They intended to go straight home—more because the weight of the coin-disk made Kael's cloak sag than because they cared for ceremony. But Emberfall's edges kept secrets of their own, and those secrets liked company.
Liora found them before they found her. She was half-kneeling at the mouth of a shallow ruin where cracked stones wore the shapes of letters. Her fingers were stained with ink the color of river silt; a smear of the same dye crossed one cheek. She wore the practical clutter of someone who made tools instead of excuses: a leather apron lined with pockets, small metal vials hooked like trinkets, strips of wire coiled into neat loops. Her hair, cropped close to her skull and dyed a startling blue, caught the dim light and made her look like someone who had borrowed a shard of sky.
She didn't startle when Kael and Arin approached. Instead she lifted one hand, smudged fingertip held out like an offering, and said without preface, "You smell of river and old blood. Which one is yours?"
Arin blinked, then grinned. "Both," he said. "Name's Arin. This is Kael. We—" He gestured vaguely at the ruined lip of stone and the disk tucked beneath Kael's cloak. "We found something."
Liora's gaze sharpened on the cloak. Up close she had the look of a scholar set loose in a market: quick, hungry, the kind of person who could read meaning into a torn bootlace. "Show," she ordered.
They sat on splintered stone while she unwrapped the disk as if it were a cooked thing. Her fingers were gentle and fast. When she pressed a fingertip to the runes the plate hummed faintly and the marks skittered like insects in a line of light. Liora's mouth made a small O. She did not smile; she catalogued.
"This is older than Emberfall's founding," she said. "Not many here can read these curves, but I can guess." She scrabbled in a pocket and produced an inch-thick bound scrap of paper, bundles of taped pages that looked like they'd been rescued from a storm. "I collect fragments. I like old letters better than new promises. Hand it here."
Kael passed it over, wary and curious. Liora set the disk into the hollow of her apron and began to compare the carved marks with the paper's inked loopings. Her eyes, bright blue and coldly amused, traced the lines as if tuning a tool. She muttered single words to herself—old names, syllables like keys—and then stopped.
"This matches," she said at last. "Partial. A sigil, likely meant for a gate or a lock. Whoever bound it to that beast meant to carry the ward with them. Either they were guarding something, or someone else wanted whoever wore it to be followed."
Arin's grin thinned. "Followed by whom? Ghost-lords?"
Liora rolled her eyes. "By men who know how to read stone. Or by other plates like this. Or by wards that will snap shut if you think the wrong thought." She tapped the paper and flipped the pages to show neat diagrams—arches rimmed with curls, runes arranged like teeth. "See these lines? They repeat across the ruins. The ancients liked repeating things. Repetition makes a spell remember itself."
Kael felt something like cold settle in his chest. The disk had been embedded in a beast. That beast had been wearing a ward. The idea that someone—some thing—had once carried that ward deliberately did not feel comforting.
"Why are you out here?" Kael asked. "You could be in Emberfall, selling your things. Why study ruins?"
Liora's mouth twitched. "Because in Emberfall they trade what already exists. I prefer trading what people think can't be made again." She tapped the paper with a reckless pride. "And because ruins talk if you listen. If you learn their language you find tools the merchants missed."
Her hands moved quickly then, producing a tiny contraption from her apron: a spool of thin wire coiled around a bead of glass and a sliver of polished metal that reflected light like a second sun. She set it on the stone and clicked two tiny levers. The bead pulsed, a pale light tracing the disk's runes when Liora held them near. In the bead's glow the engraved lines looked younger, as if the light breathed into them and woke the marks.
"See?" she said. "Your disk sings in a language only some lights can hear. And when things sing, other things listen. We should be careful."
They were careful at first—careful until curiosity tugged their sleeves hard enough to ignore caution. Liora traced the runes with her thumbnail, matching them to the diagrams in her book. The moon had climbed higher and silvered the hollow of the ruin. Arin's ember scuttled like a moth at the edge of their circle, warm and restless. The shadow beneath Kael's skin flexed with a minor impatience, as if eager for the next instruction.
"What does it mean?" Kael asked.
Liora's fingers stilled. She wiped the ink from her thumb and said, "Part of a gate-binding. The old words don't translate nicely—no one speaks them anymore—but think of it like a map and a password. The ancients made doors between places that don't naturally touch. This plate is a latch."
"A latch to where?" Arin asked.
Liora's gaze drifted to the dark throat of the ruin. For a long second she said nothing. Then, in a voice that held no pretension or performance, she said, "To other realms. To places built when the world was less tidy. There are names—slurred now—that hint at sky-bridges and places the elders call Celestial and Shadow. Whoever bound this plate wanted a gate to be held or hidden."
