The shift from the Mirror’s Heart back into the physical streets of Low-Khorat felt like being dragged through narrow copper piping packed with frozen grease.
Ren Vale tumbled onto the wet, greasy cobblestones of an alleyway in the Tanneries district, his palms slapping into puddles of foul canal overflow and rotten bark-water. His breath hitched wildly, his lungs burning with the sudden influx of heavy, humid mortal air after hours of breathing the sterile, ozone-scented chill of the Seventh Void. He stayed on hands and knees for several seconds, coughing dryly until the bitter taste of potion-made willow-ash flared in the back of his throat.
Beside him, hovering as an ephemeral projection of grey light, Master Ren, the Scroll-keeper, watched the mouth of the alley with sharp, careful eyes. The Scroll-keeper couldn’t speak—his exclusion penalty permanently barred true names and vocalized incantations—but his ink-stained fingers moved with lightning rapidity in the silent sign-language of the First High court: Temporal window: seventeen minutes. Holding power degradation: twelve percent. Proceed with haste.
“I hear you,” Ren whispered. He climbed to his feet and pulling his fraying wool hood low over his brow.
He needed binding reagents, and he needed them right away. The clash between the Ash Emperor’s Sovereign Promise and the Man Who Returned’s shard-blade had fractured two foundational dark rock rows of stone pillars in the Sanctum. Without high-purity iron-gall crystals, raw spirit-silk, and raw willow-charcoal to scribe stabilizing counter-matrices, the next causal blast wave would shear the silver floor…
