The twin suns of Asatay didn't just illuminate the wasteland; they actively hostilely interrogated it.

  Kaelen lay horizontally wedged deep inside a narrow, diagonal fissure in a sandstone bluff, his knees pulled so tightly to his chest that his boots were digging into his own collarbones. He was trying to make his physical footprint smaller than humanly possible. The rock shelf suspended three inches above his face was actively baking him, radiating the midday heat downward like an open oven door. The air trapped inside his little hiding hole was entirely stagnant, heavily alkaline, and tasted like inhaling powdered rust.

  He had been marching—dragging his feet, really—for twelve solid hours since fleeing the psychotic break at his campsite. He had scrambled over miles of treacherous, ankle-breaking scree, driven strictly by the radioactive tug of the god-rock in his pocket and a profound, sickening sense of shame. But his forward momentum had hit a brick wall.

  The vast, indifferent silence of the desert had been broken.

  Crunch. Grind. Clink.

  It was a heavy, rhythmic, industrial noise. The ugly sound of forged metal violently displacing loose stone. A deliberate, synchronized cadence of something entirely manufactured.

  Kaelen pressed his filthy, sweat-streaked cheek hard against the jagged stone wall, peering downward through a vertical fracture in the rock face that was barely wider than a coin.

  Down on the valley floor, marching directly up the center of an ancient, dried-out game trail, were five men.

  Their armor was brutalist and completely devoid of ornamentation—thick, overlapping plates bolted over heavy chainmail, prioritizing absolute deflection over any kind of mobility. The metal wasn't polished. It was treated with a matte black finish that completely swallowed the harsh desert sunlight rather than reflecting it. They looked like walking voids, dragging a localized patch of darkness across the glaring salt flats.

  The Iron Thalass.

  Kaelen’s heart slammed against the inside of his ribs so violently he was genuinely terrified the vibration would shake loose dust from the ceiling and give away his position. He clamped both hands rigidly over his own nose and mouth, suffocating himself to muffle the desperate, ragged sound of his own breathing. These were the men who had burned his world.

  They marched with an unnerving, heavy synchronization. They weren't casually taking in the scenery. They were scanning it. Their heads, entirely enclosed in bucket helms with narrow, cruel T-shaped visors, snapped from side to side in unison, sweeping the canyon walls in drilled, overlapping sectors.

  The column ground to a halt directly below Kaelen’s fissure.

  "Hold," the point man ordered. The heavy helm severely distorted his voice, stripping out the humanity and leaving behind a flat, metallic rasp.

  The column halted instantly. No shuffling. No complaints.

  "Readings," the lead soldier barked.

  The second man in the column took a heavy, deliberate step forward. He was carrying a thick iron chain attached to a heavy, geometric censer. He swung the device in a slow, tight arc over the dirt. It didn't produce smoke. Instead, as it passed over the ground, the metal emitted a low, dissonant, grinding hum that made Kaelen's teeth ache all the way up in the rocks.

  "Trace signatures only, Sergeant," the second soldier reported. He tapped a gauntleted finger against a series of hexagonal runes etched into the censer’s casing. "The frequencies are old. Decaying rapidly. It is highly likely just an ambient echo bleeding over from the purge site."

  "The purge was executed three days ago," the Sergeant replied, his tone devoid of any inflection. "The localized atmosphere should be entirely clean by now. Orheid demands absolute silence."

  "The heresy is deeply rooted in this specific geology, sir. The Remnant filth polluted the ambient magic in these canyons for twelve generations. It takes time for the iron to properly suffocate the root systems."

  Up in the suffocating heat of the fissure, Kaelen squeezed his eyes shut until his vision swam with bright, jagged phosphenes.

  Polluted. That was their official terminology. The Remnants had spent centuries quietly listening to the Worldroot, carefully tending to the microscopic fractures in the planet's crust, desperately trying to keep the bleeding barrier between realms intact. And to these faceless zealots in their heavy suits, that centuries-long effort of triage was considered pollution.

  "We maintain the pace to the eastern ridge," the Sergeant commanded, adjusting the grip on his heavy warhammer. "If any of the rats managed to scurry out of the fire before the perimeter closed, they will naturally gravitate toward the high passes. We tighten the net."

