The summons arrived disguised as politeness.
A boy from the Ordo—one of the new runners, all elbows and pride—found Luminous on the chapel steps, where she was pretending to read Oren's book while actually watching Xion teach Ivo how not to drown a plum.
"Staria," the boy said, every syllable an attempt at adulthood. "They, uh... request your presence. Formal. Briefing room."
"Request," she echoed, closing the book on a finger that had never turned its pages. "That's generous of them."
Oren glanced up from his actual reading. "First mission?" he asked quietly.
"First one they're admitting to," she said, standing. "Keep an eye on the hinge while I'm gone."
"The hinge can keep an eye on itself," he said. "I'll watch the boy."
She looked—just once—at Xion in the square. He was terrible at pretending not to enjoy teaching; his whole body leaned into the knot Ivo was mangling, patient, amused. The tower's tooth sat at twelve-oh-three like a decision already made.
"Don't let him move the bell while I'm away," she told Oren.
"I'm only mortal," Oren said. "Negotiate with your gods. I'll handle the rest."
⸻
The Ordo's briefing room was the usual exercise in humility: low ceiling, long table, no windows, twelve people who thought the world should be grateful they'd decided not to crown themselves.
The gray-haired woman sat at the head, fingers steepled. The Intercalary Clerk stood at the side, chain of numbered discs resting in neat, accused loops.
"Luminous Staria," the gray woman said. "Thank you for coming on time. The Clerk appreciates punctuality."
"I'd hate to starve the hounds," Luminous said, stepping into the ring of their attention. "What have we done to deserve a formal summons instead of a passive-aggressive note under my door?"
"This is your first sanctioned assignment beyond Maryville's threshold," the gray woman said. "Consider it a promotion or a threat, depending on your temperament."
"Promotion," the Clerk said. "She will be evaluated as such."
Luminous made a show of bowing to the chain. "Do I get a disc if I survive?"
"You get to continue existing within our ledger," the Clerk said. "Which is more valuable."
"Flatterer," she murmured.
The gray woman rolled a map open over the table. Not Maryville—this map had fewer streets and more scars. The mortal realm in rough outline, split into regions by rivers and old wars. The northern region took up half the parchment: a smear of mountain ranges, mythic forests, and glyphs indicating things that ate stories for breakfast.
"We've received... attention," the gray woman said, tapping the northern mass. "From an Ascent user anchored here. Name: Fen Eidrik. Title: Cub Warrior. Ninth Array."
The name felt like a howl that had been taught manners. Luminous rested her hands lightly on the table, as if checking that it was still solid. "Ninth Array," she repeated. "I thought you liked your Transcenders at a manageable distance."
"We do," the Clerk said. "He closed some of that distance."
"How close?" she asked.
"Close enough that the Beast Gate paid attention to his last training swing," the gray woman said. "Close enough that the Calendar Court filed a complaint about unauthorized use of lunar myth."
Luminous whistled low. "And you want me to... what? Ask him nicely to stop making the sky nervous?"
"Negotiate a binding," the gray woman said. "He's willing to listen to an Ordo envoy. Our usual representatives would be... poor matches."
"Because he eats accountants," Luminous said.
"Because he eats certainty," the Clerk corrected. "He is an Ascent built on the Moon God mythic beast tree. Darkest Wolf Ascent. His Ninth Array—Cub Warrior—should be capable, at most, of large-city devastation. City blocks to small island erasure, depending on channel integrity." They hesitated, the way a ledger hesitates before writing down a number it doesn't like. "Fen Eidrik is... anomalous."
"How anomalous?" Luminous asked, already hating the answer.
"With Zenphir at full resonance," the Clerk said, "he could wipe the northern region."
She looked down at the map again. Half the mortal realm, inked in rough charcoal. "Half," she said. "You're telling me a single Ninth Array swing could knock half a world off the table."
"The realm is forty-five times the size of the old Earth," the Clerk added, because numbers were their religion. "That is why we are... motivated to negotiate."
Luminous leaned back, arms folding. "You're sending me, with my charming sarcasm and limited stabbing ability, to ask a man who can cut half the world to please sign a non-aggression policy."
