The first letter from Arlen arrived on a wet, grey morning when Al's head felt full of numbers and not much else.
He almost missed it.
Bran dropped a small bundle of post on the ledger table with his usual lack of ceremony.
"Local stuff from Greyreach and downriver," he grunted. "Sorting order: things that can ruin us today on top, things that can wait underneath, sentimental nonsense last. Don't mix them."
Al sorted.
Trade notices. A demand from a Central bank. A half-smudged bill from a Caelbrun rope-maker. At the bottom, under an overdue payment slip from a farmer, a thinner envelope—cheap paper, Sula wax, the seal barely holding.
The scrawl on the front was unmistakable.
To Al Greyfall, it read, with c/o Brindleford Trade House crammed awkwardly underneath in someone else's neater hand.
Al's heart tripped.
He wiped ink from his fingers as best he could and slid the letter open.
The handwriting inside was a storm all its own—Arlen's half-learned, half-forced script, with uneven lines and inkblots. But it was his.
Al,
I thought writing would be easier than climbing. I was wrong. My hand hurts. I blame you for being good at this and making me look worse.
Qingshan says I should tell you facts, not just complaints. Facts: Xianwu is big. Bigger than Greyreach. The mountain the Sect sits on is bigger still. Sky you can fall into if you look too long.
They woke us before dawn the first week and made us run up a path I'd call a cliff. I thought Bren was bad. Bren is a kind grandfather compared to sect trainers.
I have not died. Yet.
They say my Qi flows strong. They have me on movement arts. They call it Cloud-Stepping. I call it Falling but Not Quite. They hit us when we get it wrong. They hit us when we get it right and look smug. You would hate it.
There are other disciples. Some my age, some younger, some older. One girl from Yamatoa with eyes like she can already cut me in half. One boy from Aurelion who thinks sects are "barbaric" but can't keep up when we run. I like him a little anyway.
Qingshan is…Qingshan. He watches. Says very little. When I thought I was going to cough my lungs out on the third climb, he said, "Good. Now you know you have lungs." I wanted to hit him. Then I wanted to thank him. I did neither.
I heard from a caravan that you caught a merchant cheating in Brindleford. That's good. Hit them with your quill while I hit their hirelings with my staff. Between us, we might get a fair world. Or at least an annoyed one.
They have us meditate sometimes. I'm bad at that. I fall asleep. But I think of Greyfall when they say "find your root." I think of the ridge. Of ash. Of you getting that look like you're seeing roads no one else can.
Don't let them tell you ink is less than steel. Qingshan says "A blade moves one man. A pattern moves an army." He was looking at me when he said it. I'm now deciding he was talking about you instead.
I have to stop. The writing teacher says if I blot the page again I have to copy sutras all night. I miss kicking your ankles. Kick someone else's for me.
—Arlen
Al reread it twice, then a third time, each pass unknotting something tight inside his chest and tying it differently.
He could almost hear Arlen's voice between the crooked lines. Could see him, taller, sunburned, tumbling up impossible paths, swearing at cold stone and silent elders.
A warm hand landed on his shoulder. Selene leaned over, eyes flicking to the page.
"Good," she said. "He's not dead."
Al swallowed a laugh. "Or if he is, he writes well for a corpse."
"He always was stubborn," she said. Her gaze lingered on one line. A pattern moves an army.
"Who wrote that?" she asked.
"His elder," Al said. "Qingshan."
"Smart man," she murmured. "Steals my lines from half a continent away."
She straightened. "Write back," she said. "After you finish those cross-checks."
"Yes, mistress."
She squeezed his shoulder once and moved away.
Al folded the letter carefully, tucking it into the small pouch at his belt with Jana's map and Ressa's knife.
Ressa.
He made a mental note: next letter to Greyfall, he'd copy some of these nonsense complaints and send them to her too. She'd like mocking Arlen for "Cloud-Stepping."
He bent back over the manifests, but the world looked a little less sharp-edged now. His brother was alive, grumbling, learning. That mattered.
It also sharpened something else: a quiet urgency.
If Arlen was climbing toward being a blade, the games being played along Sula's roads—the ones Rhett had hinted at—might be the whetstones and grindstones waiting for him.
Al didn't want those stones to be in hands that would grind until all that was left of his brother was someone else's weapon.
He dragged a new sheet toward him.
Time to map.
The map grew faster than he expected.
