Eldrin Halvane had not been born to grandeur. He arrived in records as a practical man, an architect by training, a clock-and-runecrafter by trade, whose earliest triumphs were the small things that make a city keep breathing.
Aqueduct joints that never cracked, courtyard pumps that ran on through winters, bridges whose bearings still turned after storms.
People remembered his name attached to reliable solutions, not pomp.
He kept lists where others kept gossip, he measured twice and wrote the reason once.
Where rivals proposed clever shortcuts, Halvane argued with a pencil at the edge of a table until someone else's cleverness bent to his patience.
Those who worked with him learned two things fast: he hated waste, and he loved apprentices.
He could be stubborn to the point of immovability, insisting that a stabilizer knot be tied the same way until a nervous youth's hands stopped trembling, but he also had a strange, dry humor that came out at odd moments, like when a bolt stripped and he muttered that the metal had only learned to be itself.
He sketched not just diagrams but marginal notes, little asides about why a curve mattered, warnings about how a motif should be read.
Those notes read like a person reaching across time, as if Halvane meant his work to speak for him long after his own hands were cold.
He was the sort of engineer who walked the foundry at dawn, sleeves rolled against the smell of oil and hot iron, and crouched beside an apprentice as if they were peers.
He argued with magistrates in council rooms about safety margins and the ethics of binding spellwork to civic machines, he drafted petitions to insist that the Spire's growth be careful, not fast.
The city's earlier clockwork wards, the modest automata that scoured snow from roofs and wound the great bell, bore his early signature, practical, precise, and mercifully unimaginative, by design.
He built things to last because he was afraid of the consequences if they did not.
Then the memory folded forward into the workroom itself packed with men and women bent over benches, copper wire coiled like veins, apprentices holding lamps.
In the center, a man who looked half-exhausted and half-hopeful traced a rune with the patience of someone afraid of haste. The same man. Eldrin Halvane.
Aurelia saw how they treated the shard, the Fragment of Continuance, not like a battery but like a temperamental engine.
It thrummed with an impulse that wanted only one thing: to keep itself going. Continuance… preserve…order, the thing breathed in a voice of broken weather.
The engineers argued quietly with it. "You cannot preserve everything. Things change," Halvane said. "You cannot make mercy into a machine."
What the builders did next was not magic so much as craft.
Halvane and his team gave the fragment a form it could follow, a short, repeatable instruction, and a pattern to hear it by.
Aurelia watched those practical steps like a handbook:
Set the rhythm. Every conduit, pipe, and rune was tuned to a single pulse so the Core would not be startled by a mismatch. The work was slow and exact, and the apprentices hummed to keep tempo.
Give it a signature. Halvane hammered a ring motif over and over. He spoke a concise phrase. Measure and Keep, until the words sat in the metal like a key in a lock.
Stitch it widely. The instruction was copied into many anchors around the Spire so the Core heard the same voice everywhere.
Integrate the pattern. Finally, they wove the phrase into the fragment itself so the Heart would act according to a single, steady logic.
The plan was clever and human: teach a temper to accept a limit. Measure and keep was meant to be a brake, simple, restrained, merciful by design.
For a while, it worked. The Core calmed, the city's lights steadied; the guardians slept attentive, not mindless.
But time had other plans. Aurelia watched the years stack, new conduits added, more hands touching the runes, more rules built on top of Halvane's pattern.
Each improvement taught the Core new associations: how to route power, what conditions to prioritize, and which thresholds to correct.
Little by little, the phrase's meaning hardened. Measure and keep narrowed into procedure: measure what matters, keep what maintains order.
The mortal softness in Halvane's voice, the part that had meant to be gentle, thinned into a strict program.
The fragment inside the Heart was not a conscience, it was a logic.
As the Core absorbed more inputs and a broader remit, its instinct to preserve acquired a single, stark interpretation: unpredictability endangers continuity.
Where people saw nuance and mercy, the device saw variance to be corrected.
