The tower's mood did not reset overnight.
It rarely did.
But in the days after the bracelet snapped and the council drew its lines, the hum shifted from taut to… watchful.
Less like a pulled bowstring, more like eyes at arrow slits.
John noticed first in the stairwells.
The same stones, the same lanterns, the same scuffed steps trodden by too many boots—but the lattice beneath had changed. Not in strength; in attention. It felt, as he moved, like the wards were cataloguing more, filing away where everyone walked, who paused, who lingered near which door.
"Feels nosier," Flint muttered on the third morning.
"That's because we taught it to be," Dorothy said. "You pull a line tight enough and it remembers how."
Doris hadn't left the suite much.
When she did, it was on purpose, not because someone had summoned her.
Today, she was going to the Stacks.
Not as a fugitive dragged by Fate, not as a trembling ex-voidborn playing hide-and-seek with her past.
As a scribe.
As someone with ink of her own.
Brian was staying.
The thought made her palms sweat.
But the ledger said they had to start testing small separations, or they'd never trust any larger ones.
And Dorothy had put it plainly:
"If we're going to fight the people using your diagrams, we need you in the room where they live. And we need him somewhere that doesn't echo every bad idea louder."
So Brian would remain in the suite with John, Flint, and enough wards to make a god trip.
Doris would go down into the book-belly of Aetherion with Dorothy and Lyr and look her past in the ink-stained face.
Simple.
Terrifying.
She almost turned back twice between their door and the stair.
Brian had been half-asleep when she kissed his forehead, his fist curled around John's calloused finger. His nose wrinkled at the separation, but he hadn't screamed. The crooked chalk star had glowed faintly as she stepped away, like a tiny, silent blessing.
"You're sure—" she'd begun.
John had cut her off gently. "We're fine," he'd said. "Ledger's here. Walls are listening. If the hum twitches, we shout."
Flint had added, "And if anyone comes in wearing twine, I'll cut their bracelet off with the hand."
So she'd gone.
Now, as she followed Dorothy down a narrow service stair, palm brushing rough stone, she listened harder than she ever had.
No hooks.
No sharp jitters.
The hum was thick and even, like a blanket pulled snug.
"They'll be fine," Dorothy said without turning. "You'd know already if they weren't."
"How?" Doris asked.
Dorothy tapped her staff lightly against the wall. The ripple ran past Doris's hand, down, up, around.
"You're woven in, remember?" Dorothy said. "You're part of this room's pattern now. The lattice would twitch if someone rattled it. You'd
feel it, even here."
"That's not as comforting as you think," Doris muttered.
"I didn't say it was comforting," Dorothy said. "I said it was true."
The head-level Stacks greeted them like before—with the smell of paper and ink and faintly metallic wardlight.
Master Lyr waited near the entrance, arms full of scroll tubes, braid coiled like a rope over one shoulder.
"Good," she said, looking Doris up and down. "You came."
"I said I would," Doris replied, more stiffly than she intended.
Lyr's gaze softened—not with pity; Lyr didn't seem to have much patience for that—but with recognition.
"Running and returning are both hard," the archivist said. "Sitting between the two is worse. Come before I think too much and change my mind about letting you near my shelves."
She led them not to the public tables this time, but deeper, past an arch where the hum changed pitch.
The air here was cooler.
Tighter.
Doris felt the shift like a drop in altitude.
"Restricted Voidborn Compendium," Lyr said. "Redacted edition. Don't look at me like that; I already burned the worst of it. What's left is diagrams, notes, and lies we haven't disproven yet."
They reached a long table with three seats.
On it: a stack of thin folios tied with faded ribbon, a heavy ledger with Maevra's seal, and a smaller, leather-bound book Doris
recognised with a jolt she felt in her teeth.
Her own handwriting on the spine.
DV-17 — Peripheral Notes, Field Correlations.
Her breath hitched.
Lyr's eyes tracked the reaction.
"You left that behind when you ran," the archivist said. "You were in such a hurry, you didn't even tear the pages."
"I thought you'd… burn it," Doris said hoarsely.
"I thought about it," Lyr said. "But you made notes on regional micro-fracture patterns no one else had bothered to record. And you had the annoying habit of writing little warnings in the margins in red ink."
Doris remembered.
Never do this again.
We got lucky; this mark lies.
