Rain came back to the city in a slow, soaking way that made everything feel older.
Not the violent storm that had thrown the caravan against the canyon walls—this was a persistent, steady fall that seeped into stone and cloth and bone. The tower's slit window filmed over, drops tracing crooked paths down the glass before disappearing into the sill.
Brian loved it.
He lay on his back in the cradle, watching the rain-smeared strip of sky with the solemn fascination of a scholar. Every time a drop ran
faster than the rest, his fingers twitched as if trying to catch it.
Doris watched him and tried not to think about water under the city.
She failed.
John's hand slipped into hers where it rested on the cradle's edge.
"He doesn't know," he murmured.
"I know," she said. "That's what makes it worse."
There were three anchors under the city.
They'd touched one.
Serais had soothed another's scar.
That left the river bend.
And today, Orane was going to meet it.
The mission brief came as words on parchment and tension in the hum.
Halvar brought the parchment, his chain more crooked than usual. The tension came on its own.
"River team leaves in an hour," he said. "Orane's leading. Lyr, Elian, two of her wardens, one of mine. No John, no Doriane. That's not a suggestion."
"You want me to sit here while they poke an anchor under a flooded tunnel?" Doris asked, sharper than she meant to.
Halvar's expression softened by a fraction. "I want you alive when we go into the chapel," he said. "If Orane's team finds what we think they'll find at the bend, we're going to need you later. Not drowned today."
"Comforting," John muttered.
Halvar's gaze flicked to him. "Your job is here," he said. "Quiet room this morning. Suite this afternoon. If the river hum goes wrong, you'll feel it anyway. Better you're where you can hold the line, not waist-deep in brown water with a sword that won't swing."
John ground his teeth, but he couldn't argue with that.
Doris didn't argue either.
She wanted to.
Everything in her screamed to go.
To put her own hands on the stones Orane was about to walk over. To listen, not filtered through reports and residue and metaphors but directly.
Instead, she looked down at Brian.
He chose that moment to sneeze.
The crooked star flickered in sympathy.
The hum in the room responded—soft, amused.
She exhaled.
"Fine," she said. "But you bring them back."
Halvar's mouth twisted. "That's the plan," he said. "Tell your son not to shake the tower too much while we're gone."
Brian gurgled.
The Rector inclined his head gravely, as if accepting an oath, then left.
The ward-sigil brightened for a moment when the door sealed.
Doris pressed her palm to the wall.
Under the usual bass note of the tower, another line tugged, faint and insistent.
The river.
Old, heavy, restless.
Waiting.
Orane hated water.
Not in cups, not in washbasins, not in rain on her face. Those she could deal with.
She hated water in tunnels.
"Remind me," she said as she sloshed through ankle-deep runoff, "why the old Voidborn decided to build stabiliser's under rivers instead of on nice, dry hills."
Lyr, stepping carefully along the narrow drier ledge, snorted. "Because rivers move," she said. "Cracks like stillness. If you want your anchor to hold, you put it under something that remembers how to flow without falling apart."
Elian, walking behind Lyr with his robes hitched up to his knees, added, "Also because they were arrogant and assumed everyone could swim."
The two wardens Orane had picked for this—Merrit and Tessa—said nothing. They were too busy watching the darkness.
The runoff tunnel they followed was wider than the under-Market one John had described, with a higher ceiling and a deeper central channel where water hurried toward grates and sewers. The air smelled of old stone and river mud and iron.
The hum here was different.
Not just old scar and patchwork fixes.
There was a deeper note, a slow, heavy vibration under their feet, like a creature breathing in its sleep.
"We're close," Lyr said quietly.
"How do you know?" Merrit asked.
"Because my stomach is trying to curl into my boots," Lyr replied.
Orane couldn't hear the hum the way they did—not like Halvar, not like John or Doriane. But she knew how other people moved when the lattice changed. She watched Lyr's shoulders tighten, saw Elian's fingers twitch at his sides as if itching for holy symbols, noted the way Tessa's eyes kept flicking to cracks in the ceiling as if she could see through them.
