Aerialis didn't sit on the cliff so much as argue with it.
The cliff rose in a black, jagged face—lava glass and stubborn stone—then stopped making sense. Chains the size of siege towers plunged from pylons above and bit into anchor-plates buried in the rock. Between chain and cliff, platforms hung like thoughts someone refused to finish, each stacked with streets and walls and wind-vanes. The whole city hummed at a pitch just below fear.
"Home of rules you can stub a toe on," Jorn said, reining in the horses to a dignified plod.
Aerialis answered with a low, contented tremor that set Kael's teeth vibrating. It wasn't the wind. It was law—Vector fields layered and crosshatched until physics marched in a parade and saluted.
The entrance cut into the cliff's shoulder: an archway armored in black iron and etched with a riot of sigils that made Kael's head feel like it had swallowed bees. Guards in layered leathers and metal stood flanking the arch. Their armor wore little copper plates that flickered faintly, fields anchoring to flesh.
The nearest guard eyed the cart and relaxed just enough to show he was tense. "Papers."
Serah flicked her coat to show the Concord badge and a second sigil Kael hadn't seen before: a stylized chain with a star caught in its links. The guard straightened, then took the sheaf Jorn handed over with the respect of a man who knew paperwork could get him killed.
He read fast, lips moving. "Sovereign Serah Ilyane. Escorting… asset: Kael Varren." His eyes slid to Kael, took in the smile, didn't like it. "Quasi-licensed observation. Apostate: Brother Maeron under provisional truce." A sniff. "And—Lysa Tren."
Silence made a shape.
Lysa offered nothing to fill it. She folded her hands like someone who had been a soldier long enough to know where to put hands when people looked.
"Marshal's order says she's taken under Sovereign notice," the guard said, tone carefully flat. "Fine. Secondary gate. You'll want the Inner Lash."
"The Lash?" Kael said.
"The chain," Serah said. "The inside one. Easier on carts."
"You call your roads lashes?" Kael asked the guard. "Comforting."
"It keeps them obedient," the guard said, and stamped the papers with a device that made the sigils flare briefly and then settle like ink deciding to be real.
They rolled through the arch into a throat of stone shot with iron ribs. The air went denser. Kael felt a gentle hand on his shoulders and ankles—this many meters per second, please; no sudden accelerations; yes, you stop here. It was like being scolded by a polite aunt in five dimensions.
"Welcome to Aerialis," Serah said. "Walk soft or the city walks you."
The throat spat them onto a suspended avenue: a broad band of stone festooned with chains and struts. Beneath, air fell away to the Shatterfront, not so much a canyon as a sermon in fracture. Beyond it, the land ran in wounded lines toward a dim horizon, where the Black Halo smudged the sky.
Houses, workshops, barracks, and spiderwebs of catwalks clung to the avenue and its companions. People moved with the serious efficiency of those who knew gravity was watching. Everywhere, little copper plates flickered on collars, braces, lampposts. The city glittered like a nervous animal.
A figure in a dark coat waited where the Inner Lash widened into a square. She wore her grey hair braided under a steel circlet. Her coat kept the same practical lines as Serah's but carried authority the way a blade carries an edge.
"Marshal Ossa," Serah said, stepping down.
"Serah," the woman returned, eyes flicking to the cart and cataloguing. "Jorn. Brother Maeron—on a leash at last." Her gaze settled on Kael like a measuring instrument and did not move. "And the boy."
"Man," Kael said reflexively. Then he winced. "Boy-man. Man-shaped boy."
Her mouth didn't smile. "Auditor Tessel wanted to greet you with a collar," she said to Serah. "I told him to try it himself first."
"Very progressive," Kael said.
"He thinks you're flammable," Ossa continued, still to Serah. "He's probably right. But you don't stop a house fire by padlocking the kindling to a wall."
"Disagree," said a crisp voice, and a man stepped out from a shadow of chain.
Auditor Tessel was angular in the tidy way of sharp letters on good paper. His coat had too many pockets and too little dust. He wore a delicate circlet of gold around his brow that flickered faint Radiant—a monitor. Kael decided immediately that he hated him and that Tessel paid men to hate him first.
"Asset Varren," Tessel said, making Kael into a filing label. "Welcome to a city built to contain you."
Kael bared his teeth. "Can I leave a review?"