"Your sarcasm is an asset," the gray woman said. "Your ability to listen is a greater one. And you are one of the few in this city who has stood in the same paragraph as a Beast Gate and not gone mad. You will not be impressed into obedience when he shows you his teeth."
"The Ascent hierarchy is... sensitive," the Clerk said. "He respects nothing below Ninth Array. But he has heard rumors of Maryville's anchor. Of the bell. Of a Trinity who told the Court no and was not erased."
"Ours truly does get around," Luminous said. "Does Fen know the hinge is still learning how to boil an egg?"
"He knows only that someone with Trinity blood moved the tooth," the gray woman said. "That is all we have allowed to leak."
"Good," Luminous said. "He'd be insufferable if he knew the truth."
"Which truth?" the Clerk asked, but she ignored it.
"Fine," she said. "I'll go smile at the wolf. Where?"
The gray woman's nail clicked a point on the northern edge. A plateau, unnamed on the map, marked only with three small crescents. "Neutral ground. Old temple of the Moon God, long abandoned. Fen agreed to wait there until second dusk."
"And if he's not in a waiting mood?"
"Then you do what you always do," the gray woman said. "You improvise. We'd prefer if the realm remained attached to itself when you're done."
"That's very needy of you," Luminous said lightly. "All right. Show me the door."
⸻
The Ordo's doors were lies until they remembered they were promises. The one they gave Luminous was in the back of a storage room, behind crates of old banners and failed policies: a rectangle of stone mortared into a wall that had no reason to exist.
She pressed her palm to it and whistled the shape of a key. The stone forgot itself and swung inward onto air that smelled like cold iron and pine.
"Don't die," the gray woman said behind her, in the tone of a supervisor reminding an employee not to misplace a pen.
"Not on my first mission," Luminous said. "Bad precedent."
The Clerk lifted their chain. "We will be counting."
"You always are," she said, and stepped through.
The northern plateau received her with the silence of places that have outlived their gods. The sky was a pale bruised blue, cloud seams stitched with moonlight even though the sun was still arguing its case. Mountains ringed the horizon, black along the edges like teeth. The air tasted thin and old.
The temple was more suggestion than structure now: four pillars, one broken; a cracked stone disk half-sunk in the ground; the ghost of an altar. The crescents carved into the central stone were worn, but not forgotten.
He was already there.
Fen Eidrik stood at the altar's far edge, back to her, cloak snapping in the plateau wind like an irritated flag. His hair was black with a sheen of blue where the light found it, gathered in a loose tail. Wolf-silver threaded the temples and the line of his jaw. His shoulders were too broad for the coat he'd chosen, as if muscle had argued with tailoring and won.
Zenphir rested at his side, point in the dust. The sword looked like a shadow someone had sharpened. Its guard curved like a crescent moon bitten by teeth. Runes—lunar, old—slept along the blade's length, dim.
Around him, the Array floated: nine circles of faint light, stacked in an oblique spiral around his spine. Each ring held runes and beast-glyphs; each had a notch where power could be poured and reversed. The Ninth ring was thicker, its edge fuzzed with a darkness darker than shadow.
He smelled like iron, cold water, and something older—wet fur in snow.
"You're early," Luminous said, because walking into Ascent rituals without a joke was bad luck.
Fen didn't turn. "You're soft-footed," he said. His voice was deeper than she liked, with the kind of control that suggested it had been used to command people to die. "The Ordo sends ghosts now."
"They're low on polite faces," she said. "Luminous Staria. Hinge liaison. Festival organizer. Unlicensed therapist. I'm here to ask you not to swing your sword at the sky without calling us first."
He turned then.
His eyes were wrong for a man: irises a washed-out, reflective gray, pupils thin and vertical like a cat in noon; around the edges, tiny fracture-lines of silver light pulsed in time with the breath of the Array.
"You are small," he said, looking her up and down, not lascivious—appraising, the way one might inspect a knife and decide it was for vegetables. "They said you stood beside a Beast Gate and did not beg it for purpose. I assumed taller."
"The Gate has bad taste," she said. "It also likes surprises. I'm one. Zenphir, I assume?"
