The teleportation tore at him.

  It had not been designed for grace. Sharrzaman burst from the sigil in a tangle of robes and blood, slamming against cold stone like meat hurled into a cellar. For a long moment, he did not move. Just the sound of dripping, something hot pooling beneath him, and the echo of magic torn too fast through time. His ears rang. His vision pulsed. Every breath scraped.

  He clawed at the stone, dragged himself to a knee, then to his feet. The chamber was colder than he remembered. It smelled of rust, old dust, and dried bones. A faint magical light flickered from a glyph embedded in the wall—remnants of long-decayed Weave infrastructure, barely clinging to coherence.

  This was no sanctum. This was no wizard’s tower. It was an oubliette, buried deep beneath the city, built millennia ago as a holding pen for pixies—before he refined the process. Before he perfected the time-suck.

  Cages lined the walls, tiny and bent, many crushed inward as if from panic. Bones littered the floor—some unmistakably pixie, others from creatures that had no name, attempts at time-aligned lifeforms that didn’t survive the experiments. Glass tanks were cracked and dry. The remnants of failed chronomantic engines lay in rusted pieces, designed to drain seconds and convert them into power. Sigils carved into the walls now dripped with mildew and silence. The air was heavy with the memory of screams.

  He winced with each breath. His illusions were gone—his true age showed in the drag of his hands, the slack at his jaw. One eye was swollen shut. The scroll had saved his life but not his dignity. The old pride that buoyed his posture had vanished along with the Weave.

  "Unacceptable," he hissed. But there was no ritual to perform. No working to begin.

  The Weave was gone.

  He had no access to the magics he once commanded, no path to scrollwork or constructs or ritual repairs. All that remained were scraps—flickering glyphs, inert devices, and pain. The latent residue in the walls responded like a corpse to a prayer.

  So he did it the hard way.

  He stripped what was left of his robe, tore it into bandages, and set about splinting the worst of the damage. He dragged a half-rotted crate into a corner and slumped against it, bones aching. He drank from a cracked canteen that tasted of copper and rot, just to keep his hands moving.

  There was nothing left to command but movement. Eventually, with trembling hands, he tried to reapply his glamours—not with finesse, but through sheer force of memory. But there was nothing to draw from. No threads to grip. It was like trying to paint with an empty brush.

  He turned slowly in place, taking stock of his ruin. The dust, the smell, the silence.

  A mirror in the far corner was covered in black cloth. He did not touch it.

  His throne—a chair of brass and bone—remained in the center. He did not sit in it.

  Instead, Sharrzaman stood barefoot on the old mosaic floor, blood drying on his robes, and whispered the first truth he'd allowed himself in years:

  "I did not plan for this."

  Then he began again.

  He had no clue how to do regular things anymore. Without the Weave, he couldn’t plan, couldn’t think properly, couldn’t scry, couldn’t build. Everything that had once been an extension of his will now hung limp, severed. The spells he once whispered like afterthoughts were gone. The tools he'd once summoned with gestures had crumbled or become meaningless.

  He tried to map his options—but options required a framework, and the framework was gone. His mind, once a cathedral of timelines and contingencies, now echoed like a hollow room. Thoughts fled before they could be written. He could not even conjure a list. He simply sat. And breathed. And hated the quiet.

  Then he exploded.

  The scream came first—thin and cracking, then guttural. He hurled it into the dark like a curse, his voice bouncing off stone, jagged and aimless. He kicked the crate he'd leaned against, then kicked it again, over and over, until his bare foot split open and the wood caved like rotted fruit.

  He swept his arm across a shelf, sent flasks and bones and copper scraps clattering in every direction. He knocked over cages, stomped on skulls, clawed at the walls like he could dig through them with fingers alone. His hands bled. His breath whistled.

  He shrieked at the glyphs, at the bones, at the silence, until his throat tore bloody and raw. He wept without meaning to, tears of fury and impotence, and when he caught sight of his reflection in a shattered tank, he struck it until his knuckles split.

  He looked like a child. Like a child dragged forward through too many centuries, his skin parchment-thin and splotched with age, his veins like ink stains, his mouth sunken and trembling beneath glamours that no longer held. His eyes, when they opened, were milky with exhaustion—not ancient in the mythic sense, but ancient in the real, human, decaying way. Like time had finally claimed its due.

  The room was in shambles by the time he collapsed again, panting, shivering, muttering threats to no one, to nothing. The air reeked of old magic and fresh blood.

  It was not a tantrum. It was grief with teeth.

