Lena leads Aster through Galamad's winding halls toward a heavy iron-bound door, where Musa lounges beside it like a bouncer who'd somehow wandered into a poetry society and decided to stay for the lighting.
"I'll meet you in the Market District when you're done," Lena says, glancing at Musa. "This shouldn't take more than two hours. Say… four a.m.?"
Aster stares at her. "Four?"
He tries to do the maths, which immediately turns into the kind of mental arithmetic normally associated with concussion victims and men reading utility bills.
Matter had started the ritual yesterday. Early morning. Around five, maybe.
Which meant his body in the Material Plane had been asleep for well over twenty hours.
Just out cold. Spirit yanked sideways into another dimension while the flesh stayed behind like abandoned luggage.
He frowns at Lena. "Do I have time to, I don't know, not die of sleep intoxication? I've also been fasting for the past ten days, if anyone's taking requests from the gods of basic bodily maintenance."
"You'll be fine," Lena says, with the cheerful confidence of someone who has never once had to negotiate with her own central nervous system. "You'll be back by eight at the latest."
Reassuring.
Aster mutters something that could, if one were feeling generous, be interpreted as thanks, then heads toward Musa.
"Enjoy your lunch?" Musa asks as Aster steps through the doorway.
Aster wrinkles his nose. "You mean the sad vienna hotdog cosplaying as food? Yeah. Culinary excellence. Really broadened my spiritual horizons."
Musa barks a laugh and waves him inside.
Aster forgets about the hotdog almost immediately.
The Weapon Depository doesn't feel like a room so much as a concept someone has made habitable. It looks like a war museum and a library had a kid and then allowed it to be raised by a cathedral. Rows of weapon racks stretch so far they blur into fog.
Aster stares. Then stares harder. "I'm supposed to get through this in two hours?"
Musa waves a hand dismissively. "Relax. Everyone's first time in the vault feels like they've accidentally wandered into a very aggressive museum. Most people find a starting point through whatever they used in the Material Realm. Sports help. Cricket bats, javelins, golf clubs. I knew one guy who resonated with a croquet mallet. Horrifying to watch, but technically valid."
Aster gives him a flat look. "No sports."
"Cooking, then? You strike me as someone who's been forced into a close personal relationship with a frying pan."
"That is a very classist way to phrase poverty."
"I'm saying pans make excellent close-quarters weapons. Pair one with basic alchemy and you've got a flamethrower skillet."
Aster searches his memory for any hidden martial aptitude. What he finds instead is a lot of dust, some abandonment issues, and one particularly vivid recollection of losing a schoolyard fight to a mop handle.
"I've got nothing," he admits.
Musa sighs with theatrical disappointment. "Fine. Then we do this the old-fashioned way. We walk until something answers."
Aster glances around at the endless ranks of weapons. "You mean that literally?"
"Not in the dramatic 'chosen blade whispering your name across the ages' sense, no." Musa starts down one of the aisles and Aster follows. "Nothing in this vault is ranked highly enough for that. These are school weapons. Training tools. Loaners. Think of this place as a violent library. You borrow something, you break it, you return what's left."
That is not as comforting as Musa seems to think it is.
They wind through aisle after aisle of steel and wood and old ambition. Spears stand in neat bundles like disciplined executions. Axes glimmer from the walls. A hammer made of what looks suspiciously like frozen lightning sits on a pedestal with the air of a retired war criminal.
And then Aster stops.
Something has snagged inside him.
On a shelf to his left leans a plain ironwood staff, dark and unadorned, the kind of weapon that looks almost insultingly simple. Beneath it sits a coil of chain—thick, ugly links piled on the rack like a sleeping animal.
His breath catches.
The Cradle.
The amber ants. The mantis made from a street sign and bad intentions.
And beneath that memory, older still, another one rises from somewhere deeper.
He was fourteen.
Hungry enough that the world has narrowed to stolen food and the people trying to take it from him. Four older boys have cornered him behind the orphanage, all swagger and appetite and the kind of confidence that comes from knowing the adults won't care if he gets hurt.
He'd had a stick.
That had been his opening argument.
It had worked for maybe twenty seconds.
Then numbers won, as they so often did.
He remembers stumbling back, arms rattling from the impact of bad blocks and worse hits. He remembers one of them grabbing his shirt. Another circling behind him. The taste of blood.
