The third day after the scream began with rain.
Not the wild, tearing storms of the frontier, or the dry lightning that skated over distant ridges. This was city rain: steady, fine,
pattering against stone and ward-glass in a rhythm like fingers drumming on a table.
From the narrow window slit, John watched drops bead and slide down the invisible barrier that kept the wet out. The wards diverted the water just enough that it flowed in strange paths—arcs and veering lines that
ignored gravity in favour of some deeper geometry.
It should've been soothing.
It wasn't.
There was too much pattern in it. Too much reminder that he was living inside a building where even rainfall didn't behave itself without
magical negotiation.
Behind him, Brian fussed.
Not the panicked, full-body wail from the night the wards screamed. Just a restless, irritated sound—the baby equivalent of complaining
about the weather.
Doris paced slowly from one end of the suite to the other, bare feet silent on the rug, Brian cradled against her shoulder. She'd tucked a
cloth between his cheek and her robe to catch dribbles, but he kept rooting and mumbling, not quite hungry, not quite content.
"He doesn't like the pressure," Dorothy said quietly from the table, where she sat with a slate and stylus. "Rain makes the wards thrum. They're diverting water away from old fractures. He feels it."
Flint lounged on the other chair, feet up, flipping a knife between his fingers with deceptive laziness. "So rain is now a magical threat. Excellent. I miss when it was just 'wet.'"
"It isn't a threat," Dorothy said. "It's just noise. And he's still learning which noises mean danger."
John turned from the window. "How exactly does anyone learn that here?" he asked. "Everything hums. Everything glows. Even the water's got runes in it."
"The same way you learned not to panic at every twig snap on the road," Dorothy said. "Repetition. Experience. Someone beside you not panicking first."
"Terrible system," Flint muttered. "Highly inefficient."
"Effective, though," Dorothy said.
Doris kissed Brian's damp hair. "He slept better last night," she murmured. "Fewer jolts. Fewer clenching episodes."
"That'll help," Dorothy said. "The longer he goes without another big surge, the more his body will treat that scream as a fluke instead
of a pattern."
John's jaw tightened. "What happens if it does become a pattern?"
Dorothy met his eyes. "Then," she said, "we're not in Arc—" She stopped, corrected herself. "Then we're not in the same story anymore. And we'll deal with that when we must."
He didn't understand what she'd almost said, but the look in her eyes was enough.
He changed the subject.
"Any visitors scheduled for today?" he asked.
"Halvar said he'd come after first council bell," Dorothy replied. "Serais asked to stop by sometime before dusk. Ren sent a message that he won't darken our doorway unless something explodes, 'which he strongly
prefers to avoid.' His words."
"So the Rector, the priest, and the sharp stick again," Flint said. "Nice to know our social calendar is consistent."
A soft knock came at the door.
Three light taps.
Not Halvar's rhythm, not Ren's sharp double.
John moved quickly, hand brushing the hilt at his belt more out of habit than need. The wards on the suite door tickled his skin as he
opened it.
It was the warden from the hall—the one with the bruise fading along his jaw.
He held a sealed tube of thick paper in one hand.
"Message," he said. "From the outer caravan quarter. Routed through city post, then Academy review, then Halvar's clearance."
John's stomach tightened. "Caravan quarter?"
The warden nodded. "It's addressed to John and Doris. Marked from 'Gerran, who dislikes all towers.'"
Flint snorted. "Sounds like him."
Doris stopped pacing.
Her arms tightened around Brian.
"Give it," she said.
The warden passed the tube to John and stepped back, clearly expecting to be dismissed.
"Thank you," John said.
The warden shrugged. "Better than most assignments," he said. "I get to stand still and not dodge self-inflicted fireballs."
He returned to his post.
John shut the door.
Doris watched the tube like it was a snake coiled to strike.
"Open it," she whispered.
He popped the wax seal and slid out the rolled parchment.
