Dareth burst into Agnes's office without bothering with the door, too many things tugged his sleeve and he needed answers now.
The room smelled faintly of ink and old cedar. Agnes looked up from a stack of papers as if he'd merely popped in for tea.
"You're sending students into the Heart's outer chamber?" Dareth's words came out clipped. "After the alarms, after the malfunctions? I thought that quadrant was sealed until we figured out what's wrong."
Agnes steepled his fingers and regarded him with the calm that had steadied the Spire through worse storms. "I have a plan, Dareth. We'll proceed under supervision."
"A plan?" Dareth echoed, incredulous. "You can't seriously mean the students. Are you using them as some kind of test-run—guinea pigs to see if the core misbehaves?"
"No." Agnes's voice stayed soft, but there was steel beneath it. "There's no malice in this. The students are exactly the right people to learn from it if we handle it properly. They're adaptable. They notice things seasoned technicians miss. They'll work with our staff. It will be controlled."
Dareth's jaw worked. "Adaptable doesn't mean trained. They're children compared to professional wardens, engineers, and mages with decades of field experience. If the heart is behaving oddly, let the experts lead."
Agnes inclined his head, a small, almost apologetic smile curving his mouth. "You always have a soft spot for the kids, Dareth. I've admired that about you. But the other day, I told one of them she was 'blessed by Aether' to keep her from poking in dangerous places."
Dareth's scowl deepened. "You lied to a student?"
"I lied to protect her curiosity," Agnes said briskly. "And… I may have been wrong to dismiss that phrase so quickly. Watching her today, I think there might be truth in it. The next generation sees the currents differently. They learn new patterns faster. They can do things our hands no longer shape as easily."
Dareth pressed both hands flat to the desk. "They're still children, Headmaster. Even with gifts, they're not ready to shoulder what you're proposing."
Agnes rose and crossed the small room to stand close enough that Dareth could see the tiredness in the older man's eyes. "I taught you to be cautious," he said quietly. "I taught you to keep students safe. But I also taught them to be trusted. Sometimes stewardship means stepping back, letting the ones we've trained test the limits. Not all risks are sacrifices. Some are opportunities to learn with supervision."
For a moment, Dareth simply looked at him, at the steady line of his jaw, the unflappable patience that hid hard decisions.
The practical part of him catalogued contingencies and protest points, another part, teacher, guardian, felt the weight of letting go.
At last, he exhaled and bowed his head in a slow, reluctant acceptance. "Yes, Headmaster."
Agnes gave him the briefest of nods, then gestured toward the papers. "Good. Draw up the supervision roster. I want conservators on every team, engineers in the loop, and you keep a single direct line to me. No unsanctioned experiments, no heroics. We proceed carefully, and together."
Dareth straightened, a knot loosening somewhere in him. He moved to the desk, already thinking through lists and safeguards, the teacher's work that never stopped even when the rules around it shifted.
We'll keep them safe, he told himself, and started writing.
-
Lysandra tugged the straps of her pack once more, fingers fumbling with knots she'd tied a dozen times and still had to check.
Around her, the others moved with the focused, nervous energy of people about to step into the unknown.
Kael testing a wind-knot at his wrist, Arthur whetting the edge of his blade until the steel sang faintly, Lucien smoothing his sleeve as if posture could armor him. Aurelia stood a little apart, quiet in that way that made the air around her feel thinner.
Yesterday, when Ardent spoke of the Heart, Aurelia didn't blink, didn't widen her eyes, or ask a dozen questions like a normal person would. It was like she'd already been told the world would look this way.
She remembered the small curl at the corner of Aurelia's mouth, no triumph, no horror, only a steady, shadowed attention.
No surprise. Not dread. Just… acknowledgement, as if the past had already told her everything it could.
It bothered Lysandra more than she wanted to admit. Aurelia's gift is a miracle and a burden piled into one.
