The heavy iron door of the Broken Horn Tavern let out a tortured shriek as Silarias shoved it open with his shoulder.
The transition was a physical blow. The icy, corrosive ash rain of the Ward vanished, replaced instantly by thick, stagnant heat. The air clung to his skin like a cocktail of stale ale, industrial machine oil, and the sharp, medicinal bite of clove pipe smoke.
Silarias breathed in ragged, burning hitches. The rags wrapped around his gauntlets, once a dull white, were now soaked through with black soot and the luminous, viscous ichor of the Hell Hounds.
In his left arm, he cradled Nyx. She was deathly pale. Her golden radiance had extinguished, and her breathing was reduced to a fragile, rhythmic whisper.
It was the burden over his right shoulder that truly anchored him. With every step the twelve year old took, the floorboards groaned in protest. The heavy timber beams of the tavern creaked under a mass that defied logic, as if he were hauling a piece of a fallen mountain.
At the far end of the bar, half-hidden by a veil of gray fog, sat Grand master Juro. His monolithic metal pipe rested in the corner of his mouth, looking less like a tool and more like an extension of his jaw. The etched symbols on the iron pulsed with a low orange glow that synced with his steady heartbeat. He didn’t look up from his glass, where a dark liquid bubbled with a life of its own.
“You are late, Nobody,” Juro growled. The sound was tectonic, like massive stones grinding together in the bowels of the earth. “The ash of the Ward does not wait for children who linger too long in the rain.”
From a darkened corner behind the bar, the predatory eyes of Mistress Vespera ignited. She leaned forward, her silver hair shimmering like strands of refined spider silk in the amber glow of the jukebox.
“Look at the girl,” she remarked, her voice a smooth blade. “Did you find her in a refuse pile, boy? Even in her stupor, she wears the arrogant look of someone waiting for a crown.”
Silarias bit his lip, the raw tension coursing through his body like a live wire until the metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth. He ignored the barb and dragged himself toward the cellar door.
GRRRRR.
A subterranean growl vibrated from inside the bag. The sound was so primal it made the glassware on the bar chatter and caused the jukebox to skip a beat. The air in the room grew heavy, saturated with the suppressed fury of Toji, a fragment of primordial power locked in the dark.
“It is just scrap,” Silarias rasped, his throat raw from the ash. “Replacement parts for Alchemist Bones. Let me through.”
Juro took a slow, deliberate draw from his pipe. He exhaled a perfect ring of smoke that drifted lazily through the tavern, defying the drafts. The ring settled precisely over the bag and suddenly flared with a cold blue light.
The snarl of the beast was cut short instantly, as if an invisible hand had clamped shut around its throat.
Juro finally turned his gaze toward Silarias, his eyes cutting through the haze like searchlights.
“Scrap, you say? Did you hear those metal parts snarling too, Vesper? Or are the sewers of the Federation finally overflowing with monsters?”
“Perhaps it is just the rats, Juro,” Vespera laughed, a short, sharp sound as she spun a needle between her fingers with blurring speed. “Large and hungry rats who think they can play at smuggling.”
Silarias didn’t stay for the interrogation. He hurried down the protesting stairs into the damp workshop of the cellar. He lowered Toji gently onto the stone floor and settled Nyx onto a heap of salvaged blankets. He turned to demand an explanation, but Juro’s voice cascaded down the stairs before he could speak.
“Nobody. See that she is cleaned. Vespera will not tolerate a single speck of mire on those clothes, and neither will you.”
Just as Silarias felt his knees buckle, a massive hand clamped onto his shoulder. Juro’s touch was searing, radiating a heat that suggested smoke and ash lived inside his very marrow.
Without a word, the boy was hauled back up the stairs and hurled through the tavern doors, tumbling back into the freezing deluge of ash. Juro threw him into the mud with effortless, brutal force.
“One more time, you senile baboon!” Silarias hissed, scrambling to his feet. His jaw locked tight as he adjusted his gauntlets.
Deep inside his chest, the Anting Anting gemstone began its frantic hammering once more, a physical manifestation of a divine curse that had once fractured the heavens.
Juro didn’t remove the pipe. The smoke he exhaled coiled around him, hardening into a translucent suit of armor.
“You stand there waiting for the next blow. You believe enduring pain makes you a man.” Juro took a single, measured step. The ambient noise of the city died away, replaced by an unnatural, ringing silence. “The world has no pity for your labor. If all you do is absorb hits, then you are nothing but a punching bag with a burden too heavy to carry.”
The heat radiating from the pipe was so intense that the rain on Silarias’s cheeks evaporated into wisps of steam.