  The glamours were gone. They had shattered the moment the Weave collapsed, and without it, there was no spellcraft left to bring them back. What remained was not the slow fray of illusion but its total, irreversible absence. His face was no longer masked—it was exposed in full, unmediated by magic, abandoned by the vanity of artifice. The storm inside him had nothing to fight through. It simply flooded out.

  His hair, once maintained in an illusion of inky black, hung in sparse, silver tatters. His hands shook uncontrollably, knotted with arthritis and old fractures that had never fully healed beneath the masking spells. One of his molars fell out as he clenched his jaw too tightly. His joints throbbed with every twitch.

  He touched his face and recoiled at its texture—like paper soaked through and left to dry wrong. Even his voice, when he dared to whisper, had become uncertain, no longer the weapon it had once been, but something rasping and wet.

  He looked less like an archwizard than a mistake kept alive by habit. Time had come for him all at once, and now it would not let go.

  When the shaking slowed, he crawled to the mirror.

  He peeled back the black cloth with fingers that did not feel like his own. The surface was dusty, fogged, reluctant to show him—but when it did, he stared. Long and hard.

  Then he began to fix what he could.

  He rummaged through the debris of the oubliette like a grave-robber, dragging out ancient cloaks, discarded bandages, strips of velvet, torn canvas sacks. He tried a hood first, draping it over his scalp and framing the ruined map of his face. It made him look like a beggar.

  He tried again. A cloth mask. A heavy scarf. A lacquered half-helm that clanked loose no matter how he adjusted it.

  He used a broken glass shard to trim his hair, pulling it forward, trying to style it like it had once looked—slick, sharp, imperial. It didn’t work. The hair was too thin, too brittle. It clung to the wrong places.

  Each attempt was worse than the last. He muttered to himself with every failure, louder each time, until finally he screamed at the mirror again—not because of what it showed, but because it refused to lie.

  No one in the city would recognize him now. They believed him a myth, a symbol, an empty chair atop the tower. But the thought of being seen like this—even by accident—curdled his stomach.

  He settled on a wide-brimmed hat and a dark veil, stitched together from what cloth he could find. It did not restore his pride. It simply let him look away. It may have obscured his vision somewhat, but he didn't care. It looked better.

  And then, even with blood on his hands and the veil barely clinging to his face, he began whispering theories.

  Desperate half-thoughts poured out of him, cracked fragments of magical logic, theorems unspooled from memory. He ran equations under his breath, sketching sigils in the dust with a broken bone, reciting the names of long-dead laws of arcana as if their mere invocation might spark something.

  He knew the Weave was gone. But part of him couldn’t stop.

  He tried to recreate resonance patterns from memory, tapping out their pulses on his chest like an addict knocking on an empty vein. He muttered the words for levitation, for shielding, for scrying—anything—but they hung in the air, empty. Powerless.

  Still he kept going. Stripping wires from broken constructs, reassembling parts that didn’t fit, turning gears by hand. His breath came in short, wheezing gasps, but his eyes were wide, hungry.

  He wasn’t looking for hope. He was looking for sensation—a flicker, a tingle, a scrap of the divine rush he used to feel with every spell. The silence where magic should be was worse than pain. It was absence.

  And Sharrzaman, archwizard of the City of Cities, was reduced to crawling through ruins, chasing ghosts of spells like a man clawing at dirt to find a buried pipe.

  Nothing came.

  But he kept scratching anyway.

  Then—a thought.

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  The pixies.

  He froze mid-scrawl, the broken bone trembling in his fingers. Pixie magic was not Weave magic. It never had been. Their time-aligned nature ran on something older, something more stubborn. Something parallel.

  He had none left here. They were all gone—reduced to skeletons or twisted remains, casualties of his earliest prototypes. But back at his tower...

  The thought burned like a flare in the fog. His tower. His cages. His supply.

  He could almost see them—hovering, glowing, trembling in the tanks he’d perfected over centuries. Hundreds, maybe thousands. All still pulsing with potential. Untethered to the Weave. Waiting.

  He stood too fast, staggered, caught himself on the broken rim of a tank.

  He didn’t know how he would reach the tower, not without teleportation, not without the Weave, but it didn’t matter. Not yet. All that mattered was that something might still work.

  And if it worked—he would not just recover.

  He would ascend.

  But the thought of triumph came tangled with another.

  Krungus.

  The things that old fool had said to him over the years—casual, cutting, maddeningly sincere. He’d brushed them off at the time, kept his posture still and his voice amused, but the words had taken root. They festered.

