Chapter 8 - The Temple That Wouldn't Sink

The Parliament kitchen woke up before the rest of Lindell.

Fire was already gnawing at the logs in the hearth, painting the rafters in orange. Steam clung to the high windows. Someone had propped the door to the outer stair and you could see, framed in that upright rectangle of cold, the leaning shoulders of the city wall and the hollow silhouettes of the bound giants in their towers, skulls catching the first line of sun like they were waiting for roll call.

At the table: maps. Always maps.

Temple sketch inked in three different hands, water lines shaded in with a bored kobold's cross-hatching, legal scrolls stacked like bricks waiting to be thrown. Mugs. Crumbs. One dried fish-tail, slain in the line of breakfast.

Riona sat with her back to the wall, because she always did, palms pressed flat on either side of the Temple sketch as if she could hold the whole site down by stubbornness alone. She'd slept, technically—she had that washed-out, over-laundered look of someone who had managed four hours by main force. Under her tunic the healing lines from the siege were ghosting into old aches. Her shield leaned against her chair like a loyal animal.

Tamasin perched sideways on the bench beside her, one knee up, already building a spell list in the space between their hands and the ink. They looked like someone had put a forest witch into a respectable shirt and told them to "act parliamentary." Their hair ignored this.

"Freedom of Movement," they said, ticking off on their fingers. "Because if the Temple has moving parts, somebody will try to jam us in one. Resist Energy—probably cold, but if the foundations are gnome, I'm not ruling out boiling water on principle. And Cure Critical Wounds for whoever decides to be brave and stupid first."

"Statistically," Kel said from the far end of the table, "that's Branna."

Branna was currently pretending not to listen, because she was busy doing spear drills in the middle of the kitchen.

Some fighters trained like dancers, like they were courting the weapon, wooing it into an arc. Branna trained like she was arguing. The spear went up: statement. Down: rebuttal. Quarter-turn, plant, the butt of it hitting the flagstones with a report that made the tableware tremble.

"Statistically," she grunted, "it's whoever mouths off to the priest first."

"That's also you," Skrik put in, from under the table.

He was doing his own drills, a jittering little dance between chair legs—two steps forward, duck, palm on bench, twist, two steps back. Never in a straight line. If you tried to pin him down with your eyes you got motion sickness. Every few passes he tapped the back of Branna's boot like he was tagging base.

Lyra watched both of them with one knee hugged to her chest, Prism balanced on the table in front of her, the faint inner color of it pulsing in time with her breathing. The fever flush was mostly gone from her cheeks; her eyes had lost their glassy shine and gone back to ordinary, haunted ranger. She had a new habit: every few minutes she flicked her gaze to the nearest window, checking light, depth of shadow, the shape of the weather. Tracking out of habit, even with nothing to track.

"Here." She reached across the map and tapped the rough penciled circles of the Sacred Lake. "If we have to bail, we don't go back down the main culvert. We cut across the west terrace, hug this retaining wall, and use the inspection stairs."

Riona eyed the sketch. "Those stairs are ankle-deep in silt and river gossip."

Lyra shrugged. "We can move full-speed now and still see where our feet are going. So long as nobody panics."

"You're assuming," Kel said. "Bold of you."

He was seated sideways on the bench, boots up, his back against the wall, one hand idly spinning a quill. He had added three new little sigils in the margin of the Temple sketch—short, crabbed things that meant: alarms, misdirection, a rope that was also a lie. Every now and then he glanced toward the Parliament door as if he could see through it and into the corridor and count footsteps.

Riona pulled her shield closer and fitted her arm through the straps, more from nerves than necessity. "We're not going to panic," she said. "We're going to go in, look at the clauses, and tell the Crown to stop using a god as flood artillery."

"You're going to tell the Crown," Kel corrected. "I'm going to stand behind something solid and make pithy commentary."

"You do that now," Skrik said. "This is development?"

Merrow had colonized half the table with parchment. Circles, notations, a few crisp, dead-straight lines that did not look like anyone else's hand. He had written Telepathic Bond at the top of one sheet and underlined it three times, which was roughly the Merrow version of screaming about it.

"Sorry," he said absently as Branna's spear butt thumped and jostled his ink. "Could you—maybe—argue with a different part of the floor?"

Branna paused, spear held upright, like an exclamation point. "Temple's water. Water is stubborn. I'm practicing telling it no."

"Rivers do not care about your practice swings," Neris said from her post near the hearth.

She'd come in out of the dawn mist still damp, hair braided back, river-scales glinting faintly at the edges of her jaw. She leaned on the warm stone with her arms folded, watching them all with the tight, wary affection of someone shepherding a litter of clever but occasionally self-destructive puppies.

"They care if you ask properly," she went on, "and if you're willing to get wet."

"Good thing we brought a priest," Skrik said.

"Two," Tamasin corrected. "One-and-a-half, depending how you feel about druid credentials."

"Three," Riona said mildly. "Depending how you feel about paladins."

Kel made a little gagging noise, soft enough that he could pretend he hadn't if pressed.

Riona ignored him. She raised her shield, shifted her stance. The kitchen light glanced along the battered rim, snagging on the new runes she'd had etched into the inner face—no holy names, just titles: Ward, Oath, Threshold.

"New trick," she said.

She flicked her wrist and the shield came up. Tamasin, never one to pass up a chance to test something, picked up their mug without looking and lobbed it in an easy arc at her shoulder.

The mug hit something that was not her.

It thunked against air a hand-span from the pauldron—the sound you get if you smack a door you thought was open. It rebounded soft, dropped into Riona's palm. Not a splash. Not even a spill.

Skrik's head popped up like a ferret out of a hole. "Do that again."

"No," Riona said. "Because if I break Benat's mug he'll stop bringing the good bread."

"Also because," Merrow said, "we only have so many explanations for 'oh look the paladin is experimenting with reality in the kitchen again.'"

Riona lowered the shield and exhaled, some tension bleeding out with the breath. "Point is," she said, "anything that tries to slip around me gets caught there. I'd like there not to be a lot of those things, but if the Temple's wiring is as bad as the notes said—"

"It's not wiring," Kel said automatically, "it's doctrine," and then they were off again, all of them, circling the problem.

Freedom of Movement, Resist Energy, the ethics of drowning as policy. The valley villages. The Crown's favorite excuse: act of god.

Merrow finally slapped his palm on the Telepathic Bond page. "Whatever else we say," he said, "we are not doing this with hand signals and yelling. I'm done with sending my thoughts out like flare rockets and hoping they land somewhere useful."

He traced the circle once, then crossed through it in neat, decisive strokes. "I can link us properly now. Clean channels, not that fuzzy mess from the elder brain. If you want in, you get your own room. If you don't, I don't kick your door. That's the deal."

"Consent," Tamasin said, nodding. "Imagine that."

"Imagine we had that," Neris muttered, "with the river."

Lyra's fingers tightened around the Prism. It pulsed once, sympathetic.

"Working on it," she said.

Benat Gregor arrived like he always did: with the door, with the smell of yeast and sugar and the faint singed note of someone who has to work near ovens all day and refuses to die politely of it.

"Breakfast or mutiny," he announced, backing through the doorway with a crate in his arms. "You get one or the other."

"Can't we have both?" Skrik said, already in position by the table corner.

Benat ignored the kobold and thumped the crate down on the cleared end of the table. The resettling wood made Merrow's ink jump again. He sighed this time and just lifted the whole sheaf of Telepathic Bond away from the splash radius.

"Look at you," Benat said, hands on hips, surveying them. "Skinny, under-slept, eyes like bad coin. This is what Lindell's hope looks like? I'm offended."

"We're a work in progress," Kel said. "Speaking of which, did you bring progress that tastes like cinnamon?"

Benat flicked a tea towel at him. "You get brown if you're polite and black if you're not. Move your maps."

They shifted scrolls and sketches aside. Benat unpacked the crate: rounds of dark rye, lighter loaves dusted with flour, a covered tin that absolutely was going to taste like cinnamon but which he refused to confirm on principle.

He set one heavy, dark loaf in the center of the table with a little more care than the others. It steamed gently in the cool kitchen air, heat clinging to it stubbornly.

"That one," he said, "stays warm until sunset if you don't bait it. Don't ask how. Don't argue if it offers advice."

"It offers advice?" Tamasin said.

"It might." Benat's eyes crinkled. "On extremely stupid days."

He started handing out rolls. Some were plain, some had little sigils burned into their crust—flour-white lines, tight loops.

"Those are for cleverly stupid acts," he said, dropping one by Lyra's elbow. "That one nudges your thoughts straight when you're about to commit something heroic and idiotic. That one is the opposite: you'll still be idiotic, you'll just be lucky about it."

"You can do that with bread?" Skrik said, reverent.

"You can do that with anything if you're stubborn enough," Benat said. His gaze snagged on the Temple sketch. "You're headed lake-ward?"

Riona nodded. "We have…questions."

Benat grunted. "They've been running that poor thing hard. Couple of cycles back we almost had the valley go sideways. The big Temple up the river spat out more water than sense. But the foundations held." His expression softened, just a fraction. "Gnome lot did something right, for once."

Tamasin tilted their head, curious. "You've seen the underworks?"

Benat's shrug was evasive but not hostile. "Bakers see the inside of more buildings than people think. You learn which ones stand up to a stiff wind. That place… someone built it for keeping people dry, not for impressing visiting bishops. Then the Crown decided it should be both." He sniffed. "You'll be careful with it."

