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She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t have to.
A long silence followed.
Selinne exhaled slowly. “If we don’t find him…”
Maia nodded. “The Fracture opens.”
“How long?” Julen asked.
Maia closed her eyes, searching the memory’s edges. “A week or two. Maybe less. Once they’re done coaxing, there’s no stopping it.”
Selinne went pale. “That means—”
“Everything,” Maia said. “The cities. The outer provinces. Anyone close enough to feel the pull.”
She swallowed.
“Our families.”
The silence that followed was the kind that hollowed you out from the inside.
“What will we do?” Selinne asked.
Maia inhaled.
“I didn’t see where he is,” she said. “But I saw where they operate from.” She closed her eyes again, chasing the memory, the cavern, the jagged table carved from fractured stone, the smell of iron even in a vision centuries old. “Not in the city, at the edges. Close enough to the Fracture to feel it, far enough to stay hidden. I saw it - the tunnels where they first gathered, after his brother died. I’d wager everything I have that it still exists and it’s still theirs.”
She met their eyes, steady despite the storm breaking inside her.
“If they’re holding him, it’ll be there. Near the Fracture. It’s the only place they’ve ever trusted enough to hide anything that matters.”
“And you think he left that for you, in the stone? To help find him?” Julen asked.
She looked at the stone. “He didn’t leave that for me to find him,” Maia said quietly. “He left it so someone would understand. Not to be saved. To be known.”
She turned toward the exit, heart pounding, her resolve burning cold and fierce.
“If we’re going to stop this,” she said, “we start with Caelith.”
She was already reaching for her cloak before anyone answered.
39
He Waits
CAELITH
They had moved him on the sixth day.
Hooded, through more turns than the distance warranted. He had counted them anyway, and the count had told him what his guards had not. That he would be going to the source. The Fracture.
The light in the new chamber never changed.
It was not bright enough to mark time, nor dim enough to permit rest. A flat, colourless glow seeped through the stone, erasing shadow without offering warmth. There was enough to see, just about, and Caelith understood immediately that this was intentional. Shadow allowed imagination, and darkness allowed sleep. Of course, they permitted him neither.
There were no wardlines cut into the floor here. There had not been any need. The power bleeding off the Fracture was enough to hold the containment by itself, so that every time he moved toward the threshold, the air would warp and send him back, and afterwards the pressure travelled through his bone: a reminder that resistance would be answered.
He had written the proposal for it himself, a long time ago. A containment sited close enough to the tear that it would need no upkeep, no rotation, no one standing watch. Efficient, he had called it. Humane, even, because nobody would have to be so cruel on purpose.
