The Cirque des Ombres moved like a ghost through the grey mist of dawn. The victory over the Collector's Menagerie had left the performers weary, their mechanical parts groaning with the stress of combat and their porcelain skin chipped by glass and steel. But for Aryan, the exhaustion was deeper. It was a spiritual fatigue that sat heavy in his marrow. As the wagons creaked toward the jagged horizon of the Iron Forest, the air began to change once more. The warmth of the plains died away, replaced by a wind that carried the metallic tang of cold silver and the mournful sound of whistling wind.
Before them lay the Bridge of Sighs. It was a massive, arching structure that spanned a bottomless chasm shrouded in white fog. The bridge was not made of stone or steel, but of a substance that shimmered like pearl—Singing Bone. Legend said it was harvested from the remains of the Great Grove's ancient guardians. Every gust of wind that passed through its porous structure created a haunting, melodic hum that sounded like a thousand voices whispering at once.
"The bridge reacts to the weight of your soul, not your body," the Jester warned, his brass gears clicking in a slow, somber rhythm. "If your heart is heavy with secrets or regret, the bridge will sing your sorrows back to you. And sometimes, the song is so beautiful, travelers simply lie down and never get up."
Aryan stood at the precipice. Behind him, Sarah gripped Mira's hand. Mira looked skeletal; the silver rot had reached her throat, making every breath sound like the scraping of a needle on a record. Aryan knew he was the only one strong enough to lead them across. He stepped onto the bone-white surface.
Immediately, the hum intensified. The bridge didn't just vibrate; it breathed. As Aryan walked, the mist around him began to coalesce into shapes. He looked back, but Mira and Sarah were gone, swallowed by a thick, milky white wall. He was alone.
"Aryan... look at what you've become."
The voice was warm, familiar, and thick with the scent of cedar shavings. Aryan turned. Standing in the middle of the bridge was Vikram Khanna. He looked exactly as he had on that final day in Shimla—his apron stained with wood glue, a chisel tucked behind his ear. But his eyes were not the eyes of the man in the soul-anchor; they were dark, filled with a bottomless pity.
"Papa?" Aryan whispered, his mahogany arm throbbing. "Is this another memory?"
"No, Aryan. This is the truth," the figure said, walking toward him. The bridge sang a low, grieving chord. "Look at your arm. Look at the bark climbing toward your heart. I didn't build this 'armor' to protect you, son. I built it because I was a coward."
Aryan froze. "What are you talking about?"
"I couldn't protect your mother," Vikram said, his voice cracking with a simulated grief. "The Master wanted a Seed, and I gave him Rhea instead so that you could live. I wrapped you in wood to hide my sin, hoping the Master would think you were just another failed experiment. Every inch of mahogany on your body is a monument to my failure as a father."
The words felt like poison. Aryan's mahogany hand gripped the railing of the bridge. The bone under his fingers began to glow a sickly violet. The "Father" stepped closer, his hand reaching out. "Stay here, Aryan. Lie down on the bone. The wood will stop growing if you just stop fighting. We can be a family again—you, me, and the memory of the forest. Let the Weaver have the rest. You've suffered enough."
Aryan looked down at the bone bridge. It felt so soft, like a bed of feathers. The music was becoming a lullaby, the same one his mother used to sing. The fatigue in his soul was telling him to listen. Just lie down. Let the mahogany claim you. No more running. No more silver rot.
But then, he felt a sharp, burning sensation on his chest—right where the star-shaped mark lay.
He remembered the Jester's words: "The Purity of the Flaw." He remembered the girl with the glass wings he had saved in the circus. He remembered Mira's synthetic tears. If his father had truly been a coward, he wouldn't have left the Lexicon. He wouldn't have left the soul-anchor. This thing on the bridge wasn't his father—it was the Weaver's thread, trying to weave a blanket of despair.
"My father told me that wood has memory," Aryan said, his voice rising above the bridge's song. "And my memory of him isn't of a coward. It's of a man who loved the grain too much to ever let it be used as a prison."
Aryan gripped his mahogany arm with his human hand. He didn't try to hide the wood; he commanded it. "You say this is armor? Fine. Then I will wear it like a Knight!"
He slammed his wooden fist into the Singing Bone. Instead of breaking the bridge, he forced his sap into the bone's pores. The golden liquid flooded the structure, and the bridge's mournful song shifted. The violet glow vanished, replaced by a brilliant, sun-like amber.
The hallucination of Vikram shrieked—a sound of tearing silk—and dissolved into a thousand silver moths that flew off into the abyss.
The mist cleared. Aryan saw Mira and Sarah standing just a few feet away, frozen in a trance. Sarah was crying, and Mira was staring into the fog with a look of absolute horror.
"Mira! Sarah! Move!" Aryan roared.
The bridge began to buckle. The Weaver, realizing her trick had failed, was pulling the silver threads that held the bone fragments together. The structure was literally unmaking itself beneath their feet.
Aryan didn't run. He knelt. He thrust both hands—one wood, one flesh—into the bone floor. "Sarah, get Mira across! NOW!"
"But Aryan—" Sarah cried.
"GO!"
As Sarah dragged the semi-conscious Mira toward the far bank, Aryan became a living bridge. He used his "Root" power to bridge the gaps where the bone was falling away. His mahogany arm stretched, the wood splintering and regrowing at an agonizing speed to hold the weight of the massive structure. Every second felt like his joints were being pulled apart by horses.
He watched as Sarah and Mira finally tumbled onto the solid earth of the far bank. The bridge was now nothing but a few strands of silver and Aryan's own distended, wooden limbs.
"Aryan! Jump!" Mira screamed, her voice barely a whisper.
With a final, explosive surge of energy, Aryan retracted his roots and launched himself across the final ten-foot gap. He landed hard in the cold iron-rich soil, his mahogany arm smoking and cracked.
Behind them, the Bridge of Sighs collapsed into the fog, the bone fragments sounding like a choir falling silent all at once.
Aryan lay in the dirt, gasping for air. His human hand was bleeding, but his mahogany arm... the bark had reached his collarbone. It was now inches from his throat.
Sarah crawled over to him, her face smudged with soot. "You did it. You held it together."
Aryan looked at his hand. He noticed something he hadn't seen before. Among the green leaves on his wrist, a single, tiny white flower had bloomed. It smelled of jasmine and mountain air.
"Mira," Aryan said, turning to her. "The Weaver tried to tell me my father traded Rhea for me. She tried to make me believe I was a mistake."
Mira looked at the flower on his wrist. "The Weaver tells the truth that hurts the most, Aryan. But she forgets that a Seed doesn't care about the quality of the soil. It only cares about the light."
Suddenly, Sarah gasped. She was looking at Mira's neck. The violet glow of the silver rot had stopped moving. In its place, a small, silver thread was vibrating, humming a melody that didn't belong to Mira.
"She's a beacon," Sarah whispered, her eyes wide with realization. "Mira isn't just rotting. The Weaver is using the silver in her heart to track our every heartbeat. As long as she's with us, we can never hide."
Aryan looked at Mira. She knew. He could see it in her eyes—the tragic, silent acceptance of a guardian who had become a threat to the person she was meant to protect.