"We're better at careful than we were," Lyra said quietly.

"Mm." Benat looked at her properly then, and whatever he saw—fever scars, Prism-glow, the sharper set of her mouth since the brain—it made him set a hand on her shoulder just for a moment. A warding gesture disguised as affection. "Here," he said, pulling another loaf from the crate and flipping it over. "Give me your knife."

Lyra passed him the little hunting blade she used for everything from carving sigils to trimming bow-callus. Benat scored the bottom of the loaf with quick, practised cuts. When he turned it back over there was a faint, bark-like pattern in the crust—raised ridges, overlapping scales.

"You've already got barkskin in your little spellbook, don't you?" he said. "Layer mine with yours if you have to. Stone and skin."

Lyra's mouth twitched into something that wanted to be a smile and didn't quite dare. "Thanks, Benat."

"You come back with all your bits attached," he said, and that was as much blessing as he would give.

In the foyer, on the way out, they had to detour around the chalkboard.

The kobold organizer had stolen half of the wall for their scheduling system: columns for sewer flows, lamplighter patrols, ooze sightings, "things that tried to bite the giant bones," and "things that successfully bit the giant bones" with different colored chalk.

"Morning, foreman," Skrik said, because he was determined to make the job title stick until it was real.

The kobold flicked an ear at him without looking away from the board. "If you're not here to take a shift, leave your complaints in writing."

Riona studied the mess of handwriting. "Busy day?"

"Busy week," the kobold said. "We've got a slime nest in third runoff, one of the wards on the north sluice is buzzing like a drunk wasp, and the Crown sent a nice letter saying we should 'minimize unpleasant odors visible from the upper terraces.' I am—" Chalk squeaked hard across slate. "—honoring that by scheduling a safety meeting tonight."

They wrote it neatly at the bottom: SAFETY COMMITTEE, IF WE'RE NOT ALL DROWNED.

"Assuming," they added dryly, "the whole city isn't ankle-deep in divine runoff by sundown."

"We're working on that part," Riona said. "We'll bring fresh grievances. Gods willing, better leverage."

"And stories," Skrik added. "You'll like the bit where we argue with the river."

The kobold snorted. "Bring proof. Management denies the river is unionizable."

Skrik hopped up, balanced on the back of a bench, and peered at the ooze line. "You can't send lamplighters through third runoff until that's cleared," he said. "You'll lose at least three lamps and one apprentice. Shift them to second for tonight and hit third with a sweep in the morning when the flow's lower."

The kobold squinted, doing the math. "You got promoted and I didn't notice?"

"Local knowledge," Skrik said, smug, and flicked the chalk to a new slot with quick, economical strokes.

As they stepped out onto the front steps of the Granary, sound hit them like a warm wave.

The plaza was in full throat. Carts. Voices. The clatter of a dropped crate, the muffled curse after. The distant, hollow tone of a giant's arm-bone bell, marking a shift up on the walls.

Layered through it: music.

The tabaxi bard had claimed their usual spot near the fountain—tail coiled comfortably around their ankles, one boot braced on the rim of the stone basin. The instrument was something stringed and battered that had once been a respectable lute before life happened to it. They were tuning while singing, which took a particular kind of arrogance and talent.

"…and the giants in the wall-bones dream," they sang, plucking a line that sounded like climbing stairs, "of a city that remembers all its names—"

"That's not how that went," Skrik muttered.

The bard slid into a new verse without apology. "A clock that walked and would not stop / a mind unmade without a drop / of blood upon the cobble-stones—"

"Definitely not how that went," Kel said.

"They're compressing for narrative," Tamasin said. "Bards are allowed to be wrong if it scans."

"Bards decide what counts as right ten years from now," Kel added, eyes half-closed, listening with the attention of someone who was taking notes on the crowd, not the song.

He whispered something under his breath, fingers moving as if he were sketching a pattern on his thigh. The air shivered around him.

"You're cheating," Skrik said.

"Sampling," Kel corrected. His eyes unfocused slightly. "The crowd likes the giants, loves the funeral, doesn't understand the clock, and has already decided the Crown only showed up at the end to bless what someone else fixed. This is useful."

Riona grimaced. "We don't need them to remember who did it. We need them to remember it can be done."

"Relax," Kel said. "History is sloppy. It'll stain the right places eventually."

They threaded their way down into the street: past the fountain, past the bard, past a cluster of dockworkers arguing about net weights and a pair of giant-skeleton arms moving somewhere overhead as a tower stretched.

Riona paused with her hand on the Parliament door handle and went through her mental checklist one more time. Holy symbol. Legal writ authorizing "inspection of temple infrastructure in light of recent flood risk projections." Shield. Willpower. People she trusted.

"Stop pre-worrying," Tamasin said, bumping her shoulder. "That's my job."

"You don't pre-worry," Riona said. "You worry exactly on time and in the right direction."

"Yes," Tamasin said. "And I'm telling you, right now, that if the Temple is in the kind of trouble the notes suggested, it's a better use of your energy to worry later when I say 'now.'"

"Fine," Riona said. She drew a breath, centered herself, and spoke a word under it. Cold light skimmed over her hands, then over Branna's. The air around them tightened fractionally, as if frost had decided it was not welcome.

Branna flexed her fingers. "Feels like when you wear two sets of gloves at once," she said, approving.

"Better that than frostbite," Riona said.

Tamasin knelt briefly by the storm drain near the steps. A rat's whiskered face poked up, curious. They held out a hand, murmured in a language that had more rustle than consonant.

The rat twitched, nose working.

"Hmm," Tamasin said. "It says the water from upriver tastes wrong. Like somebody boiled the river and poured it back in without saying sorry."

"That tracks," Neris said quietly.

Tamasin straightened. "Right. Everybody ready to go argue with a Temple?"

"Born ready," Kel said.

"Born reluctant," Riona corrected, opening the door to the river stairs. "Doing it anyway."

The door shut behind them. The noise of the city flattened. Ahead, the stone steps spiraled down toward the dock and the water that remembered everything.

The river was in a mood.

It sat under Lindell like an employee forced into overtime: slack on the surface, tight in the muscles. Neris stepped to the edge of the little Parliamentary dock, closed her eyes, and whispered the rite like someone filing a complaint in triplicate.

"Here we are," she said, hand skimming the water. "We brought offerings. We brought work. We brought questions."

The river sucked at the pilings, making a sound like someone rolling their tongue around a toothache.

It knew them. Of course it did.

It knew Riona by the way her boots thudded through the planks, weight carried like a responsibility you couldn't set down. It knew Tamasin by the way their shadow and the shadow of the nearest weed agreed with one another. It knew Kel by his smell of ink and mischief and the faint ozone prickle of illusions gone wrong in other rooms.

It remembered the Chronometer. It remembered the Clock. It remembered the funeral: the weight of the coffin, the thrum of the city's grief through its water.

"That's a yes," Neris said finally, when the current brushed her ankles and did not try to pull her in. "Or at least a 'you owe me, but I am curious.'"

They loaded into the skiff in their usual configuration. Branna in the bow, shield up, Stubbornness Personified. Riona midships, steady and upright, hand never far from her holy symbol. Lyra near Neris, one hand on the gunwale, the other keeping the Prism turned toward the light. Skrik and Kel side by side toward the stern, which meant trouble and commentary. Merrow in the absolute middle, where he could see all of them and none of the water.

Tamasin took the oars for the first stretch. Their muscles knew the motion by now; they'd rowed into worse.

Lyra watched the wake, eyes narrowed. The river should have moved one way and it was doing something else: a long, dragging reluctance in the direction of the Sacred Lake, like a muscle pulled too tight.

"That's the Temple," she said softly. "It's holding the river higher than it wants to be. See?" She pointed at a bit of drifting plank. "Should've gone under the tower arch. It's stalled instead. There's a tug on it from upriver."

"You can tell that," Skrik said, impressed.

"Tracking doesn't stop at deer," she said. "Or at streets."

He leaned over as far as he dared, ears high, watching the tiny vortices in their wake. "Huh. Looks knotted."

"Feels knotted," Neris muttered.

They talked while the city wall slid past and the giants' bones dwindled behind them.

Riona laid out the stakes again for anyone whose brain had been eaten or pushed out of their skull recently.

"The Temple was built to cycle through three states," she said. "Low, mid, high. Resting, Work, Flood of Favor. Low to breathe, mid to share, high to bless fields. Built after the homeland disaster as a promise: 'never again.'"

"Then the Crown," Kel said, "looked at it and said, 'What if we add a setting called Emergency and point it at people we don't like.'"

"Roughly," Riona said. "The notes from the Guild say there's an extra clause now. An add-on. An override that dumps the whole lake in one direction, no buffering, no consent."

"On the valley," Tamasin said, tone flat.

"On the valley," Riona echoed. "On people who had their taxes in on time."

Lyra's hand tightened on the Prism. "We can't leave it like that."

"We're not," Riona said. "We're not going to desecrate a holy site. We're going to unscrew the bolts the Crown stuck in its spine."

Neris laughed under her breath, sharp. "The god doesn't enjoy being used that way either. It remembers."

Merrow had one finger pressed lightly to his temple, like he was already holding three conversations they couldn't hear.

"I can keep us linked," he said suddenly, looking up. "Properly. Not the half-broken whisper-net from before. Clean channels. If you let me."

