The warmth began at the point of contact — at the cut, at the blood meeting the pitted surface — and spread outward through the metal with a speed that had no business belonging to heat, racing along the carved lines, tracing the patterns across the bowl’s face in a language of orange light that brightened as it spread, one line feeding the next, the whole design illuminating from the center outward like a map being drawn in fire.

Jake stared at it.

He couldn’t look away from it. Something in the light demanded attention the way the sun demanded attention.

The claws, which were on the edges of the bowl, moved.

All six of them, simultaneously, unfolded backward from their curved inward position with a sound like grinding stone, rotating outward and then downward until they pointed at the ground rather than the center. And from the tips of the claws — from the six iron points now aimed at the earth — tendrils of orange light shot outward and then upward and then inward, arcing over the bowl’s center, and Jake had one full second to understand what was about to happen before they reached him.

They caught him like hands.

Six tendrils, one from each claw, were wrapping around his arms and legs and torso with a grip that was not painful and was not gentle and was not anything that had a human equivalent because light did not grip things, and yet this did.

The ground left his feet.

He rose — slowly, with the horrible smoothness of something being lifted by a mechanism — until he was floating above the cauldron’s center, two feet off the ground, held in the spread of orange light with his arms slightly out and his legs slightly apart and his blood still dripping from his cut palm and falling into the bowl below and vanishing when it touched the glowing surface.

He looked down at the cauldron.

He looked at the leader, standing at its edge, watching him with an expression of profound, focused satisfaction.

"The Tianlan," the leader said. His voice had changed — the pleasant warmth of it had been set aside, replaced by something older.

"An Fe-cauldron. One of nine."

He paused, giving the information space.

"You should feel honored. Very few people have seen one activated."

Jake looked at the orange light wrapped around his wrists.

He looked at the ground, two feet below him.

He looked at the leader’s face, composed and satisfied and completely certain.

"I don’t know what that means," Jake said.

And then, because he was floating above a glowing iron cauldron held by tendrils of light in a closed barrier at a rest stop on a valley road with a system error ringing in the back of his skull and a dead man’s blood drying in the grass ten feet away and another man potentially dying on the road because Eskar had pointed at him and run, because all of that was the sum of the last ten minutes of his life, and because panic was a thing that bypassed the filters that normally governed what came out of his mouth —

"You fucking dimwit."

The leader blinked.

"I don’t know what that iron bowl is," Jake repeated, his voice cracking at the edges now.

"I don’t know what a Fe-cauldron is. I don’t know what Tianlan means. I don’t know what clan you’re talking about or what this mark means or why you killed those men or what you’re trying to do with this thing, and I am floating in the air and—"

He stopped, taking his time to breath slowly. It was hard to concentrate when you are under such immense pressure.

The orange light held him, indifferent to his state. "I am having an extremely bad afternoon."

The leader looked at him for a long moment.

Then he smiled.

"Yes," he said. "I imagine you are."

He turned to give an instruction to the man at his left.

And one of his men fell down.

The arrow came from the road.

It arrived before the sound did — the man simply dropped, mid-motion, with the instantaneous completeness of someone who had been present and then was not, and the arrow stood in him at the angle of something that had traveled a long distance very fast and arrived with complete conviction.

Every head in the rest stop turned.

Jake turned.

Eskar stood at the road’s edge.

He stood the way a man stood who had run hard and stopped hard and was standing now on the power of something other than steadiness. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

His chest was moving. His face was the face of someone still frightened and present anyway.

A crossbow in his hands, already being reloaded with the mechanical urgency of someone who knew exactly how long he had before the advantage of surprise finished.

Jake stared at him.

The barrier — whatever the men at the perimeter had built — had not stopped the arrow. That registered somewhere and it mattered.

But it was what came behind Eskar that made the barrier irrelevant.

They came slowly and deliberately.

The way things came when they had no reason to hurry because their arrival was itself the statement.

First one figure from the treeline beside the road, then another, then several more, stepping out of the forest shadow into the valley’s golden afternoon light with the unhurried certainty of people who had been waiting for precisely this moment.

The first one he saw was a woman.

She walked ahead of the others with the ease of someone accustomed to being at the front of things.

Not young, not old either, somewhere in the territory that carried its years as authority rather than age, with dark hair going silver at the temples in the particular way that looked less like time and more like a deliberate aesthetic decision. Her face was striking in the way of faces that had been arranged by good bone structure and then refined by decades of expressions worth making.

She wore traveling clothes that were practical and expensive in the way that things were when they didn’t need to announce either quality because both were self-evident.

Beside her — slightly behind, in the position of someone who knew better than to walk ahead — a younger woman. Dark-haired, composed, with large dark eyes and a short blade at her hip and a hook weapon at her back and a short bow across her shoulder.

Lady Ankerita Solhani.

Adolina.