Saera woke with the taste of fire on her tongue and ash smeared across her vision. She lay there in the dark, chest rising and falling like something hunted. The room was stifling, too small, too full of the memory of what she'd just seen. Again, the same dream: a world drowning in blue flame, shadows circling a boy on the edge of the world, her own hands stained with a language she couldn't read.
She pressed her palms to her eyes, but it was no use. The afterimages crawled in the dark. Veins of light pulsed behind her eyelids, glyphs and faces and wings, always wings. She felt hollowed out, scraped thin by visions that were never really hers. The Ash, Kossara had called it, like a blessing or a curse. She could feel it now, humming under her skin, a residue that sleep could never wash away.
The clock beside her bed blinked out the hour in sullen red. Two-thirty. The city outside was silent except for the endless, bone-deep thrum of the air-changers fighting against the poisoned sky. She thought about crying, but the tears wouldn't come. Just a low ache, old and heavy, sitting behind her ribs like a stone.
She rolled over and stared at the cracked ceiling. The dreams weren't just dreams anymore. They lingered after dawn, clinging to her shoulders, turning every shadow into an omen. Lately, she couldn't shake the sense that something was waiting for her in the waking world, something with teeth, something that burned.
She sat up, swinging her feet to the floor, and caught her breath when she saw it: the faintest dusting of blue ash on the backs of her hands. Gone in a blink when she wiped at it, but real. Real enough.
From the next room, metal clinked. A muffled curse floated through the thin wall. Rudger, of course, never sleeps, always fixing, always trying to hold back a world that didn't want to be saved.
She padded down the narrow hall, rubbing sleep from her eyes, and found him hunched over a tangle of copper and wire, face shadowed by a single guttering lamp.
"Up already?" he grunted, not looking up from his work.
"I couldn't sleep," she said quietly.
He just nodded, fingers busy. "Bad dream again?" His tone was matter-of-fact, a man who'd run out of patience for things he couldn't repair.
She leaned against the doorframe, trying to swallow the frustration. "It's more than that, Dad. It's happening every night. I feel...different. Like the Ash is inside me. Like it's using me."
He snorted, twisting a connector until it squealed. "You sound like those Ash Mothers now. It's the ceremony getting into your head, that's all. Rituals, chanting, masks—all designed to keep you obedient. I told you, they prey on weak nerves."
"I'm not weak," she snapped, harsher than she meant. "And I know what I saw."
He looked up then, eyes sharp behind the tired. "You're my daughter. You're brilliant. But you're also tired, and scared, and maybe you're letting old women in dead cities decide who you're supposed to be."
She shook her head, anger burning hot beneath her skin. "I don't want to be anyone's chosen anything. But I can't stop it, Dad. It's in me."
For a moment, the only sound was the soft, relentless hum of machinery, the sigh of tired metal and exhausted hope. He returned to his work, jaw set.
"Get some sleep, Saera. The city's got enough ghosts without you summoning more."
She almost laughed—almost. Instead, she turned away, fingers trembling, feeling the Ash whisper in her bones.
She wanted to scream. Instead, she watched her reflection in the window, the faintest flicker of blue tracing her veins, the promise, or the threat, of something neither of them could fix.
Saera let the door shut between them with a quiet, deliberate click. She stood in the dim corridor a moment, jaw clenched, resisting the urge to go back and say something that would only end in more silence. The familiar ache rose in her chest—anger at him, at herself, at the city and its endless rituals and rules. She'd spent years learning to be clever, tough, hard-edged like him. All it got her was this: a father welded to his machines, the distance between them measured in soldered joints and a thousand unsaid things.
"You know, sometimes I feel like you don't even listen to me anymore," she'd snapped, and meant every word. "I wish I was one of your...trinkets...maybe that way you'd pay more attention to me!"
His only answer had been the steady whir and clatter of his tools, filling the space where words should have been.
Saera pressed her back against the door, fighting down the sting in her eyes. She wasn't going to cry. Not for him, not for anyone.
She retreated to her room, a small, box-shaped cell stacked high with half-built contraptions, sketches curling from every surface, wires and cogs glinting in the low light. The one place in the city where she could almost breathe.
She dropped to her knees beside the narrow bed, reaching into the darkness beneath. Her fingers found it instantly, the little machine she'd built from scavenged scraps and half-remembered blueprints, the one she'd sworn to keep hidden from Rudger's ever-watchful eyes.