"Define 'clean,'" Skrik said.

"You get your own thread," Merrow said. "If you don't want to hear someone, you don't. If you need everyone, you ping everyone. I can drop you out if you tell me to. No pushing, no rummaging. I've had enough of that to last several lifetimes."

Riona considered. The river moved under them, partial and grudging.

"I want to hear you," she said. "Do it. But we ask. No surprises."

"Please, Merrow," Tamasin added sweetly. "Bond us in your weird brain-web so we don't drown separately."

"One of these days," Merrow said, "I'm going to cast a spell without being heckled."

"That day would be strange and I would not trust it," Skrik said.

Merrow smiled despite himself. "Fine."

He took a breath, squared his shoulders, and began to draw the circle in the air.

It wasn't a visible line. It was a sensation: a cool ring around each of their temples, a doorframe outlining the space behind their eyes. Merrow's voice wove through it as a thread of intention.

He did not barge in. He knocked, one by one.

Lyra felt the invitation like a pressure against the edge of the Prism's awareness. She opened herself cautiously, expecting the old chaotic flood of voices. Instead she got a neat, labeled hallway, doors marked with familiar names. She picked RIONA and TAMASIN and NERIS and left KEL half-open on purpose, because you never knew when you would need to hear him swear in your head.

Branna accepted with a grunt and a slam, the door into her mind-icon plain wood with a heavy bar. Tamasin's was a tree. Riona's was a doorway in a city wall with a small, stubborn light burning above it. Kel's was already open and contained a sign saying PLEASE WIPE YOUR FEET.

"You all right?" Merrow asked out loud, but the real question turbulence ran along the new connections.

"Yes," Riona said, both ways. "We do the same for the Temple."

"What, give it hallways and doors?" Skrik said.

"Consent," she said. "Let it say no."

"Imagine that," Tamasin repeated, quiet.

The skiff slid on.

The Temple Landing rose out of the water with that weird, deliberate geometry only gnomes and gods seemed to love.

The stone steps fanned out from the shore like a tongue. The mooring posts at the edge were old, iron-banded, the metal clean and unrusted. The river glared at them.

"See those bands?" Lyra said, as they tied off. She knelt and ran her fingers along the closest post, careful of the slick moss. "No pitting, no rough edges. Whoever put these in hated surprises even more than we do."

Skrik flicked water off his whiskers and peered at the base of the post. "And they sunk them deep. That's not cosmetic. That's 'I watched my country slide into the ocean and I am never letting go of anything again.'"

In the stone of the landing itself, inset near the edge, was a brass survey peg. Its surface was stamped with the Crown's crest: a stylized eye with too many lashes, the weirdly barbed circle they'd started insisting on in the last decade. Under that imprint, scored so lightly you had to know what you were looking for, was a different mark.

"Lindell's old watchmark," Riona said, crouching beside the peg. "And—"

Kel leaned in, eyes narrowing. "And the Guild," he said. "See that little crossed-gear under the city? Horologium. They stamped everything they touched. Look at the chisel work. The city mark and the Guild mark went in first. The Crown got itself added later."

The difference was in the lines. The older marks were clean, smooth, laborious. The Crown crest sat on top like a second thought hammered in by someone in a hurry.

Kel laid two fingers lightly against the brass, eyelids dropping half-mast. You could almost see the mental paperwork flipping behind his eyes.

"Whoever logged work here did it in the last decade," he said. "You can feel the thinness. Original inscription's older. This is a retrofit. A weapon, after the fact, not a factory defect."

"Retrofit," Tamasin said. "That's one word for 'tied a bomb to the church.'"

Riona straightened up and looked toward the trees.

The Sacred Fringe was a green collar around the lake: dayshade trunks rising straight from damp earth, their leaves filtering the dawn light into a slow, underwater kind of glow. Little shrines had been nailed to some of them over the years: bowls wired to branches, bundles of herbs, clay charms. The wax from a dozen candle-drippings made one trunk look like it had grown its own pale bark.

Someone had carved the royal crest into that same trunk, just above one shrine. The lines were shallow but arrogant.

Riona stepped closer. Her shield hummed on her arm, the new wards on it shivering at the edge of her perception. The moment her fingers brushed the carved eye she felt a cold, slick attention try to slide in under her skin.

The shield caught it.

It flared, invisible to anyone who didn't know what to look for, a hard curve of condensed will around her. The crest's divine ping hit that barrier and smeared sideways like grease on glass. There was a tiny, irritated hiss.

"Mm," Riona said.

She pulled a knife from her belt and carefully, deliberately, marred the carving. Not enough to destroy the tree's bark, just enough to cross the eye out. A little line of defiance through propaganda.

"You don't get to live here," she said. "You have enough walls."

Skrik, who had been weighing something small and round in his palm, flicked his wrist and sent it skittering into the shadows between two roots.

Pebble. Charm. One of his little boundary-tester things. It rolled, then stopped abruptly as if it had hit an invisible wall.

He closed his eyes and listened.

The god's domain line hummed under his feet. On one side: river, Temple, old promises. On the other: city, Crown, new lies. The air itself seemed to hold its breath, insects going abruptly quiet, leaves stilling.

"Yep," he said under his breath. "Somebody's drawn a hard line."

"Which side are we on?" Lyra asked.

"Whichever one complains less when we start rearranging it," Skrik said, and pocketed another pebble for later.

They walked out of the trees toward the lake.

The Sacred Lake was not sacred in the sense of being pretty.

It had been pretty once, probably, back when the gnomes had first carved terraces into the banks and laid the stone ribs along the shore. Now it was functional. The water sat in a wide bowl of worked rock, stepped down in concentric rings. Channels cut the terraces into neat sections: some for bathing, some for irrigation, some for ceremonial drowning (the nice kind, with rescue ropes).

The Temple rose out of the middle of it, half machine, half prayer.

Stone ribs. Terraced shoulders. A central shaft like a throat leading down into the water. From here it looked like someone had dropped a clock into a lake and then decided to build a church around where it landed.

"It's sitting too high," Neris said immediately. Her face had changed; some of the habitual river-wryness had been stripped out, leaving something more raw and devout. "Resting Tide should have half those lower rings submerged. It's perched."

Lyra's eyes flickered from the water line to the scratch-marked notes on the map in her hand and back.

"If it's this high in its 'normal' state," she said slowly, "that means more weight held in the bowl. More pressure on everything downstream. Somebody cranked it up and left it there."

"Because they like having Flood of Favor on tap," Kel said. "Or because they like the threat."

Tamasin squinted toward the distant terraces along the valley rim. "If the whole system is running hotter than it was designed to…" They whistled under their breath. "That's a lot of 'necessary sacrifices' waiting to happen."

They made a slow circuit of the nearest terrace, boots leaving damp prints on the stone.

At the edge of one of the access ramps, half-buried in mud, Lyra spotted a glint of metal. She crouched and pried it out with careful fingers.

It was a heel plate. Tiny, sized for a gnome's work-boot. Iron, with a distinctive chip out of one corner where it had once caught on something sharp. The surface was worn, the edges smoothed by time and grit.

Branna, looking over her shoulder, sucked her teeth. "I've seen that notch pattern," she said. "Horologium. Those smiths mark everything. One of the clock-bailiffs had a pair that matched."

"Gnome footprints," Skrik murmured. "Even when they're not here."

Lyra turned the plate over in her hand, thumb tracing the old damage. The Prism pulsed faintly, as if remembering a different set of gnome iron rods somewhere under Lindell.

She stood and looked at the Temple again, letting the lines of it settle into the back of her eyes.

The base ribs of it were solid, cautious geometry. Angles chosen for load-bearing, for sharing strain across multiple supports. Above that, though—above the gnome bones—someone had added sharper, more aggressive structures. Narrowed sluices. Steep channels.

The Prism helped. When she opened herself to it, the edges of the Temple picked up a faint outline, like heat shimmering. Original lines glowed a soft, even blue in her inner sight. The new cuts blazed white and jittery, like scar tissue.

"This is wrong," she said softly. "The load-bearing structure is fine. Better than fine. Whoever reinforced the foundations after the homeland disaster knew exactly what they were doing. But the discharge channels…"

She pointed, following an invisible map only she and the Prism could see.

"…these routes are newer. Thinner. Someone added a fourth setting and pointed it straight at the valley."

"They turned seasonal blessing into a switch," Tamasin said, "that flips to 'weapon' when they're offended."

"And then left it halfway on," Riona said. "So we get the flood risk even when they're not offended."

Neris' jaw clenched. "We're fixing it."

Riona glanced at the others. At Merrow's ink-smeared fingers. At Kel's thoughtful frown. At Lyra, steadying the Prism against her own unsteady heart. At Branna's planted feet. At Tamasin's hands, flexing like they were feeling the roughness of the stone from here.

"We're fixing it," she agreed. "We're not walking away from this."

They retreated to the shade of a low wall to argue about how.

"Two groups," Riona said, already dividing them up without meaning to. "One outside, one inside."

"Clearly," Kel said. "The Church Ladies and the Grease Monkeys."

Neris raised a hand. "I'm going where the god's throat is," she said. "If there's an original gate under the water, I'm the only one who can ask it nicely."

"Then Branna goes with you," Riona said instantly. "And Lyra, for sight. The rest of us go into the shaft and read the clauses on the stone."

