The doors of the throne room groaned open, and two Steelborn hauled a man up from the lower cells like refuse pulled from a drain. He was little more than bones wrapped in skin. His cheeks had collapsed inward, his lips were cracked and bloodless, and his eyes glassy with fever and terror as he was dumped unceremoniously onto the floor before Gael.
The mont the man’s gaze found Gael’s beaked mask, his composure—or what was left of it—instantly shattered.
“Please,” he croaked, voice scraping raw from too much begging in too many dark places as he clawed weakly at the floor. “I won’t fight. I won’t run. I’ll work, I swear it, I’ll work until I drop—”
The man barely had ti to register confusion before Gael snapped his wrist forward. A syringe flashed through the air and struck the side of the man’s neck, and there was a sharp hiss as the sedative imdiately discharged, putting the man into a soft, cozy slumber.
He slumped forward, unconscious before his face even hit the floor.
Gael crouched imdiately, throwing his coat flaps behind him as he knelt beside the limp body.
“Alright,” he said lightly, already reaching for his bundle of wrapped surgical tools inside his coat. “Let’s see what’s chewing on you, my friend.”
Maeve knelt opposite him, folding her umbrella away and opening her Umbral Eyes in sync. The man below them peeled apart into layers of heat, flesh, muscles, and bones—it didn’t take them long at all to locate the Myrmur heart beneath the man’s skin.
“There,” Maeve said quietly. “Right side. Upper chest. It hasn’t burrowed too deep.”
“Lucky bastard.”
Gael unfurled his surgical wrap across the floor. Scalpels glead dully in the chandelier light, and the Steelborn around the throne room leaned forward despite themselves, curious to see what the two of them were trying to do. Jin and Vivi stood behind them, holding their breaths. Even Calvos had stopped chewing on his tallic fruits, gaze locked firmly on Gael’s steady hands.
Fortunately, he was used to people staring at him while he worked, so there was nothing particularly theatrical about this surgery either. He picked up two scalpels and began cutting the man’s chest open. Skin parted cleanly beneath his blades. Maeve assisted like she’d been practicing the past two years, holding tissue aside, adjusting angles, and keeping the area of surgery immaculate. Within three minutes, they cut deep enough to see their target.
The Myrmur heart pulsed sluggishly within the chest cavity, half-organic and half-tallized, its surface slick with blackened ichor. Veins of dull tal threaded through it like corruption fossilized in flesh. It was the work of the Steelborn’s stabilizer, no doubt, but even if the Myrmur was suppressed, it throbbed the mont it was exposed to open air—likely sensing the imminent threat hanging on Gael’s belt.
His grin widened.
“Oh, you’re a pretty one,” he murmured. Then he glanced up at Calvos. “Now pay attention, boss.”
He unclipped the Gloam Lantern and pressed it into Maeve’s hands. She’d seen him work it before, so it didn’t take her long to figure out which dial to turn to focus the pale white light into a brighter, colder cone. The pale light shone down onto the Myrmur heart imdiately made the parasite recoil, spasming violently as if trying to flee a cage it could no longer escape.
While Maeve held the lantern there, Gael went straight in with his scalpels. One cut, two cuts, and then the Myrmur heart tore free with a wet sound, writhing weakly in his palm.
Before anyone could breathe, he closed his fist and crushed it into minced at. Black ichor seeped between his fingers as the heart collapsed into useless pulp.
Silence fell over the throne room like a dropped curtain… but the Host didn’t convulse beneath them. Didn’t scream. Didn’t die.
His chest rose, fell, and rose again.
Nobody in the throne room was an idiot. They all knew he was still alive.
Maeve was already stitching, sealing his wound as if this were just another night in the clinic, while Gael helped with the bandages. Pressure. Wrap. More pressure. The man lay there unconscious the entire ti, and he wouldn’t wake up for another few more hours, but it’d probably be the best waking up he’d had in weeks.
Once they were done bandaging up the man, Gael stood and rolled his shoulders, turning towards the throne. “Well, boss? What do you think about—”
“How much?”
Gael blinked. “Sorry?”
Calvos leaned forward on his throne of scrap, armor plates grinding softly as his bulk shifted. His single eye never left Gael’s face.
“How much does it take,” he repeated, “to buy you. To have you work here. Forever.”
For a heartbeat, the hall hung suspended between breaths.
Then Gael laughed.
