“Just die.”

  Pello’s eyes widened in alarm, then hardened into horror. A second later, his heart clenched, a sudden, ice-cold fist closing around it.

  Then the warmth began to leave him.

  It wasn’t blood loss. Far from it. Compared to Dion’s battered form, Pello was practically whole if you ignored the numb, dead feeling below his knees.

  But this was different.

  Heat fled his chest, his limbs, the very tips of his fingers. In its place, a deep, marrow-numbing chill, causing his skin to tighten, prickling with invisible frost.

  His breath fogged weakly in the air before thinning into nothing, each exhale stealing more of the heat that had sustained him.

  Life was warmth, motion, energy. He was being stilled, siphoned away, leaving only a cold that settled into his bones.

  The world grew quiet, distant, as the last of his heat bled away into the silent forest air, leaving him empty and still.

  Dion watched the desperate, pleading light in his eyes as the last flicker of consciousness vanished.

  To be frank, he had half expected the alchemist to be referring to him when he heard those words.

  A bout of shame and relief flooded his system. Somehow, he couldn’t help but notice it now.

  The forest, it seemed to breathe in the scavenger’s fading warmth.

  He would have thought it a trick of his frayed senses if he hadn’t seen it.

  A deep crack in the iron-bark tree beside the scavenger began to knit together, rust-colored sap welling and hardening in real time.

  The hexagonal silicate plates beneath the scavenger’s body grew denser, more lush, their sickly phosphorescence brightening as though fed.

  It all screamed a tale.

  Life did not end, it was merely transferred, absorbed into the hungering lattice of the Ferro-Locus.

  Dion had seen death before. The state-sanctioned beheading in Lavos’s central square was all pomp and ceremony.

  The messy, groaning end of a guardsman who’d taken a practice pike wrong. Those were events within the human spectrum, tragic, brutal, but understandable.

  This was different.

  What he had just witnessed was a void where emotion should have been.

  Ending a life felt no different from crossing out a misspelled word. The perpetrator had not so much as glanced at the result.

  He offered none of the petty, human theatrics that usually accompanied a kill.

  No grim satisfaction, no flicker of regret. There was only the act itself, and then, the seamless return to stillness.

  Dion’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle spasmed in his cheek.

  A vast, hollow coldness spread from his core.

  This sensation was not grief for Pello, far from it, he hardly knew the man. Rather, it was the chilling, absolute understanding of the new world he found himself in.

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  The alchemist's hand lowered smoothly back to his side, the motion as precise as if he had just adjusted a dial on a complex apparatus.

  “Your burden is lifted.” His dry, baritone voice was unchanged. The darkness within his hood seemed to deepen as he turned his gaze fully on Dion.

  “Now we may proceed… Follow.”

  He did not wait for an answer.

  Dion felt it.

  A pull that was not physical, but existential.

  He took a single, stumbling step forward. Then another.

  For a long time, the only sounds were the uneven crunch of their footsteps.

  Unknown to him, they soon crossed the unmarked boundary, leaving the uneasy sanctuary of the Outer Verge of the Ferro-Locus behind.

  He felt the change before he saw it. The air thickened, coiling in his lungs like damp wire, carrying the copper-sharp scent of rust and a deeper, fresher note of spilled blood, the scent of violence that had not yet dried.

  Around him, the forest began to transform. They descended into the basin of the Mid Locus, a rust-rimmed wound in the world.

  What passed for trees here were no longer the ironwood pillars of the outer ring, but hollow, spiraling pylons of pitted steel, some bent as if frozen in a silent scream.

  Between them hung curtains of bioluminescent razor-vine, their cold, pulsing light casting long, grasping shadows that seemed to move independently of the breeze.

  The ground was a treacherous scree of metal shavings and crystalline slag that shifted and crunched with every step.

  Dion’s sense of direction frayed almost immediately. The basin’s slopes were subtle deceptions.

  Paths seemed to open and close at the edge of his vision. He jogged, struggling to keep pace with the alchemist’s effortless stride.

