They bound him with rope that bit into his skin and marched him through streets that watched like hungry faces. Torches lit up windows where people pressed their hands to the glass and pretended not to see. Whispers trailed the guards like a second shadow. Darian kept his head high. The ropes were real. Fear could be made real. He would not gift them his panic.Captain Merek led the way with a slow sure step, his badge dull in the torchlight. He smelled of old sweat and iron. Behind him the guards kept a careful distance as if afraid the air itself might flare. Darian smelled the city too—smoke, stew, someone frying bread. He tasted the salt of his own patience. The ember under his skin pulsed like a small drum, close to waking.At the guardhouse they shoved him into a low cell. The air was thick with damp and old ale. A single slit in the wall let in a slice of sun like a knife. Lyra stood across the corridor, held by two younger guards. Her ankle was bandaged and she limped, but she

The floor cracked open like a secret throat and the hall smelled of copper and old promises. A shape rose from the seam, not a man but something built like a memory of a man—steel ribs braided with ember veins, a face of hammered silver that wore no expression. The crowd recoiled as if the thing had spat. Men fell back from the dais. Torches tilted and sweat shone on brows.Darian felt the world tilt. The ember at his chest hummed, a low note that matched the machine’s breath. The thing that rose carried no banner and yet its presence had the weight of law. The regent's robe fluttered at his knees like a small flag betrayed by wind. He took a step back as if the mechanism had named him traitor without sound.Someone screamed. Lyra’s fingers tightened on the scrap of cloth in her palm until the threads bit. She mouthed a prayer so small Darian could not hear it and then shoved forward, ignoring the soldiers who blocked her path. Her ankle stumbled but she did not care. Her eyes were fi

The crown and the ring of ember hung a breath apart. The hall held its noise like a body holding itself under water. Dust trembled in the shaft light. Every face in the Spire looked as if it had been asked to remember something too terrible to say.Darian felt the heat on his skin like a second pulse. The iron clamps burned but did not cut. The ring of light at his chest reached up, small and steady, and the crown edged down, cold and carved from old law. For a single heartbeat the two lights matched and nothing happened. The regent’s hand hovered over the lever with the certainty of a man about to seal fate.Then the crown touched the ember.It should have been a sound. Instead it was a sound and a movement and a thing that uncoiled like a sleeper stretching. The contact sent a small shock through Darian that hammered at his teeth. The crown drank a thread of heat and answered with a low metal tone that rolled through the iron ribs of the Spire. Gears deep under the floor answered li

The hall erupted. Men shouted and the crowd pushed like a spilled river. Torches swung and sputtered. The regent clawed at the air as if he could sew the world back together with his hands. Blue smoke curled from the Spire and licked the rafters. For a heartbeat every motion in the room felt slow and fatal.Isolde did not move like the rest. She pulled the metal rod close and it drank the Spire light. Her eyes found Darian and for a second he smelled the linen of his childhood and the iron tang of this place at once. "Now," she said, voice small but sharp.Lyra did not hesitate. She lunged past a staggered guard and shoved the torn scrap of paper into Darian's hand. "Names," she said. "Take them. Remember." A dozen people who had stood and spoken crowded toward the rail and then back as soldiers tried to block them. Lyra’s ankle bled where a rope had cut. Her face was white and fierce.Captain Merek moved as if pulled by different ropes. His jaw worked and his eyes flicked between the

They moved under a moon that did not bother to hide the scars in the road. The narrow lane to Vallis smelled of oil and wet grain. Houses leaned like tired men. The mills at the edge of the town slept with their teeth broken. Above them the Spire burned a slow blue in the dark, a wound that would not close.Isolde led with the metal rod held like a lantern. The rod hummed when they passed old maker marks carved into doorposts. Lyra kept close, her breath loud in the quiet, the scrap of cloth folded like a prayer in her fist. Darian walked between them and felt the locket under his tunic like a second heart. The river had pointed them toward Vallis. Now Vallis would answer.They had not gone far when a crack of sound split the night. Men shouted from the bridge. Torches flared like sudden stars. The regent’s men had not been slow to track a trail. Someone had sounded an alarm and the hunt came with it."Faster," Isolde said. Her voice did not tremble. Her fingers dug into stone as if s