“Oh, I’m flattered,” he said warmly. “Truly. That’s one hell of a complint coming from the boss of the Steelborn, but no.” He gestured vaguely southward with one gloved hand. “I’ve got a clinic down in Blightmarch. It’s a pretty decent place that slls like antiseptic, bile, and bad decisions all the ti, but it is mine, and I’m rather fond of it, so I’m afraid I’m not for sale… but I have another proposal to make.”
As Maeve handed him his Gloam Lantern back, he looked around at the Steelborn crowding the hall.
“First things first, though, I’d like it if this little chat wouldn’t leave this room,” he said cheerfully. “Not a whisper. Not a rumor. And it most certainly shouldn’t crawl its way up to Vharnveil anyti soon, because if it does, I might have to break my Bloodless Mandate and gut the fucking snitch. Is that understood?”
The Steelborn stiffened. A few swallowed audibly. Several took an unconscious step back, eyes flicking to his lantern, to the unconscious Host still breathing on the floor, and to the mad, mad certainty radiating off the Plagueplain Doctor who was very clearly not bluffing.
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Calvos didn’t hesitate.
“All of you, out,” he rumbled.
And almost every gangster moved at once without any lingering bravado. The spectators numbered over a hundred just a few monts ago, but now over ninety percent of them tripped over themselves as they hurried out, dragging their weapons and scraps with them before sealing the doors behind them.
Once the doors were closed, only Gael, Maeve, Jin, and Vivi remained, along with Calvos on his throne and a handful of quiet, blind n in the shadows behind the pillars. They were all scribes clutching notebooks, pens hovering over yellowed papers.
Gael nodded, fully satisfied.
“Much better,” he said. “So this little lantern functions off sothing my clinic designed. We call it the symbiote elixir. You can think of it as a…. Well, there’s no pretty lie for it. It’s basically a panacea. Take a vial of it in liquid vial, and the next sickness, ailnt, or curse that would’ve fucked you up gets intercepted—including the killing curse Myrmur hearts normally give people if you try to remove it from them.”
Calvos’s eye narrow a fraction. “An elixir, you say?”
“Mhm. And this lantern,” Gael went on, “is the most advanced form the elixir is capable of taking for now. The pale white light itself is the elixir. You shine it on a Myrmur heart, and you’ll be able to remove it without killing the Host. You can basically apply this principle to any other disease and sickness you’re trying to get rid of, too.”
“How much for the lantern?”
“That’s a strange question for the Steelborn boss to ask.”
Calvos tilted his head and smiled wryly. “How much for the chemical makeup for the symbiote elixir?”
“And to that,” Gael said cheerfully, “my answer is it’s not for sale. You’ll have to kill twice to get to tell—but I am willing to strike a deal between the Heartcord Clinic and the Steelborn.”
“Which is?”
“We’ll send you crates of symbiote elixir in liquid form every month,” he said. “You boys can use it at your own discretion—give it to miners, workers, soldiers, whatever you think keeps your ward breathing. In return, the Steelborn will help the Heartcord Clinic mass produce the lantern. Not the elixir. Just the lantern.”
Calvos leaned back slightly. Armor scraped. The sound was a warning. “And why prevent us from making our own symbiote elixir if you’re just going to tell us how to make the lantern anyway?”
“Because the lantern will just be a normal lantern without my symbiote elixir,” he said, tapping his lantern again. “In order to make this thing work, you need to infuse the glass panes the light shines through with two things: the symbiote elixir and a very, very special flower called the moonflower. When crushed and mixed with the symbiote elixir, it amplifies the elixir’s effects. Problem is, moonflowers are super rare. They can only be found on the highest mountains on the continent, so I’m talking mostly about the Hagi’Shar Mountains, but in Ironwych…”
He gestured vaguely up, towards the unseen peaks beyond the ceiling.
“Ironwych sits next to so of the highest mountains on the continent. The Grand Ironwych Mountains,” he said. “I’m not much for climbing, personally, so it’s impossible for and the clinic to produce these lanterns in bulk—but you and your boys can certainly climb those mountains. You’ve dug into those rocks that eat teeth. If there are moonflowers growing up at the peaks—above the Vile—then you can harvest them, and you can mass produce the lanterns… as long as I provide you with the symbiote elixir for infusion into the glass panes.”
“So we can make as many lanterns we want, but you will limit the number of lanterns we can actually activate,” Calvos finished.
