Chapter Three: The Rootless
I wasn't born in a palace, or even a proper house. I was born in a field tent in the outskirts of Nethra, surrounded by wet roots, fog, and silence.
No healers came to welcome me. No neighbors gathered to cheer my rune's arrival. Because when my card appeared, it didn't glow. It didn't even hum.
It just hung in the air, cold and black and empty.
They say Nethra's forests whisper to those who listen. I never heard whispers. I heard silence. Staring. The kind that coils around your ribs and doesn't let go.
I don't have a name here. Just a label. Blank. Null. Rootless.
Nethra has no schools. It doesn't believe in training the weak. You either have value, or you vanish. Those with powerful cards especially Morphers are taken into the noble lineages and apprenticed into the Houses. The rest? You survive by your own hands or become fertilizer for the soil.
For most of my life, I worked the perimeter trade routes, scavenging old wreck sites from the Age of Landing. The places where the great ships first touched down. The places where ancient things still sleep. I traded scrap metal, old Arc fragments, sometimes even broken glove parts, anything the merchants in the lower canopy cities would take. I slept in a converted transport crate. Ate once a day if I was lucky.
And yet, I wasn't completely alone.
Because someone had been watching me.
The first sign came a week ago.
A small square of paper pinned to my tent flap. No ink. No symbols. Just a pressed white flower, crushed into the center, and the faint scent of ash and mint. The moment I touched it, my card dormant for seventeen years twitched. Just once. Like it had flinched.
Two days later, a man appeared.
He didn't give a name. Wore a grey hood, clean robes, and an Arcglove with no runes. Blank, just like me. His eyes were silver. Unsettling.
He didn't speak until he was two feet away. "You are rootless," he said. "But not fruitless."
Before I could ask what he meant, he dropped a sealed scroll into my hand and vanished into the trees.
I opened it that night.
It said: "Come to the Grove of Third Names. We will show you what the runes fear."
And that's how I found myself walking alone through the Whispering Veil.
A forbidden stretch of forest where compass stones fail, Arc readings scramble, and Morphers rarely tread. It's where the old cults lived before the Seven Nations scattered them like ash. Where the Children of the Blank once built temples to nothing.
I passed ancient stone faces half-buried in moss. Obrium roots growing over collapsed spires. I saw a broken statue of a child, faceless, reaching upward toward something that had long since burned away.
And at the center of it all: the Grove.
Twelve figures stood in a circle beneath the blackroot trees. Each wore a different mask. One smiled. One wept. One was made entirely of mirrored glass. Their robes were plain, and none of them bore visible Arcgloves.
Yet when I stepped into the circle, the air shifted.
My card rose. On its own.
It never did that before.
"It answers now," said one of the masked figures. The voice was female. Low, rough, tired. "Even the void must speak in the presence of truth."
Another mask, this one carved from obsidian nodded. "He is older than the others. But the card is still dormant. That makes him dangerous."
"Or divine," said a third.
I took a step back. "Who are you?"
"We are what came before," said the weeping mask. "Before the Glove. Before the Five. Before the Rune Lies."
I didn't understand. "I don't want trouble. I just want to know what I am."
"You are not a mistake," said the mirrored one. "You are a mirror the world is not ready to look into."
Another stepped forward. This one shorter. He wore no Arcglove. Just bare hands wrapped in cloth.
"Tell me, Aleister," he said softly. "Have you ever wondered why your card doesn't need a glove?"
My mouth went dry. "…What?"
"The Glove channels Arc into cards. Yours doesn't need channeling. It is a source."
A beat. A pause in the air. My heart thudded once. Then twice.
"And if I told you," he whispered, "that the card you carry… is older than Alcraya?"
I didn't answer.
Because for the first time in my life,
my card began to glow.
Faint. Pale. But not white. Not light.
Something darker.
Something that pulsed like a heartbeat in the void.
And for the first time ever, I heard its voice in my head.
Not words.
A question.
One I wasn't ready to answer.