Chapter Four: The Descent
The tea was ginger and dried citrus.
I smelled it before I opened my eyes — faint, warm, cutting through the cold morning air like something specific was being remembered. I lay still for a moment, not quite awake, and thought: *mother.*
Then I heard Adelheid moving near the fire and understood.
She was crouched at the embers when I sat up, pouring the tea without looking at me, and she held the cup out when I emerged from the tent with the particular patience of someone who had already known I would emerge at exactly this moment.
"You talk in your sleep," she said.
"I do not."
"You said a name. Quietly. Several times." She still wasn't looking at me. "I didn't catch which one."
I took the cup. The ceramic was warm against my palms — the same warmth as the shrine cloth yesterday, but this was just clay and heat. My gift didn't stir. It recognized the difference.
"How did you know?" I asked.
She glanced at me then. Just briefly. The healer's inventory look — checking something without announcing she was checking it. "Know what?"
"The tea. My mother used to make this. When I couldn't sleep. Or when something had..." I stopped.
Adelheid was quiet for a moment. "Ginger and citrus is what my teacher prescribed for students before difficult examinations. Something about the combination steadies the nerves without dulling the mind." She poured her own cup. "I've used it for soldiers before battle. Refugees after crossings. Children who have experienced something their bodies haven't finished processing yet."
She said it without emphasis. Just a list. Just context.
"I'm not a child," I said.
"No," she agreed. "You're not. You're thirteen and you crossed a portal and fell out of someone else's worst memory and touched a shrine cloth that showed you your mother before the world made her careful." She looked at the fire. "And today we're going into a ruin that took Elric."
I had no answer for that.
We drank our tea in the grey morning while the others slept. The valley was still below us, the ruins invisible in the pre-dawn dark, but the wrongness was there — a low pressure, a bad frequency, the same thing I'd felt standing on the ridge yesterday. My gift had been awake since we crested the hill. It hadn't quieted since.
"Adelheid."
"Mm."
"The things I felt yesterday. In the shrine." I turned the cup in my hands. "I feel them everywhere here. The hills. The road. The stones under my feet." I paused. "It's louder than it's ever been."
She was quiet for a moment. "Is that bad?"
"I don't know. I can't tell if I'm getting better at this or if something down there is —" I stopped. "Pulling."
Adelheid looked at me properly then. Not the inventory look. Something more careful. "Tell Elric that." She paused. There was a doubt she was suppressing. "Once we find him."
Kai emerged from the tent twenty minutes later, already sharp-eyed, the night's sleep metabolized into readiness the way fighters metabolize everything — efficiently, without waste. He looked at me, at my cup, at Adelheid's expression, and understood enough not to ask.
Jin came out last, maps already in her hand, her staff tapping once against the earth as her feet touched ground. The attuning. The greeting. *I am here. I am listening.*
She pressed her palm flat to the soil for three seconds. When she stood, her face was very still.
She was quiet for a moment. Then, almost to herself: "He woke the lines early. Whatever he's building — it couldn't wait for the Crumbling to do it naturally. He had to force it."
Nobody asked what that meant. The green light in the walls answered for her.
"The ley lines are worse than yesterday," she said. "The nexus has been active overnight. Someone's been feeding it for months."
Kai: "Someone's been feeding it?"
"Continuously. Whatever is down there doesn't sleep."
We broke camp in ten minutes. Kai strapped on the leaf-shaped shield — the pickaxe handle worn smooth in his grip — and the curved scimitar disappeared into the shield's face with the soft sound of metal finding its home. The rune on the blade was briefly visible before it vanished: dark ink, fluid strokes, a script I had never encountered.
That inscription. I looked at it for a moment too long.
He noticed. "Kanlian High Script," he said. "Old dialect. Probably predates the unified empire. It was an inscription Kat had on her staff. I had a craftsman add it to the shield just as I was reforging the staff into the now blade." He adjusted the shield strap. "I don't know what it says."
He said it simply. Not self-consciously. Just: *I don't know.* A man who had carried words on his weapon for years and never thought to read them.
I filed that away.
We walked down into the valley.
*
The ruins announced themselves before we saw them properly — the air changed first, that ozone-and-metal smell thickening as we descended, and then the sound, or rather the absence of sound. No birds. No insects. The specific silence of a place that living things had decided to avoid.
Then the walls.
Celestian stone — black, dense, carved with symbols that predated every writing system I had studied. Two thousand years old at minimum. Possibly older. The Precursors had built with materials that didn't announce their age the way ordinary stone did; the walls looked neither ancient nor new, just permanent, as if the concept of decay hadn't been fully explained to them.
The ley line patterns Jin had mapped from the ridge were visible here at ground level as faint striations in the stone — lines of deeper black running through the standard black, barely perceptible unless you knew to look. She tapped her staff against the threshold and I watched her eyes move, reading the geological text beneath our feet.
"The main channel runs northeast to the central structure," she said. "Someone has cut secondary channels — new work, recent, the stone remembers being shaped within the last six months." Her jaw tightened. "Crude work. They forced it rather than asking."
