Morning came late.
Not by the sun's measure—that rose when it pleased—but by the tower's. Bells rang half a chime slower than usual, as if someone had asked time itself to take a breath.
John's shoulder hurt.
Not the sharp, immediate pain of a fresh wound. The deep, grinding ache of a bruise that had gotten into the bone. Every time he moved his arm he heard Echo's fingers tapping his blade, felt the wall hum under his
palm, remembered the way the old anchor had strained.
He woke anyway.
Doris was already sitting up, robe wrapped around her, hair braided back, ledger open on her knees. Dark smudges underlined her eyes. Her quill hovered over a blank line, unmoving.
Brian slept in the cradle, sprawled on his back, mouth slightly open, one foot caught on the blanket as if he'd tried to kick his way out and given up halfway.
"Thinking or writing?" John asked.
"Both," Doris said. "Poorly."
He sat, working his shoulder gently, testing the range of motion.
She watched him.
"You should still be in bed," she said.
"You should have been in bed three hours ago," he replied.
She had the grace not to argue.
The room's hum felt… thicker this morning. Not alarmed, not bruised in the way it had after the first hook, but alert. Like a sentry who'd seen movement in the dark and hadn't yet decided what it was.
"Any mist?" he asked softly.
"No," Doris said. "No shadows either. He slept… mostly clear. A few little flutters. I hummed. They went away."
"Good," John said.
Doris tapped the blank line with the quill.
"How do we write yesterday without making it sound like a list of ways we could have died?" she asked.
"It was a list of ways we could have died," John said.
"That's not the point," she said. "He'll read this one day. I don't want him thinking his infancy was just tunnels and cultists."
He glanced at the cradle. Brian snorted in his sleep and flung an arm over his face.
"You also wrote his first laugh," John said. "He'll figure out it was both."
She sighed and started writing.
— Under-Market test: first direct clash with Paragon handler ("Echo") and undercity crack. Old anchor prodded, refused. Result: line held, wall scarred, no surface collapse.
She paused.
Then added:
— John came back filthy and whole. Brian slept through it and woke angry that his porridge was late.
She underlined "whole" once.
John smiled despite himself.
The ward-sigil above the door pulsed.
He tensed out of habit.
"Halvar," Dorothy said from her chair, before the knock even came. "He hums like a headache."
A moment later, the knock confirmed it: firm, businesslike, mildly apologetic.
John opened the door.
Halvar stood with his chain crooked and his hair more chaotic than usual, a rolled parchment tucked under one arm. Behind him waited Kael, Orane, and, to John's surprise, Master Lyr.
"Council wants you," Halvar said. "Again."
Doris closed the ledger with a soft thump. "Now?" she asked.
"Before the rumors get to the Emperor," Halvar said. "So, yes. Now."
The council chamber felt more crowded than last time.
Maevra at the head, face pale but composed.
Serais beside her, robes neat, fingers loosely laced.
Ren Kaltan with his usual tidy stack of papers.
Lyr with new ink stains on her fingers.
Orane glowering like someone had asked her to attend a tea party with knives.
Vela, stiff-backed, eyes cool.
Dorothy, leaning on her staff, expression carved in dry stone.
Halvar, of course. Tired. Sharp. Watching everything.
John, Doris, and Brian took the same seats as before.
Flint stood behind them.
Kael hovered near a pillar, half in shadow, as if he didn't trust himself not to say something unfortunate.
Maevra waited until the door sigils faded, sealing sound.
Then she said, "I hear the undercity has started editing itself without permission."
Halvar sighed. "Yes," he said. "We encountered our first awake anchor. And the Paragon scholar who's been poking it."
Doris tasted bile at the word "awake."
Lyr flicked a scroll open, revealing a rough sketch of the tunnel: warped wall, crack mark, approximate positions.
"Anchor isn't fully active yet," she said. "Echo—" she made the name sound like something she'd stepped in "—was testing how far they could nudge it before the line slid. Thanks to John, Kael, Orane, and an inconvenient amount of stubbornness, we know the answer is 'not that far. Yet.'"
