The shard sat in the center of the table like a very small, very quiet declaration of war.
Doris's hand hovered over it, quill tip dripping ink that trembled with the slightest shake of her fingers. Brian gurgled, blissfully unaware, chewing on the corner of his blanket. The faint smear of shadow that had reached toward the shard was gone; the wardlight in the corners behaved itself like nothing had happened.
No one in the room believed that.
Doris forced the quill down. Ink kissed the page.
— Voidborn stabiliser shard found in Blue Wing stairwell.
Sigil: spiral-anchor, field-type. Inert to lattice. Responds to voidborn-trained touch. Shadow drifted toward it when brought into suite.
Dorothy repelled.
Pattern: fragment used as lure / pointer.
John watched her writing with the same intensity he gave battlefields. He could feel the room holding its breath again, not in panic
this time, but in wary attention.
Kael cleared his throat. "Lyr wanted to lock it in the Stacks," he said. "I asked to bring it here first. I… thought you should see it."
Doris almost laughed.
You thought the thing calling to my blood should be in the same room as my son.
But she didn't say it.
Because he was right.
If the Paragons were using Voidborn pieces as messages, she had to see them. Hiding from the fragments that echoed her work and her ancestors' mistakes hadn't stopped any of this.
"It's well you did," Dorothy said. "It brought its friends." She nodded toward the corner where the shadow had stretched. "The next time
they reached, we might not have seen the drift."
Flint rubbed his arms. "You're both talking like shadows are people now. I hate this place."
"You liked the drains," John reminded him.
"I liked knowing where to stab," Flint said. "I can't knife a shadow. Or a shard. That's your department."
"Shards don't care about knives," Doris muttered. "They care about patterns. About where they used to live."
John's gaze flicked to her. "You really think it's from an old sanctum?"
"Yes," Doris said immediately. Then she caught herself. "Almost certainly. It doesn't… feel like a fresh carve. The resonance is…
fossilised. Old echo, not new."
Kael frowned. "But you said it's inert."
"Inert doesn't mean empty," Doris said. "It means it's not feeding into anything right now. Think of it as a broken cog from a machine
that still remembers how to spin."
Brian spat his blanket out and reached toward the shard, fingers flexing.
Every adult in the room froze.
Doris scooped him up instantly, turning her body so that his line of sight cut away from the table.
"Absolutely not," she whispered into his hair. "You have enough problems without licking sanctum trash."
Brian wriggled, offended, but accepted the change in vantage point when he realised her braid was now within grabbing range.
Dorothy eyed the shard. "We need to move that," she said. "The longer it's near him, the more interesting this room looks to anything
following its echo."
John nodded. "Back to the Stacks?"
"For now," Dorothy said. "Then somewhere worse."
Flint blinked. "Worse?"
"The old sanctums," she said. "If this is a pointer, the place it points to is already compromised. Better we see it than leave it for whoever dropped this here."
Kael's jaw tightened. "We're sure it was the Paragons?"
"No one else is wandering around chipping off chunks of forgotten Voidborn infrastructure to use as party favors," Dorothy said.
Doris looked down at Brian's soft, unlined face.
He looked up at her, eyes bright, and laughed his small, startled laugh.
It hurt.
Everything hurt.
But she nodded.
"All right," she said quietly. "We follow it. Carefully. With too many guards and twice as many wards. But we follow it."
John's head snapped toward her. "We?"
"Yes, we," Doris said.
"You are not going anywhere near an active—or half-active—Voidborn site," he said. "We just finished dealing with bracelets and dream-mist and hooks. Now you want to walk voluntarily into a place the Paragons are circling?"
"John," she said softly.
He hated that tone.
It sounded like the moments before she did something brave and stupid.
He opened his mouth.
Dorothy raised a hand.
"Argue in a moment," she said. "First, we confirm something."
She took the shard again, this time wrapping it in the cloth so skin didn't meet sigil.
"Doriane," she said to Doris. "You felt the call. I felt the echo. Let's see how far it stretches."
Kael frowned. "You want to trace it from here?"
"No," Dorothy said. "Tracing from the suite is asking for trouble. Here, everything is tuned to him. We move it somewhere designed to listen to wrong things." Her eyes glinted. "The Stacks."
Flint shuddered. "You say that like it's comforting."
"It is—for us," Dorothy said.
She turned to Kael. "You'll walk ahead," she said. "See if anything in the corridors itches. If the shard tugs, I want to know whether it's reaching through floors or just along my palm."
Kael nodded. "Understood." He hesitated. "Should we… tell Halvar?"
