Morning came, but it did not feel like morning.
The light that slipped through the window slit was thin and grey, the kind of washed-out brightness that belonged to days after storms and nights after bad dreams. It slid over the chalk stars, softened the edges of the pinned letter, and came to rest on Brian's face as he blinked awake.
Doris watched him from the pallet, eyes gritty, body sore from tension instead of battle.
He was fine.
He yawned, fumbled for his toes, and made a happy noise when he found them.
Fine.
He had laughed in a chapel and the stone had listened and the sanctum under it had shifted, but he was fine.
Her heart still tripped every time she looked at him.
John lay on his back beside her, forearm over his eyes. He hadn't slept much either. Each time the bell had twitched in his memory, he'd
reached for the wall, half ready to shove back.
"Still there?" Doris asked hoarsely.
He moved his arm and squinted at the ceiling.
"We are," he said. "So is the tower. The chapel hum is… wrong, but not cracked. Serais is probably baptising the altar in salt."
Doris let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh.
"Come here," she murmured to Brian, lifting him closer.
He grabbed a handful of her hair and tried to eat it.
John rolled onto his side, propping himself on one elbow, watching them both.
"You shouldn't have had to do that," he said quietly.
"I didn't do it," she said. "He did."
"You know what I mean," John said. "You shouldn't have had to… offer him. Not even as an idea."
Her throat tightened.
"I wasn't offering him," she said. "I was offering his existence. There's a difference."
"That's one of Dorothy's lines," John said.
"It's one of mine now," Doris replied.
She shifted Brian so he lay on his back between them, his small arms spread, eyes still full of sleep-fog.
He kicked once, pleased simply to be.
The hum in the room responded—a tiny, bright shimmer around him.
Not as sharp as in the chapel.
Familiar.
Domestic.
"Ledger?" John said, the word more habit than request.
"Later," Doris said. "If we write it now, I'm going to start shaking."
He nodded.
They lay there for a moment, all three of them, breathing.
The tower did the same.
Word of the chapel incident spread faster than any official report.
By mid-morning, the corridor outside the family suite hummed with a different sort of noise: whispers.
"…heard the altar cracked—"
"—no, it glowed, my cousin saw it—"
"—the hymn turned inside out—"
"—someone said the Wail laughed and the bell nearly fell—"
Flint opened the door once, took one look at the gathered students, and shut it again.
He turned back to the room.
"Well," he said. "We're popular."
Dorothy snorted. "You were popular before this," she said. "For all the wrong reasons."
"Jealousy is ugly," Flint replied.
The ward-sigil pulsed.
A more official knock followed—precise, measured, three short raps and one longer.
Halvar.
John opened the door.
The Rector looked like he had slept exactly enough to function and no more. His eyes were red at the corners, his chain slightly
straighter than usual, his shirt only half-wrinkled.
"We need to talk," he said.
"Can it wait?" Doris asked sharply. "He only just woke up."
"No," Halvar said. "But we can do it in pieces."
He stepped inside, shutting the door firmly behind him.
Outside, a student whispered, "Was that him?" and another hissed, "Shut up, they'll hear you."
Halvar ignored them.
He looked at Brian first.
The baby regarded him solemnly, wriggled, and then lost interest in favor of his own hand.
"Is he all right?" Halvar asked.
"Yes," Doris said.
"We think so," John added.
Halvar's mouth twisted. "Honest," he said. "That's a good start."
He moved to the table and set down a folded piece of parchment, heavier than most.
The seal was not the tower's.
It was the palace's.
Doris's stomach dropped.
"So," she said. "They noticed."
Halvar barked a joyless laugh. "The entire district noticed," he said. "You heard the bells. Sound carries. So does gossip. Palace
runners were at the chapel before Orane got the last student out of the pews."
He tapped the parchment with one finger.
"This," he said, "is the Emperor's response."
John tensed.
"What does it say?" he asked.
"That he is 'deeply concerned' about the integrity of Third Chapel," Halvar said. "That he 'applauds the swift action of the Academy and Church' in averting tragedy. And that he 'would like, at the earliest appropriate moment, to be introduced to the child whose resonance is now woven into the city's sacred stones.'"
Doris closed her eyes briefly.
"Of course," she said.