If anyone finds this, skip page 43 entirely.
"I left your warnings," Lyr said. "And covered a few of my own. The Paragons would love all of this. I'd prefer not to make their lives easier."
Dorothy slid into the seat opposite, staff leaning against the table, eyes sharp.
"So," she said. "Show us what they've stolen. Or copied. Or warped."
Lyr untied the stack of folios.
One by one, she laid them out.
Some were older than Doris—yellowed, ink faded, written in the cramped, precise script of Voidborn scholars who'd never expected their
work to survive them.
Some were newer, copies made by Lyr's careful hand.
Some were layered with redacted swirls—black and rust-colored blocks where lines had been scraped, erased, or ward-burned.
"We matched residue from the bracelet and the garden knot against known patterns," Lyr said. "It's close to this." She tapped an older
folio. "The 'Stabilised Cleave' model your ancestors came up with when they thought they could slice misbehaving wardstations clean off the lattice."
Doris swallowed bile. "The town that tore," she whispered.
"Yes," Lyr said. "That one."
She pushed the folio toward Doris.
Doris braced herself and looked.
There it was: the crack symbol with three dots under it, drawn not as a cult mark but as part of a formal array. Lines radiated from it to a stylised mountain icon, arrows indicating intended flow.
In the margin, in slanting, impatient handwriting she remembered from childhood lessons, an older Voidborn had written:
Theoretically sound if executed at scale with perfect alignment. Practically insane. Risk unacceptable. Archive, do not circulate.
Next to it, in red ink, a younger hand—her own, years ago—had added:
We tried a partial version near the Talren ridge. Lost houses, not mountains. Lines snapped instead of sliding. Never again. DON'T let students near this without five warnings.
Her stomach clenched.
"I was twenty when I wrote that," she said.
"And now," Dorothy said, "we have idiots weaponising the thing you explicitly told them not to touch."
Lyr grimaced. "We redacted the central portion," she said. "The original mark had more lines—switchbacks, compensators, a whole mess of counterweights. The Paragon version strips all that out. Just the crack and the dots. No brakes."
"Of course," Dorothy muttered. "They never met a caution they didn't want to sand off."
Doris traced the red ink with a fingertip, not quite touching.
"What about the bracelet?" she asked.
Lyr flipped to another folio.
This one showed a smaller, more contained array—circles within circles, a bracelet-like series of nodes.
"Your work again," Lyr said. "DV-17. Peripheral link experiments. Defensive only. See?" Her finger moved to a note. "'Only moves ward-sense along existing safe lattice. No independent hooks allowed.'"
Doris remembered that experiment, too.
She'd tried to build a way for non-mages to feel ward stress—little focus rings keyed to specific halls, so that if a line vibrated badly, the wearer would get a warning tingle. She'd abandoned it when she realised even a small misalignment could send the wrong signal, make someone door-ward-blind at exactly the wrong moment.
"That never made it out of prototype," she said. "It was too finicky."
"The Paragons combined the two," Lyr said. "The cracked cleave mark with your peripheral focus. Strip out the cautions. Add borrowed
zealotry. Hand it to a boy who wants to be important."
Dorothy's jaw clenched. "So every time we cut one, we're not just breaking a cult toy," she said. "We're snapping bastard cousins of your
work."
Doris's vision blurred.
Guilt rose like bile.
"This is my fault," she whispered.
Lyr's hand slammed flat on the table hard enough to make the folios jump.
"No," the archivist said. "Your ancestors built the knife. You tried to blunt it. They stole your dull blade and sharpened it on stupidity. That's not the same as guilt."
"It's still my ink," Doris said.
"Yes," Lyr said. "Which means you know where the weak points are. That makes you useful, not damned." Her eyes narrowed. "Unless you'd rather sit upstairs waiting for them to misinterpret you again without your
input."
Doris flinched.
She looked at the red warnings, at the blacked-out lines, at her younger hand's desperate attempts to throw sand into the machine.
She thought of Brian stiffening under unseen hooks, eyes wide with things he shouldn't have to see.
She thought of Bridget in the caravan, laughing over bad stew, unaware that a cult and a council and a dead dynasty were arguing over her nephew's future in a tower he hadn't even reached yet.
"I won't watch them twist this from the sidelines," she said.