The familiar, rough-edged handwriting hit him like a physical thing even before he fully unrolled it.
Gerran's hand.
His throat tightened.
He read aloud.
John. Doriane.
I am told by people in fancy coats that you are safe inside their walls. They say this like it is good news. I do not trust people in fancy coats, but I trust that you are stubborn and Dorothy is sneakier than she looks. So I choose to believe you are alive.
The caravan survived. Mostly.
We lost Tomer. We lost Nal. We lost the second grain wagon. You already knew that. We burned the ridgeclaws' bodies and what was left of the Paragon. The soil remembers, but I didn't want the cultists leaving any pretty little blood marks behind for their rituals.
After you left, we moved twice. The first night was quiet. The second wasn't.
Doris sank into the nearest chair, Brian clutched tight.
John continued.
Three cloaks tried to intercept us near the broken mile-marker. They came not for the caravan, but for you. They shouted at the
night like you were still there. One kept saying "the breach-born cannot hide in stone."
I took offense.
We drove them off. Killed two. The third fled. I put an arrow in his thigh before he vanished into the rocks. I hope it hurts him every time the weather changes.
We limped into the city a day later than planned. The gates were jumpier than usual. Something about strange readings from the Academy. I pretended not to care. The guards pretended not to notice I was lying.
Your friend Halvar met us long enough to confirm you made it inside. He looked like he hadn't slept for a week. I told him if anything
happens to the boy, I will teach his tower new words for "regret." He did not seem offended.
Flint barked a short, humorless laugh.
"That sounds like Gerran," he said. "Threatening a man who runs a magical fortress."
John kept reading.
We're heading south for now. Too much attention on the capital roads. Too many cloaks sniffing around. The Paragons are restless. They smell change. They also smell their own fear, though they would never say it.
People in roadside inns are already telling stories about a child in the Academy who made the wards sing. Some say it's a warning. Some say it's a blessing. Some say it's a lie. I do not correct them.
You were always going to walk into big stories, John. Doriane, you were always going to trip over your past. I did not think it would
happen this fast.
The road misses you. The fire misses you. I miss you.
When the boy is old enough to drink, bring him to me. I'll tell him what his father was like before he grew a sense of responsibility.
Don't die.
— Gerran
The parchment ended with a crude drawing of a wagon and a stick figure shaking a fist at an enormous, badly sketched tower.
Doris laughed once, a short, broken sound.
Then she started to cry.
Not the wild, panicked sobbing from the night of the scream.
Quieter.
Deeper.
John set the letter down carefully, out of Brian's range, and crouched beside her, one hand on her knee.
"He's alive," he said. "They made it."
"I know," she whispered. "I know, I just—" She bit her lip. "They're still out there. On the roads. Where the cult wants them. Where there are cracks and wardstations and no towers between them and whatever this is.
We… left them."
"We had to," John said gently. "We'd have drawn worse to them if we stayed."
"I know," she said again. "Knowing doesn't make the guilt smaller."
Brian wriggled, bothered by her shaking.
She tried to steady herself, breathing slow.
Dorothy reached for the letter with careful fingers, studying the lines.
"Cloaks shouting at empty roads," she murmured. "They're desperate."
Flint's eyes narrowed. "Cloaks shouting about the 'breach-born' right near where we passed that old wardstation? That's not just
desperation. They were following the echoes."
"Not well," Dorothy said. "Ridgeclaws did more damage than they did. But yes. They're sniffing. The more he resonates, the more it will draw them, even when he's nowhere near."
John's jaw clenched. "You think they can track him through… whatever he did to the wards?"
"Not precisely," Dorothy said. "But they can feel when something big moves in the Aether. Like animals feeling a storm through their
paws. They'll thrash about more."
"Thrashing cultists are still cultists," Flint said. "People die either way."
Doris pressed her forehead to Brian's hair.
