A thin wind slipped through a missing tile and guttered the last spark in the lantern. Darkness swelled, but Jang let it come; after long nights inside this box of soot he could read the room by texture alone—the way ash whispered underfoot, the quiet tick of cooling chain, the faint glow that still breathed from splinters where the staff had broken.
His heartbeat finally settled into a steady drum. Power for what? The question gnawed, scuffing the edges of his earlier thrill. He pictured the courtyard at dawn, rows of grey-corded drudges hunched while a lash traced welts the color of rust. The same strength that had twisted wood tonight could just as easily carve another back tomorrow. If I can't wield it for them, I'm only widening the gap.
Something like a laugh—light, rueful—floated across memory. Won-Il's laugh, the one that had tried to make ember-rain a joke. "Hot welcome, isn't it?" Jang almost answered aloud before the emptiness reminded him the shed walls kept no company.
Enough.
He stooped and searched among the splinters until his fingers closed on the largest shard: a palm-length spike hardened by age, tip jagged where the grain had sheared clean. Instinct said keep it. He bound the point in a strip of rag and slid it beside the fragment copy in his hidden hem—wood for muscle, ink for marrow, both feeding the same quiet fire.
The beam that served as his calendar waited. Three shallow cuts already scarred the grain; each marked a dawn wrestled from fatigue, a breath count surpassed, a new layer of agony folded into resolve. He pressed the nail point, worked slow deliberate pressure until fresh cedar curled away. A fourth slash. Two dawns left.
Ash motes shook free of the scoring and drifted through the dark like muted stars. They settled on his shoulders, his lashes, the half-healed frost stains the balm had left along the backs of his hands. He closed his eyes and imagined each fleck an ember poised between dying grey and living glow. All it needed was air.
Outside, a crow tore the hush with a single ragged caw. A heartbeat later the low bronze bell tolled from the lower yard—first call for forge crews. The night had surrendered while he worked; violet seeped into the cracks around the door, washing the shed in the color of tired bruises.
Jang wiped his cheeks with a sleeve already striped black, smudging soot into war-paint. Fingers brushed the fresh tally in the beam one last time, sealing a silent oath between skin and wood.
"Two more embers," he whispered to the empty shed, voice low as banked coals, "then the mountain."
He lifted the bar, eased the door open a thumb's width. Cold air slipped over the sill carrying the tang of quenched iron from distant forges. No footsteps, no glow of patrol lanterns. He stepped out, drawing the door closed until the latch clicked soft as a breath. Behind him, the splintered staff pieces cooled; ahead, the courtyard stones waited, slick with dew, ready to record the next set of prints.
The fire under his ribs did not sleep, but it burned steady now—no flare, no sputter—just the patient heat of charred heartwood preparing, at last, to bloom.