His hand moved, casual, touching the hilt. The sword's runes brightened a hair, as if pleased to be named. "You know its name."
"I like to know what can ruin my day," she said. "And my maps."
"You know what my Ninth Array can do," he said. "Why are you not on your knees?"
"Because my knees are busy," she said. "Holding up the rest of me."
His mouth twitched. It might have been amusement. It might have been the prelude to murder.
"You Ordo types," he said. "Always pretending the world is a ledger. You think you can talk the moon into clocking in on time."
"We've managed worse," she said. "We got the Calendar Court to admit error. Once. On a Tuesday. It almost killed them."
He looked past her, eyes narrowing. "Where is he?"
"Who?" she asked, knowing.
"The Trinity," he said. "The boy who moved the tooth. The one your city keeps like a dog on a string."
She smiled without showing teeth. "At the moment? Teaching a child how not to weaponize fruit."
Fen's fingers tightened on Zenphir's hilt. The runes along the blade flickered like an eye opening.
"He is here," Fen said quietly, as if correcting a misfiled word. "In the realm. In my sky. And you expect me to ignore that?"
"I expect you to honor the agreement we're here to write," she said. "Your Ninth Array stays pointed at your mountains. The northern region does not become an anecdote. In return, the bell will not ring your name in front of the Gate."
"Do you think I fear your bell?" he asked.
"I think you fear a future where the Gate knows you exist at the wrong moment," she said. "You are not stupid, Fen Eidrik. Stupid men do not survive to Ninth Array. Or they do, briefly, and then become a footnote in someone else's myth."
He stepped down from the altar, each footfall measured, as if he refused to surprise the ground. "You talk like someone who has seen more than she should."
"Occupational hazard," she said. "So. Binding. We put it in the Ledger; you keep your wars on your side of the line; everyone sleeps slightly better."
He walked a slow circle around her, Array humming quietly, rings rotating. She let him, because flinching would be its own kind of surrender.
"You stink of him," Fen said at last, stopping at her back. "Not his body. His... possibility. How do you know his weight?"
"I read," she said. "I listen. And I have better instruments than your paranoia."
"What instruments?" he asked.
"Trade secret," she said.
He came back around to face her, blade still down. "You think your Trinity can stop me if I decide to walk south."
She looked him dead in the eye. "I think he could erase you by accident."
Luminous heard the wind inhale.
Fen's face did not change much, but what changed was important. A muscle in his jaw flicked. The runes on Zenphir brightened, then dimmed, then brightened again with a tremor that had nothing to do with hand movement.
"You have not seen me fight," he said. "You have not seen Cub Warrior wake. With one swing, I could turn the northern forests into a memory. Half this realm would forget it ever grew trees."
"I know," she said. "I counted the hypothetical corpses on the way here."
"You have not seen him," he pressed. "Not truly. He plays at hinges. At tables. At petty coins. He is... restrained."
"That's the frightening part," she said. "He is restrained. Half asleep. No memory of what came before he woke up on a stranger's doorstep and learned how to eat soup. And even like this, you will never come close to him."
The plateau went very, very quiet. Even the old gods' dust stopped moving.
Fen's eyes went thin.
"You speak as if you watched him do... something," he said. "As if he has already ended a world."
"World is a big word," she said. "Let's say: half a people."
His hand spasmed.
Memory took him.
⸻
He was small again, in a village carved into the side of a mountain that had never known conquest. The moon hung fat and kind above the snow. Wolves sang along the ridgelines, their howls harmonizing with the old prayers.
The child walked into the village at dawn.
Red and black hair, messier than an argument; eyes like someone had set a star in water and then shaken it. Bare feet. No weapon. No Array visible.
Fen's father—taller, colder, commander of six packs—had stepped forward with ritual challenge, asking name and purpose.
The child had tilted his head, thoughtful, as if re-learning language. Then he had smiled.
The first house didn't fall; it came apart, its beams remembering they were trees cut unwillingly. The second erupted in blue fire that burned without heat, consuming only oaths. Wolves fell where they stood, their shadows torn free and used as blades against their former owners.
The moon went dark for three heartbeats.
In those heartbeats, half of Fen's people ceased to be.
