The mountain did not sleep after the sky burned. All night the ridge breathed white light in slow waves that rolled over rock and pine, then thinned to a pale seam along the spine of the valley. When dawn finally took hold, the glow retreated into the caves and left the snow bright and ordinary on the upper ledges. The world below was not ordinary. Roads were split by bands of dark soil that did not belong to this century. A river that should have kept to its old channel now braided through a cluster of square houses and then vanished into a sink of black reeds that no map could explain. In the nearest town, a row of new streetlights stood in a line beside a set of stone pillars carved with moons. The two rows were the same height. The air carried the faint metallic smell it had carried since the Lotus Flame.
Mira woke to that smell and to the quiet murmur of people working in rooms that used to be empty. Her chest rose and fell without the old stutter. The weight she had carried so long was still there, but it behaved if she did not ask too much of it. Her body was light and wrong in familiar ways: palms too warm, forearms tingling, skin heavy with a faint, steady glow. When she opened her eyes, the world arranged itself around her in pale planes and soft edges, not sharpened, not cured, but changed. White lashes made a thin veil at the edge of her sight. The ceiling above her was stone, the old kind, not dressed by machines. A thin draft moved along it as if the mountain was breathing through its seams.
Selina sat by the bed with a ledger and a cup of water. She had slept a little and badly; her hair was unbraided and pushed behind one ear, her sleeves rolled to the elbow. She looked at Mira's face for a long, steady second and then stood.
"Good morning," she said.
"Morning," Mira answered. Her voice was a little raw. "How long?"
"Since the burst?" Selina checked the small brass watch she had scavenged when the power failed. "A night and a morning. You slept most of it."
"Any bleeding?" Mira's hand drifted to her mouth without meaning to.
"Not after the first hour," Selina said. "Heat, yes. Nosebleed, no. Your pulse climbed and settled twice."
"Did I hurt anyone?"
"No," Selina said. "You shook the chamber when you exhaled too hard. The ward held."
Mira shut her eyes. The faint light behind her lids was not sunlight. It was the same quiet that had filled the lotus when the shell cracked. She could still feel the memory of petals against her ribs. She could still hear the low sound the mountain made when it took the blast and did not break.
Kael stood in the doorway. He did not come closer at first; he watched the line of Mira's breath until it convinced him. He looked tired in a way that did not show in his face, only in how he kept his hands very still at his sides.
"Are you in pain?" he asked.
"No," Mira said. "I feel too much. It's loud without noise."
"Then we slow things," he said. "We can turn some of it down."
"How?"
"Breath. Counting. Contact with cold stone. We teach the body what to listen to." He glanced at Selina. "Do we have water and salt?"
Selina passed him the cup. "Salt, yes," she said. "The small jar."
He took a pinch and dissolved it with his finger, then held the rim to Mira's mouth. "Sip."
She did. The taste grounded her more than she wanted to admit. It was simple and clean and human. She finished half the cup and the pressure behind her eyes eased.
"I can hear everyone," she said. "Not words. I know where people are."
"That will pass," Selina said. "It will become a tool, not a flood."
"It's too much to be mine," Mira said, opening her eyes again. "It feels borrowed."
"Everything feels borrowed after a day like yesterday," Selina said. "We return what we can. We keep what we must."
"Everyone is safe?"
"For now," Selina said. "The lower wards held. The clan who woke when the city opened are stable. We are reorganizing the halls. We don't have power from the grid. We do not need it while the mountain breathes."
"Outside?" Mira asked. "The town?"
"Bad," Kael said. "Worse in the distance. The grid dropped in patches. Some places are dark. Some are half-bright, half something else. There are reports of animals that aren't animals we know. We saw a fox with antlers. We drove it off. It moved like a thing taught to move by someone who did not know foxes."
"People?" Mira asked. "Are there calls for help?"
"There are too many," Selina said quietly. "We have already taken in more than we can feed for three days. We're sending small teams down and bringing up only those we can keep alive. We will do more when the elders finish the first map."
"The elders," Mira repeated. She touched the edge of her blanket. "They saw me last night."
"They did," Selina said. She did not add you lit their city. She did not add they bent their heads. "They will not put you on a chair and call you something. Not while I am the person opening that door."
Mira breathed out and watched the stone above her tremble very slightly. She closed her mouth and waited for it to settle.
"Don't push," Kael said, crossing to the wall to put his palm against the seam the ward ran along. "Let the mountain match you. It will."
