Fountain of Memory

The world does not remember softness. Only what carves stone or bends the sky.

The wind here tasted strange—thin, almost surgical in its sharpness. It sliced through the ash like a blade through rot, bearing a tang of altitude and the electric trace of old storms. There was no soot this high, no memory of fire—only silence wrapped in metal.

Lord Valerius stood still atop the fanged spine of Embermark's upper bastion, where the granite strained toward a sky that had long since abandoned the city. Behind him, the stone bled rust from centuries of heat and grinding gears. Before him, the horizon bent like a half-healed scar.

His tunic billowed with careful defiance, dyed the black of coal-embers, tailored from dusk-silk harvested in the Silt Warrens. Threaded with slivers of embersteel, the fabric hissed when touched by wind. Glyphs, stitched in molten script along the hem, shimmered like flares submerged in oil—subtle, patient, and watching. Ash curled toward him, then turned away, sloughed off like shame by invisible hands.

Valerius inhaled.

Scorched stone. Molten brass. The coppery breath of pressed flesh. The scent of a city eating its young and growing fat from the marrow.

Far below, The Verge writhed.

Kilns screamed as they opened. Smelteries belched slag into the fire gutters. Sparks erupted like small rebellions and died just as quickly. The clangor of forgehammers echoed in rhythmic devotion—metal on metal, a choir of cruelty. Workers moved like shadows half-swallowed, eyes down, backs arched by habit. Embermark never stopped breathing. Not while there was still something left to burn.

Behind him, a phalanx of guards stood in grim symmetry. No faces, only helms smoothed by soot and time. Their armor bore branded glyphs—scorched into iron, not sewn, not asked. Wielders of lesser bloodlines. Mercenaries by coin. Inked for function.

Names?

Valerius did not keep names.

A subtle tick came from his wrist—bone nestled into brass. His timepiece, a gift from the Shaper's Guild, purred softly. Inside, a single caged droplet of Timed-Akar pulsing like a dying star, counting seconds with the precision of cruelty.

Right on schedule.

The sky shifted.

The clouds folded inward like parchment struck by heat. Light trembled—flickering, refusing to behave. From the rippling veil of air emerged something vast.

The Sky-Leviathan.

Not flown. Flown into being.

Its wings shimmered, not with feathers but with pressurized glyph-streams—curving, self-writing, breathing script drawn midair. Its chitinous body glistened like wind-hardened glass, etched with symbols sung, not burned. Aeridorian. Alien.

Where Embermark's glyphs carved, scorched, branded—these ones moved.

They danced. They shimmered in fractal spirals, bending currents around them like gravity re-written.

The Leviathan descended with reverent silence. Its weight did not crash—it persuaded the stone to yield. The platform beneath Valerius shuddered, but none of the wind dared brush his form. His warding glyphs blinked softly in the air, rippling like a net of invisible blades. The dust obeyed.

From the Leviathan's side unfurled a stair of compressed air—spinning gently, a spiral of captive turbulence.

Lady Caedra descended.

Ninth Wind-Blood of House Vaelenar, her presence announced itself before her feet neared stone. She hovered rather than walked, her steps cradled in threads of high-altitude command currents. Her robes shimmered in sky-colors Embermark had no names for—hints of dawn glimpsed from mountaintops no longer mapped. The glyphs across her sleeves rippled as if tasting the wind—flexible, shifting, alive.

The air grew lighter, as if deciding to obey her.

"Sahven da'el vaeren, Khair Valeriyan."

Her voice was a whisper braided with stormsong. It carried no echo. It needed none.

Valerius bowed his head the precise degree required by foreign etiquette. "Lady Caedra. May your winds remain steady." His tongue held no melody. His words, brick-heavy by comparison.

She said nothing more, but drifted forward—her guards trailing like ink poured through air. Unlike his, they wore no armor. Their weapons were their glyphs—etched into flesh with sky-silver and drawn in curved geometries that Embermark's logic could not decode.

Valerius turned to the ledge, gesturing toward the cages clinging to the cliff face like barnacles. They pulsed dimly with crimson suppression glyphs, each rune jagged and brutal—crafted to not just bind, but humiliate.

Fifty-two souls inside.

Cramped, shoulder to shoulder, limbs sallow, eyes hollowed by waiting. These were not prisoners. These were ingredients.

"Fifty-two," Valerius said. "Freshly condemned. A productive batch."

Caedra said nothing. Her gaze swept over them not as a collector, but as a scholar observing fossils. She glided past one cage. Then another.

Then stopped.

Her eyes locked on a man—slumped, but still upright. Blood traced his temple, dried to a crust. His wrists bore rings of bruised defiance. But his spine did not curve.

His eyes were open.

Lugal.

A ghost of a glyph showed on his arm—half-faded ink of Forum Intelligence. The brand of someone who once had clearance. The kind that opened vaults of forbidden thought.

Valerius's lips twitched. Not quite a smile.

The one who dreamed.

The fool who whispered of the Ascended as if they were puzzles to solve rather than truths to kneel before. He had spoken of climbing past the Ancients. Of reaching power not yet defined.

"Power shouldn't calcify. It should evolve."

Valerius remembered the Forum's silence after Lugal had spoken those words.

The Sunken Forum had smiled.

Now he was here. Scabbed. Caged. Not evolved—reduced.

Caedra lifted a hand. One of her Wielders—tall, adorned in wind-braid tattoos—stepped forward. He carried no weapon. Only an orb, swirling with liquid glyphs that writhed like serpents in amber.

"Vael'danir," she whispered.

The orb responded. It floated from his palm and pulsed once.

The air stirred.

Currents invisible to Embermark-born eyes flowed from the orb and brushed Lugal's body like fingers tasting truth. The glyphs on the Leviathan's side shimmered in response, humming briefly in agreement.

The Wielder nodded.

"Vasya," Caedra said. Acceptable.

Valerius inclined his head. "That one still has instincts. A pity the Forum cast him out so theatrically. Pride makes strange orphans."

She didn't answer. But her gaze lingered a moment too long.

What she saw—Valerius could only guess. The echo of a mind not yet fully broken. Or worse: a silence too patient.

The cages opened with a hiss. Shackles unfolded like iron serpents. The condemned were pulled into aeroweave cradles—woven windwood and restraint-glyphs. They floated upward one by one, limbs limp, souls caged tighter than their bodies.

Among them, a girl—slight. Wide-eyed. Unbranded. Her feet stumbled as she was pulled.

Her gaze flicked across the platform—unsure, quick. No recognition. Just searching.

Lyra.

He did not know her name. But he knew what she was.

Untested glyph-potential. No claims. No protection. No history worth preserving.

A flicker.

A spark.

A future to be melted down.

He stepped forward, watching her vanish into the air with the others.

Behind him, a servant in gold-trimmed robes approached with reverent steps. Valerius lifted the silk cover.

Three Akar crystals nestled within—faintly glowing. Still warm with memory.

He plucked one between thumb and forefinger. It vibrated in time with a heartbeat no longer beating.

Female. Young. Raw.

A girl should always leave a gift.

The Sky-Leviathan flexed its wings—pressure warping the clouds, folding the air like paper. The platform groaned.

Then silence.

Fifty-two vanished into cloud.

Valerius stood alone. His robes shifted in a breeze that wasn't truly wind—but aftermath.

"Let the sky take them," he muttered.

"Let the mines feed."

"Let the ash forget."

He turned the crystal in his hand, light trapped inside like a scream without sound.

Embermark endures.

Because men like him make certain it does.