  "Sir," the soldier at the very rear of the column spoke up. His voice sounded marginally younger, slightly less metallic. "The water reserves. We are operating below the minimum threshold."

  The Sergeant didn't simply look back. He slowly, deliberately rotated his entire armored torso to face the subordinate.

  "Does your personal thirst somehow outweigh the mandates of the Crusade, Legionary?"

  "No, sir. Absolutely not. But the pack animals—"

  "We do not possess pack animals," the Sergeant interrupted, stepping into the younger soldier's personal space. "We march. If your physical form falters, you will be left for the scavengers. Weakness is strictly dead weight. You either drop the weight, or you will be dropped."

  The subordinate instantly slammed a heavy, steel-plated fist against his own breastplate. A sharp, ringing, fanatical salute. "Iron binds, sir."

  He threw out a hand signal, and the column lurched back into motion. Crunch. Grind. Clink. They marched straight past the base of the bluff, their heavy, steel-shod boots mercilessly pulverizing the sparse clumps of desert scrub into grey powder. They walked with the slow, arrogant inevitable momentum of men who fully believed the tectonic plates beneath their boots belonged to them by divine right.

  Kaelen stayed absolutely paralyzed. He kept his hands clamped over his face, breathing in shallow, terrifyingly hot sips of stale air, watching through the crack until the five black shapes became blurry specks, eventually swallowed entirely by the liquid shimmer of the heat haze on the horizon.

  Only then did he finally rip his hands away and drag in a massive, ragged lungful of oxygen.

  It didn't calm his racing heart. The paralyzing, cold terror of being discovered was slowly receding, but it was leaving a vacuum behind. And something else was rapidly crawling out of the dark to fill that empty space.

  It was pure, unadulterated rage.

  It was a hot, sour, corrosive feeling. It tasted exactly like the greasy black smoke of the burning archive. Listening to those men—hearing their casual, administrative disdain for his murdered family, witnessing their robotic, indoctrinated devotion to absolute cruelty—had burned away the heavy, protective numbness that had insulated him since the courtyard.

  Polluted. He looked at his own filthy, blistered hands. The tremors had returned, but he wasn't shivering from adrenaline or fear. His hands were shaking because he was seized by a desperate, violent urge to pick up a jagged piece of sandstone and hurl it at the back of the Sergeant's helmet. To scream until his vocal cords tore. To do literally anything other than cower in a hole like a whipped dog while the monsters casually strolled across his home.

  He violently shoved himself out of the fissure. He slid haphazardly down the steep scree slope, tearing the fabric of his trousers and scraping his shins raw, until his boots hit the valley floor. He landed directly on the trail. He stood there, staring down at the crushed, pulverized grass and the deep, heavy indentations of their iron heels in the dirt.

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  He was incredibly thirsty. His throat felt like it had been scrubbed with heavy-grit sandpaper. A massive dehydration headache was driving a spike directly through his temples, making the glaring sunlight throb in perfect sync with his elevated heart rate.

  He looked furiously around the desolate, baking valley.

  Dead limestone. Dead dust. Dead, petrified roots.

  "Why?" he croaked. The single syllable felt like coughing up a razor blade.

  He locked his eyes on a small, miserable bush growing out of a crack in the rock right next to the trail. It was a twisted, gnarled knot of greasewood. It had died seasons ago, choked out by the relentless heat and the total lack of rainfall. It was nothing but a brittle skeleton of pale wood, pointlessly clinging to the dry hardpan.

  It looked exactly like him.

  Kaelen lunged forward and grabbed it.

  He seized the main trunk with both hands, his calloused fingers digging viciously into the dry, flaking bark, instantly snapping off several of the brittle outer twigs. He wanted to violently uproot it. He wanted to snap it in half over his knee. He needed to physically destroy something just to externalize the fact that his entire life had just been violently dismantled.

  "Why is everything so dead!?" he screamed directly at the plant, his voice breaking into a harsh, ugly sob.

  He dumped everything into the wood. He pushed his blinding anger, his survivor's guilt, his agonizing thirst, and his absolute, suffocating hatred for the men in black armor straight down through his forearms and into his grip. He wanted the inanimate object to feel exactly what he felt. He wanted the world to hurt.

  WAKE UP! the demand detonated inside his own skull.