  As much as he hated it, it was his only choice. He could feel the wrongness here, a pressure that made the Skollynx seem like a child’s toy.

  The only thing keeping that encroaching dread at bay was the grey-robed figure ahead of him.

  “Your arm… it heals well.”

  The alchemist’s voice sliced through Dion’s focus, bringing him back to the jarring present.

  Only now did he notice. The deep gashes along his forearm were sealing, the skin knitting together.

  The pain was almost gone. He scanned his body, the cracked ribs, the dozens of smaller cuts l, all were closing, leaving only faint silver traces.

  Only a profound, bone-deep exhaustion remained.

  Another detail snagged his attention. His blood. It wasn't drying brown. It was darker. He filed the observation away.

  “A side effect of ingesting the Alkahest?” The alchemist continued, “The power you expressed on the beast,” his voice carrying clearly over his shoulder without him turning his head.

  “You conceptualize it as a single act. A strike. Primitive but understandable.”

  Dion’s shoulders tightened involuntarily. A phantom ache flared in his bones as the memory of his first battle replayed.

  His eyes slid, almost against his will, to the alchemist’s waist. The Skollynx’s head hung there, cradled in a sling of shadowy filaments, its eyelids twitching over terror-stricken pupils.

  Still alive. A trophy or a specimen.

  Dion swallowed hard.

  It was difficult, no, impossible to understand the thoughts moving behind that hood.

  The man’s mind operated on a different plane, where life and death were mere variables, and curiosity was the only sacred law.

  “It is more accurate to think of it as a part of you,” he continued, his words measured.

  “An extension of your will. A word, spoken in a language to which the fundamental particles of reality are compelled to listen.”

  He paused, allowing the sheer weight of the concept to settle in the roaring silence between them.

  “You willed ‘cease’ to the molecular bonds of the creature’s flesh, and they obeyed. The phenomenon in itself is not a mystery.”

  His steps paused.

  “The mystery is the user. How does one who does not know the alphabet, the grammar, the syntax, speak a single, perfect, commanding word?”

  Dion’s throat worked, a dry, clicking sound. He had no answer.

  Why wasn't he dead yet?

  The brine sea swallowed him. Yet the incident he still couldn't make head or tails of happened.

  The sea spat him back out.

  The alchemist steps resumed.

  “Currently, you are an untuned instrument. A priceless violin wielded by a savage. The note you force out is potent, devastatingly so, but it shatters the soundboard and snaps the strings.”

  “Like a true virtuoso does not break his instrument to produce a sound. He coaxes it. He listens to its unique resonances, understands its inherent limits. He strives to become one with it.”

  “Come… We are close.”

  They walked for what felt like miles, the journey measured in the burning of Dion’s thighs and the deepening ache in his feet.

  Apart from the impromptu lecture, the walk had gone silent, broken only by the scuff of their steps and the faint, whispering rustle of the alchemist's robes.

  Finally, he saw it.

  The destination.

  At the edge of the Mid Locus, where the air began to thicken and the light turned thin and brittle, stood a single tree.

  It wasn't right.

  It looked like several ironwoods had been fused, their trunks knotted and braided into one gnarled, twisted pillar.

  It wasn’t beautiful, far from it… It felt unnatural.

  A slow, rhythmic swell moved through the fused trunk, too subtle to be wind.

  Gods… It’s breathing.

  The thought slipped.

  The entire pillar seemed to inhale, metal and stone rising by the width of a fingernail… then settling again in a long, silent exhale.

  A film of metallic lichen clung to its sides, glowing with a cold, foxfire shimmer that threw shifting blue-green shadows across the crater.

  The alchemist stepped toward a smooth, seamless section of the trunk. For a heartbeat, Dion genuinely thought he meant to knock, he lay his palm against the surface.

  The tree shuddered. It felt like it greeted him.

  Dion couldn’t tell which.

  Instead, as the Alchemist drew near, the impossible happened.

  The stone and metal of the trunk softened, flowing outward. A circular opening formed, petals of metal irising back with utter silence.

  “Step in.”