At first, it was just lines and names: Brindleford to Kharas Gate, Kharas Gate to Greyreach, Greyreach down into deeper Sula. He marked villages he knew by rumor or from Selene's stories: Red Hollow, Ashford, Broken Pike. He dotted in major Nexuses with a small circle—the ones the Gilded Compass maps in the Archive mentioned: an old Standing Stone field near Red Hollow, a Ley Spring rumored farther south, a Hollowed Ruin on the edge of a forest older than most nations.
Then he layered on contracts.
Each suspicious run got a thin line in red: who hired it, what it claimed to carry, how much was paid, what hazard bonuses were included, whether Paragon or other escorts were recorded.
Patterns began to show.
"See this?" he said later that day, jabbing his quill at a tangle around Red Hollow when Seryn and Bran leaned over at Orren's gesture. "Three separate expeditions, different sponsors, all using similar routes between here and here."
He traced a rough triangle: Brindleford – Red Hollow – a blank space farther east where the map's ink thinned.
"And here," he said, tapping that blank, "is where reports stop. No returns. No follow-up contracts. No demand for refunds. If these were honest academic expeditions or seal support, someone would have raised a fuss when the wagons didn't come back."
"Unless the people funding them don't want anyone asking where their money went," Seryn said.
"Or they got what they wanted," Bran muttered. "Or got eaten by something and decided arguing with it about refunds was above their pay grade."
Orren stroked his beard. "What's around there?"
"According to Compass charts," Al said, shuffling through a smaller map, "old Aurion-era ruins. Crown-Scars. A half-buried Titan or two if you believe Beastkin songs. And at least one minor Southern Ward outpost that's supposed to keep an eye on Weave flares."
"That's a lot of interesting in one patch of dirt," Seryn said. "Too much."
"It gets better," Al said quietly. He slid another sheet onto the table.
Orren squinted. "That's…bank marks."
"Credit lines," Al said. "For the last year, we've seen increased credit transfers from certain Central houses into accounts linked to Sula's deeper regions. Not just ordinary trade financing. Off-ledger stuff. Loans that aren't being repaid, on paper. Credits that loop back to the same limited set of names and sigils."
He pointed to a cluster of symbols: a stylized tower, an abstract dragon, a broken sun. Different hands. Same neighborhood.
"Someone with money in Central and influence in both Aurelion and Xianwu is funneling resources through smaller fronts into the same area," Al said. "Money, people, goods. None of it in the obvious books."
Bran whistled softly. "How did you…?"
"I got bored last week," Al said. "And Orren lets me see more than he should."
"Accurate," Orren said. "Go on."
"If I draw it like this," Al said, sketching quickly, "it looks like an ordinary tangle." He circled the sigils individually. "But if you ignore the names and just look at the directions of the flows—credit out, goods not returning, no formal claims—you get this."
He connected them with quick lines. The sigils formed a rough ring around that same blank patch on the Sula map.
"Like they're all feeding a hole," Seryn said softly.
Rhett's words echoed in Al's ears. Digging through old bones without telling the Wardens.
"Do we know if the Wardens know?" Bran asked.
"Does it matter?" Orren said. "If they do and they're letting it happen, they're complicit. If they don't, someone's playing games in their back yard."
He rubbed his temple. "Rhett will love this. And by 'love' I mean swear and drink more."
Al hesitated. "There's one more thing."
"Of course there is," Seryn said. "Go on, spider."
"At least one of the sigils," Al said, pointing to the broken sun note, "matches something in the northern side of our ledgers. Old contracts. From Black Anvil. Before I got here."
Orren's head snapped up. "You're sure?"
Selene, who'd slipped in quietly halfway through and was now leaning against the doorframe, straightened too.
Al swallowed. "The ink's old, but the hand is the same. The same sigil appears on shipments we took from a 'Volsh Consortium' two years ago. Mixed Essence gear. Cheap. Poor quality. We don't take their goods anymore—there were…issues—but the mark's there."
"Volsh," Selene said slowly. "That was the group we cut ties with after that cursed shipment almost gave half the dockhands breathing fits."
"And after the Frostbound Orders sent a letter requesting we cease trade with any firm using that sigil," Orren added grimly. "On pain of being labeled 'sympathetic to infernal adjacent operations.' I remember. I don't like letters that include phrases like 'on pain.'"
"So," Seryn concluded, "someone who got told 'no' up north may have taken their toys south."
"Or has ties both ways," Al said. "Either way, the same money scent is in both places."
