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Her hand gripped the marble railing until her knuckles blanched. She took a step forward. Just one. The marble stair felt suddenly too narrow, too confining. If she reached the square, if she spoke clearly enough—
A hand closed hard around her wrist.
“Don’t,” Julen hissed, his breath sharp against her ear. “Are you mad?”
She wrenched against his grip. “Let go of me.”
“You step down there,” he murmured, “and they’ll turn on you too.”
“Then let them.” She twisted her wrist again, harder, though his fingers only tightened. “Someone has to say something, Julen.”
“Someone else,” he said. “Not you. Not today.”
“That’s what everyone tells themselves. That’s how it never gets said at all.”
His grip didn’t loosen, but something in his face did. “You’ll get yourself killed trying to be right, Colwyn.”
Below them, another stone struck silver flesh.
Maia gasped, loud enough to hear this time. Her body leaned toward the square even as Julen’s grip held her in place. For a moment she imagined wrenching free, but instead she hated herself for standing still while a child’s stone drew blood. She knew the vows the Umbralyn had been forced to swear and knew what they endured for breaking them. But her tongue stuck fast, Julen’s grip and the scholar’s words from her first day pounding in her ears.
Best not to notice.
Her jaw ached with the effort of staying shut. In her village, silence like this would have been its own kind of scandal. A whole street would have spilled from its doors at the first stone thrown, if only to shout the thrower down. Here, stillness was a kind of manners, and she could feel herself failing to master it. Her whole body strained forward while her feet stayed rooted. Obedient.
Then she felt it again. A weight across her skin, colder than the sea air. She looked up beyond the square.
In the shadow of a pillared colonnade, another figure stood. The air around him looked strangely still, as though the wind that circled the rest of the square refused to touch him.
Caelith’s eyes were fixed on the younger Guardian, but he did not intervene. He did not move to shield his kin. He simply watched, like the violence before him was something he had seen before and had long since stopped expecting to change.
Before she could think on it any further, his eyes shifted and found hers as she stared at him.
She didn’t have time to react before he looked away with no readable emotion. But something uncomfortable had risen along her throat, knowing he had seen her standing still while one of his kind bled.
Had he seen her stand there and do nothing? Did he hate her for it? She hated herself enough for the both of them.
At last, the temple guards took the injured Guardian through the far arch, and the crowd let them. Maia did not know where the arch led. Perhaps it was a cell, a court, the cliffs, or perhaps it was nothing at all. No one thought to ask. Their fear had been fed, and now life went back to normal.
When she looked again, the colonnade was empty. Caelith had gone, the shadows beneath the arches closing over the place where he’d stood, stone swallowing him and leaving no seam.
She lingered at the railing long after the others had vanished inside. The square was quiet now, only wind and a few broken voices left in it.
Shame moved through her, though she couldn’t say which shamed her more. What she’d watched, or that he had watched her watch it, and do nothing.
The city she had come to for answers had only given her more questions. About the people here. About the Umbralyn.
And now, about herself.
6
The Chains That Bind Us
The Archive’s chamber was even colder the next day, its high arches filled with the hisses of whispered arguments. The fragments lay spread across the central table, their edges glimmering faintly like glass dipped in dew. Tension grew tighter by the hour, yet the truth remained stubbornly out of reach.
Master Orell stood with his arms folded, his robes rustling as he surveyed the scribes and scholars.
“These fragments are tainted. The tongue is broken, the symbols incomplete. Our best minds have strained at them for days and made little sense. And still the Elders insist.” He spat the words like a curse. Even the other masters avoided meeting his eyes.
