The conduit rested on the forge altar like a slumbering god—cold, immense, waiting.
Twelve feet of auricite-cored steel, its skin veined in glyphs so dense they seemed less carved and more grown. The sigils breathed under the forge's amber glow, coiling in fractal geometries—impossible spirals that mirrored the latticework of Asha's script. Not mere decoration. Not mere function. These were instructions for reality itself. Written in the same language the gods had used to pin existence into shape.
And now it waited for him.
Hatim's hands hovered inches above the metal, trembling—not from fear, not yet—but from the electric hum bleeding off its surface. He could feel the breath of it. The hunger.
The forge behind him rumbled low, as though trying to offer comfort. Or a warning.
Even the fire pulled back, flames thinning to tall, silent tongues. Sparks flared, hung midair longer than they should, drifting like confused fireflies. Around him, the hammer-song of the other apprentices fell away, the usual clang and roar of the forge fading into a hush so profound that even the conduits beneath the floor seemed to listen.
Hatim swallowed. His lips tasted of iron and ash.
A single breath. In.
His palms lowered—pressing against the conduit's spine.
The metal drank his touch like a starving thing.
Akar wasn't drawn the way one might cup water from a stream. It wasn't a pulling. It was a conversation. An offering. A coaxing. His fingertips tingled, warmth threading up his wrists as he reached inward—down to where the forge-master Kael had taught him to listen. The hollow beneath the ribs. The reservoir. The Node.
Every Wielder carried one—an echo of Asha's breath left behind when the world first cooled from chaos. A spark. A seed. Fragile. Finite. But infinite, if handled with reverence.
And there it was. A warmth at the center of himself. Small. Familiar. A sun behind closed eyes.
Hatim inhaled deeper.
The warmth unfolded. Coiled light rose through his bones like golden silk. It slithered through muscle, nerve, scar. A thousand threads braiding together. His hands began to glow faintly—first amber, then deep gold. The glyphwork beneath his palms stirred.
Lines pulsed.
Circuits aligned.
The first hum shivered into being—subtle, precise. As though the conduit were exhaling for the first time in centuries.
His pulse matched it. Or maybe it was the other way around.
The current flowed. Not a flood, not a surge, but a steady climb. Each breath fed it, each beat locked the golden flow deeper into the conduit's hollow lattice.
This was Asha's order. The river of discipline. Akar behaving as the world intended. Structure. Harmony. Will made manifest through pattern.
The glyphs brightened—amber to gold, circuits shimmering like molten light stitched into steel.
Then—
A catch.
A tremor in the current. A split in the rhythm. Something cold unfurled, subtle as a blade's shadow.
Hatim's spine locked.
It wasn't from his Node. It didn't belong to Asha's river. It didn't flow. It... existed. A presence threaded into the hollow space beneath his ribs, as if it had always been there—waiting for him to notice.
Cold.
Not cruel. Not yet.
But vast.
Violet shimmered beneath the gold. A crack of refracted light—impossibly sharp. Thin as glass, but stretching endlessly inward.
He should have let go. Should have severed the link.
But it... offered.
Not as Asha's current did. Not as a servant.
As a mirror.
A question.
He gritted his teeth, breath faltering. His muscles burned. His reservoir screamed for release, but his will held. Hatim did what the glyphs had taught him. What Kael had taught him. What the forge had beaten into him over months of hammer and pain.
Give it shape.
He braided the violet current with gold—not to drown it, not to crush it, but to hold it steady. To recognize it. Order didn't reject the unknown.
It made space for it.
The currents locked. A perfect coil. An impossible union.
The conduit responded.
It ignited—not in fire, but in song.
A resonance rolled out—pure, crystalline. A chord so sharp it bent the very air, rattled the bones, cracked the silence in half. The floor trembled. The rafters vibrated. Molten light spun along every glyph, chasing itself in infinite loops.
Apprentices stumbled back, tools slipping from slack fingers. Their mouths hung open—not from fear, but from something closer to reverence. Kael stood frozen, fists clenched, the tendons in his neck taut as drawn wire. His lips moved, mouthing something. A prayer. Or a curse.
And Lady Aethel—
Her breath caught. Her gaze locked not on the conduit, but on Hatim.
Not with the cool detachment of Crown nobility.
With hunger.
The light dimmed—but did not vanish. The conduit pulsed. Alive. Whole. A self-contained harmony, humming in perfect balance. Its song still hung in the air, woven into the forge's stones, into the metal, into the very skin of those who had witnessed it.
Hatim collapsed to one knee.
His breath came ragged, each inhale tasting of soot and blood. His hands—gods, his hands—smoked at the fingertips. Blisters welled where the Akar had surged too sharp, too fast. But the line... held.
He looked up.
Aethel was already striding forward, whispersteel robes trailing behind her like liquid shadow. Her glyph-lined sleeves shimmered, rearranging themselves as she moved—living equations reshaping to match her intent.
"Such resonance..." she breathed. "Such... convergence."
Her voice wasn't reverent. It was greedy.
Her gaze flicked toward Kael. "The Crowns will require this boy. He is not merely gifted. He is..." Her eyes slid back to Hatim.
"Convergent," Aethel murmured. Her thumb brushed the thorned sigil on her collar—a smaller, sharper twin to the diadems in the mural. "The Synod warned of this. A will that bends Akar without permission."
Hatim's vision swam, but the truth came sharp and undeniable.
He wasn't just seen.
He was claimed.
Around him, the forge began to breathe again. Sparks fluttered. Hammers resumed—tentative, cautious. As though the world itself wasn't sure whether it had survived what had just happened.
But deeper.
Far deeper.
Beyond brick and steel. Beyond the lowest mines and the forgotten crypts buried beneath the city's first foundations...
The Veins stirred.
Not as tools.
Not as pathways.
As witnesses.
And something far below them—older than the Crowns, older than the scripts, older than the very idea of Order itself—
Began to sing back.