"He doesn't say 'weapon' or 'asset,'" Halvar continued. "He says 'child.' That's… something. But he knows. At least in rumor. That the bells changed when Brian laughed."
"And you?" John asked. "What did you write back?"
"I haven't," Halvar said. "Maevra has. A very polite 'not yet.' But we both know this moved his request from 'idle curiosity' to 'political priority.' We needed you to hear it from us, not from a student muttering outside your door."
Flint raised a hand. "For the record," he said, "I would've made it sound worse. You're welcome."
Doris stared at the seal.
"He'll push," she said.
"Yes," Halvar said.
"And Maevra will push back," John said.
"Yes," Halvar repeated.
"And eventually," Doris said quietly, "we'll have to let him see our son."
"Maybe," Halvar said. "Or we'll have to risk saying no in a way that makes the palace rethink how much it needs Aetherion."
"Can you afford that?" Flint asked.
Halvar rubbed his temples. "No," he said. "Which is why we're going to try to avoid a direct collision for as long as possible."
He looked at Doris and John, eyes tired but clear.
"You gave the chapel a new note last night," he said. "A better one. I am grateful. The city is safer for it. But you also made Brian brighter on the lattice. We can't pretend otherwise. So we plan. For the sanctum. For the Emperor. For rumor. For the day a Paragon decides the best way to crack a hymn is to steal its source."
"Comforting," John muttered.
"I promised you no comfort," Halvar said. "Only honesty."
Doris exhaled through her nose.
"We need to change the quiet room," she said abruptly.
Halvar blinked. "Explain," he said.
"The baseline can't be just 'tower,'" she said. "Not anymore. The chapel fields have tasted him. If we don't incorporate that into our training, we'll be surprised every time his resonance leaks. I don't like surprises."
Halvar's mouth quirked.
"I hate that you're right," he said. "I'll talk to Lyr.
We'll add a 'Brian layer' to the drills."
Flint laughed. "You're going to write his giggle into the curriculum."
"I doubt we can avoid it," Halvar said.
He pushed the palace letter toward them.
"Read it when you have the strength," he said. "Don't answer it. That's Maevra's job. Your job is to decide where your lines are. Yesterday
we added a new one, whether we meant to or not."
He turned to go, then paused at the door.
"For what it's worth," he said, without looking back, "I'm glad his first word to the chapel was laughter. There are worse things for a sanctum to learn."
Then he left.
The whispers outside swelled as the door opened, then died as it shut.
Doris stared at the letter.
"Later," John said.
"Yes," she agreed. "Later."
Brian, oblivious to imperial seals and sanctum politics, sneezed.
The crooked star pulsed in sympathy.
The chapel district changed shape that day.
Serais cleaned the altar himself.
He didn't let acolytes near it until every faint hint of crack sigil had been scrubbed, salted, and re-consecrated.
He led three services back-to-back—smaller, quieter, controlled. No experimental hymns. No updated verses. Just old songs, old words, the same patterns the stone had known for generations.
"Isn't that… regressive?" one junior priest asked, eyes nervous.
"Tradition is not the enemy," Serais said. "Stagnation is. We're not refusing change. We're refusing sabotage. There's a difference."
Under his feet, the chapel hummed in approval.
When he stood alone in the nave afterward, he pressed both hands to a column and, despite himself, whispered, "Thank you" to the stone.
He wasn't sure if he meant the anchor, the tower, or the child.
Possibly all three.
Rumors evolved.
"The Wail screamed and the altar cracked."
"No, he didn't scream, he laughed, that's worse."
"The Rector wants to bottle his voice."
"They say Maevra is hiding him in the Spire."
"I heard the Emperor's already ordered a cradle built in the palace."
Kael, passing a group of students animatedly acting out the hymn incident—one playing the bell, another doubling over dramatically as
Serais—rolled his eyes so hard it hurt.
"You people need hobbies," he muttered.
"We do," one of them said. "It's called 'trying not to die when the chapel explodes.'"
"Then you might consider listening more and reenacting less," Kael snapped.
They blinked at his tone.
One girl flushed. "Sorry," she said. "We were just—"
"Scared," Kael finished. "I know. So is everyone else. Including the people you're gossiping about. Think about how you'd like it if they did charades of your worst moments."