“I do not strike you to teach you how to stand. I strike you so you understand that every time you are hit, you have failed. If an enemy lands a blow like mine, then you are dead. Then the Princess is dead. Then that hound is dead.”
Silarias’s eyes widened. His heart skipped a beat. “Wait. The hound. How did you know?”
Juro took a deep breath. The symbols on the pipe glowed white-hot. “Become stronger so that no one ever touches you again. The day I can no longer hit you is the day you can stop cleaning.”
He turned and retreated into the tavern, leaving a wall of smoke so thick it stood like a physical barrier, isolating the boy in the cold.
Limping and mapped in bruises, Silarias eventually returned to the cellar. He found Nyx awake, perched on a workbench as she absentmindedly raked her fingers through her golden hair.
“He already knew, Nyx,” Silarias panted, leaning heavily against the damp wall. “His smoke was all over me. He knows everything.”
Nyx merely shrugged. “Of course he knew, Nobody. Juro’s smoke is his nervous system. He has the entire Ward under his thumb. Just look at your leg.”
Silarias looked down. A small, persistent wisp of smoke was latched onto his trousers, pulsing rhythmically like a second heartbeat.
“Hey! Get lost!” He swatted frantically at his leg, his face flushing with frustration. “Get off me!”
Upstairs in the tavern, Juro took a long pull from his pipe and muttered to himself, “The girl told him… and I even paid her to keep her mouth shut.”
Silarias cursed under his breath and headed for the small washroom in the rear of the cellar. But when he tried to exit, the handle wouldn’t budge. The door was anchored as if welded shut.
“What? Open up! Stupid door!” Silarias kicked the wood, but it felt like striking the base of a mountain.
In the main cellar, Nyx didn’t even notice Silarias was gone. To her eyes, he was still standing by the table with his back turned to her. But slowly, the boy’s voice began to warp into a strange melody. The shadows in the corners of the room stretched and twisted.
Nyx froze, her instincts screaming. “No. An illusion. Vespera.”
The figure rippled like a reflection in a disturbed pond, shifting back into the form of Mistress Vespera. She leaned casually against the workbench.
“So, darling,” Vespera said, her eyes drifting toward the bag. “Which dog were we discussing? Or should we say… which ancient god?”
In her excitement, Nyx’s guard dropped completely. “This is Toji! He is the cutest pet in the whole world! He can sit, and give a paw, and bark, and roll over!”
Vespera erupted into a laugh that shattered the lingering illusion like thin glass.
At that exact moment, the real Silarias finally burst through the washroom door, stumbling into the room covered in dust.
“Do not underestimate the baboon, Nobody,” Vespera said as she glided toward the stairs. “Tomorrow I begin with Nyx as well. Shadows require an architect. And we have a guest student joining us. She arrives an hour before you, although you likely will not even perceive her.”
The following morning, on a rusted platform suspended above the fog, the world felt hollow. The wind shrieked through the broken machinery.
Invisible within the gloom stood Lila. Everywhere the children stepped, a single purple flower already lay waiting on the ground.
Juro’s voice thundered from the fog. “Late, Nobody. The guest student could have ended you three times over while you were busy staring at your own feet.”
Silarias saw only a single petal, drifting slowly down through the black ash. The hunt had truly begun.
Upstairs in the training hall of the tavern, the air was so saturated with static that the hair on Silarias’s arms stood on end. The chamber had been transformed into a labyrinth of thousands of gossamer threads, glowing in the dark like the nervous system of a slumbering deity.
Mistress Vespera hung motionless at the center of the web, her six additional spectral arms splayed like a spider sensitive to the slightest vibration.
Nyx stood in the heart of the maze, her face ashen under the flicker of the lanterns. She forced herself to ignore the threads and focused instead on that hollow, freezing sensation in her gut—the hunger she had known all her life.
As Vespera unleashed a wave of obsidian shadow silk with a flick of her wrist, Nyx’s first true instinct flared to life.
The shadows on the floor surged toward her with violent velocity, making the very gravity of the room feel skewed. Vespera’s incoming threads were dragged toward the floorboards, pinned by an invisible, frigid pressure that made the wooden beams groan. Nyx staggered, a thin trail of blood escaping her nose as the silver light in her eyes flickered.
Silarias, watching like a sentinel from the edge of the room, felt the building on the verge of structural collapse. Without a word, he slammed his left gauntlet onto the primary support beam.
“Stop it!” he grunted. He channeled a focused vibration through the timber, hitting the exact frequency needed to neutralize the crushing pressure of Vespera’s web.
“Do not rely solely on gravity, girl,” Vespera hissed, her voice echoing from the ceiling. “The night possesses needles as well. If you do not learn to master the cold, then your own heart will be the first thing to freeze solid.”