Footsteps passed in the corridor in a pattern that already felt like the mountain's new pulse: two quick, one slow; the hiss of wool; the scratch of boot soles. Voices came and went. None of them rose above work-volume. The air held the clean smells of water boiled on coals and wet stone. Someone somewhere cut bread with a dull knife and someone else cursed at a knot in a rope.
Mira tried to sit up. Her body argued and then obeyed. Selina moved the pillow without making it into a performance. She tested the strength in her hands against the blanket and accepted that she had enough for now.
"I want to stand," she said.
"Not yet," Selina said. "You will in an hour. We do not lose what we won because we treated the first morning like a race."
"I can try."
"You can," Selina said. "And in an hour you will succeed."
Kael left his hand on the wall for another breath and then lowered it. "There is a meeting," he said to Selina. "You should lead it."
"I will," she said.
He looked back at Mira. "I'll be at the door."
She nodded. He left without turning his back to her. He had never done that before yesterday. She did not know if it meant anything. She memorized the new detail anyway.
When the first hour was done and the mountain had added it to its ledger of the morning, Selina brought in a bowl of porridge and a folded cloth. Mira ate half without tasting it and the second half with effort because she had told herself she would. When she stood, she kept one hand on the post and one on Selina's sleeve. She took three steps and did not fall. She sat again and did not pretend she was not shaking. Selina wrote something small and private in the margin of the ledger and closed it.
"Now the hall," Selina said. "If you are steady."
"I am."
She was not entirely steady. The corridor was longer than her legs wanted to accept. The turn into the council space happened before she was ready for it. The hall itself felt open and heavy at the same time, a high room cut into the rock with an oculus that admitted the square of white sky. There were marks on the long walls that had not been made by hand yesterday. The room had decided to show its age because the city below had decided to exist again. The elders had no banners. They had three long tables pushed together and a map drawn in charcoal across old parchment, then amended on the stone with chalk and ash.
Selina stood at the end of the table with her palms down. She had slept badly and she was the sharpest thing in the room. Kael stood two paces behind her left shoulder. He did not touch the table. He looked as if he might lift it with one hand and remove it if it got in the way.
An elder with iron hair nodded to Mira without a flourish. "You are well enough to listen?"
"Yes," Mira said.
"We need plain truth," the elder said. "If you feel weak, sit. If you feel pain, say so. We will go on either way."
"I can listen," Mira said again.
Selina spoke first. "The lower valley is unstable," she said. "The modern road is split by two bands of mana-rich earth. Machinery fails inside them. Engines choke. Radios die. Our teams can cross on foot. We leave vehicles at the edges and pick them up on the other side. We mark the safe stones and move the markers when the lines shift. The lines have shifted twice."
"Water?" another elder asked.
"High flow in the main river," Selina said. "It absorbed a channel from the old map. It carved a new course through a car park and a row of sheds and is behaving like the old river today. That may change. The spring at the south mouth is drinkable. We are boiling everything above the lower bridges."
"Food?"
"Enough for ten days if we ration," Selina said. "If we do not take in more refugees. We will take in more refugees. We need a fields plan by the third day. We can seed fast crops in the lower terraces if the soil does not poison them. We won't know until we try. The animals we kept above the fourth gallery are frightened but sound."
"Threats?" The iron-haired elder looked at Kael.
"Scouts saw three things they did not expect," Kael said. "One: a stag with two rows of antlers and bone plates over its eyes. It charged a tree that should have stopped it. The tree split. Two: a flock of birds that did not fly as a flock. They cut the air in a pattern. The pattern pushed the scout sideways. Three: footprints at the river mouth that belong to nothing from here. Claws. Six-point pattern. Deep as a barrel. The stride is long and careful. It was not running."
"People?" the elder asked. "Organized?"
"Red Veil retreated after the blast," Kael said. "They lost a third of their outer ring to the mana surge. The beasts turned on them. They pulled back to the highway turnoff and set a line. Arthur Halden got out with two trucks and seven men. He is moving east. He is not coming here today. He will come when he thinks he can turn it to his name."
"Do you have confirmation?" the elder asked.
"Nora left a message," Selina said. "She did not use a phone. She used a mark on the back gate we taught her for emergencies. The mark says the Red Veil will march when they find a path that does not kill them first. She says dawn tomorrow or dawn the next day. She says Arthur took a call from the Council. She says Harland is with him. She says Harland smiled when the sky burned and pretended to cry for the cameras."
