The carriage rattled like it was trying to toss them out.
Cassian sat on the narrow bench, knees almost touching the opposite seat, hands resting loosely on his thighs. The wood creaked with every pothole. Iron bars crossed the tiny windows, turning the morning light into a grid across his knees.
Virelion rolled by outside in slices.
Through the slats, he caught flashes of the Outer Wards falling away—lean-tos and sagging tenements giving way to straighter streets, taller buildings, cleaner stone. Ward lines over doorframes grew sharper and more complex. The crude sunbursts and chalk circles of the slums were replaced by metal inlays and carved sigils that actually meant something.
Lyra sat opposite him, arms crossed over her chest, head lolling with each jolt. Her lip was healing, a faint split where a Nightmare's hand had grazed her. Bandages showed at her collar and wrist. The fresh leather of a new trainee coat creaked when she shifted.
"Well," she said, as the carriage thunked up onto smoother cobbles with a lurch that made everyone sway. "Bougie."
"Tighter warding," Cassian said.
"Obviously," she replied. "Also the people smell less like garbage and more like anxiety."
Two other figures shared the cramped space.
Sade took up most of one corner, arms like tree trunks crossed over her chest, expression carved from stone. The new coat sat surprisingly well on her; butcher muscle was adaptable. Next to her perched a skinny boy whose name Cassian had already forgotten twice. He stared at the floor, eyes unfocused, lips moving silently. Counting, praying, or both.
Outside, the city sighed and woke.
They passed a market street where stalls were only half erected, vendors arranging goods under canvas awnings. Here, the bread wasn't stale by default. Wards over the street itself hummed faintly, subtle Shroud barriers invisible to people who hadn't spent their lives staring at them.
Cassian's gaze tracked them anyway.
At each crossroads, he marked the way sigil-lines intersected, how light bent around certain stones. The inner ring's wards were newer than the Outer's but under more strain. Elements of patchwork repair showed—different styles layered over each other, Consortium sigils patched into Church script.
Everything that claimed to be whole was lying. He'd learned that early.
The carriage hit a rise. The world outside tilted up, showing him a glimpse of the inner wall.
It was not a simple barrier of stone. The section they approached bristled with towers, each banded in metal and etched with sigils that climbed up their flanks like vines. Chains hung from higher ledges, linking bell housings to crystal nodes. From a distance, it looked like a ring of teeth studded with glass.
At the base of one tower, a gate yawned.
Two sets of doors, one inner, one outer, both open for the carriage. Wardens in pale tabards stood beside them, spears grounded, eyes alert. Above the arch, someone had carved the sunburst of the Final Dawn—this time encircled by a ring of smaller symbols.
Sanctum of Concord.
The carriage rolled through the gate and into the tower's shadow.
The air changed. Cooler, denser. Wards throbbed against Cassian's Mark like distant bass.
The carriage shuddered to a stop.
"End of the line," one of the guards outside called, muffled through the wood. "Candidates, out. Try not to fall on your faces. The floor's expensive."
The door scraped open.
Light stabbed in. Cassian blinked once, then slid off the bench and stepped down.
The Sanctum's courtyard was a tall, narrow slice of sky cut into stone.
Three walls curved around them—the tower's interior face, flanked by lower buildings grafted to it like barnacles. The fourth side was taken up by the inner wall's thickness, studded with small barred windows and narrow walkways. A well sat toward one side, its rim lined with metal plates that hummed softly.
The ground was clean. No trash. No puddles of stagnant water. Just stone, laid in careful patterns that doubled as ward-circles under a thin veneer of dust.
Cassian's awareness ticked off details.
Guard posts on the upper walkways—two, no, three, each with a pair of wardens and a mounted ballista. Doors leading into the tower—one large main set, flanked by two smaller, more discreet ones. Lines of power running along the walls—bright here, dim there, one section of glyphs slightly cracked near a corner.
He felt the faintest difference there. A thinner place. A hairline flaw in the Sanctum's shell.
His Path hummed in appreciation.
Lyra stepped out behind him, stretching her arms overhead until her back popped. She squinted up at the sky, then at the tower.
"They're compensating for something," she muttered.
"For the Shroud," Cassian said.
"I mean architecturally," she said. "But sure, that too."
"Candidates!" a brisk voice called.
They turned.