Fen had survived because his mother had pushed him into a storeroom under the floor and told him to be a coward, just once. He had watched through a crack as the red-and-black child walked through the ruin, expression halfway between confusion and apology, hands wet with something that was not blood and not light.
When the Moon God answered the slaughter with silence, Fen swore to be the kind of monster the child would not ignore next time.
⸻
He came back to the plateau with his teeth already bared.
"You," he said, voice low. "You dare speak of that day as if it were an anecdote."
"I speak of it as a fact," Luminous said. Her heart had sped up—a rational response—but her face stayed in its usual drawer of bored interest. "You remember a six-year-old who butchered half your people. I remember an anchor with no memory who apologizes to furniture when he bumps into it."
"He is playing you," Fen said. "He is waiting."
"No," she said. "He is healing. You're the one waiting."
He lifted Zenphir.
The Ninth ring of the Array flared.
The plateau darkened.
⸻
Cub Warrior woke like a scar remembering why it itched. The air thickened. The light shifted blue, then ultraviolet, then into a shade the human eye had never been designed to parse. Shadows lengthened away from Fen, stretching into lean wolf-shapes that paced around him in a radius.
Each step he took left an afterimage—a smear of darkness that lagged a heartbeat behind, then snapped to keep up. Runes lit along the blade's length, each one a phase of the moon in reverse: full, waning, gibbous, half, crescent, gone.
Luminous felt the power like a tide moving under the stone. This was not the city's neat ledger-magic. This was myth given teeth, running up her calves like cold.
"You are out of your depth," Fen said, stepping forward. The Ninth ring rotated into place above his head like a crown laid on by an impatient hand. "Run back to your tables, hinge-girl. Pray your Trinity remembers your name when he hatches."
"I hate when men monologue standing on old altars," Luminous said, because if she didn't talk she might flinch, and flinching would be the same as conceding scale. "Do you always bring all nine rings to first meetings?"
"You insult me," he said.
"I calibrate," she said.
He moved.
She barely saw the first swing—just the absence where his shoulder had been, then Zenphir coming down in an arc that felt, more than looked, like it wanted to split the plateau from memory.
She threw herself sideways.
The blade did not touch the stone. It didn't have to. The wave of force that burst from the edge traveled out in a clean, contemptuous line, shearing a trench into the mountain face beyond. Rock didn't explode; it simply ceased to consider solidarity an option. Dust billowed, then was pulled upward into the Array, devoured as data.
Even holding back, she thought. That was holding back.
"Negotiation seems to be going well," she said, picking herself up, voice a shade higher than she'd like.
"You said I would never come close to him," Fen said, eyes bright now with something hot and ugly. "You will demonstrate the margin."
He swung again.
She ducked behind a pillar that had once held up prayers. It disintegrated when the shockwave hit—no debris, just vertical absence. The line of un-being swept toward her.
Luminous snapped her fingers.
Rope appeared.
Not literal rope; she wished. This was a strand of Ordo work: a field-line, invisible but properly knotted, that she anchored between two points with a thought. The wave hit it and... folded, slightly, the way a ribbon folds when it encounters a railing. The line of annihilation split, passing to either side of her in twin scythes that shaved the air.
Behind her, two new trenches scored the earth.
She exhaled.
"Cute," Fen said. "You can bend the splash. The stone still gets wet."
"I'm more of a chair person," she said. "Edges aren't my specialty."
Another swing. Another. Each one a potential story of an ending, each one trimmed, redirected, blunted by field-lines and small lies she laid in the way. She was fast. She was clever. She was losing.
He was not even trying to hit her, not really. He was writing a demonstration on the plateau in deep carved letters: This is what happens if I stop being polite. Every near-miss scraped at her mind like claws, reminding her that nothing but his mood separated her from not existing.
"You're not going to aim one at me?" she called, breath short, as she rolled behind the half-altar.
He appeared above her. Literally above—gravity had taken a personal day; the Ninth ring hummed, holding him mid-air as his cloak hung around him like a patient, angry wolf-pelt.
"I don't waste Cub Warrior on envoys," he said.
"Chivalrous," she said.