I understood what she meant. The difference between Jin shaping stone and what the Veilborn had done here was the difference between conversation and surgery without consent. The earth's memory of it was uncomfortable even to stand near.
The outer gate was intact — two columns of Precursor stone supporting a lintel carved with interlocking circles that Jin identified as a portal-alignment sigil, the same system used in the Ramos mirror. Not a portal itself. A marker. *This structure was built in relationship to the portal network. This was part of the first alliance.*
Kai studied the ground beyond the gate. Boot prints in the dust — multiple individuals, different gaits, coming and going. A dark stain on the left column that Adelheid crouched beside and examined without touching.
"Blood," she said. "Old. Two weeks, maybe more." She sniffed — that precise Zephyrian-trained olfactory assessment — and her expression shifted. "Fear. Prolonged fear. Whoever this was, they were here for some time before—" She stopped.
"Before?" Kai said.
"Before they weren't afraid anymore." She stood. "Which means either they left or they stopped being capable of it."
A silence.
"Elric's escort?" Jin asked.
"Possibly. Or earlier visitors." Adelheid's voice was clinical. She had locked something down behind her professional manner — I could see the lock, even if I couldn't see what it protected. "We should move."
Kai drew the scimitar.
The blade cleared the shield with that soft familiar sound. In the ruin's shadow it looked different than it had in morning light — the curve more pronounced, the rune more visible, the fuller running along the flat catching what little light filtered through the gate like a groove designed to let something breathe.
We crossed the threshold.
*
My gift woke the moment my foot touched the interior stone.
Not violently. Not the way the portal had hit — total immersion, no warning. More like a door opening in a room you'd been standing in for a while. A change in quality rather than kind. The background hum of the hills sharpening into something focused, directional, aware.
The ruins remembered a great deal.
I could feel it the way you feel a crowded room before your eyes adjust to the light — the sense of many presences, layered, some ancient and some recent and some very recent indeed. The Celestian stone held two thousand years of memory with the patient density of deep rock. Underneath that, older still: the earth's own record, geological, pre-human, the memory of a time when this valley was seafloor and these hills were movement below water.
And over all of it, recent and wrong: the Veilborn's work. The forced channels. The harvested Andorium. The binding engine below us, pulse-pulse-pulsing like a second heartbeat in the floor.
*Elric,* I thought, not yet needing to say it aloud, just checking he was there.
The first courtyard was open to the sky, or would have been — the upper stories of the surrounding walls had collapsed inward long ago, leaving a rectangle of grey morning visible overhead and the courtyard floor thick with centuries of debris. Someone had cleared a path through the center. Recent work. The stones moved aside with purpose rather than fallen in the natural patterns of decay.
We found the cartographer first.
He was in the second courtyard, half-hidden beneath a collapsed section of interior wall — not buried by the collapse but placed there afterward, with a deliberateness that was somehow worse than simple violence. His instruments were still in his pack. His maps were gone.
Kai crouched beside him without touching. His face did the thing it did when he was processing something he didn't intend to show — the jaw setting, the eyes going very still.
"How?" he asked.
Adelheid crouched on the other side. She didn't touch the body either, but her eyes moved over it with the clinical attention of someone reading a text. Then she closed her eyes briefly and I understood she was using the other kind of reading — the resonance sense, the body's story told in temperature and chemistry and the specific signatures of how life had left it.
"Quickly," she said. "He didn't suffer long." A pause. "The constructs don't kill with malice. They kill with efficiency. There's a difference in what they leave behind."
"He ran," Jin said. She was standing at the edge of the courtyard, staff pressed to the earth, reading the ground. "The floor remembers. He came through the main gate, turned right instead of left — away from Elric's chalk marks, he didn't know the system — and when the construct caught him he—" She stopped. "He was fast. It just didn't matter."
The maps were gone. His instruments remained. I understood what that meant: they had taken what was useful and left the rest. The same systematic intelligence.
I looked at the cartographer's face. He had been perhaps forty. He had kind eyes, even now. I thought about what Elric had told my mother when he brought her news of her family's death — I am sorry. They were good people. I thought about how the cartographer had probably been someone's good person too, and how the ruins had no interest in that.
I filed his face. I didn't know his name yet.
I would find it, I thought. Later. I would find his name and write it down.
It was the first time I had thought like a Chronicler without knowing I was thinking like a Chronicler.
Kai stood. He looked at the body for a moment longer than strictly necessary. Then he looked at the shield in his hand — at the pickaxe handle worn smooth — and something moved through his expression that was gone before I could name it.
"We keep moving," he said.
*
Jin crouched at the edge of the cleared path, touching the displaced stones without lifting them. "Golem labor," she said. "The weight distribution — something much heavier than a person moved these." She looked up. "Recently. Within the week."
"How many?" Kai asked.
"I can count the contact points." She closed her eyes. Her lips moved slightly — the geomancer's internal calculation, feeling the earth's memory of pressure applied to its surface. "Four. Maybe five. Moving in coordination." She opened her eyes. "He has more than we thought."