He walked away before they could answer.
Or before they could see how his hands trembled.
In the quiet room, the work shifted.
Lyr and Halvar had already been planning to introduce chapel overlay into baseline drills.
Now they added something else.
Brian.
They didn't bring him to every session.
He was still a baby, not an instrument.
But once, twice a week, Doris carried him into the stripped, humming chamber and sat on the floor while they worked.
"Listen," Dorothy told the room. "This is what home sounds like upstairs."
She hummed one of the caravan tunes that had woven into their nightly rituals.
Serais added a thread of chapel hymn.
Halvar laid his hand on the wall, grounding it in the tower's deep pulse.
Lyr sketched a faint echo of sanctum field.
And in the center, Brian babbled.
At first it was nonsense.
Half-formed sounds.
Gurgles.
Wet consonants.
The walls didn't care about meaning.
They cared about pattern.
When he repeated a cadence—three short sounds, one longer—the hum mirrored, faintly.
"Like a call-and-response," Elian said softly.
"Exactly," Serais replied. "That's how we teach children hymns. And altars."
"Are we… indoctrinating the stone?" Flint asked once, leaning in the doorway.
"Yes," Lyr said without remorse. "It's about time someone did it in a direction I approve of."
John's role in these newer drills was stranger.
He didn't always touch the wall.
Sometimes his job was simply to stand between Doris and the stone and say "no" when the wrongness edged closer to Brian.
He did it with increasing ease.
Not because he grew comfortable.
Because he grew practiced in drawing that line in his mind:
Not him.
Not through him.
Not this way.
The stone learned that too.
Stubbornness had its own resonance.
Doris grappled with guilt in ink.
The ledger pages blurred under her gaze more than once.
She wrote anyway.
— Chapel incident has made him brighter to the lines. We chose that. Or allowed it. Difference is academic. I keep thinking of the town that cracked. Of all the children there whose names I never knew. We "protected" them by running. We saw the fracture starting and we fled. Now, when the crack comes to the chapel, I stay. I put my son in the hum. I don't know which failure is worse.
She tapped the quill against the page until a small blot formed.
John read over her shoulder later and added beneath:
— Both times you were trying to keep people alive. That matters. We can't raise him in a silence that kills. The Paragons already wrote
him into their story the moment they looked at the caravan in the canyon. We're writing our own version. If his laugh saved a chapel, that's not just "using" him. It's him existing loudly enough to make things better.
She didn't wholly believe him.
She believed him enough not to tear the page out.
Two days after the hymn incident, Maevra summoned only four people to her office: Halvar, Serais, Lyr, and Dorothy.
The room smelled faintly of rain and old ink.
The tower's hum here was steady, like a deep drumbeat.
"The Emperor will want movement," Maevra said without ceremony. "He has already requested a full report. Not just on the hymn. On Brian."
"Will you give it to him?" Serais asked.
"I will give him a report," Maevra said. "Not the
full one. I will describe the chapel incident as a failed Paragon infiltration. I will note that the child's resonance interacted with the field in an unexpected but stabilising way. I will not tell him how much the stone liked it."
Halvar rubbed his temples. "You realise he will read between the lines," he said. "He'll know we're leaving things out."
"Good," Maevra said. "Let him suspect we have more leverage than we do. It will make him cautious."
"And when he insists on seeing the boy?" Lyr asked.
Maevra's jaw tightened.
"Then," she said, "we remind him that sanctums are stirring under his chapels. That his tax base stands on anchors he has ignored for generations. That our work with Doriane and John is the only thing standing
between him and a very expensive rebuilding project. And that if he spooks them, I may decide to take my tower and my Voidborn refusal and my Aetherbound child and walk."
Halvar blinked. "You can't walk the tower," he said.
"No," Maevra said. "But he doesn't need to know that."
Dorothy chuckled. "Bluffing an Emperor," she said. "I knew I liked you."
Serais sighed. "Be careful," he said. "His pride is fragile. If you prod it too hard, he'll cut off his own face to spite your nose."
"I grew up in this city," Maevra said. "I know how its monarchs sulk. I'm not asking his permission. I'm informing him of the reality:
we have a crack under our chapel. We are dealing with it. The child is part of that work. He can either support that or get out of the way."