Maevra's gaze moved from Lyr to John. "Describe what you did," she said.
John shifted, uncomfortable.
"It wasn't… magic," he said. "Not the way you lot mean. The wall hummed wrong. I've been listening to the wards long enough to know what 'wrong' feels like. When Echo pulled, the old anchor reached up. I pushed back."
"How?" Vela asked sharply. "With what structure?"
John thought, searching for words that didn't sound like idiocy.
"No structure," he said. "I put my hand on the stone and thought 'no' very hard."
A few mouths twitched.
Halvar's did not.
"Don't undersell it," the Rector said. "Whatever you did pushed the lattice back toward the tower's default pattern. You don't get that by just thinking 'no' in a vacuum."
Doris spoke quietly. "He anchored himself," she said. "On us. On the suite. On the chalk stars. On my song."
John blinked. "Did I?"
"You told me after you came back what you were thinking," she said. "Walls don't care about intent without reference. You gave them one. You reminded them of what 'home' feels like."
Halvar nodded slowly. "A localised 'safe pattern' overlay," he said. "Crude. Effective. Painful, I imagine."
John rolled his shoulder. "Yes," he said.
"Is this repeatable?" Maevra asked.
"Yes," Dorothy said. "With training. And risk. If you ground yourself on the wrong pattern, you'll reinforce the wrong thing."
Vela sniffed. "Teaching soldiers to shove their feelings into the lattice is not a sustainable defense strategy."
"No one said it was the only one," Lyr replied. "But it's what we have while you're not allowed to perform large-scale experiments with Voidborn theory."
Vela's jaw tightened.
"We are getting off topic," Ren said mildly. "The question is how quickly the Paragons can repeat what Echo attempted. And how we counter it without turning half the city into a ritual site."
"Echo," Maevra said, tasting the name. "Describe them."
Kael stepped forward.
"Gray cloak," he said. "Accent from the east. No house colors. Not formally marked Paragon, but the way the lattice bent around them… wrong. Slipped between ordinary and cult patterns. They like to talk. They like to test. They like to move people like pieces."
John added, "They folded space in the tunnel. Displaced Flint and Bren into a storage room. No blood, no burns. Just… inside out for a moment."
Vela leaned forward. "Folded," she said. "Not full void-walk. Localised slip along weakened lines."
"You knew someone was working on that," Dorothy said.
Vela's eyes flashed. "The theory has existed for decades," she said. "We never had the… political freedom to test it."
"Thank the gods for small mercies," Lyr muttered.
Maevra's gaze sharpened. "Can the Paragons fold people into sanctums from the surface?" she asked.
"Not yet," Lyr said. "Not cleanly. Whatever Echo did used the partially warped wall as a pivot. They need stressed anchors or badly
maintained wardlines to twist reality without snapping it."
"So the worse we let the city rot," Orane said, "the easier we make their lives."
"Exactly," Lyr said.
"We can't fix the entire undercity overnight," Halvar said. "We can fix what we know they're touching. That's where the shard trace comes
in."
He looked at Doris.
Doris sat straighter.
"We followed the shard yesterday," she said. "In the Stacks. Lyr, Dorothy and I. It pinged three old anchor points under the city when we poked it: northwest quarter, river bend, chapel district."
Maevra's eyes closed briefly. "Of course," she murmured. "Markets, water, faith. Hit those, you destabilise everything."
Serais frowned. "We'll increase inspections of sub-chapel tunnels," he said. "Quietly."
"Quietly," Maevra confirmed. "We don't need a panic every time someone sees a priest with mud on his boots."
"Even if that's my natural state," Ren added dryly.
Orane tapped the table. "We need teams," she said. "Listening teams. Not just wardens with spears. People who hear the hum. John. Kael. Doriane. Dorothy. We can't drag them into every tunnel, but we can't afford to send squads blind either."
"You're proposing a new unit," Maevra said. "A
'line-watch.'"
"Call it what you like," Orane said. "I'm tired of walking into bad places and finding out they're worse when my teeth start vibrating."
Halvar nodded. "I support it," he said. "We're already halfway there. John and family have been doing the job informally."
