The cart had been moving again for nearly an hour when Alucent finally spoke.
He had spent most of that time watching the terrain shift through the window as the blackstone gave way to patches of dark soil and the copper rivers narrowed into thin channels along the roadside.
The mountains were closer now, their peaks catching the mid-afternoon light in bands of white and grey, and inside the cart, the white curtains with their golden edges swayed gently with the motion while the throbbing in his wrapped wrist settled into a dull rhythm he was learning to work around.
The fragments had been turning over in his mind since the crystalline residue dissolved into the blackstone.
The Waros breeding in Verdant Hollow, The BIO-REACTIVE INPUT shipments, The twelve-day Shadebinder conversions, The Cogspire pulling an entire Vale's output inward. The numbered cages with their logbooks.
He had been treating each one as a separate horror encountered along the road, filing them away individually the way he would have separated data points in his old life, but as the cart carried them north and the Cold Scribe method's barriers thinned from exhaustion, the separations kept collapsing.
They connect. All of them connect. I've been sorting pieces when I should have been looking at what they build together.
Scribe Joy sat beside him with her hands folded in her lap, her deep forest green dress catching the pale light from the window. She had been watching the mountains through the glass, though Alucent suspected she was assembling the same connections he was.
On the opposite bench, Raya sat with her Weaveblade across her knees, the gold trim of her burgundy gown still bearing faint Voidshard stains, while Gryan leaned against the window frame beside her with his mechanical arm tucked beneath his dark blue sleeve.
"The cages were numbered sequentially into the thirties, and each one had a logbook attached to the frame," Alucent said, pressing his good hand against his knee as the cart swayed over uneven ground. After letting that settle for a moment, he continued, "If someone just wanted those things locked away, there would be no reason to track their development. Logbooks and sequential numbering only make sense if someone is raising them deliberately."
As he spoke, Scribe Joy turned from the window, and the recognition was already in her blue eyes when they met his. "Raising them," she repeated softly, her voice unhesitant. "Training them, watching how they change, and preparing them for deployment."
Alucent nodded slowly before leaning his head against the window frame. "It's the same shape as the Waros operation in Verdant Hollow," he said, his voice dropping as the connections tightened. "They were being farmed and shipped out as BIO-REACTIVE INPUT, labelled and packaged like raw material moving through a supply chain. And the Shadebinder conversions in the tunnels were running on twelve-day cycles, when the old process from Eryndral took months."
The memory of the dying Shadebinder at the fire surfaced behind his eyes as he spoke. The tired face. The wife in the craftsperson quarter. The daughter learning to read. Twelve days from worker to creature. His throat tightened, and he had to swallow before continuing, "Someone turned the conversion into a production process, and the Cogspire is feeding all of it. Every bit of Runeforce the Vale produces, flowing inward instead of cycling back out."
"Three systems," Scribe Joy said, her fingers pressing together slightly in her lap as the pale light shifted across the cushioned bench. "The breeding for raw material, the conversions for soldiers that can be produced quickly and replaced, and the Cogspire for the power to sustain it all." After a pause that lasted long enough for the cart to sway twice over uneven ground, she added, "Each one feeds the others. It is an infrastructure that sustains itself."
The word "infrastructure" settled between them. Alucent felt his stomach turn at how clean it sounded.
Infrastructure... Supply chains, production timelines, these are clean words for monstrous things. BIO-REACTIVE INPUT instead of farmed parasites. Core Support Maintenance instead of workers marked for disposal. Sequential numbering instead of caged weapons. The system even comes with its own language, and the language makes all of it sound reasonable. He pressed his palm harder against his knee as the thought left a bitter residue in his throat. Man, Madness would be easier to face. Yes, madness burns itself out, but something built like this just keeps running.
Across from them, Raya's hand had tightened on the Weaveblade's hilt, and Alucent noticed that her breathing had shifted into the slow, deliberate rhythm she used during combat. Her knuckles had gone white around the grip while her jaw locked tight, and when the cart swayed again, she did not move with it the way a relaxed body would. She was holding herself rigid from the shoulders down.