"We should be with them," she whispered. "Helping. Fighting. Not locked in a room while everyone else pays for our son's existence."
John gently lifted her chin.
"Look at me," he said.
Her eyes were wet, angry, hollow.
"We are fighting," he said quietly. "Just not with steel right now. We're holding a line no one else can hold: keeping him alive.
Teaching him who he is before anyone else decides it for him. If we were back on the road swinging blades, we'd feel better… and he'd be worse off."
A muscle jumped in her jaw.
"I hate that you're right," she said.
"I often do," Flint said cheerfully. "You get used to it."
Doris huffed wetly, half a sob, half a laugh.
Brian made a small, complaining sound, sensing the tension but not understanding it.
She rocked him gently. "Shh. I'm here. We're here. Gerran's alive. The caravan's moving. The world hasn't ended. Yet."
Dorothy rolled the letter and slid it back into its tube. "Keep that," she said. "You'll want to show it to him one day."
Doris looked down at Brian. "Will we?" she whispered. "Will any of this make sense to him?"
"One day," Dorothy said. "When he asks why we're all so tired."
Halvar arrived just after the second morning bell.
He didn't knock so much as announce himself with two sharp raps and an irritated, "If you've barricaded the door, I'm going through the
ceiling."
Flint opened it before he could test that threat.
Halvar stepped in, shook rain from his sleeves, and glanced around the room as if checking for new holes.
"Good," he said. "Nothing's on fire, no one's glowing, and the wards aren't humming in panic. I needed one room in this tower that isn't an ongoing disaster."
"That's as close to a compliment as we're going to get," Flint said.
Halvar sniffed. "Correct."
His gaze landed on the parchment tube on the table. "Gerran's letter?"
"Yes," John said. "He made it. So did most of the caravan."
A brief flicker of relief passed through Halvar's features. "Good," he said. "It's easier to calm nobles when I can tell them the trade routes still function."
Doris bristled. "Is that all they care about? Trade?"
"It's the part they say out loud," Halvar said. "Some of them care about people too. They just haven't learned how to shape that into
policy without sounding weak."
"You don't sound weak," Flint said.
"I'm not talking to nobles," Halvar said. "I'm talking to you. Different mask."
John crossed his arms. "You came for more than a status check."
"Always," Halvar said. "Two things." He held up two fingers. "First: news from outside. Second: lines."
"Lines?" Doris asked, suspicious.
"Maps," Dorothy guessed.
"Exactly," Halvar said. "Sit."
They gathered around the table—Doris shifting so she could keep Brian against her chest while still leaning in.
Halvar rolled out a large, oil-treated parchment from his satchel.
It wasn't the Empire map John had seen in Ren's office.
This was older.
The ink had faded to brown in places, and the edges had been reinforced with fresh leather.
The drawing showed the capital and its surrounding lands, but not in political lines.
In threads.
Thin, curving lines radiated from the Academy's central mark and wove out in complex arcs across the terrain—some solid, some dashed, some so faint they were almost invisible.
"What am I looking at?" Flint asked. "Spaghetti?"
"Aether flows," Dorothy said quietly. "Old-world mapping."
Halvar nodded. "Voidborn design, in fact," he said. "Or at least heavily inspired by it. This is how your ancestors saw the land, Doriane."
Doris's fingers tightened on Brian's swaddling.
"I thought those charts were destroyed," she said.
"Most were," Halvar said. "Some survived. Hidden, forgotten, or misfiled. The Academy has been… reconstructing. Carefully."
John frowned. "You told us you didn't understand Voidborn work."
"We don't," Halvar said. "Not fully. Not safely. That's why the Deep Weave wing is full of sealed mistakes. But we do understand patterns somewhat better now than when those mistakes were made."
He tapped the map.
"Two days ago, when the wards screamed, our instruments recorded spikes along several of these lines," he said. "Channels that connect the Academy to the surrounding region. Not just physical roads. Resonant ones."