It wasn't much to look at: a battered copper disc, soldered to a mesh of filaments and crystal, pulsing now with the faintest blue glow. Her Songcatcher, she called it, a device meant for listening to the world's secret frequencies, the ghostly voices drifting on the edge of hearing, the half-music that sometimes threaded through the poisoned winds above the city. Not for spying, not really. For dreaming. For hope.
She pressed the copper disc to her ear, her breath shallow. The machine hummed, adjusting itself, threads of ash and static crackling against her palm. She tuned the dials, searching for the note, the impossible song she sometimes heard in dreams, a voice calling from the highest peaks, beyond the reach of machines or prayer.
Tonight, it came almost at once.
A low, mournful melody, trembling just beneath the noise, like a lullaby sung from the edge of the world. It wound through her, ancient, aching, full of longing and loss. There were words there, she was sure of it, though she couldn't make them out—just fragments, echoes, syllables that made her bones ache with wanting.
The Songcatcher vibrated in her hand, blue light spilling across her fingertips. The Ash inside her seemed to answer, humming in time, a resonance that was both a warning and a welcome.
For a moment, the pain faded, and she was only the music, the dream of flight, the memory of something she'd never seen. She closed her eyes, let the song fill her, and, just for a heartbeat, imagined herself soaring above it all: the city, the ash, even her father's disappointment. Up where the wind was clean, where the stars still sang.
But the song changed, flickering, sharp, and discordant. She jerked back, heart pounding. The blue glow surged, then dimmed, and the Songcatcher went silent, cold in her hand.
In the hush that followed, Saera sat cross-legged on the floor, machine cradled to her chest. She could still feel the echo inside her—a secret, a summons, a promise whispered by the Ash.
For the first time, she wondered if her dreams were not madness, but a map.
And if so, where did they want her to go?
Saera curled tighter around her knees, the Songcatcher's chill pressed to her skin, letting the darkness of her little room swallow her whole. Every night was the same, her body aching for something she could not name, her thoughts spinning circles in the hush.
Why do I feel that the air up there is not going to kill me? Why do I believe, against all reason, that if I could just get beyond these choking streets, past the clouds and the ash, I would finally be able to breathe?
The city's elders said the peaks meant death. That nothing but poison and madness waited on the high wind. That no Volrok could survive the world above. But every night, the need rose inside her—hot and electric, impossible to deny. A need to climb, to leap, to let the wind carve through her hair, to feel her own heart beating wild and unbound against the sky.
She gripped the Songcatcher tighter, its blue light pulsing faintly against her palm, a heartbeat not quite her own.
What is wrong with me? she wondered, bitter and awed in the same breath. I shouldn't feel this way. I'm Volrok. Ash-bound. I should be content. I should know my place. But I don't. I never have.
The old stories called it madness, a sickness, a curse from the world before. But it didn't feel like a curse. It felt like... memory. Not hers, but someone's. Something older. Something truer.
Like half of her was built for this: the hunger, the longing, the ache for heights she'd never seen. As if her blood was singing an old, forbidden song—one she was only now beginning to hear.
She closed her eyes, pressed her forehead to the cold wall, and let the longing sweep through her, bright and sharp and endless. In that silent moment, she could almost remember—almost—what it was to fly.
* * *
The knock on the door was urgent—fist, not knuckle—loud enough to rattle dust from the old beams. Shouts echoed in the night outside, desperate, frightened, and not a little angry. Saera flinched where she sat, her small machine forgotten beneath the bed, her heart leaping to her throat.
Rudger stomped to the door, boots slamming the floorboards, muttering curses loud enough for Saera to hear. "You'd better have a damn good reason to come at this hour and disturb my peace," he bellowed, fumbling with the lock. "I swear, one of these days I'll take my daughter and leave you all to rot—with the Ash Mothers, for all I care!"
He threw the door open, glare at the ready, breath misting in the cold. The corridor outside was a tangle of shadows and torchlight. Three figures stood there—neighbors, not strangers, but the look in their eyes was new: fear mixed with the sharp, ugly edge of accusation.
"What is it?" Rudger growled, scanning their faces. "What could possibly be worth dying for in the middle of the night?"
Old Samin from down the hall, hunched and hollow-eyed, was the first to speak.
"It's out!" she gasped. "The generator, Rudger. The air generator is down—the alarms won't stop, and the monitors are already flashing red. We're already coughing, and if we don't fix it—" She cut herself off with a wheeze, clutching at her chest.
More voices joined, a rising tide of fear:
"We'll die, all of us..."
"My children..."
"The Ash Mothers warned this would happen..."