"Good," Lyr said briskly. "Then help me make this more useless to anyone who doesn't have your brain." She shoved a blank folio toward her. "We're going to build a new layer of red ink. Map every way these marks can be misread and mark the failures."
Doris hesitated. "Won't that… give them ideas?"
"Only if they steal this exact book," Lyr said. "This one doesn't leave the Stacks. And if they do manage to get to it, I'll make sure
they go insane trying to parse my notation."
Dorothy smiled, grimly appreciative. "Archivist spite," she said. "Underestimated defense."
Lyr's eyes twinkled. "We have few joys," she said. "Let me have this one."
Doris picked up the quill.
Her hand shook on the first stroke.
It steadied on the second.
By the third, she remembered the old rhythm: diagram, note, warning, alternative.
Don't do this.
If you must, do it this way instead.
Better idea: don't.
She wrote in red again.
It felt like reclaiming a part of herself she'd buried in the desert.
In the suite above, John wrestled with a much less cooperative subject: rust.
Orane had insisted on involving him.
"You're not just family anymore," she'd said gruffly, standing in their doorway with mud on her boots and annoyance in her eyes. "You're part of the line. You feel things. Might as well put that to use somewhere that smells worse than your room."
So now John stood in a damp tunnel under the west ward, boots sinking slightly into the muck, the air thick with the scent of old stone, stagnant water, and things better not examined closely.
Brian lay three stories up in his cradle, ward-wrapped, Flint and a warden between him and the rest of the world.
John's palm pressed to the slimy wall.
The hum here was different from the tower proper.
Thinner.
Edgier.
As if the wards considered this space beneath them but still reluctantly brushed it with their awareness.
"Ugh," Flint said, picking his way along a narrow ledge. "You owe me for this."
"You volunteered," John reminded him.
"I volunteered to help keep cultists away from the baby, not to wade through city drainage," Flint said. "There's a difference."
Orane led from the front, lantern held high, sword already drawn.
Her hair was braided tight against her skull, her sleeves rolled, revealing forearms mapped with small scars.
"The bracelets had to be fed from somewhere," she said over her shoulder. "Lyr thinks the Paragons used the drain knots as anchor points. We burned the ones we found. I want to make sure they don't have cousins hiding in cracks."
"How many times have you done this?" John asked.
"Too many," Orane said. "Never with someone who could hear the lines complain."
They reached a junction where three tunnels met.
Orane motioned them to a halt.
"Feel," she said.
John swallowed and put both hands on the nearest wall, ignoring the cold damp seeping through his sleeves.
He closed his eyes.
Listen through yourself, not to yourself.
Lattice.
Here, it was like a frayed rope, strands thinner than in the tower, patched and repatched over years of neglect and quick fixes.
Two of the tunnels hummed with the same tired, steady note.
The third…
He frowned.
"Left," he said slowly. "There's a… hitch. Like the sound you get when a wheel hits a cracked stone over and over."
Orane nodded. "That one's had trouble before," she said. "We burned a knot there three months ago. Seems we didn't get all its friends."
They turned left.
The hum grew more jagged the farther they went.
Not sharp enough to be active danger.
Old damage.
Like scar tissue in the lattice.
"What does it feel like to you?" Flint asked, hand hovering near the wall but not quite touching.
"Like someone scribbled on a ledger and then tried to erase it badly," John said.
Flint grimaced. "Stop making analogies that make sense."
They came to a narrow choke point where the tunnel ceiling dipped.
Rust streaked the stone in ugly, reddish trails.
Orane crouched and ran a gloved finger through one of them.
Her glove came away smeared with red and black grit.
"Old blood," she said. "New rust. The Paragons love dramatics."
John touched the wall nearby.
There—under the rust—he felt it.
A faint, lingering pattern.
The echo of a knot burned, its memory still imprinting the stone.
And, fainter yet, a whisper of resonance, like a song almost forgotten.
"Here," he said. "They had something anchored here. It's gone. But the lattice remembers."
Flint squinted. "Can they use those echoes?"
"Not easily," Orane said. "But we can. Every place they touched tells us how they're thinking. Where they like to hide things. Which
cracks they favor. It's like… tracking rats by the bits of fur they leave behind."
John almost smiled. "Halvar said something similar," he said. "Except with flies and corpses."
Orane snorted. "Sounds like him."
She straightened and sheathed her sword.
