Lilian waited until Bastet's breathing had deepened into the slow, heavy rhythm of true sleep. A part of her, the small, frightened girl who had survived the forest, screamed at her to stay, to huddle by the fire and wait for the safety of his protection.
But she could not rest. Her mind latched onto one possibility she could not dismiss, a thought that circled like a vulture: Wesia could create an endless legion of stone here. But they weren't. The operation was small, secretive. A handful of stone workers in a forgotten quarry. The question hammered at her. Why?
Bastet had guessed that perhaps the living statues could not leave the city. But the answer born of her fear was far more terrible. It was because this was only the beginning. It was a test. A seed being quietly planted in the dark, where no one is looking, waiting for the right moment to grow. And when it began in earnest, what would happen then? She thought of the children from the chaos priest's forest, their hands sewn into a living horror. That was the art Wesia promised. And the army being built here could unleash that same horror on a continental scale. Bastet was right to be cautious; his promise was to keep her safe. But this was a terrible secret, and she was the only one who could go back and warn them. Bastet, with his mind fixed on leaving, would not act on what they had found. She closed her eyes, forcing herself not to imagine. But it was the blueprint for the end of her world.
It was her duty, but it was personal as well. She thought of her father. Bastet said they could not yet meet. He was still out there, advising the Covenant army, believing he had saved her. But gratitude was a hot, sharp shame in her throat. She was the reason he was in this war. She got caught. Her childish desire for an adventure to Olenos had cost a dozen men their lives and had made her a liability her father was forced to redeem.
But now… now, she would no longer be returning to her father as a burden. She held a secret of immense, world-altering importance. A secret that could change the course of the war. She could give him something that would finally help him, something to make him proud. The thought solidified into a cold, hard resolve that eclipsed her fear. The mission was simple. A quick reconnaissance. She just had to see.
Slipping out of the villa was easy. The silent city was bathed in the silver light of the moon. She kept to the shadows of the grand, ruined colonnades, her footsteps an insignificant sound in the vast emptiness. The beauty of the place was even more haunting at night. The shattered statues seemed to whisper stories she could not hear, their broken forms a testament to a forgotten tragedy.
She moved down a wide, marble-paved boulevard that must have once been a processional way. On a villa wall, a magnificent fresco of a philosopher teaching his students was partially obscured by a great, black scorch mark that had burned away his face. Further on, a fractured statue of a musician stood on its pedestal, but his marble lyre was shattered, its silent strings snapped.
She finally reached the city's heart, a vast central plaza surrounding the ruined skeleton of the main palace. The destruction here was on another scale entirely. Craters from immense impacts pocked the gardens, and the palace itself was a jagged maw of broken towers and collapsed archways. But she saw nowhere among the ruins that could conceal an army of the scale she feared. Her mind raced, sifting through the fragments of history she had gleaned from the rotting books in the villa. The texts were inconsistent, their histories blurred, but one detail had appeared in several of them: a solution to the city's seasonal droughts. When the river Odna ran low in the summer, the city drew its life from a vast, subterranean cistern built beneath the main plaza, an architectural marvel spoken of in reverent tones.
A place large enough to water ten thousand citizens. Or to hide an army. She circled the ruins of the broken lion-headed fountain at the plaza's center. She searched its base, and found it: a section where the marble paving stones had been shattered, revealing not dirt, but the top of a grand, spiraling staircase descending into absolute blackness. Taking a deep, steadying breath, she began her descent.
The air grew cold and still, the silence so profound that the only sound was the frantic, hammering beat of her own heart. And then, she saw light in the distance. Her hair stood on end. She knew she had found something important, if they were keeping the torches alight this deep into the night. The stairs opened into a space of breathtaking, impossible scale.
She pressed herself into the shadow of a marble column as wide as an ancient oak, her eyes fixed on the single, crude Wesian torch bracket hammered into the next pillar a hundred feet away. She took a breath and darted across the open space, where the marble flooring gave way to shallow water and soft gray clay that sucked faintly at the soles of her boots. As she reached the next column, the flickering light washed across a shape standing just beyond it. She froze.
What she had taken for another pillar in the darkness was not a pillar at all. Standing ankle-deep in the still water was a colossal figure, its horned head bowed, its massive axe resting against its stone shoulder. A minotaur, just like the one from the workshop. Its blank, sculpted eyes seemed to stare into the darkness just past her.
Her breath caught in her throat. She flattened herself against the cold stone, forcing herself to stay silent, to listen. There was nothing. No movement. No sound but the faint hiss of the torch and the dripping of water from some unseen height. Cautiously, she peeked around the other side of the pillar. The torchlight was weaker here, but it was enough. It was not one minotaur. It was a line of them.
