The wind didn't whisper atop the Needle Spire.
It scraped.
It howled through the latticed ironwork like a thousand razors dragged across bone. It clawed at stone, gnawed at rusted steel, and peeled at skin. Kander did not flinch. His silhouette was jagged against the churning bruise of night—half man, half ruin. A cloak frayed by too many years, armor scoured down to raw steel and memory.
He crouched on the outer parapet—no railing, no mercy—where the Needle pierced the clouds, so high the city below looked like a broken circuit board veined with fire. His gloved fingers traced the glyphwork etched deep into the parapet's frostbitten stone. Old symbols—Vein-Warden script. Not ornamental. A living circuit. The lines pulsed faintly beneath his touch, threads of Akar running cold and thin.
A heartbeat.
Weak. Erratic.
Failing.
Below him, Embermark sprawled—a leviathan of stone and steam writhing mid-convulsion. Slag-furnaces vented fire through cracked chimneys. Gantries groaned under the weight of cargo pulled by chain-draggers. Zeppeliths—vast, blubber-bellied airships—floated between spires, their hulls stitched with patchwork glyphs, sagging under condensation and forgotten prayers.
The city sweated iron. Bled ambition. Coughed smog.
But its rhythm was wrong.
It wasn't the deep, reliable thrum of a living machine. It was the hollow wheeze of something breaking beneath its own weight. A ritual fraying mid-incantation.
Kander felt it in his bones—the city's pulse stretched thin, vibrating like a string tuned a breath too tight. Waiting to snap. The Veinlines beneath the streets—the same conduits of structured Akar that had bound the city together for centuries—flickered with discordant energy.
Even the glyphs here atop the Needle, once tuned to symphonic harmony, now coughed static.
Disorder.
His jaw clenched.
Disorder had a name.
Valerius.
The King's pet snake. A politician masquerading as an innovator. A man who had dared invite the Aeridorian Sky-Leviathan into Embermark's skies.
Kander had seen it—felt it—when the Leviathan descended. The air hadn't trembled. It had ceased. Silence so total it ruptured the mind. The passage of that ship was not flight. It was dominion.
Even now, a phantom ache crawled through his bones from the memory of its gravity well.
The Aeridorians. Glyphsmiths from beyond the Cloud Wastes. Architects of impossible geometries. They wore science like armor and heresy like perfume. To them, Embermark wasn't a city.
It was material.
They hadn't come for trade. Not for steel. Not for Embermark's factories or the crawling lattice of its power grid.
They had come for essence.
Not the willing. Not the licensed wielders. Not the Crown-sanctioned channels of Akar.
The untamed.
The raw.
Those like Hatim.
Kander's teeth ground together. His eyes narrowed against the slicing wind.
He'd seen the manifests—clay-sealed, ash-lined scrolls intercepted from Aeridorian couriers, buried beneath forged invoices and shipment ledgers. Their code wasn't meant for Embermark eyes.
But Kander was Vein-Warden.
His fingers had unraveled the false lines. Behind the pretty math were brutal truths. Lists. Measurements. Words that reduced people to units.
"Fifty-two viable. Fourteen pending maturation. Seven designated anomalous."
Ingredients.
Not citizens. Not sons or daughters. Not people.
Glyph imprints recorded. Experimental loops pending. Composite harmonics under review.
They weren't mining Akar.
They were mixing it.
Splicing the breath of foreign gods.
The memory soured his mouth. His own House—House Tann—had once walked the same precipice. A touch of Void here. A slice of Asha's pure lattice there. Curiosity became doctrine. Doctrine became heresy. Heresy became exile.
The Ascended had almost come then. Almost.
His thumb dragged over a particular glyph worn into the parapet—one older than the Spire itself. It pulsed. Weakly. A monitor-sigil. Its pattern was wrong—stretched thin, like a harpstring a tremor away from snapping.
Akar was not flowing right.
The city is suffocating itself.
His mouth pressed into a bitter line. He didn't curse Valerius—not entirely. Nor the Aeridorians. Not even the whispering cabals that had folded themselves into Crown Council chambers.
He cursed the silence.
The King's silence. The Crowns' blind obedience. The way men traded a future for the illusion of flight.
And then—
A tremor.
Not in the stone. Not in the air.
In the Veins.
Deep below. A shiver along the buried lines that most had forgotten. It wasn't part of the grid. Not a sanctioned pulse.
A signal.
Kander slowed his breath. Fingers brushed the glyph again, extending not power, but awareness. His Akar flowed into the listening lattice. He sank into the bones of the city, where structured currents danced like caged storms.
And there—
A flare.
Faint. Erratic. Beautiful.
Hatim.
The boy's signature wasn't clean. It wasn't orderly. It curled and bent in patterns that shouldn't exist—gold threaded with a fracture of violet. A pulse like a song half-remembered, but too real to dismiss.
Not broken.
Not corrupted.
Convergent.
Kander exhaled through gritted teeth. His knuckles whitened against the stone.
He'd seen this pattern before—once.
Buried deep in the forbidden scrolls of the Keepers' vault. In the fractured, terrified notes left by Virgil, the Keeper of Memory.
A soul that could bear both.
The lattice of Asha. And the wild fracture of the Void.
Not as prey to either. Not to extinguish one in favor of the other.
But to bind them in tension.
A third path. Neither Order nor Unbinding. A balance born of defiance.
This wasn't heresy. This was survival's last shape.
Granny Maldri had believed. That's why she'd walked willingly into the cursed veins of the Sinks. Others whispered it in backrooms, in graffiti scrawled where even the Ascended's eyes dared not look.
There must be a third way.
Hatim wasn't just a boy. He was a pivot. A risk. A keystone, or a fracture. The knife, or the hand that held it.
Kander's hand slipped into his cloak. Fingers found the lead-wrapped scroll. Heavy. Bound in copper wire and sealed in glyph-wax drawn from the old formula—the kind Crown agents no longer recognized.
The triple-knot of the Vein-Wardens spiraled along the seal, flaring faintly as his thumb pressed it open.
This wasn't for the Keepers. Keepers debated while fires spread.
This was for Torvin.
The last Warden who remembered that Akar was a conversation, not a command.
His thumb sank into the wax. Glyphs sparked, flared, then unraveled. The scroll dissolved into the stone beneath his feet, sinking into channels even the Crowns had forgotten how to see.
A message bound in urgency.
A warning. A plea. A plan.
If Hatim fell—if the Crowns got him, if the Aeridorians dissected him, if the Ascended judged his existence a sin—then the reckoning would not be surgical.
It would be erasure.
Kander planted both hands on the freezing stone, feeling the thrum of the city beneath.
"Let them call it treason," he murmured to the void, to the wind that scraped and shrieked and carried nothing but cold judgment. "Let them burn my name."
The storm bit down harder. His cloak whipped against the spire like a battered flag.
"But I will not let that boy fall alone."
Beneath his palms, the glyphs answered—dim but alive.
The city breathed.
Bled.
And trembled on the cusp of becoming something else.