Doris's fingers tightened in Brian's blanket.
"We have a baby," she said.
Maevra looked at her. "We are not asking you to drag him into drains," she said. "But we are asking you to lend us your ears."
"I already have," Doris said. "The shard trace. The warnings. My notes."
"And we're grateful," Halvar said. "But we need more people who can do what you do. We can't build a defense that relies on one bloodline and a ledger."
Vela opened her mouth.
Dorothy fixed her with a stare. "If you say 'prophecy' I will throw my staff at you," she said.
Vela shut her mouth with a click.
Serais spoke into the tense pause. "You need quiet spaces," he said. "If you're going to train more listeners."
Maevra arched a brow. "Explain."
"The tower is full of noise," Serais said. "Magic. Wards. Students. Arguments. You want people to learn what wrongness feels like? You teach them in a place where 'normal' is as clean as you can make it. A… quiet room. A baseline."
Halvar rubbed his temples. "We don't have rooms without wards," he said. "That's the point of the tower."
"I'm not suggesting we strip protections," Serais said. "I'm suggesting we tune a few chambers so their lattice is as simple as possible. No experimental knots, no overlapping triple wards, no ten-year patch jobs. One pattern. Clean. Strong. Then you put your listeners in there and have Dorothy
throw pebbles at the hum until they learn the difference."
Dorothy looked perversely pleased. "I like this plan," she said.
Lyr considered. "We could repurpose an old meditation suite," she said. "One of the pre-Aetherion spaces. The stones there remember simpler days."
Maevra nodded slowly. "Do it," she said. "Designate one free of student access. One for training our new 'line-watch.' And one under Church oversight so Serais and Ren can stop accusing us of heresy every time we
breathe near a sanctum."
Ren smiled faintly. "I was going to accuse you of hubris, not heresy," he said.
"Same category," Serais murmured.
Maevra's gaze returned to John and Doris.
"This brings us to the inevitable question," she said. "Who goes below next?"
"Me," Orane said immediately.
"No one is surprised," Halvar murmured.
"Orane, a squad of wardens, and Lyr," Maevra said. "To the river bend anchor. Water risk is high. I want someone there who understands
what happens when stabilisers fail near it."
"You're not suggesting a Voidborn walk into a
water-fractured sanctum," Vela said sharply. "That's asking for a rift."
"I'm suggesting Lyr," Maevra said. "Who has more sense than you and less blood complication than Doriane."
Doris relaxed a fraction.
Then Maevra turned to her.
"Doriane will not be in the first wave," she said. "But she will walk into one of these places eventually. On our terms. Not the Paragons'. You've seen the patterns, written the warnings, traced the shard. When we move on the chapel district anchor, I want you with the team."
John stiffened.
Doris felt his whole body go taut beside her.
"No," he said.
"Yes," Maevra said.
They stared at each other.
"I'm not taking her into a sanctum," John said. "We have a child."
"I am aware," Maevra said. "I was in the room when he screamed the first time. I've watched you both hold the line more times in the last month than some wardens do in a decade. That is precisely why I refuse to let you hide upstairs while the Paragons dig under our shrines. Doriane understands those anchor shapes better than anyone alive. If we walk into that without her, we'll miss half the traps."
"And if she dies down there?" John asked, voice low. "What then? You add a line to your ledger and move a piece on a board."
"No," Maevra said. "If she dies, the city loses one of its few people who knows how the old warp behaved. We all lose. Including your son."
Silence stretched.
Brian gurgled and burrowed into Doris's collarbone.
She stroked his back, feeling John's fury like heat beside her.
"He's right to be afraid," Dorothy said quietly. "Sanctums are teeth. They don't care whose blood you carry."
"Do you think she should go?" Maevra asked.
Dorothy sighed. "I think if you don't let her," she said, "she'll find a way down there anyway. And she'll do it alone and angry, which will go worse for everyone."
Doris shot her a look.
Dorothy shrugged. "You're predictable," she said.
Doris wanted to protest.
She didn't.
Because Dorothy was right.
The thought of sanctum stones humming without her there to see what the Paragons were doing to them made her feel physically ill.