"How deep are we?" Orane asked.
"Two levels under street," Lyr said. "One above the old Voidborn work. Maybe less. The shard pinged something between here and the sanctum line."
"And the Paragons?" Orane asked.
"Everywhere," Lyr said. "And nowhere. We won't see them until they decide we should."
"Comforting," Merrit muttered.
They reached a larger chamber where three tunnels met and widened into a half-circle.
The central channel broadened here into a shallow pool before narrowing again. Water swirled lazily, flecked with silt and bits of whatever the city had dropped in it over the years.
On the far side, the stone wall bulged slightly inward.
Not warped like the Old Market wall.
Not yet.
Just… swollen.
Like something behind it was pushing.
Elian sucked in a breath.
"I don't like that," he whispered.
"You're not supposed to," Lyr said. "Everyone touch the wall. Gently. Tell me what you hear."
Orane stayed in the shallows.
She put her palm against damp stone.
It was cold enough to sting.
She couldn't pick out the fine strands like Kael or John, but even she could feel the difference between this and the rest of the tunnel.
The wall felt… attentive.
Like it was leaning back.
"Feels like someone holding their breath," Tessa said.
Merrit frowned. "Feels like a toothache," he said. "Like it wants to crack but hasn't yet."
Elian's voice was very soft. "Feels like… a hymn half-sung."
Lyr nodded slowly. "There's an anchor behind here," she said. "Still mostly dormant. But something's been scratching at the shell."
"Paragons?" Orane asked.
"Or time," Lyr said. "Or both. Hard to tell. The shard resonance ended here. I'd bet all of Halvar's ink there's a stabiliser ring
past this wall."
Orane eyed it. "We're not breaking through today," she said. "Maevra was clear."
"We're not," Lyr agreed. "But we can mark it. Strengthen what's left. Make it less friendly to anyone who tries to pry."
"Without waking it further," Elian said.
"That part is your job," Lyr said. "Dorothy's right about one thing; prayers are just structured resonance with flattery. Make the stone feel flattered."
Elian made a face. "I don't like that definition," he said. "But fine."
Orane stepped back, giving them space.
"Keep your ears open," she said to Merrit and Tessa. "If anything shifts, shouts, or smells wrong, tell me before it kills us."
They nodded.
Lyr knelt in the shallow water, robes soaking without complaint.
She took a small pouch from her belt and sprinkled salt in a thin line along the base of the bulging wall.
"Serais swears by this," she muttered. "Personally, I suspect it's eighty percent tradition and twenty percent actual resonance, but I'm not arguing with anything that makes his eyebrows relax."
Elian wiped his hands on his robe and placed his palms on the stone above the salt line.
He closed his eyes.
"Saints of the current," he murmured. "You've done your work. Hold fast."
The hum shifted.
Orane couldn't see it, but she felt the subtle change—the old anchor's restless, sleep-breathing slowing just a fraction, as if soothed.
Lyr added her own piece: fingers touching the stone in precise points, tracing invisible sigils.
"By initial alignment," she whispered, speaking in clipped Voidborn technical jargon. "By first fix. By the day you were carved to keep the world from tearing. Remember your function. Refuse misuse."
The wall shivered.
Water in the pool rippled outward from the base, small waves slapping against the tunnel edges.
Merrit flinched.
"Is that good?" he asked.
Lyr's jaw clenched. "Mostly," she said.
"Define 'mostly,'" Orane said.
"It listened," Lyr said. "It remembered its job. It also realised we're here."
The hum thickened.
The anchor behind the bulge pushed, harder.
Not sliding.
Not cracking.
Just… aware.
As if something very old had opened one eye.
"Easy," Elian whispered. "We're not enemies."
"You're going to confuse it," Lyr hissed. "Anchors don't care about enemies. They care about stress thresholds."
Elian ignored her.