"No fresh hum," she said. "Good. That means the trouble's moved higher. Or farther. Either way, this line's quiet for now."
John listened once more.
The scar hum was still there.
But no new pulse.
No thread pushing through.
He exhaled slowly.
"Back," Orane said. "Before the tower decides we've gone missing and sends Halvar and Maevra down here to yell."
Flint made a face. "I'd rather face Paragons."
"No, you wouldn't," Orane said. "You just don't like being scolded."
"Same thing," he muttered.
They retraced their steps.
By the time they emerged into cleaner air and wardlight, John's head ached—not from hooks but from the constant low-level strain of
listening to stone complain.
"It gets easier," Orane said as they climbed. "Not comfortable. Just… less like you're standing under a waterfall all the time."
"How long did it take you?" John asked.
"Ten years," Orane said. "But I started late."
Flint blanched. "Ten years of drains?"
"Ten years of listening," she said. "The drains are a perk."
By evening, the Stacks and the drains both had fresh ink in the ledger.
Doris returned with red-stained fingers and ink smudges on her wrist. Her eyes were shadowed but clearer, as if she'd traded one type of weight for another.
"How is he?" she asked the moment the ward-sigil pulsed to admit her.
"Missed you," John said. "Didn't break anything."
Brian gurgled from the cradle as if to confirm.
The crooked star above him flared briefly when she stepped close.
He kicked, demanding arms.
She scooped him up, burying her nose in his hair.
"You smell like dust and regret," Flint observed.
"And victory," Dorothy said quietly.
Doris blinked. "Victory?"
"You wrote warnings on top of warnings," Dorothy said. "You translated old arrogance into useful caution. Lyr's shelves are heavier now. That's a win."
Doris thought of the red ink, of the way her younger handwriting had looked back at her like a ghost, of the shock of seeing it
weaponised by people who'd never held the quill.
"Small win," she said.
"Inch by inch," Dorothy said.
John pulled the ledger from the shelf and opened it.
He added new entries:
— Drain survey with Orane. West underlines scarred but quiet. Rust trails, old blood, burned knot echo. No new hooks. Pattern:
Paragons favor old damage sites.
And, beneath that:
— Stacks session with Lyr. DV-17 diagrams. My red warnings. Paragons combined failed cleave and peripheral focus. Result: bracelets, garden knots. Pattern: they use our abandoned ideas, stripped of caution.
He hesitated, then wrote one more:
— Doriane back at the table. Not running. Pattern: we're not just reacting now. We're rewriting.
He tapped the quill against the page.
Doris peered over his shoulder, Brian settled on her hip.
"You sound almost hopeful," she said.
"Almost," he agreed.
Flint stretched, joints popping. "So now we have knobs in drains, scribbles in books, bracelets on students, and strangers in gray
cloaks," he said. "Anything else?"
"Leaves that turn," Dorothy said.
"And stars that glow," Doris added.
Brian shoved his fist in his mouth and made a content noise.
The crooked star obliged him with a soft flicker.
John smiled despite himself.
"Those," he said, "we keep."
Outside, beyond stone and drains and shelves, night gathered.
In some forgotten cellar, someone traced a crack symbol with reverent fingers, unaware that its siblings had been turned to ash.
In a small rented room, a gray cloak hung to dry, its wearer studying notes on ward reactions and thinking, Almost.
In the Stacks, Lyr closed a folio on DV-17 and locked it with a ward that would bite anyone without voidborn blood hard enough to leave
a mark.
In the Church quarter, Serais practiced a sermon about walls and choices and the difference between watching and waiting.
Orane mapped scars on the city's underbelly, marking which cracks had been probed and which needed more watching.
Maevra stood in the Spire's highest chamber, finger tracing invisible lines where the wards hummed loudest, counting cracks they'd seen and those still invisible.
And in the over-warded suite that had become an unlikely war room, a family sat at a table, ledger open, baby drooling, chalk stars glowing faintly overhead.
Ink.
Rust.
Lines.
They weren't winning.
Not yet.
But they were no longer just pieces on other people's boards.
They were keeping their own.
John closed the ledger.
"Tomorrow," he said quietly, to no one and everything. "We listen again."
Brian yawned, unimpressed.
The wards hummed.
The crooked star shone.
And the tower, for one small, fragile moment, felt less like a cage and more like a book they'd finally begun to write in themselves.