Fingers twitching, trembling—as if reaching for a blade long lost, or a memory carved too deep to heal. Each spasm stung. Like echoes of forgotten pain clawing up from nerves too long scorched. His breath hitched. Sharp. Ragged. The air felt heavy, weighted with silence and soot. Ribs ached as if bruised by something unseen.
The world didn't freeze—it wavered. Wobbled at the edges, like ink in water. Memory had become a lens—unstable, fractured, maddening. And through it, Akar thrummed beneath his skin. Not merely sensation—but a rhythm. A forgotten song echoing in marrow.
The chamber didn't blur. It melted.
Not from heat, but from remembrance. Blackstone walls veined in molten Akar pulsed with quiet urgency, their glow soft and mournful. The liquid memory moved like breath beneath flesh—truth in motion, restless, eternal. Where the stone resisted, it blistered. White-gray flakes of Ash, ember-kissed, drifted outward in slow spirals—the soot of moments consumed by time. The masonry crackled softly like whispered confessions. A scarred history, scorched by what it once tried to contain.
And yet—silence.
A hush too deep for stillness. The chamber did not observe—it remembered. And in its remembering, it watched him.
At its heart stood the hooded figure. Motionless. The blur around them faded, lines sharpening as if reality was reluctantly agreeing to shape itself again.
Hatim's mind cleared like smoke sucked through a lung.
The hood lowered. Not illusion—a face. A man.
Old beyond the comfort of time, but eyes etched in sharp precision. Wrinkled like ancient parchment, skin drawn like stretched hide. Hair silver and bound in a knotted loop above the crown, like the seal of a forgotten king. Robes bled in rust and muted crimson, stained as if steeped in memory, not dye. But it was the eyes—amber-gold, not with power but with comprehension—that caught Hatim and rooted him.
That quiet power. The same force that once cracked thugs into silence. Now it turned inward.
Hatim faltered.
Then: "Hatim."
Dry. Familiar. Wrong.
Granny Maldri.
Not just her voice. It was her. Her cadence, her ache. Her defiance. Behind the man's eyes—like smoke trapped behind frost-glass.
Hatim recoiled. A breath caught mid-chest, too sharp to finish.
The torchlight stuttered. Shadows warped like memory refusing to stay still.
The old man's body shifted. Shoulders slumped. The jaw loosened.
Then—the smile. Gums bleeding. Familiar. Terrifying.
The scent followed: ash, rotted wool, boiled roots and bark. Not illusion. Memory made flesh. Realer than sight. More potent than blood.
Hatim's knees wavered beneath a body suddenly too light.
Gone.
The old man stood steady. Unmoved. Silent. Unapologetic.
Hatim clutched his gut. Not hunger. A deeper thing. Absence. A hollowness that had once been a name.
"I need to go," he rasped. The voice dry, words shaped by ash.
"Bolun owes me a meeting. I didn't come for ghosts."
The old man raised a brow. "And yet they follow. You don't even know what you're chasing."
"I need food. Coin. That's it."
"And when you find them? What remains?"
Hatim paused. The question landed like a blade. Not the one he wanted—but the one that fit.
The old man turned. Cane tapped the stone. Akar beneath stirred, rippling golden light that reached for him—not like a servant, but like a witness. One who knew communion.
"Come. One trial. One truth. Then you may go. Then you'll understand why Akar clings to you."
The descent began.
Spiraling steps coiled past raw stone windows, veins of Akar pulsing like arteries beneath old skin. It shimmered thick as honey, flared like breath caught in firelight. The deeper they moved, the more Ash thickened. Flakes drifted like shed skin from dying truths.
At last, a vault. Hollowed from the mountain's marrow.
The air was heavy here—saturated with memory. Breathing it in felt like swallowing dreams. Symbols circled a stone basin—glyphs etched in slow reverence, Cultivation's language. Stories without tongue. Truths too old for words.
The old man knelt. His hands—gnarled, twisted like tree roots—moved in spirals above the stone. Not commands. Invitations.
The Akar rose.
Liquid light. Gold infused with shadow. It climbed slow as grief into the shape of a gourd. Blackstone etched with lines that pulsed as if remembering its own carving.
Then came the Babs.
Winged things. Beetles, but not. Gilded shells that shimmered like burnished memory. Tails like fire whips, hissing when near Akar but never touching. Drawn. Starved. Reverent.
One hovered near Hatim's face, as if tasting the outline of his thoughts.
The old man swatted it gently. "Even Ash-born hunger for memory. But not all may taste."
He offered the gourd.
"Kander," he said. The name fell like a stone into still water.
"Drink."
Heat pressed against Hatim's lips. The gourd tipped.
Akar touched his tongue.
The world cracked.
No walls. No floor. Only strands.
Threads of memory—golden, raw, infinite—wrapped him in a web of self.
Akar tested.
First thread: Kander. His teaching. Humility over force. The thread held.
Second: Maldri. Her hands. Her stew. Her belief. It pulsed. It held.
Then—his oath to protect. A hollow promise. The thread flickered.
It snapped.
No fade. It burned away. Ash drifted upward.
Another broke—coin as salvation. Gone.
The Babs circled, feeding gently on the shed illusions.
Kander's voice, soft: "Akar does not judge. It reveals. You erase yourself."
Then—clarity.
A memory untainted: a starving boy refusing to steal from the blind. Not from pride. Because Maldri had once whispered: "Your soul is the only weight you carry across time."
It held.
Another: defending a child from guards. Acting not with courage, but despite fear.
That thread held.
The web trembled.
Then reshaped.
Not restored.
Reforged.
Ash fell like blessing. New threads spun where old lies had crumbled.
Akar pulsed.
Hatim collapsed.
But not shattered.
Forged.
Kander stood near, silent sentinel. The Babs vanished into shadow.
"You survived," he said.
Hatim: "I lost so much."
"Only what never belonged."
Hatim breathed deep. The chamber shifted around him.
Akar still pulsed.
Ash still fell.
But now—it welcomed him.
And under his skin, something answered.
He didn't remember everything.
But what remained—
Was real.