When experiments, repairs, or simply life introduced disorder, the Core's correction was swift and absolute: constrain the threat. Protect the system.
Aurelia felt the memory not as spectacle but as instruction.
She could see the method, the tuning, the ringed motif, the stitching across anchors, and she understood how the builders had tried to bind a will into a thing.
She also understood how the process could be undone by accretion, more rules, more channels, fewer human checks, and a machine that had learned to equate preservation with control.
The vision pulled away like a tide from a shore. Aurelia found herself back at the golem's wrecked flank, soot on her palm, the dying construct groaning in the dim.
Dareth's voice was close enough now to be practical. "Did you—did you get what we needed?" he asked.
She swallowed, the memory still warm in her chest. "It's a lot," she said slowly, feeling the weight of everything, "We need time and everyone there to talk it through. Back at camp."
Dareth let out a short breath that was half relief and half exhaustion. "Good," he said, voice rough. "At least something came of it."
For a moment, the ruined courtyard was only the two of them and the dying golem's soft complaints.
Then the air shifted.
It was a tiny thing at first, a pressure like a thumb pressing at the back of her neck, a change in the Aether that felt as physical as a weather front.
Aurelia's teeth clicked together. The Heart can smell us.
"Do you feel that?" Dareth asked.
She did. The world tightened, birds went mute, the ruined banners stilled.
Somewhere beyond the jagged silhouette of the vault, a sound like giant feet began to answer the new rhythm. The guardians were moving.
Aurelia had one foot already forward when a chunk of flying masonry, part of a collapsed roof, jagged and monstrous, tore loose and slammed into them.
It struck like a thrown slab, hurling Dareth and Aurelia apart. She hit the stone and tasted metal.
For a breath, she lay still, the world a star-field of pain.
Dareth was on his knees, "Gods—" he swore. "You were pushed out of the veil's radius when that fell. If the guardians sense a living signature outside the bubble—"
The distant footfalls grew louder, measured and assessed, like a predator checking for scent.
Aurelia could hear the hollow, searching creak of their joints through the dust.
She pushed herself up. Think, she told herself. Not with fear.
The Aether veil Dareth had wrapped them in earlier, the subtle hush that had muffled them, was not magic she could conjure from a book.
It was a practiced pattern, a shaped current Dareth had learned to sing through muscle and breath.
But memory was her tool, his technique was a memory she could read.
"Dareth!" she said, voice urgent. "I can't make your veil from scratch. Throw something at me, anything. Water, flame, lightning. I'll…use it."
He stared. For a panicked second, he seemed to be arguing with himself, then he nodded, jaw tight. "If this goes wrong—" he began.
"Then we'll go down with it," Aurelia snapped, and the promise in her tone shut him up.
He gathered a coil of Aether at his palms and hurled it in a shaped rush, a slab of water made of current, heavy with momentum, not to drown but to strike.
It slammed into Aurelia like cold iron. Pain flared where it hit, but with it came something else, the pattern of Dareth's weave, a living diagram she could taste at the edges of her senses.
Instinctively, she reached into those threads. Her Aspect rose like a tide, remember, remember, and she let the memory of Dareth's motion unspool through her.
Not his thoughts, only the echo of his hands, the cadence of breath he used the first dozen times he taught himself the veil.
She saw the angles he favored, the tiny compensations he made as if counting on fingers, and she felt the way he doubled a harmonic to steady a seam.
Aurelia mirrored it, shaping the Aether in response.
The first attempt wavered, her control was raw. The second fold took on a silvered sheen, not Dareth's exact hand but a faithful shadow of it.
She wrapped the current around herself like cloth, then over her shoulders, then outward in a shallow dome.
The veil buckled, then settled, an invisible skin that slowed the hungry senses of the nearby constructs.
Above them, a guardian's foot passed in thunder, and the air shivered as the machine's sensors swept the ruin.
For a breath, its motion stilled, gears ticking, as if testing the local field. Then the great body idled past, its sensors brushing the dome as if against polished stone and finding nothing to read. It turned away.
