Brackenwalk - Biometal

A long exiled Hue now known to the city as Brackenwalk (The name given to him by the Prismatic in honor of his greatest discovery) returned on the first day of the 94th year since the pool’s awakening. He was old by any standard: hair gone the color of storm-ash, face creased by decades under Faernyr’s choking skies, and both legs ending in scarred stumps just above the knee. He arrived on a Kinochian barge and brought to the city on a makeshift sled pulled by two Awakened bison. In his arms he cradled a single pot no larger than a ripe melon, and inside that pot grew a seedling wrought of living metal (silver veins pulsing faintly beneath bark of blackened bronze).

For forty-four years Brackenwalk had wandered the Ash Wastes, scavenging scraps of forgotten dwarven alloy, sleeping in the ribs of dead ironclads, and listening to the wind scrape across volcanic glass. Forty-four years of bringing back nothing the Consortium deemed “new.” Each time the great doors of Glasshold closed on him again, returning him to exile. He simply bowed, smiled the same tired smile, and limped back into exile. No bitterness, only the quiet Hue certainty that tomorrow’s attempt would be the one. Whispering the mantra as he went back into exile, "Never complete, never defeated, forever becoming."

When he finally crawled his way into the Presentation Chamber, the entire Consortium fell silent. The seedling’s leaves chimed like tiny bells when he breathed. After a long debate that lasted three full days (recorded as one of the longest deliberation in city history), the Augmentarium and Verdant Circle both claimed him. In the end Brackenwalk himself settled the matter. Voice soft, almost shy, he said only: “I lost my legs to rust and fire. Let me give them back something that will never rust again.”

They granted him a workshop on the border between the two districts, half greenhouse, half surgical laboratory. There, over the next seven years, he spoke to the seedling the way a parent speaks to a slow growing child. He fed it starlight captured in Skyreach lenses, irrigated it with quicksilver distilled from his own blood, and sang it the lullabies he had learned from Dhampir caravans beneath Faernyr’s view of the moons. Cell by living cell the metal crept outward, rooting into the stumps of his thighs, weaving tendons of mithril like wire, plating muscle with petals of living steel. On the morning the limbs first answered his thought with movement, Brackenwalk rose from his chair without aid for the first time in decades.

Word spread faster than any courier-raven. By the time he reached the outer wall the entire city had heard of his discovery. Brackenwalk ran the full circumference of Huetopia without pause, a slow, deliberate circuit that took from sunrise to sunrise. Wherever his new feet touched stone, droplets of liquid mercury welled up, cooled, and hardened into thumbnail-sized mirrors. Each mirror caught the sky for a single heartbeat before fracturing into silver dust that the wind carried away like glittering snow.

When he completed the circle and stepped back through the gates, the Prismatics were waiting. Without ceremony they pressed the city’s highest honor into his hand: a single blank pane of glass meant for the inner wall of the Alabaster Frame and an etching tool. Brackenwalk smiled and took them bothin hand. He kneeled on the ground at the feet of the Prismatic and etched a symbol to represent his discovery into the pane, then slotting in its place among the names of legends. This is where he was given the name Brackenwalk.