"We will not debate Harland," the elder said. "He is not a puzzle. He is a rat with a human face. We will step on him if he comes up the path."
Mira held on to the back of a chair. She could feel the eyes in the room and she did not shrink from them. She was not ready to stand alone in the middle of the stone. She was ready to be in the room without apology.
"What do you need from me?" she asked.
"First," Selina said, "you need to live. That means we limit your output until your body can pay for it. You do not push to prove something. You do not test your limits in a room with other people in it. When you breathe, you think about the stone above your head and the stone beneath your feet and you match it. If the ward hums, you stop and drink and sit. You do not burn to make anyone feel safe."
"I understand," Mira said.
"Second," Selina said, "we will use your awareness, but only in measured minutes. You will sit with me and listen for three things: breaks in the ward, concentrated motion on the lower path, and any voice that is not a voice but a pressure. If you feel a pressure, you tell me at once."
"What is a pressure?" Mira asked.
"You will know it," Kael said. "It is a presence that does not belong to an animal or a person. It wants a door and does not ask."
"Third," the iron-haired elder said, "you stand beside Selina when we speak to the people we have taken in. They need to see you alive. They do not need a sermon. You say your name. You tell them we will feed them if we can and we will protect the children first and the sick second and the strong will take a shovel. Then you leave. Do not stand for their tears. We will deal with tears."
"I can do that," Mira said.
"You can," Selina said, softer.
They worked through the map, square by square. Runners came and went to pass new markings to teams in the lower terraces. Two teenagers brought a tray with cups of barley tea. No one pretended it tasted good. They drank it and moved on.
At midday, a string of flares wrote a jagged line across the southern sky. It was not fireworks and it was not a storm. The mountain answered with a low tremor, not fear, only notice. The clan below the oculus looked up as one body.
"Mana storm," Kael said. "Small."
"It twists above the highway," an elder at the far table said, squinting through a brass tube. "It is making a funnel over the east line. The funnel isn't touching the ground."
"People will say it is a sign," someone muttered.
"It is a sign," another answered. "For anyone with eyes."
"Call the scouting pairs back to the first ring," Selina said. "No one goes past the south marker without a rope and someone watching."
Mira felt the shape of the storm in her bones before she translated it into weather. It was cold and high and metallic. It smelled like the coins Nora used to jangle in her pocket when she was nervous. The thought of Nora brought a brief, sharp ache. She did not ask where Nora was. She already knew what the mark on the back gate meant. It meant danger and guilt and loyalty twisted into something that made no one happy.
After the meeting, Selina walked Mira back to the small chamber that the mountain had allowed them. It was not grand. It was dry and it had a bed and a bench and a place to set down a cup. It had the sound of people nearby, not crowding, only present. Kael stayed at the door and gave short instructions to a boy about firewood and watch intervals and how to speak if a stranger's voice came down the corridor. The boy nodded without staring at Mira. She was grateful for that.
Selina sat and opened the ledger again. "We keep this for our own heads," she said. "Not for anyone else."
"Write," Mira said.
"Morning after blast," Selina said as she wrote. "Breath steady with guidance. Heat present, controllable. No bleed. Awareness high. Able to stand and walk under supervision. No energy output without request."
Mira watched the pencil because it was easier than watching Selina's face. "You slept badly," she said.
"I slept," Selina said. "Badly is still sleep."
"You're afraid."
"I am careful," Selina said. "That is not the same as afraid."
"It is for me."
Selina set the pencil down. "Do you want me to lie?"
"No."
"Then yes," Selina said. "I am afraid of losing you to people who think a light in the sky is something to own. I am afraid of the force in your body when it does not have enough blood to pay for itself. I am not afraid of you."
Mira held her gaze for a long time. "Are you sure?"
"I am sure," Selina said. "You are a person. I am a person. We will act like it."
Kael leaned on the doorframe and listened without the pretense of not listening. "We do not make her a shrine," he said. "We do not make her a weapon. We keep her alive."
"Yes," Selina said.
"And you," Kael added, looking at Mira, "you tell us before you fall. No more making your face into a wall so no one will worry."
"I can try," Mira said.
"You can do more than try," he said. "You can tell the truth out loud."
She almost smiled. "You too."
"Fine," he said. "I will tell the truth out loud too. It is not as hard for me."
"Liar," Selina said, and the word had the weight of a hand on a shoulder and not the sting of a slap.