The twelve-day conversions... He remembered what Raya had told him during the Runestorm, in the Steamcottage, her voice was steady despite the grief. Her twin brother Marcus had been taken by Void corruption, she had been forced to kill him before the conversion completed. If the process Eloha developed had existed back then, Marcus would have been converted in less than two weeks, and it's likely Raya has to be doing that math right now
He did not look at her directly after reaching that conclusion, giving her the space to hold herself together without someone watching.
Gryan had not shifted from his position against the window, but Alucent noticed that his right hand, the organic one, had closed slowly on his knee. The fingers pressed into the fabric of his dark blue suit with a pressure that whitened the knuckles, mirroring Raya's grip on the Weaveblade without either of them being aware of it. The faint clicking from the degraded wrist joint of his mechanical arm was audible in the quiet cart, steady and persistent.
He recognizes this. The Conclave processed him as raw material the same way Eloha processes workers and Waros. Different scale, same architecture. He must be hearing all of this and remembering what it felt like from the inside. Alucent watched Gryan's organic hand tighten further before looking away. Some things did not need an audience.
After a long moment, Raya spoke without looking up from her Weaveblade. "Runepeaks needs to know," she said, her voice carrying the flat certainty of someone stating what needed to happen. "All of it."
The cart swayed as it crossed a shallow depression in the road while the white curtains shifted against the window frames. Gryan's right hand uncurled from his knee slowly, each finger releasing with deliberate control, before he spoke. His voice was low and rough, and the question carried no rhetoric.
"Warn them and then what?"
The words settled into the cart's interior as the pale light crept across the cushioned benches. Alucent did not need to guess where the question came from.
He had heard Gryan describe the Iron Conclave during the journey, had listened to him explain how the system continued operating after complaints and protests and escaped prisoners, had watched his expression when he spoke about bureaucracies receiving information about atrocities and doing nothing with it.
He's not saying don't warn them. He knows the warning matters. But he also knows from experience that information alone doesn't stop a system. The Conclave received plenty of warnings. It kept running anyway. Eloha built something with the same kind of resilience, and telling Runepeaks about it doesn't guarantee they can break it. Alucent felt the weight of that conclusion settle alongside everything else the road had given them.
Scribe Joy turned toward Gryan, and her blue eyes held his across the cart as the silence stretched between them. The mountains grew closer through the window while neither of them looked away.
"We will reach Runepeaks and tell them what we found," she said finally, her voice soft but carrying the weight of a decision that had already been made. After pausing, she added simply, "Then we see what we know."
From his angle, Alucent could see her hands folded in her lap. Every finger was perfectly still. Raya and Gryan, sitting across from them, could see her calm face and hear her steady voice, but they could not see the hands from where they sat. Alucent could, and the stillness in those hands went deeper than composure. It was the stillness of someone who had made a decision while knowing full well that the decision was not enough.
Raya's grip on her Weaveblade eased after a moment as she accepted the answer for what it was. Gryan held Scribe Joy's gaze before nodding once, a single downward motion of his chin, then turning back toward the window.
The conversation settled into silence as the cart continued north. After a while, Raya began cleaning the Voidshard stains from her burgundy sleeves with a cloth from her kit, her movements precise and unhurried, while Gryan tested his mechanical grip against his knee by curling the brass fingers once. The rune-lines at the wrist flickered briefly before steadying, and he let the hand rest without testing it again.
Scribe Joy turned back to the window as the blackstone beneath the cart's wheels gradually lightened toward the grey of the border region. Alucent closed his eyes briefly before opening them again, as the dizziness was still worse with them shut. His wrist throbbed beneath the linen while the Cold Scribe method held its barriers in place, thin but functional.
Almost out of Iron Vale. He watched the grey stone replace the blackstone through the window as the mountains sharpened against the darkening sky.