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Safir ignored him. “Continuing your plan is our choice now,” he said and turned towards the door. “We’re merely finishing what you started, Caelith. Remember that.”

After he left, the chamber felt smaller. The Fracture shifted, impatient now.

He could still sense the resonance between wardlines and shards embedded throughout the stone around him - that faint familiar hum that told him, in its own indirect way, that Eryssan still stood and that the fragments there still answered to something.

He thought of Maia, the way he always did now, without meaning to.

He wondered if she could feel him now, the way he felt like sometimes he could feel her. A strange certainty with no evidence behind it, the sort of thing he would have called superstition in anyone else. But in this cold, wet, shadowless room, he allowed himself to hope that she could.

Would she come for him? He calculated in silence, mapping probabilities against time. Four or five days, they had. Perhaps fewer.

He didn’t know how to want her to come and also brace for what her face may look like when she did. Whether the warmth he knew well would be gone once she had found out what they were doing. How much of it he was to blame for.

He didn’t deserve rescuing. He was no longer certain he deserved to be waited for, either. But he took comfort in knowing that if she knew everything, she would make her own decisions. Whether she decided to choose him or hate him.

And if Maia came - if she came - it would be soon. And if she did not, he had decided he would still resist.

For his brother. For her.

Pain, he could endure. Silence was nothing. But what he could no longer endure was becoming the thing they believed him to be.

The Fracture breathed. Caelith breathed with it.

And then he waited.

40

The Quiet Withdrawal

They hadn’t made it past the gate the night before.

Patrols had doubled somewhere between Maia reaching for her cloak and the three of them reaching the lower stair - Umbralyn stationed at every junction that had been empty just an hour earlier. Selinne pulled them back before they’d been seen. Not tonight, she’d said. Tonight we’d just die for nothing. And Maia had hated her for being right.

After seeing everything the stone had shown her, Maia could finally see the final pieces being put together.

The fragments hummed everywhere now, as though threaded through the stone itself. The energy coming off them seemed to grow every hour, and so did the Umbralyn surveillance. Lanterns burned at their usual intervals, and scholars moved between sectors with their heads bent over notes and measurements, speaking in hushed tones about pressure fluctuations and containment drift.

Even the way people were moving changed. Scholars and civilians would pause when turning down a path, in case they set a foot wrong.

Another reassignment placed Maia in a smaller analysis chamber, closer to the reinforced zones, and with her usual escort. This time, though, the fragments brought to her were already stabilised, already catalogued before she touched them. She was asked to confirm conclusions rather than draw them.

The context told her that someone had decided what mattered before she ever touched the glass. But that still didn’t stop her from shaking every time her fingers met it.

The Umbralyn noticed. “Do not worry yourself, Scribe. No more assessments are needed. You are…” he hesitated, his words uncertain. “Safe.”

“Of course,” she replied, compliant.

But it struck her, walking back to her desk, that she had not actually read a fragment in days - only confirmed conclusions someone else had already reached. She was no longer a scribe, not in any sense that mattered. She was a formality. A number. A person kept busy so she would no longer ask what she was kept for.

Later that morning, Julen arrived with his new escort, irritation poorly concealed beneath forced composure. He’d been deemed well enough to return to his duties, another pointless exercise.

He didn’t greet Maia immediately, only set his notes down with more care than necessary and leaned closer once the Umbralyn stationed at the far wall turned his attention elsewhere.

“They’ve sealed the archive annexe now,” he murmured. “No explanation.”

Maia stayed looking at the fragment in her hand rather than turn to him. “Safety measures?”

Julen’s mouth tightened as he exhaled. “Obviously.”