Adelheid had been studying the walls while the others worked. She moved along the right-hand perimeter slowly, her eyes reading the stone the way she read everything — looking for what the surface revealed about what lay underneath. She stopped at a section near the covered entrance and pressed two fingers against the mortar between stones.
"Someone repaired this wall recently," she said. "The mortar is new. Maybe two months."
"They've been here longer than we thought," Jin said without looking up.
"Or they've been preparing longer than they've been here." Adelheid stepped back. "There's a difference."
We found the first guard in the corridor connecting the outer and inner courtyards — propped against the wall in a sitting position, his back straight, his hands folded in his lap.
Someone had arranged him.
Jin saw it first and stopped walking. The rest of us stopped behind her.
The guard was young — younger than I'd expected, younger than Kai, perhaps twenty. His escort sword was still in its scabbard. He hadn't drawn it, or hadn't had the chance to, or hadn't been killed in a way that drawing it would have helped. The Andorium-threaded rope that had bound his wrists had been cut — recently, the fiber ends still clean.
"They freed him," Kai said. His voice had a flat quality I associated with him working very hard to keep it level. "After."
"As a message," Jin said. "Or as a demonstration." She pressed her palm to the floor beside him, reading. "He was brought here from somewhere else. The floor remembers weight being carried, not walked." She paused. "He'd been bound the same way as—" she stopped.
"The same way as Elric," Adelheid finished. She was crouching beside the guard, her hand near his but not touching him. Her eyes were closed. "He was kept for a while. Then he wasn't useful anymore." A pause, very quiet. "I don't think he knew what was happening to him at the end. The fear had been going on long enough that it had exhausted itself. What's left is—" she stopped. Opened her eyes. "Peaceful isn't the right word. Absent. He was somewhere else by the time it finished."
I looked at Kai.
He was looking at the guard's folded hands. At the deliberate arrangement of them, the specific care taken by whatever had placed him here — not respect, nothing as human as respect, but a kind of aesthetic attention. This is where you go. This is what you become. We arrange you because arrangement is what we do.
The construct's aesthetic. Thorne's aesthetic. Everything placed. Everything staged.
Kai's right hand had found the scimitar's hilt without him seeming to notice.
"Kai," Adelheid said quietly.
He released the hilt. Flexed his fingers once. "I know."
"Do you?"
A silence.
"I know," he said again. Different this time. Lower.
We left the first guard where he'd been placed and pressed on. There was nothing else to do for him yet. There would be, later. I made a note of the corridor, the distance from the outer gate, the approximate position. I would find his name too.
*
Elric's chalk marks began in the second corridor — faint circles at knee height, the notation system Jin had described from his field journals. Arrow indicating direction. Circle indicating cleared. X indicating danger. We found three Xs in the first hundred meters and understood why he'd turned back from certain passages.
*
The second corridor opened into a wider hall, and the hall had a ceiling that was still mostly intact, and the intact ceiling had Celestian inscription covering every surface — not decorative, Jin said, running her staff along the floor as she moved. Functional. This was the working architecture of the portal network: the mathematical language of the first alliance written in stone.
I kept my hands at my sides.
The second guard we almost missed.
He was in the alcove off the scriptorium — not the main chamber but a narrow service passage that Jin only found because her staff picked up an anomaly in the floor's memory. Weight, recently. Dragged, not walked. She followed the trace to the alcove entrance and stopped.
This one had fought.
The evidence was in the scorch marks on the alcove walls — Jin's assessment, not fire but concentrated ley discharge, the kind that happened when a geomancer pushed past their technical limits into something rawer and less controlled. Desperate magic. The kind you did when technique ran out and survival was the only remaining instruction.
"He had training," Jin said. Her voice had gone careful in a way that meant she was managing something. "Not advanced. Apprentice level, maybe. But he knew what he was doing and he did it until he couldn't anymore." She paused. "He damaged one of them. Significantly. The floor remembers the construct's weight changing after they were in here together — something structural was disrupted."
"He bought Elric time," Kai said.
"Yes." Jin didn't look up from the floor. "He bought Elric time."
The second guard was older than the first — closer to Kai's age, perhaps. He had not been arranged. He had been left where he fell, which felt, paradoxically, more honest than the first guard's staged repose. He had fallen in the middle of fighting. He had not been tidied afterward. He was simply finished, the way a fire is simply finished when the fuel runs out, with the specific dignity of something that burned completely.
His staff was still in his hand. The tip was cracked — the ley discharge had damaged the focus as it passed through it, the wood unable to fully contain what he'd pushed into it.
I looked at Jin looking at the cracked staff.
Her face was very still.
"Jin," I said quietly.
"I'm fine." She turned away from the alcove. "He gave us something useful. The construct he damaged is probably the one we'll face first — structurally compromised, joints already disrupted. We should use that."
She was already thinking tactically. Already metabolizing grief into function.
I watched her do it and thought: that's what she means. That's what the work carries.
Kai was looking at the cracked staff. At Jin's back. At the cracked staff again.