"Leylines," Dorothy murmured.
"Whatever name you prefer," Halvar said. "The important point is: when he screamed—" he flicked his fingers toward Brian "—he didn't
just rattle these walls. He tugged a web."
John's stomach dropped. "The cult felt it."
"Yes," Halvar said. "Ritual sites along these lines flared. Ren's people intercepted reports from several provinces. Tiny cult circles
tried to capitalize on the surge. They failed, but it tells us something."
"That they're idiots?" Flint suggested.
"That they're organised idiots," Halvar said. "They recognised the signature enough to try to use it. That means they've seen something like it before."
Dorothy's eyes darkened. "Voidborn seals failing," she said. "Old breaches. Echoes from when the First Flame was bound."
Doris flinched at the name.
Halvar didn't soften it.
"Yes," he said. "We know from fragmentary accounts in the restricted stacks that when the old seals were laid down, the world… rang. Like a struck bell. The Paragons worship the idea of that ringing. They believe recreating it will 'purify' everything."
Flint grimaced. "Always about burning everything to fix it. People are unimaginative."
Halvar traced a line that curved from the Academy outward, passing near several marked points.
"These," he said, "are stabilized wardstations. The ones your ancestors built to keep the world from coming apart after they nearly broke it. The structure you walked past on the road was one of them."
"And the basalt field that sang near the ridge?" John asked.
Halvar nodded. "Resonant field around another. The pillars amplified any disturbance. Your son cried. The field heard. The wards on that station hummed for the first time in years."
Doris looked ill. "We did that?"
"No," Halvar said. "You woke up something that was built to be woken when the world shakes. It did its job. It told us the seal network is still responsive. That's… good news. The bad news is that the Paragons also felt those ripples and are trying to read them as encouragement."
Dorothy leaned in, studying the lines. "You've mapped all of these?"
"Not all," Halvar said. "Some are guesswork. Some are missing. That's why I wanted you to see this. You knew the old symbols before you ran. You might see patterns we don't."
Doris went very still.
"Doriane," John said softly. "You don't have to—"
"Yes, she does," Dorothy said, surprising him. "If we want him to live a long life instead of a short, spectacular one, we need every scrap of knowledge we can scrape together."
Doris swallowed hard.
She shifted Brian so that he lay more securely against her, one of his tiny hands flopping onto the table.
Then she leaned in.
Her eyes took on a distant focus, as if the ink lines were pulling at memories she'd buried deep.
"These two," she said finally, pointing to a pair of lines that intersected near the city's southern edge, "aren't separate. You've drawn
them as if they cross, but they fold around each other. Like braided rope."
Halvar scribbled a note in the margin. "Braided," he murmured. "Of course. That would explain the double pulse we saw during the storm event a month ago."
"And here," Doris said, tapping another point, "you're missing a circle. There should be a wardstation. It would have been built on high ground, over a fault line. You've put the line through that valley—no, that's wrong. The valley came after."
Her gaze went vague for a moment.
"The ground sank," she whispered. "After the sealing. I remember the records. They said the land got tired and lay down."
Dorothy's throat worked.
"You remember already," she said softly.
Doris flinched as if struck.
"I… read it," she said quickly. "In the archives. Before. When I was… still theirs. I don't remember remember. I'm not that old."
Halvar watched her carefully. "Old knowledge doesn't care whether it lives in your head or on a page," he said. "The important thing is that we put it somewhere useful now."
Doris shook her head. "I ran from this," she whispered. "From all of this. From being the person they turned to when the lines on their
little maps didn't make sense. I don't want—"
"We're not asking you to be their tool," John said gently. "We're asking you to help keep him from becoming theirs."
She looked at Brian.
His tiny fingers flirted with the edge of the map, patting ink lines he couldn't see.
The choice was written in the tension of her shoulders.
Finally, she exhaled.
