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The names on the wall in front of me seem to hold their breath along with the rest of the room. Dust sifts down from somewhere near the dome’s apex, fine and silver, catching the gray light on its way to the floor.

High along the dome’s edge, warning lights kindle one by one in sconces I hadn’t noticed were sconces at all until they burn —cold blue-white flame, ancient and precise, chasing around the chamber’s upper windows in a pattern too deliberate to be accident.

“We didn’t do that.” Already scrambling up, satchel clutched against my chest. “We didn’t trigger that.”

Vorren’s on his feet in the same motion, Nightfall already half-clear of its sheath, teeth bared at the ceiling like he’s daring the whole dome to try him. “Something else did.”

The glass dome groans.

One of the ancient panes cracks along its lattice seam, black iron shuddering under a stress it hasn’t carried in a thousand years, directly above the chamber’s center where I was kneeling a breath ago. It doesn’t fall — not yet — but the crack spiders wider even as I watch it, threading toward the frame in slow, deliberate lines that have nothing accidental left in them.

“Back wall. Now.” Vorren’s already moving, and I’m a half-step behind him, both of us using the statue’s solid base as a buffer against whatever the dome decides to do next.

We end up pressed against the base of the Warden statue side by side, both of us breathing hard, watching the fractured pane hold its shape by a margin neither of us trusts. A sound breaks loose in his throat, wordless, aimed at the broken window like a threat that’s already too late. Whatever this room was about to tell us has just run out of time to finish.

“You’re all right.” Not quite a question, the way nothing from him ever quite is.

“Yes.” I flatten a hand over my own racing heart, willing it to slow. “That window’s held a thousand years. Through storms. Through whatever’s already tried this city once before us. It didn’t fail on its own, Vorren.”

“No.” His jaw’s gone tight enough to show along its line. “Something helped it along.”

“Something, or someone.”

“Doesn’t much matter which, standing here.” He doesn’t move us from the wall, not yet, like he hasn’t fully decided the danger’s finished. “Either way we’re not the only reason this city’s remembering how to defend itself.” His gaze shifts to the ceiling, to the warning lights still racing along the dome’s edge in a rhythm that’s picking up speed instead of slowing, and understanding settles behind his eyes, mirroring exactly what’s settling behind mine.

The Hall waited a thousand years to be found. It did not wait for this.

Whatever’s approaching this city right now, it isn’t looking for artifacts. It isn’t looking for proof of a lost civilization that trust once worked. Standing in the wreckage of a window that’s held for a millennium, wrapped in the arm of a man whose blood this room already knows by name, I understand with total, unwelcome clarity exactly what it’s looking for instead.

Us.

Neither of us moves from the statue’s base yet, Vorren’s attention still fixed on the dome’s edge like he’s counting the seconds until that crack finishes what it started.

Somewhere beyond the dome, faint at first and then unmistakable, a bell begins to ring.

Then another, farther off, answering it. Then a third, and a fourth, until the sound isn’t coming from any single tower anymore — it’s coming from every tower this city has left standing, all at once, a chorus of warning bells that haven’t rung in a thousand years finding their voices again in the same handful of minutes.

Vorren’s arm settles tighter at my waist, an answer to the bells more than a decision.

“We didn’t do that either,” I whisper, and I already know he’s thinking the same thing I am, because I can see him grinding down whatever he wants to say about it.

Blackspire isn’t waking up because two people finally walked through its gates.

It’s waking up because something’s already inside it, moving with purpose now instead of merely testing its own weight. Whatever that is, it didn’t bother knocking first, and judging by how fast those bells are ringing, it isn’t planning on staying polite for long.

NINE

LYESSA

The bells don’t stop, and Blackspire doesn’t stay dark to listen to them.

We come up out of the Hall’s lower passage into streets that shouldn’t have any light left to give, and every one of them is burning silver anyway — moonstone veins surging bright along every wall we pass, statues turning their carved heads a degree at a time to track us as we run, the whole city waking up mean instead of curious. This isn’t the slow, patient stirring that answered Vorren’s blood at the gates. This is a city that’s found a threat worth fearing, and it wants that threat found and dealt with before it can do any more damage.

Doors we passed cold and dark on the walk in now stand outlined in hairline silver, wards flickering to life along thresholds that haven’t held a ward in a thousand years. Somewhere below us, deep in the stone, that same coordinated tremor from the Hall keeps pulsing, faster now, less like a heartbeat finding its rhythm and more like one racing toward something it can’t outrun.

“This way.” Vorren doesn’t slow down to explain how he knows. He’s reading the streets the way I read parchment, some inherited sense of this place clicking into gear now that it’s finally being asked a real question. We break out onto a rise overlooking the lower districts, and he pulls up so fast I nearly run into his back.

I see why immediately.