The wind howled—not like any wind Lyra had ever known. It wasn't the ragged breath of the Sinks, nor the soot-choked gusts that rattled chimney bones. This wind keened like something alive, threading through the bars of her cradle with a voice halfway between grief and hunger. A sound like ghosts chewing on iron.
Lyra curled tighter, arms locked around her knees, spine pressed against the aeroweave slats. The cradle groaned beneath her weight—a mesh of glyph-threaded bonewood and chitin that flexed like sinew, not timber. Every surge of wind made it shudder. Made her shudder.
Beneath, the world fell away in a smear of impossible color. Rivers unspooled like molten veins. Mountains wore crowns of perpetual storm. Embermark was already fading behind them—a bruise of red and black on the horizon, crumbling into distance as the Sky-Leviathan's prow tilted eastward.
She'd never been this far. Not even atop the crooked smokestacks where she and Hatim had once stood, daring gravity to notice. Out here, the air was thinner, meaner. Every breath felt like swallowing needles wrapped in ice. There was no scent of coal, no sour tang of city-rot. Only ozone, rain-metal, and something stranger. Something like static wrapped in silk.
The Leviathan groaned—an ancient, vertebral sound. Its belly was layered in interlocking chitin plates that flexed like tectonic ribs, creaking as though the sky itself strained beneath its weight. Veins of glyph-light pulsed along the hull, writhing in patterns that never resolved. Language pretending to be anatomy.
Lyra's stomach knotted. Not with hunger, not entirely. With vertigo. With dread.
Around her, dozens of cradles swayed—each suspended from the Leviathan's underbelly by glyph-threaded sinews. Children. Adults. Strangers. Refugees, prisoners… or worse. Some cried. Some whispered. Others sat hollow-eyed, staring at nothing. A boy—maybe seven—clutched a shattered cogwheel, thumb rubbing the rusted edge raw as if it were some sacred talisman. No one met her gaze. Not truly.
The Aeridorian Wielders walked between them.
Not soldiers. Not exactly. Not human. Their bodies were wrapped in fabrics that shimmered between opacity and transparency—woven from strands of glyph and memory. Skin inked with living sigils. Lines that didn't stay still. Some glyphs pulsed like heartbeats. Others crawled beneath skin like parasites made of meaning.
One passed close. His gaze snagged on her wrists. Glyphs along his forearms twitched, like an animal scenting prey. His eyes—flat, depthless, polished obsidian—held no curiosity. Only a mechanical hunger.
His lips tugged—not into a smile. Into... assessment.
Then he moved on.
A groan rumbled through the Leviathan's belly. With a hiss like pressurized bone, the creature's undercarriage split open—revealing a spiral ramp of spinning air and woven light. One by one, the cradles lurched, reeled upward, and were swallowed into the ship's gullet.
When hers jerked skyward, Lyra nearly screamed. The world dropped away. Cities collapsed into pinpricks. Rivers became thread. Forests became moss.
And then—
The Leviathan's innards.
It wasn't a ship. Not entirely. Not like ships should be. The walls were membrane, stretched between latticeworks of breathing bone and chitin. Glyph-circuits pulsed beneath translucent skin. Veins. Arteries. The floor vibrated with a thrum that wasn't machinery.
It was pulse.
A heartbeat.
Warm. Damp. Smelling of ozone, iron, and something floral—decay sweetened to the edge of nausea.
The chamber they were funneled into was circular—ribbed and breathing. The ceiling vanished into clouds of shadow that writhed, shifting between fractal geometry and the suggestion of infinite height.
Lyra pressed herself against the wall. Not stone. Not metal. Flesh pretending to be both. Beneath her palms, the glyphs twitched. Patterns nested within patterns. She didn't understand them, but they recognized her.
A flicker. A pulse.
Resonant anomaly detected.
The wall shivered as if tasting her. She snatched her hand back, breath hitching.
Days lost shape. Hours braided into hours. The Leviathan did not land.
It traversed mountain spines that scraped clouds to shreds. Glided over jungles whose canopies breathed, expanding and contracting as though the entire forest was a lung. Beneath were cities built inside the hollowed ribs of titanic beasts. Floating strongholds drifting on monsoon winds. Rivers of molten glass. Archipelagos that rearranged themselves like living puzzles.
And stranger things.
Fields of bone, where towers rose like femurs from the earth. Serpents the size of mountains coiling through violet lightning storms. Ruins—half-swallowed by deserts—where entire civilizations had been erased, leaving only statues of beings with no mouths, no eyes.
The world was bigger than Embermark had ever let her believe. Vast. Terrible. Beautiful in the way teeth are beautiful to something about to be eaten.
Food came when it came. No pattern. No kindness. Crystalline fruit that fizzed and burned the tongue. Bread like compressed lightning. Water that tasted of static and metal.
The Wielders spoke rarely. Their voices braided vowels and consonants in ways that bent the air. Some sounds throbbed in the bones, others fluttered against the skin like phantom fingers.
At night, the Leviathan dimmed. The glyphs sank into a low throb, like embers buried under skin. Lyra huddled against the warm seam in the floor. Watched stars through the translucent membrane.
Was Hatim staring at the same stars?
Was he even looking at the sky?
Or was he...
She squeezed her eyes shut. Refused to follow the thought to its end.
Then—
A voice. Smooth. Layered. Not heard but felt. Words that warped the shape of air itself.
At the chamber's center, a figure emerged. Robes woven from captured sunrise and deep-ocean shadow. Her hands moved—sigils unraveling into glyph-constellations that floated, spun, collapsed.
"You were taken for purpose," the voice vibrated. "Not all of you will survive it. Fewer still will understand it."
The glyphs around the figure flared—burned themselves into the membrane of Lyra's vision, like afterimages she'd never blink away.
Her fingertips dug into the weave of her sleeve. A small act. A tether.
She pressed her palm to the floor again—despite herself. Despite the fear.
The heartbeat of the ship answered.
Slow. Deep. Inevitable.
Embermark was gone. A smear in memory. Already decaying.
And this… this was the shape of the world beyond the walls.