"After we have something more useful than 'a rock made us nervous,'" Dorothy said. "He'll get more mileage with council if we bring him
potential destinations instead of vague dread."
John frowned. "This still sounds like 'we' are going down there without—"
"With Orane or one of her people," Dorothy cut in. "Obviously. I may be old, but I'm not suicidal. We'll also want Lyr. She'll need to see the echo sites herself."
"And me," Doris said.
John stared at her. "Absolutely not."
She met his gaze, unflinching.
"John. This is my work. My bloodline. My warnings the Paragons tore out of context. If you walk into a sanctum without me, you'll be
missing half the language on the walls."
"And if I let you walk into a sanctum with cultists sniffing around it, I'm a bad husband and an idiot," John said. "We have a child who
can't sit up yet. He needs one of his parents not inside a ticking ritual."
Doris's jaw tightened.
He saw the hurt before she could hide it.
"You think I don't know that?" she hissed. "You think I want to crawl back into that world? I left it for a reason. I ran. I broke with my
family and burned my bridges and hoped that if I changed my name and sold spices on the road, the old patterns would forget me. They didn't. They found our son before he could walk."
She stepped closer, Brian a small, warm weight between them.
"He's in this because of me," she whispered. "Because of what I am. Now we have a chance to walk into one of the places they're using and mark it before they do. And you want me to stay upstairs knitting constellations."
"I want you alive," John said thickly.
"And I want him free," she said.
The shard warmed faintly on the table, as if approving of the argument.
Kael coughed into his hand. "You two can fight about who gets to be the responsible one later," he said gently. "Right now, we need to
stash that in the Stacks before the shadow comes back with friends."
He wasn't wrong.
John let out a breath that felt like it had been caught under his ribs all morning.
"We move it," he agreed. "Together. Doris stays behind Halvar's rules until we know what we're walking into. After we trace, we decide who goes below. Not before."
Doris opened her mouth.
Dorothy cut in, voice steel.
"He's right," she said. "We don't decide sanctum teams in a room with a baby. We decide them after we've seen how loud the shard sings."
Doris swallowed her retort.
"Fine," she said. "But you are not leaving me out of the choice."
"I wouldn't dare," John said.
Flint sighed. "Good. Settled. We're all angry and terrified in the same direction. Progress."
Moving the shard to the Stacks should have been simple.
It wasn't.
Kael went ahead, as planned, hands occasionally skimming the wall when they turned a corner, eyes half-closed as he listened.
To John, the corridors hummed with their usual layered chorus: general lattice, door wards, Halvar's knots. A faint, sour note hung
near the old Red Wing branch—Teren's faded circle—but the Rector had scrubbed it down to discomfort, not danger.
The shard tugged faintly in Dorothy's wrapped hand.
Not hard enough to pull, just enough to remind.
Here.
Here.
And here.
Like a compass needle passing through a magnetic field, quivering when they walked above certain lines.
Doris, walking beside Dorothy, could feel it too—even at a remove.
Her blood recognised the pattern of old Voidborn anchor routes.
They were not supposed to exist under this city.
She kept her breathing level.
Every small twitch in the hum made her flinch now, looking for mist, for cracks, for whispers. But this was different. It was less like a threat and more like… a map.
She hated that this made her curious.
John walked on the other side of Dorothy, eyes everywhere, one hand near his hilt, the other brushing stone at intervals. If any hook,
rope, or invisible line so much as sniffed in their direction, he meant to feel it.
Flint trailed, one step behind, keeping an eye on their rear, knife hidden but hand ready.
Their little procession looked, Doris realized,
The wards hummed.
Students parted around them, eyes wide, pretended not to stare.
They reached the Stacks without incident.
The hum changed at the threshold—denser, quieter, like sound muffled by shelves.
Master Lyr stood waiting, arms crossed, braid perfectly pinned.
"You took your time," she said.
"We stopped to argue about who's allowed to throw themselves in front of the next disaster," Flint said.
"Efficient," Lyr replied. "Did you bring my stone?"
Dorothy held up the cloth-wrapped shard.
"Your rock," Flint muttered, "is loud."
Lyr's eyes flicked to Doris. "You touched it?" she asked.
"Yes," Doris said, knowing evasion was pointless here. "It warmed. The spiral lit, briefly. It felt like an old anchor calling to an empty net."
Lyr's nostrils flared. "Charming," she said. "Put it here."
She led them to a table ringed with sigils etched directly into the wood. The air above it shimmered with faint wards, like heat haze.
Doris recognised them.
"Isolation circle," she murmured. "Voidborn design with Academy revisions."
Lyr's mouth twitched. "I take insult from both sides," she said. "Best of both worlds."
