Page 28

The Changing City

They saw the spire before they saw anything else.

Eryssan rose the way it always had, crouched between sea and mountain, but the eastern spire was broken now, split near its peak, pale scaffolding webbed around it like a bandage that hadn’t held. Eight days. That was all it had been. Eight days since the night the steps fell, less since the cliff had split beneath them, and the city had aged years in the space of it.

No one spoke as they passed through the outer gate. The guards saluted, and the salute was hollow; their eyes went to Caelith and slid away. Inside, the markets still bustled and the messengers still ran, but it was wrong in a way Maia felt before she could name it. Cracks glowed faintly in the lower walls. A street in the northern quarter had been cordoned with rope and runic wards, the flagstones beyond fused into translucent shards, and someone had built a small shrine beside it: candles guttering against the wind, untended. No one had cleared the glass. No one wanted to touch it.

They went first to the Archive. The white dome loomed as it always had, unbroken at a glance, but as Maia mounted the steps, she saw it: a hairline fissure trailing across one of the lower stones. Small, but visible.

Inside, the council’s summons waited. They were questioned at length about their visit to Meridon. The chamber was thick with accusation and fear. Maia, Rhelas and Julen gave the reports they had scribbled throughout the journey, their testimonies picked apart line by line. Arguments flared about containment, blame, summoning more Umbralyn to the outer ring.

Maia continued to speak and write until her ink and throat ran dry.

The council’s questions circled the same ground for the better part of an hour - the tremor on the cliff road, the collapse, whether the Guardian’s warning had come before or after the ground gave. A younger councillor kept returning to the timing of it, as though a half-second either way might change what they were about to believe about him.

“He said ‘hold tight’ before the crack,” Maia told them, for the third time. “Before. Not after. The Guardian held onto my reins. I remember which one of us was calm and which one wasn’t.”

The councillor made a note and did not look up again.

Deyar and Rhelas were kept longer. Julen vanished toward the side rooms of the Archive before she even left the hall, though she’d expected him to wait for her.

Caelith gave his testimony separately. Maia found herself wondering what he’d said. Whether he had spoken honestly about how he’d been treated. Whether the council had listened or if they carried the same quiet judgement she’d seen in the guards’ eyes. She wondered, too, if he had mentioned saving Rhelas’s life.

The corridor outside the council chamber was colder than the hall had been, and she’d walked half its length before she understood how much of her had been braced.

Her notes had gone crooked in her arms by then. She’d gathered them in the order the council demanded them rather than the order that made sense, and she was sure that somewhere between the dais and the door she’d dropped a few pages. She felt like dropping the rest, as if her accounts no longer meant as much as she thought they would.

As the corridor turned, she saw Caelith crouched at the turn of a passage, one hand flat against the stone, and a sheaf of pages between his gloved fingers. He straightened as she reached him, and did not hand them over immediately.

“You wrote this on the road,” he said, turning one of the pages towards the light.

She looked at the page. The line ran downhill across the parchment, the letters dragging sideways where the mare had shifted beneath her.

“I didn’t want to lose the timing.”

He gave her the page. His fingers didn’t touch hers, but she found herself wishing they had. He noticed her pause.

“What did you tell them?” she asked.

“The truth.” He paused, long enough that she knew there was a second half to it. “They only asked about the warning. Not what came after.”

He meant Rhelas. The collar, the ledge tearing free, the seconds that had decided it. He had not offered it, and no one in the chamber had thought to ask. Now it would not exist anywhere at all unless someone wrote it down.

“Then I’ll put it in mine,” she said.

He looked at her, a moment longer than he needed to, then he stepped aside to let her pass. She went by him close enough to feel the cold coming off his armour, but kept her silence. She carried the pages the rest of the way with both of her hands.

Maia’s new quarters, the Agarin wing, lay beneath the Archive’s north wing; smaller than before, the walls faintly smelling of chalk. A lantern burned low on her desk, her satchel waiting beside it.

The sight of her empty notebooks made her throat tighten unexpectedly. It had been barely a week since they left for Meridon. And yet the world felt older. Much older.

She unpacked slowly until a knock at the door startled her. When she opened it, Julen stood there, hair uncombed, eyes bright with fatigue.

“They’re re-reading every fragment,” he said quickly. “The tremors altered their resonance. None of the old glyphs match.”

“Altered how?”

He leaned closer, lowering his voice.