She'd seen the way Aurelia's hands would still, mid-gesture, when a memory grazed her, she'd watched Aurelia's laughter thin and the room tilt inward when those echoes came.
Sometimes the others didn't notice, how could they, when the change was a tiny tilt behind the eyes? But Lysandra noticed. She always did.
She tightened a strap and forced a smile even to herself. I wish she'd tell us. We're here. We're not just classmates, if anything happens, we'll be the ones dragging her out. The thought warmed and scared her at once.
Trust was a thing you built with small things, shared jokes, patched armor, borrowed potions. She wanted Aurelia to let them in on this one terrible, strange piece of her life.
A clang echoed from the maintenance hatch as the last team checks came through.
Lysandra squared her shoulders, slid a hand into Aurelia's sleeve in a quick, casual squeeze, and let the touch say what words hadn't. Tell me this isn't the only map you're holding, she wanted to say, but the words stayed folded. Instead, she mouthed, We've got you, and tried to believe it for both of them.
They led them down through service corridors that smelled of oil and cold stone, past panels of brass and conduit, until the Spire opened like a machine's throat.
The vault was larger than Aurelia expected, an elliptical chamber suspended on iron ribs, stacked scaffolding ringing the air like scaffolds around a cathedral.
At the center, cradled by clamps and filigree, hung the Heart.
A crystal roughly the size of a carriage wheel, veined with a thousand thin runes that spun faintly as if with their own breath.
Around it, concentric rings of forged metal bore carved symbols, stabilizer marks, the teams called them, each ring keyed to the next with arc-shims and woven wiring.
Light pooled off the crystal in a slow, patient pulse. It looks like a moon tethered to the city.
The air tasted of ozone and melted copper, the background thrum of the Spire felt as if it had both lungs and a heartbeat.
Victoria lingered at a projection table with Ralen the archivist, slate open and fingers darting.
They compared Halvane's marginal notes, the hurried sketches, the repeated motifs, with diagrams drawn on the metal.
Where the ledger's sketches looped, ringed motifs matched the Heart's etchings.
"See here," Ralen murmured, lifting a lens. "Halvane sketched this stabilizer as a hand, then as a ring. He annotated it with behaviour triggers. He wasn't just drafting, he was teaching the crystal how to behave."
Victoria's voice was small, urgent. "He left instructions inside the pattern, but not instructions like 'turn on' or 'off'—they read like reminders. Like he was speaking to someone he loved." Her fingers trembled as she traced the margin phrase.
Aurelia watched Victoria's face go bright, fierce with the delight that always came when a hidden thing made sense.
Aurelia felt it before she saw it, the echo rose like the intake of breath in a crowd.
Not the ledger now but the Heart itself, threads of memory that slid through the chamber and brushed her like a cold hand.
Images arrived in fragments: Halvane's callused fingers, smudged grease at the thumb, a small joke written in the margin about the stabilizer's stubbornness.
Phrases threaded into patterns, measure and keep, but in the Heart's memory they bent into something more intimate, half-whispered instructions and a tremor of worry.
Hands reaching for control. Hands that trembled when the current came alive, she thought, and the vision unspooled into the past with a vividness that made her knees want to buckle. He taught it care as if it were a child.
Aurelia kept the images private. She let her fingers fold into her sleeves and watched as the specialists started the interface, an awkward mix of ritual and engineering.
Kestrel set his tools to humming, Serel murmured a cautious chant under her breath, and a ring of technicians fitted calibrating staves at key points around the Heart. Agnes stood to the side, face unreadable but hands clasped as if steadying himself.
They brought the first diagnostic node online with a slow ceremonial hum.
A plug fit into the Heart's outer seam, copper fingers found runes; a low bell tolled, and for a heartbeat the crystal answered with a single, very clear ring, the ring motif brightening on one shard like a pulse.
The room's Aether deepened. The lights in the vault dimmed as if something thirsty had taken a mouthful.
