Aerialis woke to weather with an attitude.
Clouds stacked above the Shatterfront like a jury deciding whether to convict the horizon. Wind rehearsed being verdict. The Lash tuned itself tighter, plates thrum-shifting into storm cadence that made men check knots twice and pride once.
"Good day to be boring," Serah said, which in Aerialis was either a prayer or a challenge.
"Let's make it fashion," Kael said, bells murmuring trendsetter and behave.
Training continued because guilt loves routine. Blink drills on the West Spur. Yawn refreshers for plate crews who insisted they understood and then demonstrated improvement in public. Saints—pardon, Community Plate Volunteers—stayed at their marks and pretended not to count along.
Pereth had a workbench now—inside a lattice cage and under three kinds of supervision—where she turned Kael's grammar into diagrams Crown techs could whisper to metal. She wore the patient smile of someone who was both imprisoned and right.
Tessel supervised with the joyless zeal of a man who'd found purpose and paperwork on the same day. Lysa walked the anchor lines like an admonition. Jorn sharpened nothing and made everyone feel safer by proximity. Maeron scribbled until the page threatened to sue for libel.
Ossa sent a memo on vellum and the smell of storms: Inspection crews to upper braces. Blink windows restricted to licensed spans. Choir presence minimal unless requested. The last line was underlined twice and smelled faintly of threat.
"Speaking of Choir," Jorn said, staring over Kael's shoulder.
Brother Estan arrived with the weather, robes tucked, pity ironed. He carried a travel reliquary that hummed faint Radiant and a smile that said he had a new kind of patience to sell.
"Warden Marshal permitted me three minutes," he told Serah. "Two to observe. One to warn."
"We're on the clock," Serah said. "Warn fast."
Estan's eyes went to the Dome, the sunwell that wasn't here, the city that kept not dying. "The Choir has composed a Litany of Intervals," he said. "A hymn teaching the faithful to breathe in time with your blink. It is very beautiful and will kill someone by accident if you let it out of our chapels."
"I hate you," Tessel said, sincerely.
Estan bowed slightly. "Mutual. I came to ask—beg—authorize a counter-hymn. A boredom psalm. One note: a no sung on a beat the Choir owns. We will teach restraint by habit."
Serah weighed the audacity and the utility. "Give me the music first," she said. "If it behaves, I'll authorize it at noon in the North market. If it doesn't, I will turn your psalter into plates."
Estan's smile acquired humility like a scarf. "Fair."
He floated away, leaving a ribbon of incense and policy.
"Religion's value proposition," Kael said. "Make no fashionable."
"Let him try," Lysa said. "If the Choir teaches no badly, we'll hear it."
By late morning the storm had decided. Wind hit the Lash sideways; rain began as a suggestion then committed. The upper braces rang like teeth in cold water. Blink windows tightened. The city's hum shifted from confident to polite panic and back again as Tessel barked into copper and Serah drew thin webs that told heat it could have opinions later.
Kael felt the strain as a familiar itch behind his ribs. He kept his hands to himself anyway. The habit tasted like growth and displeased him.
Estan's psalm arrived to the North market at noon: one long note on human breath, sung soft enough to not offend plates, pitched where rain liked to listen. The Choir didn't wear their full robes; they wore work-coats and awkward sincerity. People joined because people are built to.
Kael threaded the stalls with Serah. He blinked a stove for a cake-seller again and became briefly holy in her eyes. The charm-seller handed him a legal sun and mouthed later as if alarms were gossip.
The psalm worked. It put a reach into shoulders and then convinced them not to. It put a space between anger and action and taught hands to count their own tremors. A toddler clapped out of rhythm; no one died.
"Use it sparingly," Serah told Estan as the last note laid down like a dog. "Teach them no as room, not rule. If it starts to taste like obedience to you, I cut it in half."
Estan bowed. "Boredom as mercy. I almost like your theology."
"Don't," Kael said. "It sheds."
A bell rolled from the upper braces: inspection transforming into actually, fix that. Tessel vanished in the direction of an equalization panel. Lysa went to a chain that had opinions. Jorn tried to convince a crew boss that tightening a bolt harder doesn't make it morally better.
And then the cough came wrong.
Not the lattice's new habit, not the little hiccup Kael had taught it to tidy. A wet cough from the Dome's direction like a mouth trying a word it didn't want and getting stuck halfway.
Serah looked at Kael. That was the whole conversation.
"On our way," he said.
They ran the rain-slick Lash without speed, which is the fastest you're allowed. The crowd turned toward the Dome and then away like men facing lightning in polite society. The ring of anchors flickered an off-beat. The seam didn't open; it tried to blink without permission.
"Not yours," Tessel panted, catching up and hating it. "Not ours. External push."
"Pereth?" Jorn demanded.