They did not get the hour of quiet they had planned. A runner skidded at the door and caught himself with both palms. He stood straight before he spoke.
"Report from the town," he said. "Two things. A bus is stuck on the north slope. The engine died in a song it could not finish. People aboard. We can take a trail down and back with ropes. The other thing is a thing. It looks like a dog. It isn't. It has plates on its neck and a head like a badger and it is pulling apart rubbish bins and eating what's inside even when it cuts its mouth. It is not afraid of shouting."
"Teams?" Selina asked.
"We have three on the slope," the runner said. "They want one of you."
"I'll go," Kael said.
Selina nodded. "Take two of the second ring. Not the boys with new hands. No one tries to show they are brave. If the thing runs, let it run. If it comes at you, blind it with light and kill it clean."
"Weapons?" the runner asked.
"Spears and the two short blades from the stair gate," Selina said. "No guns. They'll jam at the band. Use the old ways."
Kael was already moving. He looked back at Mira for one breath. "Stay," he said. "If you feel pressure, call Selina by name."
"I will," Mira said.
He was gone.
Selina turned the ledger shut with care and strapped it closed. "You rest," she told Mira. "We have an hour if we are lucky. I need to speak to the kitchen and the teams on water."
"I can come."
"You can sit," Selina said. "If anyone asks you to stand for them, you say no and send them to me. If anyone says you owe them something because of last night, you send them to me twice."
Mira lay back. The mountain hummed and it was a friendly noise. She closed her eyes and counted in and out until the wall vibration matched her breath. She waited to fall asleep. She did not. The new hearing she could not turn off yet kept her just at the surface. She heard three children learning to sweep without banging the broom. She heard a woman sing under her breath while she kneaded dough with salt water because the spring was closer than the casks. She heard, far away, a single sob that stopped after one breath because the body attached to it had learned to make tears into quiet.
She heard something else when the hour was almost over. It was not a voice. It was a pressure, exactly as Selina had described: a weight at the edge of a door that had not been opened. It did not belong to an animal. It did not belong to any of the clan. It was patient and wrong. It pressed and released as if testing the seam.
"Selina," she said.
Selina was at the threshold, speaking to the same boy about ropes. She came at once. "Where?"
"Under. To the west side," Mira said. "It is like a hand without a shape."
Selina did not argue. "Call Rian," she told the boy. "No one else. And find Elder Shan. Quickly."
They moved to the west passage without making a line of people that would teach the pressure the way in. Elder Shan came at a walk with a small iron bowl and a bag of salt. He was lean and looked carved from a single piece of wood. He bowed to Mira once and to Selina once and set the bowl down at the corner where the ward seam turned.
"Point," he said.
Mira pointed to the place where the wrong press felt strongest. It shifted immediately as if it did not want to be seen. That told them there was something there and not nothing.
Shan spoke to Selina in a voice that assumed she would understand. "We lay the old line. We do not strengthen the new one or it will try to break louder. We salt in four places. We take no chants. We do not wake the thing we do not need."
Selina knelt and took salt on three fingers and pressed it in a small triangle over the line. The air changed at once, not big, only a hair different. Mira felt the pressure push harder and then give up and slide away along the seam to test another place. Shan followed it with his bowl and pressed the second point there. It moved again, slower this time. By the fourth pinch, it stopped trying.
"Rian is on the lower bend," the boy said, breathless, returning.
"Good," Selina said. "He stays there until night. If he feels cold on his teeth, he runs."
Rian nodded once without asking why teeth, and took his place.
"Back to the hall," Shan said. "Do not speak about this beyond the three of us and the boy. If it comes again, you call me. If I cannot come, you call Selina and you call the ward itself with your hand."
"How?" Mira asked.
"Flat palm on the seam," Shan said. "Call it by what it is in your own head. It will hear you if it is willing, and it is willing now because you broke it open and it likes your voice. It is old stone. It is not your enemy."
"Thank you," Mira said.
He nodded, satisfied that she had listened like a student who planned to pass the class and not like a god who thought classes were below her.
Kael was back by evening with a cut on his cheek and dried mud on his boots. The dog-thing had not run. It had not been clever. That had not made it less dangerous. The spears had done the work. The bus rescue had gone well. The people were shaken and quiet and did not look around the mountain like thieves. They looked at the ground and at their hands. One child had clung to Kael's coat and refused to let go until he put him down in front of a bowl of soup. The child had eaten and then cried without making a sound. Kael had watched and not interrupted and then had gone out to stand under the oculus until the cut on his face stopped feeling like a problem.