Silence again.
Then Orren blew out a breath. "Rhett gets the lot. Maps, credit webs, sigils. Copies of everything we can risk. And a very stern note about not dying before he sends word back."
Selene nodded. "I'll send a copy to the Archivists' Compact in Central as well. Quietly. They track this sort of thing. And to Edran, through Greyfall. However big this is, the Threads down there should know which way the knife is coming from."
Al's chest tightened at the mention of home. "Greyfall…"
Selene's eyes softened. "We'll word it so he doesn't think you're already neck-deep in something you're not," she said. "No need to give your mother palpitations yet."
"She already has two sons trying their best," Al said. "Palpitations come free."
Seryn clapped him lightly on the back. "Welcome to the part of the world where ink leads to demons."
"I thought that was all of it," Al said dryly.
"Now you're learning."
That evening, by the dim light of an oil lamp in the loft, Al wrote.
Not ledgers or summaries or Orren's notes for Rhett, but an honest letter to Greyfall.
Mother, Father, Mira, Ressa, Jana, Bren, Edran (and Toren if someone reads this out loud and he's close enough to hear),
Brindleford is big. No, not as big as what Arlen describes, but bigger than our whole field and then some. There are more smells, mostly bad, and more people, mostly loud.
I am safe. Much safer than if I had followed Arlen to his mountain. Don't let this letter make you think otherwise. Selene would hit me with a ledger if I lied.
I am also seeing things. Not Blight—not like that day in the fields. Not full Weave. But hints. Smears. People who lie in ink more than in words. Patterns in contracts that look like rivers feeding into the same sinkhole.
There is a Paragon scout here named Rhett. He's looking for missing teams in Sula. I'm helping him by finding where the ink says "this is fine" and the numbers say "this is not fine." It feels…important. In the way that makes my stomach feel like I ate bad fish.
Edran once told me that when you touch threads, you can't just pretend you didn't. He was right. (Yes, you may read that sentence back to him with smugness.)
Please don't worry too much. I am in a trade house, not a war camp. The only things flying at my head most days are Bran's complaints and the occasional quill.
Ressa, if you're listening: there is a thief here who is almost as good with pockets as you. Almost. You'd like her. I haven't decided yet whether to report her or learn from her. (This is a joke. Mostly.)
Jana, thank you again for the map. I am adding to it. Don't tell Selene I drew on her good paper.
Mira, there are no dragons here. Only big fish. Tell Arlen your dragon is winning.
Father, I am eating. Enough. I know that's your first question.
Mother, I am careful. Enough. I know that's yours.
I don't know how long I'll stay in Brindleford. Long enough to make the ink worth it. Long enough to understand more of the roads. When I come back, I want to see Greyfall with different eyes and still love it the same.
Your son, who trips more over numbers than spears now,
—Al
He sanded the letter, folded it, and sealed it with simple plain wax. Selene would add the Trade House mark to ensure it hit Greyfall on the next run.
He wrote a shorter note to Arlen:
Arlen,
Survived my first storm that didn't involve ash. Survived my first thief. Survived my first box full of contracts that all pointed to the same hole in Sula and made my head hurt.
You climb mountains. I swim in ink. Qingshan says patterns move armies. We may both find out what happens when someone else tries to move them for us.
Don't fall off any cliffs without telling me first.
—Al
He smiled at that last line, imagining Arlen's snort, then sealed the letter.
Down in the Trade House tonight, he knew Orren and Rhett and Seryn would be arguing over which routes to avoid and which to watch, which names to trust and which to quietly mark as dangerous.
Up here, in the quiet loft, Al lay back on the straw mattress and let himself breathe.
He could feel it now, in a way he wouldn't have been able to name back in Greyfall: the faint hum of Essence lines along the river, the muted press of a dozen Novice and Adept Pneuma signatures sleeping under the same roof, the distant static of Malice and Miasma at the edges of the world where things were being prodded awake.
He was small. A Spark and a Novice and a boy with more questions than answers.
But threads touched him now from multiple directions: a brother's letter from a far-off mountain, a priest's old warnings from a smoky shrine, a trade factor's rough trust, a scout's half-desperate hope, a mage's reluctant lessons.
"Not nothing," he murmured to the dark. "Just…at the start."
The river whispered. The beams above creaked.
Al closed his eyes, and for once, sleep came without dreams of spears or falling.
Only of maps, and roads, and a web that, if he was very careful, he might learn to move without snapping.