The hush in Amelia's chamber was a living thing: thick, heavy, redolent with the scent of blood and ozone and failed miracles. The shard of gold remained in the wall, a dull accusing eye. On the bed, Amelia did not sleep so much as was absent. Her breathing was the faintest whisper, a suggestion of life where none seemed possible. Her skin was translucently pale, and the dark carvings upon it looked less like inscriptions of power, more like cracks in porcelain.They had taken shifts. Kaelen, whose will was a tangible force, would sit vigil, his silent presence a bulwark against the nothingness that threatened to claim her. Sophia, her healer's hands useless, would change the cool clothes on her brow and try to feed her spoonfuls of broth that were mostly refused by a body that had forgotten how to swallow.But it was Ethan who spent the most time there. While the others fought the tangible wars—the Healing War in the wards, the political war with Faren—Ethan fought the war of memory.

The plague did not arrive with a bang, but with a silence. It was the silence of the sparrows that did not greet the dawn, the silence of the market square where the cheerful clamour of barter had once thrived, and the silence that had fallen over Lyra’s little brother, Kael, whose laboured breaths were the only sound in their small, dark room.It was called the Grey Sorrow. It did not kill quickly or violently. It leeched the colour from the world, first from the periphery of one’s vision, then from the very soul. Victims would speak in monotones, their emotions fading like a washed-out painting. They would stop eating, not out of nausea, but out of a profound, grey apathy. Finally, they would simply lie down, their eyes open but seeing nothing, and cease to breathe, as if they had forgotten how. The city of Aethel was drowning in shades of ash and dust.Lyra fought it with every fiber of her being. She forced bright broths between Kael’s lips, described the vibrant crimson of sunset

The lull that followed the plague was not the Grey Sorrow’s hollow emptiness. It was a quiet thick with memory, a city breathing deep for the first time in years. Aethel was a scarred jewel, its colours restored but its psyche forever marked. And at the centre of its collective memory, both a shrine and a scar, was the sun-bleached carving of Lyra on the fountain rim.For Kael, Lyra’s brother, the memory was a constant, low-grade hum of pain beneath the vibrant noise of life. He had grown from a boy rescued from grey oblivion into a man, his eyes the same rich earth as his sister’s, but shadowed by a loss he could never fully articulate. He became a Warden of the Obelisk, part of the order founded by Old Man Hemlock to understand the black spire and protect the city from its price. They were scholars, not soldiers, dedicated to ensuring such a sacrifice would never be needed again.But memory, as the Obelisk itself seemed to testify, is a fragile bulwark against the hunger of the prese

The hush after Amelia’s departure was the loudest sound Elara had ever heard. It was not an empty silence, but a dense, heavy one, filled with the ghost of a completed pattern. The Sky-Shard was gone, the Resonant Dissonance had vanished, and the world had snapped back into a focus so sharp it was almost painful. The people of Aethel moved through their days with a reverent caution, as if afraid a sudden noise might shatter the newly restored order. They tended their gardens, repaired their homes, and looked with uncomprehending eyes at the new mandala carved beside Lyra’s figure on the fountain—a beautiful, complex mystery.For Elara, now the de facto leader of a city grieving a living idea, the mystery was a burden. Amelia had been their compass, their interpreter for the Obelisk’s cold language. Now, they were adrift. The Wardens, once scholars of consequence, had become caretakers of a void. Their meetings were hushed, circular things, filled with the question none could answer: "W

He finds a way to bind the plague into the shards.The golden dawn that had healed the Obelisk did not vanquish the Grey Sorrow. It had been suppressed, yes, its progress halted by Lyra’s ultimate sacrifice and the city’s hard-won stability. But a plague that feeds on emotion and life cannot be truly eradicated; it can only be quarantined. It had retreated into the shadows, into the forgotten corners and the wounded hearts of Aethel, a latent sickness waiting for a moment of collective weakness.Ethan knew this better than anyone. He was not a Warden, not a soldier, not a descendant of sacrifices. He was an archivist, a man whose world was the dust-scented, parchment-filled halls of the Great Library, a place that had become a sanctuary for those who preferred the company of the dead to the complexities of the living. He had been a young man during the Grey Sorrow, and while he had not lost his colour as completely as some, he had lost something else: his faith in grand, singular solu