"One cut for the city," he said, voice roughening. "One for the bell. One for the Trinity. That is all I will need."
He raised Zenphir.
The Array tightened. The air went thin, then thinner, as if the plateau had been lifted out of the realm's atmosphere. Luminous's lungs complained. Dust lifted in a vertical column around him, drawn toward the blade.
This is the swing, she thought. The one the Clerk was talking about. Not full power—this was a warning shot in his mind—but angled badly, even a warning could make the northern horizon... reconfigure.
She tasted iron at the back of her tongue.
Fine, she thought. First mission, and already we're doing this.
Her hand went to her belt.
The Chaos Key was small enough to be overlooked. A piece of metal the color of mistakes, hanging on a thin chain, utterly unremarkable... until you looked too long and realized your sense of perspective was sliding sideways.
It was not Ordo-issued. The Ordo did not know it existed. The Bell Warden had noticed it once and pretended not to. The Gate, when it had briefly tasted its outline, had gone very quiet.
Luminous Staria wrapped her fingers around it and felt the world flex.
"Don't you dare," she said quietly—to herself, to the key, to whatever listened beyond it. "Just a nudge."
She pulled.
⸻
Reality, properly behaved, is a ledger: rows, columns, numbers accumulated and carried over. Ascent magic writes itself in the margins, flourishing where the scribe's hand can't quite reach. The Chaos Key didn't ask for the ledger. It asked what was behind the page.
For a heartbeat, the plateau's sky went blank. Not clouded. Blank. As if someone had cut out that part and left an untextured absence.
The Array around Fen flickered.
Not power failure. Something worse: context failure.
The beast-glyphs that tethered Darkest Wolf to the Moon God myth-tree pulsed, then stuttered, as if uncertain which story they belonged to. The Ninth ring shuddered out of alignment, its perfect circle quivering at the edge, suddenly aware that circles were, fundamentally, lies told about ellipses.
Zenphir's runes flared in panic.
Fen gasped—not from pain, from disorientation. For a being built on narrative, having your narrative yanked sideways felt like losing half your limbs without any blood.
Luminous saw all of it in overlay: the Array, the mythic anchor, the conduits rising up toward a canopy of power that had nothing to do with moons or wolves. Pathways above Paths. A lattice of something older than the realm's shape, moving slowly, with the patience of a parent watching children build empires out of sugar.
Her stomach twisted. She did not look up. She had learned, early, that looking directly at the structure above Arrays made human sanity fray like wet paper.
The Chaos Key hummed in her palm, a pleased, discordant little note.
"Enough," she hissed, and throttled it back.
The sky remembered itself. The Array stabilized—partially. The Ninth ring dimmed; Cub Warrior's full extension recoiled like a tail pulled too hard.
Fen staggered, dropping a foot from the air before the Array caught him. Zenphir's downward arc faltered, the blade shuddering, force bleeding off into mist that smelled of cold ash. The wave that should have carved new geography into the northern region instead skittered along one of Luminous's waiting field-lines and sheared a single, ugly groove into the plateau twenty paces long.
Still too much, she thought. But survivable.
Fen landed heavily, knees bending, cloak settling around him with insulted weight. His eyes snapped to her hand.
"What did you do," he said.
Luminous let the Key hang visible for a second. It didn't look like much. That was the point. The air around it shimmered, slightly, as if depth had gotten confused.
"Stopped you from embarrassing yourself," she said, slipping it back under her coat. "You were about to write a check the realm couldn't cash."
"That was Cub Warrior at a whisper," he said, the words edged with affront and something less steady. "You... cut the root."
"Not cut," she said. "Tilted. There's a difference. If I cut, you'd be on your back howling at a moon that had never met you."
He stared, nostrils flaring. "That harm... that angle... was not Ordo. Not Ascent. Not Gatework. What tree do you belong to, Staria?"
"Houseplant," she said. "Tolerates low light. Needs little watering."
He took a step toward her. The Array around him tried to swell, then thought better of it; the Ninth ring pulsed resentfully, constrained.
"You hold something," he said slowly. "Something beyond Transcender. Beyond myth. It touched my Array like—"
"A teacher correcting a line of bad handwriting?" she suggested.