Dorothy set the bundle down.
Lyr unfolded the cloth carefully, revealing the shard.
It lay in the center of the circle, spiral up.
The wardlines around the table thickened, light running along the carved marks.
Nothing exploded.
Doris took that as a good sign.
Lyr laid two fingers near, but not on, the stone. Her eyes unfocused slightly as she listened.
"Hm," she said after a moment. "Yes. Old anchor. Mostly bled. Someone chipped it from a stabiliser that used to hold a micro-fracture
in place."
"A fracture where?" John asked.
Lyr's throat bobbed.
"In the city," she said. "Below us."
Doris's stomach sank. "You said the sanctums collapsed."
"Most did," Lyr said. "But collapse doesn't mean 'gone.' It means 'buried' and 'broken.' Pieces remain. Anchors. Lattices. The Paragons have been poking them from below for years. We've been patching what we can
reach from above." Her gaze hardened. "Now someone is deliberately bringing pieces up."
"To tune them," Dorothy said.
"And to send messages," Doris added.
Lyr nodded once. "You felt it talk?"
"Yes," Doris said. "Not with words. With… direction. It tugged when we passed above certain lines."
She sketched a rough map on the tabletop with a fingertip: the family suite, a corridor, a stair, the archway where the tug had been
strongest.
Lyr watched, eyes sharp.
"Interesting," she murmured. "Those points align with the old ward records we have from the pre-collapse days. Not perfectly. But close
enough to be cousins."
"So the Paragons are walking the same old roads under the city," Dorothy said. "No wonder the drains hum like scar tissue."
"Can you trace it from here?" John asked. "Safely?"
Lyr arched a brow. "Define safely."
"Without tearing holes in the floor," he said.
"Then yes," she said. "Probably."
Doris stepped closer. "Let me help," she said.
Lyr studied her for a long moment.
"You're sure?" the archivist asked. "We can do a rough trace without you. Cruder. Slower. But possible."
"The Paragons already have my notes," Doris said. "They're using my half-baked abandoned ideas in bracelets and knots. I'd prefer to be in the room while you pull on my bloodline's skeleton."
Lyr's mouth twitched in something like approval.
"Very well," she said. "Dorothy, with me. Doriane, opposite. You two—" She nodded at John and Flint. "—keep everyone else from interrupting. If the wards shiver in a way you don't like, shout."
Kael lifted a hand. "Should I—"
"Stay near the door," Lyr said. "If something goes wrong, you run to Halvar. If nothing goes wrong, you tell him anyway."
Kael nodded, jaw set.
Lyr placed her hands at two points on the isolation circle.
Dorothy mirrored her on the far side.
Doris took the last open spot, fingers burning with the urge to pull away and the need to do anything but.
The wards around the table flared.
The shard warmed.
Doris closed her eyes.
The world narrowed to hum.
Not just the tower's general lattice, but a deeper line—old, buried, bruised.
She felt it like a scar under skin—tender, swollen, crisscrossed with newer stitches.
The shard connected.
A faint echo pulsed out, not strong enough to affect the structure, just enough to ping the old anchors it had once belonged to.
Hello, again.
Doris bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood.
Images flickered at the edges of her mind.
Not full visions.
Impressions.
Dark stone.
A chamber half-collapsed.
Runes half-buried in silt.
Water seeping where it shouldn't.
Three points lit in her inner map.
Here.
Lower.
Farther west.
Lyr's voice came, thin and focused.
"North-west quarter," she murmured. "Below the Old Market. Below the river bend. And… there. Under the chapel district." A hiss. "Of
course."
"Of course?" John demanded.
"Because if I were a cult that loved fire and hated walls," Lyr said, "I'd absolutely dig under the part of the city everyone thinks is 'safest.'"
The shard pulsed once more.
Then Lyr did something to the circle that felt like a book slamming shut.
The echo cut.
The temperature in the Stacks dropped by a fraction.
Doris opened her eyes.
Her hands shook.
The shard lay still, spiral dull again.
She felt like she'd just shouted down a well and heard too many whispers answer.
"That," Dorothy said, voice rough, "is enough for now."
Lyr exhaled. "Agreed."
John's hand was on Doris's shoulder in an instant, steady and warm.
"You all right?" he asked.
She tried to answer.
Her mouth wouldn't cooperate for a moment.
"Yes," she managed finally. "No hooks. No voices. Just… directions."
Lyr nodded, satisfied. "We have three likely sites," she said. "We'll need to cross-reference with old maps and newer ward reports. Then we decide which to poke first."
"With an army," Flint said.
