Embermark was never just stone and steam.
It lived.
Beneath the cathedral spires of blackened brass, under the endless coils of pipework and soot-choked alleys, the city breathed through a circulatory lattice older than empire—older than memory. The Veins.
Invisible to the unmarked, incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Akar's lifeblood flowed through them—structured, coiled, bound into threads that pulsed beneath forge, temple, and throne. Not mere power. Not magic.
Memory, caged in motion.
And tonight… the Veins did not breathe.
They screamed.
High above the Verge, atop a ruin of rusted skyhooks and wind-lashed gargoyles forgotten by every map that still dared name the city, Kander stood sentinel. A silhouette scrawled against the storm-lit sky—ragged cloak thrashing, armor dulled to bare tendon over bone.
He was still. A fracture in the wind.
His thumb traced the cracked sigil embedded in the parapet's edge—an ancient Warden's glyph, shaped not as a symbol, but as a listening wound carved deep into the marrow of the city. Lines worn by centuries of weather and whispers.
The glyph thrummed beneath his touch.
Not the quiet pulse of Embermark's usual decay. Not the sluggish hymn of a metropolis growing fat on its own exhaust.
This was new.
A resonance raw as molten bells tolling through the bones of the world. It surged up through conduit, stone, and vein alike. A chime so pure it scraped against his ribs, vibrating marrow and memory in equal measure.
It came from the Verge. No doubt. But deeper still—from within the Ironweavers' forge.
Kander inhaled. The air here was always stained with iron, altitude, and bitter ozone. But now? Now it carried something else. The taste of upheaval. The scent of something long forbidden dragging itself back into the shape of the world.
Instinct took over. His inner channels opened like shutters beneath a storm. The hollow beneath his sternum—where the Warden's glyph was etched in ink and scar—flared softly, absorbing the signal.
Akar surged—not like fuel. Never like fuel.
Like a conversation.
Not dominated. Reflected.
And what now rose through the veins of the city was no ordinary voice.
It was duality made flesh.
Two patterns. Opposed. Entangled.
The familiar warmth of Asha's lattice—structured, gold, human—twined impossibly with something older. Sharper. Violet, fractal, precise. A frequency that obeyed no King, no Crown, no Law of Balance.
Not Unbinding. Not exactly.
Not Order.
Convergence.
Kander staggered back half a step, lips parting.
"...Hatim."
The name wasn't a thought. It was a truth, breathed into the wind like a ward against the dark.
His gaze swept the skyline. The old ley-towers jittered in their own harmonics, sending sparks of failed stabilizers into the sky. The domes of the Crown's Spire flickered—a heartbeat behind the pulse. Warden-glyphs citywide would be flaring. Magisters would already be drawing augury maps. The Aeridorians would scent the fracture like blood in the water. Even the gutter-witches and bone-scribes would feel it.
Every predator was awake now.
Kander's jaw tensed. He pictured Lady Aethel's face—sharp as folded steel, eyes like a ledger balanced against ruin. She would not call it an anomaly.
She would call it an asset.
A lever.
Leverage.
A weapon in the making.
His hand dropped to the lead-wrapped scroll at his hip, thumb brushing the seal—a spiral of triple-bound glyphs looped in Vein-Warden script. The copper wire binding it twitched against his skin, sensing his intent.
No time for subtlety.
His thumb pressed down.
The scroll pulsed, Akar lines flooding into the tethered channels embedded in the architecture beneath his boots. The message encoded itself in harmonics, weaving through the old transmission lattice—hidden veins that the Crowns had forgotten, that only the exiled still remembered how to touch.
Torvin will hear this.
The boy was no longer just a curiosity. No longer a stray line in a broken ledger.
He was the fulcrum.
The stair coiled down behind Kander like a serpent made of shattered rib and iron. He pivoted, boots scraping rust from the edge. His descent was fast, quiet, surgical. Each step reverberated—echoes tangled in the quiet screaming of the Veins.
Halfway down—he stopped.
Not from fear.
Presence.
It lived here now. Not seen. Not fully formed. But awake. Watching. Not hostile… not yet. Something vast. Patient. Woven into the marrow of the city itself. Something that remembered the way the world used to be.
"You felt it," Kander whispered. Not to the wind. Not to the dark. But to it.
Silence answered.
But silence was never empty.
He pressed on. Faster.
The lower gantries trembled beneath his boots. Sparks flared in the mist. The conduits along the industrial walls hissed, glyphs flickering out of sync like nerves misfiring in a wounded beast.
Embermark was waking up.
Not like a machine. Not like a city.
Like a god.
A thing long buried under steel and ritual, pulled now—aching, screaming—back toward something it hadn't tasted in a thousand years. A convergence written in flesh and fracture.
Kander vaulted the last rung of rusted scaffold, boots slamming into a gantry strut. His cloak caught the wind, snapping like a broken standard.
Below, the city yawned open—its veins lit in pulses, its towers shedding their shape to become instruments of listening.
Every eye was turning. Every mouth was drawing breath for a command.
If Kander didn't reach Hatim first—
The boy would be seized. Skinned down to his pattern. Turned into a weapon. Or a warning.
By those too blind to see that what the Crowns called corruption was in fact the oldest truth:
Balance wasn't stasis.
It was tension.
And it was salvation.
He leapt.
Down through the burning spine of Embermark—not with grace.
But with purpose.