The road to the Verge wasn't measured in miles or steps. It was measured in what it demanded from every fiber of you.
Kander's pace was relentless—not hurried, but inevitable. Each footfall was a decree, a sentence passed without mercy. Hatim stumbled to keep pace, his feet raw against ash-caked grit. His soles burned, split open on shards hidden beneath the dust. The ground seemed to gnaw at him. The air bit sharper now—thinner, like breathing through a forge's exhale. It scraped his throat raw, left soot crusted in the corners of his lips and clung to his tongue like a bitter ash.
Behind them, the last veins of the Sinks withered away—walls sagging like tired spines, roofs bowed beneath centuries of neglect. Smoke-cured rags hung limp from broken poles, fluttering like surrendered flags.
Beneath Hatim's feet, he felt it.
The Akar here was not the soft pulse of home—the hidden hollows where Granny Maldri's needle hummed, where old rivers whispered secrets. No. These veins trembled with something violent, hot, furious. Akar throbbed like blood desperate to burst its own arteries. The earth beneath Embermark wasn't just alive. It was raging.
Here, the city shed its skin. No gilding. No lies. Only bone.
The land twisted as they climbed. Flora warped by heat and memory clawed through cracks—black-veined shrubs, bark split open by ancient burns, leaves stiff as iron and darker than coal. Nothing grew straight. Everything hunched, bent, bowed beneath the weight of smoke and fire.
The wind shifted again. No longer ash alone. Now came the copper tang of molten brass, the sharp bite of flux, the sick-sweet reek of burned oils and marrow-greased gears. Every breath was a gulp of industry, of labor made flesh.
Then came the sound.
Not chaos. Not noise.
Rhythm.
Clangs, hisses, roars—a machine-god's heartbeat forged from hammerfalls and screaming steel. The shrill wail of heated iron folding against will. The groan of cranes hauling bones heavier than men.
Hatim flinched at the first near strike—his body still wired from ambushes in the Sinks—but this was not violence for its own sake. This was creation. War given form.
Then he saw it.
The Verge.
A city layered atop a wound.
Scaffolds clung to cliff faces like ribcages. Girders braced towers of smoke-streaked iron. Giant skeletal cranes swung molten spines from furnace to furnace. Lifts scuttled like brass insects up sheer walls, groaning under loads of ore, coal, and gods-knows-what else.
Akar streamed through transparent arteries—golden rivers flowing through pipes stretched between smokestacks and factories. Their glow barely pierced the fog. Not enough to light the Verge, only enough to remind it it was still alive.
Hatim's throat tightened—not from awe or fear, but from the oppressive weight of this place.
"This is the Verge," Kander said beside him, voice dragging like iron over stone. "Where Embermark stops pretending."
His gaze shifted to the transport gates—colossal constructs layered in reinforced glyphs, each a vault masquerading as a doorway. Beyond sprawled the trade yards—black plains filled with titanic freighters, metal-plated beasts stitched with sigils from far kingdoms.
Hatim watched as crates were hauled from their bellies—timbers smelling of salt and wind, ice shards glittering like broken stars, grains dusted with gold from distant fields, meats dried with spices that stung his nose in unfamiliar ways.
His stomach growled, loud and pointed.
Kander didn't look, but his voice sharpened. "The wealth flows upward. Always upward. To the Crowns in their walled gardens. They drink rainwater imported in glass. Breathe filtered air. Their children eat fruits that never tasted ash."
His hand gestured toward the forge—the monstrous heart of the Verge. A fortress of heat, walls black as obsidian, rippling under the strain of the fires within. Glyphs crawled its surface—harsh, angular, not drawn for beauty but for containment, control, for keeping a star caged behind stone.
A mural spanned the entrance arch: crowned figures harvesting Akar from kneeling workers, their sickle-tipped staves piercing nodes at the base of each victim's skull. The paint shimmered; the thorns on their diadems seemed to twitch, following Hatim's passage.
"That," Kander growled, "is the Ironweavers' forge. It feeds the military. The markets. The Crowns. The world. It feeds them with us."
Hatim stared. The forge was no mere building or machine. It was a mouth. And it was watching him.
No glyph would save him here. No clever line drawn into Akar's current. This was older magic. Cruder. Merciless.
Not manipulation. Not finesse.
Will.
His fingers curled instinctively—still bruised from days of training. His skin stung where it split. He breathed—and the air scraped going in.
"You need more than glyphs for the Trial of Resonance," Kander said, stepping toward a smaller workshop nestled like a scar between two guild halls. Its walls sweated steam; its roof spat sparks. Inside, shadows moved—apprentices bent at anvils, shoulders trembling, skin slick with toil.
"They don't care how pretty your lines are. They care about marrow. When the Akar gutters out, when glyphs fade, when your marks crack and your channels bleed—what's left?"
He turned, eyes like iron dragged from the earth.
"Flesh. Fire. Will. That's what's left. That's what they test."
A voice cut through the hammer-song.
"Kander."
Hatim turned.
A figure stood with sleeves rolled, a glowing iron rod clutched in grease-streaked hands. Muscles lean. Posture wired, coiled like a spring never fully unspooled. A glyph tattoo shimmered along his forearm—lines not of power, but of discipline. Of control.
Kael.
Kael rolled his sleeves higher, revealing a faded glyph—Sennari—identical to the one on Kander's shoulder. It pulsed faintly, as if in protest.
The name stung like a fresh bruise—Lugal's name for him. The apprentice to Master Bolun. The one who was supposed to teach Hatim—before everything shattered.
Kael's eyes scanned Hatim. Sharp. Clinical. Not cruel—but not impressed.
"Smaller than I expected. Thought you'd come for coin, not calluses."
Heat flushed Hatim's neck—sweat mixing with ash, streaking him gray. He felt like a ghost of someone who belonged somewhere else.
Kander's smirk barely ghosted his lips. "He'll grow. Teach him the hammer's song, Kael. And how not to shatter when the anvil talks back."
Kael's grin curled—knife-sharp. "Come on, then. Let's see if that famed Akar of yours can keep a hammer from breaking your spine. First the hammer. Then the song. If you're lucky—your bones will learn the rhythm."
Hatim stepped forward.
No words. No defiance.
Just jaw tight, hands clenched.
Let them hammer him.
He would not break.