A woman in a dark gray coat strode across the courtyard toward them. She was tall in a rangy way, with her hair scraped back into a knot that left no stray strands. A sunburst pin glinted at her throat, smaller than a priest's, larger than a warden's. She carried a clipboard with a slim stylus, and her eyes—sharp, pale—missed nothing.
"Registrar Hale," she introduced herself, when they were gathered close enough. "Sanctum administration. You will deal with me more than you like. If you're lucky, you'll never have reason to deal with anyone above me."
She looked them over: Sade, Lyra, Cassian, the skinny boy, two more who had been brought in another carriage and were now joining them—a heavyset girl with Gutter Spark bracer already on her wrist, and a pale, narrow apprentice with ink smudged on his cuffs.
"Sade," she said. "Lyra Senn. Cassian Rael. Jin Orlo." Names rolled out like she was matching faces to a mental ledger. "Tess Marel. Orrin Kale."
Her gaze lingered on Cassian half a heartbeat longer than the others.
"Congratulations," she went on, voice dry. "You have survived long enough to become the Sanctum of Concord's problem. Follow the rules, survive your training, and you might become the city's solution. Fail, and you'll go back to serving the Engine in a more… common way."
Lyra raised a hand. "Will there be written exams, or is this more of a 'pop quiz in the face of monsters' situation?"
"Yes," Hale said. "This way."
She turned on her heel.
They followed her through the main doors.
Inside, the tower swallowed them.
The entry hall rose three stories high, banners dangling from the ceiling—sunbursts interwoven with geometric sigils, cloth in muted gold and deep blue. Light slanted in through tall, narrow windows, each pane cut and leaded into stylized images of Nightmares being confronted by figures in robes and armor.
The floor was polished stone. Cassian saw his own reflection, blurred and broken by the ward-lines etched into the tiles.
Hale led them down a side corridor. Here, the air cooled further. Torches burned in brackets, but each flame sat within a glass cylinder etched with sigils, controlled and contained.
They passed under an arch bearing carved words: HOC LOCUM SERVIT CONCORDIA.
Tess frowned. "What's that mean?"
"'This place is serviced by the Concordia cleaning staff,'" Lyra said solemnly.
Registrar Hale did not sigh. Cassian admired the restraint.
"It means," Hale said, "that what happens here serves both Church and Consortium interests. You are expected to remember that when you're tempted to declare allegiance."
"Do they conflict?" Cassian asked.
"Constantly," Hale said. "This way."
She took them into a smaller hall lined with benches and a long table. Two other figures waited there.
Cassian recognized one.
Journeyman Nero leaned against the far wall, ledger tucked under his arm, stylus tapping lightly against its spine. He wore the same blue-trimmed gray as before, but here, in his own space, he looked less like a stray scribe and more like part of the Sanctum's skeleton.
The other was a man Cassian hadn't seen before.
He was in his thirties, maybe, with pale hair pulled back into a low tie and an unassuming face that sharpened at the edges when he focused. His coat was a deep blue, cut in the Magus style, with subtle silver sigils embroidered at cuffs and collar. A crystal rod hung at his belt, and his hands bore faint faded ink sigils—permanent, not fresh.
"Candidates," Hale said, gesturing. "This is Instructor Varin Iyriel, of House Iyriel, on assignment from the Consortium. He will be responsible for much of your… education."
Varin nodded once. "Instructor Iyriel is sufficient," he said. His voice was cool, clipped, carrying a faint accent Cassian associated with inner-city educated circles.
"And you already know Journeyman Nero," Hale added. "He will be making sure everything you do is written down in painful detail."
"I prefer 'immortalized,'" Nero said.
"Sit," Hale ordered.
They sat.
Varin's gaze swept over them. It lingered briefly on Tess's bracer, on Sade's butcher-bulk… and on Cassian's Mark, which was still mostly hidden by his sleeve.
"The Sanctum of Concord exists," Varin began, "because walking into Nightmares is… less lethal if you train first. The Church provides access, doctrine, and… moral justification. The Consortium provides research, structure, and containment. You provide the blood."
Tess swallowed audibly.
"The city needs people who can move through the Shroud," Varin went on. "People who can recognize pattern, anticipate scripts, and come back with Shards, data, and their minds intact. That is what you are here to become."
"And if we don't?" Lyra asked.
"Then you become good examples of why we need better ones," Nero said.
Sister Elane slipped in then, almost as an afterthought. She was the priest Cassian had seen at some lectures above—late twenties, maybe, with tired eyes and a sunburst on a chain around her neck. Her gray-and-gold robe was less ornate than Serane's, more practical.