"Water runs," he murmured. "Stones stay. We're asking you to do what you've always done. Hold. Just hold."
Orane's skin prickled.
The bulge in the wall eased.
Not wholly.
Just enough that the stone stopped feeling like it was about to burst.
Lyr let out a breath she'd been holding.
"That's better," she said. "We've soothed it. For now."
Orane scanned the chamber.
"Any Paragon signatures?" she asked.
Tessa shook her head. "No crack marks," she said. "No chalk. No bones. Just… old work."
"Not just," Lyr said. "Old work woke wrong is more dangerous than new."
"Elian?" Orane asked.
The priest opened his eyes.
He looked shaken but steady.
"There's… residue," he said. "Someone drew a symbol here and erased it. Recently. It smells like what we found under Third Chapel. But weaker. They tested. They didn't commit."
"Then we beat them to it," Orane said. "We've reminded the anchor whose side it's on."
Lyr smiled grimly. "Anchors don't have sides," she said. "But we've reminded it what 'holding' feels like without Paragon fingers digging in."
"Can they try again?" Merrit asked.
"Yes," Lyr said. "But now they'll be pushing against the memory of our visit. That makes their job harder. Makes their missteps louder.
When they poke next time, Halvar's precious lines will scream faster."
Orane nodded, satisfied.
"Good," she said. "Then we get out before the river decides to join the conversation."
They turned to leave.
They didn't get far.
Halfway back through the main tunnel, the hum changed.
Not in the slow, creeping way of scar stress.
Violent.
A sharp spike, like a stone dropped into still water from a great height.
Lyr stumbled.
Elian gasped, clutching at the wall.
Merrit's spear tip skidded on wet stone.
Tessa swore. "What now?"
Orane felt it too, even with her dull ear—a sudden, wrong vibration racing along the tunnel from behind them.
"Back!" Lyr snapped. "Something's pushing from downstream."
They ran.
The narrow channel of water whipped into sudden turbulence, slapping against their boots. The air grew heavy, pressure building like a storm front in a confined space.
As they re-entered the anchor chamber, they saw it.
Not the wall.
The water.
The shallow pool in front of the bulge had gone still.
Too still.
Then, from its center, thin tendrils of liquid rose.
Upward.
Against gravity.
They spiraled toward the bulging stone, tips trembling like seeking fingers.
Elian choked. "That's not how water behaves."
"No," Lyr hissed. "That's how badly designed ritual scaffolding behaves when someone triggers it from afar."
Orane drew her sword.
"What does it do?" she demanded.
"If it finishes," Lyr said, "it pulls the stress off the anchor shell and dumps it into the water. The water then carries the fracture downstream. Into grates. Into pipes. Into every crack it can find."
"Like rot in the bones," Elian whispered.
The tendrils inched closer to the wall.
"Can we stop it?" Orane snapped.
Lyr's mind raced.
"This is an echo of the Stabilized Cleave linked to a flow pattern," she said. "Crude. Clever. Dangerous. We can't erase it in time. We can only… misalign it."
"How?" Orane barked.
"By breaking the pattern," Lyr said. "It's expecting a perfect circle of anchored water. If we disrupt the circle, the resonance will
collapse inward instead of spreading."
"Disrupt how?" Merrit asked.
"Drain it," Lyr said. "Or fill it so much the lines smear."
Orane stared at the pool.
"Drain it?" she repeated. "Into what? We're under a river."
Lyr's lips thinned. "Then we flood it."
Tessa blinked. "Flood a flooded tunnel?"
"Flood the pattern," Lyr said. "Right now the water is sitting just at the level their array anticipated. If we bring in enough messy,
uncontrolled flow, the clean lines will blur. The ritual can't complete if its components won't hold still."
"How do we bring in more water without drowning ourselves?" Elian demanded.
Orane's eyes flicked to the central channel.
It ran deeper, darker.
Beyond it, smaller tributary pipes fed into the main flow.
Choice narrowed like a corridor.
