Kiran stood in the dormitory doorway with the sword at his side.
The weight of a thousand stares pressed against his back.
Voices sank when the Administrator's summons reached the corridors.
Even the lamps seemed to lean in.
The leather on his palm creaked as he tightened his grip.
"He's here," a clerk muttered as Kiran passed.
The whisper braided into the night.
Relic.
Denial.
Half the square felt it.
He moved past bunks and boot prints and found Borgan waiting behind a table.
It was strewn with ledgers and a single, impatient candle.
Borgan's hand was a slab of meat on the ledger as he tapped a page.
He did not rise.
"So," he said, voice like a ledger closing.
"You brought the object back."
Kiran set the sword on the table instead of handing it over.
The metal made no sound on wood, only a dull kiss.
He kept his face blank.
"It extinguished the lantern," he said.
The explanation landed as technical and small.
Borgan's eyes narrowed to coins.
"An implosion? Absorptive alloy?"
He turned the possibility like a man weighing meat.
"Explain."
Kiran's mouth was dry.
"A patch of metal that disrupts resonance," he said.
The words were precise and tinkered for credibility.
"It nullifies low-frequency energy fields. A localized collapse of air pressure could have snuffed the flame."
"Enough of this technical theater," Borgan snapped.
He did not laugh; he did not need to.
"You expect us to accept a child's salvage report dressed in pseudo-science?"
Kiran kept his hands on the table.
He showed the ledger the same politeness he'd learned from foremen.
Don't beg.
Don't accuse.
"I found it in a heap," he said.
"I used it to shield someone. It behaved as I said."
"Who were you shielding?" Borgan asked.
He leaned back as if testing the rope of the conversation.
"Meira," Kiran answered.
One small fact anchored the lie to something true.
Borgan's jaw tightened.
He thumbed an entry and then pushed the pen across the page like a judge closing a case.
"Your answers are clever for someone with no papers."
He tapped the card Sylas had left earlier.
"I heard a prospector was here tonight. Sylas, was it?"
Kiran kept still.
The name scraped like salt.
"He offered coins," Kiran said.
He left the rest out.
Borgan's chest moved.
"We can't have artifacts acted upon by amateurs in public."
He stood and filled the room with his bulk.
The lamps tilted their small light over the blade.
"Containment is the Guild's business. Displaying—wielding—an object that denies resonance could cause a panic or invite opportunists."
His voice found the map of policy.
"We will not have it on record without verification."
Kiran read the sentence the way men read the storm.
Policy as pretext.
"Will you take it?" he asked.
Borgan's smile was a contract.
"Not yet. Effective containment requires... controlled testing. We will test."
He leaned forward.
"You and your mentor will go on a reconnaissance in two days. Ruins of the East Observation Post. Standard reconnaissance. Light escort. You will bring the object and your reports."
Kiran's shoulders dropped like a poorly tied sail.
The order landed with the delegation of disposal.
"Reconnaissance" in Guild speech meant a place to send men out of eyes and into danger.
"Two days," Borgan repeated.
"Report to logistics at dawn. Fail and the object will be impounded and you will face disciplinary hearing."
He pushed back a chair with a scrape that sounded like a gavel.
"Dismissed."
Kiran left with the sword heavier than before.
The dorm corridor closed around him with the hushed hum of men who had decided a fate.
Someone spit underfoot.
Meira's face flashed in his mind.
Her grin over a dumpling.
The way she trusted him to keep what was small and fragile.
Elias found him at a bench where instruments lay like patient animals.
The veteran's hands had the ink stains of someone who read maps for a living.
He used compassion like an instrument.
He did not ask about Borgan.
His eyes contained the question instead.
"They want distance," Elias said.
His voice was low, not unkind.
"Or a test away from the city's reach."
Kiran set the sword down.
He watched the strip of non-reflective metal swallow the lamp's edge.
He did not touch it.
"They could lock it up," he said.
"Or they could come after it openly."
Elias rubbed his chin.
"They could do either. But sending you out is their preferred risk management: test it against ruins, anomalies, things we already mark as expendable."
Kiran's breath thinned.
He felt the ledger closing, the words adding up.
Send them where the map is thin.
See what happens.