Then he'd seen the chain.
Half-buried in weeds near the back fence. Rusted, heavy, probably stolen from a gate somewhere.
He'd grabbed it without thinking.
And the fight had changed after that.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
The staff had given him reach, space, rhythm. The chain had given him panic with momentum. One kept them away. The other punished them when they got close. Together they'd turned him from prey into a problem.
Now, staring at the staff and the chain in the vault, Aster feels the same strange certainty settle into his bones.
Musa notices him go still. "Something there?"
Aster nods slowly. "Yeah. Not those exact ones. Just…" He gestures vaguely. "The type. I've used a staff and chain before. On the Cradle. And years before that, the same combination."
Musa's expression sharpens at once. "You've reached for the same weapons across separate periods of your life?"
"That sounds much more dramatic when you say it like that, but yes."
"That's not nothing," Musa says. "That's resonance. Your spirit's got preferences. It recognises patterns before your conscious mind catches up. If you keep reaching for the same tools, it usually means they fit the shape of you."
Aster frowns. "You're saying my soul has a preferred loadout."
"Exactly."
He says it with enough enthusiasm that Aster immediately distrusts the concept.
"And the weapons you used on the Cradle," Musa goes on, "where are they now? Cause it sounds like you grabbed Material-Echo’s from their real world counterparts—the pre-spirit formations used to eventually construct an artefact. At Initiate rank, there's practically no difference between those and the training weapons you see around you, so you should be able to keep using them until you find something better."
"They vanished."
Musa's brows lift. "When?"
"The second I crossed through the barrier around the house I'm staying in."
"What kind of barrier?"
"Golden. Covered in symbols. Very much in the category of magical nonsense I wasn't qualified to evaluate."
Musa snaps his fingers.
"If you crossed a Runic Barrier carrying them, they probably weren't destroyed. They were stored."
Aster blinks. "Stored? Where?"
"Your Dantean."
He stares.
"The yoghurt brand?"
Musa pinches the bridge of his nose. "No. Christ. Alright. We're doing this from the ground up."
He folds his arms and shifts into the tone of a man preparing to explain plumbing to someone who'd only just discovered taps.
"You've got three Danteans," he says. "Palaces. Pocket dimensions built into your Astral Vessel. Each one handles a different function. The Stomach Palace stores things. Artefacts, weapons, books, materials, whatever. Think of it as a metaphysical inventory system."
Aster stares at him.
"You're telling me I have an invisible storage organ and nobody thought that was worth mentioning?"
Musa shrugs. "People don't usually sit you down and formally announce the existence of your intestines either. Some things only come up when relevant."
"That is one of the worst analogies I've heard all week, and this has been a deeply competitive week."
"The Core Palace stores Aether. That's your engine room. The Mind Palace handles memory structures, dreamwork, spell architecture, all the heady nonsense. But right now we care about the Stomach Palace. If those weapons vanished the moment you crossed a Runic Barrier, odds are they got absorbed into it."
Aster puts a hand over his abdomen. "So I've just been walking around with a staff and chain inside me."
"Yes."
"Fantastic."
"They're probably still there," Musa says. "We just teach you how to retrieve them."
Aster eyes him. "And how, exactly, does one fish weapons out of one's soul-guts?"
"With your Will. Now close your eyes."
He does, mostly because he's already accepted that dignity is no longer a meaningful part of this process.
"Focus inward," Musa says. "Not on your body. On the space just behind it. Around your diaphragm. Don't think about organs. Think about boundaries. A hollow curve. A chamber that isn't physical, but is there anyway."
Aster expects resistance.
A wall, maybe. Static. Something dramatic and mystical and deeply inconvenient.
Instead he finds stillness.
A vast, hollow quiet.
A space that isn't part of his body and yet sits inside it with the certainty of a second skeleton. Empty, black, patient.
His Stomach Palace.
And inside it—
Something drifts.
Two somethings, to be precise.
A long shape suspended in the dark. Another coiled beside it, heavy and dense and familiar in a way that makes something in his chest tighten.
"I feel them," he murmurs.
He reaches instinctively.
Nothing happens.
"They're not moving."
"Because you're trying to grab them with thought," Musa says. "The Palace doesn't respond to thought. It responds to authority. Don't yank. Invite. Pull from your centre, not your head."
That sounds like nonsense.
