The palimpsest's scream sank into the bones of Lucent Reach and then spread outward like ink dropped in water, slow, inevitable, changing the tint of everything it touched. Stone veins brightened; old murals half-visible beneath soot shivered into view; a long-forgotten bell within the observatory answered somewhere high above with a single, hollow ring.
Sofia came through the tunnel like a weathered thought: precise, unshowy, everything in her tuned to the shape of command. Her boots made hardly a sound on the wet tiles. She moved first toward the mouth of the pit and then stalled, eyes narrowing at the tableau below: a child and an Ash Walker with a hand on a spear, a dim ember between them, and a man kneeling like someone who had chosen to stay at the edge of a cliff to see whether the ground would hold.