"With something that passes for one," Lyr replied. "Orane will insist on a squad. Maevra will insist on oversight. Halvar will insist on
caution. The Emperor will insist on not being told any of the details until we clean up the mess."
"That sounds right," Dorothy said.
Kael stepped closer. "How soon?" he asked. "We don't know how long the Paragons have been using those places."
"Not as long as they'd like," Lyr said. "If they'd had full access for months, we'd have seen more collapses topside. This is still in the
'probing and staging' phase. They're laying lines. Testing responses. Just like with the bracelets."
"Then we move before they get to the 'lighting things on fire' phase," Flint said.
"Exactly," Lyr said.
John looked at Doris.
She met his gaze, and he saw it there: fear, yes—but also resolve hardened into something he recognised from the caravan days, when storms had tried to rip their wagons off the road and she'd stood at the front shouting logistics through wind.
She was already halfway gone in her head—to the sanctums, to the maps, to the ghosts.
He swallowed.
"All right," he said quietly. "When the teams go below, we'll talk. Not here. Not yet. But we'll talk."
A small, grateful smile flickered in her eyes, gone almost as quickly.
Dorothy snorted. "That's as close to 'I'll let you be reckless with supervision' as you're going to get," she said.
They left the shard in the isolation circle with three extra ward layers and Lyr's personal threat that anyone who touched it without her
permission would find their quills mysteriously turning into spiders for a month.
On the walk back to the suite, the hum felt… different.
Not because the tower had changed.
Because they had new lines in their heads.
Under every corridor, Doris could almost feel echoes of the old anchor network—half-erased roads the Voidborn had carved through reality, now being traced by zealots with worse intentions and less care.
Brian was awake when they returned, propped in his cradle with a stack of folded cloths as makeshift walls to keep him from rolling. He squealed when he saw Doris, arms flailing.
Doris scooped him up, holding him close, breathing him in like air after a long submersion.
"You missed nothing," she whispered into his hair. "Stay that way as long as you can."
John closed the door.
The wards hummed in recognition.
He sat at the table, pulled the ledger closer, and wrote:
— Shard traced via Lyr + Dorothy + Doris. Old anchor echoes beneath city: three main points (NW quarter / river bend / chapel district).
No direct threat yet.
Pattern: Paragons walking old Voidborn paths under capital.
Risk: sanctums as staging ground. Counter: we get there first.
He hesitated.
Then added:
— Doriane linked to network without cracking. Good. Terrifying. Necessary.
Flint peered over his shoulder. "You make us sound almost competent," he said.
"We are," John replied. "Terrified, exhausted, and competent."
Dorothy lowered herself into her chair with a sigh. "Enjoy it," she said. "Competence is a temporary condition."
Brian grabbed Doris's braid and laughed that small, bright laugh again.
John looked up.
The sound cut through the Stacks-echo and sanctum-maps in his head like a clean blade through mold.
He wrote one more line:
— First laugh remains louder than hums and shards. Remember that.
Doris traced the words with her eyes and let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.
"They want us in the dark," she said softly. "Down in holes, chasing old ghosts and new cults. They want us so wrapped up in their patterns we forget why we're fighting."
John nodded.
"And why are we?" he asked, not gently, not as a test, but as if he needed to hear it aloud.
She looked at Brian.
Then at the chalk stars overhead.
"For him," she said. "So the world he grows up in isn't just cracks and hooks and shards. So he has a chance to learn magic as something
other than a weapon. So when he hears the hum, he doesn't only think of the Paragons."
Flint shrugged. "I'm mostly in it to annoy dangerous people and not die," he said. "But that sounds good too."
Dorothy smiled, small and sharp. "I'm in it because I watched the last generation of Voidborn try to rewrite the world and fail," she
said. "I'd like to help this one avoid making the same artistic choices."
John's hand rested on the ledger.
"Then we follow the lines," he said. "On our terms."
Outside, the city went about its business, oblivious to the invisible threads being tugged beneath its streets.
In a chapel, someone lit a candle and prayed for stability without knowing how literal that request had become.
In a cramped basement, a gray-cloaked figure counted dwindling shards and smiled when they realised one had been found.
Good, they thought. You're almost where I need you.
In the Stacks, Lyr and Halvar and Maevra argued over maps and teams and how far they could push the Emperor's patience before he sent his own people blundering into the sanctums.
And in the overprotected suite above, a family listened to the hum of the walls, to the rustle of cloth, to a baby's laugh that still hadn't learned the taste of fear.
The shard had given them direction.
The Paragons thought that meant the game had moved to their board.
They were wrong.
The Aetherbound child was not the only one learning to read lines.