The wind no longer whispered atop the Needle Spire.
It scraped.
It carved through stone and skin, a shriek of altitude and judgment. Kander didn't flinch. His silhouette stood jagged against the night sky—a ragged banner of old armor and older oaths, cloak torn by years and wind alike. He crouched on the ancient parapet, fingers brushing the frost-bitten lip of stone. The old glyphs beneath his touch pulsed faintly, threads of Akar flickering like a heartbeat under siege.
Far below, Embermark churned. A stone leviathan caught mid-spasm.
Slag furnaces roared. Chains dragged. Pipes exhaled steam into the heavens like dying gods coughing final breath. Zeppeliths drifted through the murk like bloated whales, hulls gleaming wet with condensation and forgotten prayers. The city bled heat and ambition. But something in its rhythm had soured.
The city had become a ritual gone wrong.
Kander felt it in his bones.
The ley-lines shivered beneath the surface, not shattered, not yet, but stretched—like nerves pulled tight, humming with too much silence. Even the glyphs around the Spire—once sacred, once symphonic—now whispered in discordant tones.
He knew the scent of betrayal. It burned different than fire.
And this betrayal had a name.
Valerius.
That viper had welcomed the Aeridorian Sky-Leviathan like an honored relic. Lady Caedra, with her singing glyphs and impossible flight, her wings of logic and arrogance, had not come in peace. Her kind never did. Their descent upon Embermark was not ceremony. It was dominion. A claim, wordless and vast.
Kander's jaw clenched. The Leviathan's passage still echoed in his bones. It hadn't roared. It had erased. All sound, all thought, all certainty.
He had seen their kind before—on old scrolls buried beneath Crown libraries. Scribes had drawn them with shaking hands.
Most Aeridorians didn't want tribute. They didn't want Embermark's steel or smoke.
They wanted its essence.
Not the willing. Not the trained.
The condemned. The gifted. The raw.
Kander's eyes narrowed.
He had intercepted the records himself—scrolls smuggled in clay vessels lined with ash-oil. Ciphers only the Vein-Wardens could crack. "Fifty-two units prepared." Ingredients. Not people. Not citizens. Glyph imprints bore Aeridorian curves. Experimental loops. Unnatural harmonics.
They weren't just mining Akar.
They were mixing it.
Combining the breath of foreign gods.
The memory stung. His own House had once done the same. A whisper of the Void here, a captured echo there. Curiosity had become heresy. Heresy had become exile.
The Ascended had almost come.
He dragged a thumb across the ancient glyph etched beneath the parapet, the one still humming. Old Vein-Warden code. A sigil meant to monitor city balance. Now its pulse was thin, stretched taut. Like a harpstring before it snaps.
He muttered a curse.
Not against Valerius.
But against the silence of the Crowns. The blindness of the King. The ease with which men traded their soul for borrowed wings.
And then, deep below, he felt it again.
A stirring.
He reached inward, breath slowing. Threads of his Akar dipped beneath the surface, brushing Embermark's buried veins like fingers along a sleeping beast.
There.
Faint.
But cutting.
A signal in the dark.
Hatim.
The boy was still out there—somewhere in the smoke-warped veins of The Verge, too wild to predict, too important to lose. And the boy's Akar was wrong.
Not broken.
Resonant.
It sang of rhythm before Embermark. Of tones not born of Asha, but something older, something... possible. He had felt this once before—decades ago, deep in the Keepers' vaults, where Virgil's fractured accounts had spoken of souls capable of holding both Order and the Void without breaking.
Wielders who could walk the knife-edge.
Not extinguish the Unbinding.
But bend it.
Kander's hand tightened on the ledge.
This was what Virgil had hinted at. What had been buried by the Ascended's fire and forgotten by the Crowns. That a soul could carry both Akar and the Unbinding. That it could create a new balance.
A third path.
This wasn't heresy. It was survival. And it wasn't just Kander who believed. In the Sinks, in the alleys of the broken, in the hushed sermons of glyph-burnt witches—the belief spread.
Granny Maldri had believed it. That's why she entered the tainted forest.
They didn't crave power.
They craved deliverance.
And Hatim... he might be the key. The gamble. The knife. Or the hand that held it.
Kander reached inside his cloak. A scroll emerged—heavy, lead-wrapped, marked in blood and flame. The triple glyph of the Wardens curled along the seal.
This wasn't for the Keepers. They would debate while the city burned.
This was for Torvin.
For the last Wardens who remembered that Akar was a conversation, not a command.
He pressed his thumb to the wax. Glyphs flared. The scroll melted into the stone, disappearing into veins few remembered.
Below, Embermark boiled.
If Hatim fell, the Ascended would come.
And they would not care who tried to help him. Or why.
They would erase it all.
Kander pressed both palms to the glyph-ridden stone.
"Let them call it treason," he whispered. "Let them burn my name."
The wind howled.
"But I will not let that boy fall alone."
The city pulsed under his touch.
Breathing.
Bleeding.
Becoming.