The journey back to the Rust Gate was a pilgrimage through pain.
Every league Noctis traveled felt heavier than the last. His body, pushed beyond breaking point in the spire's crucible, was a chorus of protests. A deep, marrow-deep ache, the signature of magical burnout, had settled into his bones, a constant hum of wrongness beneath his skin. His mind moved through a clinging fog of exhaustion, and the newly carved hollows in his memory—the places where vital things had been—throbbed with a phantom sense of loss, like a tongue probing the socket of a freshly pulled tooth. He moved through the deep, lightless tunnels not with purpose, but with the grim, mechanical persistence of a ghost retracing the path of its own death, guided only by the ingrained, magnetic pull of the Cradle-shard and the familiar, comforting scent of decay.
He gave the Sympathy corridor a wide berth. He couldn't face the echo of Echiel's vast, wounded song again, not in this hollowed-out, brittle state. To stand in that river of collective grief with his own cup empty might wash what was left of him away entirely. Instead, he took a longer, more treacherous route through forgotten utility tunnels and abandoned seismic monitoring stations, where the only company was the skittering of pale, blind arthropods and the eternal, patient drip-drip-drip of water finding its way through the world.
Two days of this slow, agonizing travel brought him, at last, back to the cavern of the Rust Gate.
It was a tableau frozen in time. The monstrous, biomechanical accretion of rusted metal still loomed, its surface weeping the same clear, viscous fluid that pooled and reflected the cavern's faint fungal light. The air still hung thick with the taste of ozone and cold iron. And on the smooth, worn stone before the gate's jagged, interlocking maw, the Warden kept his vigil.
Rook sat as if sculpted from the very stone, his patchwork form a permanent monument to penitence and patience. His organic, copper-brown eye was closed; the azure, glassy sensor lens set into the metal half of his face glowed with a soft, unwavering light, sweeping the cavern in a slow, constant, automated arc. As Noctis's shuffling footsteps echoed from the tunnel mouth, both eyes opened.
The Warden did not rise. His dual gaze—one organic and fathomlessly weary, one artificial and piercingly analytical—tracked Noctis's limping approach across the cavern floor.
"You return," Rook's voice grated out, the organic rasp undercut by the synthetic, buzzing timbre. It was the sound of a stone grinding against a broken speaker. "Few who pass the Gate and receive its answer ever walk this way again. It typically signifies one of two outcomes: abject failure… or death."
"I didn't die," Noctis said, his own voice a dry rustle from disuse. He stopped, swaying slightly with fatigue. "But I didn't succeed either. Not in any way that matters. Not yet."
The Warden's massive hand—flesh on one side, sculpted alloy on the other—rested on the crude, resonator-forged weapon lying across his lap. "Then why are you here, Keybearer? The deep has spoken to you. The Mother has shared her song. Your path lies forward, into the world, to act upon that knowing. Not backward, into the silence you have already left."
"My path forward is blocked," Noctis replied, the admission tasting of ash. "The Corporate witch, Thorne. She has a larger piece of Echiel in her claws. She's not just draining it. She's… editing it. Forcing it into a simpler shape. I tried to disrupt her work. All I did was plant a seed of doubt and light myself up like a beacon for her newest, smartest hunter." He met the Warden's mismatched stare. "I need to disappear. To become someone else, somewhere else. And I need to find something else before they find me."
Rook's copper eye narrowed. The blue lens whirred faintly, focusing. "What 'something else'?"
"Another Grimoire."
A long, heavy silence descended upon the cavern, broken only by the metronome-like drip… drip… from the weeping gate. The Warden's expression was a study in contrasts—the metal half eternally impassive, the flesh side shifting through a complex landscape of grim consideration, memory, and something like profound sorrow.
"The Flesh-Grimoire," Rook stated, his layered voice flat. It was not a question. "The Archivist has grown bold. Or desperate. She has been listening on frequencies that were meant to stay silent. The whispers from the Bio-Modification District."
"You know of it?" Hope, thin and fragile, flickered in Noctis's chest.
