kind worn by operatives who worked outside official channels.
Jin sucked in a breath. "That's Leyron."
"You know him?" I whispered.
"By reputation." Her voice was tight. "Zephyrian exile. Became a Han operative five years ago. He works for my uncle—Master Elric. Gathers intelligence near the Strait."
Adelheid's expression darkened. "He was captured three months ago. Tortured. I found him two weeks ago in a safe house near the border, barely breathing. I've been trying to keep him alive long enough to deliver his message."
Kai stepped forward. "What message?"
Adelheid moved to a low table and lifted a scrap of parchment. A single line had been scrawled in shaking script, the ink smudged as if written in haste:
"The puppeteer's string is tightening."
The words were in old Kanlian—formal, deliberate.
Kai's face went white.
Jin looked between us. "What does it mean?"
Kai didn't answer. He stared at the parchment like it was a death sentence.
I had never seen him afraid before.
Adelheid's voice was quiet. "He wrote it the night before he collapsed. He hasn't woken since." She hesitated. "There's more. He tried to write something else—coordinates, I think—but the fever took him before he finished."
She gestured to the table.
A quill lay beside the parchment. Old, worn, the kind used for field reports. It had been gripped hard enough to crack the shaft.
I felt the pull before Kai even asked.
"Pete," he said quietly. "Can you try?"
Jin frowned. "Try what?"
Kai's eyes never left mine. "His gift. If Leyron held that quill long enough, if the fear was strong enough..." He trailed off.
I swallowed. My gift didn't work on everything—only objects held with intention, with emotion, with presence. A coin passed hand to hand wouldn't carry much. But something clutched in desperation, written with shaking hands while death loomed?
That might.
I reached out.
The quill was warm.
Too warm.
The world tilted.
Fear. Choking, clawing fear.
I'm running through stone corridors, ancient walls pressing close. My leg is broken—I can feel the bone grinding—but I can't stop. They're behind me. Not soldiers. Something worse.
I stumble into a chamber. Ley lines pulse beneath my feet, bright and wrong. The nexus is awake. It shouldn't be awake.
Something moves in the shadows—too many limbs, too fluid. Not a creature. A construction*.*
I scrawl the message with shaking hands. The string is tightening. He needs to know. Elric needs to know.
The coordinates—I have to finish the—
Pain. White-hot. My chest.
I'm falling.
The puppeteer is—
The vision snapped shut.
I staggered backward. Kai caught me.
"Easy," he said. "Breathe."
Jin's voice was sharp. "What did you see?"
I gasped for air, heart hammering. "Ruins. Ley lines. Something... something was there. Not human. A golem, maybe, but wrong. And the nexus—it was active."
Jin went very still. "The ruins near the Strait?"
I nodded.
Kai looked at Adelheid. "Where did Elric go this morning?"
Her voice was barely a whisper. "The same ruins."
Silence dropped like a stone.
Jin's knuckles whitened around her staff. "We need to leave. Now."
Kai was already moving toward the door. "How long ago did he leave?"
The steward answered. "two days."
"Then we're already too late to catch him before he arrives." Kai turned to Jin. "Can you track him?"
"If he's near a ley line, yes." She was already pulling maps from her pack. "But if the nexus is active—"
"Then we go anyway." Kai's voice was iron. "We don't leave family behind."
I looked down at the quill still clutched in my hand. The fear lingered like oil on my skin.
The puppeteer's string is tightening.
I didn't know what it meant.
But I knew one thing with cold certainty:
Whatever was waiting in those ruins, it had been waiting a long time.
And Master Elric had just walked straight into its hands.
Jin was already moving toward the door, maps in hand. "I'll prepare supplies. We leave in ten minutes."
Kai nodded. "I need to change first. Garvossi plate won't do me any good in the ruins."
He disappeared down the eastern corridor—toward the family quarters he hadn't seen in years.
I started to follow him, but Jin stopped me with a look. "Give him a moment, Petras. Some things need to be done alone."
We waited in the courtyard. The jasmine smelled too sweet, cloying in the midday heat. Adelheid moved between us and the wounded agent's room, checking his breathing, adjusting bandages. The steward brought water, bread, dried fruit—travel rations assembled with the quiet efficiency of a man who had done this before.
When Kai emerged, he was different.
The shield was leaf-shaped — not the flat Garvossi standard but something curved, almost organic, designed to deflect rather than absorb. It was burnished steel etched with ley line patterns that seemed to breathe in the light. But it was the handle that stopped me.
A pickaxe. Or what had been a pickaxe — the head removed, the handle integrated into the shield's grip with the kind of careful metalwork that took months, not days. Dark wood worn smooth in one specific place where a hand had gripped it thousands of times. Not Kai's hand. Older wear than that.