She had found proof, but not enough to carry home. A line of minotaurs told her Wesia had soldiers here, not how many, why they remained hidden, or what kept them here. She knew she should turn back. Instead, she moved from the shadow of one colossal pillar to the next, her path guided by the sparse constellation of distant torches. Each pool of light was a new, horrifying revelation. Here, a squadron of gargoyles, their wings folded, their claws trailing in the black water. There, a cluster of beings so twisted she could not put a name to them, their forms a nightmarish fusion of man and beast.
Finally, she reached the edge of a vast, central expanse, where the torches burned brighter. She peered around the last column. Rank upon silent rank of stone monsters stood in perfect, disciplined formation. But they were not facing outward, as if to guard against an intruder. They were all facing inward.
Their formation was a perfect, containing circle. And in the center of that circle, scattered across the vast, torch-lit floor, were thousands of other statues. But they were not statues of monsters, and they did not move. They were statues of ordinary people, frozen in a single moment of terror. She saw a merchant, his face contorted with shock, his hand outstretched as if to ward off a blow. She saw a young boy, no older than ten, his arms wrapped around his mother's leg, his face buried in the folds of her stone dress. She saw a city guard with his spear raised in a futile attempt to shield the family behind him. And there was something different about these statues. These were not the idealized, eerily beautiful faces of the settlers above. They were flawed, asymmetrical, human. Their clothes were the simple tunics of commoners, and their bodies were imperfect. She took a single step forward, trying to see their faces more clearly, her foot landing with a soft splash.
The sound was a whisper, but in the absolute silence of the cistern, it was as loud as a scream. A hundred stone heads turned in unison. The minotaurs, the gargoyles, their blank, sculpted eyes fixed directly on her.
She had been discovered. She had to run. But a cold numbness shot up her leg. She tried to step back, but her foot was already heavy, her ankle growing hard and losing color, turning into immovable stone. At last, a sickening understanding washed over her. The statues here… these were the people of Statia. The original inhabitants. The city did not merely turn stone to life, but it had swapped their places. The living had been turned to stone, and the statues brought to life. There was no pain, but the numbness was quickly spreading. It had already reached her knee.
She had failed. But the knowledge could not die with her. She had to send a message. The bird. If the city had given purpose to the crude shape she made, perhaps it would do so again. With a final, agonizing effort, she bent down and scooped a handful of the wet, gray clay. There was no time for art. She simply coated her hand in the slick mud, fitting it like a glove. Using the nail of her other hand, she desperately scratched three words into the surface. The letters were crude, barely legible. She tried to retrace them, to make them clearer, but the fine control of her body was waning, her fingers already feeling like foreign objects. The monsters were approaching. No air would enter her petrified lungs. She poured all of her remaining will into a single, silent prayer, begging the city's strange magic to recognize this crude shape as a sculpture and give it purpose. As if in answer, the clay solidified and slipped from her stone fingers, landing with a soft slap on the floor. With a dry, scraping sound, it began to crawl back towards the staircase and the world of the living. It was the last thing she saw before her eyes became stone, and the world went silent and gray.
***
The clay hand crawled under the doorway, stopping its grim pilgrimage by his feet. It was crudely formed, a half-clenched fist made of drying, gray clay. As he watched, the fingers slowly unfurled. On the rough surface of the palm, three words had been desperately scratched into the clay, the letters barely legible: TURNED TO STONE. The moment he finished reading, the magic holding the effigy together seemed to vanish. The fingers crumbled, the palm cracked, and it dissolved into a small pile of gray dust and dried mud on the floor.
He stumbled back into the villa, his legs weak, and slumped onto a stool by the cold hearth. The weight of his failure crushed the air from his lungs. He had promised Kreil he would keep her safe, and now he had failed him twice. He should have never let her leave. He should have barred the door, argued louder, tied her to the chair if he had to. He was her protector, and he had slept while she walked out alone. Self-loathing burned through him. He was alone again.
He looked up, his gaze falling on the cracked stone faces visible through the doorway. Turned to stone. The thought was a spark in the darkness of his despair. Thomas. Gaius. Sybil. They were stone, but they were alive. They walked, they spoke, they worked. An impossible hope took hold. The curse of this city, the magic that had taken Lilian… it did not just end life. It changed it. If the curse turned the living to stone, and the stone in this town was alive… then Lilian was not gone. She was just… like them. One of them.
And he would not allow it.
