The next week was a foundation built on rust and resonance.
Elara's approach was the antithesis of the Convocation's. No meditation on pure flows, no sacred geometries. Their classroom was the pump-house and the surrounding ruins. Their tools were scrap metal, stones, and Elara's seemingly bottomless bag of Keeper gadgets.
"Forget 'channeling,'" Elara said, holding up a tarnished copper plate. "Think 'conversation.' This plate is old, tired. It wants to be verdigris. Your magic doesn't force it; you just… agree with it, and expedite the process. Now, make a specific spot rust. Just a dot."
Lyra focused, not on imposing her will, but on feeling the plate's history, its exposure, its latent desire to change. She let her affinity brush against that latent state. A pinprick of orange-brown appeared, precisely where she intended.
"Good! Now, stop it."
"Stop it?"
"Convince the rust thatthis spot is fine as it is. For now."
It was infinitely harder. Encouraging decay was instinctual. Halting it felt like trying to hold back the tide with her hands. But after an hour of sweat and strain, she managed to contain the rust dot, to make the plate believe that particular reaction was complete.
It was crude, exhausting control. But it was control.
They moved on to resonance. Elara had her place her hands on different materials—the ancient alloy of the arch, the newer iron of a tool, the living wood of a vine—and just listen. Lyra learned to distinguish the "songs": the deep, slow, mournful drone of the millennia-old ruin-metal; the bright, short-ringing tone of fresh iron; the complex, pulsing, living harmony of the grown materials.
"The God-Engine," Elara said one evening as they pored over her pilfered maps and fragmented scrolls, "is said to be made of a material that doesn't exist anymore. A living metal that sang with the world's own ley-lines. The Convocation's crystals just tap the lines. The God-Engine was said to harmonize with them. To be a conductor, not a siphon."
"And its Core?" Lyra asked, tracing a faded diagram of a vast, terraced city that bore no resemblance to Skyreach.
"The score to the song," Elara said, her eyes gleaming. "The source of the harmony. If the legends are true, it wasn't just a power source. It was a… a tuner. For the whole world."
A few days later, while practicing on a collapsed section of wall deep in the ruins beyond Fallow's Reach, Lyra found it.
She was trying to sense the structural integrity of a block of the strange black alloy. She pushed her awareness into it, listening for the fractures of age. But beneath the slow song of decay, she heard something else. A faint, buried echo. Not of the material's own decay, but of an energy that had once coursed through it. A ghost of a melody, profound and orderly and impossibly complex. It was gone in an instant, but it left her trembling.
"Elara! I felt something…"
Elara was at her side in moments. "Show me."
Lyra placed her hands on the cold metal, seeking the echo. It was like trying to recall a dream. But as she focused, channeling not force but acute, receptive attention, the ghost-melody flickered again. This time, a corresponding glyph, invisible to the naked eye, flickered to life on the metal's surface—a angular, geometric symbol that glowed the colour of tarnished bronze before fading.
"A tracer!" Elara breathed, excitement making her voice sharp. "A path! This ruin isn't just a dead place. It's a… a switchboard. And that symbol is one of the indicators. The God-Engine's infrastructure!"
She scrambled for her maps, cross-referencing the location. "The legends say the Core was taken deep, to the heart of the old world, for safekeeping when the Ascent began. A place called the Silent Foundry." Her finger landed on a point far to the east, deep within a region the maps marked only with warnings and ancient runes for 'Contained Cataclysm.'
The journey would be impossible. Through dense, mutated forests, across seismic rifts, into lands where the very laws of magic were said to be fractured.
Lyra looked from the now-inert metal block to the daunting map, then to her own hands. She felt the wild, untamed power within her, humming in tune with the rust and ruin around them. She was a flaw in the Convocation's perfect system. An anomaly.
Perhaps only an anomaly could navigate a broken world to find a lost song.
"We need supplies," Lyra said, her voice quieter, but steadier than it had been since her fall. "And a way to get there."
Elara grinned, rolling up the map. "First, we see what the good people of Fallow's Reach need fixed. A broken water purifier buys a lot of dried fungus and good will. Your particular skills, Songbird, might just be worth more down here than they ever were up there."
For the first time, Lyra Thorne didn't feel like a failed mage. She felt like a key, newly forged, about to be tested in the lock of a forgotten world. The journey to the Silent Foundry had begun.