"Fine," she said. "But on my terms. I won't sit in their councils. I won't stand beside chalkboards while they argue. I'll map what I
remember here. With you. Not them."
"That suits me perfectly," Halvar said. "They'd only argue with you anyway. I don't have time for more arguments."
Flint mumbled, "You say that like you don't enjoy them."
Halvar ignored him.
He tapped another point on the map—the spot Kael had mentioned in the practice yard.
"Here's the other reason I wanted you to see this," he said. "Three days before the ward scream, some idiot novice scratched part of a Voidborn seal pattern into the practice field ground. It's right on this line."
He drew a small circle.
"When the wards yelled and your son nearly braided himself into the lattice, this point cracked. Just a hairline. Enough for light."
Doris went pale. "That's not coincidence."
"No," Halvar said. "We think the fragment acted like a… tuning fork. It resonated with the larger pattern and amplified the stress."
Dorothy frowned. "Which means any cultist with enough scraps of old seals could build their own forks near existing lines. They don't need to break wards where they stand. They only need to make them ring when the world does."
Flint stared at the parchment. "So they're scattering little echo-stones along the web, hoping something big shakes it."
"Yes," Halvar said. "Which is why we need to find as many of those points as we can. And either reinforce them. Or erase them. Preferably before he"—he nodded at Brian—"grows loud enough to make them all sing at once."
Brian chose that moment to let out a small, sleepy grunt and smack his open palm down on the map.
His tiny hand landed squarely on a point that wasn't marked.
All eyes went to it.
Doris's breath hitched.
"There," she whispered. "There should be something there."
Halvar leaned closer. "We have no record of anything there."
"You wouldn't," she said. "It was one of the emergency stations. Not like the big ones. A… cut-off switch. If a line started to overload, they could shunt excess into a fold and dissipate it."
John frowned. "A… drain?"
"In crude terms," Doris said. "Only used once. It nearly took the heads off the two Voidborn who activated it. They didn't build more."
Halvar's eyes gleamed with unwelcome interest. "And if it still exists—"
"Then it's unstable," Doris cut in sharply. "No one has maintained it. No one has calibrated its bleed capacity. If you poke it with anything, you risk venting power into folds you don't control."
"I wasn't suggesting—" Halvar began.
"You were," Doris said. "I grew up in these stories, Rector. Don't try to be clever with something my ancestors nearly died to shut down."
Halvar held up his hands. "All right," he said. "We don't touch it. But we note it. Because if the Paragons find it first…"
Doris closed her eyes briefly.
"They won't understand what it is," she said. "They'll think it's a well. They'll draw from it. And if they do it wrong, they'll crack more
than this city."
Flint pressed his palm flat on the table, as if to steady it. "So add it to the list of 'terrible things we have to keep idiots away
from.'"
"The list gets longer every year," Halvar said.
Brian's hand slid off the map.
He yawned.
Whatever instinct had guided that small slap had already faded.
Dorothy watched him thoughtfully. "He shouldn't know where that is," she said. "Not even in the loose, unconscious way newborns know things. This is not how knowledge should arrive."
"It didn't arrive," Doris said tightly. "It echoed. Through me. Through the map. Through the tower. Don't start acting like he's some…
reincarnated archive."
Dorothy lifted a placating hand. "I wasn't. I'm just… taking note of how easily lines connect around him."
Halvar began rolling the map again. "I'll bring more charts," he said. "In manageable doses. I don't intend to drown you in other people's mistakes."
"See that you don't," Doris said.
He tucked the parchment away.
"One more piece of news before I go set fire to someone's thesis," he said. "Ren passed along a intercepted message. The Paragons have changed their wording."
John tensed. "How?"
"They're still obsessed with that forbidden word," Halvar said. "But they've added another. They call him 'the child who made the tower listen.'"
Flint grimaced. "That's clunky."
"It's also true," Dorothy said quietly.
Doris's jaw tightened. "Let them talk," she said. "We won't let them close enough to do more than that."