  You don't build cities. You break people until they pretend the ruin is order.

  You're not a visionary. You're a coward with a calendar.

  You can't love anything you didn't design.

  Sharrzaman sat down again, slower this time.

  It had hurt. Not because it was true—never that—but because some part of him feared Krungus believed it. That after everything, after centuries of genius and precision and sacrifice, he was still seen as a manipulator playing dress-up as a savior.

  He whispered, "He doesn't know what it costs to plan a future."

  But the mirror behind him, uncovered and unblinking, said nothing.

  And then the worst of it came—what Krungus had said about her.

  Utopianna.

  She never loved you. She loved the story you told about yourself. The moment it cracked, she walked away. Not because she betrayed you—because she finally saw you.

  Sharrzaman closed his eyes, but the words bloomed behind the lids. The soft way Krungus had said her name. The grief there. The truth.

  He tried to shake it off, to sneer, to mock—but the edges had dulled. The scorn no longer came easily. A hollow opened in his chest, wide and aching.

  He didn’t know if she had loved him. Not truly. He couldn’t remember anymore whether the moments he recalled were real or part of the persona he’d crafted around her approval. Her attention had once felt like sunlight.

  Now it felt like rot.

  His hand trembled.

  He reached for the thought, tried to untangle it—tried to understand—

  —and then shoved it away. Hard.

  No.

  He stood again, too fast, chest heaving. The pain was good. It broke the spiral. Thought was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

  She was gone. Krungus was wrong. The city needed order. That was all that mattered. That was always all that mattered.

  And besides—it wasn’t his fault.

  The Weave had not collapsed because of the Needle. It had collapsed because Krungus returned. Because the man had barged back into the world like a cracked bell, ringing ruin across the lattice without even understanding what he was breaking.

  Krungus had always been chaos with robes. And now, finally, the city had snapped under the weight of his recklessness. Sharrzaman had merely reacted. He had injected clarity, not poison. Structure, not entropy. The Needle hadn’t killed the Weave—it had tried to save it from rot.

  He said it aloud, just to hear it:

  "It was him."

  He didn’t believe it at first.

  So he said it again, firmer:

  "It was him."

  The third time it sounded like truth.

  He exhaled slowly. Then, with stiff movements and a body that no longer felt like his own, Sharrzaman turned away from the mirror and made for the oubliette’s exit. The stairwell was narrow, slick with condensation, and choked by time. Every step upward felt like dragging a coffin behind him.

  The last hatch required both hands and a full minute of grunting effort to force open. It groaned like a dying beast and let in a shaft of dusty, colorless daylight.

  The City of Cities stretched above him, broken and bruised, its towers bent like fingers mid-collapse. Smoke clung to the sky. No birds. No spelllight. Only wind.

  He squinted. The veil did little to keep the sun from stabbing into his eyes. He adjusted his wide-brimmed hat and pulled the cloth tighter around his face.

  His tower lay far beyond the city walls, nestled in the crags past the eastern rise—remote, imposing, and deliberately separate. He had always considered himself above the city’s filth and chatter, its politics and pace. With his healthy body, the walk might have taken a month.

  Now? Closer to two.

  He did not sigh. He did not curse.

  He simply started walking.

  The streets were worse than he remembered—filthy, sagging, crowded with the detritus of lives he had long stopped considering real. Trash was piled against crumbling curbs. Tarps flapped over shattered windows. People huddled near broken fountains or gathered in clumps around street vendors hawking unidentifiable meat.

  Sharrzaman moved like a ghost through it all, his veil low, his gait slow. No one looked at him. They saw an old man, maybe sick, maybe mad. He preferred it that way.

  Every corner reeked of desperation dressed as resilience. Families bartered moldy fruit like it was gold. A bard played a two-stringed lute with theatrical glee, surrounded by people pretending to enjoy it. Children scampered barefoot through ash. Sharrzaman scowled.

  Regular people doing regular things. He hated it. Hated the noise, the smells, the way the city accepted its own ruin with such cheerful rot.

  It had been nearly a thousand years since he'd walked through the streets himself, and they had only grown smaller, pettier, more grotesque in his absence. He had thought himself above it then. Now the divide felt insurmountable.

  And then he saw them.

  Two chickenfolk children, feathered and scruffy, kicking at a puddle. One leapt, cackled, soaked the other. The second screamed and gave chase, flapping tiny wings, their laughter high and wild and useless.

  Something in him froze.

  Galloquin.

  Of course.

  And then it came clearer: Galloquin wasn’t a ghost or a memory. He was still alive. He had to be.