He said nothing.
He didn't need to.
Adelheid was still looking at the cracked staff. Not with surprise — with the particular expression of someone encountering evidence for something they already knew. Her fingers moved slightly at her side, the same unconscious gesture of a medical student examining a cadaver.
She had felt that architecture before she'd seen its consequence. The staff was just the proof.
She didn't say this aloud. She closed her satchel and followed Jin out of the alcove.
I filed it anyway.
"Here," Jin said.
We gathered around her. She was crouching at a section of wall where the Celestian inscription had been partially obscured — not damaged, covered. A layer of newer stonework applied over the original surface, rough and hasty compared to the Precursor craftsmanship underneath.
"They sealed something," Kai said.
"Tried to." Jin pressed her palm flat against the newer stonework, eyes closing. A long moment passed. "There's a resonance key underneath. A frequency marker — the Celestians used them to calibrate the portal network. This one is still active." Her jaw tightened. "If they'd left it exposed, anyone with sufficient geomantic sensitivity could use it to disrupt the nexus from above ground. Without going down."
"So they covered it," Kai said.
"Crudely." She opened her eyes. "Which means they understood enough to know it was dangerous but not enough to neutralize it properly." She was quiet for a moment, her hand still flat against the stone. "I'd need the covering removed to use it. But I can feel it through the layer." She marked the wall with a small chalk circle. "We come back here if we need to."
The temptation was constant. Every wall offered something — the low warm pull of old memory, patient and layered. The Celestian stone remembered being cut, being placed, being consecrated with whatever rites the Precursors used. Two thousand years of travelers passing through. The specific weight of a place that had mattered to many people for a long time.
My gift pressed toward it the way water presses toward lower ground.
*Not yet,* I told it. *Not yet.*
"Through here," Jin said.
The hall narrowed at its far end into a passage that descended — stone stairs, broad and shallow, cut with the same inhuman precision as everything else in the ruins. The ley lines running beneath the floor were brighter here, visible even to me without full contact: thin lines of light at the edge of perception, the same sick green from the ridge but stronger at this depth.
Jin walked with one hand trailing the wall, her fingers reading the veining in the stone the way she read everything — looking for what the surface revealed about what lay underneath. I watched her touch a node where several lines converged and pull her hand back faster than she'd put it there.
"Still green," she said. To herself, not to us.
Kai looked at her.
"I keep hoping it will look different up close," she said. "That it will turn out to be something I recognize." She looked at the pulsing light in the mortar. "It doesn't."
I could see them without touching anything. I watched the lines pulse and thought about what they looked like when they were healthy. Not this green. Something warmer. Something that moved because it wanted to, not because it was being directed.
Kai was three steps below me on the stairs, shield angled to cover the descent, scimitar loose in his right hand. The blade caught the ley line light as we went down and for a moment the rune on the flat was perfectly illuminated — those fluid strokes, that unfamiliar script — and something in my gift stirred toward it the way it had stirred toward the shrine cloth.
*Not yet,* I told it again.
But I looked at the rune and thought: *I want to know what that says.*
*
The first construct came at us in the inner courtyard and it was the one Jin had predicted — the damaged one, the one the second guard had cracked open before he died — and even damaged it moved with the horrible fluid wrongness that made the back of my mind insist it was wrong, wrong, wrong in a way that bypassed rational assessment and spoke directly to something older.
It was man-shaped and man-sized and inhabited neither quality. The Andorium conduits threaded through its joints pulsed in time with the nexus below — the same green-wrong light we'd seen from the ridge, but here at close range it had a heat to it, a pressure. The left shoulder joint was visibly disrupted, the conduit there bent at an angle that suggested the second guard had hit it precisely where it mattered. The arm moved at roughly half capacity, swinging wide and late.
Kai was already in motion.
He moved the way I'd watched him move in drills — not aggressive, not reckless, the controlled explosion of someone who had trained his body to think faster than his mind. The shield came up, the scimitar cleared the shield-scabbard with that soft familiar sound, and he angled left to draw the construct's attention away from the rest of us.
It worked. The construct pivoted toward him with that too-smooth rotation, tracking him the way it would track any threat — mechanically, without the hesitation of something that had to think about being afraid.
Kai didn't have that advantage.
He should have had it. He was trained for this — trained to suppress fear and function through it, trained to keep the body moving when the mind wanted to stop. But the ruins were doing something to him. I could see it in the half-second of hesitation before his first strike, in the way his grip on the scimitar was too tight, white-knuckled where it should have been loose.
The scimitar was vibrating.
Not visibly. Not dramatically. But I could feel it from where I stood — that low frequency I'd noticed on the road south from Huanan, the warmth and hum that I'd told myself was sun on metal. Here in the ruins, with the nexus pulsing below and the construct's Andorium conduits cycling at close range, the vibration was undeniable. The blade was resonating with everything around it. Recognizing it.
And Kai could feel it in his palm.