At dusk, they stood with Mira on the upper ledge just below the shrine that had woken itself when the city came through. The sky over the lowlands was wrong in a dozen places. It had streaks of color that did not belong to any hour. There were bands where the air looked thick, as if two kinds of day were arguing about who got to be real. In the far east, a square of black hung above the horizon and did not move with the wind.
"What is that?" Mira asked.
"Another gate," Selina said. "Sea-side, if the old map still means anything. We will hear about it soon."
"I keep thinking about the town," Mira said. "About Nora. I want to go down. I know I can't."
"You can't," Selina said. "You would make a light that would draw the wrong eyes."
"Will they live?"
"Some will," Selina said. "We will make it more."
Kael watched the south road. He had counted the torches Red Veil had lit to feel brave. He had counted fewer since noon. He had seen a line of something move across the slope at the edge of his sight and had decided it was fine to let it pass as long as it did not climb.
"Arthur is off the road," he said. "He took the old service track at the broken mile. He will try to cut around the wards and come from the ridge. He will not succeed tonight."
"Harland?" Mira asked.
"With him," Kael said. "Talking. He likes to talk like a friend when he wants a knife to work."
Mira nodded. She was very tired and did not want to go down and confront a man who would say he knew what was good for her with a smile. She wanted to sleep for a day and then wake to a world that had decided to behave. She would get neither. She would get what was in front of her and the people beside her to hold it.
"Do we hide?" she asked.
"No," Selina said. "We do not stand in the open for the sake of pride. But we do not hide. The world needs to see that someone lived through yesterday and is not on their knees."
"I can stand," Mira said. "Not long."
"That is enough," Selina said.
They went down to the lower court where the rescued sat and the clan stood watch and the elders held a loose line. The air was full of smoke from stoves and the clean smell of boiled grain. When Mira stepped into the space, there was a murmur that moved like wind across a field. It did not rise beyond that. Selina did not let it. She raised one hand, not grand, only clear, and the sound calmed.
Mira stood on the first step and did what the elder had asked. She did not preach. She said her name. She said this: "You are safe here if we can make it so. We will feed you as we are able. The children are first. The sick are next. If you can work, you will work. If you can carry, you will carry. If you can teach, you will teach. If you are alone, you are not alone now. We do not worship here. We do not bow. We stand and we keep each other breathing. That is what we have. It is enough for tonight."
A woman near the front started to cry. She covered her mouth to hide it. Mira did not go down to touch her face and make it about them. She held the line and then she turned away and went back up the stairs before her legs betrayed her.
They put her to bed as the cold reached in from the higher vents and the torches were pressed down to reduce the smoke. Selina checked her temperature with an old glass thermometer they had found in a drawer behind a door that should not have led to a room that had not existed last week. Kael walked the corridors and then the ledges and then stood under the oculus and counted the stars and the places where there were no stars because the sky had torn. He listened for the press at the west seam. It did not come back.
Far away, in a room with a long table and nine chairs, Arthur Halden answered a call on a device that still worked because it was powered by something humans did not own. The voice on the other end told him he had a place if he opened himself. It did not explain what opened meant. He said yes because saying no would have meant stepping out into a world where he had no power to force the story into the shape he wanted. Harland sat across from him and did not interrupt. When the call ended, Arthur poured himself a drink with a hand that did not shake and looked at Harland with a kind of bright contempt that Harland pretended to miss.
"You stay useful," Arthur said, "or you go where the rest went."
"I am always useful," Harland said. He smiled and thought about the lab in the private wing that still had power because he had stored batteries in the walls. He thought about tubes and valves and hands that did as they were told. He did not think about the mountain as a place with people in it. He thought about a resource he had not yet secured.
Nora sat in a dark kitchen with the curtains shut and the radio off. She held a phone with no signal and a torn scrap of paper with a symbol on it that she had drawn without letting her hand shake. She had not told the Council of what she had felt at the mountain last night. She had told them enough to keep her place. She was afraid that telling them everything would mean they came too soon and the girl died on a road lit by red torches. She put the scrap of paper down and picked up a tin of soup and then put it down again because she did not want soup. She wanted to stop time. She could not. She stood and went to the sink and washed her hands because it was a thing she could do and because Selina had taught her, without words, that clean hands were a kind of prayer that did not belong to any god.
