The conduit rested on the forge altar like a slumbering god—cold, immense, waiting.
Twelve feet of auricite-cored steel, its surface veined with glyphs so dense they seemed less carved and more grown. The sigils breathed beneath the forge's amber glow, coiling in fractal geometries—impossible spirals mirroring the latticework of Asha's ancient script. Not mere decoration. Not mere function. These were instructions for reality itself, written in the language the gods had used to shape existence.
And now it waited for him.
Hatim's hands hovered inches above the metal, trembling—not from fear, but from the electric hum bleeding off its surface. He could feel its breath. Its hunger.
Behind him, the forge rumbled low, as if offering comfort—or warning.
Even the fire pulled back, flames thinning to tall, silent tongues. Sparks flared, hanging midair longer than they should, drifting like confused fireflies. Around him, the hammer-song of apprentices faded into a hush so profound that even the conduits beneath the floor seemed to listen.
Hatim swallowed. His lips tasted of iron and ash.
A single breath. In.
His palms lowered—pressing against the conduit's spine.
The metal drank his touch like a starving thing.
Akar was not drawn like water cupped from a stream. It was a conversation. An offering. A coaxing. His fingertips tingled, warmth threading up his wrists as he reached inward—to the hollow beneath his ribs, the reservoir, the Node.
Every Wielder carried one—an echo of Asha's breath left behind when the world first cooled from chaos. A spark. A seed. Fragile. Finite. But infinite, if handled with reverence.
There it was. A warmth at his center. Small. Familiar. A sun behind closed eyes.
Hatim inhaled deeper.
The warmth unfolded. Coiled light rose through his bones like golden silk. It slithered through muscle, nerve, scar—a thousand threads braiding together. His hands began to glow faintly—first amber, then deep gold. The glyphwork beneath his palms stirred.
Lines pulsed.
Circuits aligned.
A subtle hum shivered into being—subtle, precise. As though the conduit exhaled for the first time in centuries.
His pulse matched it. Or maybe it was the other way around.
The current flowed. Not a flood, not a surge, but a steady climb. Each breath fed it, each beat locked the golden flow deeper into the conduit's hollow lattice.
This was Asha's order. The river of discipline. Akar behaving as the world intended. Structure. Harmony. Will made manifest through pattern.
The glyphs brightened—amber to gold, circuits shimmering like molten light stitched into steel.
Then—
A catch.
A tremor in the current. A split in the rhythm. Something cold unfurled, subtle as a blade's shadow.
Hatim's spine locked.
It wasn't from his Node. It didn't belong to Asha's river. It didn't flow. It existed. A presence threaded into the hollow space beneath his ribs, as if it had always been there—waiting for him to notice.
Cold.
Not cruel. Not yet.
But vast.
Violet shimmered beneath the gold. A crack of refracted light—impossibly sharp. Thin as glass, yet stretching endlessly inward.
He should have let go. Severed the link.
But it offered.
Not as Asha's current did. Not as a servant.
As a mirror.
A question.
He gritted his teeth, breath faltering. Muscles burned. His reservoir screamed for release, but his will held. Hatim did what the glyphs taught him. What Kael hammered into him through months of pain.
Give it shape.
He braided the violet current with gold—not to drown it, not to crush it, but to hold it steady. To recognize it. Order didn't reject the unknown.
It made space for it.
The currents locked. A perfect coil. An impossible union.
The conduit responded.
It ignited—not in fire, but in song.
A resonance rolled out—pure, crystalline. A chord so sharp it bent the very air, rattled bones, cracked silence in half. The floor trembled. Rafters vibrated. Molten light spun along every glyph, chasing itself in infinite loops.
Apprentices stumbled back, tools slipping from slack fingers. Mouths hung open—not from fear, but reverence. Kael stood frozen, fists clenched, tendons taut as drawn wire. Lips moved—mouthing a prayer or curse.
Lady Aethel—
Her breath caught. Her gaze locked not on the conduit, but on Hatim.
Not with Crown nobility's cool detachment.
With hunger.
The light dimmed—but did not vanish. The conduit pulsed. Alive. Whole. A self-contained harmony humming in perfect balance. Its song wove into forge stones, metal, and the skin of those who witnessed it.
Hatim collapsed to one knee.
Breath ragged, each inhale tasting soot and blood. His hands—gods, his hands—smoked at fingertips. Blisters welled where Akar surged too sharp, too fast. But the line... held.
He looked up.
Aethel strode forward, whispersteel robes trailing like liquid shadow. Glyph-lined sleeves shimmered, rearranging as she moved—living equations reshaping to match intent.
"Such resonance..." she breathed. "Such... convergence."
Her voice wasn't reverent. It was greedy.
Her gaze flicked to Kael. "The Crowns will require this boy. He is not merely gifted. He is..." Her eyes slid back to Hatim.
"Convergent," Aethel murmured. Her thumb brushed the thorned sigil on her collar—a smaller, sharper twin to diadems in the mural. "The Synod warned of this. A will that bends Akar without permission."
Hatim's vision swam, but truth came sharp and undeniable.
He wasn't just seen.
He was claimed.
Around him, the forge breathed again. Sparks fluttered. Hammers resumed—tentative, cautious. As though the world itself wasn't sure it had survived what had just happened.
But deeper.
Far deeper.
Beyond brick and steel. Beyond lowest mines and forgotten crypts beneath the city's first foundations...
The Veins stirred.
Not as tools.
Not as pathways.
As witnesses.
And something far below—older than the Crowns, older than scripts, older than Order itself—
Began to sing back.