Exile from Ironreach did not begin with gates.
It began with forgetting.
Tareth Veyl woke to motion that did not translate into distance. His body lay on a slab of stone that slid—not forward, not downward, but asideways through the city's foundations. The sensation was nauseating, like being carried through a thought someone had abandoned halfway.
He could not feel his qi.
That absence was louder than pain.
Every breath scraped raw flesh. Every heartbeat reminded him that his body had not been designed to exist without the quiet corrective pressure that had shaped him since childhood. He was unbalanced in ways no stance could fix.
Beside him walked the Inquisitor.
She had removed her helm. Her hair was streaked with iron-gray, her face marked by old scars earned before she had learned to hide hesitation. Her blade remained unsheathed—not as threat, but as habit.
"This path was sealed before my birth," she said quietly. "Ironreach denies its existence. That is why it still functions."
The walls around them did not look carved.
They looked excised.
Sections of stone simply ceased to exist, edges too clean, too final. No chisel marks. No fracturing. Just absence shaped like intention. The air here tasted thin, metallic, like rain that had forgotten how to fall.
"Where does it lead?" Tareth asked.
She did not answer immediately.
"Out," she said at last. "But not safely."
That tracked.
The road—if it could be called that—wound through layers of Ironreach that had never been finished. Hallways intersected themselves. Staircases descended into ceilings. Once, they passed a door that opened briefly on a dueling court full of motionless figures frozen mid-strike, faces contorted in expressions of permanent correction.
Tareth turned his head away.
"What happens to them?" he asked.
"They were removed improperly," the Inquisitor replied. "Ironreach does not like incomplete erasures."
They continued.
As they moved farther from the core, the city's pressure faded. The omnipresent weight of Kaelvar doctrine—of form, of expectation—thinned until it felt like breathing after drowning.
That was when the world noticed Tareth again.
Not as a variable.
As a gap.
The first sign was sound.
Footsteps echoed where no one walked. A second set of breaths matched his cadence, always a fraction late. Shadows lengthened independently, stretching toward him instead of away from light.
He clenched his jaw. "It followed."
The Inquisitor did not slow. "Yes."
"You knew it would."
"Yes."
The corridor ahead narrowed, walls leaning inward until even the concept of passage felt conditional. Cuts appeared along the stone—thin, glowing lines that shimmered uncertainly before sealing again.
Not Sub-Cuts.
Cruder.
Recent.
The predator was testing proximity.
"It can't touch me," Tareth said, more question than statement.
"It doesn't need to," the Inquisitor replied. "It only needs you to make sense again."
That struck deeper than any wound.
Without qi, without the blade's guidance, Tareth existed in a state the predator could not easily parse. But the longer he remained conscious, the more his mind reached instinctively for alignment—for coherence.
For definition.
That desire was the opening.
They reached a threshold that did not look like one.
The corridor simply… ended.
Beyond it lay open sky.
Not the sky above Ironreach's towers, but something lower, broader, stained amber by perpetual dusk. Wind rolled in from vast distance, carrying the smell of dust, old blood, and burned contracts.
The western marches of Vaalbara.
The Demon Realm's borderlands.
The Inquisitor stopped. "Past this point," she said, "Ironreach's authority fails completely."
"Yours too," Tareth noted.
"Yes."
She turned to face him fully.
"Kaelvar doctrine would require me to kill you now," she said. "Or at least cripple you beyond relevance."
"And you're not," Tareth said.
"No."
"Why?"
For the first time since they met, she hesitated.
"Because systems that refuse to adapt become prey," she said. "And Ironreach is bleeding. Slowly. Quietly. Like all arrogant things."
Behind them, the corridor shuddered.
A line appeared in midair—vertical, jagged, struggling to stay closed.
The predator pressed against it.
Not forcing entry.
Listening.
Learning the shape of Tareth's pause.
The sword—still strapped uselessly at Tareth's side—ticked.
Twice.
Not awakening.
Measuring.
The Inquisitor stepped back. "Go."
"And you?" Tareth asked.
"I will return," she said. "And lie."
He nodded. That, at least, was familiar.
He crossed the threshold.
The moment his foot touched the borderland soil, the world lurched—not violently, but decisively. Distance snapped back into agreement. Gravity remembered its direction. The sky settled into a constant, bruised twilight.
Behind him, the corridor sealed—not cleanly, but urgently.
The predator struck the closure an instant too late.
The impact rippled through the air, sending fractures racing across the sealed absence. The line held—but barely.
Tareth staggered forward, away from Ironreach, away from doctrine, away from the place that had shaped him into obedience.
Pain flared anew as his body rebelled against continued existence.
And then—
Something answered.
Not qi.
Something cruder.
The land itself seemed to acknowledge him—not as master, not as threat, but as irregularity. Dust shifted beneath his boots, settling differently around his footprints. The wind curved slightly toward him, as if uncertain whether to pass by or remain.
He was not aligned.
He was noticed.
Far away, in a border city already suffering quiet distortions, a contract unraveled itself mid-sentence.
In the Demon Realm, the ancient entity tilted its head.
"Oh," it murmured. "You let him leave."
The predator struck the sealed path again.
Harder.
Cracks spiderwebbed across nothingness.
The road behind Tareth did not reopen.
It thinned.
And somewhere between Ironreach's denial and the Demon Realm's hunger, a man without qi, without system, without permission, took his first uncorrected steps into a world that no longer knew how to pretend it was whole.
The edge had been broken.
Now the consequences were learning how to walk.