"I know of the district," Rook said, his voice dropping into a lower, darker register, like stone grinding deep underground. "It is a voluntary damnation. A marketplace for the soul. It is where people go to escape the prison of their own humanity, only to forge themselves into new, more exquisite cages. The Flesh-Grimoire… in such a place, it would be a holy relic. A scripture of transfiguration. Or it would be the ultimate weapon. Likely," he added, the synthetic buzz in his voice hardening, "it is both."
Noctis nodded, the motion sending a fresh spike of pain through his neck. "Lyra said you could get me in. Unseen."
Rook let out a sound that was half weary sigh, half burst of corrupted static. "The Archivist calls in her favor. The last one. I owe her a debt. Not for my freedom—that is my own burden—but for the memory she guards. The memory of the world as it was before the cages." He stood then, in one fluid, powerful motion that belied his seeming stillness. His hybrid form seemed to fill the cavern. "I can get you past the district's unofficial borders. I can show you a door they do not watch. But I cannot get you in as you are. You reek of deep magic and fresh Corporate attention. In the Bio-Mod District, they smell weakness and desperation like blood in the water. You need a cover. A skin to wear."
"What kind of cover?"
The Warden took a step closer, the blue lens in his face brightening to an actinic gleam as it performed a swift, invasive scan of Noctis from head to toe. "You need a reason to be there. Everyone in that cesspool is one of three things: a buyer, a seller, or something becoming. You are not a buyer—you have no currency they would accept. You are not a seller—the only things you carry are secrets they would flay you alive to possess. Therefore, you must be the third. You must be becoming."
Noctis felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cavern's dank air. It was the cold touch of inevitability. "Becoming what?"
"A patient." Rook's organic copper eye held his, unblinking. "A man on the run, seeking a very specific, very illegal modification to hide from high-tech pursuers. It is one of the most common stories in the district. I will take you to a mod-surgeon I know. She is… discreet. For a price, she will graft you a temporary, subdermal resonance damper—a piece of contraband tech that emits a constant, low-level null-field, masking your magical signature. It will make you a ghost to the Praetorian's scans."
"And the cost?" Noctis asked, already knowing the answer would be written in pain.
"It will hurt. The implantation is crude. The body hates foreign tech of that nature. It will itch, it will ache, it will feel like a splinter in your soul." Rook's gaze didn't waver. "And it will make using your own magic… agonizingly difficult. Like trying to scream with a hand clamped over your mouth. The damper will suppress any active resonance you try to project. You will be cut off from the Grimoire's active power. From the shadow. From everything but the most passive listening."
The prices kept mounting. First, memories—pieces of his past. Now, his very connection to power—his present and future. He was being systematically unmade to survive.
"How temporary is 'temporary'?"
"A few weeks. A month at most before your body's immune response forces a rejection, or the cheap power cell fails. But it should be long enough for you to find your quarry. Or," he said with brutal honesty, "to die trying."
Rook hefted the resonator-weapon onto his alloy shoulder with a metallic clunk. "This is my favor to Lyra. I do not do this for you, Keybearer. I do it for the memory she guards. For the echo of the song that was. Do you understand the terms? Do you accept them?"
Noctis looked past the Warden, at the weeping, silent Rust Gate—the threshold he had crossed to become something more. Now, to go further, he had to become something less. He had to walk into a den of scavengers and butchers, wearing a muzzle of his own choosing.
There was no other path. The spire had proven that. To move forward, he had to shed another layer of himself.
He met the Warden's dual gaze, the human eye and the machine eye, and gave a single, exhausted nod.
"I accept."
"Good." Rook turned without another word and began walking toward a different, narrower fissure in the cavern wall, one Noctis had not noticed before. "Follow. And from this moment, do not speak unless spoken to. In the places we are going, words are a currency you cannot afford, and silence is the only armor you have left."
The Warden led him away from the gate, away from the profound silence of the deep, and toward the screaming, neon-lit chaos of the Bio-Mod District—a place where the human form was mere clay, identity was a commodity, and pain was the universal price of a new shape.
Noctis followed, the Grimoire a silent, dormant weight on his back, the shard a quiet, anxious pulse against his thigh, and his own uncertain future narrowing to the cold promise of a needle and a piece of forbidden tech buried under his skin.