The world is on fire.

It's the first thought in Allayria's head when she sees the rivers of smoke and flame. She's setting us all on fire.

There's something about seeing it from the air—one might think it would make the churned chaos of carts and crates and shrieking horses seem small, remote, but the ignited supply lines loom all the larger because here they can all be seen, these long veins of vitality charred in death.

The sound up here is greater too, and they can hear it all, hear screams from beings turning to ash leagues away, hear the crack and sizzle of frames in collapse.

And she doesn't know what to do.

Some people are trying—Nature-callers are sending water over some of it, others are trying to beat down the flame, but it not fast enough. They are not fast enough. And up here, watching it all, she is trapped.

How can I save them? she despairs, watching as one of the burning soldiers frees himself from a cart, stumbling in a blaze of crackling, melting flesh toward a stream. He's dead before he touches it.

"Five lines," Feuilles says, sounding as sick as Allayria feels. "Two hours—five of our seven supply lines completely destroyed."

"Their minds are all connected," Ruben says. "It was too precise for a typical attack. She ordered it simultaneously."

"Skilling is not a one-way street. The more you control elements, the more they can control you," Allayria murmurs, letting her eyes slide closed, letting herself feel the weight of the words she should have understood sooner settle on her, the way the overpowering lights and sounds had once pressed on her in the lonely trawl of Solveigard City by night. "She's Skilling the metal plates in their heads the same way you Skill the elements sight-unseen, Ruben. And the Skillers have been exposed to the metal for so long..."

"The connection is working on them in reverse," Ruben finishes, sounding ill too by the end. "I have heard of people becoming disoriented or dissociated by overexposure to elements, but never of someone manipulating the reverse process..."

"And on different types of Skillers," Feuilles interjects, looking pale and gaunt as his eyes remain fixed on his burning troops. "How is it working on Nature and Beast-callers?"

"We have to fix this," Aren Dost says. "We have to prevent it from happening again."

"We need Smith-callers," Beinsho says in an unaware echo of his protégé, his mouth nothing but a hard, thin line.

"I need to get to the front line," Allayria says, and they all turn and stare.

It is summons, whispered on paper, and the first place she arrived is the last place she will linger in this city. Inside the tinkling room of instruments and sunlight he waits for her, spectacles drooping on the hook of his nose, back bent against the rise of the suns.

"Beinsho said you are going," the Dynast says as he tinkers with another delicate thing —a small, thin metal scrap he pokes and prods at, as if there are hidden secrets to this plain sliver.

"It's time."

He peers up at this, his eyes large and owlish in the glassware.

"Quite right." And he rises, setting his instruments on the table, walking further into his shop's quagmire.

"I promised I'd be of help," he says, "But you have started sooner than I anticipated."

Allayria follows, watching the wispy man slip between rows, weaving in further still. There are vials back here, metallic stands, boiling tankards, smoke trapped in glass.

"Not all of it is quite ready," he continues. "You'll have to make do for the time being."

His nimble fingers work at a cabinet, twisting and tweaking dials and gears, thrumming along it, half memory, half-improvisation, until the doors click open.

He half-glances back, a mere moment of consideration.

"Red, isn't it?" he muses. "It's what you wore when you came here. A dark, purple red."

He pulls out a suit, deep burgundy, just like the first one she wore, but there is no metal here—she reaches out, touches it, and finds only fabric, bulky and stiff where there would be armor.

"Sofo will love it," he says as she examines it further. "A true patriot, wearing Keesark colors."

It feels like nothing she has held before, and she's opened her mouth to ask what it is when he suggests, casually:

"You should stab it."

She looks up and stares but his eyebrow only quirks and she Skills out a thin blade, melding to her grip, sharpening into a razor-thin point, and she swings.

It plunges in, but when she pulls back there is no tear.

"Oh good, it worked," he says, bending over and peering at the spot. "You'll be black and blue underneath, but there will be no breakage."

"How?" Allayria murmurs, her brow crumpling with wonder, her fingers touching the fabric once more.

"Much more flexible than normal armor," Qui Wren rambles on, "and much more Jarles-proof. Still, with weak points."

He gestures to the thin material on the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee, the corner of the neck.

"The cost of mobility," he explains. "But the important things are covered. I've made—"

He pauses, glancing up at her and then dabbing at the air around her, as if to point at invisible people, as if to dot at each of them—

Eeny, meeny, miny...

"Seven," he finishes, oblivious to the hair-raised crawl of her flesh. "The rest are gray."

He reaches farther into the cabinet and at first she thinks it's to pull out the rest, but something shorter comes out instead—something that gleams coldly in the morning light. A knife. A knife she saw last pressed into Lei's neck during the Gauntlet, as he lay, huffing in the ground's dust. Raul's silent knife, the one she had turned over to Ruben.

"Difficult to replicate," Wren says, once again interrupting her memories, interpreting her silence as scientific interest. "The qualities are strange and... resistant. I had hoped to make more. But if the compound won't break..."

He trails off and he turns the weapon in his fingers.

"Your Beast-callers will need these," he says eventually, and he hands it to her, pulling out a short sword after it.

When she looks up from these things she finds him examining her in a similar way to the trinkets and trifles he had fiddled with before, peering in mild curiosity, attempting to divine how all the gears click and shift together.

"It's time to begin the hunt, Paragon," Dynast Qui Wren says instead. "Track our quarry. Learn its mind. And when it is time, call the banners and look for me in the sky."

A/N: And we're off! The people have spoken, and Friday/Sunday postings it is. In this chapter we come back full circle to the Nature-calling Jarles soldier and Allayria + Ben's late night conversation about Skilling from Paragon as we finally learn the real extent of the Cerebrum Program. Everyone is Concerned ©, and our girl is making moves. Do we think this next foray into Jarles territory is going to go well? At least there's some level-up swag. I love getting swag, and knife-proof swag is the best swag, especially when you're dealing with a metal-headed maniac.

Speaking of which....