Night had a different gravity in Blackspire. It didn't fall so much as congeal—heavy, slow, full of the kinds of smells that told you how this place lived and how it died. Ezra moved through it with the careful, small steps of someone learning how to read a language from flickers and scents: the sour tang of fermented root-sacks, the oily sweetness of lamp smoke, the copper-sour of old blood that never fully dries in a city built on ruined vows.
The market lanes were a maze of patched canvas and rusted iron, lit by jars of pale, sputtering flame. Merchants hawked everything from brittle charms that hummed faintly when you pointed at them, to jars of preserved Qi-blackened teeth, to shawls woven with thread that claimed to keep spirit beasts at bay. Scraps of song drifted from a far alley; a child tried to sell a broken wind-chime and was shooed away by a woman with soot under her nails.
Ezra kept his hood low. The mark at his chest burned like a coal behind cloth, a private warmth that made him twitch when he moved too fast. His sleeve had curled, the tattoo-line along his wrist visible beneath torn denim: the first coil of a serpent-shaped band, as if his skin were being written on by a hand that didn't aim to ask permission. Each breath made it pulse perceptibly, and every stranger's glance felt keyed to it even when they looked elsewhere.
He chose his first destination not for comfort but for utility—a tavern whose sign was a black fang, crooked and hammered into a slab of driftwood. The Hollow Fang promised two things: cheap ale and an excellent concentration of information. In Blackspire, the two were often the same currency.
Inside smelled of old ale, wet wool, and the faint electric tang of bottled Qi. Lanterns hung from iron arms, jars inside them boiling with captured motes of light. The bar was a slab of scorched wood, scarred by blades and problems too large to name. Faces turned as he came in—sharp eyes, flat stares, the practiced curiosity of people who traded in other people's fortunes.
He took a seat at the far end, by a cracked window that looked out over the alley he'd come from. Perfect for watching movement. Perfect for not being watched first.
A man in a threadbare cloak slid into the seat beside him without asking. He smelled of oil and old ink, and his fingers were stained with the black residue of tattoo pigment. "You're new," the man said, voice like a file. "Either that, or you're very good at pretending."
Ezra tilted his head. "Neither. I'm just looking for work and information."
The man chuckled. "Honest answers rarely fetch coin here. Name's Rook." He traced a crude design on the table with a finger—an hourglass trapped in a circle. "What brings a stray like you to Blackspire? The Concord rarely misses a stray that looks like it might be more."
Ezra swallowed. He wasn't ready to say anything about the mark. He'd already felt its hunger; he did not want the city to feel it first.
"Passing through," he said. "Hunting for survivors, maybe a lead on—" He trailed off. It would sound strange, even here. Absorption was a rumor at best, a myth at worst.
Rook's eyes flicked down, and for a heartbeat something almost like recognition softened the man's expression. "You're not the first to think survival is just about not dying," he said, half to himself. "Come, you'll want to listen tonight. A caravan's due—Ironveil goods, rare elixir stashes. Plenty of teeth in the crowd."
The Hollow Fang did what taverns did: it bled stories. A woman on the platform sang a low tune about a sect that burned its novices to refine them. A trio of mercenaries argued about which clan's blood was worth more on the market. At a corner table, a pair of scouts whispered names like tally marks—"Vermilion Fang… Hollow Ice… Golden Lotus"—and the way they spat the names was almost reverence, almost curse.
Ezra watched, cataloguing details like an algorithm learning the shape of a stranger's face. His absorption markers—small, suffused lights under his skin—fevered when talk broke toward something darker. A drunk, shoving his mug too hard, barked a laugh and, in full voice, said: "You heard about the one who eats Qi? Say he walks in here, and half of you'll cry to your gods."
Laughter, thin as thread, followed. For a moment, the breath of the room steadied—an audience waiting for a trick. Ezra felt the mark twitch. He kept his hands on his knees, steady.
Movement at the door pulled his attention. Two men dragged a third between them, bound with a strip of leather in a way that made the fellow's shoulders slump in resignation. He'd lost something—pride, pride and the coin to buy the kind of gruel that gave you the strength to boast. They shoved him to the floor near Ezra's feet, and one of the guards at the bar went to take his coin.
