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Lyessa doesn’t move for a long moment. Neither do I.

“Before, who does?” She says it again, to the silence this time, because the Guardian isn’t answering anyone anymore.

No answer waits for me either. Only a dead thing that used to guard this city kneeling in a fountain that hasn’t run in a thousand years, a warning aimed at a mountain I haven’t finished exploring, and the growing, uneasy certainty that tonight was only the first door in a house built entirely of them.

SIX

LYESSA

Nobody’s tried to kill us in fourteen hours, and I don’t know what to do with my hands.

Vorren doesn’t either, from the look of him — pacing the entrance to what used to be a market square instead of standing still in it, Nightfall strapped across his back instead of loose in his grip for the first morning since Asterhold. No map of Blackspire that survived into the modern age marks a route to the Hall of Oaths. The Guardian died before it could give us more than a name and a warning, and warnings don’t draw maps. So we’re down here instead, in a quarter of the city nobody bothered evacuating with any urgency, hunting for whatever the merchants and clerks who lived here left behind that might still remember the way.

It shouldn’t feel like a holiday. It feels a little bit like one anyway, and I don’t trust that feeling even slightly.

The bakery on the corner still has bread in the window.

Not fresh — a thousand years past fresh — but whole, four petrified loaves arranged in a display rack with the kind of care that only makes sense if the baker fully expected to sell them by midday. I rest my hand against the glass, careful not to lean my weight on it, and try to imagine the smell that would have filled this street on an ordinary morning. Yeast. Woodsmoke. Someone shouting the price of eggs two stalls down.

“They didn’t know.” Half to myself. “Whatever happened, whoever gave the order — the people actually living here didn’t get a warning long enough to finish the day’s baking.”

“Or they left in a hurry and didn’t care about bread.”

“Bakers care about bread, Captain. It’s the one universal truth I’ve found in seven years of this work.” I move down the row, cataloguing without meaning to — a cobbler’s stall with a customer’s boots still on the last, waiting for a repair that never happened; a spice merchant’s cart, jars gone to dust inside but still labeled in a careful, looping hand; a public fountain, dry now, ringed with a low wall worn smooth by generations of people sitting exactly where I’m not sitting. Somewhere under all of it, faint and half-imagined, I can almost hear what the street would have sounded like — wheels on stone, a dozen conversations layered over each other, the ordinary noise of a place too busy to notice how alive it was. “This wasn’t panic. Panic leaves things knocked over. This was orderly. Someone had time to plan an evacuation and executed it well enough that a baker still expected to open shop.”

“That’s worse.”

“That’s much worse.” I look up at him, and his shoulders square in a way that isn’t the controlled stillness he wears like armor — closer to a man doing arithmetic he doesn’t like the answer to. “What.”

“I’ve spent my whole life being told this city was already dead when the Covenant fell. A cautionary tale. Rubble with a moral attached.” The words cost him more than they should, and he says them looking down the row of silent stalls as if they might argue back. “It wasn’t dead. It was a Tuesday.”

“It was somebody’s Tuesday.” Right up until it wasn’t, and I don’t say that part out loud, because he’s already thinking it and doesn’t need my help getting there.

He doesn’t answer. I let the silence sit, because some things don’t improve with more words stacked on top of them.

I can’t leave it there, though. Not really. Not when the street around us is practically begging to be read like a page.

“Here.” I plant myself at the mouth of the row and turn slow, taking in the whole of it — stalls, awnings, the cobbler, the spice cart, the fountain — and let an ordinary morning build itself back up around me the way it always does when I stop treating a ruin like a crime scene and start treating it like a home. “The baker’s up before dawn. Has to be, if the bread’s meant to be out by first light. His neighbor across the row sells eggs, and there’s a running argument between them about whose rooster wakes the district — you can tell, because someone’s scratched a tally onto the doorframe there, little marks, years of a joke neither of them was willing to let go.”

“You’re inventing that.”

“I’m reading it. There’s a difference.” I point to the marks, real, carved shallow into old wood, and watch his eyes follow my finger with the focus of a man deciding whether to believe me. “The spice merchant’s from somewhere south, judging by the script on her jars — traders come through, not locals, which tells you this district welcomed outsiders enough that a foreign hand felt safe setting up permanent shop instead of packing a cart and moving on every season. And that fountain wasn’t just decoration. Look at the wear on the north side of the wall — that’s where people actually sat, which means it faced something worth watching. A stage, maybe. Street performers. Somewhere a mother could sit and mind a child while she gossiped with a neighbor.”

“You get all that from a wall.”

“I get all that from paying attention, which is a skill nobody in Asterhold ever thought a woman needed for anything more important than embroidery.” It comes out sharper than I mean it to, old scar tissue talking before I can stop it, and I catch myself and soften. “Sorry. That one wasn’t about you.”

“I didn’t think it was.” He’s watching me with something that isn’t quite the flat, assessing stare he wears on everyone else — softer at the edges, like he’s sizing up a different kind of danger entirely. “Keep going.”

So I do. We walk the row, and I build the district back up around us, piece by piece — the tavern two doors from the bakery, its sign long since faded past reading but its shape unmistakable, benches worn into permanent grooves by a thousand nights of the same regulars claiming the same seats. I duck inside long enough to find a wall of tally marks behind the bar, some drinking game or running debt nobody ever settled, and a dartboard so old the cork’s gone to powder behind glass someone must have installed to protect it. Somebody loved this place enough to want it preserved even while they used it hard.

“A historian’s dream, this district.” Vorren’s voice, from the doorway — he hasn’t followed me all the way in, one shoulder braced against the frame, eyes already gone to the tavern’s dark corners out of a habit he clearly can’t switch off even here. “You look like you’ve forgotten there’s a mission attached to any of this.”

“I haven’t forgotten. I’ve just decided the mission can wait ten more minutes while I figure out who was winning at darts.” I trace a deep score mark into the board’s edge. “Someone was very sore about losing here. See how hard this line’s cut? That’s a person who threw their dart as if it owed them money.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I absolutely can. I’ve read enough sore losers’ correspondence to recognize the handwriting even carved into wood.” I step back into the street, and he falls in beside me without a word passing between us, our shoulders nearly brushing with every stride. Past the tavern sits a little shrine tucked into an alley mouth, offerings turned to dust but still arranged with care — small stone figures, a dried wreath, the kind of unofficial worship that survives every organized religion built on top of it. “Whoever kept this up did it because they wanted to, not because anyone made them. That’s the part your Council never lets people learn about this place. It wasn’t a temple to something enormous and unknowable. It was ordinary people, choosing each other on purpose, every single day; nobody made them.”