"—like a verdict," he finished.
She let all the jokes fall for a breath. "You're not wrong," she said. "About him. About that day. There is a version of Xion Trinity that ends more than villages. I've seen the shadow of it. But that boy is currently tying chair-knots for children and arguing with ropes. You showing up with a god-wolf and a sword won't draw him out. It'll just make the Gate curious."
"You think he is... weaker now," Fen said.
"I think he is not finished deciding who he is," she said. "And I think measuring yourself against an unfinished thing is a good way to lose pieces you didn't know you had."
"And yet," Fen said, "you were sure enough of his margin over me to speak as you did."
She thought of the moment under the Gate, the way the Beast had leaned toward Xion like a dog recognizing a scent on a man who claimed to be a stranger.
"I have better instruments than you," she said again. "Take the compliment: you are the strongest Ninth Array the north has bothered to grow. You could tear continents. You could spoil calendars. You cannot touch what's above him."
"Above Trinity?" Fen asked, sharp. "What stands above Trinity?"
She smiled, thin. "That's the part I'm not telling you."
They stood like that for a while: him, blade half-raised, breathing the thin air; her, hand on a Key that was still vibrating with the urge to twist something fundamental. The abandoned temple watched, uninterested. The old crescents on the stone caught a bit of light and pretended they'd always been decorative.
"Here is what you will do," she said at last. "You will keep your Cub Warrior pointed at the edges of the map. You will carve trenches in mountains, not in markets. You'll sign a binding—no swings south of this line without Ordo consent. In return, we will not mention your name in front of the Bell Warden. We will not bring the Court down on your head for unauthorized rearrangement of moonlight. And we will not tell him"—she didn't need to say who—"that the boy in the storeroom survived."
Fen's eyes flashed. "You assume he would remember me."
"I assume he'd be sick when he did," she said. "And I like him the way he is."
His jaw worked. He looked away, toward the mountains. The trenches his earlier swings had carved smoked gently, like arguments that had lost momentum.
"You speak as if you own his future," he said.
"No one owns his future," she said. "That's what scares everyone."
"What if I refuse?" he asked.
"Then I tilt again," she said, fingering the Key through her coat. "Harder. And you spend the rest of your very impressive life wondering why your Ninth Array always feels like it's half a circle short."
He bared his teeth—not quite a grin. Not quite a snarl. "You are arrogant for a First Mission."
"I'm efficient," she said. "Auditors love that."
He looked at her for a long time. The Array around him settled, rings slowing, lines dimming. Finally, he drove Zenphir point-first into the altar stone.
The blade sank in without resistance. The crescents carved there flared once, then rearranged themselves into a new pattern—nine smaller arcs nested within a larger ring.
"Binding," he said. "No Cub Warrior south of this temple without Ordo Meridian's door opening first. No zenith cuts aimed at your bell. No hunts declared on your Trinity while he... chooses."
The air thinned, then thickened—agreement settling. Somewhere far away, the Ledger under Maryville's bell turned a page and wrote a new line.
"Fen Eidrik—bound to altitude," it said, in letters no one would read but many would feel.
Luminous exhaled slowly. "Sign on the dotted altar," she murmured. "Thank you."
"This binding does not erase my oaths," Fen said. "If he comes north, there will be no rope between my blade and his throat."
"We'll cross that scar when we come to it," she said.
He pulled Zenphir free. The new crescents glowed a moment longer, then went dull. The Array around him completed its last slow rotation and sank, each ring folding into his spine in a shimmer of light. For now, he looked merely like a tall, tired man with a sword and too much history.
"You reek of higher Paths," he said, almost conversationally. "One day, Staria, someone will come looking for whatever handed you that Key."
"One day," she said. "Today is not interviewing day."
He snorted. It might have been a laugh in a different life. "Go back to your tables, hinge-girl. Tell your Ordo their north will remain inconveniently attached to their south."
"And you?" she asked.
He turned his face to the mountains. The wind pulled his cloak around him like a word closing. "I will wait," he said. "And I will remember that you said he was holding back."