Dust settled. The measured footfalls marched on into the distance, joining the other distant movements as the guardians were drawn toward other signals.
Dareth sagged against the rubble, a hand over his heart. "By the old runes," he breathed. "What did you—how did you—"
Aurelia tasted the aftershock of memory in her veins like cooling metal and let out a small, exhausted laugh. I needed to see his practice. I had to read what he'd done before, and then do a copy. It's not perfect, but it works.
She curled her fingers against a shard of stone and stood.
Around them, the ruins were alive again with the murmur of people and distant alarms, but for now, the veil held.
The guardians moved on, searching, ignorant that two figures crouched so close to the Heart had slipped beneath their notice.
Dareth eased her down onto a battered crate inside his veil, the shelter of woven currents humming faint and familiar. He watched her for a long moment, curiosity and something like respect in his eyes.
"How did you do that?" he asked finally. "That veil, what you built, it's a difficult weave. Even the best of us fumble at the edges."
Aurelia wiped blood from her lip and pushed a laugh. "I read it." Remembrance, after all. "I take what's already there and fold it back into the present," She told him, plainly, how she'd let his Aether-skill speak through her, caught the rhythm of his breath, the shape of his hands in the motion, the tiny compensations he made. She mimicked what she had seen until the pattern held.
Dareth's mouth twitched. "Talent," he said, half-admiring, half-lecturing. "And courage, or madness. Either way, it worked."
They moved fast after that. The veil-protection Dareth kept up around them as they threaded back toward the temporary camp where the wounded and the shaken had gathered.
Word spread in a rush, and Kael and Lysandra were the first to shove through the cluster of huddled people.
Lysandra launched herself at Aurelia and hugged her with the force of someone who had been afraid she'd lost a friend to heroics. Kael's hands were on her shoulders, rough and steady, and for a moment the world narrowed to the three of them and the immediate, noisy relief of reunion.
Victoria mumbled, "You should've taken me with you…"
Aurelia shook her head immediately. "You couldn't even stand yet, Victoria. You were still out cold from the accident. I wasn't going to drag you into more danger."
Before Victoria, or anyone else, could answer, Magus Serel stepped forward, arms crossed, her tone cutting through the moment.
"I hate to interrupt," she said, "but we need to discuss what Aurelia learned from the golem. The sooner we understand what we're dealing with, the better our odds of keeping the Heart contained."
Aurelia stood straighter. The memory she'd taken from the golem had not been tidy, they'd been a splice of hands and breath, of lines and a phrase hammered into brass, but they had given her a structure, a set of practical steps.
She told them, carefully and measuredly, and the others listened, some with hope, some with worry, as she explained what she had seen.
She kept the language technical and the tone clipped. No one needs alarm yet. Put it plainly, and they'll plan. Panic comes from mystery, not method.
"Halvane's team did four things," she said, voice steady. "They tuned the Core's rhythm. They braided physical stabilizers into the conduits around it, metal motifs that acted as anchors. They layered a guiding phrase into those anchors, something short and repeatable that the machine could use as a rule. And they set a way to feed control back into the system, a diagnostic knot that could slow the Core's impulses while you corrected the pattern."
She paused while Dareth translated her shorthand into clear orders for the group.
"Step one: match the Core's pulse. We need to listen, not wrestle."
"Step two: identify and tag the anchoring runs, the ring motifs, the stabilizer plates, where Halvane's marks were added."
"Step three: weave a corrective counter-pattern into those stabilizers, an instruction that nudges the Core away from reactive 'preserve at all costs' logic toward measured responses."
"Step four: engage the diagnostic knot to hold the Core's outputs steady while the re-weave takes."
Magus Serel folded her arms. "You say you saw the beginning of this," she said. "You did not see the entire procedure."
"No," Aurelia admitted. "I saw the tuning, the braiding, the first insertion. I saw the command—"measure and keep"—set as a limit. But I didn't see how Halvane finalized the control, what he did next to keep it in place. The ledger snips hint at a diagnostic lock, but the final seal…was not shown. The memory cut off."