Pereth was still in her cage, dragged here because Crown paranoia had good instincts. She raised both shackled hands to show empty palms. "I'm complimented you thought of me," she called over the rain. "But no. That's sloppy. I'm never sloppy."
The seam flexed. The refusal ring held, then hissed as if offended. Kael felt the shape of a long bell starting somewhere that wasn't the well, wasn't the pylon, wasn't any place he had taught to yawn.
"Thin place," Lysa said, voice flat as stone. "Not ours."
Serah's staff grounded. "Kael."
He lifted his hands, palms a breath from the stone. Anchor: the ring's stitched no. Path: a pinhole. Release: blink with manners, then close.
He blinked the trespass into a breath and denied it the next. The seam took the allowance and did not widen. The external pressure sulked in the walls like a smug sermon.
"Again," Serah said.
He blinked again. The pressure flicked and retreated the way a cat does when you shut the door gently enough to save your fingers.
Tessel crouched by an anchor and slammed a portable plate in line with a hiss of relief and a small profanity. "I'm locking that blink," he said. "Licensed. Timed. Ours."
A laugh—not his—skated under the rain and tried to hide in the thunder. Elyra stood on a brace, unbothered by weather, head tilted as if the sky had whispered an old joke.
"Not the third bell," she called. "A cheap knockoff. Don't flatter it."
Kael's bells chimed petty and true. He set his palms wide and poured the Cloister through his fingertips until the refusal ring remembered it had posture. The cough turned into a sigh and then into a bored exhale.
"Whose?" Serah asked, not to Elyra.
The Oracle did not shrug. "A town that fell. A habit that didn't want to admit it. Someone has taught the ruins to do impressions."
"Cult?" Jorn said.
"Choir with ambition?" Tessel suggested, venom and worry evenly mixed.
Estan, who had followed, went appropriately pale. "Not ours," he said. "We barely sing on key."
Pereth's voice came through the rain bright as metal. "It's Kole's old circle," she said. "He bought a dead lattice. He was tuning it on a shop floor to impress donors. The donors are bored. Bored men try to open old mouths."
Tessel looked like someone had said slander about his children. "Where."
Pereth jutted her chin toward the east—toward old Guild storage cavern mouths in the cliff. "Under-smithy. Two spans down. Service shaft. They'll have a copied ring and a bad blink."
Serah didn't waste a second on blame. "Jorn, three guards. Tessel, cutouts and a bag full of no. Lysa, you're the floor. Estan, keep your psalm out of the way. Pereth—"
Pereth rattled her shackles. "I'm in a tasteful birdcage."
Serah frowned at the cage. "Bring her. On a leash."
Tessel sputtered. "Absolutely—"
"—necessary," Serah finished. "She'll recognize their mistake faster than we will. If she runs, Kael will trip her."
"I'm excellent at undignified saves," Kael said.
Pereth bowed from the waist, chains chiming. "How flattering."
The under-smithy smelled of old heat and men who got paid by weight. Racks of hammer heads slept in oil. Crates with Guild stamps lounged arrogant in corners. The service shaft yawned a mouth into dark. You could hear a ring if you wanted to—tinny, imprecise, trying too hard.
They descended on a maintenance ladder while Lysa told gravity a bedtime story. At the bottom, a cavern opened into a circle of plates repurposed from honest work, sigils smudged to imitate Crown geometry. Saints with poor posture and worse tools clustered around a student's idea of a Dome.
Kole's donors wore good boots and worse intentions. A Radiant tuner Kael didn't recognize—Pereth did; her mouth tightened—held a wand like a baton.
"You'll kill someone," Tessel announced, pleasant as a lawsuit.
"Someone unnecessary," the tuner said, confident. "The city slouches toward kneeling; we're just teaching it choreography."
"Your cadence is off by a quarter-beat and your blink is a grin," Pereth said crisply through the bars. "You're asking the field to chew. It will. On you."
The tuner half-turned to sneer and found Kael standing there with bells and an attitude.
"Hello," Kael said. "I'm the aftertaste you're trying to copy."
The tuner's eyes narrowed. "You think the Dome prefers you? It prefers its own voice. We're giving it one."
"You're giving it bad improv," Kael said.
Serah moved like a rule. "Step away from the ring."
"No," the tuner said, and raised her wand.
The plates tried to yawn in the shape of grab.
Kael blinked on the beat, not generous, not long—pin, close. The fake ring took the allowance because it was dumb and thought this was praise. The donors flinched at the feeling of being told no in a grammar they'd never bothered to learn.
Tessel flung cutouts onto two plates; the hum snapped to Crown. Lysa pressed air into floor without asking. Jorn took a donor's shoulder in his palm and educated it into sitting.
Pereth leaned forward until the lattice kissed her knuckles. "Left plate," she said. "Shut it last. It has arrogance."
