The coppery taste of blood clung as a persistent ghost on his tongue, a grim reminder of the Obelisk's prophecy. Alexander lay out on the cold planks of the bell tower, the vision of the cracking, bleeding monolith burned into his mind. You are starving it. You are killing us both. The reality was a weight around his neck, heavier than anything that the City Council could build. He was a cracked cistern, leaking out his life and the Obelisk's power for personal miracles while the city's disease simmered systemically.He couldn't keep healing. The anguished cries that nudged against his Truth-Sense were harpoons in his own heart. But he couldn't keep answering every one of them with a death-dealing expenditure of his own vitality. The Hands of Purifying Fire were a double-edged sword. He required a scalpel. He required a means of healing that wouldn't cost him his own life to do.The answer came not in the guise of a quest, but in a quiet, desperate thought. The Obelisk was a storehous

The tenement was called the "Weaver's Nest," a crumbling five-story anthill of human lives where the city's textile workers resided, loved, and died in air thick with cotton dust and despair. The Crimson Bloom had found fertile soil here, its symptoms raging by day-to-day inhalation of particulates. It was not just an epidemic; it was a biological inferno.Alexander stood in the doorway of the thin alley that opened on the Nest, Sophia at his elbow. The air stank. It was filled with the sickly-rotten smell of cholera, the underlying, nipping tartness of fear. His Bio-Scry map was a nightmare. The entire building pulsed a solid, throbbing red, so heavy with disease that lives were smeared together into one bellowing patch of agony. Dozens of orange spots—City Guards—pared out an ill-formed, ineffective cordon across the block, their purpose not to help, but to corral the dying until they could be effectively dragged away."We can't enter," Sophia stated, her voice pinched with a profes

The clinic was a living thing, a monster of hope and need that breathed in the ill and breathed out the cure, or at least the steadied. Alexander moved through it like its center, a presence of unhuman composure at the storm's eye. His Active Scan was a low-level hum, a sixth sense that allowed him to sort the wounded with superhuman haste. A touch here, a whispered word there, a vial of purple tincture into an open hand. To the privileged few, the most extreme cases, a moment of intense willpower, a blinding flash of scarlet light at his fingers, and a consequent, gasping fall against a wall as the toll is exacted.Sophia was the heartbeat. She organized the volunteers, watched over the dwindling supplies, cleaned wounds, and reassured the dying when Alexander was too spent or needed elsewhere. She was his anchor, his translator, the mediator between his otherworldly talent and the cruel, human realm of suffering around them.And pressure was etching its way onto her, too. The calm,

The blood on his face split and dried into a crusty brown plate. Alexander still felt the ghost heat, a cold, accusing jolt to the numb, icy chill spreading through his soul. The marketplace had been evacuated, with nothing but wreckage of fear remaining: overthrown baskets, trampled fruits, and two bodies swathed in coarse sacking. One, a victim of a poison he had pushed into forgetfulness. The other, a casualty of a poison to which he had no antidote: human cruelty.The City Guards arrived late, their orange signature creeping along on his Bio-Scry map in a creeping, bureaucratic delay. They asked him questions, took notes, and viewed Alexander as the nuisance, not the informant. The official version, he realized, would be twisted. Fire-Scribe's Attempt at Healing Culminates in Tragic Violence. The narrative was already being written by hands that were unseen.In the attic bedroom, Sophia tried to clean him up. She used a wet cloth to gently remove the blood from his face, her hands

The city burned. Ethan Ward's secret had been the spark, and now a low, smoldering cloud of fury and fear was churning out of every ward. The Council acted swiftly and ruthlessly. The City Guards were everywhere, their presence no longer a passive containment but an angry occupation. The Whisper was declared seditious literature. Possession was a crime for which one could be imprisoned. The printers at the Inkwell went underground, their presses silent under cover of raid and arrest.Ethan Ward was the city's most sought after, second only to the Fire-Scribe himself. He slunk along in sewers and abandoned tunnels like a rat, but this was a rat on purpose. The release of the truth had been the first punch. Now he had to ensure that it wasn't a knockout punch. He had to find the one person who could make revelation into revolution.Finding the lair of the Fire-Scribe had not been as hard as he had thought. Secrets were currency that they spent sparingly in a city whose walls and windows