Branna made a face. "I hate water."

"You hate everything," Skrik said cheerfully. "This is at least new."

Tamasin tapped their fingers on their knee. "I want Freedom of Movement on whoever's doing the deepest tunnel-crawling," they said. "The Temple will breathe when we start tugging its ribs. I don't want anyone jammed in a slot while it does."

"I'll be in the shaft," Riona said. "Put it on me before we go down."

"We're going to need Resist Energy on whoever's anchoring in front of the worst flows," Tamasin went on. "Riona already has that. Branna does too."

Riona looked at Merrow. "You keep us linked. If the god seems…upset…we don't assume. We ask."

"And if the Crown's overrides start screaming in the stone," Kel said, "we write new footnotes on their theology."

"Carefully," Merrow said. "Surgical theology. No improvising with a floodgate."

"Improvisation is what got us here," Riona said. "We'll try something different this time."

Merrow rubbed the bridge of his nose. "All right," he said. "Then let me give you good improvisation tools."

He lifted his hands, the Telepathic Bond circle already etched in his mind, and offered each of them a place in the network again.

One by one, they accepted or held back. The connections snapped into place with less static than earlier, the pathways clearer, the distances shorter. Branna's mindspace felt like standing behind a wall with your back pressed against stone you trusted. Skrik's was all scaffolding and rattling pipes. Kel's felt like a theater with the stage usually occupied.

"This is a corridor," Merrow said, into their minds as much as aloud. "you can walk down it if you want. You can close your own doors. I won't open any I'm not invited into. We're done with being a hive."

"Good," Lyra thought, and he heard it as clearly as if she'd spoken.

"Good," Skrik thought, too. "Because there are things in here that would upset you all."

Kel, naturally, broadcast a picture of himself lounging on a couch labeled SECRETS, just to be annoying.

The bond held. The river breathed under them. The Temple waited.

Time to get wet.

They didn't jump in all at once.

You don't walk into an argument with a god and a gnome in the same breath; you ease in, say hello to the parts that can kill you first.

Neris walked down the carved steps into the lake like she was going home. The water reached her calves, her knees, her hips, clinging more than it should. She hissed something in its own language, pure river consonants, and it grudgingly loosened.

Branna followed, every line of her body complaining. Armor off, stripped down to padded underlayers, spear swapped for a shorter haft with a blunt cap so she didn't harpoon the wrong sacred rock by accident. The river lapped at her thighs and muttered about it.

"You're wearing more metal than sense," Neris told her. "The lake has opinions."

"The lake can file a complaint," Branna said. "I'll be the wall."

"Of course you will," Neris sighed, but there was affection in it.

Riona laid a hand on Branna's shoulder, murmured the word again, that small cold thing. Resist Energy wrapped itself around Branna like a second skin, a thin frost between her and the bite of the water.

Lyra went last, Prism on a cord against her chest, fingers touching it lightly. The thing hummed in anticipation, sensing depth and structure below like a dog scenting a rabbit warren.

"Stay in my shadow," Neris said. "And if the god says 'out,' we go."

"Oh, good," Kel called from the shore. "We have a plan for when the local divinity gets cross. Splendid."

"Shut up," three voices said in eerie, perfectly synchronized chorus—out loud and down the new mental link.

Neris took a breath that looked half ordinary, half ritual, and slid under.

Branna and Lyra went with her.

The lake closed over their heads, muffled the world into press and murk. Cold clawed instantly; Riona's warding trimmed the claws to dull nails, blunted but present. The water's first impulse was to grab ankles and drag. Freedom of Movement, whispered along the bond by Tamasin and fed through Merrow's work, turned that grip into more of a suggestion.

Neris went first, slicing through the dark like she was being pulled by a cord only she could see. Lyra followed, kicking with neat efficiency, lungs burning in a way that felt almost nostalgic: all the times she'd gone under in rivers farther north, all the half-drowns she'd walked away from harder.

The gate lived under the Temple like a forgotten mouth.

It was a ring of stone set into the submerged wall, carved when the lake was younger. Lines radiated from it: gnome bevels, river sigils, the universal grammar of "this is a door that only opens if you ask correctly." Over it, latched like a metal hand on a throat, lay the Crown's addition.

A thin brass ring had been bolted around the original sigil. It forced one segment of the door's pattern slightly ajar—just enough for a continuous leak of pressure, an ever-present readiness to spit water out in one direction.

Lyra's skin crawled at the sight. The original lines, when the Prism looked at them, shone a steady, sane blue; the ring screamed white in her inner vision, a jagged, twitching command.

There was no time for pretty ritual here. Lungs had opinions. The lake had its own.

Lyra grabbed hold of the stone and set her feet, the Freedom of Movement spell letting her keep her balance in water that wanted her elsewhere. Branna planted herself above and slightly behind, one arm to either side, taking the worst of the current on shoulders and spine. It came at her like a fist; Resist Energy took the sting out of the cold, left only the shove. She grunted, adjusted, and became a temporary part of the Temple: a brace that wore irritation instead of moss.

Neris hovered a body-length off, eyes half-shut, hands moving in little circles as she took the river's muttering and translated it into something like patience.

Merrow's mind brushed Lyra's, steady and cool. We've got you. Say it clean. Tamasin's watching for cycles.

Tamasin's presence hummed in the back of Lyra's head like a drumbeat, counting, sensing the way the water pulsed—when it surged hardest, when it eased for a fraction of a second. A window. A breath that wasn't theirs.

Lyra waited for that half-beat of slack, fingers pressed flat against the old gnome marks.

Up close, the sigil felt less like words and more like a handshake. The original clause under her palms said, in stone-grammar: I ASK / YOU ANSWER / WE BOTH MAY LET GO.

The brass ring around it said: I COMMAND / YOU COMPLY / UNTIL I RELEASE YOU.

That was the wrong story. For rivers. For people.

She didn't have to carve new lines. She just had to remind the old ones what they had sworn to.

In her head, in the shared space, she shaped the words as much to the others as to the gate.

We are here. We have work. We may leave. You may say no.

The Prism warmed, bright under her fingers. Light bled from its surface into the water, taking the shape of the original sigil. It walked the grooves, burning off algae and silt, reciting the geometry the gnomes had meant. The brass ring shook, offended.

Pressure ramped up. The current tried to slam Lyra sideways into the wall. Branna took it on her shoulders, feet carving deeper furrows into the silt. Freedom of Movement meant the water couldn't bind her, but it could try to shove. She let it shove, redirected, became a breakwater.

Again, Merrow's thought came. Just to be cruel.

Lyra repeated it. The clause, the offer, the permission.

Something in the stone shuddered like an old lung remembering how to inhale. The brass ring split with an audible crack. One of the bolts sheared off and skated past them into the dark.

The gate opened.

Not all at once. Not catastrophically. Not in the explosive, weaponized way Kel had described in the notes. It opened like an old door in a house that had been shut too long: slow, with complaining hinges, letting pressure equalize in a long, hissing sigh.

The Temple's body shifted. They all felt it: a gentle, whole-structure exhale. The water level around them dropped by a hand's width as some of the load got redistributed elsewhere.

Neris laughed into the water—bubbles breaking around her face, hair drifting like weed. If rivers had shoulders, the lake's dropped.

"The gate remembers," she thought, fierce and giddy, and sent that joy along the Bond so even those still on the terrace felt it. "It hated that ring."

"Same," Kel said dryly, from somewhere up in the air.

They kicked for the surface, lungs on fire.

The sky had never felt so arrogantly spacious.

They clambered up onto the steps, coughing, dripping, alive. Branna flopped onto her back, eyes closed, letting the weak sun soak into her. Lyra lay there and watched the Temple, sitting just slightly lower in the lake than it had a few minutes before. The topmost ring of stone now had a thin lace of water over it where it had been bone-dry.

"Looks better already," Tamasin said.

"That was just the throat," Riona said. "Now we go down its spine."

Inside the Temple shaft, the world narrowed to stone and water and carved promises.

The main entrance was above the waterline: a wide arch set into the Temple's lower ring, reachable by a flight of slick steps. They lit chalk-lanterns as they went, the soft blue of gnomish glow-powder crawling reluctantly up wick threads.

The throat's interior was a vertical cathedral.

Balconies ringed it at intervals, some no wider than a man's shoulders, others broad enough for entire processions. Channels cut through the stone like arteries, carrying water at varying heights depending on which clause the Temple was currently obeying.

Four great sigils had been carved into the central pillar that rose from deep below and vanished up into the dark.

The upper three were old work: patient, even, the lines worn smooth by fingers and offerings. RESTING TIDE. WORK OF WATER. FLOOD OF FAVOR.

The fourth sat below them, gouged in like an afterthought with someone's more expensive chisel.

EMERGENCY DISCHARGE.

Even without the Prism, Lyra could feel the wrongness radiating off it. With the Prism, the word looked like a bruise on the pillar.

"It's loud," she muttered.

Feels like a compulsion effect, Merrow sent around the circle. A standing order: 'If X, then drown Y,' without the option for Y to opt out.

"Someone told the god, 'If we say so, you empty yourself no matter who's downstream,'" Tamasin said. "And they carved it deep enough that it thinks obeying is virtue."

"That's the sickness," Riona said. "We cure it. We don't smash the patient."

They descended first, into the Temple's resting heart.

