The forge's warmth still clung to Hatim's skin, seared into his bones like the echo of something far larger than fire. The conduit's hum still pulsed under his ribs—a phantom heartbeat, out of rhythm with the world.
The courtyard stood silent. The usual clang of hammers had fallen away. Even the Veins beneath the cobblestones seemed to hold their breath, their glow dimmed to thin threads of violet and gold.
Lady Aethel stepped forward, trailing shadowthread and memory-silk, her robe woven with glyphs that refused to settle. They rotated—folding, fracturing, reknitting—each moment a new equation, a new intent.
Her voice cut the air like silk drawn across steel.
"You are required."
Not a request. Not a command. A claim. As inevitable as gravity.
The Whispercloaks moved. Six of them. Their mirrored masks reflected no faces, only warped fragments of the world—Hatim's trembling hands, the fading glow of the conduit, his desperate breath—all bent, broken, reduced to symbols.
They advanced not with speed, but certainty. The kind of certainty that comes from laws written into the marrow of reality.
Then—
"Stand. Down."
The words cracked like lightning splitting stone.
Kander.
His figure strode through the far archway, breath ragged, boots dragging dust behind him. The sigils of a Warden still burned faintly on his shoulder—half-erased, but not erased enough. Not yet.
He planted himself between Hatim and the Cloaks, cloak snapping like a battered banner in the rising tension.
"The boy is under my charge," he growled. "You will not take him."
Aethel's gaze didn't falter. Her smile was a scalpel. "The exile returns. Always late. Always misplaced. You stand in the domain of House Valerian, Kander. You have no standing here."
The Veins underfoot pulsed—slow, warning.
The Whispercloaks did not wait.
A ripple shimmered across their ranks. Glyph lines unfolded from their palms—not drawn, not summoned, but extracted from the very air, the very lattice of the world. Reality itself fractured in geometries that refused to obey mortal vision. Spirals that bent inward until they disappeared. Edges that shouldn't exist, yet did.
"Vel'Askar," one murmured. Not heard. Felt. A subtraction of sound.
The air collapsed.
Glyph-lines spiraled into lattices under Kander's boots—folded triangles within mirrored hexagons, nested again and again. He staggered as if the ground itself rebelled against his existence.
A field snapped into place.
Kander's fists lashed out—not at the Cloak, but at the glyphwork forming at his feet.
Too late.
The moment his punch connected, the air around the glyph folded, swallowing the impact, transforming force into absence. His punch hit...nothing. Not a deflection. Not resistance. Just—not.
The Whispercloak's palm flicked sideways.
A lattice exploded outward like a net woven from glass threads and hollow light. Kander dove, rolling, glyph-knives spinning from his fingers—sigils of Dispel, of Fracture, of Null.
The Cloaks answered with a glyph so refined it didn't shimmer—it bent light away. A prism of absence.
His null-sigils collapsed mid-formation, their symbols breaking into gibberish as they touched the field.
Kander roared. His hands slammed into the ground—glyphwork scorched into the stone.
"Sen'Var—"
A crack. Not of stone. Not of bone.
Of concept.
A Whispercloak twisted a mirrored wrist, and with it, Kander's glyph simply...unwound. Symbols stretched like threads pulled from fraying cloth. His knees buckled as the connection to the Veins beneath him vanished—not severed, but as though it had never been there.
A glyph-string whipped from the Cloak's fingertips—barbs of folded script—slashing Kander across the chest. It didn't cut flesh. It cut alignment. His Node spasmed, his breathing seized, and a high-pitched, bone-deep hum invaded his skull.
His fist rose again.
A mirrored mask tilted.
A second glyph snapped into being—lines of spiraling tetrahedrons stitched into an inverted sigil of closure.
"Locus Sever."
A shockwave of null-force struck him center mass. His body flung backward—not through the air, but through space itself—folded out of the line of conflict, reality deforming around him like warped glass.
Kander hit the far wall. Cratered. Slumped.
Not unconscious.
But unmade. Just enough.
Aethel turned her gaze back to Hatim, her voice silk-wrapped iron.
"No more interruptions."
The Whispercloaks shifted—glyphs cascading into their hands like liquid metal shaped into meaning. Their presence fractured the courtyard geometry. Cobblestones stretched where they should be flat. Angles refused to add up.
Hatim's breath turned raw. His Node spasmed. That violet thread inside him flared, writhing—not in defiance, but in warning.
His fingers trembled. He dragged the shape of a glyph midair—spiral left, arc right. Veshan. A shield against force.
The glyph ignited.
A Whispercloak's palm sliced a line in the air—an inverted arc. The sigil wasn't defense. It wasn't attack.
It was Redaction.
Hatim's shield didn't break.
It ceased to have ever been.
The glyph faded mid-formation—its own light swallowed by the Cloak's suppression field. Lines fractured into meaningless scatter.
The Cloaks stepped forward.
Hatim's body rebelled. His Node thrashed. He forced Akar upward—a coil of gold laced with that stubborn, chaotic violet.
He carved a desperate sigil:
Sen'nari.
A glyph to unravel momentum. Force into water.
It formed—halfway.
A mirrored mask tilted.
"Mirror Breach."
His glyph reversed.
Momentum doubled back. His own unraveling force snapped his knees sideways, sent him sprawling, coughing blood.
A second Cloak stepped in. Glyph-threads snapped outward—four lines of burning white geometry lashing around his wrists and ankles. They lifted him, body half-suspended, cruciform.
Hatim screamed. His veins glowed too bright—Akar surging where it shouldn't, not refined, not stable.
The Cloak's third palm turned toward his ribs.
A glyph stitched into place—an ouroboros spiral folded around an eye-shaped core.
"Null Spiral."
The hum of the Veins—gone.
The pulse of Akar—gone.
The world dimmed to nothing but breath. Bone. Skin. No power. No resonance. No thread.
Hatim sagged.
Aethel approached. Her voice was a scalpel run gently along skin.
"Convergent, indeed. Far too dangerous to be left feral."
Her hand hovered, not touching him, but the glyph floating between her fingertips tightened like a noose.
"Bind him. Fully. The Crowns will decide his use… or disposal."
The Whispercloaks closed the lattice.
Hatim's last sight before the black mesh of null-space closed over him was Kander's shattered frame, slumped against the wall—trying. Failing.
But his eyes were open.
Still watching.
Still burning.