The morning sun hung low behind wisps of fading mist as Garrick made his way along the now-familiar trail leading to the edge of Arsenic City, where Kalem's tent stood like an idle defiance against the world's shifting gaze.
He half-expected to find the smith-lord hunched over his forge, bent to some fresh fever of iron or rune. What he did not expect—what made him pause with one brow arched high—was the sight before him.
Kalem, the Lord of Armaments, the butcher of the Blood Crusade, was perched atop a single wheel, rolling slowly back and forth in front of his tent. Barefoot, shirtless, and wearing nothing but worn black pants tied with a leather strap, he stood balanced with arms out, knees bent, like some wandering jester without bells.
Then, as Garrick stepped forward, Kalem shifted again—gracefully inverting his body, hands planted on the spinning wheel, legs held straight like a dancer in still water.
"…What is this?" Garrick asked at last, blinking. "Don't tell me this is the thing you were building yesterday."
Kalem chuckled softly, flipping back onto his feet and letting the wheel roll away behind him.
"Oh, no. This is nothing. Just a new timepass."
"Timepass," Garrick repeated. "You know, for a second I thought you'd decided to throw away swords and take up coins by tumbling in city squares."
"If I needed coin," Kalem replied with a shrug, "I'd build a single weapon and sell it. With my name, it'd fund ten winters of leisure. And that's without engraving."
He picked the wheel up and began to juggle it between one foot and the other, like it weighed nothing. It was the same one he'd forged days ago, runed along the rim and reinforced in pale alloys not found in any surface mine.
"Sure," Garrick said, folding his arms. "But that doesn't explain why you're only wearing pants."
Kalem grinned, setting the wheel down and wiping his brow with a cloth.
"You wear armor like I do," he said. "You should know why."
Garrick sighed. "Aye. But you don't usually get caught air-dancing on a wheel in public."
"Better here than the city," Kalem said. "The children stare less. Mostly."
Garrick shook his head and sat on a nearby rock, eyeing the half-finished constructs laid out beneath the tent's awning. Blades, yes—but also strange things. Curved plates, thin frames, lengths of hardened silk, glass-thread tubes.
"You're building more than wheels now," he said.
Kalem nodded. "I've been thinking about motion. About cities. Carriages. Travel without beasts."
Garrick narrowed his eyes. "You want to make carriages without horses?"
"I can make weapons that summon storms and forests from stone," Kalem replied. "Why not wheels that roll themselves?"
"And you'd build these for who? The merchant lords? The high houses?"
"For everyone, eventually," Kalem said. "But first, just for my friends."
He gestured toward a smaller wheel—child-sized—resting on a plank nearby. A name had been etched on its core: Lyle.
"I met a boy on the road," Kalem said quietly. "One leg bent wrong. Couldn't walk without pain. His family were cast-outs from the outer ring. I gave him a charm to dull the ache, but it's not enough."
"So now you're making him a wheel?" Garrick asked, surprised.
"A chair, with runed wheels. Something light enough to push. Strong enough to survive dirt and stone."
Garrick whistled low.
"You'll terrify the nobility," he said. "You build for war, they say. Now you build for cripples."
Kalem shrugged again. "Let them be terrified. I've done enough killing for three men. Time I made something that lives."
There was silence then, save for the faint crackle of the anvil's self-fed flame. Garrick stared at the pale shimmer of Kalem's arms—scarred, sinewed, marked with strange patterns that didn't look like burns or blade-work.
"I've been meaning to ask," Garrick said. "Those lines. The glowing ones. They don't fade. What are they?"
Kalem looked down at his arms, then raised his left palm, turning it toward the light.
"They're from the Abyss," he said. "The deeper I went, the more the place… left marks. But they aren't wounds. They don't ache. They help."
"Help?"
"They let me feel things others don't. Vibrations. Magic. Tension in metal. In a way, the Abyss made me better."
"That's not how anyone else tells it," Garrick muttered. "The Abyss drives men mad."
"It probably did," Kalem said softly. "But madness… isn't always ruin."
He smiled faintly then, and for a brief moment, Garrick saw something rare: peace. Not in a man free of burden, but in one who'd made peace with his burdens.
A breeze passed through the clearing, rustling the tent flaps.
"So," Garrick said at last. "What happens next?"
Kalem turned toward the forge again.
"I make the rest of the wheels. I finish Lyle's chair. And after that... maybe I try something new. Something with light."
"Light?"
"Not the kind you burn. The kind you harness. You'll see."
Garrick rose, brushing dust from his tunic. "You know, if you keep this up, people will stop calling you a warlord."
"Let them," Kalem said, picking up the wheel again. "I never asked for the title."
As Garrick walked back down the path, he glanced over his shoulder one last time.
Kalem was standing on the wheel again, arms spread wide, silhouetted in the light, balancing not just his body—but something heavier.
Hope, perhaps.
Or the weight of everything he hadn't killed.