  And the planet immediately answered the demand.

  A localized, terrifying surge of kinetic energy exploded upward through the limestone directly under the soles of Kaelen’s boots. It was raw, unrefined, violently aggressive life force rushing up from the subterranean depths, desperately seeking a pressure release valve.

  Kaelen was the valve.

  The planetary energy slammed into his central nervous system, instantly scorching his veins. It rocketed up his legs and rushed through his shoulders, burning like liquid phosphorus, before exploding violently out through the palms of his hands directly into the dead greasewood.

  CRACK. The sound was as loud as a fractured whip.

  In the span of a single, frantic heartbeat, the pale, dead wood violently shifted into a saturated, impossible shade of neon green. The dead branches shot outward, forcefully lengthening by several feet in a fraction of a second, whipping through the air. Thorns—massive, dense, inch-long spikes of hardened green wood—erupted straight through the bark.

  They tore directly through the calluses of Kaelen’s hands.

  He shrieked in pain, trying to jerk his arms back, but the cellular growth was moving too fast. The rapidly expanding bush aggressively wrapped around his right wrist, binding his arm in thick, muscular vines that instantly began to constrict.

  Broad, heavy leaves unfurled violently, snapping open with a sound like sails catching a gale-force wind. Massive, swollen buds formed along the new branches, instantly swelling to the point of rupture before bursting open.

  Flowers.

  Massive, grotesque, crimson blooms, their overlapping petals saturated with a red dye so intensely bright it actually hurt to look at them. They immediately began exuding a thick smell of heavy perfume and overturned wet earth, an aggressively fertile stench that completely overpowered the dry, sterile smell of the desert dust.

  The mutated bush expanded until it was easily as tall as Kaelen himself, a towering, chaotic riot of deeply unnatural life violently asserting itself in the middle of a dead wasteland.

  Then, just as abruptly as it had breached, the energetic surge completely severed.

  Kaelen violently threw his weight backward, ripping his bound hand completely free from the restricting vines. He tumbled backward onto the hardpan, clutching his injured arm against his chest, gasping for oxygen like a drowning man.

  His right hand was heavily damaged. The massive thorns had gouged three deep, ragged furrows straight across his palm and down his inner wrist. Blood was welling up quickly, dripping steadily off his fingertips and instantly soaking into the dirt.

  He didn't even look at the lacerations. He just sat in the dirt, staring up at the bush.

  It stood over him, physically vibrating with the residual friction of the magic. It was a terrifying monstrosity of vegetation, impossibly lush, aggressively alive, and casting a deep, unnaturally cool shadow over the sun-baked rock.

  "What..." Kaelen breathed, his chest heaving.

  The ambient air immediately surrounding the massive plant was actively shimmering. The Weave—the wild, untamed circulatory system of the world—was highly agitated, swirling tightly around the epicenter of the spell like water spiraling down a heavy drain.

  A memory floated to the surface of his mind, entirely unprompted.

  The lower levels of the Archive. Three years ago.

  The room always smelled heavily of melted beeswax and decomposing book-binding glue—a scent that used to make Kaelen sneeze, but now, in the sterile heat of the wasteland, he would have given anything to smell it again.

  Elara was standing by the narrow slit window, holding a heavy piece of cut crystal. She was twisting it slowly in her arthritic fingers, letting a fractured rainbow dance across the uneven limestone blocks. Kaelen was sitting at his small oak desk, aggressively picking at a splinter in the wood, vibrating with teenage boredom. He wanted to be outside running drills; he didn't want to hear about theory.

  But Elara wasn't lecturing. She was just watching the light.

  "There are really only two ways the power of this world moves, Kaelen," she said. Her voice was quiet, lacking the sharp, professorial edge she used with the other acolytes. It was the tone she used when she was tired. When she was just an old woman talking to a boy she worried about.

  Kaelen stopped picking at the desk. "The texts say there are dozens."

  "The texts like to complicate things to justify the ink," she said, finally turning to look at him. "But in the end, it’s about permission."

  She walked over to his desk, her robes rustling softly against the stone floor. She didn't scold him for his fidgeting. She just reached out and rested a hand on his shoulder, her thumb brushing the rough fabric of his tunic.