"Lyr," she said. "If we collapse one of those pipes, can we dump more water into the chamber without dropping the ceiling on our heads?"
Lyr grimaced. "If we pick right, yes," she said. "If we pick wrong…"
The tendrils ticked upward another inch.
No time.
Orane pointed at Merrit and Tessa. "You two," she said. "Right-hand pipe. Halfway between here and the last turn. Smash it. Hard. Then
run."
Merrit hesitated. "But if we—"
"If I'm wrong, we all drown," Orane snapped. "If we do nothing, the river carries a fracture through half the city. Pick your terror."
They ran.
Elian stayed with Lyr, both of them at the pool's edge, watching the rising water threads like snakes.
Orane planted herself between them and the exit, sword up, as if she could cut the river if it tried anything else.
Merrit and Tessa's footsteps faded.
The hum swelled.
John felt it in the quiet room.
He and Kael were practicing "soft refusals" when the spike hit.
The baseline note shuddered.
The walls around them groaned—a deep, low sound, not panicked, but strained.
Kael gasped, slamming both palms to the stone.
"Where?" he whispered.
John closed his eyes.
He'd learned, over the last days, to distinguish local ripples from distant ones.
This wasn't in the tower.
It came from below and west.
Water in it.
Weight.
River.
"Bend," he said. "Underground. Orane's line."
Halvar swore.
He'd been leaning against the frame, watching their work with his habitual exhausted interest.
Now he stepped fully into the room, chain rattling.
"Dorothy's with Doriane," he said. "Good. Stay here. Feel. If the anchor slides, I need to know how far before the reports catch up."
Kael's eyes were wide. "What are you going to do?"
"What I can," Halvar said, and was gone.
John pressed his hand harder into the stone.
He pictured the river.
The bulging wall.
The shallow pool.
He'd never seen it.
Lyr's diagrams and words filled in the gaps.
The hum wavered again.
Not a slide.
A strain.
Like something trying to twist.
He braced, mentally, as they'd practiced.
"Baseline," he muttered. "Quiet room. Suite. Chalk. Stars."
Beside him, Kael whispered, "Garden. Bench. Halvar's ugly chain. Lyr's ink stains."
They anchored themselves in their own references and listened as the river tried to write its own.
Back under the city, the water threads reached the wall.
They touched stone.
Light rippled along them—pale, eerie, more felt than seen.
The bulge pulsed.
Elian clutched his belt so hard his knuckles whitened. "They're almost aligned," he whispered.
"Not for long," Lyr said through gritted teeth.
Merrit and Tessa came pounding back into the chamber, boots splashing.
"We broke it!" Tessa shouted. "Pipe's cracked. Water's coming—"
The rest drowned in sound.
A roar thundered down the tunnel behind them.
The main channel surged.
A wave of river water barreled into the chamber, foaming, muddy, carrying twigs and trash and the occasional unfortunate rat.
"Hold on!" Orane bellowed.
The wave hit.
Cold slammed into Lyr's legs, nearly knocking her from her crouch.
Elian went down to one knee, water up to his thighs.
The shallow pool exploded upward.
The neat, rising tendrils shattered into chaotic spray.
The hum shrieked in protest as the precise lines of the ritual collapsed under the onslaught of uncontrolled flow.
For a heartbeat, everything was water and sound and pain.
Then, as quickly as it had risen, the surge broke past them, racing down the next tunnel, leaving the chamber awash but not drowned.
Orane spat river out of her mouth.
"Report!" she yelled.
Merrit coughed. "Alive!" he choked.
Tessa groaned. "Prefer not to do that again."
Elian pushed himself upright, water streaming from his robes. He pressed his palms to the stone, eyes closed.
Lyr did the same.
The wall's bulge remained.
But the pressure had eased.
The old anchor behind it hummed, irritated but intact.
The neat circular pattern the Paragons had tried to etch through water was gone—smeared into turbulence, its lines broken.
"It worked," Lyr said, almost surprised.
"Of course it worked," Orane said. "You said it would or we'd drown."