She didn't say goodbye. Some people you didn't break the air with farewell around. She walked back to the door-stone, felt for the old key-shape with her tongue, and whistled herself home.
⸻
Maryville's air felt heavy after the plateau's thin bite, as if the city had overcompensated with density. The Ordo's storage room smelled of dust and policy. The gray woman and the Clerk were where she'd left them, because of course they were; they had likely not moved since.
"Well?" the gray woman asked.
"I still have knees," Luminous said, stepping through and letting the door close behind. "Your world remains un-sliced. Fen Eidrik has agreed not to repaint the northern horizon without filling out the proper requisitions."
The Clerk's chain ticked, a disc swinging forward. "You fought?" they asked.
"Briefly," she said.
The gray woman's gaze sharpened. "You used... the other thing."
Luminous's expression went bland. "Which other thing?"
"The air smelled wrong for three breaths," the gray woman said quietly. "It is doing it again, around your hand."
Luminous glanced at her palm. She hadn't realized she was still clutching the Key. She eased her fingers open. It lay there, innocuous, like something you might use to wind a clock if you hated clocks.
"I adjusted his aim," she said. "He was about to write his name in capital letters across the northern region. I wrote a margin note."
The Clerk swallowed. For them, it was an act akin to prayer. "We do not have that instrument in our inventory."
"You won't," she said. "You can put 'Luminous Staria occasionally does things you don't understand' in the ledger if it helps."
"It does not," the Clerk said. "But we will anyway."
The gray woman watched her a moment longer, then nodded once. "You negotiated the binding," she said. "You returned intact. That is sufficient for today. We will argue about the rest tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," Luminous echoed. It was a word that had begun to feel like an occupation.
She left them to their papers and discs and walked out into the square.
The festival tables were half gone now, broken down into planks and stacked near Tilda's ropes. Children played on the fountain ledge. Eline was bullying a recruit about posture. Sareen was pretending she hadn't enjoyed giving away plums.
Xion sat on the chapel steps with Ivo on one side and the soot-haired boy on the other, a length of string stretched between his fingers. He was mid-demonstration, tongue caught in the corner of his mouth in concentration, as he showed them the chair-knot the boy had invented.
He looked up when she approached, eyes bright, face open in that irritatingly uncomplicated way he had.
"You're back," he said. "On time. The Clerk will be thrilled."
"They did look like they might smile at one point," she said. "It almost killed us both."
"What was it like?" he asked. "Outside."
"Bigger," she said. "Colder. The chairs wobble more."
He laughed. Ivo laughed because Xion did. The soot-haired boy tied the knot wrong and the string tangled; Xion patiently untied it, fingers deft.
She watched his hands. She thought of Fen's memory: the child in the village, eyes like a broken sky, walking through ruin with bloodless, impossible light on his skin.
"You okay?" he asked quietly, catching the shadow on her face.
"Fine," she said. "First mission. They forgot to issue me a medal."
"I'll make you one," he said promptly. "Out of string and bad policy."
"Perfect," she said. "Make sure it doesn't match anything."
She almost told him.
She almost said: there's a man in the north who remembers you younger than you remember yourself, who built an entire Ascent on surviving you. She almost said: I saw what's above you today, and it scares me, and it makes me absurdly hopeful, and I hate both feelings.
Instead, she put her hands in her pockets and felt the Chaos Key settle against her fingers like a coin she hadn't decided to spend.
"Not yet," she murmured, too soft for anyone but the Key to hear.
Above them, the tower's tooth held stubbornly at twelve-oh-three. The bell did not ring. The city breathed. In the seam behind maps, the Calendar Court underlined a new clause about chairs at wakes and wrote, in the margin: Staria—unknown Path. Monitor.
In the north, on a plate of stone under an old, indifferent moon, Fen Eidrik ran his thumb along Zenphir's flat and felt, for the first time in a long time, something like doubt.
In Maryville, Xion Trinity laughed at a badly tied knot.
Tomorrow, Luminous promised herself, she would set another table. And pay another petty coin. And maybe, if the Key behaved, sleep through one storm.
Tonight, she stood in her city and let the wind from the north slide past her, cool and thin, smelling faintly of pine and old oaths.