WAYFARER: CLAIM THE UNCLAIMABLE

The portal collapsed before Arch could see where it had taken Angle. He remained on the broken flower with blood soaking one side of his coat, a spear wound through his lower armor and the Siphon Aegis hanging from his arm in fractured pieces of light. Rovan approached from the front while Selyn and several other Eclipse members spread around him, but nobody rushed. They had watched Arch hold the route while his Condition collapsed around him, and wounded or not, none of them seemed eager to discover what he could still do.

Arch wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked past them toward the scarred moon hanging above Maelor. Then his eyes shifted toward the empty space where Angle’s portal had vanished. Something in his expression changed, not fear or relief, but recognition of a thought he had carried for much longer than this fight.

”I read something once,” Arch said, his breathing rough enough to break the rhythm of the words. ”When the moon chases the sun, a father shall stand where the road loses its light, and when the son looks back...”

Maelor turned his head.

The air between them compressed with a crack.

The strike crossed the canyon before anyone surrounding Arch could react and punched directly through his throat. His sentence vanished into a wet burst of breath as the front of his neck collapsed beneath the pressure. The broken Aegis flickered around his forearm, but his body had already stopped obeying him. His knees hit the amber before he folded onto one side, fingers still half closed around the dead gauntlet.

Rovan stared down at him for a second, his metal-covered arm still raised. Selyn’s eyes moved from Arch to Maelor, then toward the upper rim where Gant and Cestor were still fighting. Whatever the rest of the prophecy had been, Arch took it with him. Another Eclipse member stepped across the amber beside his hand as Maelor’s voice reached them through the grinding canyon.

”Cestor is still here.”

That was enough. Rovan launched toward the upper bloom while Selyn and the others followed, leaving Arch where he had fallen. The battle shifted away from him so quickly that within moments the loudest sounds near his body were snapping silk, falling debris and the scrape of spores gathering across the flower.

Maelor’s gravity dragged shattered shop frames and pieces of canyon wall upward while Gant pulled marked debris across the current from different directions. Cestor stood near the rim with parasites streaming around him, using every opening Gant created to force swarms toward the Eclipse members closing from below. Rovan smashed through one marked slab with his transformed arm, while Selyn cut through a cluster of parasites before they could reach her face.

Not every Eclipse member joined them.

A few metres lower, Tavian sagged between the roots of his own flower. His hands were still pressed against the living surface, but his skin had gone almost grey beneath the blood covering his face. The roots pulsed around him while each breath came shallower than the last.

Selyn saw him and stopped.

”Tavian.”

He did not answer.

Two Eclipse members broke away before she could give an order. One grabbed Tavian beneath the arms while the other pulled his hands from the flower. The roots resisted for a moment, thin red strands clinging around his fingers before tearing loose. Blood immediately coated both rescuers’ gloves.

”He’s lost too much,” one of them said.

Selyn looked toward Maelor, then back at Tavian. Her jaw tightened. ”Get him out. Don’t wait for us.”

The two lifted Tavian between them and carried him toward the upper routes. His head rested against one rescuer’s shoulder without resistance, and neither man complained about the blood soaking through their sleeves. Whatever Eclipse had become to the people outside it, Tavian was still theirs.

Above them, Cestor watched Maelor through the gaps in his swarm. ”We will clash properly,” he said. ”But not here. This is too soon.”

Maelor’s expression hardened as loose nails, broken blades and pieces of stone began rising around him. ”You don’t decide when this ends.”

Cestor tilted his masked face. ”Not ends. Begins.”

Maelor attacked before he could say more. Gant ripped several marked flower ribs from the bloom and dragged them across the strike, buying Cestor seconds while Eclipse closed from the other side. Cestor used every one of them. Parasites scattered through the market suddenly reversed direction and raced toward the canyon rim.

Thousands climbed over rock and one another, hooking together into thick cords that reached deep into a narrow fissure above. Smaller winged parasites locked themselves across the mass until the entire structure began beating and pulling like a living muscle.

The swarm wrapped around Cestor and Gant. Hooked bodies secured their coats and legs while the cords contracted, dragging both men upward along the wall. Eclipse attacked from below and Maelor tore chunks of stone after them, shredding hundreds of parasites, but replacements kept crawling from the market.

Gant twisted inside the harness and pulled marked debris through Maelor’s next attack. Dust exploded across the rim, and by the time Maelor cleared it, the living cords had hauled Cestor and Gant sideways into the fissure. The clicking of parasites continued from somewhere inside the rock, but the passage narrowed too sharply for Eclipse to follow at the same speed.

Maelor remained beneath the broken rim with stone circling one hand. Rovan reached him moments later while Selyn looked toward the route where Tavian had been carried away. Nobody relaxed, but the fight had finally stopped moving forward.

Below them, Tavian’s flower had not stopped at all.