I watched him register it — the slight shift in his expression, the moment of internal distraction that a fighter cannot afford and that he pushed through on training alone. He struck at the construct's damaged shoulder and hit — not cleanly, not where he'd aimed, because his hand had adjusted mid-swing for something his conscious mind hadn't authorized.
The construct's arm locked. Partially. The disrupted conduit flared and dimmed.
But the construct's other arm came around fast.
Too fast.
Kai took the impact on the shield — the pickaxe handle absorbing the blow with a solidity that spoke to whoever had built it — and the force of it drove him back two steps. He caught his footing. Held.
But in that two-step stumble something happened to his face that I had never seen there before.
Fear. Not of the construct. Not of being hit. The specific fear of someone whose body has just understood that it is possible to lose this — that the equation of survival does not always balance in the right direction — and beneath the fear, underneath it, threaded through it like a dark wire:
Not again. Not here. Not them.
He was thinking about the courtyard. The cartographer. The arranged hands of the first guard. The cracked staff of the second.
He was thinking about what the ruins did with people it had finished with.
He was thinking about us.
The construct raised its functional arm for a second strike and Kai moved to meet it and his grip on the scimitar was still wrong, still too tight, the blade still humming its low recognition against his palm, and for a half-second that felt much longer I watched a man fight two battles simultaneously and begin to lose the one that mattered more.
Jin's staff hit the floor.
Not a strike — a planting. Both hands, full contact, her eyes closing as she reached down through the stone with everything she had. I felt the ley line beneath the courtyard shudder as she asked it — not took, asked — and the stone under the construct's left foot remembered something about its own composition that it had been content to forget.
The foot sank two inches.
The construct staggered.
One half-second of imbalance. That was all she could give him.
Kai used it.
The scimitar found the conduit junction at the construct's neck — not the shoulder this time, somewhere more central, somewhere the second guard's damage had made accessible — and the impact disrupted the flow. The construct's movements went arrhythmic, its joints cycling without coordination, the Andorium light in its connectors dimming and flaring in rapid stuttered sequence.
It wasn't down.
Kai hit it again.
Again.
The third strike should have been the one. His technique was clean, his positioning was correct, the blade angled exactly where it needed to go. But the scimitar vibrated at the moment of impact — a pulse, like a second heartbeat in his palm — and his follow-through was off by two degrees and the construct lurched sideways instead of collapsing.
Toward me.
I had time to register this fact and not much else.
Then Adelheid was there.
She had been watching the construct since it emerged — the specific way she watched everything, reading it the way she read bodies. The Andorium conduits threaded through its joints were a circulatory system. She had understood this within the first ten seconds. They had a routing architecture. And the same empathic resonance that let her feel the shape of a fever inside a body, that let her locate a ruptured vessel in a soldier's chest by smell and intuition, could feel the shape of a flow inside a construct.
Different material. Same principle.
She had spent thirty seconds locating the central routing junction.
Now she pressed three fingers against the construct's spine at the precise location she'd identified — not a healing gesture, not a strike, just contact, just the fingertips of a woman who had learned to speak very quietly to things that could hear her — and looked at Kai.
"Here," she said.
He hit it without asking why.
Because he trusted her. Because she had been here twice and he knew what that meant and in the middle of a fight against something that was about to reach me that knowledge translated directly into: she found the thing that ends this.
The construct collapsed.
The silence after was the silence of machinery stopping — not death, but cessation. The Andorium conduits dimmed in sequence, the light draining from the joints the way warmth drains from a body, and the thing that had been man-shaped lay on the ancient stone floor and was simply metal and composite and nothing more.
We stood in it for a long moment.
Kai's breathing was audible. Not from exertion — he was too fit for a single construct fight to wind him. From the other battle. The internal one.
His grip on the scimitar loosened slowly. I watched his knuckles return to their normal color.
He looked at the blade.
The vibration had stilled — the construct's Andorium gone dark, the resonance source removed. The blade was just a blade again, curved and rune-marked and quiet. But Kai looked at it with the expression of a man who has heard something he cannot unhear, who has felt something in his hand he cannot unfeel, who has been told something by an object he did not ask to be told.
He sheathed it without looking at the scabbard. The motion was automatic. His eyes stayed on the blade until it disappeared.
Then he looked at me.
"You all right?" he said.
His voice came out almost even.
"Yes," I said.
He nodded. Looked away. Looked at Adelheid.
"How did you know where?"
"The same way I know where anything is," she said. She was already moving to check her satchel, the professional manner restored, the instrument back in its case. "Bodies have architecture. So do the things that imitate them." She glanced at the collapsed construct. "The second guard damaged it here—" she indicated the shoulder — "which rerouted the flow here—" the spine — "which created a single point carrying everything it had left." She looked at Kai steadily. "You were hitting the right target. You were just hitting it with something that was fighting you back."
The last sentence landed quietly.
Kai heard it. I saw him hear it.
He said nothing.
"There are more," Kai finally said. "The courtyard path was cleared by something. These don't sleep."
"No," Adelheid agreed. "They don't."
Nobody argued with that.