"So they want to see if it works against something worse than a lantern," he said, voice flat.
"That is one possibility," Elias agreed.
"Another is that they want you off the books in case the object draws attention. Less political heat that way."
He met Kiran's gaze.
"Do you understand what that means?"
Kiran let the question fold into him.
The canyon's Spinner.
The festival's dead light.
Sylas's smile.
Threads collected into a rope of consequence.
"They could be trying to dispose of me," he said.
Elias's hand tightened at the wrist.
"They could. But I don't think Borgan is callous enough to kill without need. He is careful."
He paused.
"This mission will show the object's properties against old feedback zones. It will also show if you are expendable."
A pause held like a map marker.
The instruments around them made small clicks as if marking time.
"Why stay?" Kiran asked then.
The question was small enough to be a confession.
"Why help me if this is dangerous? Why risk—"
"Because your parents were my friends," Elias said.
The words had weight like a stone placed on a map.
"Because I owe them, and because I want to know whether their notes led them to something true. And because curiosity is a poor guide but a stubborn one."
Kiran's jaw tightened.
The amulet at his throat brushed the seam against his shirt.
He had listened to rumors about Elias.
About a man who kept ledgers for ghosts.
Now he saw no ledger.
Only a stubbornness that mirrored his own.
"So we go," Kiran said.
The word closed the loop.
"We leave at dawn."
Elias nodded.
"We prepare. You will catalog equipment. You will learn the instruments you mocked tonight."
He pointed to a coiled wire on the bench.
"And keep the sword hidden until we need it."
Kiran almost objected.
The sword had become too loud to hide comfortably.
He stopped himself.
The choice to bring it along now felt less like courage than inevitability.
Night surrendered the dormitory to small sounds.
Kiran lay on his pallet and tried to name the cost.
Borgan's order had not only sent him away.
It had made the sword a subject of official curiosity.
That changed his life the way a compass changes a route.
He rose and took the blade into his hands at last.
The leather hissed.
He turned it like a question.
The metal strip stared back with its matte hunger.
He pressed his thumb to the place where rust had once flaked.
Where a silver glint had once winked.
Thinking the motion might coax a response.
Nothing happened.
He breathed in steady counts as Elias had taught him in the canyon.
One, two.
He tried again, intentionally this time.
Not by accident.
Not by instinct.
By design.
He carried his frustration from the docks into his palms.
The humiliation of Lysandro's punch.
Borgan's ledger.
He focused the tight heat of all that small anger onto the metal.
He imagined the silence he'd felt in the Test of Silence.
The hush that had swallowed the crystal's pulse.
Again: nothing.
Kiran's hands moved with the cadence of someone trying to tune a ruined instrument.
He pushed harder.
Channeling not only anger but the unformed grief about parents who had not returned.
He tried to pull the blade's obscurity into service.
To make it obey a need rather than a fluke.
The sword stayed inert.
Cold metal.
Rusted edge.
A lingual silence that refused speech.
He hit it with a flat palm out of frustration.
More a child striking a stubborn door than a cartographer making a measurement.
The act made no sound.
The alley of his room absorbed it like a floor taking a stone.
Elias's voice broke the hush from the corridor.
"Sleep, boy. Tomorrow you learn instruments, not miracles."
Kiran looked up.
He felt small and unbearably human.
The sword lay between them like a quiet accusation.
He shoved the blade toward the pallet.
For an instant he considered selling it to Sylas.
To any prospector who would give enough coin to buy a train ticket and a promise of distance.
The thought lasted a breath.
Then it folded under the weight of his mother's hum in his memory.
The amulet's seam against his ribs.
He tried one more time.
Not anger now, but the silence itself.
The empty that had followed the crystal.
He centered his breathing.
He imagined the hush as a thing to be found again.
Silence remained silence.
He pulled the sword to his feet.
He threw it to the floor with a soundless motion.
The metal landed with a dull absence.
It felt like an answer and a question at once.
Alone, Kiran faced the sword.
He tried, deliberately this time, to channel his own frustration and anger into the blade.
Nothing happened.
He tried to focus on the silence he had felt before.
Nothing.
The blade remained dead, cold, and rusted.
The power did not obey.
In despair, he threw the sword to the ground.
It fell without making a sound.