The road to the Verge wasn't measured in distance. It was measured in what it took from you.
Kander's pace was merciless. Not fast—inevitable. A march. A decree written into footfalls. Hatim stumbled to match it, every step scraping raw against the ash-caked grit. His soles burned, split open on hidden shards. The ground gnawed at him. The air bit harder—thinner now, sharper, like breathing through a forge's exhale. It scoured his throat, scraped dry across his tongue, and left soot crusted in the corners of his lips.
The last veins of the Sinks shriveled behind them—walls slumped into tired spines, roofs sagging beneath centuries of failure. Smoke-cured rags hung limp from broken poles like flags surrendered long ago.
Beneath his feet, Hatim felt it.
Akar here wasn't the soft pulse of home, of hidden hollows where Granny's needle hummed and old rivers whispered. No. The veins here trembled with something else—violent, hot, furious. Akar thrummed like blood trying to punch through its own arteries. The earth beneath Embermark wasn't just alive. It was angry.
Here, the city shed its skin. No gilding. No lies. Only bone.
The land twisted the deeper they climbed. Flora warped by heat and memory clawed its way from cracks—black-veined shrubs, bark split open by old burns, leaves stiff as iron and darker than coal. Nothing grew straight. Everything hunched. Bent. Bowed to the weight of smoke and fire.
The wind changed again. No longer just ash. Now came the copper stink of molten brass. The sharp bite of flux. The sick-sweet reek of burned oils and marrow-greased gears. Every breath was a swallow of industry, of labor made tangible.
And then—
Sound.
Not chaos. Not noise.
Rhythm.
Clangs. Hisses. Roars. A machine-god's heartbeat made from hammerfalls and screaming steel. The shrill wail of heated iron folding against will. The groan of cranes hauling bones heavier than men.
Hatim flinched at the first near strike—body still wired from ambushes in the Sinks—but this wasn't violence for its own sake. This was creation. This was war given shape.
Then he saw it.
The Verge.
A city layered atop a wound.
Scaffolds clung to cliff faces like ribcages. Girders braced towers of smoke-streaked iron. Giant skeletal cranes turned endlessly, their limbs swinging molten spines from furnace to furnace. Lifts scuttled like brass insects up sheer walls, groaning under loads of ore, coal, and gods-knew-what else.
Akar streamed through transparent arteries—golden rivers flowing through pipes stretched between smokestacks and factories. Their glow barely pierced the fog. It wasn't enough to light the Verge, only enough to remind it that it was still alive.
Hatim's throat closed. Not from awe. Not even from fear. From pressure. From the oppressive fact of this place. The weight of it.
"This is the Verge," Kander said beside him, voice dragging like iron over stone. "Where Embermark stops pretending."
His gaze shifted toward the transport gates—colossal things layered in reinforced glyphs, each one a vault pretending to be a doorway. Beyond them sprawled the trade yards, black plains filled with titanic freighters. Metal-plated beasts stitched with sigils from faraway kingdoms.
He watched as crates were hauled from their bellies—timbers that smelled of salt and wind, ice-shards that glittered like broken stars, grains still dusted in the gold of foreign fields, meats dried with spices that stung the nose in ways Hatim didn't even have words for.
His stomach growled. Loud. Pointed.
Kander didn't look, but his voice sharpened. "The wealth flows upward. Always upward. To the Crowns in their walled gardens. They drink rainwater imported in glass. They breathe filtered air. Their children eat fruits that never tasted ash."
His hand gestured to the forge—the monster that squatted at the Verge's center. A fortress of heat. Walls black as obsidian, rippling under the strain of the fires within. Glyphs crawled its surface—harsh, angular things. Not drawn for beauty. Drawn for containment. For control. For keeping a star caged behind stone.
A mural spanned the entrance arch: crowned figures harvesting Akar from kneeling workers, their sickle-tipped staves piercing Nodes at the base of each victim's skull. The paint shimmered, the thorns on their diadems twitching to follow Hatim as he passed.
"That," Kander growled, "is the Ironweavers' forge. It feeds the military. The markets. The Crowns. The world. It feeds them with us."
Hatim stared. The forge wasn't a building. It wasn't a machine. It was a mouth. And it was watching him.
No glyph would save him here. No clever line drawn into Akar's current. This was older magic. Cruder. Merciless.
Not manipulation. Not finesse.
Will.
His fingers curled instinctively—still bruised from days of training. His skin stung where it split. He breathed—and the air scraped going in.
"You need more than glyphs for the Trial of Resonance," Kander said, stepping toward a smaller workshop nestled like a scar between two guild halls. Its walls sweated steam. Its roof spat sparks. Inside, shadows moved—apprentices bent at anvils, shoulders trembling, skin slick with toil.
"They don't care how pretty your lines are. They care about marrow. When the Akar gutters out, when the glyphs fade, when your marks crack and your channels bleed—what's left?"
He turned. Eyes like iron dragged from the earth.
"Flesh. Fire. Will. That's what's left. That's what they test."
A voice cut through the hammer-song.
"Kander."
Hatim turned.
A figure stood with sleeves rolled, a glowing iron rod clutched in grease-streaked hands. Muscles lean. Posture wired, coiled like a spring that never fully unspooled. A glyph tattoo shimmered along his forearm—lines not of power, but of discipline. Of control.
Kael.
Kael rolled his sleeves higher, revealing a faded glyph—Sen'nari—identical to the one on Kander's shoulder. It pulsed faintly, as if in protest
The name stung like a fresh bruise—Lugal's name for him. The apprentice to Master Bolun. The one who was supposed to teach him—before everything shattered.
Kael's eyes scanned Hatim. Sharp. Clinical. Not cruel—but not impressed. "Smaller than I expected. Thought you'd come for coin, not calluses."
Heat flushed up Hatim's neck—sweat mixing with ash, streaking him in gray. He suddenly felt like the ghost of someone who belonged somewhere else.
Kander's smirk barely ghosted his lips. "He'll grow. Teach him the hammer's song, Kael. And how not to shatter when the anvil talks back."
Kael's grin curled—knife-sharp. "C'mon, then. Let's see if that famed Akar of yours can keep a hammer from breaking your spine. First the hammer. Then the song. If you're lucky—your bones will learn the rhythm."
Hatim stepped forward.
No words. No defiance. Just jaw tight, hands clenched.
Let them hammer him.
He would not break.