In Blackspire, coin or blood could be sold for the same weight. The bound man had neither.
One of the bar's usual predators—broad-shouldered, with a grin like a split stone—decided the man had more entertainment value than value in his pockets. He kicked him for sport. The room watched, the way a tide watches a stone settle.
Ezra watched too. He watched how the attacker's balance gave, where his hips shifted, how the boot vector created a tiny opening under the ribcage. Not much—only the length of a breath. He should have looked away. He should have been wise and detached.
Instead he moved. Not because compassion made him foolish—because he recognized a lesson inside the violence: individuals drop power like fruit when they fall. A man dying gives up more than coins.
He didn't bargain. He only stepped forward, palms open, voice low. "Enough." The word landed like a coin on the bar. It felt absurdly small.
The broad-shouldered man looked at him, then at the empty plate where the bound man's coin used to sit. "You mind your business, stranger," he said, laugh brittle as snapped reed.
Ezra's reply was a motion. He tugged the man's arm with a twist—simple, nothing flashy—and the attacker's forward momentum turned against him. The man's balance broke. He stumbled into the table, knocking mugs, and when he reached to right himself, something precise found a vulnerable line. Ezra's palm brushed skin—not the open wound of a killing strike, but the exposed place where Qi often pools under stress. He felt it then: a tightness, a small candle-flame's worth of essence.
The mark pulsed. A whisper rose—not a command but a suggestion. Take. Keep. Learn.
He took. Not with hunger but with practiced economy. It wasn't a feast—merely a sip—enough to steady his muscles and thicken the clarity in his head. The broad-shouldered man found himself dizzy and clumsy, breath shallow. The room muttered. People noticed the turn in the fight; a stray hand grabbed for a weapon and found his own reflexes dull.
The skirmish ended as all minor skirmishes do in Blackspire: blood on wood, a quiet curse, and the shifting attention of a dozen souls. The bound man—who had intended nothing grand beyond surviving one more night—pressed his forehead to Ezra's knee in a crude, instinctive thank you. Ezra felt a residue of warmth settle in his chest, and when he flexed his wrist, the tattoo had crawled another inch up his forearm, a thin black tendril coiling toward his elbow.
Rook, who had been watching from the bar, knocked a coin against the wood and called, "You've got good reflexes for a stray." His voice carried neither scorn nor warmth, only interest. "Name's Rook. If you're staying, find me after—there's a thin line between being useful and being prey here. And the mark you bear? Don't show it to the Concord."
A dozen questions crowded Ezra's mind—what was the Concord's reach? Who else knew of marks like his? But the mark itself was loud in his blood, humming like a bell. He let the questions sit. Information here, he knew, was something that arrived when it wanted to, not when he asked.
He took a small room above the tavern for a price that would have made his old self wince, and lay awake on a pallet while the city sang and argued below. The tattoo on his arm shivered in the dark like an insect. The whisper in his skull was softer now, braided with a new certainty: Each claim leaves writing. Each writing can be learned. Master it, and hunger becomes language.
He rolled onto his back and watched the single slit of sky over Blackspire—the bruise of heaven, streaked with gold. Far off, a bell chimed; someone sheathed a sword and swore softly at a bad joke. Ezra held the moment like a page and turned it over in his head. He wasn't a genius yet. He had no lineage, no sanctioned teacher, no holy scroll to press between his hands.
But he had an appetite that obeyed rules, and a mind that read rules like a map. In a city that prized lineage and scripture, that combination could be either a weapon or a curse.
Under the pallet, a moth batted at a sliver of light. Up above, from the shadowed eaves, someone watched him—just a silhouette at first, then the tilt of a head. Ezra felt eyes on him and did not look back. He didn't need to know yet whether the watcher was friend or fang. The night had taught him one thing: in Aetherion, attention rarely came for free.
He closed his eyes, feeling the mark settle. The tattoos crept. The hunger pulsed. And the long work of becoming began, one small, dangerous lesson at a time.