"No," Tessel said. "Also no to your request to not exist. Follow me, please. Sovereign, Warden Marshal."
Ossa's gaze and Serah's presence kept Tessel in check enough that Kael didn't immediately find himself in a basement. Instead, Tessel led them across the square to a door set under a carved relief of chain links turning into constellations. The door accepted Serah's sigil and Ossa's stare and opened on a corridor with walls that buzzed faintly with containments.
Tessel walked like he was the leading edge of the building. "You will not manipulate energy in the corridors," he said without looking back. "You will not 'test' the Quiet Rooms unless told. The Quiet Rooms will test you if you misbehave. The Silence Dome is off-limits except with escort. The Anti-Acceleration Cloister is not a place to race in, Mr. Varren, despite the name."
"Why do I feel personally attacked," Kael murmured.
"Experience," Jorn said.
Maeron tapped a sign as they passed. "Ah," he said, "they've stabilized the Entropy bleed with tuned Radiant. That will be a relief to your teeth, Kael."
Kael ground his teeth on principle.
Tessel stopped at a viewing gallery and let them look whether they wanted to or not. Below, a circular chamber held a flat, silver mirror in a floor of black stone. Above it, a lattice of copper hums. Sigils crawled along the walls like imported bacteria.
"Proving Well," Tessel said. "Standard intake. Place your hand. The field maps your couplings and tells us whether you're lying about what you are."
"Is there a version that doesn't sound like a threat?" Kael asked.
"No," Tessel said.
They took an elevator—a real one, not the rope-and-winches nightmares Kael knew—down. The Proving Well smelled of metal, old incense, and stubbornness. An attendant with ink-stained fingers adjusted levers with reverent care.
"Shoes off," Tessel said.
Kael sighed and unbuckled. The black stone was colder than it had a right to be.
"Hand," Tessel said.
Kael put his palm flat to the silver mirror. It was not wet, not metal. It was surface, too perfect to be allowed. It accepted him the way the Aerialis gate had: fines paid, responsibility assumed.
Something rose from the mirror and into his hand with the intimacy of a confession. Not power. Structure. It wandered his nerves like a lost tourist and then took notes.
The copper lattice hummed. The walls wrote in light.
"Primary: Kinetic," Tessel said, not needing to look at the script. "Secondary: Neural. Tertiary potentials: Radiant, low; Thermal, incidental to Kinetic. Vector Load: variable…" His mouth tightened. "Oscillating. That is not… common."
The walls went on writing. Kael watched a little line skitter, hesitate, and then jump a groove.
"What's that?" he asked, because it made him uneasy and everything made him curious.
Tessel glanced. The circle of gold at his brow pulsed. For a heartbeat, his professional disdain thinned into interest. "Historical coupling skew," he said. "Your… interactions with ambient entropic bias aren't static. That should not be true. But then, you are an edge case."
"I prefer 'limited edition,'" Kael said.
"Step off the Well," Tessel said. "Slowly."
Kael lifted his hand. The mirror clung like an argument that wouldn't end, then let go in a long, reluctant sigh. The hum subsided. The attendant wrote something with three underlines.
Serah had the disciplined patience to wait until they were back in the corridor to speak. "Well?"
Tessel clasped his hands behind him. "The oscillation means two things: he couples to local fields like a normal idiot—excuse me, user—and he couples to nonlocal bias like a… like a switch. It flips. There is a signature on him that is not entirely his. A… memory of coupling."
"Causal echo," Maeron said, almost sweet.
Tessel did not deign to look at him. "Until we know the triggers, we treat him as volatile. No collar. He will cheat it. Anchor points at all times. Constant supervision."
Jorn blew out a breath of pretend relief. "So. Like a toddler."
"Like a grenade you explain yourself to," Tessel said. He looked at Lysa. "You will not touch anything without permission."
"I am touching my own restraint," Lysa said dryly. "With permission."
Ossa's messenger found them in the corridor: a boy of fifteen with a chain-pin too heavy for his jacket. "Marshal requests Sovereign Ilyane and Auditor Tessel in the North Lash. Equalization surge reported. Possible breakage."
"Of course," Tessel sighed, already pivoting. "Varren stays in—"
"The Well wing?" Ossa's voice came through the messenger's panic neat as thread. "No. He comes. If he destroys my city, I prefer to watch."
Serah gave Kael a look that said gentle and don't in one muscle motion. "Stay behind me. Do not—"
"Do anything fun," Kael finished. "Understood."