The stairs down to the low chapel were carved tight, the walls beading with condensation. Somewhere water dripped in a slow, off-tempo beat. The air smelled of old candles, older stone, and the faint copper tang of coins that had been left and taken and left again.

The chapel itself was small and long, a nave scooped into the base of the pillar. Benches lined either side, worn smooth where generations of valley folk had sat and listened to sermons about floods and favor. At the far end, the altar was less an altar and more a basin carved into the floor, currently dry but ringed with tide-lines.

Names marched along the walls in careful, chiseled columns. Years. Families. Crops. The record of when the Temple had chosen to flood barely enough, just enough, too much.

Here and there, a brass plate sat over a cluster of letters, riveted directly into the stone. Redacted history.

Kel ran his fingers lightly over one such plate. "These will all say the same thing," he murmured. "After action reports rephrased as 'acts of god.'"

Under his touch, fine scratches whispered: the original chisel-marks beneath the plate. The gnomes had written the numbers honestly before someone else had come along with a covering square of metal and a theology to match.

Tamasin stood before the altar-basin, arms folded. "These aren't hymns," they said finally. "They're safety reports someone tried to turn into scripture. 'Year X: overflow reached the third terrace; no homes lost.' 'Year Y: culvert twelve failed; two houses gone; reinforcement added.'" They pointed at the fine, precise diagrams etched low along the base of the wall: tiny cross-sections of culverts, support ribs, pressure gates.

"Somebody," they went on, "lived through an entire country sinking and then spent the rest of their life writing footnotes so nobody's kitchen flooded again."

Riona stepped closer to the nearest brass-plate patch.

She touched the edge of it with two fingertips, eyes half-closed, and let her sense for rot, for infection, stretch out—not into flesh this time, but into the story.

Behind the plate, the stone thrummed with names.

"They're still there," she said. "Under the metal. The god remembers them. The plates only fool people."

"Like putting a bandage over an infected wound without cleaning it," Tamasin said. "Looks tidier. Smells worse."

A familiar tickle at the back of Riona's mind: the itch that said remove disease. Her old, blunt instrument, now sharp enough to be wielded on institutions if she dared.

"It's not a disease of the Temple," she said, quiet. "It's one of policy. We scrape the plaque off, the body might remember how to move."

Lyra stepped up to the central RESTING TIDE sigil.

It was a simple thing in theory: three lines, a shallow cup, and the suggestion of a heartbeat. In practice it was a paragraph, grammar built into groove depth and the way one line intersected another.

She laid the Prism into the central cup and set her hand over it. Neris' presence swelled along the Bond, filling the chapel with river-song without a drop moving.

Resting Tide, Lyra thought. Not the strained resting the Crown likes. The one you built. The one that means 'you are allowed to stop.'

The Prism flared. The sigil warmed under her palm, old channels waking.

Words—not human words, not exactly—rose like bubbles. The original clause talked about winter, about low demand, about breathing space. About the Temple being allowed to sit between work and favor and simply exist.

Lyra spoke them in her own tongue anyway, giving them shape.

"We are asking you," she said aloud, "to remember rest. You don't have to be ready to flood someone every hour of the day."

Something deep under the floor shivered. The basin in front of the altar, bone-dry for who knew how long, filled slowly from below. Not a gush. A seep. Quiet as a confession.

Throughout the Temple, they felt things shift.

High above, in the shaft, water levels crept down. Old maintenance door seams exhaled damp. Somewhere a rusted hinge gave up with a sigh and a hidden panel popped open in a shower of dust.

"There," Skrik said, already moving. "Backstage."

Tamasin lifted their hand. "Freedom of Movement on Riona," they said, sending the spell's flexibility into her muscles before the Temple decided that rearranging its lungs while mortals were inside them was funny.

Riona felt it take, a new slickness in her joints, a refusal to stick no matter how hard stone or water tried. She nodded her thanks and followed Skrik through the narrow, newly-opened slot in the chapel wall.

The maintenance tunnels were not made for ceremony.

They were carved low to the ground, thick with the smell of wet stone and old grease. Gnome lines ran along them: etched flow diagrams, arrowheads pointing direction, numbers annotated with "tested," "reinforced," "do not touch without five colleagues watching."

Lyra, squinting at a particular knot of lines, realized they were essentially tracking what she always tracked—movement over time, strain on paths. The gnomes had just done it with more math and less mud.

"No prayers," Skrik said, fingers trailing over the grooves. "Just 'if this breaks, this many people get wet.' I like them."

Water whispered somewhere ahead, the low, constant rush of a system never fully at rest.

Lyra tilted her head. Her tracker-brain could follow that sound the way it followed a deer through brush.

"Pressure's building there," she said, pointing left. "And again there, two junctions down. That one's fine." She indicated a third path with a flat palm. "They used that for overflow. The rock is used to it."

"Good," Tamasin said. "That's probably where our Belly goes."

They moved deeper.

Skrik's ears were their early warning system. He stopped them twice to lay his head against the wall and listen to a particular creak or drip. Once he pulled Riona back by the tunic before she stepped onto a patch of stone that had gone slick with something more than water; a moment later the section ahead of it twitched, settling under a shift in pressure as the Temple continued to inch toward true Resting Tide.

"You're hearing that?" Riona murmured.

"Grew up in pipes," he said. "Stone complains before it fails. You just have to listen like you're trying to eavesdrop on a board meeting."

Eventually the tunnel widened into a space that was only half-room, half throat.

Here the stone was stained a darker shade in long, violent streaks. This was where they'd been forcing the EMERGENCY clause through the Temple's throat.

The gate at the far end was a brutal thing.

The original frame was sensible: thick supports, cross-bracing, clean iron rods sunk deep to take the strain of a true emergency release. Gnome over-caution all over it, every joint triple-checked.

Threaded through that, bolted on like malicious jewelry, were the Crown's improvements: sharper iron teeth, a narrowed chute cut directly through to the valley without the mitigating loops and holding basins the diagrams elsewhere showed.

"This looks like if you asked a paranoid engineer to build a safety valve," Tamasin said, touching the original frame, "and then you let a general carve a shortcut through it."

The stone hummed with choice.

The obvious one—rip all the Crown metal out, seal the gate, declare the danger gone—sat in the air like a dare.

Riona stared at it and felt that urge crawl through her hands. To close, to end.

Then she thought about real floods. Real storms. That collapsing dam upriver three summers ago that they'd just barely managed to divert.

"No," she said.

"No?" Skrik echoed.

"We can't just brick it over," Riona said. "Sometimes things do break. Sometimes there is too much water. If we seal this completely, all that pressure is going to find somewhere to go. Somewhere we haven't mapped."

"Block the artery," Tamasin said slowly, catching up, "and you don't cure the disease. You just push it further in."

Riona nodded. "We reroute. We keep the emergency, but we stop it being aimed like a weapon."

"Then we need a new destination," Kel said along the Bond, picking up the thread from where he'd stayed in the shaft. "Somewhere the water can go that isn't 'on people.'"

Back in the chapel, Tamasin had already been tracing flow diagrams on the floor with chalk, extrapolating from what they'd seen in the tunnels. There had been, in the original design, the suggestion of another basin under the Temple—a big, hollowed-out sump, never fully realized before the Crown commandeered the system.

"The Belly," Tamasin thought to them all, the mental image blooming across the Bond: a deep, stone stomach under the Temple, meant to hold excess until it could be bled off gently into multiple channels.

"Not built," Lyra said aloud, looking at the tunnels ahead. "But the rock there is thick, and it's already used to holding weight. The gnomes planned for it and then never got the budget."

There was a particular bitterness in that: safety feature relegated to "nice-to-have" because the people holding the purse strings thought the existing protections were "good enough."

Tamasin's hand tightened around their chalk. "All right," they said. "We build the damn thing ourselves."

A world away, but connected by pipes and numbers, a wall of gauges began to complain.

Sera Argent had been in the Guild laboratory since dawn and had the ink-stained fingers to prove it. The glass model of the Sacred Lake glowed on the central table—a little miracle of hydraulic engineering: miniature terraces, tiny sluices, dyed water tracing routes through channels that corresponded to real, unseen ones in the bones of the land.

She was midway through a quarterly report on "flow irregularities of negligible risk," which meant she was bored and annoyed, when the needles started to jump.

The model lake's waterline dropped by the width of a thumbnail. Several of the tiny brass sluice-doors along the valley side shuddered, then settled into a new pattern of movement without her touching a control.

On the wall, a bank of pressure gauges, each labeled with a culvert number and a location, swayed like startled eyes. Two that had been riding high in the orange slid down toward green. One in the red flickered.

"Absolutely not," Sera said to nobody, and then louder, "Who touched the Temple controls?"

Apprentices looked up guiltily from their scrolls. Nobody had been near the master levers.

Sera grabbed a slate and started scribbling readings. The changes weren't random. They were too clean, too intentional.

"That's not a breach," she said slowly. "That's…someone re-clause-ing it."

Her superior, a higher-ranked gnome with tired eyes and a head so full of tolerances and acceptable casualty figures that they sometimes talked in numbers at dinner, came to stand by her elbow.

"Temple anomaly?" they said.

"Level three?" Sera offered, because that was the category for "unplanned but not yet disastrous."

"Log it for Horologium," they said, already turning away. "If it drops another five points, we escalate."

Sera stared at the model.