His hand closed around the hilt of Folly's Edge. He had failed to protect her, but he would be damned if he failed to bring her back. He stormed out of the villa and into the pale, pre-dawn light, searching for Thomas.
The city was a labyrinth of stone, and he had no idea where to begin. Where would a man made of living marble rest? Did they even need to?
His first, desperate thought was the Sculptor's workshop. He ran, his footsteps loud and clumsy on the marble boulevards, the hundreds of broken, inert statues watching him pass. He burst into the workshop, Folly's Edge in his hand. It was empty. The colossal minotaur stood in the center of the room, half-mended, its face frozen in rage. The Sculptor's tools were laid out with precision, but the man himself was not here.
Frustration gnawed at him. The quarry? No, that was a place of labor, miles away. He stood in the middle of a deserted street, utterly alone, the scale of the dead city pressing in on him. He was a man of the fields, used to open skies and clear lines of sight. He hurried toward the central plaza, one of the few places in the city where he could see more than one street at a time. He burst into the vast, open space and saw him. Thomas was sitting on the edge of the shattered fountain, his single hand resting on his knee, watching the sun begin to rise as if he had been waiting for him all along.
Bastet stormed across the marble, his hand tight on the hilt of Folly's Edge. He stopped a few feet from the stone man, his body radiating a furious, desperate energy. "Where is she?" he growled.
Thomas watched Bastet cross the plaza but did not rise. His gaze dropped once to the hand clenched around Folly's Edge, then returned to Bastet's face. The weariness there had deepened into pity. "The girl has paid the price of knowledge," he said, his voice melodic. "And now she knows."
"She's one of you now, isn't she?" Bastet's knuckles were white on his sword. "You turned her to stone! Did you think I would just let that happen?"
Thomas's fingers tightened against his knee. "We did nothing," he said. "The city did what it has always done. She rests now, along with the others."
"Bring me to her!" Bastet lunged, his fist aimed directly at Thomas's head. But before it could connect, a force, brutal and absolute, seized his arm. It was not an external power, but a rebellion from within. The muscles in his arm locked, spasmed, and his arm went completely limp, the strength draining out as if a plug had been pulled. For Thomas to be harmed by him would be against the interests of their masters. The Oath would not allow it. Bastet fell to his knees on the marble, helpless.
Thomas's gaze fell to Bastet's useless arm. The same weary recognition Bastet had seen in the villa returned to his eyes. He made no move to help.
Defeated, Bastet pushed himself up. His arm was a useless weight at his side. He could not force the truth from Thomas. But he could still find it himself. He turned from Thomas and took a single, desperate step toward the dark, gaping entrance leading underground. Lilian was looking for a hidden army, and perhaps this space was something she had searched.
"Stop."
The word was flat and toneless, stripped of Thomas's usual measured cadence. Bastet turned. Thomas had risen from the fountain. His jaw was clenched, and a faint tremor ran through his stone body as he fought against the words he was being forced to speak.
"It is my duty," Thomas said, the words coming out clipped and unnatural, "to inform you, an asset of Wesia, that to enter the heart of the city is to join the long dream. You will be turned to stone. I am forbidden from allowing an asset to be willingly destroyed."
The trap was complete. Bastet could not fight Thomas, and now that he knew what waited below, his own oath would not let him knowingly throw his life away. He was bound by the city's curse from the outside and his own from within. His rage turning to a black, sickening despair, he turned without another word and walked back to the silent villa. When he arrived, he slumped onto the stool under the weight of his absolute failure, his gaze sweeping over their useless supplies. The waterskin, the rope, the knife… all tools for a world with normal rules.
Thomas's words echoed in his mind. He said that Lilian was trapped in a long dream… And then he remembered. The vision from the hut. The little girl crying forever in an absolute darkness. It had not felt like a dream. It had felt like an echo, a wound in the world. A dream that was real. It was an absurd thought. But he had no practical options left. He had no logical path forward. All he had was the impossible. His eyes fell upon the dark, heavy tome Lilian had left on the table. The book of madness. The piece of the one who clouds your judgement when you dream.
It was a trap. A poison pill. But it was his only path forward. The insane logic was undeniable. If she was trapped in a dream, he had to find a way into that dream. And the master of dreams had left behind a key bearing what he claimed was his own authority.
He walked to the table. His hand hovered over the dark, heavy tome, the leather of its cover seeming to drink the candlelight. He thought of his own mind, and the violation of the interrogator's probe. What he was about to do was a thousand times worse. A willing invitation to a god of madness. But then he thought of Lilian, alone and terrified, trapped in an endless nightmare. His hand closed around the grimoire.