"It doesn't have to be now," Serais said gently. "We can prepare. Train. Choose a moment that isn't dictated by panic."
Maevra nodded. "Agreed. We are not rushing this. Old Market was already moving. The chapel anchor is slower. We have time to build the team properly."
She looked at John again.
"You have weeks," she said. "Maybe months. To decide whether you trust us not to throw her away."
"I don't," he said.
"Good," Maevra said. "Trust is dangerous. Stay suspicious. Watch us. Come to the training rooms. Learn what she learns. If, at the end of that, you still think we're using her as a tool, you tell me. And then you walk away. I will not chain you here."
The room held its breath.
Doris looked at John.
There it was again—fear and stubbornness and love, knotted together in his jaw and shoulders and the tightness in his hands.
"We can't walk away," she said softly.
He exhaled, a sound like stones grinding.
"I know," he said.
Maevra inclined her head. "Then we don't pretend we might," she said. "We accept that you are here, that we are in this together, and we do the work as cleanly as we can."
Lyr cleared her throat. "In the meantime," she said briskly, "we start with something that doesn't involve falling rocks and drowning. We
start with quiet rooms."
The chosen chamber was smaller than John expected.
Tucked near the tower's inner curve, it had once been a meditation hall: smooth stone floor, plain walls, a single narrow window slit
high up that admitted a slice of light and not much else. The wards here were simple—a single, strong pattern running around the perimeter like a belt.
"Pre-Aetherion work," Lyr said with grudging approval. "Before we added three redundant safety lines to everything."
Dorothy approved. "Feels like a clean note," she said.
Halvar had brought three more people besides John, Doris, and Kael: two wardens Orane trusted, and a young priest from Serais's circle named Elian, whose job, apparently, was to tell them when their experiments started leaning toward "heresy."
Elian looked terrified and determined in equal measure.
"This is a quiet room," Halvar said. "Not physically, obviously. You're going to hear each other breathing. It's quiet in the lattice. We're here to teach you what 'normal' feels like when you're not in a crisis."
He gestured around.
"Touch the wall," he said.
They did.
Stone under hand.
Soft discharge tingle from the ward.
Hum.
Not layered like in the suite.
Softer.
Like one note held steady.
"Focus," Dorothy said. "Not with your eyes. With the part of you that twitches when Brian screams."
John obeyed.
He let his breathing slow.
The hum met him.
Baseline.
No cracks.
No knots.
No hooks.
Just structure.
"We'll start small," Lyr said. "Doriane."
Doris stepped into the center of the room, Brian in a sling against her chest, wide-eyed but calm.
"I thought—" John began.
"I am not leaving him with a stranger," Doris said. "And if we're making 'home' patterns, he should be part of them."
Lyr nodded. "Fine," she said. "No drastic shifts. Just… pebbles."
She sketched something in the air with her fingers—a tiny, contained symbol, nothing like the cleave marks, more akin to a ripple than a
crack.
The hum wobbled.
Not painfully.
Just enough that everyone felt it.
"That's wrong," one of Orane's wardens muttered.
"Good," Dorothy said. "Name it."
"Feels like… a hiccup," Kael said. "Like the room forgot what it was doing for a second."
"Stumble," John said.
"Stutter," Elian added.
Lyr let the ripple fade.
"Now you," she said to John.
He blinked. "Me?"
"Anchor," Dorothy said. "Like in the tunnel. But gentler. Take this wobble and push it back into line."
Lyr repeated the small symbol.
The hum hiccuped.
John set his palm against the stone.
He thought of the suite. Of the cradle. Of chalk stars and river-song and the way the ledger looked half-filled.
"Not this," he whispered, more to the wall than the room.
The wobble smoothed.
The hum steadied.
He pulled back, sweating lightly.
"That," Lyr said, "is what we want. Controlled. Small. In here, if you overdo it, you only give Elian a headache. Out there, you might throw someone off a ladder."
Elian smiled weakly. "I've had worse in sermons," he said.
They repeated it.
Lyr introduced tiny disturbances—hiccups, flutters, faint hints of the crack symbol, never fully formed.