The tiny representation of the valley, where normally a speculative flood would pour if the EMERGENCY gate tripped, now had a trickle redirecting to a lower, central basin she hadn't noticed before. On the drawing, it had always been labelled AUX SUMP—future work, funding pending—and quietly ignored by everyone who thought the Crown would never authorize that kind of infrastructure if it didn't involve a statue.

Now, dots of dye ran into it.

"Someone down there knows what they're doing," Sera said softly, and reached for a second, private notebook. The one where she wrote the numbers that mattered to her, not just the Crown.

She wrote: TEMPLE FOUNDATIONS HOLDING. CULVERTS TAKING STRAIN AS ORIGINALLY MODELED. UNSANCTIONED REWRITE IN PROGRESS. RESULTS: BETTER.

She underlined that last word three times.

In Horologium's side-archives, Rowan Delmare watched a different kind of gauge twitch.

He was filing disasters.

The thing about being bound to the god of Law was that you spent a lot of time watching people justify themselves on paper. Rowan's job, this week, was to help transcribe records from older scrolls onto newer, neater slates: flood events, crop failures, evacuations categorized as successes or "acceptable losses."

Acceptable losses. Eight syllables with teeth.

He sat on a high stool, surrounded by shelves of parchment that smelled like dust and excuses, and watched the numbers slide by.

Each event had columns: water levels, warning times, casualty estimates, actual casualty counts, whether it had been logged as act of god, act of negligence, or act of Crown (the last category had a mysterious habit of shrinking over time).

A clerk he barely knew dropped a fresh slate on his desk with a stack of others. "New telemetry from the Sacred Lake," she said, distracted. "They want it matched to historical thresholds."

He nodded and set the slate beside his current stack.

Merely looking at it made the little red glyph under his collar itch. Oath magic. His own binding, tight and precise as a line in a contract: protect the innocent, interpret the law honestly, do not let numbers make you forget bodies.

He picked up the slate.

It showed current states: water levels at various points in the Temple, pressure in culverts, calculated thresholds for when EMERGENCY DISCHARGE would kick.

Rowan frowned.

There were values here he recognized from old charts, but they were lower. Pressure that had been allowed to creep up into the "we can probably get away with it and blame the river" range had dropped back to cautious, pre-Crown numbers.

Casualty projections that had once been columns of two-, three-, four-digit figures now read zero in neat little script.

As he watched, one of the threshold values changed again. The slate shimmered faintly; a connection to the live instruments elsewhere updated.

The line that had read OVERFLOW ROUTE: VALLEY FLOOR now read OVERFLOW ROUTE: AUX RETENTION BASIN.

His glyph burned.

He looked up, scanning the room. No one else seemed to notice. A higher-ranking aasimar with wings folded tight under a robe frowned at the same slate type a few tables away, jotted something down about "update divine intervention rubric," and went back to whatever abstruse rubric divine bureaucrats liked.

Rowan, slowly, copied the key figures onto a scrap from his personal book. Projected casualties before. Projected casualties now.

The paper felt heavier when he folded it and slipped it into his sleeve.

Somewhere, someone was arguing with the way the world had been told it had to be. And winning.

He smiled, a small, feral thing, and went back to pretending to be a quiet archivist.

Back in the Temple, on the mid-level balcony, WORK OF WATER watched them approach.

The sigil here was more crowded than RESTING TIDE. It showed stylized figures passing buckets up a line, water moving from hand to hand. Smaller annotations in gnome shorthand described flow rates, crop rotations, volunteer rosters.

Someone, later, had added little hooks around the edge. Crown work. Caveats in law. "Only when tithe quotas met." "Only at royal discretion." "Only for those who can pay."

Lyra stared at it, lip curling.

"This used to say 'everyone lifts,'" she said. "Now it says 'the poor drown first.'"

Tamasin ran their palm just above the stone, feeling for whatever passed for pulse in rock and rune.

"It's a mutual aid contract," they said. "Was. You see the original terms? 'All who work, eat.' 'All who carry, drink.' Every amendment they hammered on after is about who gets cut out of the bucket line."

"Strip them," Riona said.

"Gladly," Tamasin said.

They worked like surgeons.

Lyra held the Prism close, letting it highlight the original lines in that calm blue, the newer ones in jittery white. Tamasin used a combination of druid sense and legal training-by-osmosis to tease out the phrases they needed: the bits that said "only for" and "except when" and other little knives.

Merrow kept track of everyone's thoughts as they argued each clause, letting consensus flow through the Bond instead of degenerate into three separate debates barked over each other.

Kel chimed in with phrasing that would withstand the inevitable "creative reinterpretations" from Horologium. Skrik suggested language that priests could actually explain from a pulpit without sounding like a tax notice.

"It has to mean," Tamasin said at one point, finger tracing clean through the air, "that when the Temple works, it works for anyone who's in its reach, not just the Crown's friends. That when the water goes out, it doesn't check your papers first."

They carved the new understanding in—not with chisels, but with alignment.

Lyra spoke the WORK OF WATER clause aloud, folding out the original promise and stitching their clarifications to it.

"We carry together," she said. "We lift together. The Temple's work is not contingent on tithe. It is contingent on need."

Water responded.

The level in the shaft rose to what felt like a sane mid-point. Channels overhead woke; small flows began to move outward, down pathways that fed not the valley's exposed throat but the old, patient irrigation runs that wrapped the higher terraces.

Along the Bond, they all felt the Temple ease again. A second detente.

"Good," Neris thought, somewhere up near the outer shell. "That's what it was built for."

"Hold that thought," Skrik said. "We still have a murder hallway to fix."

He was referring, with resignation and accuracy, to the dynamic flow hall.

The entrance lay just off the WORK balcony: a long corridor, shin-deep in water, with circular openings cut into the walls at shoulder height. The gnomes had designed it as a calibration space—somewhere you could walk and feel where the water hit, tweak valves, adjust flow. A tuning instrument you could physically get inside.

The Crown, inevitably, had seen "walkable engineering marvel with controllable jets" and thought: demonstration. Trial. Punishment. Spectacle.

"Feels like a rich person's idea of a miracle show," Kel said, eyeing the dark circles along the walls. "And a poor person's idea of a bad day."

"We're turning it back into a tool," Riona said. "If it complains, that's good. Tools that scream when misused are safer."

They stepped in.

At first, the water around their boots was just…cold. Stubborn. The kind of chill that made ankles ache. Then it rose, creeping up to calves, and the floor under them tilted.

Skrik's instincts went from quietly alert to vivid red.

"Don't stand still," he snapped, paradoxically, and then, "Except you, Branna."

Branna was already planting. Freedom of Movement or not, a floor that decided to become a slide needed something immovable. She set her feet, feeling for the solidness under the shifting layer, and braced the butt of her spear against a notch in the stone.

The first jet hit a moment later.

It slammed out of the wall with the force of a thrown boulder, aimed square at Riona's ribs. Her shield came up automatically, but it was the new ward that saved her from being spun.

The water crashed against an invisible curve thirty centimeters in front of the wood and iron. Resist Energy took the sting out of the chill; Shield Ward shoved the angle of it outward, sending the bulk of the force skidding past and into the opposite wall instead of through her.

She grunted, teeth rattling, boots sliding half an inch before Freedom of Movement corrected the slip.

"Walk behind the paladin," Skrik barked, "unless you bounce for a living."

Another jet shrieked out, this one low, aiming for knees. Merrow snapped his hands up with an oath that felt like a spell component in itself. An invisible plane appeared between them and the jet.

The water hit nothing and split.

Wall of Force was an inelegant spell—no artistry, just raw, absolute refusal. The torrent crashed, flattened, skated along its conjured face like rain along glass. For ten seconds, fifteen, it gave them room to move.

"Don't waste it," Merrow hissed. Sweat beaded on his forehead even as the spell held.

Skrik darted ahead, using the brief reprieve to slip between jets, skimming along the edges of pressure waves. Moving fast made him less of a target and more of a question the room didn't have time to answer.

He reached the first bank of controls: brass wheels, levers, each poorly labeled in Crown script over much neater gnome marks.

"Got 'em," he sent along the Bond, even as he sprang sideways to avoid another jet that came in at chest height. "Tamasin, which ones are force and which ones are pressure?"

Tamasin, bracing near the entrance, closed their eyes and felt through stone. The Temple talked up through their soles.

"That one," they thought, pointing in his mind at a specific wheel. "That's extra pressure from the EMERGENCY feed. Turn it three notches down. Not more, or you'll starve the irrigators. The ones marked with circles are calibration. Leave them; they're doing what they're supposed to."

"Copy," Skrik said. He spun the wheel, arm muscles knotting.

Lyra stayed just behind Riona, watching the rhythm of the jets. The flow in the walls had a pattern. It built, released, switched. Once you saw it, you could time your steps between surges the way you skirted around an animal's grazing arc.

"Left now," she called, and Riona shifted, shield taking a jet on the rim rather than the center, deflecting it.

Overhead, the level of water in the hall began to drop as Skrik's adjustments took hold. The floor eased itself back toward level, protesting in little hitches.

Branna, in her planted post, felt movement under her feet that was more tripod adjusting than slide. The Temple wanted to do what it had been made to do; it just needed permission and someone to slap its hand when it went for the crowd-pleasing trick.

As a last, nasty gesture, one of the jets cranked itself to what the Crown must have thought of as "dramatic."

It howled out of the wall like a silver battering ram, right at Merrow and Tamasin.

