Chapter 39 A Guide’s Gambit

Chapter 39 A Guide’s Gambit
As Jorren sought what to do to rescue his sister, he didn’t know that Sel Voras's attempt to hold his Sister was only a part of the equation. It was the whole theory. Sel Voras had deployed Resonance Harvesters, a brass tuning fork that hammered the air with high-frequency pulses of pure, aggressive energy at every major intersection. 

Jorren stood in the crawlspace of a collapsed textile mill,  his arm pressed against a damp stone wall in order to ground the static bleeding off the air. He could feel the pulse tearing through the district every three seconds.

Voras’s goal wasn’t just to find him. Voras wanted to sanitize the math of the fifth tier by flushing the pipes, looking for a single variable that refused to resonate with the frequency of the system.

Voras didn’t end there. She found Davan Rell, forcing him to a point of submission and making him lead her primary sweep team. 

Davan Rell moved through the grime of the lower district like a figure produced from a high-end octane engine. His white reflected the harsh orange glare of the harvesters, and behind his visor, his eyes darted across a tactical overlay of soul signatures.

“It’s clean,” he called out, but his hands trembled.

He felt the mirror in the workshop weeks ago, and he had seen how his energy wasn’t just blocked but consumed. Only one person came to his mind who could do that.

Jorren Thale.

The Spire had termed his experience as a cursed bloodline, Davan thought. He was beginning to suspect that the curse was a term the system used for a truth they were too afraid to calculate. He thought that he was beginning to think he was hunting a man who had proven that Davan’s exceptionalism was a curated lie.

But he didn’t have all the facts yet. 

Davan found Jorren in the only place the resonance pulses couldn’t reach. The ruins of the Keeper’s old workshop. The building was a dead zone by design and could shield off layers of lead essences. 

Jorren was waiting in the center of the room, standing in the space the obsidian slab had shattered. The Keeper wasn’t present at all. He had gone to attend to his numerous businesses.  

Davan thought he looked taller, and his skin didn’t look like that of a teenager who had suffered in the slums. It seemed that the success of his soul affected his body.  He looked fresher.

“You should have stayed in the Shattered fields,” Davan said. “After all, it powers you. If I don’t bring you in, Sel Voras will authorize that they level the block.”

Jorren snorted. “The block is already leveled, Davan. The Spire hasn’t just told the people who live here yet. It’ a purge, and the math isn’t just designed to search for me. It is designed to drain the ambient essence of the fifth tier to refuel the Primary Soulwell.  They are eating the poor to keep the lights on in the seventh tier.”

“It’s how the system maintains equilibrium,” Davan countered. “I thought you understood that. Order needs a source, and without the Spire, the ridge will collapse.”

“Order is a name you give a rigged game,” Jorren took a step forward. “You know the game is rigged, but you don’t have any evidence yet. You know I’m not mistake, but a subtraction that makes the game honest. You’ve felt it before. You’ve seen it work.”

Davan didn’t speak. He only stared as Jorren’s words made him question everything he had ever believed.

“You know fully well that my zero is more real than your five,” Jorren added.

“Maybe,” Davan said, raising his weapon. “But I have a duty to the architecture.”

“Then overcome me,” Jorren challenged him, his voice a defined certainty. “Prove that your light can survive a vacuum.” 

Davan’s shoulders slumped. He knew there was no point to prove. Anything that meets a negative becomes a negative or gets destroyed. He lowered the blade in his hand, and for a long minute, he stood there with Jorren as the golden boy before the hollowed human.

“I… I can’t,” he whispered. “If I strike you and you consume my essence again, I won’t be able to pretend that I’m the better practitioner anymore.”

Without another word, he turned his back to Jorren and keyed in his comms unit.

“Section 4-G is clear. I  found no trace of the anomaly. The unusual signature has likely dissipated into the industrial runoff. Moving on to sector five.”

“Davan,” Jorren called, stopping Davan before he could leave. 

“You should run, Jorren.” Davan didn’t turn. “I may have ignored you, but you can be sure I won’t be the one leading the sweep next time.”

As Davan left the workshop, a tiny insect-like drone drifted silently down from the rafters of the workshop, its single lidless eye having recorded the entire conversation between Davan and Jorren. 

Miles away, in the heights of the Evaluation Spire, Voras watched the exchange from a crystalline screen. She watched Davan Rell lower his weapon. He saw how the Thale boy stood tall in the center of the void. 

It was clear to her now. She wasn’t unsure who the shadow was. She knew the personality of the shadow now, and she knew she didn’t see him coming. But now that he had arrived, it was time to nullify him. To render him useless.

“Excellent,” she whispered. “We don’t just have a ghost. We have a traitor. Prepare the Iron lattice. It is time to see how much negative resonance the boy can take before he shatters.”

The guide around her got to work, and she leaned back in her desk chair, a finger tapping the bridge of her nose. She was going against Jorren with every illegal rule in the books. She believed there was nothing wrong, as far as she was protecting the integrity of the system that had existed many years before the shadow boy was born.