The gate closed behind him with a finality that echoed through marrow and memory alike. The sound was not just the sealing of stone, it was the sundering of everything behind him. Altan stood alone in the narrow tunnel, the last tremors of earth still fading from his shoulders. The breath he drew was cool and damp, touched with the scent of minerals and mist. The air was different here. Quieter. It clung to his skin like river-breath, soaked with something older than fire and heavier than stone. His limbs still remembered the weight of the mountain, but something deeper now stirred within him. A presence. A pull.
Ahead, a sound. Subtle at first, just a murmur beneath the silence. Water. Flowing. Steady. Infinite. The tunnel curved downward, its walls smooth as sculpted jade, reflecting ghostly ripples of light from unseen depths. Altan walked on, each step slower than the last, as if the world was drawing him inward not just physically, but spiritually. Always downward. Into the flow.
The corridor spilled open into a vast underground dome, a sanctum unlike any he had seen. Light, though no flame burned, shimmered above him, filtered through a translucent canopy that refracted it like fractured crystal. Thin rivers, faintly luminous with blue-green glow, meandered across polished stone like living veins. Pools sat still in sacred silence, reflecting not sky, but dreams. A low, eternal dripping filled the air, soft as lullaby, echoing through the hollowed expanse. There was no dust here. No heat. Only the presence of something that waited, and remembered.
At the center stood the old man, robes soaked to the knees, silent as the shrine he kept. He stood beside a perfectly round pool, its surface unbroken, its center impossibly dark.
"Stone taught you how to hold," he said, eyes never leaving the water. "Now you must learn how to let go."
Altan's voice was subdued, uncertain beneath the dome's hush. "What is this place?"
The old man tilted his head slightly. "This is where warriors drown. In pride. In control. In certainty."
Altan took a slow breath. "I didn't come here to drown."
A faint smile flickered on the old man's face, unreadable. "Then step in. And see what drowns, and what survives."
The water was not warm. Nor was it cold. It was ancient. As his foot entered the pool, the sensation crawled up his skin like the memory of rain in a land long forgotten. Another step, and the water took him. Not dragged, not devoured. It simply accepted him. Drew him in like breath.
The world vanished.
Beneath the surface, there was no blackness. There was clarity. And vision. Images spilled before him like pages in a forgotten book. His mother's gentle smile, soft and fleeting. His sister, laughing, alive, untouched by fire. Then came the flames, his tribe consumed, screams torn apart by wind. The clash of steel, the red mist of war. Loss. And then, a face, his own, shifting through ages. A child. A killer. A survivor. A monster. A son.
A voice spoke, liquid and low, from within the current.
"Who are you, Altan of the Steppes?"
He struggled to rise, to swim. But his arms would not move. His body felt weightless, yet bound. He strained against the water, but it did not yield. "You are not your grief. You are not your strength. You are not your name."
Panic flared, swift and wild. Then a whisper, faint but familiar, echoed from his soul: "This is water. Yield."
So he stopped fighting.
He let go.
And the water let him go.
He surfaced with a gasp, not one of desperation, but rebirth. The air no longer pressed. The chamber no longer constrained. Water curled along his skin, no longer clinging, but guiding. It flowed with him, not around him. His limbs felt different, not lighter, but freer.
The old man nodded once. "Now you may learn."
Time unraveled, as it always did in these sacred hollows. Fire had taught him how to strike. Earth had taught him how to stand. But water, water taught him how to listen. It was a lesson in silence. In rhythm. In yielding and reclaiming.
He learned the Mist-Step, a graceful spiral that slipped past blades like wind through fog. He practiced the Tide Shift, a subtle form of redirection that deflected even the fiercest assault with a tilt of the palm or bend of the hip. And most of all, he honed The River Breaks Stone, a flowing strike that carved through even the most grounded stance with elegant inevitability. These were not techniques of dominance. They were truths of transformation.
Water did not meet strength with strength. It moved around it, beneath it. It waited, and it remembered. In the stillness of his training, Altan saw his younger self, the boy who had once roared at the Empire, fists clenched, heart burning. That boy could not survive this path. That boy was a flame. Here, he had to become something deeper. A current beneath the current.
Then the pool darkened.
Its surface hissed like boiling oil. Mist thickened. From the heart of the water rose a figure: the Deep Wraith. No face. No eyes. A mirror in place of features, reflecting every flicker of Altan's doubt and fury. Its body flowed like armor formed from water, shifting with every breath. It did not walk. It glided.
The old man remained still. "You cannot fight water," he said. "You can only survive it."
Altan bowed low at the pool's edge, then stepped forward. The Deep Wraith mirrored the gesture and surged.
Their clash was not a battle. It was a dialogue. The Wraith struck not with rage, but with intent. Its limbs became blades of current, slicing air as if it too remembered war. Altan did not resist. He flowed. Where the Wraith struck, he was not. Where it collapsed, he became. They danced across the shallows in a spiral of liquid grace, neither dominating nor retreating.
Pain came, yes, sliced skin, bruised ribs. But not fear. Altan breathed through each motion, shifting form as needed. Mist-Step into Tide Shift. Tide Shift into River Breaks Stone. Every movement bled into the next until time itself lost meaning.
At last, the Wraith lunged, overcommitting.
Altan turned with it, followed its flow, not to break, but to meet.
His fingers touched its center.
The mirror rippled.
And the Wraith dissolved, mist returning to mist.
Silence returned, deeper than before.
The pool shimmered once more. From its depths rose a tendril of silver-blue qi, coiling like a serpent around Altan's leg. It slithered down, etching into his flesh a spiraling sigil, water made spirit. It pulsed not with fire, nor pressure, but serenity.
The mark of water. Accepted.
Altan stood still. In silence. Four marks now burned across his body, Wind. Fire. Earth. Water. He should have felt triumphant. Whole. But something was wrong.
The old man's face had changed.
There was hesitation in his voice now. A shadow behind his gaze.
"You're not done," Altan said.
"No," the old man whispered, voice quiet as falling droplets. "The next trial is not of body. Not even of mind."
Altan's jaw clenched. "Then what?"
The old man turned away. "Spirit."
And the world began to shift.
The water faded, drained into mist. Stones dissolved. Light withdrew. The Underglade itself, sanctuary, shrine, mirror, vanished like memory.
All that remained was breath.
And the path beyond.
"To face the spirit," the old man murmured, barely audible now, "you must face yourself."