Merrow's Wall of Force was still up but weakening; he could feel the spell's edges fraying, the magical structure buckling. Riona couldn't pivot in time without opening someone else up to a hit.

Tamasin didn't think. They shoved.

Not at the water. At reality.

Freedom of Movement surged, whipped out beyond their usual careful boundaries. For one moment, the incoming jet was treated less like force and more like an overly enthusiastic suggestion. The spell didn't push it away; it simply refused to let it fix anything in place.

The water hit their bodies and slid around them as if they were greased, as if they were suggestions too. They felt the force of it, hard enough to bruise, but it couldn't get purchase. It shot past, smacking the far wall with a crack that showered them with stone dust instead of bones.

"New use case," Tamasin wheezed, wiping their mouth. "I hate it."

By the time they reached the far end of the hall, the jets had calmed to their intended behavior: short, testing spurts at manageable pressures. Enough to let someone feel where the current was too sharp, not enough to knock a child flat.

The Crown's signature—danger for its own sake—was gone. The gnome intent remained: a device that made noise when misaligned instead of killing people quietly.

"Congratulations," Kel said through the Bond. "You've successfully turned a liability demonstration back into a piece of infrastructure. Horologium is going to have to rewrite so many memos."

"Good," Riona said. "It'll keep them busy."

"Heart next," Neris thought. "Before it gets lonely."

The heart-engine chamber was where gods and gnomes had met in compromise.

It was huge, yet it fit tightly inside the Temple's ribs. In the weblight of their lanterns, the main mechanism hung from the ceiling on thick chains: a rotating assembly of rings and weights, a gyroscope for hydrology. Gauges protruded from the walls like spider eyes, minor valves clustered around them like attendant children.

In the center of the chamber, on a pedestal of carved stone, sat the eye/ear symbol.

From one angle it was an eye: lidless, slit-pupiled, watchful. From another, with the light shifted, it was an ear: spiral, cupped, ready to listen.

Right now it flickered uncertain between the two, as if it couldn't decide whether its job was to surveil or to hear.

"It's the part of the god that reads the paperwork," Kel said, squinting at it. "And maybe the part that secretly hates it."

The underlying metal of the framework was textbook gnome: redundant braces, clean joints, triple-bolted connections. Crown additions glittered on top like cheaper jewelry: extra levers labeled with those same overriding phrases, "Royal Priority," "Emergency Override," "Tithe Enforcement."

Tamasin warped their lips around the words like they tasted sour.

"This is where we decide," Riona said quietly. "How much say the Crown gets in future storms."

They argued. They were who they were; they weren't not going to.

"We have to leave a real emergency clause," Riona said. "Dams fail. There are mountains. Snow exists. There has to be a way to choose 'flood a field' instead of 'let a wall blow.'"

"I refuse," Tamasin said, "to let any clause exist that can be triggered by somebody stamping their foot in Horologium and yelling about lawbreakers."

"Then we change what the stamp does," Kel said. "Make it a stop button instead of a red lever."

"We reroute the EMERGENCY default to the Belly," Lyra said. "We've already started carving it. If we give the Temple a safer place to dump, it won't need the valley as a pressure sink."

"And we tie the emergency trigger," Neris added, "to natural thresholds, not Crown ones. High snowpack. Unpredictable storms. River's own sense of 'too much.' The god gets veto."

Riona bent over one of the larger diagrams scratched into the floor, a full blueprint of the Temple's flows.

She started drawing triangles.

"This," she said, tapping one, "is triage. It's how you choose who to save when you can't save everyone. You don't get to just decide 'we don't like that village, dump it there.' You look at how much injury each option causes, and you pick the one that hurts least."

"You're suggesting a moral algorithm," Merrow said.

"I'm suggesting," Riona said, "we train the god to consider more than one column of numbers. And we remove the option for it to be told to ignore that training on command."

The eye/ear symbol watched them, indecisive.

"Hey," Skrik said to it, on impulse. "You listening or spying? Pick one. We're trying to help."

Maybe it was nothing but light and trickery, but the next time the lantern flare shifted, the symbol favored the ear by a hair.

They divided tasks.

Kel Alter Self'd himself taller and narrower, bones and skin folding like someone refactoring a document for a new format. He wriggled into a cramped maintenance nook that Riona could never have fit in, removing the most egregious of the "Royal Priority" linkages and replacing them with more modest, sensible lines. It wasn't as simple as cutting them; he had to splice them into new routes so the mechanism wouldn't seize.

Merrow took up position by the main valve assembly, fingers hovering over the controls but not touching unless someone told him. He was the only one with enough practice orchestrating disasters in his head to operate multiple moving parts without losing track.

Lyra and Tamasin worked shoulder to shoulder on the central contract, Prism in one hand, chalk in the other, carving the new terms into the Temple's logic.

Neris sat cross-legged on the floor with both palms flat, listening to the way the water in the pipes reacted to each change. She fed that feedback up into the Bond so everyone knew when a tweak soothed the system and when it made it tense.

Riona paced, reading the room as much as the inscriptions, ready to shout stop if any adjustment started to feel like they were just swapping in their own tyranny.

"Emergency stays," she said again, at one point, when Tamasin's temper spiked high at the thought of leaving any of the Crown's work intact. "But it must mean 'save lives.' Not 'punish.' Not 'send a message.' Save lives, even if that means fields go under sometimes."

"Fine," Tamasin said begrudgingly. "We'll let the god flood my cabbages if it means they don't have to flood my cousin."

Gradually, the shape of it changed.

EMERGENCY DISCHARGE stopped being a direct line to the valley. They rerouted it through the space that would become the Belly.

Tamasin and Neris guided the earth-shaping. They didn't move mountains; they nudged. They followed seams that wanted to crack and turned them into deliberate cuts. The Belly grew under the Temple: a deep basin, lined with reinforced stone, connected to multiple, thinner exit veins that led to less destructive places. The old, cautious gnome lines linked into it seamlessly, as if they'd been waiting all along.

Kel rewired the royal sigil so that activating it now dropped all systems back toward Resting Tide and locked out further changes for a set period. A dead-man switch, not a whip.

"The Crown will hate that," he said with satisfaction. "Imagine, having to convince an angry river to cooperate instead of just pulling a lever."

"They can practice negotiating like the rest of us," Riona said.

When they were done, or as done as they could safely be in one day, the heart-engine spun slower. The gauges on the walls had dropped to steady, acceptable ranges. The eye/ear symbol had settled, for the moment, into ear.

"Test?" Skrik said. "Before we declare victory and go home for bread?"

"Three states," Tamasin said. "Low, mid, high. Under the new rules."

"Resting Tide first," Neris insisted. "I want to see how it feels when it really breathes."

Resting Tide, properly invoked, looked like surrender from outside.

From the shore, the Temple seemed to sink.

Its rings descended a little deeper into the lake, relinquishing some of the proud hauteur the Crown had insisted on. The topmost terraces kissed water just enough to leave a gleaming film, not enough to stand high and threatening.

Inside, water retreated from corridors and chambers that had been running overfull. It slid down into the newly carved Belly, filling it with the weight and warmth of pent-up seasons.

In the maintenance tunnels, tiny, alarming creaks resolved into more comfortable groans as pressure redistributed. The gnome culvert diagrams along the walls finally corresponded to reality again.

Skrik stood in one corridor with his hands spread and grinned as the stone under his palms vibrated in a way that sounded like relief instead of complaint.

"That's settling," he said. "Not cracking. All right, big guy. You're allowed to slouch."

Back in the Guild lab, Sera Argent watched one of her most troublesome gauges slide from jittery orange into solid green.

She drew a neat circle around it and wrote, in the margin: TEMPLE RESTING STATE ACHIEVED (FIRST TIME IN YEARS?). Underline.

Work of Water next.

Lyra touched the mid-level sigil again, this time with the new language still humming through it.

"We work," she said. "We share. You lift the weight with us."

The Temple rose a notch.

Water surged into channels that fed the irrigation systems snaking out along the terraces. Rills that had been running mean and intermittent revived, flowing evenly. In far fields, farmers looked up from their tools as their feed-ditches began to wet the soil properly for the first time in a while without a corresponding "kindly reminder" from Horologium about taxes.

Inside, the dynamic flow hall ran a self-check. Jets whispered at low pressure, testing their range and then quieting. Merrow watched the gauges. The lines he'd written as "danger" on his mental map stayed quiet.

Finally, the big one.

"FLOOD OF FAVOR," Neris said, with the distinct lack of reverence only someone intimately acquainted with a god's plumbing could manage. "Let's see if we can make you generous without homicidal tendency."

They tripped the high clause.

The Temple rose to its full height—its intended full height, not the overcompensating strain it had been held at. Water climbed the pillars, poured down channels toward the terraces and the river.

Once, this state had been where the Crown hid its favorite trick: a subtle shove that turned a blessing into an execution.

Now, the water's path bent elsewhere.

The Belly took the extra. Inside that deep new basin, water churned and settled, held for future use instead of weaponized. Somewhere, one of Sera's gauges that had always refused to leave the edge of risk finally, grudgingly, did.

In the heart chamber, the eye/ear symbol pulsed.

The Temple, or the god behind it, or the complicated marriage of both, listened to its new constraints. Tested them. Prodded for loopholes.

Riona, hand on the stone, felt that pressure and pushed back—not with force, but with an offer.

