The smell came before consciousness.
Crushed herbs, boiled water, and the faint bitterness of fresh resin. The air slid into his lungs too easily. No resistance. No familiar rasp. Silence was the second warning—not the silence of the room, but of his own body. For fifteen years, waking had been a violent negotiation with pain; joints grinding, ligaments screaming at the slightest movement. Now there was no internal noise. The emptiness left behind brought no relief—only the strangeness of a cell whose bars had evaporated overnight.
Eyes closed, he curbed his breath. Beneath the lavender scent of the House of Breath, something else burned: a devouring hunger. Not appetite—a furnace flaring open in his gut, demanding fuel to sustain the impossible engineering unfolding inside him.
Voices filtered through the linen curtain.
"…we don't have time for rituals, Miguel." Kahn's growl was punctuated by the heavy sound of restless pacing. "The Trumpets of Rupture weren't a warning. They were the starting shot. The Council has already unleashed the dogs."
"They'll need the Guild, Kahn." Miguel's calm was brittle. The Elder-Healer of the Order of Breath sat at the table, his ivory robes stained with fresh soil at the knees. Deep shadows carved exhaustion into his face, clashing with the rigid posture of a man carrying the weight of Solis on his shoulders. "You're a forgotten thorn—but now you're a tool. The Council won't kill its guides."
"They don't want guides. They want disposable vanguards." Kahn's palm struck the table with a dull thud. "They'll use the Guild as a spearhead to choke the monsters while the iron army marches over our corpses. I won't wait for the slaughter."
Gin felt his skin prickle. Until yesterday, the Council crushed slowly, like rust. Now, they were a hammer.
"Take Amber," Miguel pleaded. "She's special. If the Council gets hold of her… they'll turn her into a weapon. To me, she's a daughter. Don't let her become another hollow soldier."
Leather creaked as Kahn paused.
"Prepare her. We leave in an hour. And the boy?"
The silence that followed was thick, damp—saturated with the earth beneath Miguel's nails.
"We buried Celeste before dawn," Miguel whispered. "The boy needs time."
"He doesn't have time. No one does. What he did last night… that light…" Kahn hesitated. "Watch him, Miguel. No one suspects an bedridden boy."
Gin opened his eyes.
The wooden ceiling was too sharp—every grain etched with a clarity his myopic vision had never known. He sat up. The movement was fluid. No protest from his hips. The memory of light and pain still burned at the base of his neck.
The linen curtain was pulled aside abruptly. Miguel entered, balancing a wooden bowl filled with steaming gray paste. It smelled of damp sawdust and stale grain, yet it struck Gin like a punch. His stomach clenched in a violent spasm—a chemical demand that ignored taste entirely. Behind him, Kahn tightened the leather buckles of a campaign pack until they groaned.
Miguel's eyes widened. The bowl wavered.
"Gin?"
The boy stared at his hands. The pressure sores—the scars of a life spent prone—were gone. His skin was flushed with new blood, stretched over muscle that hadn't existed hours ago.
Miguel inhaled sharply, but before words came, a smell filled the space between them: cold, freshly turned earth. The same scent clinging to the healer's sleeves and nails. The furnace in his gut coiled. He didn't need to ask. The body knew before the mind. The place Celeste had occupied in the world was now a hollow filled with that cool, loamy undertone.
"Where… is she?" The question escaped on its own. He already knew.
"In the cemetery, behind the greenhouse," Miguel said, eyes scanning Gin's body with clinical disbelief. "You look… well. Go to her, Gin. You need to say goodbye. And eat this first."
Gin devoured the porridge in three spoonfuls. The energy vanished into him instantly. His feet touched the wooden floor, and for the first time, the impact didn't send lightning through his spine. The linen robe that once hung on his frail frame like a coat rack now settled across broad shoulders and long legs. Gin stood—and the room seemed to shrink.
But it wasn't the new height that disoriented him. It was the absence of a sound that had shaped his life since birth. The rasping wheeze of a punctured forge bellows—his mother's dying breath—was gone.
Kahn turned. Words failed him. The Guildmaster had to lift his chin. His eyes met Gin's on higher ground. The boy had always had the height; illness had simply folded him inward. Now the body had unfolded—slender, elongated, like a willow after the thaw.
Kahn let out a dry laugh of pure shock. The flash of joy was genuine—and gone in a breath, drowned by bitterness.
"She should be here to see this," he murmured. Then his gaze hardened on Gin. "You're not a ghost under blankets anymore, boy. They'll scent you on every corner. The plan's changed. You're coming with us."