They went at a controlled hurry, their footsteps sketching pulses along the chains. The North Lash was a broader version of the entrance causeway, studded with pylons and work-cranes. A crowd had gathered—laborers, runners, a pair of Radiant techs with singed hair. At the edge stood a field team in copper vests holding poles topped with little flickering plates.
Beyond them, a crane hung frozen in a posture that made Kael's back hurt. Its boom angled out over the void, a load of stone blocks dangling on a cable. The blocks should have been heavy downward. Instead, they drifted sideways, tugging at the cable like a dog that smelled a better world left of here.
"Equalization field slip," one of the techs shouted to Ossa as she strode up. "The lattice went lazy two minutes ago. We're holding on manual. The boom's got tension wrong; if it swings we lose the load and the crew on the sub-platform."
Tessel's mouth flattened. He looked at Serah. "Your field, Sovereign."
Serah didn't wait for permission. She stepped to the edge, lifted her staff, and drew a shape in the air. Heat came like a suggestion and then an order. The air over the crane shimmered, temperature sketched into a web. The lazy equalization field woke with an offended hum.
The stones obeyed some. The cable stopped twitching and decided to be a cable.
"Slow," Serah said to the team on the boom. "Back by degrees. Don't fight the field."
Kael felt the strain line through the air into his bones: tension that wanted to go wrong. The Pale Belt had taught him the taste of inverted obedience. Aerialis had layered obedience into the light. Between the two, his nerves found the seam.
"Kael," Serah said without looking. "Do not."
"I am not," he said, which was practically true.
The boom shifted a fraction. A cheap pin in the sub-platform bracket chose that moment to remember it was cheap. It made a noise like a coin deciding not to be money and sheared.
The sub-platform dropped half a meter. Men shouted. Someone clung with both hands and one leg and did not have enough limbs left to keep not-dying.
Kael didn't think. He moved.
Anchor: the sudden jolt. Path: up-and-back, along the chain of the Lash, through the heat-web Serah held. Release: calm.
He caught the kinetic panic, stuffed it into his mouth metaphorically, and burped the gentlest upward push he had ever managed in his terrible life. The platform sighed instead of falling. The men scrambled. The stone load swung once and then decided manners mattered.
Serah's heat-web flexed and did not break. She spared him a half-inch of eye. It said good and I will murder you in equal portions.
Ossa's attention sharpened like the point on a spear. Tessel went very still, then tapped the circlet at his brow to mark something only he could see.
"Back," Serah called, voice steady. "Now, now—good. Anchor. Lock it."
The crew locked the boom. The load kissed the ground. A under-rope groaned. The lattice in the walls of the Lash hummed higher, equalization remembering itself.
Applause broke out where it shouldn't. It wasn't much, just a few claps and then some embarrassed grins and a man in a copper vest wiping his eyes with the back of his hand as if dust existed in an air this fussy.
"Don't encourage them," Ossa said to no one and everyone. She turned to Kael. "You chose gentle. I am impressed and suspicious."
Kael opened his hands. "I'm a complex disaster."
Tessel stepped in, professional again. "That was—ill-advised," he said. "You could have induced sympathetic oscillation and dropped half the Lash."
"I instead induced sympathetic calm," Kael said. "New technique. I call it 'don't die.'"
"Trademark later," Jorn muttered behind him.
Serah lowered her staff slowly. She gave Kael a nod he could carry in his pocket for later hungry hours and then turned to Ossa. "The equalization lattice really went lazy? That shouldn't happen."
"Tell it," Ossa said dryly. "We'll test the segment. Someone's been poaching copper for charms again."
"Charms?" Kael asked.
"People like to take the plates from the anchors for luck," Ossa said. "They do bring luck. Specifically the luck of not plummeting when you do the civic minimum. We post notices. We confiscate. They keep imagining they're the exception."
Maeron had drifted to the Lash's edge and was peering down with obscenely serene curiosity. "Exquisite," he said. "The city is a cathedral of irrational obedience. It tells the world how to flow. The world grumbles and mostly agrees. Until it doesn't, and then we learn which sermon we believed."
"Back from the edge," Jorn said, catching the monk's collar and hauling with the care you use on toddlers and bombs.
Tessel's circlet flickered. He frowned, touched the device, and looked at Kael with a new calculation. "Did you feel… anything else?" he asked. "Any doubling."
