The door clicked shut, and the world outside became a muffled suggestion. Kaelen stood in the empty, sunlit main room of his new house, and the silence rushed in to fill the space. It was a profound, dense quiet, so different from the constant grind and murmur of the caravan, the chaotic chorus of the city streets. Here, the only sound was the soft, dry whisper of his own breath, and the faint, rhythmic tap of a loose shutter somewhere down the street.
The room was small, practical. Plain whitewashed walls drank in the afternoon light, casting a pale, clean glow over a floor of dusty red tiles. A single window, shuttered with weathered wood, looked out onto the narrow street. It was bare, anonymous. It was perfect.
His legionary's instincts took over before his mind could settle. This was a new terrain to secure.
He moved through the space with a silent, methodical precision. The main room: one door, one window. The single bedroom: window too small for a man to squeeze through. The kitchen was a niche with a clay oven and a stone basin, its only notable feature being a heavy iron bolt on the inside of the street-facing door. The walled courtyard was his real prize—a rectangle of packed earth and a single, struggling olive tree, enclosed by high sandstone walls. Private. Good for training. No overlooking windows. He noted the placement of the roof's edge, the texture of the wall. Accessible, but the tiles would clatter like bones. The neighbor's wall is a full foot higher. Impossible without a running jump… or Ulos.
Finally, the cellar. The wooden trapdoor in the kitchen floor was heavy, its iron ring cold in his grip. He lifted it, and a wave of cool, dry air rose to meet him, carrying the scent of ancient stone and dust. The stairs were steep, carved directly into the bedrock. Below, the space was small, darker, and utterly still. A single, grilled vent near the ceiling let in a thin blade of light, illuminating motes of dust. It was easily secured. It was silent.
Sanctum, he thought, the word solid in his mind.
His possessions were few. A bedroll. A change of clothes. A small kit for cooking and mending. Lucius's Vow, wrapped in oiled cloth. And the Godclimb.
Unpacking the book here felt like a sacrament, or a surrender. He placed it on the crude, heavy table he'd dragged down into the cellar. The moment the worn leather touched the stone, the ambient mental murmurs he'd learned to tolerate shifted. They didn't grow louder, but deeper, resonating with a new frequency. It was a low, dissonant hum, felt more than heard, that seemed to vibrate up through the cellar floor. It wasn't coming from the book alone. It was as if the Godclimb were tuning itself to something beneath the city—a hidden chord in Al'Rahim's foundation.
Over the next hours, as he cleaned and settled, he tested it. Walking to the market for a meager supper of cheap fig paste and stale flatbread, the book, left in the cellar, was a quiet weight in his mind. But passing a particular, nondescript shrine at a street corner—a simple niche holding a weather-worn statue of a Titan he didn't recognize—the mental hum spiked into a brief, static prickling. Later, when he brushed his fingers along a section of the city's outer wall, where the stone was visibly older, the pages in his memory seemed to stick together, resisting, as if coated in psychic resin.
It's a compass, he realized, wiping the fig paste from his fingers with a piece of rough bread. Not to north, but to power. To history. To cracks.
The first night fell, and the sounds of the city transformed. The shouting vendors were replaced by the distant, plaintive song of a reed flute. The smell of donkey dung and hot stone from the day cooled, overtaken by the scent of baking bread from a night bakery and the faint, sweet perfume of night-blooming jasmine clinging to his courtyard wall. Through his small window, the stars were a brilliant, icy spill across the velvet black, undimmed by the haze of the day.
And the silence in the house became a canvas for every creak and sigh.
Every settling timber was a cautious footstep on the stair. The scuttle of a desert rat in the roof thatch was a clawed hand searching for purchase. The wind, sighing through the street, carried whispers in a language just below comprehension. He lay on his bedroll, muscles coiled, ears straining. The hyper-vigilance was an old companion, the constant awareness of a man who knew he was both hunter and prey. His hand rested not on his heart, but on the hilt of Lucius's Vow, lying beside him. It wasn't heroism. It was a calculation. Blade is faster than Ulos from a dead sleep.
He dozed in fitful fragments, each time jolting awake at some phantom noise. In the deepest part of the night, the twin moons rose, Castor and Pollux, their sickled blades of light carving slow, deliberate paths across his floor and up the opposite wall. He watched them, tracking their cold progress, his mind caught between the simple, clean geometry of their motion and the low, chaotic hum of the Godclimb in the cellar below.
But as the moons faded and the first grey hint of dawn bled into the sky, Kaelen remained staring at the ceiling, the silence of the house now feeling less like peace and more like a held breath. The Godclimb was down there, a silent, heavy presence. And it was listening to something. Waiting for something. And so, now, was he.