Harrowgate Bastille was a squat, old thing against the river, a place with windows like eyes that had learned not to blink. Its doors were iron-seamed; its locks had been tested by damp and rain. Razille knew its bones. She had been taken there like cattle and left under cold lamps, the shackles biting at the wrist like a rumor. For days she had listened: the scuff of sentries, the wordless exchanges at the corridor's edge, the quiet coughs of men too used to waiting for judgment. Each sound had become a string in her chest, and the strain had only increased with the thought of what lay beyond the walls — caged men, frightened boys, old thieves with a story to tell and no voice to tell it with.
"It's time," she said to the dark that had been gathering like a winter cloud.
The phrase was simple. There was no prayer in it. It sat in her mouth like iron.
At first it was a hum — an inside feeling of small energy kindling in the bones. The shackles had been forged to hold men, not the thing now coiling in Razille. The iron blends of prison were narrower than the dark that moved in her; it slipped the seams like water finding old mortar. Metal groaned as it learned new pressures. The chain chinks sang in a key the guards could not hear.
She did not scream when a cuff pinged and dropped. Her breath was normal, the patient exhalation of someone who does not mistake violence for surprise. A pulse rolled through the corridor, not sound but a pressure — an animal's breath down a hollow. Torches on the walls guttered and then bloomed again, shadows moving like ripples.
When Razille pushed, the shackles opened as if it is made of wood. A black mist skirted from her palms and licked the iron, leaving hairline cracks on the cuff edges that widened like the mouth of winter taking on spring. She rose, careful, purposeful. The dark around her was not the absence of light; it is something else — a green copper tang that touched the throat. It filled her chest and made her limbs feel like cords pulled taut. She moved, and the air around her trembled.
She did not walk away for escape. She walked toward the cells.
Doors that had once been iron boundaries folded under an unseen pressure — bolts unlatched and fell through the hinge. Locks she had seen wrestled by hands now opened like arguments conceded. The first prisoner looked up and saw Razille standing in the corridor like a lit candle in a wet room. His expression was confusion, then a dawning, grateful joy that she would save them.
"Free," she said, voice even. The word was wrapped in something dark and delicious.
The men rose with hunger in their eyes — men who had been caged for crimes small and large, men who had stories of wronged reputations and official cruelty. Razille's darkness touched them and they walked toward the stone door like men called by a familiar town-bell. She did not speak a command other than the whispered invitation to be gone; the energy around her eased the hinges and unsealed the bars. Chains fell from ankles like a prayer's last line.
When the first prisoner stepped into the corridor and the second and the third followed, a blind thing unfurled in Razille. She did not smile. She moved like a woman who has given herself to purpose. The dark she wore around her did not scream out or roar; it hummed a low, hungry lullaby. Behind her, men who had felt injustice for years were taking their first uncertain breaths of freedom.
At the gate, a jailer turned, drawn by the creak of a cell gate. His hand went for the alarm; the sound was a thin, mechanical bark — the sort of thing that is supposed to wake a hundred hasty feet. Someone kicked him from behind and he fell, an oaken chair digging into his cheek. The corridor filled like a sudden tide.
Razille stood at the center of the chaos and let the dark curl out from her palms to the doors, and the doors opened like lips parting for a name. Prisoners spilled into the hall and then into the outer rooms. Razille's face was calm. Free men who had been dealt the world's worst disposals now had a chance to swing toward whatever they had wanted — a lost son, a house, a reckless vengeance.
She did not stop at mercy. She moved like a blade that had been carried too long unsharpened and now sought the whetstone: she tore the ward chains on the ward-room lamps and used the sparks to melt iron where it needed melting. Where a lock had stubbornly resisted, a quiet surge of energy loosened the bolts and made the smithwork yield like promised gold. Resin fumes mixed with the copper tang, carried the smell of something old being unmade.
And somewhere between the courtyard's noise and the appointed chaos at the Bastille, Elise's glider sketched the edge of the map and saw the columns of movement. Her lenses caught not the riders — it caught the glow that bled from Harrowgate's windows, a wrong light that spelled a breach. She flicked a small rune on her comm and relayed it.
[Emergency signal: Harrowgate Bastille breach. Possible internal infiltration — Airknight Recon Squad 3]
(The comm was one of the new devices built by the joint research between the Airknights, Octaknights, and the scholars of Aldor — fast, crisp photon magic-charged lines that could carry voice and sight across miles even when the wind was false.)
Orsic heard it in the secure house. The word hit him like a thrown stone. He did not waste phrases.
"K.P.P. reserve — drop everything. Hold only the evacuation points here," he snapped. "Two squads left to the Harrowgate. All Postknights supporting evacuation — move to Harrowgate immediately. Do not escort empties. Move!"
The room became a place of swift transformations. Men and women rose with the habit of soldiers; orders marched like commands into the night. Devon's face gray as iron, turned to recently returned Solis as the young man pivoted from the fight line. "You three — Ada, Almond, Solis — you are coming with me. Orsic's order. They need us to assist K.P.P unit III and V. Move fast. Bronn, you have the evac—"
Bronn nodded and took up the responsibility with a young man's solemn pride. The evacuation hummed on; Postknights and K.P.P. manned cordons, drove civilians to safety, and still others remounted to ride for Harrowgate.