"Node responding," Kestrel said, but his voice had an edge now. "Get me the stabilizer script, now."
They began the stabilizer weave: technicians wove threads of counter-chant and calibrated flux, binding the Heart's motion with engineered constraints.
The weave was supposed to damp the crystal's oscillation, to steady its hunger for ambient Aether.
The Heart resisted.
It was not violent at first, just an insistence that grew to pressure.
The crystal's glow thickened, then pulsed, ringed symbols along the scaffold flashed in patterns no one had planned.
The weave tugged, the Heart answered in a language of light and current they could only half-translate.
Then the drain hit.
Power blinked in the vault, then in the city beyond. Lanterns guttered across distant streets.
A training golem in a nearby square, one of the Spire's routine teaching constructs, stuttered, its joints heating and groaning like a kettle about to scream.
In the vault, instruments hiccupped, and three panels burst with a sharp, fragrant smoke. Sparks sprayed like startled beetles.
"Pull back! Pull back now!" Dareth shouted, and the field lab emptied into order.
Conservators dragged sealed kits, medics unrolled stretchers.
A shriek of alarms, that distant, flat bell that Aurelia had heard earlier, pulled in the tunnels.
Panic did not take hold, but close-calls did, a scaffolder's harness burned a ragged seam, and two technicians inhaled smoke and coughed hard.
Cassian and Mirielle were already there, steady hands and practiced magic, pulling injured personnel to safety, slapping on poultices, moving with that calm urgency of those familiar with sudden disaster.
Victoria stumbled as a rigging line snapped, and a falling brace caught her boot.
Before she could fall, Mirielle clipped a rope around her waist, and Cassian hauled her clear, breath hard and hands dusted with ash.
Agnes stood very still through it all, then moved with a decision that set the room quiet.
Kestrel's face, usually a map of soot and jokes, had gone gray with a kind of private fear.
He kept checking the runes and the Heart as a man checks a pulse, he cannot help.
Aurelia watched, a cold guilt lying across her ribs. We were told to help, she thought, and I reached for it. She had not been ordered back, she had stepped away only when Dareth called the students to safety.
The Heart's memory still whispered at the edge of her awareness, not just diagrams and instructions but a cadence that pleaded, the tone of someone who begged a machine to remember mercy.
It answers like a person, she realized, and the thought prickled into a fear she couldn't shake.
But the voice is warped. It's asking for something it cannot name.
The vault's hum settled into a low, angry note as engineers sealed panels and Serel set wards that glowed with slow, blue teeth.
In the corridor outside, a runner arrived breathless with a new message: a maintenance quadrant three districts away reported an unscheduled mobilization, several guardians walked where none should have, and sensors flagged coordinated activation.
The message echoed down the hall like thunder.
Agnes's jaw tightened. Kestrel rubbed his beard with fingers that trembled.
The chamber's calm ruptured as a shadow fell across the vault like a lowering storm.
Metal groaned, and dust drifted when it stepped through a service arch, an old guardian, vast as a small building, its joints rimed with soot and runes that bled sickly light.
Where it moved, the air hummed with a wrongness that made throats tighten, and hands go cold.
Students scattered toward the exits, a dozen voices braided into a single, anxious tide. Dareth barked orders and herded them.
Agnes did not shout. He stepped forward, sleeves rolled, face set into the only expression Aurelia could think of as absolute.
When the golem's great hand came down, an iron slab closed like a book.
Agnes threw his arms wide, and a wreath of symbols burst from the floor.
The circle blossomed faster than anyone could have expected: interlocking glyphs, woven sigils, and hammered metal runes that hung in the air like a carved lid between man and machine.
The guardian's palm slammed into the magic with a sound like a cliff taking a wall of waves.
The ring of runes flared and flowered, sparks flinging outward.
For one terrible heartbeat, the entire vault seemed to vibrate with a trapped force, the circle held, but its edges trembled, and a few of the outer symbols dimmed.