Kael lied on instinct. "Just the usual urge to throw myself off things to see if I bounce."
"Good," Tessel said, not believing him. "We limit your exposure to major fields until we build models."
"Schedule him for Quiet Room acclimation," Ossa said. "Two hours. Then bring him to the Conclave. He can introduce himself to people who own more pockets than sense."
"Fun," Kael said.
"It will not be," Tessel said.
They dispersed with the weary competence of a city that had not fallen today and was proud to be boring tomorrow. On the way back through the North Lash, children in copper-threaded caps stared at Kael and whispered. A woman sitting on a crate stringing plates onto a rope made a warding sign when he looked her way, then switched it to a rude gesture when she realized he'd seen.
By the time they reached the Well wing, Kael's adrenaline had leftover spaces that wanted filling. The hallways' fields pressed on him like polite fingers to the throat.
Tessel led him to a round chamber floored in dull stone. No mirror here. No lattice. The threshold bore three sigils: Quiet, Anchored, Return.
"The Quiet Room," Tessel said. "Sit in the center. Breathe. Do not try to prove you can explode. It is set to damp. It will teach you how it feels to not move."
"I hate it already," Kael said.
"It hates you back," Tessel said. "We find that motivating."
Serah took his elbow as he stepped over the threshold. "You'll want to fidget," she murmured. "Don't. If you fight the damp, it will pull. Let it hold you. Listen to your bones. That's where it comes for you."
"Romantic," Kael said, and stepped into a room designed to teach noise about silence.
It felt like walking under heavy blankets that remembered wars. The air shortened. His thoughts tried to run and found the floor had been waxed. He sat and felt the stone say, you may be here.
He breathed. The room breathed back in the way Aerialis did, slow and stubborn.
His fingers twitched twice and then learned better. He let the itch of motion pass along the surface of him and into the floor. For a moment he could hear the beat of men on the Lash earlier, the near-fall, and how it chose not to be. He could hear Gloomstep's tilt inside him and the way the Proving Well had taken notes on his secrets.
He heard, worst of all, the laugh he would eventually use when there was nothing left to laugh at.
He let all of it pass through him into the stone until even that laugh sounded far away.
When he came out, the corridor felt loud and rude and alive. He wanted to commit several minor crimes just to make the world pay attention.
Tessel looked him up and down. "No cracks," he said, disappointed.
"I'm saving those for the big stage," Kael said.
"Speaking of," Serah said. "The Conclave."
"Dress code?" Kael asked.
"Intact," Jorn said. "Preferably. Don't insult anyone important while they're still chewing."
On the way to whatever counted as a council chamber in a city hanging off its own arrogance, they crossed an open platform with a view of the Shatterfront. The wind had opinions. The Black Halo lounged across the horizon like a bruise that had taught itself geometry.
Kael stopped. He didn't mean to. His legs decided arrest was important.
Far above the chains, a figure stood on a high pylon like a note at the end of a staff. The light around her bent, not like heat or field, but like attention. She did not wave. She did not speak. She existed so delicately that everything else seemed clumsy.
Serah followed his line of sight and went still. "Elyra," she said, very quietly.
The Star-Sworn Oracle turned her head a fraction, which felt like watching a planet change its mind. Distantly, bells that weren't there rang once and then thought better.
Kael lifted his hand and then lowered it because he didn't know if waving at a paradox counted as flirting.
Elyra did not wave back. She stepped sideways, except there was no sideways there—only air and a habit—and vanished behind a piece of chain that took that as permission.
"Great," Kael said on an empty laugh. "Foreshadowing."
"Don't look too long," Serah said. "You'll start to see patterns you can't unsee."
"I collect those," Kael said. "They look good on me."
"Keep them off my city," Ossa said from nowhere and everywhere, and then she was beside them, because she did that. "Conclave waits."
They walked on.
Kael didn't look back. The temptation had the teeth of religion. He let it bite the part of him that bled for spectacle and kept moving toward a room where a dozen serious people would decide which leash fit him best and whether to hang bells on it.
He smiled for the door because it annoyed fate, and because he could feel the future at his back, wearing his face like a habit it struggled to break, and because this was the last moment before everyone tried to define him like ink and he was not ink.
"Let's go insult important people," he said.
"Gently," Serah said.
"Gently," he lied.