Chapter 20:

CH 16- Dust and Bone

The Wildworld

#Kane

The road to Avod shimmered like old glass—cracked, sun-warped, and stitched with the dried blood of people no one missed. Kane walked it barefoot. The shoes had vanished with the last body. His heel bled, but the nerves weren’t all his yet. They’d learn—like the rest of him.

The sky above churned with low, iron-colored clouds. Not natural ones—engine smoke clouds, the kind dumped from Aurellia’s underbelly. He didn’t look up. He never did.

A cart creakingly slowed beside him, flesh snorted and stomped while gears hissed and whirred. It was a horse cargo that looked part beast and machine. Bronze-plated shoulder, rusting joints: It had it all. In the Astral Dominion, this was considered the ride for the poor. Cheaper than tech if electricity were just a rumor where you lived.

The driver squinted from beneath a sunhat that looked like it had survived a war. His skin was pale, worn like cured leather. Eyes deep-set and shadowed. There was a patience about him—slow, earthy, like he’d buried things with his own hands.

“You smell like sin,” the old man said—not unkindly, just observing, as if naming the weather.

Kane blinked. A fly drifted near his lips, its wings humming lazily in the heat. He fought the urge to swat it and simply stared back at the old man. The body’s vocal cords strained when he tried to speak—too dry, too tight, like they were still deciding whether this voice belonged to him.

“I’ve been worse,” he rasped. The sound cracked, brittle but steady. He held up a Universal Note.

The old man grunted, satisfied, and jerked his head toward the bench.

Kane climbed in, and the journey began.

Avod didn’t rise like a city. It resurfaced—like a memory clawing its way up from somewhere cold and forgotten. Tower blocks leaned into the sky like exhausted gods, their shadows stretching over the roads. Sky-rigs hovered above, blinking behind layers of prayer graffiti. For the capital of the Imperial City, it was exactly as it should be: overwhelming, ancient, and far too alive. Only the cities in Aureilla could stand beside it.

Kane leaned back against the wood, arms resting loosely on his knees. His breath finally steadied. The Duration mana thread in him had stopped ticking—reconstruction complete at last. He’d held it active for over an hour: bone realignment, blood recalibration, vocal matching, respiratory tuning.

Only the neural sync was lagging behind so he would have to be careful once inside the walls. Dragging like a half-tired limb wasn't an option especially how with one wrong reaction the body could give him away.

“You from here?” the old man asked eventually.

Kane shook his head. “Not anymore.”

“That means yes,” the driver chuckled. “Only Avod boys lie about Avod.”

Kane didn’t correct him.

The cart creaked forward, swallowing the silence.

“My son’s an adventurer,” the old man said, more to the road than to Kane. “Hasn’t come back in a while. But I still tell people he’s in the city. Chasing dragons. Chasing girls. Chasing luck. You know how the young are.”

Kane didn’t answer, but something in his mouth soured.

“What’s his name?”

“Chizoba Ihechineke.”

Kane’s brow lifted. He didn’t look at the old man, but something in his chest tightened—like breath held too long.

“You’re not what I expected,” Kane said.

The old man smiled, as if he’d heard that his whole life. “Married his mother. She named him. I just made sure he lived long enough to argue about it.”

He scratched his jaw, thumb tracing old calluses.

“When the plague hit,” he began quietly, “the Dominion sent an imperial decree to the Ten Lords of Aureilla. They were supposed to dispatch legions of mages and medics to stop the spread. But you know how Aureilla is. They didn’t lift a finger. Let the sickness burn through us like we were brushfire already caught.”

His expression didn’t change, but his voice hardened.

“Years back, another state—Tarungi—tried to do the same thing. They refused an imperial order, tried to protect their own. The Dominion wiped one of their strongest states, Saniro, right off the map for it. Leveled it in a day. After that… I stopped asking questions.”

He swallowed.

“Stopped fighting too. Just watched my wife die in front of me.”

He exhaled shakily. “Why am I telling a stranger all this?”

The smile he forced didn’t reach his eyes.

Kane’s hand twitched in his lap.

“Is that why you didn’t give him an English name?” Kane asked softly.

“Benefits get clipped when the name’s foreign,” the driver muttered. “But the boy still tied himself to Aureilla. Said it’d make him stand out in the Concord. Wanted to reach Aurellia like the meaning of life is to live to in floating country.

“He thought his name would hold him back?”

“Said it might help in the Concord Trials final. Sponsors notice blood. Old names. Legacies.” He laughed softly. “Told him names don’t mean anything unless you can survive them.”

“He listen?”

“For a while.”

The road hummed. Neither spoke.

“World’s too fast now,” the old man said. “Everyone running. No one knows what they’re losing until it’s behind them.”

Kane stared at the skyline, his fingers flexing.

“Ambitious,” he murmured. “Thinking he could win the Dominion’s biggest festival.”

“You’re one to talk,” the old man said, looking at him directly now. “You sound just like him.”

Kane didn’t blink.

“Man old age is dealing with me,” the man added as he tapped the reins. “My boy will be back. You’ll see. Might even win those silly trials”

He took off his hat and waved it in the air.

“The Narethian gods! The supreme deities are fully of mercy.”

Kane smiled. Almost perfect, this time.