On the upper ledge, Mira woke and did not sit up. She watched the square of sky and the small flakes that drifted through it and melted before they reached the floor. Selina came and sat with her and put a blanket over her feet without asking if she wanted it.
"We will have to send word to the other places," Mira said. "We cannot pretend we are alone on a mountain."
"We will," Selina said. "There are stories moving already."
"What kind?"
"That a white light cracked the ridge and did not kill the people under it," Selina said. "That men in red masks tried to climb the road and were thrown down by something that was not wind. That your father ran. That the old city is under the new one and the doors open when they are asked the right way."
"Do they say my name?"
"Some do," Selina said. "Most do not. It does not matter."
"It matters to me," Mira said. "I want my name to belong to me. I don't want to hear it from those men."
"You will hear it from all kinds of mouths now," Selina said. "We will decide which ones get an answer."
Mira turned her head. "Are you afraid I will believe them?"
"No," Selina said. "I am afraid you will spend yourself to prove them wrong."
"I don't need to prove anything," Mira said. "I am tired. That's all I am right now."
"That is enough," Selina said. She looked at the sky. "We need to speak to the other clans."
"They will come," Mira said. "They felt it."
"They did," Selina said. "Some will want to stand beside us. Some will want to stand on us."
"What do we do?"
"We make a room where people can walk in and walk out without being owned," Selina said. "We guard that door. We fight when we have to. We treat it like water and bread. Not like a throne."
Kael came in at last and set his palm on the doorframe. "The south ridge is clear. The roads are not. The Red Veil line broke at the drain. They lost two men to something with too many legs. They think we sent it. We did not. They will say we did. Arthur is not with them. He is gone east."
"Harland?" Selina asked.
"Gone with him," Kael said. "He left a trail that says he wants someone to follow. We won't."
"No," Selina said. "We are not mice for his tests."
Mira watched both of them and then looked at her hands. They were very pale, the veins a faint smoke under the skin. When she flexed her fingers, light moved under the surface like a soft pulse. It was not loud now. It was there, and it was hers, and it did not feel like a stranger.
"Will I ever be able to go down to the town and walk on the pavement and stand by the river without breaking a bench with my breath?" she asked.
"Yes," Kael said. "You will."
"When?"
"After you eat and sleep and eat again and learn when to stop," he said. "After the world stops tearing for a day. After we teach your body the old lessons in the new air."
She nodded. "What if it never stops tearing?"
"Then we work during the tearing," Selina said. "We don't wait for a quiet that won't come."
Mira let her eyes close. "That sounds like a plan."
"It is a plan," Selina said. "It is enough for tonight."
They sat in a room that had been a wall last week and a passage a century ago and a room again today, and they counted the breath of a mountain with more people under it than it had known in a long time. Outside, the sky bent in places. Far south, a black square widened above water and something old walked through it and shook itself like a wet dog. In three cities, screens flickered to life with new symbols and then went dark again. A herd of deer turned and ran from a line they could feel and could not see. Nine men in red stood in a circle and tried to light a fire with a spark that belonged to something that did not want to be there. It blew out twice and then burned on the third try because the wind decided to help them for reasons that were not their doing.
In the morning, they would send two teams to the bus road and one to the bridge and one to the farm with the cows because the cows had not come in and people needed milk. They would start the fields and mark the safe path with stones and set the first exchange table for people who had seeds and people who had hands. They would put up a board with names and a board with numbers and a board with rules. They would decide where the children would sleep so they did not wake every time the rock hummed. They would draw a line around the elders and tell people to stop acting like elders were the only ones who knew what to do. They would stand in the mouth of the lower cave and say no to three men who wanted to trade guns for bread. They would give bread anyway and take the guns and bury them until they worked again or never.
Before the torches went down, Selina stood with Mira and Kael on the ledge. The wind was cold and clean. The world under them was wrong and new. Selina did not look at either of them when she spoke.
"The old world burned itself trying to hold what was gone," she said. "We build a new one or we die with it."
Mira's voice was quiet, not because she wanted it to be soft, but because that was what her body had. "Then we build."
Kael did not say a third line to turn it into a speech. He nodded once, short and absolute, and held the door while they went inside. The mountain shut its mouth on the night, and the light it had swallowed the day before settled deep, patient now, waiting for the next time it would have to rise. The first age of cultivation did not begin at a ceremony. It began with a list, a path of stones, a bowl of soup, a blade cleaned in snow, and three people agreeing to keep each other breathing when the rest of the world forgot how.