They moved like shadows that had learned to breathe in the dark.
Aria kept her boots silent on the slate tiles, feeling the city's heartbeat through the soles of her feet. Saltport at night was a different animal: the market's daytime clamor folded into a low, wet whisper, lanterns guttering like tired moons. Above them, the Moonforge's silhouette cut the sky—an iron tooth against the stars—its outer wards pulsing faintly in a rhythm that felt almost like a warning. Rell and Halv had marked the patrol routes; the Loom's map lay folded in Aria's mind the way a prayer might be folded into a palm. They had one window, and it was closing.
"Two sentinels on the north arc," Halv murmured, voice a thread in Aria's ear. He crouched beside her on a narrow ledge, breath fogging in the cold. "One glass, one clockwork. They loop every seven minutes. We slip on the third."
Luna's hand brushed Aria's shoulder—brief, grounding. The teacher's fingers were steady, the scent of jasmine faint and familiar. "Echo Shield ready," Luna said. Her voice was small, but the cadence under it thrummed like a held note. "If we need to pull witnesses, I can hold them for a minute. But—" she hesitated, and Aria heard the unspoken cost in the pause. "It will take from me."
Aria nodded. She had watched Luna give pieces of herself before; she had seen the teacher's eyes go soft and distant afterward, like someone who had read a page of their own life and found a blank. Tonight, they could not afford blanks. Not with the Pale Codex shard tucked somewhere inside the Moonforge's vault, not with the ledger's thread pulling at the city's seams.
They dropped from the ledge in a practiced fall, landing in the shadow of a service arch. The alley smelled of salt and hot metal; a stray dog lifted its head and then went back to dreaming. Halv moved ahead, a ghost with a rope and a crowbar. Rell kept watch, a silhouette against the faint glow of the harbor.
The outer wards were the first obstacle—sigils etched into the forge's outer ring, runes that hummed with a cold, glassy light. They were not the crude wards of a backwater shrine; these were sigil-forged, layered with metal and old magic, designed to detect empathic pulses and to snap shut like a jaw. Aria had seen them before in diagrams and in nightmares: a lattice that could turn a living thing into a map of its own memories.
Halv worked the crowbar with a surgeon's patience. "We need to dampen the hum," he said. "A simple cut will trip the alarm. We need a soft hand."
Aria stepped forward. She had a soft hand and a hard jaw. She set her palm against the nearest rune and felt the cold bite into her skin, a frost that wanted to crawl under her ribs. She breathed in, let the cadence she had practiced with Luna settle into her chest. It was not a teacher's song—she could not hold a shield or a mass cadence—but she could move the edges of a sigil, nudge it like a sleeping thing.
The rune shivered. For a breath, the lattice's light dimmed, like a tide pulling back. Halv's crowbar slipped in, and the metal gave with a sound like a sigh. They were through.
They should have been grateful for the small victory. Instead, the air tasted of metal and something else—anticipation, or the memory of it. Aria's fingers tingled. She felt a faint ringing at the edges of her hearing, a high, thin note that made the world feel slightly out of tune. She blinked and the sound receded, but the aftertaste remained: a small, dulling pressure behind her ears. Mirror Sigil Rip, she thought, and the name felt like a stone in her mouth.
They moved inside the forge's outer ring, slipping between stacks of cooling ingots and the skeletons of half-formed constructs. The Moonforge smelled of oil and old fire. Glass Sentinels—tall, faceted constructs with limbs like cut crystal—stood in niches, their eyes dark as unlit lanterns. They were the Moonforge's guardians: beautiful, dangerous, and designed to refract empathic pulses into shards that could cut a teacher's song into useless pieces.
Rell signaled, and they split. Aria and Luna took the lower corridor toward the service lifts; Halv and Rell took the maintenance shafts. The plan was simple: reach the inner ring, disable the warding lattice, and then the vault. Simple plans had a way of folding themselves into knives.
A sentinel's footfall sounded like a bell. The construct moved with a grace that made Aria's skin crawl—no human gait, no hesitation. It turned its head, and the facets along its face caught the forge's dim light and threw it back in a scatter of tiny stars. Aria felt the world tilt.
Luna stepped forward, voice low. She began a cadence—not the full Echo Shield, not yet, but a teacher's whisper that braided with the air. The sentinel's head cocked, as if listening. For a moment, Aria thought they might pass unnoticed. Then the sentinel's chest panel opened, and a thin lattice of sigils unfurled like a fan.
The construct's first move was not to strike. It sang.
Glass Sentinels did not speak in words. They refracted sound into patterns—notes that slid along the skin and left impressions like fingerprints. The sentinel's song was a test: a probing mirror that sought to map the intruders' empathic signatures and report them to the forge's core.
Aria felt the song like a pressure against her teeth. It was precise, clinical, and it wanted to know what she had touched, what she had seen. She felt the cadence in her chest answer with a reflexive note, a small, human sound that the sentinel could read. Panic flared—brief, hot—and she tamped it down with a practiced hand.
