Fingers twitching, trembling—as if searching for a blade long lost or a memory torn from time. His breath hitched. Sharp. Ragged. His ribs ached with the effort of remembering something he could not name.
The world around him wasn't still—it wavered, as though memory itself were an unstable lens through which he now perceived. He could still hear Akar, a low, resonant thrumming that echoed the pulse under his own skin.
The chamber didn't just blur; it melted. Not with heat, but with recollection. Walls carved from blackstone bled red veins of molten Akar, glowing with quiet pulses. It moved within the walls like breath beneath skin—rivers of memory, of power, of truth. Where the stone fought the flow, charred flakes of Ash fumed outward—white-gray soot kissed with ember. Not ash of wood, but of memory incinerated at the borders of resistance. The ancient masonry crackled faintly, scorched from within where Akar had once burst too wildly.
And yet amid all this, silence reigned. As if the chamber watched him.
At the center stood the hooded figure, their form now subtly shifting, blurring less at the edges.
As Hatim's mind cleared, the shadow around them thinned, revealing not just a person, but an old man.
Old beyond time, yet sharp as a dagger's point, his face was a sculpture of creases and judgment. Silver hair pulled into a knot above the crown, his robes woven from fiber dyed with muted crimson and rust, as if bled from the stone itself. But it was his eyes—glowing faintly gold, not from power but understanding—that stilled Hatim's steps.
The eyes held the same quiet authority that had silenced the street thugs, now turned inward, piercing.
He faltered. And then, impossible, he heard her voice. "Hatim."
Dry. Familiar. Wrong.
Granny Maldri.
Not just her voice—her presence. It moved behind the old man's eyes like smoke behind glass, a fleeting distortion.
A step back, his breath caught.
The torchlight jittered, casting warped shadows. The old man's face shifted, not like illusion, but as if another memory had borrowed his body. Jaw slackened. Posture drooped.
The smile—that familiar bleeding-gum smile—tore through Hatim like old grief.
The scent of ash, rotted wool, and boiled roots invaded his nose. His knees weakened. This was a deeper echo, less a vision, more a raw presence.
Then it vanished. The old man stood still, unshaken. No acknowledgment. No apology.
Hatim clutched his stomach. The ache wasn't hunger. It was absence. A void where something should've been. "I need to go," he managed, his voice hoarse, pulling away from the phantom pain.
"Bolun owes me a meeting. I'm not... I didn't come here for ghosts."The old man arched a brow, the lines of age around his eyes deepening. "And yet they follow you. You don't even know what you're chasing."
"I need food. Coin. That's it."
"And when you find them? What remains?"
Hatim hesitated.
That wasn't the question he wanted. But it was the question that fit.The old man turned. His cane tapped softly along stone, yet the Akar beneath his feet stirred in reply. Gold tendrils of light reached toward him, not as servants—but as witnesses. He was one who had mastered not domination, but communion.
"Come. One trial. One truth. Then you may leave. Then you will understand why Akar clings to you, Hatim."The descent was long.
Stairs spiraled past windows of raw stone, where veins of Akar pulsed like veins beneath translucent flesh. Sometimes it shimmered thick like honey. Sometimes it surged like molten fire. The deeper they went, the more the Ash gathered—flakes drifting like dead skin from the walls, the price of stone resisting what flowed through it.
They reached a domed vault carved directly into the living mountain. The air was thick, not with heat—but with weight. Memory pressed in from all sides. Symbols—ancient glyphs of the Cultivation—circled a depression in the stone, a basin etched with stories no tongue could speak aloud.
The old man knelt. He extended his hand. His fingers, knotted like tree roots, danced through the air in spirals—each motion summoning, not commanding.
The Akar obeyed.
From beneath the basin, it emerged—a liquid light the color of old gold and setting suns, trailing sparks and ash. It rose with impossible slowness, each drop a memory uncoiled. The old man shaped it, willed it, into a gourd of blackstone with inscriptions that glowed as it filled.
Attracted to the rising energy, Babs emerged.
Tiny creatures—winged and glimmering—fluttered from cracks in the stone. Each no larger than a plum, their carapace was gold-wrought armor, segmented like beetles. But from the rear of each dangled a whip-like tail, dripping incandescent lava. The tails hissed and flared when near Akar, shedding sparks with every beat of their wings. They were drawn to it—hungry for it—yet dared not touch.
Hatim stared. One hovered before him, its insectile head tilting, as if trying to remember him.The old man swatted it gently aside.
"Even ash-born creatures long for memory. But not all are permitted." Then, a quiet revelation, the name slipping free, soft as falling ash: "Kander." He handed Hatim the gourd.
"Drink."
It was hot.
Alive.
He raised it to his lips.
Akar touched his tongue.
The world exploded.
Hatim stood within a realm both alien and intimate. There were no walls—only strands. Threads of golden light, woven from thought, from memory, from contradiction. They stretched infinitely through stone, space, and sky.
He was suspended in a web of himself.
Akar had passed beyond his blood. It now touched his essence. And it tested.
The first thread flared to life.
A memory.
Kander's voice from years ago—teaching, not instructing. The lesson had been about humility, about channeling Akar not through force, but clarity. That thread glowed. It held.
Another.
Granny Maldri. Her voice, her coughs, her hands smoothing his hair. The warmth of her stew. The pain of her loss. Her belief in him. It pulsed. It held.
But then—
His promise to protect everyone. That belief that he alone would save them. It flickered.
Akar saw the lie within it.
It snapped.
The memory did not fade. It burned, and from it rose Ash.
Hatim screamed, though no sound escaped. It wasn't pain of body—it was the death of truth.
Another snapped—his belief that coin would make him whole. Gone.
The Babs swarmed now—dozens of them, circling the snapping threads like carrion beetles. Drinking the Ash. Feeding on what had been purged.
Kander's voice echoed in the void: "Akar does not judge. It reveals. You erase yourself."
Then—clarity.
Hatim found something else.
A memory not gilded with hope or corrupted with lies.
Standing alone, starving, refusing to steal from a blind man's bowl. Not out of pride, but because Maldri once said: "Your soul is the only weight you carry across time."
That thread formed anew. Strong. Untouchable. Then another—him watching a child be beaten by guards. This time, he acted. The moment when his foot flew into the guard's shin, even though he knew he'd be arrested.
That truth held.
The web reshaped. Not restored—reforged.
From the Ash of contradictions, new threads grew. And when enough had settled, something stirred.
A pulse of Akar, like a heartbeat of the world.
Hatim collapsed.
But this time—not broken. Forged.
Kander was there, silent and still.
The Babs circled once, then fled into the shadows.
"You survived," the old man said.
Hatim looked up. "I lost so much."
Kander nodded. "Only what never belonged."
Hatim's breath steadied. The air in the chamber shifted.
Akar still pulsed in the walls.
The Ash still fell.
But now—it welcomed him.
And beneath his skin, something answered.
He didn't remember everything.
But what remained...
Was real.