  "We don't use magic, Kaelen. Not truly. We ask. The Remnants... we are barely a whisper against the gale. We request a small favor from the dirt—a little water, a little warmth—and if the earth says no, we accept the refusal. We leave no mark on the glass."

  She gestured to the prism on the windowsill, where the light was splitting perfectly, naturally.

  "Then there is the Iron Thalass. The empires of the East." Her face hardened, just for a second. "They practice Thaumaturgy. They don't ask the earth for anything. They petition their patron gods to grant them power, and those gods answer by dragging that energy violently through the Worldroot."

  She mimed a pulling motion, a harsh, jagged jerk of her hand.

  "It is a transaction, and the planet pays the toll. Every time they cast, every time they demand a miracle to build a wall or forge a sword, the root actively thins. They are burning the foundation of the house just to keep the fireplace warm."

  "So we're better," Kaelen said, the arrogance of youth making it simple.

  Elara laughed softly, a dry, dusty sound. "We are quieter. That is not always the same as better."

  She leaned down then, bringing her face level with his. The humor evaporated from her grey eyes.

  "But there is a second way to touch the source. The Weave itself. The wild magic. It is the unfiltered blood of the planet, unthinking and vast."

  She tapped his chest, right over his heart.

  "The Thaumaturges have their gods to filter the power. We have our caution. But the Weave... it does not possess a lid. If you try to pry that door open using anger as the key... if you yank on the thread because you hate what is in front of you..."

  She paused, letting the silence of the library settle around them.

  "You won't summon a stream, Kaelen. You will summon a flood. And a flood will drown the farmer just as quickly as it waters his crops."

  Sitting in the baking heat of the valley, Kaelen stared up at the massive, bleeding bush.

  He hadn't listened. He had used a crowbar. He had utilized his own volatile, grieving rage as a conduit and violently kicked the door off its hinges.

  He finally looked down at his bleeding hand. He could still vividly feel the echo of the massive power surge—a dark, electric tingling racing up and down the nerves of his forearm. It felt wildly dangerous.

  It also felt incredibly addictive.

  For the last three days, he had felt nothing but small. He had been a pathetic, helpless victim, hiding in holes, talking to rocks, and shivering in the dark while men encased in iron casually walked over the ruins of his entire civilization.

  But this... this was different.

  He looked at the massive crimson flowers, blooming aggressively and defiantly in the middle of the sterile, grey waste.

  He had terraformed the rock. He had ripped life out of the dirt using nothing but his own fury and a dead stick.

  The deep lacerations in his hand throbbed, a sharp, grounding rhythm that cut through the dehydration headache. The Sergeant's metallic voice echoed in his memory.

  Kaelen ripped a filthy strip of linen off the hem of his tunic and wrapped it tightly around his bleeding palm, knotting it with his teeth. He hauled himself to his feet.

  The iron patrol was long gone. The heavy, oppressive silence of the wasteland had rushed back in to fill the valley. But the environment felt fundamentally different to him now.

  He wasn't just a passive listener anymore. He wasn't just a traumatized courier carrying a rock he didn't understand.

  He was a conduit.

  He reached out with his uninjured hand and gently touched one of the massive crimson petals. It was as thick as velvet, and shockingly cold with fresh moisture. Raw, unbridled life, violently manifested from absolute nothing.

  "I'm listening," Kaelen whispered to the empty air, his voice steady for the first time in days.

  But as he looked at the blood drying on the thorns, he knew the truth. For the first time in his life, he wasn't just waiting for the world to politely speak to him. He was fully prepared to start shouting back.

  He reached down and grabbed his ash-wood staff. He aggressively adjusted the heavy canvas pack on his shoulder. The dehydration was still a terrible ache in his throat, and the exhaustion still weighed heavily on his joints, but the paralyzing, pathetic despair had finally cracked.

  A violently green thing had managed to grow in the dark.

  Kaelen turned his body East, aligning himself with the brutal magnetic pull of the stone in his pocket, and started marching down the trail. He left the towering, blooming bush behind him, a massive splash of violent, impossible color standing in defiance of the grey dust.

  The Great Mending is the difference between "forcing" the world to change (The Iron Thalass/Thaumaturgy) and "listening" to it (The Weave). Kaelen just learned that listening can be violent, too.

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