“Yes, the bottleneck will be the amount of symbiote elixir I give you every month, but imagine this,” he said, almost whispering. “An entire ward hung with these lanterns. Every street. Every alley. Every corner of every market. Light everywhere, pale and cold and clean, preventing sickness and ailnts and infestations before they can even bloom into tragedy. Ironwych will be a ward without plagues—how’s that for a sight?”
Silence lingered after he painted that vision in everyone’s heads. Even the scribes in the shadows had stopped scratching their notes, quills hovering uselessly above parchnt while they imagined: their very own streets washed in pale lanternlight, sickness halted at the threshold.
“... Of course, the bottleneck I ntioned will be problematic,” he offered, beginning to ramble. “The clinic can only produce about a hundred… eh, maybe a hundred fifty vials a month for Ironwych, but we can start out slow. Test the lantern production lines first. Maybe there aren’t even any moonflowers up on your mountains, but if that’s the case, then I’m sure you guys have your own thods to secure moonflowers from outside the city—”
“Very well,” Calvos said simply, turning his head a fraction towards the scribes in the shadows. “Did you write all of that down?”
The scribes nodded discreetly, pens already scratching like insects. Calvos turned back to Gael.
“You will tell my n how to produce your lantern in mass. Give them the specifications, the procedure, the materials—”
“Ah, ah, ah. Not so fast, Steelhorned.” Gael’s grin widened, and he raised a finger between them. “I’ve got a few additional conditions before we start trading secrets.”
“What?”
“First, twenty percent of every Gloam Lantern your factories produce gets shipped south to the Heartcord Clinic every month. We’ve got our own wards choking on rot and parasites, and I’d quite like to keep my neighbours alive too.”
Calvos’ expression didn’t change. “Done.”
“Second, you stop imprisoning Myrmur Hosts for forced labour before killing them. You can stabilize them still, but no more chains. No more squeezing the last bit of usefulness out of dying people. Even if you can’t produce any Gloam Lanterns anyti soon, the symbiote elixir vials we’ll be sending to you will still be more than enough to cure them, so there’s no reason to kill them anymore.”
“Done,” Calvos said.. “All Myrmur Hosts currently in Steelborn custody will be released once they have received their dose of the elixir. Until they are cured, they will continue taking stabilizers.”
Maeve’s shoulders sagged with relief. Vivi’s eyes shone as well.
“However,” Calvos went on, his eye fixing on Gael sternly, “if you cannot produce or deliver enough elixir to sustain this promise, I will resu executions for the sake of order in the eastern ward. Their lives will depend on your output. Their deaths will be on your shoulders.”
Gael’s mouth twisted beneath his mask. “No promises of miracles, but I’ll do my damned best. A hundred and fifty vials a month.”
“A hundred and fifty,” Calvos agreed.
Then Gael stared up at Calvos, studying the old man anew.
“... You know,” he said slowly, “I expected the Steelborn boss to be rational. Anyone who runs factory lines this clean in their own basent usually is. I just didn’t expect you to be quite this cooperative.”
Calvos scoffed, then barked out a laugh that scraped through the hall
“You know nothing about the eastern ward, Raven,” he sneered. “I have been dreaming before your grandfathers were even born, and until it is fulfilled, I will do whatever it takes to turn Ironwych into the strongest ward there is. Allies, enemies, corpses—it makes no difference. If you and your clinic will make Ironwych stronger, we will be great partners. If you seek to undermine Ironwych’s efforts…” His eye hardened. “You die.”
The conviction in his voice sent a shiver through Maeve, Jin, and Vivi alike—the kind that crawled under one’s skin—but Gael, on the other hand, rely bowed his head slightly.
“As simple as that, huh?” he said lightly.
Calvos grinned back, waving a heavy hand.
“Now get out of my hall,” he rumbled. “Tell my n outside everything they need to know and hash out the details with them. Let us hope we have a long and fruitful partnership.”
Gael’s grin sharpened. He reached for Maeve’s hand and tugged her gently towards the exit, while Jin followed suit, guiding Vivi’s hand with careful, almost courtly restraint.
Then Gael stopped halfway to the doors.
“Ah,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder. “Actually, I didn’t originally co here to talk business about the lanterns. That was just sothing I rembered along the way.”
Calvos raised a brow. “Then what did you want to discuss, Raven?”
Gael watched his face carefully.
“That other Raven and his assistant. The ones who gave you the recipe for the stabilizer. Where are they now?”
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