Radeon felt his blood turn cold on command, forced down by something he could not see.
It was almost gentle. Like a mother's hand laid on a fevered brow, except the comfort was a lie and the fingers were not hers.
The calm did not belong to him. That was what scraped at him.
Not pride. Not fear. It was the simple fact of it. People doing as they pleased because it made sense to them, because it was necessary, because they could.
He almost laughed at his own thoughts. He was no better, was he. He swallowed the bite of that and kept carving.
Calls boomed through the carved walls, bouncing back until the mountain sounded crowded with unseen mouths.
"First through fifth, swing wide on the left. Prepare to flank."
"Alchemists, issue blood-poison bombs to every ranker. This is it."
The camp answered without thinking, bodies shifting into places they had practiced too many times.
Drilled. Clean. Efficient. Radeon watched it happen and felt his jaw tighten.
Their evil did not make them sloppy. If anything, it had made them mature in all the ways that mattered when steel started moving.
His hands kept moving even as the Ashlime Crag trembled. He set the windstones into their housings one by one, thumb pressing until each piece seated with a soft click.
The hoverstones followed, their edges biting at the bamboo. He bound them in place with cord and copper line, cinching every knot until it hurt.
Then he took the reinforcement coating Jekyll had given him and brushed it along the joints.
It went on slick and dark, seeping into the cuts he had made, sealing them like old wounds. The smell of it was sharp, almost sweet, and it clung to his fingers.
'Too bad the cloak won't last long.'
The cloak he had bargained for from that thing in the void came with a leash.
It would be taken back after an hour and a half, no pleading, no refund. Radeon could feel the time thinning. He had only thirty minutes of it left.
Radeon glanced at the cloak and felt a grim sort of satisfaction.
Forty eight lengths of bamboo, shaved and joined until they moved as one.
At the back hung the stone. A pale lump of alabaster a little bigger than a man's head, lashed tight so it would not tear free on the first hard gust.
Its white face was now drowned under an opaque obsidian sheen against the cloth. Unassuming. Obscured, unless someone laid a hand on it on purpose.
He fed a thread of energy into it. The response was immediate. Lightness bit at the frame.
The cloak tugged at his shoulders like it wanted to climb the air on its own, and for a heartbeat the whole thing nearly lifted off the ground.
'Now, I just need to collect the blood crystal.'
Radeon went out of the seclusion cave, his feet steady, the living quarters felt emptier than before. This time he was going without any knowledge of the cultists movements.
"Disappear."
Radeon neared the alchemical rooms and tested each door with his palm.
Heat bled through every plank. All of them had been used, recently, hard enough that the wood still held the warmth.
There was no time to be gentle.
He chose the worst of the eight. The one that stank of sour resin and old smoke. He shoved it open.
Empty. No bodies. No apprentices. No clutter.
The shelves had been stripped bare. Herbs, tools, even the broken cauldron that had always sat like a dead animal in the corner.
Gone. It was too clean, the kind of clean that meant someone had fled on purpose.
Suspicion crept up his throat.
He knelt by the brazier and dug into the coal with two fingers. The ash was still soft.
The core beneath held a faint bite of heat. A few hours old at most.
Radeon knew the call that moved people like this. He knew the teams that were named in the dark, the ones drilled into every cultist until they could answer half asleep.
He had not been assigned. Not officially. His previous merit had bought him rest, a quiet corner and the illusion that the machine would keep turning without him.
It was a lapse. A stupid one. He should have asked. He should have grabbed anyone with a mouth and a scrap of rank and forced an answer out of them.
But he had been trapped for two days, pinned under the scrutiny of Jekyll, and the world had not waited for his questions.
'Best move now is the long tunnel. I say Jekyll sent me somewhere. Guard should buy it.'
Radeon shut the door softly and went down to the blood pool.
The stink that had soaked the place was thinning now, the copper bite fading like an old bruise.
He crouched by the crimson surface and flicked a needle into it. The needle kissed the pool and sank too fast.
The viscosity had fallen away in steps, as if the blood had been stretched, watered, and stripped of its thickness.
Radeon's pulse ticked harder. He snapped two more needles into his fingers and rushed their swing toward the middle of the array.
The points hit their marks with soft clicks. He twisted his wrist and opened the array lid.
Light answered, dull and red. A crimson ruby floated above the lines, hanging there like a suspended heart.
Half a forearm long, heavy with stolen color. Radeon's throat tightened. He turned for the door.
Footsteps. Close. Not the lazy shuffle of a cultist. Measured. Sure. The latch moved and the door swung inward.
Radeon did not breathe. He snapped the cloak over himself and vanished.
He dove back toward the trapdoor, using the blood stink and shadow as cover.
Through the thin veil of the cloak he pushed his sight into what was not quite material, forcing his vision past the lie.
The figure in the doorway was not one of cultists.
A swordsman. Gilded core. Righteous sect. The kind that made blades sing.