The sword was sheathed inside the shield itself — a scimitar. curved, wide, its handle protruding above the shield's upper edge like a stem above a leaf. The blade's flat carried a dark inlaid glyph I didn't recognize.
Jin had gone very still.
She knew what it was made of.
Around his neck hung a pendant I'd never seen him wear before—a small silver disc stamped with the Garvossi royal emblem. Four stars over a sunburst. The chain was delicate, almost fragile, meant for a woman's throat.
His mother's. Geraldine. King Ricardo's Bravossi half-sister, sent as an emissary to Kanlia, who had fallen in love with a prospector and never looked back.
Kai caught me staring. He didn't say anything. Just adjusted the shield strap and walked past me toward the gate.
Jin stepped into his path.
"Khaleed." Not Kai. The formal name, the one with weight.
He stopped.
She reached out and touched the flat of the blade—just her fingertips, eyes closing for a moment. When she opened them they were very still.
"The core is reshaped," she said quietly.
"Yes."
"She designed it hollow. So ley energy could move through without resistance. A small amount of Andorium residue in the metal channel ley resonance." Jin's hand fell away. "You know that."
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because I needed something that could survive what I was carrying." His voice was flat. Final. "And I didn't know how else to do it."
Jin looked at him for a long moment. Something moved across her face—not anger, something older and more tired. She'd known him for years. She'd watched him build this particular armor piece by piece. She understood what it had cost him and she understood why he'd paid it.
That was the hardest part about understanding people: sometimes you saw exactly what they'd done to themselves and loved them anyway.
"We should go," she said finally.
It wasn't forgiveness. It wasn't absolution. It was just: *I see you. We have somewhere to be.*
Kai's jaw loosened slightly. "Yeah. We should."
He walked past her toward the gate.
I fell into step beside him. "Your father's pick. Your sister's staff. Your mother's pendant." I kept my voice low. "You're carrying all of them."
I didn't tell him what happened when I'd brushed the shield strap adjusting my pack earlier—the faint warmth that wasn't temperature, the suggestion of hands that weren't mine searching dark ground for something worth finding. My gift worked better when I was paying attention, but sometimes it worked whether I was paying attention or not.
These objects had been held for ten years with purpose and grief and love. They were saturated.
"I always do," Kai said. "Just usually not where people can see."
He smiled—small, sad.
"And if I'm going to die in those ruins, I want to die as all three of their children. Not just the one who survived."
The gate loomed ahead.
Adelheid was the only one not looking at Kai.
She was looking at me.
Not intrusively — the way a healer looks, taking inventory without announcing it. I was thirteen and I had just crossed a portal and fallen out of someone else's worst memory and I was standing very still trying to look like none of that had happened.
She had probably seen that look before. On soldiers after their first battle. On refugees arriving at borders. On people who had experienced something their body hadn't finished processing yet.
She didn't say anything. Just noted me, the way you note a patient's symptom before the examination begins.
Later I would understand that this was simply how Adelheid moved through the world — taking quiet inventory of everyone around her, filing what she found, acting on it when the moment came.
At the time I just thought: why is that woman looking at me like that?
Jin was already waiting, staff in hand, maps rolled and tied to her pack.
Adelheid stood beside her, a satchel of medical supplies slung over one shoulder. "I'm coming with you."
She turned back to the steward before we reached the gate. "Boil water every four hours. Change the dressings when they soak through—you'll find clean cloth in the blue satchel I left beside the couch. And if his fever breaks—" she held the old man's gaze, "—when his fever breaks, tell him Adelheid says the debt is paid."
The steward nodded, spine straightening slightly, as if the instruction had given him purpose where panic had been.
"He'll live," Adelheid said. It didn't sound like hope. It sounded like a professional assessment.
Kai started to protest.
She cut him off. "Leyron is my patient. If we find Elric injured, you'll need someone who knows field medicine. And—" She met his eyes. "—I owe Yaheed a debt. He asked me to watch over you if I ever got the chance. So I'm watching."
Kai looked like he wanted to argue. But he just nodded.
"Ten minutes," Jin said. "Then we move."
Kai touched the shield handle one last time—his father's grip, worn smooth by years of searching.
As we passed through the gate I glanced back once. Through the receiving hall's open door I could just see the edge of the couch where Leyron lay—still, pale, breathing.
Still breathing.
Whatever he'd survived to write that message, whatever had broken his leg and stopped his heart twice on the road to Huanan, it hadn't been enough to finish him.
I filed that away. Chroniclers learn early: the people who survive the unsurvivable tend to matter later.
"Let's go find what's hidden," he said quietly.
He meant the ruins. He meant Elric. He meant whatever the puppeteer was building in a nexus that shouldn't be awake.
But I looked at the shield in his hand and the sword at his hip and the pendant at his throat and I thought: *you've been carrying the hidden thing the whole time.*
We walked through the gate.