The wind howled—not like any wind Lyra had ever known. It wasn't the ragged breath of the Sinks, nor the soot-choked gusts rattling chimney bones. This wind keened like something alive, threading through the bars of her cradle with a voice caught between grief and hunger—a sound like ghosts chewing on iron.
Lyra curled tighter, arms locked around her knees, spine pressed against the aeroweave slats. The cradle groaned beneath her weight—a mesh of glyph-threaded bonewood and chitin that flexed like sinew, not timber. Every surge of wind made it shudder. Made her shudder.
Beneath, the world fell away in a smear of impossible color. Rivers unspooled like molten veins. Mountains wore crowns of perpetual storm. Embermark faded behind—a bruise of red and black on the horizon, crumbling as the Sky-Leviathan's prow tilted eastward.
She'd never been this far. Not even atop crooked smokestacks where she and Hatim once stood, daring gravity to notice. Out here, the air was thinner, meaner. Every breath felt like swallowing needles wrapped in ice. No scent of coal or city rot. Only ozone, rain-metal, and something stranger—static wrapped in silk.
The Leviathan groaned—an ancient, vertebral sound. Its belly layered in interlocking chitin plates flexing like tectonic ribs, creaking as if the sky itself strained beneath its weight. Veins of glyph-light pulsed along the hull, writhing in patterns that never resolved. Language pretending to be anatomy.
Lyra's stomach knotted—not hunger, not entirely. Vertigo. Dread.
Around her, dozens of cradles swayed—suspended from the Leviathan's underbelly by glyph-threaded sinews. Children. Adults. Strangers. Refugees, prisoners… or worse. Some cried. Some whispered. Others sat hollow-eyed, staring at nothing. A boy—maybe seven—clutched a shattered cogwheel, thumb rubbing the rusted edge raw as if it were a sacred talisman. No one truly met her gaze.
The Aeridorian Wielders moved between them.
Not soldiers. Not exactly. Not human. Wrapped in fabrics shimmering between opacity and transparency—woven from strands of glyph and memory. Skin inked with living sigils. Lines that never stayed still. Some glyphs pulsed like heartbeats. Others crawled beneath skin like parasites made of meaning.
One passed close. His gaze snagged on her wrists. Glyphs along his forearms twitched like an animal scenting prey. His eyes—flat, depthless, polished obsidian—held no curiosity. Only mechanical hunger.
His lips tugged—not a smile. An assessment.
Then he moved on.
A groan rumbled through the Leviathan's belly. With a hiss like pressurized bone, the undercarriage split open—revealing a spiral ramp of spinning air and woven light. One by one, cradles lurched, reeled upward, swallowed into the ship's gullet.
When hers jerked skyward, Lyra nearly screamed. The world dropped away. Cities collapsed into pinpricks. Rivers became thread. Forests became moss.
And then—
The Leviathan's innards.
Not a ship. Not entirely. Not like ships should be. Walls were membrane, stretched between latticeworks of breathing bone and chitin. Glyph-circuits pulsed beneath translucent skin. Veins. Arteries. The floor vibrated with a thrum that wasn't machinery.
A heartbeat.
Warm. Damp. Smelling of ozone, iron, and something floral—decay sweetened to the edge of nausea.
The chamber they were funneled into was circular—ribbed and breathing. The ceiling vanished into clouds of shadow that writhed, shifting between fractal geometry and infinite height.
Lyra pressed herself against the wall. Not stone. Not metal. Flesh pretending both. Beneath her palms, glyphs twitched. Patterns nested within patterns. She didn't understand them, but they recognized her.
A flicker. A pulse.
Resonant anomaly detected.
The wall shivered as if tasting her. She snatched her hand back, breath hitching.
Days lost shape. Hours braided into hours. The Leviathan did not land.
It traversed mountain spines scraping clouds to shreds. Glided over jungles whose canopies breathed, expanding and contracting as if the forest was a lung. Beneath were cities built inside hollowed ribs of titanic beasts. Floating strongholds drifting on monsoon winds. Rivers of molten glass. Archipelagos rearranging like living puzzles.
And stranger things.
Fields of bone, where towers rose like femurs from earth. Serpents the size of mountains coiling through violet lightning storms. Ruins half-swallowed by deserts—civilizations erased, leaving statues of beings with no mouths, no eyes.
The world was bigger than Embermark ever let her believe. Vast. Terrible. Beautiful in the way teeth are beautiful to something about to be eaten.
Food came when it came. No pattern. No kindness. Crystalline fruit fizzed and burned the tongue. Bread like compressed lightning. Water tasting of static and metal.
The Wielders spoke rarely. Voices braided vowels and consonants bending the air. Some sounds throbbed in bones, others fluttered against skin like phantom fingers.
At night, the Leviathan dimmed. Glyphs sank into a low throb, like embers buried under skin. Lyra huddled against a warm seam in the floor. Watched stars through translucent membrane.
Was Hatim staring at the same stars?
Was he even looking at the sky?
Or was he...
She squeezed eyes shut. Refused to follow the thought.
Then—
A voice. Smooth. Layered. Not heard but felt. Words warping the shape of air itself.
At the chamber's center, a figure emerged. Robes woven from captured sunrise and deep-ocean shadow. Her hands moved—sigils unraveling into glyph-constellations that floated, spun, collapsed.
"You were taken for purpose," the voice vibrated. "Not all of you will survive it. Fewer still will understand it."
The glyphs around the figure flared—burning themselves into the membrane of Lyra's vision, afterimages she'd never blink away.
Her fingertips dug into the weave of her sleeve. A small act. A tether.
She pressed her palm to the floor again—despite herself. Despite the fear.
The heartbeat of the ship answered.
Slow. Deep. Inevitable.
Embermark was gone. A smear in memory. Already decaying.
And this… this was the shape of the world beyond the walls.