The ringing in Cairon's ears hadn't faded. — a flat, endless note, drowning out the shouting and the fire and everything else around him , like the world had been turned upside down. He put a hand against a broken wall to keep himself upright, waited for the ground to stop tilting, and then looked around him for Vynn .
He spotted him a few feet away, soot streaked across half his face, hair standing up on one side where the blast had shoved past him. Alive , Standing. Getting reassured , nothing else mattered for now .
Suddenly Something in Cairon settled, low and quiet, that he couldn't comprehend . He remembered Whoever it was in that vision, begging someone to keep this kid safe , he didn't know who they'd been talking to, or why. But he has taken the job . Vynn under his care now , whether either of them had signed up for that or not.
"Vynn." He crossed to him, gripping his shoulder. "You okay? Can you move?"
"Um — yeah, Cai. I mean, Sir." Vynn blinked hard, like he was trying to get his eyes to agree on one image. "I'm fine. What the hell happened?"
"I don't know yet." Cairon looked back toward the wreckage, toward the smoke still climbing off of the tower. "Let's head to the explosion site."
The closer they got, the more bodies there were on the ground . Coats in blue, in green, scattered among the crimson of the Coilbloods , what ever happened here , it hadn't been one faction's tragedy alone.
Somewhere ahead, voices in red coats were shouting over each other.
"Come on, find them , we've got to evacuate them, hurry!"
"I checked near the basement entry," another called back. "Nothing there."
"The hell, man, did they blow up to smithereens? Where the hell are they?"
Suddenly the sound of a cane slowly tapping on the stone ground was heard , getting closer by the second , it was a hunched, small figure inside a crimson coat too broad for him now, moving with the help of a cane carved from red sandalwood and banded here and there with amber. The head of it had been shaped into a snake, coiled tight, its tail winding down the length of the shaft to where his hand gripped it.
"Be quick," he said, voice cracked with age but carrying anyway. "Whoever did this will be coming again. Faster."
Everyone scattered to obey. Cairon watched the old man, watched his free hand slide beneath his coat, fingers working at something in an inner pocket , searching for something.
Then Cairon went still.
"See something, Cai?" Vynn asked.
He didn't answer. He was watching the old man's hand come back out holding a small glass vial , the same pale, moonlit silver Cairon had carried in his own coat one night ago. The same vial that had broken and went inside his wound .
The old man cupped it in his fist, hiding it completely, and pressed it to his chest, right over his heart. His lips moved ; a few words Cairon couldn't catch. Then he uncapped it and drank the whole thing down in one motion.
Nothing happened. Cairon waited for it , some flicker, some sign but he got nothing, until he looked closer and realized the nothing was the wrong thing to be looking for. The old man's spine had straightened, a bit , like something in it had finally remembered how to hold weight. The lines in his face didn't vanish, but they eased. And his eyes, when they came back up, had a focus in them that hadn't been there a minute before.
"Now that's interesting." A smile found its way onto Cairon's face .
"Vynn." He didn't look away from the old man. "Today's your lucky day."
Vynn looked at him, baffled. "How so, Cai?"
"Today I'm going to teach you how to kidnap someone."
"Wha…..what?"
"Just follow me. Try to keep up."
The old man made one more slow circle around the wreckage, cane tapping stone, before he peeled off from the crowd and drifted toward a back alley close by — unhurried, unguarded.
Cairon didn't follow him in. He caught Vynn's sleeve and steered him instead toward a stack of crates against the near wall, up onto the low roofline running the length of the alley, quiet enough that the old man's cane never once broke its rhythm.
From up there they watched him stop in the dead end beneath them , alone, cane resting against one shoulder, nothing around him but brick and a few crates and the last of the smoke drifting overhead.
"Come out, you little rats." He didn't turn around. "I know you're there. Stop being sneaky about it."
Vynn went rigid, eyes cutting sideways to Cairon, silently asking what came next.
"Stay here," Cairon said, low. "Don't show yourself. If this goes wrong you run for Marek. You don't wait for me, you don't come down after me. You run."
Vynn opened his mouth like he wanted to argue, looked at Cairon's face, and thought better of it. "...Okay."
Cairon dropped.
He descended as he always did , hanging form the roof then the lip of a window frame, then the ground, landing soft enough that even his own boots barely registered it. He came up a few feet behind the old man, already straightening, already still.
"You called?"
The old man turned. Whatever he'd expected coming through that alley mouth, it hadn't been this , Cairon watched it land on him one by one : the mask, the coat, the calm. The old man's hand tightened around the cane, just slightly. His weight shifted, onto the heels of his feet.
He didn't step back.
"Not an alchemist," the old man said.
"Why did you blow up the tower?" His voice had gone hard, old grief riding just under the anger. "Too many lives were lost because of it."
"Wasn't us." Cairon kept his hands visible, easy. "What happened here? What were you doing around? Why are rival gangs even gathered in the same square?"
"Why are you feigning ignorance?" The old man's grip on the cane whitened. "Are you mocking me , lying to my face, after what just happened?"
"I'm not…."
"All you Ironclad scumbags are the same." His voice cracked on it "Toying with people. For your pleasure."
Cairon lifted both hands, slow, open. "I swear to you, I'm not lying ,And Ironclad..." he almost laughed.
."Don't they wear those leather suits, head to toe? What would I even have to do with them?"
"Look into my eyes." The old man closed the distance between them a bit , but still holding his distance . "Answer me straight, yes or no answer , Are you Ironclad?"
"No."
Something in the set of the old man's shoulders eased, though his eyes didn't. "Are you hostile to us?"
Cairon considered it long enough that the honesty of the pause probably said more than the words that followed. "Honestly, I don't know. I don't know what you people know, or what this is about. But right now — I've got no reason to be."
The old man studied him.
"I said yes or no answers only ." Said the old man
" No " Cairon replied.
Ten full seconds, unblinking, the kind of look that had clearly outlasted better liars than Cairon in its time.
"Alright," he said finally. "Acceptable."
He shifted his weight back onto the cane, some of the tension finally draining out of him , this was not him trusting cairon, not yet, but something adjacent to it , less hostile.
"Why are you here then?"