Kael grinned without kindness. "We have something in common." He palmed the left plate's field like a cat's ear—no with affection, blink like a blink, close.
It obeyed because obedience was fashionable.
The ring collapsed into non-meaning. The tuner stared at the silence with the betrayal of a mistress abandoned mid-scandal.
"Arrest," Serah said, bored as a queen. Guards obliged.
The donors tried on innocence. It fit poorly. Jorn found three wafers in one man's wallet beside a note that said last laugh and a poor drawing of a chain-crown grin.
"Congratulations," Maeron told the arrested tuner as the guards hauled her up the ladder one elbow at a time. "You almost managed to invent heresy and mediocrity in the same minute."
Pereth stretched her neck until it popped. "You're welcome," she told Tessel.
He grimaced. "I hate needing you."
"I adore being needed," she said, pure poison and pleased. "Consider loosening the leash."
"Consider not," Serah said.
Storm afternoon poured itself into evening. The Dome coughed once more, then sneezed politely and stopped when the blink kissed it and the ring looked on like an unimpressed aunt.
Estan's psalm was introduced in three more markets with Crown supervision and a ledger. Twice the Radiant tuners on duty had to pull a blink from a Plate Volunteer's curious hand. No one died. This felt miraculous, which annoyed Kael in principle and satisfied him in practice.
By last bell, the clouds emptied their verdict and lightning retreated into mutter. The Lash shook itself like a dog leaving a river. The city blinked—in rhythm, in license—and did not fall.
In the Conclave chamber, Ossa listened to the under-smithy story without letting her eyebrows betray her soul. "Donors?" she said to a ledger.
"Detained until they remember surnames," Serah said.
"Sentence?" Estan asked, faintly hopeful for mercy that smelled like humility.
"Community service," Ossa said. "With real plates, real bolts, and a very real Lysa."
Lysa smiled with the efficiency of an avalanche. "I'll teach them blink with a wrench."
Pereth's cage rolled in, lattice singing new signatures under candle shadow. She held up her slate: BLINK LICENSE v0.7. It had footnotes and three jokes only Kael would catch.
"Release her to supervised labor?" Tessel asked flatly.
Ossa stared at the slate, at Kael, at a city that had yawned itself through a storm and blinked like a soldier refusing to flinch. "Yes," she said. "Work cage. Leash stays. Title: Consulting Offender."
Pereth grinned. "I'll embroider it."
Brother Estan stepped forward, palms open. "The Choir's boredom psalm—may we teach it at dawn and dusk?"
Serah looked at Kael. He shrugged. The bells said maybe and mindful. "Dawn and dusk," she said. "Anywhere a Sovereign signs off. And if I hear you add a second verse without telling me, I will nail your hymnals to the floor."
"Tradition," Estan said, glowing, "is restraint."
"Make that fashionable," Kael said.
They broke. The Cohort spilled into a night that smelled like wet metal and reprieve.
On the viewing platform above the Shatterfront, Elyra appeared at Kael's peripheral like an annotation. He didn't start. That felt like victory.
"Your city blinked," she said.
"She learned from the best," he said, checking the wind for hubris.
"From the least worst," Elyra corrected. "The third bell will come back with a better mouth."
"I'll bring a bigger yawn," he said.
"You'll bring your no with a handle on it," she said. "And you'll give it to someone else to carry."
He looked at her. "Pereth."
"And a boy with paint," Elyra said. "And an old woman who sells illegal grins and legal suns. And a Choir that sings because it can't help itself. Spread the weight or it will crush the joke out of you."
"I'm fond of my joke," he said.
"I am fond of the world continuing," she said. "Keep them mutually supportive."
She faded like weather that had gotten what it wanted.
Serah came to stand beside him. The chain sang under their feet: dull, satisfied, tired. A good sound.
"You were gentle," she said.
"I flirted with it," he said. "It's starting to flirt back."
"Don't marry," she said.
"No," he said. "I'm terrible husband material. Ask any god."
She bumped his shoulder. He let himself bump back.
Down on the Lash, Pereth's cage rolled past a lamp. She tilted her slate so the light caught a margin note meant for one person only:
YAWN, BLINK, WINK—a tiny allowance only you see; teach sparingly.
Kael read it, laughed because fear needed somewhere to go, and tucked the word away with his coins and illegal grin and a city's pulse.
He headed for the Quiet Room because the day had put too many fingerprints on him. On the threshold he paused and looked back at Aerialis—hung off its cliff, obeying its laws, blinking of its own accord.
"Good dog," he told the city.
The Lash twanged a note that might have been wag.
His bells answered stay and go. He did both—sat in silence long enough to own his breath, then walked out into a night that wanted to be ordinary and would be, if enough hands held it that way.
Tomorrow would invent a new mistake.
He planned to make patience look good in it.