Red growth covered broken stalls, silk supports, stone and bodies. Thin blooms opened wherever the roots found moisture, and each pulse through the plant released another cloud of spores. Arch’s coat slowly collected a fine layer of them while his hand remained curled beside the lifeless Aegis.

Farther down the canyon, Karkas sat inside the white barrier created by his emergency device. Two rescuers descended on cables wearing sealed grey coats and fitted masks, entered through a temporary opening and secured a harness around his waist. Neither asked whether he could walk. They lifted him between them and began climbing while every pull sent pain crawling beneath his ribs.

Clean wind reached Karkas when they crossed the rim. The rescuers carried him farther back and lowered him against a flat shelf beyond the spreading haze, where he immediately looked down into the Grand Exchange.

From above, the canyon seemed too small for what had happened inside it. Entire sections of market were missing, Tavian’s roots covered the floor like exposed veins, and the places where Maelor, Gant and Cestor had fought were carved into the stone.

Karkas laughed once and regretted it when pain caught beneath his ribs. ”I knew there were big fish among Wayfarers,” he muttered.

One rescuer glanced at him. ”You hit your head?”

”Probably.” Karkas rubbed his thumb along the cracked edge of the Dead or Alive device hanging from his belt. ”But those weren’t big fish. Those were monsters.” He kept watching Maelor below while a thought formed beneath the exhaustion. I need to get stronger. Strong enough that one day I can put Dead or Alive over something like that and not spend the next five minutes wondering which part of me it’s going to remove.

A rust-colored drop landed near his boot. Another struck the rescuer’s sleeve and left a faint stain across the grey cloth. Above the canyon, dust thrown into the sky during the battle had mixed with moisture dragged upward beneath Maelor’s gravity. Tavian’s spores had risen into the same layer until the clouds themselves looked bruised.

Rain thickened over the Exchange. Survivors below covered their faces when it touched exposed skin, while anyone with an open wound reacted almost immediately. The bitter sweetness of Tavian’s flower mixed with wet stone and carried high enough that Karkas’s rescuers tightened their masks.

Runoff collected between the flower’s petals and carried spores through shattered shops, bodies and broken silk. The western wall began groaning as water entered fractures left by Maelor and Gant’s fight. Mud spilled through first, followed by several narrow streams that widened as the damaged stone shifted under the pressure.

The wall finally gave way.

Water burst into the canyon with enough force to tear suspended shops from their anchors. Bridges snapped, lower routes vanished and the contamination gathered across the market disappeared into the surge, spreading through the canyon faster than the drifting spores had managed.

Karkas stopped smiling as he watched people scramble toward higher ground. The two Eclipse members carrying Tavian were already climbing an upper route, one supporting most of his weight while the other kept his head above the thickening haze.

The flood eventually reached Arch. His coat caught against a broken support when the current lifted him, holding his body there for several seconds while debris struck and spun around him. The ruined Aegis hit stone and tore free from his arm before the support finally snapped, carrying Arch deeper into the canyon until Karkas could no longer tell which body had been his.

Far away, Angle still sat on his knees where the portal had left him. Cold wind pulled at his red scarf while Sterling stood nearby without speaking. Gumm remained curled against Sio’s shoulder, several eyes fixed on Angle as he slowly looked down at his left wrist.

Angle rotated the joint once, then stopped and loosened it with his other hand. ”Stop locking your left wrist when you fire,” he murmured, repeating Arch’s last correction. The words sounded wrong coming from him. He tried the motion again, but his fingers stopped halfway and closed around the gauntlet instead.

”He knew,” Angle said after a long silence. ”When he said that, he already knew he wasn’t coming.”

Sio pushed against the control still holding his jaw and shoulders. Nothing moved. Give me my mouth. Just let me say something to him. Silas gave him no answer, and the failure dragged the memory of the portal back with it. I put it beside Arch. I was close enough. If I had my body, maybe I could have pulled him through.

Something warm moved down Sio’s cheek. Another tear followed before the wind dried the first, but the grief behind it did not feel like his. Sio’s grief was restless, full of guilt and things he wanted to change. This carried memories he could not reach, years of trust and arguments and battles that belonged to someone else.

The presence behind his muscles trembled. Sio had felt Silas control him through Karkas’s attacks, Maelor’s gravity and the collapse of the market without hesitation, yet now Sio’s breathing came unevenly through someone else’s pain. Another tear reached his jaw as he finally understood what his body was doing.

I’m not crying. You are.

Silas tried to breathe through Sio’s lungs and failed halfway. The next attempt shook badly enough that Angle finally looked toward him. A voice gathered behind Sio’s thoughts, rough and unmistakably human, carrying a grief so familiar with Arch that Sio did not need an explanation for what the two men had once meant to each other.

”You idiot, Arch.”