"Please don't frighten them more than necessary," she said mildly.
"That would require a calibration of 'necessary' we have never agreed on," Nero countered.
Elane turned to the trainees.
"You've all seen what happens when the Shroud is left to… curate its own tests," she said. "What we do here is try to… aim it. To build structures inside the wound where we can learn from it without letting it eat us wholesale."
"We worry less about 'without' and more about 'slower,'" Nero said under his breath.
Elane ignored him.
"You will be living in the Sanctum for the duration of your training," she continued. "You will have food, beds, classes, and more supervision than you will enjoy. You will also be subject to recall for field Trials when your instructors deem you… ready."
Tess raised her hand. "Is there a schedule, or is this more 'surprise, Nightmare at dawn'?"
Hale slid a stack of thin slates onto the table. Each glowed faintly with sigils.
"Your schedules," she said. "Engraved. Morning drills with the Wardens. Midday lectures. Evening study or drills, depending on your aptitude. Curfew at tenth bell. Breaking curfew without permission will result in latrine duty or worse."
Lyra perked up. "There's worse than latrine duty?"
"Nightmare assignment without escort," Nero said cheerfully.
Hale passed each of them a slate.
When Cassian's fingers brushed his, he felt it hum faintly in time with his Mark. The sigil-lines etched into its surface glowed brighter, rearranging themselves as they registered his touch.
His name appeared in neat, pale script: CASSIAN RAEL – COHORT 3.
The schedule populated under it. Blocks of text, color-coded:
• DAWN – PHYSICAL DRILLS / PATH CONDITIONING
• MID-MORNING – SHROUD THEORY / DOCTRINE
• NOON – MEAL
• AFTERNOON – SHARD APPLICATION / ECHOCRAFT INTRO
• EVENING – STUDY / SUPERVISED PRACTICE
Cassian's eyes flicked to the corner of the slate.
A small glyph glowed there: an eye inside a sunburst, circled.
Under observation.
He wasn't surprised.
"Before we take you to your quarters," Registrar Hale said, "there is one more formality."
Nero straightened, flipping open his ledger with a small flourish.
Hale produced a thin sheet of translucent crystal inscribed with faint, tightly packed sigils. It looked almost like glass etched with frost.
"This is a standard concord contract," she said. "By touching this and speaking your name, you acknowledge that you understand you are entering a joint Church–Consortium program, that you may be exposed to hazardous stimuli, and that you accept the Sanctum's right to… manage your contributions."
"And if we don't?" Orrin, the ink-stained boy, asked.
Hale smiled without humor. "Then you return to your Wards. And the next time the Draft comes, you may not have a Sanctum-trained Radiant around to collapse a building on your behalf."
Orrin flinched.
Lyra rolled her eyes. "Fine," she said. She slapped her hand onto the crystal. "Lyra Senn."
The sigils flared under her palm, rearranging briefly into a pattern that settled into her name before dissolving.
Tess went next. Then Sade. Then Orrin, reluctantly.
Cassian watched the sigils carefully. They weren't just plain words. They were a geas script—weak, but present. The kind that nudged choices rather than enslaving them.
He committed the pattern to memory, marking the moment.
When it was his turn, he pressed his palm to the cold surface.
"Cassian Rael," he said.
The sigils flared.
For a heartbeat, the pattern under his hand stuttered, as if the lines weren't sure where to settle. Shapes flickered—the standard contract giving way to… other structures. Rings. Ash-like curls. Then it snapped back, the geas completing with a faint hiss.
Nero's stylus paused mid-scratch.
Varin's eyebrows lifted a millimeter.
Registrar Hale's eyes narrowed, just a fraction, then smoothed.
"Good," she said. "Now you're ours. This way."
They were given their uniforms—dark trousers, sturdy boots, shirts, and overcoats with subtle patches indicating their status as Cohort trainees. Tess practically cuddled her new coat. Lyra checked the pockets immediately for hiding space. Sade grunted once and shrugged the fabric over her shoulders like it was just another apron.
Hale led them up two flights of stairs and along a corridor that opened onto a narrow balcony overlooking the central hall. The Sanctum's innards revealed themselves in glimpses: a training yard below, a library with high shelves and ladders, a distant glimpse of a vaulted chamber lit in eerie blue.