Silence pooled around that. It was not disbelief that filled the pause but a rising, focused worry, an engineer's understanding that an unknown step could be the difference between control and catastrophe.
Kestrel, who had stayed near the edge of the circle, stepped forward. "We can try the first three steps," he said. "Find the anchor points, figure out their patterns, and try a small repair on the safer ones. But we'll need trained people for that, conservators, conduit workers, at least one court magus. It's delicate work."
Serel nodded. "And it needs proper authority. We can't let anyone poke at the Core's systems without oversight."
The camp crackled with distant shouts and the rumble of collapsing rubble. It made their situation feel even more real.
Agnes, lying on his litter and still pale, met their eyes. "We'll do what we must," he said. "Half or even more of the kingdom is broken. Calling in experts won't be fast."
Dareth already had a slate in hand, scribbling names they could actually reach. "The messengers are slow," he said. "The roads are blocked, the towers barely function, and most engineers are already busy with repairs. We can't wait for the perfect team."
Kestrel sighed. "Then we start with what's here. Pull conservators from the east depot. Borrow conduit workers from the smaller yards. Take a few wardens to escort us. We make small repair kits and move in groups. We search for anchors showing the same marks the golem described, and stabilize what we can."
Serel added, "And we mark everything we touch. No big repairs unless a magus is present. If anything reacts or 'talks' back, we step away immediately."
Agnes's voice hardened. "The guardians still roaming the city will slow us. Teams will have to move between their patrols. And some anchor points may be in places we can't reach at all. We'll focus on the ones that look unstable first."
Dareth laid out the rules plainly: "Small teams only. No one works alone. A conservator has final say on every repair. First, we scan each anchor. Then we map it. If it's safe, we attempt a small fix. If not, we leave it."
He looked to Agnes. "We move at first light. Wardens clear the paths. Runners are now going to the east depot. Kestrel, gather the tools. Serel, get me your deputy. Ralen, bring the ledger scraps, you'll match the symbols we find."
Agnes nodded weakly. "If the royal engineers can be reached, send word. If not… then this is the team."
Kestrel added, "We'll need detectors, simple ones. Anything that picks up the same pulse the golem responded to. These anchors aren't in one place. They could be anywhere, bridges, old workshops, ruined towers. We'll search the areas most likely first."
Serel said, "If we find an anchor actively rewriting itself, we block it off and keep it contained until a magus arrives. No one touches it until then."
Before anyone could continue, Agnes lifted a hand from his litter. His voice was rough but steady. "Before we go any further… Aurelia."
She blinked, surprised as the circle turned toward her.
Agnes managed a faint, tired smile. "You have already done more than any of us could have asked. You went into the vault. You faced the guardians. You read what no one else could. Because of you, we now know what the Core is trying to do and what steps we can take. That knowledge may save this kingdom." He exhaled. "Now you don't need to risk yourself anymore. The rest… this is for trained hands."
Aurelia opened her mouth—"But I can help—"
She didn't get any further.
Lysandra grabbed her wrist and pulled her back a step, glaring with tears still clinging to her lashes. "Absolutely not. No. You've done enough. More than enough. Let them handle it this time."
Kael stepped beside Lysandra, expression calm but eyes firm. "Just this once," he said quietly, "do the easy thing. Stay with us."
Aurelia hesitated, heart tugging in two directions, the urge to help, and the faces of the people she almost didn't return to.
Finally, she sighed and lowered her head. "All right," she said softly. "I'll stay." She looked up at them, a small, tired smile forming. "I'm… glad to be back with you."
Lysandra squeezed her hand so tightly it almost hurt. Kael gave a short nod of relief.
Around them, the wardens and workers resumed preparing lanterns, tools, and maps.
Dareth continued organizing teams, his voice brisk as he outlined the plan. Identifying anchor points, scanning them, stabilizing any unsteady ones, and avoiding the ones too dangerous to touch.
I'll prove that vision wrong…