"If more guardians go, the Royal garrison may already be engaged," Dareth shouted, voice raw with reason. "We can't assume reinforcements will arrive quickly."
Agnes's eyes did not leave the iron fist. "Then we buy time," he said simply. He looked at Dareth as if weighing him on a balance of trust and command. "Get the students out. Call the Royal Force regardless." His voice had a steadiness that did not come from the absence of fear but from a choice to stand inside it. "I will hold them here."
Dareth hesitated, an expectant, human pause, and then gave the only answer a headmaster wants to hear. "No. We won't risk you."
Agnes shook his head. It was not bravado in his tone but a quiet certainty. "You will evacuate the students."
"Agnes—"
"I will not die," he cut in, the words almost mundane beside the thunder of the guardian's next shove. "Move."
Dareth's jaw clenched, and he obeyed. "Form two lines. Keep to discipline. Conservators with seals, now!"
Aurelia's legs felt like they had been poured from lead. The primal part of her, muscle and loyalty and training, wanted to run forward and bury herself in the fight.
She pictured the guardian's hand smashing the runes, the Heart's light guttering, the city, the whole town, folding into darkness.
I can help, she thought, fingers going numb. I could—
Lysandra's hand closed on Aurelia's wrist so hard it stung, hauling her back behind a crate. "Don't be an idiot," she hissed, breath hot with equal parts fear and command. "You are a student. Don't even think of trying to face that monster."
Aurelia turned, mouth forming protest, but the shove was firm enough to break her forward momentum.
She saw Agnes at the center of the ring, staff in hand, sweat darkening his collar though the air was cold.
The runes at the circle's outer edges flickered like wavering teeth, and for a second, a thin, hairline crack traced one of them.
He's holding on. The image of Agnes's stance burning clear: not a heroic pose, but a man balancing every ounce of authority he had on an old and necessary wheel.
Lucien's voice cut through the fog of panic behind her, calm and almost light. "Look at him," he said. "The old headmaster still knows the circle-forms. He's not waving a flag, he's buying a road." His grin was brittle but real.
Around them, the evacuation moved with the slow efficiency of drilled habit. Conservators sealed compartments. Archivists wrapped artifacts in blankets and retreated. Victoria, slate clutched to her chest, kept pace with a hand that shook only a little.
A sharp metallic cry split the air as the guardian tested the circle again. Sparks flew. Tiny fissures blossomed in a few of the outer signs.
Agnes's mouth tightened, his palms flared with an old, austere magic, fingers tracing countersigns only a man of decades of study could keep steady under pressure.
The rune-work held for now, but a fine dust of rune-ash fell into the ring's inner light.
Aurelia pressed her back against cold iron, watching, feeling every second like a weight. I'm useless here, she told herself. But if he fails— The sentence stopped where fear and responsibility met.
Lysandra did not let go. "You will not go near him." Her voice was thick with promise and threat at once. "If you run, I will drag you by the ears and the hair. Do you hear me?"
Aurelia swallowed and nodded, more because she respected the force behind Lysandra's threat than because she wanted to obey.
She felt small and furious and frightened all at once, the taste of helplessness metallic on her tongue.
The vault's lamps dimmed again as the guardian straightened, its heavy shoulders creaking like a ship.
Agnes held the circle like a final door. The great hand lifted slightly, then fell, this time, the ring bent but did not break.
The runes smoked, for a breath, Agnes's knees buckled, and he steadied himself on the floor with a grunt, fingers blackened at the tips.
Aurelia watched the scene as if through gauze. She could see the strain in every line of Agnes's face, hear the slight, animal sound he made when the magic flared, and his breath left his chest. She wanted to move and could not.
A faint, far alarm began to roll through the Spire's ribs again, this time layered with many voices, distant and dissonant.
Someone in the corridor shouted that multiple sectors had reported unusual activity. Boots pounded.
Aurelia's palms were slick with sweat. If he's buying time, what will we do with it?