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The Fracture.

Another quake rolled through the earth, hurling her sideways. She caught herself on the stair rail, barely upright—

Then a groan split the air.

The building beside her tore free as stone blocks the size of oxen pitched downward. Maia couldn’t move. Her body wouldn’t listen, as if a part of her had already decided this was how it ended and had stopped bothering to argue. Her only option was to stand and let the stone cover her.

The world narrowed to a falling shadow.

Then—

Something hit her.

But it wasn’t stone. She was thrown hard to the side, shoulder slamming against the ground as something massive crashed where she had just stood. The steps exploded in a spray of shattered rock. Dust swallowed the square whole.

For a split second, she couldn’t breathe. She coughed loudly, clawing for air. Her ears rang and her limbs refused to obey, but she couldn’t shake the thought: someone had shoved her.

She knew it. She felt the shape of it in her bones; the direction of the force, the deliberate angle. She dragged herself upright through the choking haze. Shapes moved in the dust, shadows cut through ruin.

But for the briefest moment, she saw one silhouette standing unnaturally still at the base of the broken steps. The dust swirled around everything else. Around him, it seemed to hang.

When her vision cleared, there was nothing there. Only rubble and screams and the broken steps where she would have died.

Her pulse thundered as she felt the imprint of a hand tingling between her shoulder blades. And some part of her, small and unwelcome, hoped she already knew whose it was.

8

Rubble and Sceptics

By morning, the bells began. One toll for each of the dead. Maia stood in the grey light and counted, and when they reached nineteen they stopped, the silence was worse.

They tolled low and slow across streets still scarred by stone and dust.

Dawn had already broken, but with the scribes’ quarters destroyed, there were no chambers to return to. Maia, Julen, and the others had spent what remained of the night clearing rubble and carrying the injured to the healer’s wing. At one point she’d found herself passing stone hand to hand with Selinne, neither of them speaking, until Selinne’s voice had cracked over a name - a friend, she said, in the collapsed wing, and she didn’t know yet - and Maia had put an arm around her shoulders because there was nothing else to give.

After the bells rang, they entered the Great Hall, which had minimal damage to the lower floor.

The hall was packed far beyond its usual capacity. Merchants with soot-streaked hands, scribes with ink-stained sleeves. Artisans, dockworkers, even children clutched close to their parents. Fear moved through them as if it were contagious.

Maia felt eyes on her. Many eyes.

At the dais, the Elders stood robed in grey and crimson. Elder Maerin stepped forward, his staff striking the stone once.

“The Fracture stirs more violently than it has in a century,” he announced. “Last night’s tremor claimed nineteen lives. Homes and quarters were lost. Streets cracked. The Fracture remains closed, barely. This… this may be the beginning of an opening.”

A wave of sound rolled through the chamber.

Nineteen dead. Homes crushed into themselves, streets split like wounds torn open again.

Another Elder stepped forward, thin and severe. “We have found no evidence that the Umbralyn caused the tremor. They remain bound to their vows. None strayed from their posts.”

For a moment, the chamber was silent. Then someone laughed.

“Bound?” a merchant snarled. “They live among us now and the earth breaks beneath our feet!”

“They brought it with them!”

“Chain them tighter!”