The city was singing. That was the only word for it. As the shards gathered in the plaza, their individual hums blending into a single, resonant chord, the very air seemed to vibrate with silent music. Ethan felt it in his teeth, in the marrow of his bones. It was the sound of Amelia's power, no longer a desperate, scattered cry but a gathering hymn.And he, the former architect of silence, knew that his place was not in the choir, but rather in the scriptorium.While Sophia became the general of light and Leo its steadfast shield, Ethan retreated. Not in shame, not in fear, but with a purpose that felt, for the first time, like absolution. He stood in the small, quiet room that had become his sanctuary, surrounded not by the tools of rebellion or the ledgers of logistics, but by the artifacts of memory. Blank parchments, salvaged inks, a collection of pens fashioned from scavenged nibs and gull feathers. On a shelf lay his most precious possession: the folio of his own damning Counci

They were the city’s quietest ghosts. The immune children. Those who had survived the Weeping Pox not through Amelia’s intervention, but through some quirk of their own biology. They had watched parents, siblings, and friends succumb to the rattling cough and the bloody phlegm, while they remained, untouched and bewildered. In the new world, they were a living mystery, a reminder of a horror they had escaped but could never forget.They stuck together, a loose-knit tribe of the spared, living in the interstitial spaces of the rebuilding city. Finn was their unofficial leader, not by appointment, but by the sheer force of his will and the famous green shard he carried. But there were others. A girl named Liana, who never spoke. A pair of twins, Pax and Lex, who moved with a silent, unnerving synchronicity. And Tamas, the boy who had been drawn to the Cult, now returned to the group, his slate always close at hand.It all started with a headache.It was Liana who felt it first, a day af

The Shard-Library was Kaelen’s sanctuary, his monastery of reason in a city increasingly governed by miracles and madness. Here, amidst the neatly labeled shelves and the meticulous charts mapping shard harmonics, he was still a scientist, a man of order. The chaos outside—the Cult’s whispers, the children’s pained sensitivities, the volatile nature of the shards themselves—could be held at bay by the simple, calming act of cataloging.The shard in question was his current obsession. It was a small, unassuming thing, the color of a deep, still lagoon. It didn't glow so much as it seemed to absorb light, holding it in a tranquil, azure pool within its heart. His initial tests had been baffling. It didn't heal wounds or purify water. It didn't encourage growth or soothe pain. Instead, when activated with a focused, calm intent, it seemed to create a localized field of profound stasis. Time, within its small sphere of influence, slowed to a crawl. A drop of water hovered for minutes. A f

The great gathering in the plaza was meant to be a unifying act, a symphony of light. But to those watching from the sidelines, it looked more like a hoard. A mountain of power, guarded by Sophia’s inner circle and the strange, sensitive children. For every person who saw it as Amelia’s sacred trust, another saw it as a claim of ownership. The very act of centralization, born from a dream of defense, had sown the seeds of new suspicion.The first fracture appeared in the Foundry District. Here, the people were pragmatists-people whose hands had grown calloused rebuilding machinery and forging tools. Their leader was a woman named Brenna, the same one who had argued over the well. She had watched the gathering with a deepening frown. “She takes them all,” Brenna declared to a gathering of her own, in the soot-stained hall of a repurposed smithy. “Every shard we find, every tool that helps us survive, gets carried off to her plaza. What happens when a child here gets sick? Do we send a

Sleep was no longer a respite for Sophia. It was a battlefield of a different kind, a realm where the echoes of the shattered Obelisk pooled and swirled. Since the great gathering began, her dreams had been a tapestry of faint, overlapping whispers—the residual memories of a million healings, a thousand sorrows, all held within the glowing stones. But tonight, the tapestry tore.She stood once more in the boundless, grey mist, the dream-space she associated with Amelia. But the gentle light was gone, replaced by a deep, thrumming vibration that felt old, older than the city, older than the Obelisk itself. The air was thick with the scent of ozone and cold stone.Before her, the stump of the Obelisk appeared, not as a broken tooth, but as it once was—a needle of perfect, seamless black, piercing an alien, star-strewn sky. But it was under attack. Not from without, but from within.A shadow moved inside the stone. It was not the Shadow Prophet’s malevolent crimson, but a color her mind