They moved at dawn.
Cyril, Miren, and five other cultivator-slaves—each collared, muzzled, and watched. The Flow-seals at their necks thrummed with quiet menace, ready to detonate at Dren's whisper. Cyril walked in silence, the three pulses he'd aligned beating like drums beneath his skin.
They marched past the outer walls, past flickering pylons and rusted markers—the bones of a forgotten boundary. Beyond it stretched the wilds: untamed land warped by Flow, riddled with Spoil and worse.
That morning, Dren's voice rung through like scripture.
"The wilds teem with Spoil. Bring back what lives within… or don't return at all."
This wasn't a harvest.
It was a crucible.
Miren walked beside him, quiet and sharp-eyed. Freshly equipped. Her cloak billowed, but Cyril seen the blades beneath. She didn't spoken since they left.
She didn't need to.
He knew this was more than a hunt.
It was a test
—
The first strike came fast.
An Ember-Spoil pack—five razor-hounds with molten spines and ember-lit eyes—erupted from a ridge. Twitching, stuttering, pulsing with unstable Flow.
One lunged at a younger slave
Cyril reacted instinctively. Flow surging from his sternum, kinetic and raw. It slammed the beast sideways, bones cracking against a boulder. The rest scattered, shrieking flame and smoke.
Miren spun mid-stride, ducked a snapping jaw, and slit a throat in one smooth motion. Her blade hummed—Cyril caught the glimmer of weaving threads dancing behind it, trailing like afterimages.
Seconds. That's all it took.
The senior cultivators began harvesting cores—small and flickering, barely worth the effort.
"Ember-spoil. Weak," one muttered, flicking blood from his knife.
"If these scare you, go dig your grave now."
The younger slave grimaced at his words.
Cyril, aloof, simply stared into the horizon.
—
Later, the dunes gave way to shattered rock. The sun dipped low. That's when the Brand-Spoil came.
The vulture descended with no warning—wings like jagged stone, feathers carved in layered shale. Sigils pulsed along its beak. Its cry was a vibration that made Flow itself recoil.
One cultivator was crushed. Another immolated, screaming as a torrent of molten sand swallowed him whole.
Cyril tracked its movements. Not wild. Patterned. Flow coiled and struck in repeating loops. The thing learned as it attacked.
He baited a dive. Miren blinded it mid-air with a mirrored flash of Flow—echoing its own cry back at it, disorienting the beast just long enough for Cyril to release another shockwave, redirecting the breath weapon into the sky.
It crashed to the ground in a heap of fire and stone. Its heart still throbbing when they carved it out.
A Brand-core.
Dense.
Useful.
Dangerous.
But Miren wasn't looking at the core.
She was looking ahead.
—
On the third day, they reached the canyon.
Shard-Spoil territory.
The air shifted. Humming, tight. Flow no longer moved like water—it fractured, twisted, splintered. A dead Echo hung from the canyon wall, arms outstretched like art. No wounds. No blood. Just hollowness, as if her Flow was unraveled thread by thread.
That's when the Seraph came.
It didn't emerge.
It formed—a mirrored silhouette born of mist and quartz. Its body shimmered like shattered glass stitched together by light. Its mouth moved in voices that weren't its own.
"Don't flinch… You don't flinch for these…"
Cyril froze. That was Miren's voice—his memory of her, perfectly repeated.
It lunged.
They scattered. The air cracked—Flow lashed backward. Terrain twisted beneath them, and for a heartbeat, Cyril couldn't tell up from down.
One cultivator vanished mid-step—swallowed by a wave that reversed time for only his body. A second dropped, blood pouring from his nose as the Seraph mirrored his own flow back at him.
Miren moved.
No blade this time.
No direct strike.
She called a memory.
A shimmer of her past self split from her—an echo trailing in perfect symmetry. It darted left as she moved right. The Seraph struck the echo, its quartz claws slicing through illusion—just as the real Miren emerged behind it.
"Now!"
Cyril braced.
His Flow surged from the spine upward, stabilizing. Then from the sternum—force and focus. He struck, a kinetic blast timed with the Seraph's lurch. The impact fractured its chest, splinters of Flow-glass exploding outward.
It didn't fall.
Not yet.
It shifted again—splintered into mirrored shards that danced through the air like living blades.
Miren raised both arms.
Echoes shimmered. Not just her movements—memories. The way she'd dodged the Brand-beast. The exact pattern she'd cut down a guard in the cells. Her Flow weaved these moments into a shield around her.
"Cyril—strike its anchor!"
He focused. Mind and intent. He didn't fight the Flow. He guided it.
He aimed not at the body, but at the reflection—the distorted echo tethered to its movements.
He struck.
Glass cracked.
The Seraph screamed—not mirrored now, but raw. Its body convulsed, folding in on itself until fragments remained.
Its core glistened faintly, unstable.
A Shard-core.
Miren wrapped it in a silken weave, storing it silently.
"We go deeper."
Cyril was breathing hard. His hands shook. That wasn't a victory.
It was survival.
—
The canyon darkened.
Flow moaned.
Even the sun kept its distance.
"Crown-Spoil," Miren murmured.
"We're close."
The shape ahead was wrong. Massive. Shifting. A silhouette made of stormcloud and limbs that didn't move the way they should.
"This is where we leave."
Cyril turned. "The seals—"
"Cracked days ago," she said.
Calm.
Final.
"But we only get one chance."
Screams echoed already. The other cultivators hadn't noticed their absence.
Miren grabbed his wrist.
"Now or we die screaming."
No hesitation.
They slipped into a crevice along the canyon wall—hidden, downward.
Shrieks of terror sounded behind them.
They didn't look back.
—
Beneath, the wild was different.
Tunnels stretched into the dark. Flow pulsed, broken but alive.
Cyril could feel it—not just as a tool or weapon.
But as a current that recognized him.
Not as a slave.
Not as prey.
But something rising.
And the whisper that followed him into the dark didn't speak his name.
It spoke a truth.