"Kahn, he just stood up!" Miguel protested.
Kahn didn't look away. His eyes measured the width of Gin's shoulders, the steadiness of his wrists. The hand he set on the boy's shoulder wasn't comfort or initiation—it was weight. An anchor of reality demanding an immediate answer from Gin's body.
"Go to the cemetery. Say goodbye. We move now."
Gin stopped before the healer. He was half a head taller than the man who had watched him wither. He reached out and clasped Miguel's forearm—a man's grip, stripped of a patient's fragility.
"Thank you," Gin said. His voice was steady. Deep.
"Go," Miguel whispered. "Before I try to find a sickness where there's nothing left."
Kahn was already at the door, a silhouette of armed impatience. Gin didn't look back. He crossed the corridor of the House of Breath, where lavender and sickness now felt like a shroud he had just shed.
When he stepped through the threshold, the world struck him.
The sun of Solis wasn't merely light—it was physical assault. White brilliance crashed over Gin like a molten anvil. His pupils, accustomed to candlelit dusk and heavy curtains, constricted violently, turning the horizon into silver fire. He raised an arm to shield his face, but the heat had already claimed him. It was tactile, almost solid—a scalding kiss that seeped into his pores and woke the blood beneath his new skin, driving it into an urgent rhythm.
For the first time, the sun wasn't a concept observed through dusty glass. It was brute force, demanding every nerve in his reborn body recalibrate to the outside world.
As the glare stabilized into shape, he finally grasped the scale of what lay before him. The steps formed a vantage point over chaos.
Solis was no longer a city—it was a fevered organism. The port didn't pulse. It roared. Where once there had been the monotonous rhythm of industrial shifts, now boiled profitable disorder. The air was thick with fresh pitch, human sweat, and the frantic clatter of coins changing hands across makeshift counters.
Iron cranes, driven far beyond their load limits, shrieked like dying beasts as they hauled nets overflowing with supplies and weapons. Gin saw both faces of the human coin: peasants clutching bundles of old clothes, eyes glassy with terror at the new sky and an unknowable horizon; and beside them, mercenaries and scions of ruined houses, their gazes sharp with predatory light. These weren't fleeing Solis. They were hunting the future. Their hands, steady on newly sharpened sword hilts, trembled not with fear but with hungry anticipation for the virgin lands the broken Seal promised to unveil.
An era was being born—baptized in panic and gold.
Beneath the uproar, something cut through the noise. A march. Heavy. Rhythmic. Metallic.
At the top of the House of Breath's steps, the crowd parted like water before a ship's prow. The Iron Council had arrived. Not guards—the hounds.
At the center, two figures commanded a vacuum of silence.
The man was a mountain of flesh and discipline, black hair cut in strict military fashion. His expression carried restrained malice, as if violence were a private joke. His armor—a breastplate of iron so thick it resembled a shield molded to his torso—gleamed beneath the pale sun. Resting on his shoulder was a warhammer like a fused anchor.
Beside him, the girl was small, wrapped in a black cloak that fluttered in the wind. Her skin was translucent, but what froze Gin's blood was the blindfold: a strip of blood-red cloth covering eyes and ears alike. Old scars ringed her neck—the signature of long bondage.
Luna stopped. The procession halted. Kael lowered the hammer with a dull impact that rattled windows. The girl tilted her head, tasting the air. The crimson blindfold pulsed as she read the currents.
Slowly, Luna turned her face. The blindfold pointed straight at Gin.
"Rats…"
The words vibrated in the air before they were spoken.
"…leaving the nest."
Kael smiled.
Gin retreated into the shadows, heart pounding into dangerous cadence. Time for mourning was revoked. He spun on his heel and ran.
"Kahn! They're here!"
Steel rang instantly.
Outside, Luna broke formation and surged forward—flowing through the crowd like mercury, vaulting crates with inhuman speed.
"Back way! Now!" Kahn roared, hurling a supply bag at Gin.
They burst into the garden. Amber knelt in the fresh earth of Celeste's grave. At the crash, she sprang up, dirt-streaked hands raised defensively. Bronze skin and wild golden hair made her the living opposite of the death surrounding her.
"Father?" she cried, eyes wide with terror.
"Go! No questions!" Miguel shouted, shoving her toward Kahn.
Wood exploded at the front of the house. The Hounds were inside.
Kahn seized both youths and veered toward an iron-grated hatch.
"Down!"
Gin bolted. His new legs devoured ground. He left his mother's grave without farewell, carrying only the life she had purchased with her death—and the shadow of executioners closing in.