The new, gruesome awareness of the Echo Fevers had paralyzed them. The attack on Warehouse 7 was deferred indefinitely, the carefully detailed maps now reminders of a foolish, past game plan. Their conflict had migrated to the metaphysical realm, a battle Alexander felt completely ill-equipped to fight. How did one fight a "world-soul corrupted"? How did one purge the very atmosphere?Without a master plan, they fell back on the basics. The lines of the sick still formed daily. Alexander could not, in good conscience, turn them away. But his healing had changed. It was now a tenuous, high-wire calculation. For lesser ailments, he used only the herbal remedies, the Healing Truth's energy too valuable and its potential backlash too great to risk anything. For the worst cases, the Bloom victims, the children who died, he still reached for the fire, but now with a prayer in his mouth—a prayer that the void he created would not be filled with anything worse before the natural resilience of

The decision to escalate, to answer mass industrial poisoning with purging fire, was one that Alexander never imagined crossing. It didn't feel so much a decision, and more like a falling into an abyss his enemies had prepared for him. The cold rage that had replaced his despair was a brittle shield, and he clung to it, aware that in its bottom was a bottomless chasm of grief for the healer he had hoped to be.But before he could even start to plot the impossible attack on the factory of poison, a new war front was opened. It was a diplomatic one, given not by assassins or poisoned pies, but by seal and parchment.A procession arrived at The Guttering Candle. It was not City Guards. They were older men, in formal, slightly archaic robes of the City Medical Guild. They carried themselves with an air of institutional authority that was older, and in a sense more terrifying than the simple force of the guards. They were not armed, but carried scroll cases.His superior was a man Alexande

The cell was not what Alexander expected. It was not a dank oubliette but a sterile, white-walled room deep beneath the Hall of Verdicts. There was a cot, a chair, and a drain in the center of the floor. The air hummed with a faint, magical suppression field that made his connection to the Obelisk feel distant and muffled, like a radio signal through a storm. They hadn’t used iron bars; they’d used science and sorcery to build a cage for a phenomenon they couldn’t understand.This was to be his laboratory. His prison. The place where he would be “studied.”The first “session” came within hours. Two men in Guild robes, their faces obscured by functional masks, entered. They did not speak. One held a clipboard, the other a long, silver needle attached to a complex pump mechanism.“You will submit to a blood draw,” the one with the clipboard said, his voice flat through the mask’s filter.Alexander’s instinct was to recoil. To fight. The Hands of Purifying Fire stirred sluggishly against

The sterile cell had become a crucible. Alexander’s world had shrunk to the hum of the suppression field and the terrifying, boundless horizon of his own power. The ability to rewrite memory was a ghost in the room, a specter of absolute control that whispered seductive solutions to every problem. He had spent a sleepless night wrestling with the moral abyss, the Carving of Courage the only thing keeping him from being swallowed whole by the implications.He was pulled from his grim reverie by the sound of the door hissing open. This time, it was not the masked attendants or Bromley. It was two City Guards, their faces grim, and between them, they carried a small, limp form.It was a girl. No older than five. Her name, he would later learn, was Lira. Her skin was waxy and pale, stretched tight over delicate bones. Her breathing was a shallow, rapid flutter, each inhalation a visible effort. Her Active Scan, even through the suppression field, painted a devastating picture:[Patient: L

The space where the cell door had hung shivered, a wound in the fabric of his prison. Outside was the cold, white corridor, empty and quiet. The shriek of the suppression field was gone, replaced by a ringing silence that was heavier than any noise. Alexander stepped across the threshold, half-again in the tomb of his failure, half-again in the unknown.He did not look back at Lira's small form. The image seared in him, a permanent element of his blueprint. To look back was to allow the despair the Obelisk's rage briefly singed from his heart. Her death was not one to hold in mind; it was a compass, and its tip now only one way: forward, in rage.He moved through the gap.The air in the corridor was different. It was still the odorless, recycled air of the complex, but to his heightened senses, freed from the distortions of the suppression field, it tasted of ozone and adrenaline. His Truth-Sense, now freed, spread out like a waking limb, mapping the complex around him. He felt the gu