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“It is a word.” He said something then in a language she’d never heard, but she recognised her own guess inside it. “You were close. Closer than three centuries of your scholars.”
Maia sat down without deciding to. “What does it mean?”
He did not answer at once. When he did, he was looking at the fragment and not at her.
“Hold,” he said. “Or endure. It depends on who is saying it.” He paused. “It is the first word of the Vow.”
The quiet that followed had a different quality to the quiet before it.
“I think it wise to not do that where others can hear you,” he said at last.
“Why not?”
“Because they have spent a very long time being certain that you cannot.”
She should have asked him what he meant by they. She would think about that later, and for a long time afterwards.
“And have you seen it?” she said instead. “Whatever it is that stirs in there.”
His eyes darkened, a shimmer of shadow ghosting across silver. “You’ve already read the fore-stories. I don’t need to tell you.”
“I have. But I like getting my information from the source.”
He smirked slightly, but his gaze went back to the fragments. Maia shifted, a hundred questions on the tip of her tongue. “If it breaks - or opens - fully, does it come for you as well? Or only for us?”
That made him turn. The chains murmured as he set his hands upon the table. His voice, when it came, was quiet but sharpened to an edge. “You ask whether a blade will cut bread or flesh when it was forged only to cut.”
Maia stared at him, ink smudging her fingertips. “You hate being here.”
He tilted his head slightly. “Hatred is a wasted emotion. But if you ask whether we belong…” A faint, humourless breath. “No. We do not belong here.”
The air between them tightened again. The flames hissed softly, as though even fire feared to interrupt.
“Then why help us?” she asked. “Why be in Eryssan at all, if this is how they treat you?”
Caelith studied her for a long moment, and something unreadable passed behind his eyes.
“Because parchment and bells do not hold the Fracture,” he said quietly. “Something moves within it. Something that does not care what you are. And alone, neither survives.”
She had no answer for that. The lamps burned lower as they sat in silence. After a long moment, he looked back to the fragments, and she understood she had been dismissed.
She gathered her notes without another word. Yet as she stepped into the cold corridor, she knew she would return. Because what the fragments were saying terrified her.
And increasingly, so did Caelith.
7
Whispers in the Dark
Maia didn’t leave until night had truly fallen. She was clutching her notes, her fingers stiff with fatigue, when she spotted Julen leaning against the stairwell wall. His arms were crossed, his expression caught between relief and quiet worry.
“You were with him again,” Julen said without greeting.
Maia tightened her hold on the papers. “Oh, mind yourself, Julen. There’s a lot to go through. The Fracture’s not going to fix itself.”
His eyes sharpened. “Working beside a creature bound in chains. I don’t understand why the Elders would put you in that position. The others keep their distance. You don’t.”
His words rattled her more than she expected. “I saw what happened yesterday,” she almost spat. “The people struck first.”
