The corridor breathed.
Not metaphor. Not imagination. Every ribbed arch and veined membrane flexed—an inhale, an exhale—woven into the living bones of the Leviathan. Ligaments stretched beneath semi-translucent walls, tension rippling like something half-muscle, half-machine. The floor thrummed under her bare feet in time with a heartbeat she could never find.
Lyra walked. Or maybe she was led. Maybe she was simply carried by inevitability.
Ahead, the Aeridorian Wielder moved with soundless precision—tall, draped in robes of living glyphlight. The symbols inked across his skin and fabric bent the rules of light itself—colors that splintered into spectra she had no words for. Some lines writhed like serpents; others folded into fractals that tried to escape her gaze the moment she looked too long.
The air grew thicker as they descended. Less air and more... charge. Saturated with ozone and something sharper—like iron, like stone struck until it sparked, like the taste of storm before it breaks.
The walls flickered. Not with light. Not merely decoration. They were... conscious.
Glyph-chains bloomed, then collapsed. Circles nested within triangles, triangles birthed lines that stretched into helices—then folded again. Each shift felt like it was parsing her presence: measuring her, comparing her to some vast, unknowable algorithm of meaning.
Maps. Warnings. Language. Or perhaps... judgment.
A slit in the wall peeled open—not a door, but flesh unfolding. The ship inhaling her presence.
Beyond—
A chamber. No—a cathedral.
Vast enough to swallow the entire Sinks twice over and still leave space for the sky to breathe. The ceiling was made of translucent membranes strung between curved bone, and through it she saw a night sky that did not belong to her world.
Constellations knotted into impossible geometries. Stars burned cold and sharp, clustered in patterns forbidden to the skies of Embermark.
At the chamber's center spiraled a column of liquid light—turning, folding, unwinding like the spine of some divine thing. It was bound within ribs of material neither metal nor bone, but something between—living, breathing circuitry.
Machines floated—disk-shaped constructs trailing glyph-threaded tendrils like jellyfish in an invisible current. Each one pulsed, scanning lines of captives ahead. Beams of structured light passed over skin, bones, thoughts.
Wielders drifted among them—shadows folded in living glyphs, voices murmuring consonants that made the air vibrate at the base of her skull.
"Zairan-thil… Yelthran…" One voice unwound itself into the space around her. Words that weren't heard but felt—etched into the cartilage behind her ears.
A hand pressed against her shoulder. Not rough. Not cruel. But final.
The platform beneath her feet shivered awake. Sigils bloomed, writhing from the edges inward, wrapping her in rings of molten light.
A whisper climbed her legs—not touch but presence. Sight trembled. The world tilted.
A pressure behind her eyes, like someone trying to fold her open from the inside out.
Memory is not safe here.
She gasped as images flickered, unbidden:
—The rooftop over the Sinks, Hatim laughing as smoke tangled their hair.
—Granny's crooked fingers weaving threads by candlelight, whisper-singing lullabies only the dark remembered.
—The crack in the ceiling above her bed, shaped like a bird's broken wing.
Her hands flew to her sleeve, fingers locking on the frayed thread—the last tether.
The glyphs stumbled.
A figure approached. Taller. Stranger. No robe.
His body was pure ink. No face—only a lattice of glyph-lines, folding and unfolding across skin that wasn't skin. His eyes were eclipses. Black rings swallowing whatever light dared enter.
His hand extended, palm out.
A glyph bloomed in midair—fractal, sharp, recursive. A flower made of blades.
Golden lines unspooled from it—threads that spun around her wrists, her throat, her ankles. Not ropes. Not chains. Measurements. A geometry of being.
Her heartbeat buckled. The glyphs slid through her—not across flesh, but through memory itself.
Who are you?
What are you?
The tether in her fingers sparked against it. An act so small. So stupid. So defiant.
The Wielder's head tilted. Glyphs along his arms convulsed. A sound like static shivering against bone escaped him—confusion? Annoyance? Curiosity?
One inked hand reached—not toward her, but toward the thread itself. Stopped just shy of touching it.
A breath.
A pause inside the machinery of the world.
Then—release.
The glyph collapsed into dust-light. Scattered upward.
The weight fell off. Her knees hit the platform.
The sigils beneath her dimmed.
Another hand—another push. Gentle, but not optional.
A corridor unfolded. Narrow. Ribbed in membranes that pulsed faintly, lined with cells like honeycomb—translucent walls through which blurred shapes sat or lay. Some curled tight. Others stared back with hollow, resigned eyes.
None spoke. None needed to.
The Aeridorian Wielder pointed. In.
Lyra stepped. The membrane sealed behind her with a wet sigh.
This cell was warmer. Quieter. The hum of glyphlight was distant now—a heartbeat muffled by walls of flesh and bone.
She pressed her palm to the wall. Beneath the softness, the vibration was... different. Slower. Deeper.
A signal. A pulse meant for something other than her ears.
She looked up.
Past the translucent ceiling. Past the stitched skin of the Leviathan.
And saw it.
A city.
Floating. Suspended in sky like a mountain ripped from the earth and turned upside-down.
Towers of bone-white stone laced with veins of lightning. Bridges of pure energy arched between spires. Docks hung like skeletal hands reaching for ships shaped like manta rays, whales, serpents.
Beyond it—other floating continents. Islands of impossible geometry, tethered by chains of lightning. Some drifted in clusters. Some alone. Each carried forests, mountains, rivers—civilizations in the clouds.
This wasn't Embermark.
This wasn't anything Embermark had ever prepared her for.
Her fingers tightened around the thread on her sleeve. The tether. The memory. The defiance.
Somewhere under this broken, impossible sky...
Hatim was still breathing.
He had to be.