The silence that followed the burial of the city was not the silence of peace; it was the silence of a held breath. I spent the first few days in the shadow of the Great Wall's ruins, living off the meager supplies I scavenged from the abandoned Inquisitor camps. My body felt heavy, ungraceful. Without the "Wasting" driving me or the "Sovereign" light shielding me, I was just a girl with a healing stab wound and a hollow heart.
I kept the silver vial in my palm, even while I slept. It was my only tether to the boy who had become a seal.
On the fourth morning, I noticed the change. I was sitting near a pile of rubble when I saw a sprig of green pushing through the salt-crusted earth. It shouldn't have been possible. The salt flats were toxic, and with the magic gone, the "Ether-plants" should have turned to dust. But this wasn't an Ether-plant. It was a common weed, vibrant and stubborn.
And it was glowing.
Not with the cold blue of the Arcanum or the violent gold of the Sovereign, but with a soft, pulse-like amber light. I reached out to touch it, and for a second, I felt a flicker of an emotion that wasn't mine. It was a faint, distant sense of longing.
"It's starting," a voice rasped from behind a fallen pillar.
I spun around, my hand flying to the hilt of the rusted dagger I'd kept. Out of the shadows stepped a man I recognized from the Academy. He was an Initiate, a boy no older than I, named Kael. But his fine robes were in tatters, and his eyes—once arrogant with the power of a high-born Mage—were wide with a new kind of terror.
"Kael?" I lowered the knife. "What are you doing here? I thought the survivors fled back to the inner territories."
"Fled to what?" Kael laughed, a jagged sound. "The cities are tearing themselves apart. Without the mana to power the filters, the water is brown. The lights are out. People are killing each other for candles." He pointed at the amber weed at my feet. "But then there are these. They call them 'Embers'."
"Embers?" I knelt, looking closer at the plant.
"They only grow where people have... felt things," Kael whispered, stepping closer. "Extreme things. Grief. Love. Despair. They're drinking the emotions we left behind when the Spire broke. And they carry power, Rowen. Real power."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a single, dried petal that pulsed with a faint violet hue. "I found this near a group of mothers who were weeping for their children. When I touched it, I could see in the dark for an hour. No incantation. No ritual. Just the feeling."
I felt a cold shiver. I looked at the silver vial in my pocket. If the new magic was grown from emotion, then the City beneath us—where Aiden was buried with all his love and all his sacrifice—was the richest soil in the world.
"The Arcanum remnants... they know, don't they?" I asked.
Kael nodded grimly. "Malakai didn't die in the fall. He's regrouping. They don't want the Spire anymore; they want the 'Harvest'. They're coming back to the flats to 'farm' the grief of the survivors. They want to turn our feelings into the new currency."
I looked toward the horizon. I could see the smoke rising from the distance—the fires of a world struggling to find its way. If Malakai began to weaponize human emotion, the new world would be a nightmare far worse than the old one. The Arcanum had controlled our actions; now they would control our hearts.
"Where are they?" I asked.
"There's a camp of refugees about five miles from here," Kael said. "They're being 'protected' by an Inquisitor unit. But it's a trap. The Inquisitors are keeping them in a state of constant fear. They want the Embers to grow. They're literally harvesting terror."
I looked at the amber weed. It was pulsing faster now, reacting to my growing anger. For the first time since the city collapsed, I felt a spark of the old hunger. But it wasn't the void. It was a fire.
"I won't let them do it," I said. "I won't let them turn what Aiden did into a crop."
I stood up, and as I did, the silver vial in my pocket grew warm. I pulled it out and looked at the single drop of gold at the bottom. It wasn't fading. It was vibrating.
"Rowen," Kael said, his voice trembling. "Your eyes... they aren't gold. But they aren't grey either."
I caught my reflection in the silver glass. My eyes were the color of the amber weed—the color of a sunrise. The "New Magic" wasn't something I had to absorb; it was something I was part of.
"Let's go," I said, tucking the vial away. "We have a harvest to stop."
As we began to walk toward the refugee camp, I felt the rhythmic thud from beneath the earth again. Thump. Thump. It wasn't just a memory. Aiden was still there, acting as the root system for this new world. And I was the one who would protect the bloom.
But as we crossed the first ridge, I saw a figure standing in our path. It wasn't an Inquisitor. It was a woman with white hair and skin like ash. My sister.
She wasn't dead. But she wasn't Subject No. 1 anymore. She was holding a handful of the amber weeds, and she was eating them.
"The taste is different, Rowen," she said, her voice sounding like a lover's whisper. "It doesn't fill the hole. it makes the hole beautiful. Do you want to see what a world made of heartbreak looks like?"
She held out a hand, and from her palm, a garden of thorns erupted—not gold, not grey, but a bruised, weeping purple.
The war wasn't over. It had just moved inside our souls.