"And if he chooses neither?" Halvar asked. "If he demands, commands, orders?"
Maevra's gaze was flint.
"Then we find out how much he loves his own sanctuaries," she said. "And whether he's willing to risk them for a closer look at a baby."
That evening, after another round of quiet room drills and more rumors of the Wail's chapel "performance," Doris took down the letter to Bridget.
The chalk mark that held it came away easily under her thumb.
She unfolded the parchment and read the words she'd written days ago.
I am not dead.
We are not safe.
If the world ends, it will not be because we did nothing.
She added a line at the bottom, squeezed into the margin:
P.S. Apparently my son can argue with bells. Never tell him I wrote that; he'll be unbearable.
She stared at it.
"Send it," John said quietly from behind her.
She didn't turn.
"We can't," she said. "If they intercept—"
"If the Paragons intercept," he said, "they'll see nothing they don't already suspect. Caravan. Voidborn. Baby. They already know that. What they don't know is how stubborn you are, or how sarcastic Bridget can be in response. Let her have this. Let you have this."
Dorothy, listening from her chair, spoke without opening her eyes.
"Send it through Ren," she said. "He'll wrap it in enough ledger chatter to bore any cultist who opens it."
Doris glanced down at the cramped script.
"What if I never see her again?" she whispered.
"What if you do?" John replied.
The hum in the room was quieter than it had been in days.
No chapel echoes.
No bell memories.
Just baseline and the small, bright thread that was Brian.
She folded the letter, kissed the outside once, and held it against her chest.
"All right," she said. "We send it."
"Ledger," John murmured.
She glared at him.
Then sighed.
"Ledger," she agreed.
He wrote:
— Sent first letter to Bridget (via Ren). If intercepted, Paragons will know we have friends and a sense of humor. They may consider that a threat. Good.
She added, beneath:
— If it reaches her, she'll mock me into staying human. I need that.
Night fell more gently than it had before the hymn incident.
No bells screamed.
No anchors stirred.
No Paragons scratched at the chapel's foundations.
At least, not in ways anyone could feel.
In the suite, under chalk stars and over the faint echo of a laugh that had rewritten a verse, a family prepared for rest.
Brian was fussy—overtired, overstimulated, cranky.
He refused to settle in the cradle.
He refused to settle on the pallet.
Finally, Doris carried him to the wall and leaned her back against it, humming the "Turning of the Year" under her breath.
He squirmed.
Then, slowly, relaxed.
His breathing matched the hum.
The wall's resonance shifted to match him.
John watched, arms folded.
"Do you think we did the right thing?" he asked quietly.
"With the hymn?" she said. "With the letter? With the sanctum drills? With him?"
"All of it," he said.
She thought for a long time.
"I think," she said finally, "that there was no right thing. Only wrong things and less wrong things. I think letting the Paragons finish
that verse would have been worse. I think hiding him from every echo would be worse in a different way. I think… we're making it up as we go."
"That's not reassuring," he said.
"It shouldn't be," she replied. "But we're not alone. We have Halvar and Maevra and Lyr and Serais and Orane and Dorothy and… even Ren with his ledgers." Her mouth twitched. "And we have a baby who laughs at bells. That has to count for something in the stories they tell later."
He moved closer, shoulder brushing hers.
He could feel the hum against his back.
It felt… less hollow than before.
Fuller.
Not safer.
Just more honest.
"Tomorrow?" he asked.
"Quiet room," she said. "Sanctum drills. Maps. More arguing with Halvar. Maybe the Emperor throws a tantrum in ink. Maybe the Paragons try another hymn. Maybe they don't."
"And us?" he asked.
"We keep saying no," she said softly. "We keep teaching the stone what that sounds like. We keep loving him louder than they can threaten."
Brian sighed, finally, and went limp against her shoulder.
The crooked star glowed, bright and steady.
The tower hummed around them—chapel, sanctum, baseline, and a thin, clear thread that had not been there before: a child's laugh lodged in stone.
Stones remembered.
So did people.
So, someday, would he.
For now, he slept, held between two people who would walk into sanctums and argue with emperors and defy cults just to make sure he woke up to another morning of thin grey light and chalk stars and toes to discover.
For now, the cracks held.
For now, the hymn was theirs