I was looking at the construct and trying not to look at my hands. The proximity — the fight happening three feet from me — it had stirred my gift in a way that wasn't comfortable. Not a vision. Just: *awareness.* Of what the construct had been built from. Of what had been forced into its joints to make it move.
Not Sunjee's level. Not full necromancy. Something less complete — the Andorium threaded with bound memory but not true phantoms. Echoes, maybe. Impressions. The early stages of what the nexus below was building toward.
A prototype, I realized. This was a prototype.
The real work was happening below.
"Pete." Adelheid's voice, quiet. Close.
I looked up. She was studying my face with that careful professional attention. She didn't ask if I was all right. She just handed me my pack, which I had apparently set down without noticing, and waited until my hands closed around the straps before she turned back to the group.
*Filing it,* I thought. *She's always filing it.*
Nobody said anything else.
We kept moving.
*
The scriptorium was stripped bare — stone shelves emptied, a central lens absent from the dust outline on the plinth that made its absence eloquent. Someone had been systematic here. This wasn't looting. This was research. They'd taken what was useful and smashed what wasn't, and the distinction they'd drawn between useful and not told you something about what they were building.
Jin moved along the shelves, reading the tablets that remained — the ones the Veilborn had left behind. Her face went through several expressions she didn't share aloud.
I drifted toward the plinth.
The quill was there. A field writer's quill — shaft reinforced with a thin Andorium wire, designed for harsh conditions and long travel. It had been placed in the center of the stripped plinth with deliberate care. Not dropped in flight. Left.
I understood what it meant before I understood how I understood it. Someone had been here. Someone had known they might not come back out. Someone had left a record for whoever arrived.
"Elric's," I said.
Kai looked up from the far end of the scriptorium. "How do you know?"
"I don't. Not yet." I looked at the quill. My gift was already pulling toward it — not the gentle patient pull of the shrine cloth but something more urgent. The quality of a message that had been waiting a long time for a recipient. "But I'm going to."
Adelheid crossed the scriptorium in a few steps. She didn't touch me. She positioned herself at my left shoulder — close enough that I'd feel her presence, far enough that she wasn't crowding me.
"Loud and undignified if you need to come back," she said quietly.
"Loud and undignified," I agreed.
Kai's hand landed on my right shoulder. Not holding me back. Just: I'm here.
I reached out and picked up the quill.
*
Three different inks.
I felt them before I felt anything else — the quality of the writing changing as the night changed, the practitioner's spirit shifting from controlled to urgent to barely-legible as the hours passed and the fear accumulated and something outside the scriptorium moved closer.
*First ink: scholarly. Careful. The handwriting of a man making a record because records matter.*
I am reading a journal that has not been written yet. I am feeling the man who will write it — old, patient as stone, who has spent forty years asking questions that no one wanted answered. He found Sunjee's story in fragments: court records, exile testimony, a soldier's account from the border. He assembled it layer by layer, oldest to newest.
*I feel the moment he understood.*
*The man who built the Veilborn didn't build it from evil.*
*He built it from love.*
Sunjee's hands — younger than I expect, careful, precise — shaping the first prosthetic. Not for glory. For her. For the woman whose hands the forge had destroyed, whose music had stopped, whose particular quality of joy had narrowed to a point of pain. He sat in his workshop for three days and nights without sleeping and when he finally slept he dreamed of her playing again and when he woke he knew what to do.
The joy of it. When the first fingers moved.
*She played for him that night.* The memory of it saturated the quill like water in cloth — Elric had held this moment in his mind for twenty years, had turned it over and over trying to understand how love became catastrophe. *She played and he wept and she laughed at him for weeping and everything was, for one night, exactly right.*
*Second ink: urgent. The letters pressing harder into the page.*
The progression was not dramatic. That was what haunted Elric most — that each step followed the last with perfect, terrible logic. Prosthetics became golems became military applications became industry became empire and at each stage Sunjee said yes because the good was real and the harm was somewhere else and the logic was sound.
Liriya's illness arriving slowly. The way she tried to hide it from him. The specific quality of love that wants to protect the beloved from grief and so withholds the truth that might have allowed them to prepare.
Thorne at a lamplight table, his eyes bright. *Why sever her soul from its vessel?* A man who asked questions the way a puppeteer pulls strings — finding the exact point where a slight pressure would produce the desired movement.
*The first experiment. The rationalization. The progression.*
The corpse was a soldier. Already dead. Already beyond harm. The binding was tentative, partial, more symbolic than functional. And it worked. It worked and Sunjee looked at what he'd made and thought: *not yet. Not well enough. But possible.*
Possible.
That single word. The specific warmth of it. The way possibility can feel like permission.
*Third ink: barely legible. The quill dragged rather than guided.*
She died on a Yam (or Tuesday). He remembered the day because the market bell had been ringing and he'd thought: *I should tell her the temple bell is ringing, she used to love the temple's bell,* and then he'd remembered she couldn't hear it anymore and then he'd remembered why and then he'd understood that she was gone.
He did not mourn the way grief is supposed to work. He worked. It was denial. It became blasphemy.