"We closed the bad options," she thought deliberately, letting Merrow's Bond carry it. "We left you the ones that don't drown people for sport. You get to say no when the Crown yells. We're on your side in that argument. Don't make us liars."

For a moment, she felt something like an echo of the elder brain's horrible considering and flinched.

Then it passed. The thing considering her wasn't hungry. It was tired.

Approval came like warm water around her ankles after a winter wade. Not a word. A feeling of that's better.

"Good," Neris whispered. "About time."

Lindell didn't know, yet, what had been done.

It felt it.

Down by the docks, a goblin negotiator was haggling over cargo weights and dock fees when they realized, halfway through a sentence, that they were not as anxious as they'd been all week about the tides.

The river at their feet had a different tension in it. Less coiled spring, more steady muscle.

"Water's in a better mood than it deserves," they muttered, making a note to check the Temple sluices on their way home and then deciding not to, for once. They could afford one evening of not imagining drowning in their sleep.

At one of the city gates, an ogre guard on night shift leaned against the stone and worked on a poem in tiny, careful script. They had been trying to finish a line for weeks: the city waits for drowning. The words would not behave.

Tonight, the line in their head came out different.

The city waits for rain.

They wrote that instead and felt something in their chest unclench.

In a cramped tenement three streets off, a kobold child who'd been waking up shrieking every night at the imagined sound of rushing water slept straight through from sunset to dawn, tail unwound and soft.

The party left the Temple like people who had just reassembled a clock while it was still running.

They retraced their steps through the shaft, the chapel, the tunnels. The maintenance doors that had opened for them closed slowly behind, not in rejection but in modesty.

At the outer gate, the one Neris had coaxed open underwater, the lake's currents slid past her fingers like a dog sniffing a familiar hand instead of a creature ready to bite.

"Better?" she asked.

The ripple up her arms felt like a shrug, but one that said yes.

On the shore, the brass survey peg near the mooring post felt different under Riona's fingers. The Crown crest still sat on top, arrogantly stamped, but the Guild mark beneath it pulsed faintly with new significance.

"Tell your bosses," Riona said to the metal, "they can still measure. They just don't get to point the river at people anymore."

Branna gave the peg a solemn tap with her knuckles. "If it holds," she said, "I'll buy the Guild a round. The gnomes, not the Crown's pets. The overbuilt ones."

Skrik fished his earlier pebble from his pouch. It was warm. The little boundary charm, which had gone cold at the line between Crown and god, now pulsed gently, like the edge it had marked had shifted in their favor.

"Welcome to the union, lake," he said, pocketing it again. "Dues are steep, but the benefits are better."

Kel looked back at the Temple, now sitting half-veiled again, its rings part in and part out of water.

"Well," he said. "We've successfully rewritten a divine contract, outmaneuvered the Crown, and performed major structural changes to a piece of critical infrastructure without a single collapse or smiting. I suppose the next logical step is lunch."

"Bread," Tamasin corrected. "Then the panic about what we just did."

They took the skiff back upstream.

The river grumbled but didn't try to throw them. Once or twice it tested their new clauses, pushing a little harder against the hull when they passed certain bends, as if checking whether the emergency routes had truly changed.

Neris answered each nudge with muttered reassurance. Riona kept a hand on her holy symbol, not to invoke anything, just to remind herself it was there.

Lyra fell asleep somewhere mid-current, head tipping onto Tamasin's shoulder, Prism dimming to a soft, contented glow.

Merrow, still running the Bond, offered each of them the option to drop out now that the job was done. No one did, not immediately. Even Kel, whose mind had never met a boundary it didn't want to test, left his metaphorical door open for a while longer.

"Small revolutions," Kel said eventually, lifting the last of his canteen in a mock toast. "To be followed, inevitably, by large paperwork."

"Let Horologium drown in their own ink," Skrik said. "We'll handle the water."

Lindell's walls rose ahead. Same cracked stone. Same embedded giant bones. Not the same pressure in the river below them.

The Granary kitchen hadn't changed much in the hours they'd been peeling gods open.

New crumbs on the table, that was all. The smell of Benat's warded loaf still hung on the air. Someone—probably the kobold foreman—had left a note on the chalkboard in the foyer: SAFETY COMMITTEE MEETING MOVED TO TOMORROW. TEMPLE DIDN'T DROWN US. BUY WHATEVER IDIOT FIXED IT A DRINK.

They came in by habit: Riona first, out of reflex; Branna behind her; the rest fanning out like muscle memory around the table.

Kel paused by the door and traced a small pattern on the inner frame. The Alarm glyph that had been there—subtle, faint—flexed in response to his touch. He added one tiny coil, not to make it louder, but to change what it listened for.

"Updating for new flood rules," he said. "If the Temple ever starts misbehaving again, I want to know if the river taps."

Riona dropped into her usual chair like a stone dropped into a basin—that particular heavy, relieved thump of something returning to where it belonged.

Merrow, who had spent the last several hours being the central processor for a very opinionated group mind, sat slower. He spread the Temple diagrams across the table without ceremony this time and, as a small flex, conjured a miniature model of the flows in shimmering air above them.

It wasn't beautiful. It was functional. Little lines of light moved along channels, pooling at nodes. The newly-carved Belly glowed brighter where it sat under the main structure, taking overflow.

"That's…new," Tamasin said, watching a tiny, glowing bead of water redirect from the valley route into the Belly as Merrow flicked a mental switch.

"I've been practicing," Merrow said. "Useful to be able to show instead of just talk."

"Show me," Skrik said, climbing onto his knees to get a better look.

Merrow pointed.

"These were the old paths," he said, touching the model so that one branch lit red. "Emergency discharge straight down the valley cut. High casualties, historically labeled 'inevitable' in the records. These are the new ones." He brushed his hand under the Temple; the Belly brightened, secondary routes lit up, spreading risk out.

Tamasin watched, arms folded, face unreadable.

"What did we actually change?" they asked, though they already knew.

"Valley's not the default sacrifice anymore," Riona said. "Royal sigil is now a stop order, not an override. The Temple has a safe place to hold excess. The god…isn't being forced to be cruel for someone else's convenience."

"And the gnomes?" Branna asked. "Their work?"

Kel, surprising them, answered.

"They built this place to keep a valley from living through what they lost," he said. "They overbuilt the foundations out of pure terror and love. That's the only reason you were able to poke holes in doctrine today without cracking the whole basin. If they'd cut corners, we'd be swimming in stone by now."

Quiet settled around the table with that. A different kind of reverence than the Temple commanded. For anonymous engineers who'd carved their grief into safety margins.

"Somewhere in a Guild bunk," Tamasin said slowly, "there is a gnome right now who has nightmares about tides. And tonight they are going to sleep a little easier without knowing why."

"Good," Skrik said. "They deserve at least that."

Benat, who had clearly been waiting in the doorway for exactly this moment, took it as his cue.

"You're back late," he said, entering with a knife and a board. "Either you fought god to a standstill or you got distracted by a very compelling fish."

"Bit of both," Neris said.

Benat set the warded loaf on the table, regarded their tired faces, their wet hair, the new, fine lines of worry around their eyes, and decided this counted as extreme circumstances.

He cut thick slices. Steam curled out, carrying simple warmth and the faint tang of the sigils he'd scratched into the crust that morning.

"Eat," he said. "You can overthrow hydrological doctrine on an empty stomach once."

Tamasin took a piece, turning it over in their hands, thumbs tracing the pattern Benat had added.

They were quiet for a long moment. The others talked around them—Riona and Kel making a list of political blowback; Merrow and Lyra, heads bent together, arguing gently about whether the Temple's consent-clause could be extended to other systems; Skrik composing, aloud, the most incendiary possible version of "unionize the river" ballads for the tabaxi in the plaza.

Tamasin stared at their bread.

"I can bring people back now," they said finally, almost to themselves. "Wrong, maybe, changed, but back. Merrow can rewrite the way a god chooses to drown or not drown us. Riona can smell sickness in stories."

They looked up, eyes dark.

"If we can do that to a Temple," they said, "we can do it to worse things."

"Worse than a misused flood god?" Skrik said.

"Systems," Tamasin said. "Laws that treat drowning as a footnote. Institutions that call disaster acceptable as long as it doesn't reach the upper terraces. If we've just proven we can cut rot out of this without killing it, we don't get to pretend we can't try elsewhere."

Riona met their gaze across the table. Tired, yes, but there was a new, steady light behind her eyes that hadn't been there before the siege.

"One Temple at a time," she said. "One clause at a time. We're not surgeons for god alone."

"You're all insane," Kel said, but there was no real heat in it. Just the weary affection of someone who knew he was going to be along for it regardless. "Fine. Let's make a checklist. Start with the places most likely to drown us."

"I already have a list," Merrow said grimly. "It's called 'Horologium's greatest hits.'"

"Tomorrow," Riona said. "Tonight, we celebrate one thing we broke correctly."

They did.

Bread, and the echo of rushing water being turned aside from a thousand sleeping people who would never know their names.

Outside, somewhere beyond the high windows, the bound giants in the wall-towers shifted, bones creaking. If you squinted, you could imagine them listening too.

The Temple downriver sat in its lake, rings half-submerged, belly full of restrained fury. For the first time in a very long time, it knew that when someone in a high office tried to pull its strings, it had the option to say no.

Lindell turned over in its sleep and did not drown that night.

It was a small revolution.

They were very good at those.