“Then where is he?”

The old man’s hand lowered. The air shifted.

“He’ll be back.”

---

As they reached the edge of the city the air thickened. A teleportation glyph shimmered nearby, bleeding blue into the dirt like oil that was his stop.

For some reason he didn't want to admit he was feeling really generous today. Kane reached up to hand him the note his fingers twitching he pulled out the universal imperial bill.

But he old man shook his head. “Keep it.”

“Why?”

“You just remind me of my son.”

Kane froze. Not for long. But it wasn’t just the words. It was the weight in the voice—like hope bent under its own years.

His fingers tightened around the note.

He thought—for one reckless second—of saying it. Just saying it.

But some truths don’t belong in daylight.

“Thank you,” he said instead, and stepped down to the smell of roasted corn.

---

Hooves clopped against cracked concrete, their rhythm swallowed by the shouts of engines and hawkers. Telephone wires hung above the street like a neglected spiderweb, sparking now and then—half spirit, half sabotage.

Kane kept his head low, scarf wrapped tight against the stench of hot rubber and exhaust. His mare, a grey-brown thing with uneven eyes, shouldered past a danfo stalled mid-turn, blocking three lanes of what used to be a road and now functioned mostly as rumor.

A conductor shouted, “Naroko! Naroko straight! No change oh!”

A rooster on the bus roof shrieked back.

Kane ignored both. His eyes scanned the chaos.

He needed a pawn shop. Not a store. Not a kiosk. A shop. One run by people who knew better than to ask where things came from. He had money this time. The last time he had got his hands on a universal bill it was worth 70 gold coins at least in Nareth. It would be way more in other countries of empire sometimes they would shake the economies of other countries so that they remained the most pleasing place to be even Aurellia was not spared.

Women exchanged the Dominion’s currencies from tables made of doors laid across paint buckets. A man led a horse through a puddle deep enough to baptize the beast. Barefoot boys chased each other with a broken umbrella like a sword.

Above it all, the Tri-Span Skyroute thundered. No reins up there—just speed, smoke, and silence. At least for poor people you could occasionally see a winged beast with the accompaniying fat rider past it. He turned and kept looking then saw the sign:

"PAWN. REPAIR. REDEMPTION."

“Ask for Mama Chibundu. Don’t touch anything cursed.”

This had to be the place.

---

The inside was colder than Avod had any right to be.

No fan. No air conditioning. Just… cold.

Kane stepped inside his fingers twitched as he stepped in through the door.

Stacks of radios hummed—none tuned to any station. A cabinet held weapons from five centuries, each tagged with a name or warning. A table in the back was covered in watches that didn’t tick and phones that weren’t dead, but weren’t quite alive either.

A woman sat behind the counter, peeling an orange.

Her skin was creased like old paper. She wore a wrapper the color of dry rust and beads that whispered when she moved. A scar curved across her jaw like a grin that never reached her eyes.

“You riding stolen?” she asked without looking up.

Kane didn’t speak. He placed the pendant between them. Small. Bronze. Etched with a language no one admitted to knowing anymore.

It pulsed once. The radios hissed louder. One of the dead watches clicked.

She looked up.

Her eyes were old. Her smirk wasn’t.

“Cash, blood, or credit?”

“Whichever doesn’t follow me home,” Kane said.

She peeled another strip of orange. The skin hit the floor like a soft curse.

“Then you’re in the wrong city, child.”

The pulse flared—brief, sharp. She flinched. Then picked it up.

Inside the shard, glyphs rearranged. Logic-knots tightened. A double helix of sigils spun inside, slow as thought.

“You’re either stupid,” she muttered, “or a bastard.”

“Both,” Kane said.

She turned it once. Light caught a crack near the edge—not damage, but a seal. Military design. Auerialla origin.

Her fingers traced the x markings on it her jaw tightening.

“Does it just house data files? It should do more than that since you brought it here”

Kane didn’t reply at first. " It also boost mana"

“What mana side?”

He hesitated. “Ase”

She snapped her eyes to him. “Bullshit.”

“No.”

“I’ve used it a bit of it. The data files their encryption suggest....”

She didn’t speak for a long time.

She studied him again. Not his face—his posture. The way he stood with his fingers always twitching. Something not quite right. Like the body wore him.

“You’re Awakened.”

“I was.”

“Man how many stupid people come in here you either one or you aren't." She slapped the table and looked at him again " and why the hell do you look half-dead?”

“Mostly tired.”

She smiled. “What do you want for it?”

“Three hundred Universals.”

Her smile vanished. “It’s not worth three hundred.”

“It will be.”

She tapped the shard. “Adventurers burned this place twice. First time by mistake. Second time for fun so just know I'm not afraid of whatever sage path nonsense you might have.”

Kane said nothing.

“So now I charge double when your kind shows up.”

He shrugged. “Fine. Six hundred.”

She barked a laugh—real, bitter, warm.

“You’re either dying or insane.”

“Still both.”

She stared at him. Something in his silence felt dislocated. Like his name didn’t quite fit in his mouth.

“Leave it,” she said. “Come back in two days.”

“No. Cash.”

“I don’t keep that much here.”

Kane turned to go.

“You never told me where you got it.”