Luna's whisper rose into a shield. The Echo Shield wrapped around them like a net, a shimmering field that blurred the edges of memory for anyone who might be watching. For a single minute, the shield would hold up to five witnesses—enough to protect the team and any collateral. Aria felt the teacher's cost like a stone in her throat: Luna's eyes went distant, the jasmine scent around her thinning as if someone had plucked a thread.
The sentinel's song hit the shield and fractured. Light scattered across the corridor in a dozen tiny rainbows. For a breath, Aria thought they had won.
Then the sentinel shifted. It refracted the shield's echo back at them, a mirror of their own protection. The Mirror Sigil Rip—Aria recognized the pattern too late. The sentinel's facets bent the shield's protection into a blade aimed at its source. The corridor filled with a sound like breaking glass, and Aria's world narrowed to a single, bright point.
She moved because she had to. Reflex took her—an old, trained motion: step, lunge, redirect. Her hand found the sentinel's wrist, and she pushed. The construct's balance faltered. For a moment, she had the impression of a human face behind the facets, a flicker of something like surprise.
Then the sentinel's arm came down, and Aria felt the rip.
It was not a wound in the body. It was a wound in the senses. A hot, white pain lanced through her mouth and nose, and for a second the world lost color. The taste of iron flooded her tongue; the sound of the sentinel's gears became a distant, underwater roar. She staggered, fingers clamping on the sentinel's cooling metal as if to anchor herself.
"Aria!" Halv's voice was a rope. Rell's hand closed on her shoulder, steadying. Luna's cadence faltered, a thin thread that threatened to snap. The Echo Shield shivered, and Aria felt the teacher's cost deepen—Luna's eyes clouded, and for a heartbeat Aria saw a memory slip like a moth from a jar.
She tasted the cost in her own mouth: a dulling, a small, precise loss at the edge of perception. The Mirror Sigil Rip had not taken a limb or a life; it had taken a sense. For a moment, Aria's hearing thinned, as if someone had turned down the world's volume. The sentinel's song became muffled, like a bell heard through wool.
Adrenaline sharpened her. She could not afford to be dulled. Not now. She forced her jaw to work, to breathe, to think.
"Now," she said, and the word was a blade. Halv moved, a shadow with a crowbar, and struck the sentinel's knee joint. The construct buckled, facets cracking like ice. Rell drove a sigil spike into its chest, and the sentinel's song died with a sound like a broken mirror.
They did not linger. The inner ring waited, and the vault beyond it waited like a mouth. Halv worked the lattice with a practiced hand, and the warding hum dimmed. Aria felt the aftereffects of the Mirror Sigil Rip like a bruise behind her ears—her hearing would be off for hours, perhaps days. It was a small price, she told herself. A small price for a shard of the Pale Codex.
They moved deeper, through corridors that smelled of oil and old prayers. The Moonforge's inner sanctum was a cathedral of metal: sigils burned into the floor like constellations, and the vault's door was a wheel of glass and iron. Aria's pulse matched the slow turning of that wheel.
At the threshold, Luna paused. Her hand hovered over the teacher's satchel, where small anchors and offerings were kept. "If we need to call a Moonborn Echo," she said, voice thin, "it will cost me something I cannot give lightly."
Aria looked at her. The teacher's face was pale under the forge's light, and the jasmine scent was almost gone. "We will not ask more than we must," Aria said. The words were both promise and command.
They breached the vault with the quiet of thieves and the fury of people who had been wronged. Inside, the air was cool and dry, and the Pale Codex shard lay on a pedestal like a heart. It was smaller than Aria had imagined—no more than a palm—but it hummed with a presence that made the hairs on her arms stand up. The shard's surface was etched with marginalia: tiny sigils and notes in a hand that felt older than the city.
Aria reached for it and felt the world tilt again. The shard did not bite; it asked. It asked for witness, for recognition. She thought of the ledger, of the child with grafted grief, of the markets and the ferry seam. She thought of Luna's cost and Halv's steady hands.
Her fingers closed around the shard. It was cool, and it fit into her palm like a promise. For a moment, she let herself imagine the ledger's thread pulling taut, the Pale Codex's marginalia unraveling the Origin Engine's lies.
Then the vault's alarm sang—a thin, keening note that cut through the forge like a blade. Someone had tripped a distant lattice. The Moonforge's outer wards flared to life, and the city's night answered with a thousand small lights.
They had the shard. They had the cost. Outside, the world was waking. Inside, Aria felt the dulling at the edge of her hearing like a reminder: every victory took something. Every protection had a price. She slid the shard into her satchel and met Luna's eyes.
Luna's smile was small and tired. "We go," she said.
They moved like shadows that had learned to breathe in the dark, and the Moonforge's bells began to toll.