Pant. Pant. Pant.
He pushed through the alchemy chamber door. Soren was still there, still mixing, a completely different set of tubes arranged in front of him now.
"Clyde, you are back." He looked up. "What do you need?"
"My Divine Ichor abilities are sealed. All of them."
Soren set the tube down immediately. "Sealed?"
"Yes."
"Come with me. Right now."
The chamber Soren led him to was one Clyde had never seen before.
It was wider than the alchemy lab, lower-ceilinged, the walls made of older stone than the rest of the Sentinel's underground structure. Flowers grew in clusters along the floor's edges, pale and slightly luminous, the same quality of light as the ones in the field he had seen the night he touched the journal in the forgotten library. The air had a cobalt tint to it, the same cold blue quality as the sky above the city, but warmer somehow in this room, more present, less like something leaking from a wound and more like something breathing.
Soren never mentioned this place. This feels completely unnatural.
"Clyde." Soren turned to face him. "Do you know what mysticism is?"
"No."
Soren sighed. "It is an act of spiritual supplication toward a god. An apology. An appeal for forgiveness. When you breach a god's domain uninvited and survive, their wrath leaves a mark. Mysticism is the formal process of acknowledging what you did and asking them to release it." He crossed to a stone tablet at the room's center and placed the Alkahest Divine Ichor card on its surface carefully, the way you place something you are treating with respect. "You will need to offer blood and speak the forgiveness line."
He held out a folded script.
Clyde looked at it. A script. He wants me to read off a script to a god. Won't that seem disrespectful? Like I couldn't even be bothered to think of my own words?
He took it anyway.
"You may begin," Soren said, stepping back.
Clyde looked at the card on the tablet. Then at the script in his hand. Then at the small knife Soren had set beside the tablet.
He picked up the knife, pressed the tip against his index finger, and made a thin cut.
A bead of blood formed.
He held his finger over the card and let it fall.
Drip.
The moment it touched the surface, the room changed.
HISSSSS.
The sound came from everywhere at once, low and drawn out, the hiss of something ancient recognizing contact. The cobalt blue that had been tinting the room's air shifted in an instant, the color draining out and being replaced by deep amber, warm and heavy, the same amber as Soren's glowing eyes. Alkahest seals appeared across the walls, carved into the stone in the same interlocking triangles and geometric arrays, as though they had always been there and the amber light had simply made them visible for the first time. The symbols pulsed once, slow and deliberate.
Clyde felt the weight of the room settle onto his shoulders.
He looked down at the script.
Then he set it aside.
If I am asking a god for forgiveness then I should at least mean it.
He closed his eyes, took a breath, and spoke.
"Hearken me, Alkahest God."
His voice sounded strange in the amber-lit chamber. Smaller than he expected, but steadier than he felt.
"I stand before you as someone who entered your domain without permission and without understanding. I looked upon your eye without being invited to look. I witnessed your planet, your seals, your presence, things that were not meant for eyes like mine." He paused. "I did not do it with disrespect. I did not do it with intention. I did it because I am ignorant of the boundaries between what I am allowed to see and what belongs only to you. That ignorance is not an excuse. It is simply the truth."
The amber symbols on the walls pulsed again, slower this time.
Clyde kept going.
"I am a new Ichorborn. I have had this ability for only a few months. I am still learning what my eyes can reach and what they should not reach, what lines exist in the world between the ordinary and the divine, between the visible and the sacred." His voice stayed even but something underneath it was not entirely steady. "I am asking you, not demanding, not bargaining, simply asking, to release the seal you placed on me. I will be more careful. I will learn the boundaries. I will not look where I am not supposed to look."
He stopped.
The room was completely silent.
Then the amber light intensified, just for a second, bright enough that he had to squeeze his eyes shut.
CRACK.
Something broke behind his eyes. Sharp, specific, the sound of a lock releasing rather than something breaking under force. The pressure that had been sitting behind his irises since he hit the lab floor dissolved in an instant, clean and total, like a window opening in a sealed room.
He opened his eyes.
His Hollow Eyes activated on instinct, responding before he had consciously decided to use them. The room layered into its familiar sharpened state, the particles visible, the amber seals on the walls suddenly readable as frequency structures rather than just symbols.
The seal was gone.
He exhaled.
Soren was right. I really do need to watch where I point these things.
"It worked," he said.
Soren, who had been standing completely still against the far wall through the entire proceeding, let out a breath that suggested he had been considerably less certain of the outcome than he had let on.
"Good," Soren said. "Now go. Aldric is waiting."
Clyde was already moving toward the door.