The lute in the workshop. Her hands around the neck of it, remembered — not imagined, *remembered*, the specific weight of her grip that he knew because he had watched her play ten thousand times and his body had memorized the watching. He built the fingers from memory. He tuned the movements from memory.
When the animated shell played for the first time, it played the Astarian lament she had loved most.
Perfect. Flawless. Utterly without breath.
*Do you still love me?* he asked the empty workshop. *Is any part of you still in there?*
The shell tilted its head exactly as she had tilted hers when considering a difficult melody.
Then it plucked a single wrong note.
*Elric had wept when he first found this account,* I felt. *He had wept because he recognized the moment — not Sunjee's moment, his own. The moment every scholar reaches when the subject of their study stops being history and becomes a person. When the person stops being a cautionary tale and becomes a human being who wanted what every human being wants: to not lose what they love.*
*I did this for love,* Sunjee's spirit said through the quill and through Elric's forty years of holding it. *I did all of this for love.*
The quill released me.
I was on my knees. I hadn't felt myself go down. Kai was beside me, one hand at my shoulder, and I could hear Adelheid somewhere nearby, moving, and I could hear my own breathing which was faster than it should have been.
"Petras." Kai's voice. Level, close.
"I'm here," I said.
"What did you see?"
The scriptorium came back into focus around me — the stripped shelves, the absent lens, the faint sick-green pulse of the ley lines through the floor. Adelheid was crouched in front of me, her hand on the back of my neck — exactly as she'd described. Warm. Present. An anchor.
I hadn't needed the loud voice. But I was glad she was there.
"Sunjee," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "From the beginning. The prosthetics. Liriya's illness. The first experiments." I paused. "He didn't want to conquer anything. He just couldn't—"
I stopped.
Because Kai had gone very still beside me.
Not the tactical stillness of a fighter reading a room. Something else. The stillness of a man who has just heard something he recognizes.
"—let go," I finished quietly.
The word sat between us.
Kai didn't move. His hand was still on my shoulder. I felt his fingers tighten once — not painfully, just: *I hear you* — and then release.
"I know," he said. Very quietly. "I know how that feels."
He hadn't meant to say it. I could tell by the quality of the silence that followed — the particular silence of something said before it could be stopped. He was looking at the far wall, not at me, not at anyone.
Jin was looking at him.
She looked away before he turned back.
Recuperating from her thoughts, she checked her maps and assessed their next route.
"We should move," She said. Not urgently. Gently. The voice of one who understands that certain moments need to be stepped away from rather than pressed into. "We haven't found Elric yet. And the nexus is still active."
Kai stood. Pulled me up with him. Dusted his hands against his trousers with the efficiency of a man redirecting his energy somewhere physical.
"Right," he said. "We move."
*
We found Elric in a side chamber off the main passage.
I knew it was him before Kai's torch swept the room fully — something in my gift recognized the quill's owner the way you recognize a voice before you see the face. The same spirit that had saturated the field writer's quill, patient and precise and quietly desperate, was present here in the hunched figure against the far wall.
He was alive. That was the first thing. The second was that he looked very old in a way he hadn't looked in the portraits my mother kept — the chronicler who had crossed continents, who had carried her family's death to her across the Strait, rendered small by two days on a stone floor with his hands bound behind him.
The rope was Andorium-threaded. I could see it from the doorway — the faint wrongness of it, the way it pressed against his wrists with the specific intention of something designed to silence rather than simply restrain.
Jin made a sound I had never heard from her. Not a word. Just a sound.
She crossed the chamber in four steps and was on her knees beside him before anyone else had moved, her hands going to his face — both palms, cupping his jaw, tilting his head toward the torchlight. Checking his eyes. The geomancer's staff clattered against the stone floor where she dropped it without noticing.
"Elric." Her voice was stripped of everything she usually kept in it. "Elric, look at me."
His eyes found her. Slow, effortful, but present.
"Jin." His voice came out as a dry scrape — two days without water doing its work. "You're late."
Jin exhaled something that was almost a laugh and almost not. Her hands were shaking. She didn't seem to know they were shaking.
Adelheid was beside her a moment later, gently moving Jin's hands aside with the quiet authority of someone whose job this specifically was. Her assessment was swift and practiced — pulse at the throat, temperature of the skin, the condition of his lips, his eyes, the way he held his weight against the wall. She cut the Andorium rope with a blade from her satchel and the moment it fell away I felt the chamber change — a slight easing, like a held breath released, as Elric's spirit stopped being pressed flat.
He closed his eyes briefly. Opened them.
"My hands," he said.
"I know." Adelheid was already working on the circulation, careful pressure at his wrists, watching the color return. "Give them a moment. The rope was designed to suppress. It will pass."
"How long?" Kai asked from the doorway, where he stood with the shield angled toward the corridor. He hadn't come fully into the chamber. He was watching the passage behind them. Still working. Still keeping the rest of them safe while they tended to Elric, because that was what he did, because the ruins had already shown him what it did with people it had finished with and he was not going to let that happen again.