Kael's shadow tightened, prickling like a hound hearing its master's step. He thought of the thing in the thicket and of the hush that had followed its fall. Gates meant movement. Movement meant dangers and opportunity braided together.
Liora tapped the edge of the disk and the bead flared, sending a thin line of light across the ruin's floor. The line ran along a seam between stones and stopped. Arin, who liked motion as much as he liked bread, nudged the line with his staff. The stone gave a whisper of sound like someone stirring embers. For a fraction of a breath the ruin felt less dead.
"I don't like this," Kael said plainly. He had learned to trust the simple lines that slid across his mind. Danger came in the quiet of things.
"Neither do I," Liora admitted. "It's a trap more than a gate when a ward is sewn to a beast. Whoever did that didn't want the plate left loose." She looked at them both and the expression she wore then was less scholar than strategist: keen, pragmatic. "We either take this to someone who knows more—if there is such a someone—or we try to lift the ward and see what it unlocks. If it's only a map, fine. If it wakes something…we might have to run."
Arin shrugged in a way that tried to hide fear and failed. "Run sounds worse than lift," he said, forcing a laugh. "But I can run fast."
They set a plan as if it were a rope: Liora would attempt to read and, if possible, unbind the plate with her devices; Arin would be ready to light and blind whatever woke; Kael would hold the shadow between them—shield and lock—ready to bind. The pact was modest, like all good plans: each boy and the blue-haired inventor had a single, clear job.
Liora worked with tools that clicked and breathed. She sang small phrases under her breath—soft, made-up words that calmed her hands. The bead of glass flashed, the runes glowed, and then the plate thrummed a deeper note that settled into bone. She pressed her palm flat to its face and closed her eyes.
For a moment nothing happened. Then a sound like distant weaving filled the ruin, and the seam between two stones opened in a whisper. A faint column of light—thin as a reed—rose from the gap and formed a translucent loop in the air. The air around it smelled of iron and salt and a memory Kael could not place.
Liora's eyes opened wide and she laughed—half with triumph, half with the sharpness of someone who had almost burned their hand. "It's a marker," she said. "A beacon. Not a full gate, but a pointer—a signal in the dark. It marks a place somewhere else. There will be more plates. This is a breadcrumb."
Arin whooped and clapped Kael on the back. "Breadcrumbs mean treasure," he said.
Kael's shadow did not celebrate. It tightened like a cord pulled taut and the hairs along Kael's arms rose. The light-loop pulsed once—and with that single pulse the ruin answered as if a bell had been struck. Stones hummed. Dust drifted. From somewhere deeper, a mechanism sighed to life: a wheel turned, a trap set long ago unlatched.
Rocks shifted underfoot. A slab tipped with a sound like a catching throat. The ground under Arin's feet gave with a hollow sound and his foot slid toward a seam. Kael caught his staff out and shoved at Arin's shoulder; their motion was clumsy, imperfect, human. The seam swallowed air and let loose a spray of fine dust. Arin stumbled; his heel nearly fell into a shallow pit that had opened like a mouth.
Liora swore and dropped her tools. She rolled, blade of wire spooling free to snag at stone as she moved, and grabbed Arin before his foot went into the pit. Kael slammed the shadow-braid against the moving slab as if to glue it, and the dark material thickened and held the stone just long enough for Arin to scramble back.
They tumbled out of the ruin's throat, coughing and blinking. For a breath none of them spoke. Then Liora spat a piece of grit from her lip and laughed again—this time thin, incredulous. "Well," she said. "That was the trap part."
Kael's chest thumped under his shirt. He felt the economy of narrow escapes like a tally on his ribs. The disk still warmed his palm where he held it, and in the bead's glow the rune-lines had grown faintly brighter—a breadcrumb answered.
Liora scrubbed her hands on her apron and met Kael's look. "You have something dangerous and interesting," she said simply. "Keep it close. Keep it secret. And if you want to learn how to ask a stone what it means, come see me. I can teach you to listen."
Kael nodded. The shadow inside him pressed once—no sound, a small pressure of approval. He realized, sitting in the ruin's shallow light with dust clinging to their sleeves and the coin-plate heavy in his hand, that the world had started to expand in a way he could almost measure: a notch of danger here, a line of knowledge there, and a friend who could read both.
They walked back toward Emberfall just after dusk, the disk tucked inside Liora's apron now (she had insisted on holding it while she thought), and the ruined stone behind them settled into its old, patient silence. The bead in Liora's pocket ticked like a small heart, and somewhere beyond the hedges, the village bell began to count the hours.