John, then Kael, then the wardens took turns grounding them, smoothing the hum back toward baseline.
Sometimes they failed.
Once Kael pushed too hard; the lattice overcompensated, making the room feel briefly too still, like sound had forgotten how to echo.
Everyone flinched.
"Too much," Lyr snapped.
"Sorry," Kael muttered, cheeks flushing.
"Don't apologize to me," Lyr said. "Apologize to the wall. Then fix it."
He did.
It worked.
Slowly.
Sweat beaded on his forehead.
Doris watched, humming under her breath for Brian's sake.
The baby watched the walls with unnerving intensity.
When John's turn came again, the hum disrupted in a different way.
This time, Lyr sketched the faintest hint of the crack mark—the three dots and a partial line, nowhere near enough to tear, but enough to taste.
The air cooled.
John's chest tightened.
He slapped his hand to the stone.
"Not you," he told it. "Not here."
He thought of Echo's eyes.
He thought of Brian's hand reaching for the crooked star.
He thought of his own refusal in the tunnel.
The crack-thread snapped before it could finish forming.
Lyr exhaled. "Good," she said. "Again."
They worked until the room hummed with their strain and the quiet note both.
By the end of the session, Elian was pale, one of the wardens had a tremor in her hand, and Kael looked like he'd run three flights of stairs.
John's shoulder throbbed with every push.
Doris's voice was ragged from humming.
Brian had fallen asleep, cheek pressed to her chest, fingers curled in the fabric of her robe.
Halvar ran a hand down the wall once, listening.
"Better," he said. "Not good. But better."
"Good comes with repetition," Dorothy said. "And tea. And possibly alcohol."
"You're not getting drunk in my quiet room," Lyr said.
"Your loss," Dorothy replied.
They left the chamber one by one, the hum of the tower outside feeling almost loud after the stripped simplicity inside.
As they walked back to the suite, Doris shifted Brian in the sling.
"He was calm," she said softly.
John nodded. "He liked it," he said. "The baseline."
"We'll need one for him," Doris murmured. "Here. In our rooms. A pattern that's his. So when the Paragons press, the lattice already
knows which song it prefers."
"We've started," John said. "Chalk stars. Your voice."
"And your hand on the wall," she added.
Flint, waiting by their door, raised a brow. "You all look like someone beat you with invisible hammers," he said.
"In a way," John said. He brushed the door sigil. "We were teaching the walls how to say 'no.'"
Flint grinned. "About time," he said.
That night, the ledger got another entry.
John wrote:
— First quiet room session. Baseline hum established. Practice in "soft refusals" (small ripples) and "hard refusals" (partial cracks). All survived. Elian did not explode.
Doris leaned over and added beneath:
— Brian calm throughout. Watched walls. No dream-front tonight. Chalk pattern + song + quiet room training = stronger "home" line.
Pattern: we're not just patching. We're teaching the tower what 'ours' feels like.
She paused, then, in smaller script, wrote:
— Maevra wants me in the chapel sanctum team. John furious. Me: terrified. Also… relieved. I'm tired of running from my own ghosts.
She closed the ledger.
John sat on the edge of the bed, watching Brian sleep under the crooked star.
"You know what I hate?" he said quietly.
"Most things," Doris said. "Be specific."
"That Echo's right about one thing," he said. "We're being tested. Poked. Stressed. Bent. They're trying to see where we crack."
Doris's mouth tightened. "And?"
"And we're still here," he said. "We haven't broken yet. That has to mean something."
She reached for his hand.
Their fingers laced.
"Then we make sure," she said, "that when our son learns to feel lines, the first one he trusts is ours."
The tower hummed around them.
In the quiet room, the baseline note held.
Under the Old Market, the warped wall sulked, denied its slide.
Somewhere under the chapel district, an old anchor stirred faintly, unaware that its future included an angry Voidborn, a stubborn
soldier, an archivist with too many warnings, and a sanctum team that would not play by Paragon rules.
For now, in the over-warded suite, a family slept.
The hum watched.
The ledger waited.
The line, for this one small, hard-earned night, held.