The sky arranged itself into courtrooms.
Not buildings—manners. Halos nested inside larger halos, rails of light slid into place with bureaucratic tenderness, and in each floating chamber a Radiant Scale hung from a sun‑colored lintel, patient as paperwork. They did not descend to crush; they descended to convene. Every street received its own tidy audience with noon.
"Courtroom triage," Luna said, already unpacking a smaller forest of brass leaves on the parapet. "They'll sort us by convenience—easy confessions first, complicated lives later."
"Rude," Selene replied, and threw her net higher until shade insisted on being consulted.
A nearest scale inhaled and set its pans to steady. The left filled with allegations that sounded like speeches people give to mirrors: dereliction, disorder, delay. The right waited like a clean plate. Beneath it, a woman with flour on her wrists shifted a basket from hip to hip, trying to decide whether to be tired yet.
Cyrus spoke without raising his voice. "Put work on the plate."
The butcher's boy, now a volunteer clerk, carried a kettle to the women at the stoop. Three cups. Three names. What did you lift? asked the cup. Who did you follow? asked the second. What did you fix? asked the third. The answers steamed into the air like bread breathing. The scale tried to ignore the smell and failed.
Farther along the roofline, a separate chamber snapped into focus above a table where two men argued about a cracked beam. The scale dropped a neat accusation—reckless endangerment—and began to weight it with adjectives. Tam leaned over the gutter and wrote two toddler‑level truths on the tar in large, bossy letters: NOT NOW and FIX FIRST. The accusation, bewildered by grammar that refused to perform, glided away to find a crowd more interested in grandstanding.
The Sunfall Commander stood three rooftops off, spear couched like a conductor's baton, adjusting the tempo of trials. He did not shout. He did not need to. His light found bottlenecks and polished them into example. When a verdict landed, the halo behind him noted it in the air with elegant punctuation.
Luna detuned verbs as fast as the scales could mint them. Must thinned to might under her thumb. Should lost weight at the pivot and drifted into could if witnessed. Shall tried to bite and ended as may under certain conditions. Every time a verb softened, Selene's net caught the edge, folded it into shadow, and returned it as a question that wanted service.
"Keep them busy," Aragorn said, watching the city under trial. "We're going below once their appetite is for soup, not spectacle."
The hound of missing moments padded along a ridge, curious but not hungry. The time anchor was gone; what held the day steady now was repetition, and repetition is a posture even predators respect.
A bright chamber dropped over the plaza like a bell jar. The Radiant Scale within had ornament—a fretwork of laurels and caution tape. It spun the word interference above a team of teenagers building a ramp for a steep doorstep. The pan swung toward condemnation, pleased with its own balance.
Selene flicked her fingers. Shadows from umbrella handles and door arches elongated, slid under the scale's pan, and lifted it as gently as four strong aunties moving a dresser. "We're interfering," she told the light, "with gravity."
Tam added WITHOUT PERMISSION? on the ramp's board in chalk as big as his forearm; three neighbors signed their names beside the question. The scale sighed like an administrator who has been reminded the form is longer than remembered and drifted to audit a less cheerful block.
The Commander's attention turned. He wrote a taller sentence, confident as statute: Trials may proceed without lay witnesses when efficiency requires it.
Luna grimaced. "They're moving to bench trials."
Aragorn put the bell's lip to stone and wrote with heat along the parapet where shoes had taught it to read: No verdict without shade, witnesses, and chores. The bell hummed low; the stitch under his brand cooled like a coin leaving a palm.
The sentence above the plaza retracted itself with good grace, as if someone important had called its name. The Commander's head tilted a fraction—annoyed acknowledgment.
Rain wrinkled into a brief downpour and then into a mist that decided to linger. Selene's net drank and became heavier, stronger, more temperate. The scales adjusted their height, delicately unwilling to get damp. The city, which has more practice than law at being wet, kept moving.
"Aragorn," Luna said without looking up, her voice thinning where worry hides, "your right eye."
He wiped the corner with his thumb and found a pinprick of blood because backlash has traditions. He knew the cost—thin slices of scent and summers and someone's hand on a stairway rail. He let the absence sit where it felt like a small open window and did not waste heat on closing it.
The Commander lifted his spear until its point touched noon. A single, heavier scale descended with measured finality, its chain etched with statutes that had learned the trick of making themselves look gentle. Its left pan filled with the three words empires use when they are losing patience: For Your Own.
Luna inhaled through her nose, a sharp sound. "He's pulling the precedent."
Aragorn set the mirror he kept for bad days against the parapet and angled it until the scale saw its author—the Commander's serenely sure face and, behind him, the tidy rows of halo clerks impatient to be impressed. Selene spread shadow under the heavier chain, not to break it, to insist it feel its own weight. Cyrus placed his hand, once again, on the cobble, and the Oath cord waited where pain likes to arrive.
"For our own good," Aragorn said softly, as if explaining to a child that naps cannot be decreed. "Then we'll need to see who you mean by 'our.'"
In the square, three women poured water, said names, and listed chores this trial had interrupted. The heavier scale tried to pretend cups were not evidence and found itself ashamed, which is progress.
The Commander's eyes narrowed—not with anger, but with irritation at finding himself still at work after noon. He raised his spear and drew the Radiant Scales up and out, chambers collapsing with decorum, punctuation erasing itself with minimal drama. The court adjourned itself like a clean desk at day's end.
"Below," Luna said, closing the last leaf. "Before he remembers a new trick."
They moved fast without appearing to hurry—because panic tells on itself—and reached the colossus stair as rain ran quiet down the handrails. The first landing breathed warm. The second smelled of iron and old arguments. The third opened on a cavern whose ribs had learned to hold the weight of a city that refused to be reset.
Earth was waiting, heavy and patient.
"Sentence?" Aragorn asked, palm lifted as if to feel weather.
The pressure came the way night comes in houses where mothers move quietly: push here, hold there, breathe. Luna translated with lines on the brass: load‑paths, backfills, compressions. Selene turned her ribbon of predawn into a rope in case panic needed something obvious to grab.
"Every strike makes me stronger," muttered a basalt guardian at the far gate, its etched boast catching torchlight like pride.
"Not today," Cyrus said, rolling his shoulders. "Today every strike makes you comprehensible."
Aragorn laid the bell against the rune and pinched the hinge that made boast into grammar. The line broke into its parts; Cyrus stepped forward and spoke the seam's name with his axe instead of his mouth. Stone parted where truth pointed.
"Trial of Earth," Luna said, eyes bright as ink that knows where to go. "Let's convince stubbornness it wants to be steadiness."
Behind them, in the wet roofs above, the Radiant Scales lifted to a height from which it was hard to tell kitchens from crimes. They would be back when someone asked the wrong question. For now the mines inhaled, and the city, finally, exhaled.
— End of Episode 14 —
Key powers this episode: Verb‑hinge detuning (must→can, should→could if witnessed), martyr‑protocol defused by "harm returns to the hand that writes it," witness‑cup loading on radiant scales, mirror‑law forcing "For Your Own" to face its author, shadow‑net strengthened by rain, Oath pain‑split readiness, rune edit (boast→grammar) on basalt guardian.
Focus cast: Aragorn, Selene, Luna, Cyrus, Tam; Sunfall Commander (remote), a seraph captain, Artemis‑hound.