The forge trembled beneath Hatim's knees. Not from quake nor tool—but from resonance. A resonance not meant for mortal hands.
The conduit still thrummed behind him, pulsing like a living artery of metal and light. Gold laced with violet. Harmony where there should be fracture. Its song was not just heard—it was felt. A pressure beneath the skin, in the teeth, deep in the marrow. A song woven into the bones of Embermark itself.
But to Hatim... the sound was receding. Drifting like smoke, distant and unreal.
Lady Aethel's voice cut the air like a drawn wire.
"Required."
The word tasted of iron and ash. Not a request. Not even a command. A verdict. A claim.
His limbs trembled. Vision blurred. The forge—once the center of his universe, its glow a hearth of toil and meaning—warped at the edges. Brick and steel flexed like paper beneath water. Glyph-lit rafters bent inward, skewing angles that had no place in sane geometry.
The stench of molten copper curled sharp in his nostrils, but beneath it... something else. Something rotten. A scent like soured memory. Like tombs left unsealed.
Hatim pressed a hand to the floor. The stone was warm—too warm—and beneath it, he could feel them. The Veins. Thick conduits of living Akar, threading through the city's underbelly like the sinews of a great beast. Normally, their hum was background, a subtle comfort to those who could sense them.
Now? They felt... awake. Listening. Judging.
A pulse. A rhythm not of blood, but of something older. Something watching back.
His heart kicked against his ribs, frantic, unmoored.
Not now. No. No—
Reality ruptured.
A soundless scream—someone else's—knifed through his skull. His own lungs convulsed, trying to pull breath where none remained. The forge collapsed into shadow, sucked away like embers into a void.
Black. Not the simple dark of night. A void that hated the concept of light. A hollowness that gnawed at the edges of reality, stripping it down to bone and idea.
Chains. He could hear them. Not jingling—but dragging. Groaning. Iron links, heavy as guilt, grinding against something raw. Flesh? Stone? He couldn't tell. Faces loomed—no, grinned—from the carved walls of something vast and cruel. Their mouths split wide, but no sound came. Just the shape of agony rehearsed a thousand times.
Not again. Not again!
His voice didn't leave his lips, but it trembled inside his ribs, a silent plea.
And then—
A crown.
Forged not of gold alone but of twisted, razor thorns. Its barbs glistened with sap-black ichor. Symbols—fractured, half-forgotten—writhed along its circumference. Some were glyphs he recognized from the Akar circuits; others... others were wrong. Older. Not built for meaning, but for binding.
It hovered.
It descended.
He felt it—not as weight, but as definition. As if every fracture in his soul was being sutured into place, whether it fit or not. It pressed memories into him that were never his—betrayal, grief, the collapse of things too ancient to name. The thorns bit deep, threading agony into every nerve. It wasn't pain like flame. It was pain like understanding.
A sob ripped free. He wasn't sure it was even his own.
"No—no—no—"
But the crown did not care.
A pulse. A tremor. The chains groaned louder, or perhaps the Veins themselves did.
And then—
Air. Heat. Hammered stone. A burst of coppery light.
The forge. He was back.
But not the same.
His hands—trembling, blistered—pressed against the soot-black floor. He stared at them. Skin. Bone. But wrong. His fingers felt too long. His skin too thin. As if reality hadn't quite put him back together right.
The golden glow in his veins was fading, but under it, that violet thread still flickered. Still coiled in his nerves like a sleeping serpent.
His gaze dragged upward. Lady Aethel stood as she had before. Immaculate. Poised. Her face wore the same careful mask of interest. As if none of what had just split his reality had touched her.
Or worse—she'd expected it.
Kael still hadn't moved, his face slack with something halfway between awe and dread. His soot-smeared hands clenched at his sides, but his eyes... his eyes refused to meet Hatim's.
The weight of what he'd done pressed in. Not just the conduit's impossible song. Not just the energy he'd forced to obey. But what it had opened. What it had revealed.
And deep beneath it—beneath the stone of the forge, beneath the arteries of the Veins—something else stirred.
A call.
A response.
A knowing.
Hatim shuddered. The Veins weren't passive conduits of energy. Not entirely. Not always. They remembered. They knew. His resonance had been heard.
And now something—something far below, far older—was singing back.
His breath hitched. He could feel it thrumming under the soles of his feet. A resonance, subtle, like a chime buried miles below, yet somehow close as his own pulse.
Not hostile. Not yet.
But awake.
He dragged his gaze back to Lady Aethel. Her eyes glittered. Not with wonder. Not with fear.
With calculation.
She didn't want him for his craftsmanship. Not truly. The forge was a pretense. She wanted what the Crowns always wanted.
Control. Ownership. Leverage.
Her gaze was already turning him into a transaction. Into a theory. Into a weapon.
And beneath it all, the conduit still sang.
A perfect harmony of gold veined with violet. A harmony that should not exist.
A harmony that would change everything.
Hatim wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. It came away streaked with soot and—he blinked—something darker. Not blood. Not quite.
His body shook. His Akar was drained, frayed at the edges, hollowed by something deeper than exhaustion.
Yet the Veins still pulsed beneath him.
He realized, in that moment, with a kind of terrifying clarity—
This wasn't over.
This was the beginning.