"Two days," Adelheid said. "Maybe slightly more." She didn't look up. "He's dehydrated. Cold. The fear has been considerable and sustained." A pause. "But his mind is present. Whatever they kept him for, it wasn't to break him."
"No," Elric agreed. His voice was already steadying — the body remembering itself now that the rope was gone. "They kept me for my knowledge of the Celestian glyph system. They needed someone who could read the nexus architecture. Interpret the binding sequences." He paused. "I was not cooperative."
"Elric—" Jin started.
"I was not cooperative," he repeated, with a precision that said: this is important, let me finish. "But I was here long enough to understand what they're building. And it is considerably worse than what I came to prevent."
Jin sat back on her heels. She had recovered her composure — I could see her recovering it, the familiar architecture reassembling itself piece by piece — but underneath it something was still shaking. She had dropped her staff. Jin did not drop her staff.
I stayed in the doorway and watched and filed everything.
Elric's eyes found me over Adelheid's shoulder.
They were sharper than I expected. Whatever two days on a stone floor had done to his body, his eyes were the eyes of a man who had been thinking continuously and productively the entire time.
"You," he said. "You touched the quill."
Not a question.
"Yes," I said.
Something crossed his face — not quite guilt, not quite relief. The expression of a man who had planned for a contingency he'd hoped wouldn't be necessary. "Then you know about Sunjee."
"I know about Sunjee."
He held my gaze for a moment. Then nodded once, slowly, with the weight of someone transferring a burden they've carried alone for a long time. "Good," he said quietly. "That saves us time we don't have."
He looked at Kai. At the blade in Kai's hand. At Kai's face.
"How is the sword behaving?"
Kai went still. "Fine."
Elric said nothing more about it. But the look said everything that nothing said: I know what that sword is made of. I know what this place is doing to it. We will discuss this when we survive long enough to discuss things.
Kai held his gaze for a moment. Then looked away first.
Adelheid helped Elric drink — slow, careful sips from her canteen, not rushing it — and the color continued returning to his face with the deliberate patience of a tide coming in.
"Can you walk?" she asked.
"I have been walking for sixty-one years," Elric said. "Two days on a floor has not materially changed this."
"That's not what I asked."
A pause. The ghost of something that might have been a smile. "Yes. I can walk."
Elric steadied himself against the wall. Looked around the chamber with the brisk assessment of a man taking inventory. Then looked at each of us in turn — Kai at the door, Jin retrieving her staff, Adelheid repacking her satchel, me in the threshold.
"The quill," he said to me. "You read all three inks."
"Yes."
"Then you felt him understand it was love." He said it carefully, watching my face. "Not evil. Not madness. Love."
"Yes."
He nodded. "And the boy beside you—" his eyes moved to Kai, briefly — "heard you say it."
"Yes."
Elric was quiet for a moment. Something settled in his expression — not satisfaction exactly. The look of a man who came to stop something and arrived too late and is now recalculating what can still be done with what remains.
"Good," he said again. Softer this time. "That matters more than the quill."
Jin had picked up her staff. Her voice was level again. "We need to move."
Elric looked toward the corridor. Toward the light at the bottom of it. Toward the sound.
"Yes," he said. "We do."
The passage beyond the side chamber opened into a vast descending corridor, and at its far end — still distant, but visible — the light was wrong. Not grey-daylight-through-collapsed-ceiling wrong. Not torch-wrong. Something colder and more continuous, the specific quality of Andorium-light in a large enclosed space.
The nexus chamber.
And from it, rising through the stone like a subsonic vibration, like the building's heartbeat: a sound. Rhythmic. Almost musical. The kind of sound that might be mistaken for wind if you hadn't been told otherwise.
Strings. Being plucked.
Very far below. Very patient.
I felt my gift respond to it before my mind did — a pulling sensation, strong and wrong, like the feeling of standing at the edge of something high and feeling the drop reach up toward you. The forced binding below us was not subtle at this range. It pressed upward through the ley lines like pressure through water, and my gift was open and it felt it and it wanted, urgently, to pull away.
*He's been there the whole time,* I understood. *He let us come. He's known since the threshold.*
Kai's hand went to his sword.
And stopped.
He had drawn it halfway before something made him pause — not hesitation in the fighter's sense, nothing that had to do with threat assessment or battle mathematics. His hand had simply stopped, the blade half-clear of the shield-scabbard, and he was looking at it with an expression I didn't have a word for then. I have one now. *Recognition.* The specific look of a man encountering something familiar in an unexpected place.
The rune on the blade caught the nexus-light from below.
Dark strokes. Fluid. Waiting.
He pushed the blade back in.
"Pete," he said, very quietly. Not looking at me. "After this. I need you to read the rune."
I looked at his face. At the way he was not looking at the blade.
"After," I agreed.
He pulled the blade again — fully this time, a clean draw — and turned toward the descending corridor.
"Stay together," he said. "Stay behind the shield. And—" A pause. The smallest pause. "—stay close to me."
He walked forward.
We followed him into the light.