"I said it might," Lyr corrected. "You heard what you wanted."
Elian laughed, shaky and breathless.
"The fracture didn't travel," he said. "I can feel the line. It's bruised. But it's here. Not in a hundred pipes."
"Halvar's going to scream when he sees his undercity flood report," Tessa muttered.
"He can add it to his ledger," Orane said. "We just made his job harder and simpler at the same time."
Lyr wrung out her sleeves. "Paragons know the anchor is awake now," she said. "They'll feel the backlash. They'll know we interfered."
"Good," Orane said. "Let them know we can make a mess too."
Back in the quiet room, John felt the moment the ritual collapsed.
He'd been braced for a slide, for that horrible sense of something giving way, falling.
Instead, the tense, narrow whine in the hum—like a taut string—snapped inward, not outward.
The pressure in his bones eased.
The baseline held.
He blew out a breath.
"Better," Kael said weakly. "Whatever they just did, it stopped the worst of it."
Halvar reappeared, soaked from ankles to knees.
"Orane flooded the pattern," he said. "Lyr says she smeared their lines. Anchor held. My drains, however, did not."
He sounded both furious and pleased.
"Damage topside?" John asked.
"Localized," Halvar said. "A few backed-up grates, one very confused baker, and a dead cart of vegetables. The river vented mostly where we wanted it."
"And the Paragons?" Kael asked.
"Probably very annoyed," Halvar said. "Good. It's our turn."
Doris felt it from the suite.
The hum jerked, then settled.
Brian jerked too, momentarily startled, then giggled.
His laugh chimed through the lattice, a small, bright note overlaying the fading echo of the river's roar.
Dorothy, hand on the wall, smiled grimly.
"Orane just threw a bucket at their cleverness," she said. "Lyr will be insufferable for days."
Doris sank to the floor beside the cradle, knees weak.
"River?" she asked.
"Held," Dorothy said. "For now."
Brian kicked his heels against the mattress and tried to roll again, face screwed up in effort.
Doris leaned over and kissed his forehead.
"Ledger," she whispered.
That night, the pages filled.
In Orane's rough hand, in Lyr's precise script, in Halvar's tight notes, in Doris's steadier strokes, in John's blunt lines.
— River bend anchor. Initial soothing (Lyr + Elian: salt + hymn + Voidborn recall). Paragon flow-scaffold triggered from downstream during exit. Water rising in ritual pattern. Team response: collapsed side pipe, flooded chamber, smeared ritual lines. Result: anchor shell bruised but holding. Fracture echo contained. Under-city drains offended.
Beneath, in Halvar's sharper script:
— Pattern: Paragons tested remote trigger using partially stabilised anchor + river flow. Now know we can interfere. Will adapt. Risk:
next attempt more subtle or in multiple sites at once.
And in Doris's hand, in the family ledger upstairs:
— Brian laughed when the river tried to misbehave. Hum echoed him, not it. Small thing. Important.
She paused.
Then added:
— They keep pushing. We keep saying no. The stones are starting to believe us.
John read the line twice.
"It's not the stones I'm worried about," he said quietly. "It's the people."
Doris looked at him.
"We're stones too," she said. "They're testing our cracks. We're allowed to chip."
He snorted. "You and your metaphors."
"You started it with lines," she replied.
Brian, finally successful in rolling fully onto his side again, crowed in triumph.
The chalk stars flickered as if applauding.
Outside, the river ran past the city, bearing away silt, debris, and the faint aftertaste of a failed Paragon ritual.
Under the streets, the anchors grumbled in their sleep.
In the palace, someone added "flood incident" to a list of tower concerns to be raised at the next council.
In whatever hidden hole they used as a sanctum, Echo traced new lines on a wall and smiled, thinking, Good. You're more interesting than the last ones.
And in a room crowded with chalk and ink and quiet determination, a family listened to the hum and wrote their own story into it, one refusal at a time.
The river had teeth.
So did they.