  Sharrzaman had been in contact with him up until the Weave collapsed. Irregular messages, coded scrolls, old signs left in dead drops—Galloquin had been working, still moving through the city, carrying out errands Sharrzaman had deemed too small to handle personally. He had always been resourceful, maddeningly so, able to survive anywhere the city frayed.

  Now, Sharrzaman realized, he might be the only living thread left.

  He still had one ace in the hole. An agent in the city. Someone who knew its underside better than its maps, who had no need of the Weave to get around. If he could find Galloquin, if he could reconnect with him, he might not have to walk all the way to the tower after all.

  Maybe he could even get there in days.

  The thought struck like flint in the dark. He adjusted his pace, eyes sharper now. He had no idea how to find Galloquin, no trail to follow, no message to send—but the idea burned hotter with each step.

  Galloquin was somewhere in this city. He had to be. If he had survived the collapse, and Sharrzaman believed he had, then there was still a way forward. Still a path not carved in stone.

  He didn’t know how to reach him. Not yet. But he would figure it out.

  He would find a way.

  The last update he’d received before the Weave’s collapse had mentioned something curious—Galloquin had supposedly scored a 'motorbike' from that idiot outsider, Eugene, during one of the markets. Sharrzaman didn’t know what a motorbike was, not really, but he remembered the way the word had been underlined twice in the message. It sounded fast.

  Maybe that was the key.

  He could start there. Someone must have seen a chickenfolk tearing through the City streets on some absurd wheeled contraption. Someone might remember the noise, the flash, the absurdity of it.

  But the thought of having to ask—ask—regular people on the street? The idea made his stomach turn. To speak to a vendor or a loiterer or a common wretch and request help?

  No. He would find a different way. A cleverer way. He had not stooped that low—not yet.

  He turned a corner into a tighter alley, head down, veil drawn. The streets narrowed, the shade thickened. A trio of street-toughs leaned against the wall ahead - tatty clothes, sharpened smiles, eyes hungry with opportunity.

  It never occurred to Sharrzaman to be afraid. He had never feared people. People had always feared him. The idea of being robbed - of being targeted - was utterly foreign. He didn’t even have the instinct to flinch. Not until it was far too late.

  "Old man," one called, stepping into his path. "Alms for the wretched?"

  Sharrzaman didn’t break stride. "I have nothing for you."

  The second one moved faster, circling behind. "That hat says otherwise. So does the veil. You hiding coin or just that face?"

  "I said I have nothing," he snapped.

  They surrounded him. The leader stepped close, too close. "Let’s see, then."

  Hands pawed at him, rough and unpracticed. They searched sleeves, pressed at seams, found nothing but threadbare cloth and blood-stiff bandages. The leader frowned.

  "You’re serious. He’s got nothing."

  And then, without warning, the third one punched him. Hard. Right in the stomach.

  The air left his lungs in a wheeze. He doubled over. Vomit hit the cobbles—bile, old water, something black and stringy.

  They stepped back, sneering.

  "Gross!" one exclaimed. Another laughed.

  "Should’ve died in the gutter like the rest of ’em," the first spat.

  Then they were gone, melting back into the city’s noise.

  Sharrzaman wiped his mouth with the back of a shaking hand. The pain lingered, but the humiliation stuck deeper. He tried to pull his veil tighter, but his hands trembled too badly.

  He stumbled a few steps, then collapsed in the shadow of a broken archway, hidden from view. The stink of his own bile filled his nose. His ribs ached with each breath.

  He lay there for a long time, unmoving.

  Eventually, he whispered into the dirt, a promise not meant for ears:

  "This city will pay. All of it. Every street. Every fool. Every inch."

  Somewhere behind him, a faint giggle echoed—light, flitting, unmistakably pixie-like.

  His heart jumped, then froze. He turned his head, but saw no one. Just shadows. Just debris.

  He closed his eyes. "Imagination," he muttered.

  Still, the echo lingered longer than it should have.

  He stayed where he was, curled in the filth, shaking with exhaustion and bile and rage. And beneath it all, a hate he hadn’t felt in centuries began to crystallize.

  Krungus.

  Utopianna.

  The Number.

  The others who smiled behind their masks, who judged, who condescended, who doubted him when he had given everything. Who stole his city and left him to rot in alleys.

  He cursed them in silence, one by one, naming them in his mind with cold precision.

  Not just the city. Not just the commoners.

  Everyone.

  He would rise again.

  And when he did, he would make them all remember what it meant to fear a wizard.