Their dorm was at the end of a side corridor, a door marked with a simple sunburst and a small etched "C3."
Inside, the room was… almost generous.
Four beds lined the walls, each with a decent mattress, a blanket, and a small chest at the foot. A narrow window looked out onto the inner wall's stone. Hooks on one wall waited for coats. A single table sat under the window, with just enough space for people to sit and argue over books.
"This will be your quarters," Hale said. "You four." She gestured at Cassian, Lyra, Tess, and Orrin. "Keep it clean. Keep it quiet when you're meant to. Personal belongings go in the chests—touching someone else's is grounds for discipline."
Lyra raised a hand. "Is throwing someone else's belongings at their head also grounds for discipline?"
"Yes," Hale said. "Twice."
After she left, the silence in the room felt heavier without her voice filling it.
Lyra threw her coat onto the nearest bed, flopped down, and spread her arms wide.
"Look at this luxury," she groaned. "A whole mattress that isn't sharing fleas with six other people. I might cry."
Tess dropped her bag beside another bed, eyes shining. "Do you think we get hot food every day? Real food? I heard they feed the Wardens meat at least twice a week."
Orrin sat on the bed nearest the door and stared at the floor again, shoulders hunched.
Cassian chose the bed under the window.
From there, he could see anyone who entered without turning his head. He could also see the faint hairline crack in the stonework above the sill. It wasn't load-bearing, but it told him something about the tower's age.
He set his small bundle of belongings at the chest's foot—knife, spare shirt, a bit of coin, nothing that mattered in the grand scheme.
"Do you think they mean it?" Lyra asked the ceiling.
"About what?" Cassian said.
"About training us to go into Nightmares and come back," she said. "Not just to throw us in more efficiently."
"Yes," Cassian said.
She turned her head. "That's surprisingly optimistic."
"It isn't optimism," he said. "It's resource management."
She snorted. "There he is. For a second I thought they replaced you in the carriage with someone who had hope."
Her gaze softened, just a bit.
"That contract back there," she added. "Something went weird when you touched it."
Cassian tilted his head. "Yes."
"You going to tell me what that means?"
"Later," he said.
She rolled her eyes. "Of course."
They had a few minutes before the next bell.
Cassian used them to unpack—not his meager belongings, but the day.
He sat on the edge of his bed, hands loose, eyes half-closed, and let his mind run backward.
The rattle of the carriage. The way the gate's wards felt on his Mark. Registrar Hale's cadence when she said "ours." The contract sigils stuttering. Varin's slight change in breathing when the slate showed Cassian's name. Nero's pen stopping, then starting again.
He watched those moments in his mind with too much clarity.
If he chose, he could zoom in on the etched lines under the contract, see the tiny curls of script that distinguished consent from compulsion. He could slow the flicker when it shifted around his name, examine how the pattern had almost become a circle instead of a sunburst.
It wasn't normal memory. It was like standing in front of a wall of mirrors, each reflecting a slightly different angle of the same instant.
It felt… familiar.
Step 8 hadn't clicked fully. Not yet. But something had loosened when the Loop-Shard settled into his Path. It was easier to mark a moment and hold it now.
"Cassian."
He opened his eyes.
Lyra stood by the window, peering out at the sliver of city visible beyond the wall.
"You see anything out there?" she asked.
"Streets," he said. "Wards."
She glanced back at him. "You looked like you were anywhere but here just now."
"Mapping," he said.
"Inside your head?"
"That's where it matters," he said.
Tess flopped onto her bed with a groan and threw an arm over her eyes. "If either of you plans to map me, do it tomorrow," she mumbled. "I'm tired."
Cassian lay back slowly, careful of his ribs, and stared at the ceiling.
The Sanctum felt like standing in the middle of a clock.
You could see the hands, the face, the painted numbers. You couldn't see the gears unless you opened it up. But you could hear them, faintly, if you put your ear to the casing.
He didn't need to put his ear to the stone.
The Engine's attention had brushed him directly now, first in the alley, then in the Nightmare, then in the ash-space.
It would brush him more, the closer he walked toward its core.
He closed his eyes, let the carriage ride replay again—faster this time, just enough to note the pattern of ward-lines and watch rotations.
He exhaled.
"You dragged me closer," he thought, not sure if he aimed it at the Shroud, the Engine, or the Church. "Good."
Near the center, systems showed their teeth.
Near the teeth was where you chose whether you were a cog, or the thing that jammed them.