Unfortunately, it is the kind of nonsense that keeps working.
Aster takes a breath and tries again. This time he stops treating the void like a room he is peering into and instead lets himself inhabit it. Lets his awareness settle inside the black expanse itself.
The staff and chain don't feel like objects.
They feel like parts of him waiting to be reattached.
He doesn't seize them.
He calls them home.
The dark stirs.
The chain moves first, dissolving into threads of muted gold. The staff follows a heartbeat later, both shapes unspooling toward him in streaks of light—
—and then weight settles into his hands.
Aster's eyes snap open.
The staff is there.
So is the chain.
The metal is cold and solid and unmistakably real, the staff scarred from impacts he remembers too well, the chain coiled heavy over his palms.
For a second he just stares.
"I had weapons in my stomach."
"Technically in your Stomach Palace," Musa corrects. "But yes."
Aster turns the staff in his grip. His shoulders tighten automatically, memory and instinct slotting together with unsettling ease. The chain rattles softly in his other hand, alive with possibility.
"Try putting them back," Musa says.
"Of course. Why stop now when the sentence I'm currently living is already absurd?"
He closes his eyes again, reaches inward, finds the void, and this time reverses the motion. Instead of pulling from the Palace, he lets the weapons slide from his hands and sink back into that silent dark.
When he opens his eyes, they are gone.
But he can still feel them.
Not physically. More like awareness tucked just behind his stomach. Two stored weights suspended in private gravity.
"In my gut," he mutters. "Like spiritual indigestion."
"Perfect, so now that you have your weapons—"
Aster glances from the staff to the chain.
"Weapons? You mean I don't need to choose between the two?"
"You're drawn to both, right?" Musa asks.
Aster glances toward the empty air where the staff and chain had been. "It'd feel wrong not to use both."
"You don't have to only use one forever," Musa says. "Not here. That's Material Plane thinking—'one weapon, one style, one hand at a time.' Here? Will rewrites the script."
Aster eyes him warily. "So dual wielding is normal?"
Musa snorts. "Nothing about what you're doing is normal. But yes, you can wield two weapons—eventually. The trick is not doing it all at once."
He gestures between the staff and the chain like a lecturer pointing at twin devils.
"There are three stages to wielding dual scripture paths," Musa says. "And each one will test whether you're building a style or just throwing sharp things at problems."
Aster leans in despite himself.
"First phase is Alternation." Musa holds up one finger. "You choose one weapon and one Scripture path to start with. You let it settle into your Vessel until the movements become instinct. Then you begin training the second weapon. Once both are embedded deeply enough, you learn to switch between them fluidly. Not simultaneously. Sequentially."
"So one at a time."
"For now."
Musa raises a second finger. "Phase two is Simultaneity. That's when your cultivation is strong enough to split your focus and run both paths together. You cycle through each weapon as you strike. Moving from one seamlessly into the other reaching a resonance between the two."
"That sounds catastrophically bad for my continued survival."
"It is. Which is why most people never make it that far." Musa gives him a pointed look. "And it relies heavily on your Dantean control. If you want to dual wield seriously, you need to get comfortable moving weapons in and out of your Stomach Palace on instinct. Mid-fight. Mid-motion. Mid-panic. Master that, and you're difficult to disarm. Fail it, and you'll die rummaging through your own metaphysical storage compartment while someone stabs you."
Aster nods slowly. "Right. So phase two is learning to teleport violence into my hands on command."
"That's one way to put it."
"It's the best way."
Musa ignores him and lifts a third finger.
"Phase three is Fusion."
Aster waits for the metaphor.
It never comes.
"You don't just wield both weapons," Musa says. "You make them one. Through Scripture. Through Artificing. Through your own cultivation. You create a fused weapon and a fused style that didn't exist before. That's what we call legacy work. That's how people stop inheriting old systems and start building new ones."
Aster stares at him.
"So the end goal is: begin with one, learn the other, then eventually turn them into some horrifying hybrid of staff and chain."
"Exactly."
"And you think that's a good sign?"
"I think it's your sign," Musa says.
That is a deeply irritating answer.
It is also, annoyingly, the sort of answer that lodges somewhere under Aster's ribs.
Musa gestures deeper into the Depository. "Come on. Now that we know your weapons, we need to find a Scripture path that won't get you killed before breakfast."