Halvar inclined his head. "That is the plan," he said. "And unlike most plans I hear in this building, I intend to keep it."
He left with less ceremony than he'd arrived, cloak swirling as he stepped into the rain-muted corridor.
The door closed.
The room felt smaller with the map gone, but also… lighter.
Doris stared at Brian's tiny hand.
"He put it right on the point," Flint said. "That's not… normal, right?"
"None of this is normal," Dorothy said. "That doesn't mean it's prophecy. It means he's swimming in currents we barely understand, and sometimes the water moves his hand."
Doris didn't look reassured.
She rose, moving to the small cradle the wardens had brought the second day—a simple wooden thing, softened with cloth and a faint ward to keep the mattress dry and free of vermin.
She laid Brian down gently.
For a moment, he flailed, objecting to the loss of constant warmth.
She rested her palm on his chest.
He settled.
John came to stand beside her.
Above the cradle, the ceiling was just plain stone—no painted stars, no diagrams.
"Feels wrong," Doris murmured.
"What does?" he asked.
"He deserves a sky," she said. "Not bare rock."
John glanced at the narrow window.
Rain streaked the invisible barrier.
"Then give him one," Dorothy said from behind them.
Doris looked back. "How?"
Dorothy tossed her a stick of pale chalk. "Start small," she said. "Draw shapes. Points. The constellations you remember from the road. Let him grow up with them. He doesn't need the tower's maps yet. He needs yours."
Doris turned the chalk between her fingers.
Then she smiled—wobbly, but real.
"That," she said, "I can do."
She climbed onto the bed, careful not to jostle Brian, and reached up to the low stretch of ceiling above the cradle.
With slow, deliberate strokes, she began to draw.
Not Voidborn seals. Not Aether flows.
Stars.
Rough circles.
Lines connecting some, leaving others alone.
"The Hunter," she murmured, sketching three small dots in a crooked row. "The Ridge. The Broken Wheel. The South Lantern…"
John watched the shapes appear.
They were the same constellations he'd grown up watching from bedrolls under open sky. Seeing them here, in chalk on stone above their son's sleeping place, made something in his chest ache and ease at the same time.
Brian stared up, eyes unfocused but drawn to the movement.
Doris finished the last line and hopped down lightly.
"There," she said. "It's not much. But it's ours."
Brian blinked.
His tiny mouth curved—not quite a smile, but not a grimace.
His fingers wiggled.
For a heartbeat, the air above the crib shimmered.
The chalk stars glowed faintly.
Not bright. Not dangerous.
Just a soft, warm light, like reflection off still water.
They pulsed once.
Twice.
Then dimmed, leaving only chalk.
John exhaled slowly. "Did he—"
"Yes," Dorothy said softly. "He reached. Gently. No screaming. No cracking. Just… answering your map with his own."
Doris pressed a hand to her mouth.
"He made them shine," she whispered.
"Only a little," Dorothy said. "Only enough to say: I hear you."
Flint leaned against the wall, arms folded.
"So he likes your sky better than theirs," he said. "Good taste."
John slipped his arm around Doris's shoulders.
She leaned into him, eyes still on the chalk stars.
"I'll redraw them when they fade," she said. "Every time. As long as I have hands."
"We'll teach him the names," John said. "Our names. Not the cult's. Not the Academy's. Ours."
Beneath the chalk constellations, Brian's eyes slowly drooped.
His breathing deepened.
For the first time since the scream, he fell asleep without clinging to anyone.
The wards hummed in the background, their own old patterns still shifting.
Far away, in temples and hidden chambers and watchful offices, people marked new lines on their own maps—plans, fears, ambitions
bending toward the child in the tower.
In this small room, Doris and John marked theirs in chalk and quiet vows.
Lines between stars.
Lines between hearts.
Lines that, if they held, might one day keep a much larger map from breaking.