Rudger's jaw set. He knew what it meant, as did everyone: without the air generator, the natural Asirios air would seep back into every crevice and chamber of the Volrok city. What was clean air for the Asirians in the mountains was death for the colonisers down here.
Saera stood back, watching her father turn stone-faced and silent, feeling a dark, bitter satisfaction. Maybe now he'd listen. Maybe now he'd see what she saw in her dreams, what she heard in the ether.
"We need you, Rudger!" another neighbour pleaded. "If you can't fix it, we're all..." She trailed off, the rest unspeakable.
Rudger grunted. "I'll try. But these machines weren't built to last. We keep patching them, but one day—" He glanced at Saera, as if seeing her for the first time in years. "Get your kit. You're coming."
For a heartbeat, Saera almost smiled. He needed her. Not just as a daughter, but as a mind. As hands. As something more.
Rudger pressed the battered comm to his lips, jaw clenched, eyes never leaving the anxious crowd in his doorway.
"All engineers, sector 34 Essos, engage portable breather protocol! This is not a drill. Everyone else, use this time to remember your training: locate your breathers, stay calm, and do not leave your homes. We will take care of this."
A moment's hesitation, dead air, and then voices crackled back, tense, some already tinged with panic.
"Copy that, chief. We're mobilizing."
"Breather packs... gods, mine's still at the wash..."
"Hold, I'm coming, I've got a backup, bringing it now—"
Saera watched her father change before her eyes: all stubbornness and bluster burned away, replaced by the flinty steel that had kept their people alive since the first landing. He moved like a man with no patience for fear, barking orders, scanning faces, always calculating the worst and preparing for it.
He glanced at her, eyes sharp, and for once his voice was not scolding, but urgent and almost gentle.
"Saera. Bring your kit. All of it. If your little machine can pick up a frequency shift, I want to know before I risk an entire sector on a hunch."
Her heart jolted. He was asking. Not commanding. Not dismissing. For a split second, she felt not just useful, but necessary.
"Yes, sir," she replied, clutching the small, boxy device to her chest as she hurried after him.
Behind them, the city's alarms began to wail, low and mournful, like the breath of dying titans. Doors slammed. Curtains drew. The world shrank to one corridor, two figures, and the choking promise of dawn.
The generator loomed ahead, no, it reared, like some ancient beast of burden, all plated iron ribs and snaking cables, shoulders hunched beneath the endless smog. In the cold gloom of dawn, Sector 34 Essos's tower was alive with light, every window pulsing with the heartbeat of recycled air. Even from a hundred paces, you could feel it, the whir and rumble, the exhale of pistons, the sigh of giant lungs keeping death at bay.
Volrok engineering was never subtle. The generator was a testament to survival by force, a symphony of brutality and beauty:
Gleaming copper conduits spiraled up its flanks, sweating condensation that dripped down onto lattices of pressure dials and spinning fans. Brass catwalks crisscrossed the superstructure, their meshwork worn thin by generations of frantic boots. Beneath it all, the main intake vents, hulking, maw-like, ringed with spinning vanes—sucked in the mountain air, filtering it through layers of chemical fog and volatile blue flame.
At the summit, the output pipes belched their vapor skyward, painting the Volrok skyline in luminous, shifting bands—blue, green, faintly purple—the visible spectrum of survival.
Rudger led the way, breath sharp behind his mask. The maintenance crew trailed after, eyes wide, faces drawn in the hard white glow of emergency lamps. Saera hung back, half-scared, half-transfixed.
She watched the machine as if it might move, stretch, or speak; there was something alive in its complexity, something that called to the engineer in her, even as it repelled the part of her that yearned for wild air.
It was always this way for the Volroks. Order, precision, trust in the mechanical gods. Without the generators, there was no life, no history, no hope. Their ancestors had crossed a universe in starships, carved new cities from the bones of old machines, and remade air itself to suit their fragile lungs.
And yet, in the quiet spaces between the generator's labored breaths, Saera remembered stories of the other world.
The Asirians, primitive, yes, but alive in ways the Volroks could only envy. No generators, no great towers, only the wind, the fire, the ritual. Their air was a gift, not a war. Their homes grew into the rock, their tools shaped by hand and song, not forged by the ghosts of dying stars.
The Volroks had given up that simplicity. In exchange, they had built a city where every breath was paid for, every hour a negotiation between science and doom.
She pressed a hand to the guardrail, feeling the vibration, steady, then skipping, a warning pulse.
Rudger barked orders, already halfway up the main ladder:
"System three's down, filtration cycling off, backup pressure tanks running dry. Get me the code sheets—no, not the old ones, the updated schematics—do I have to do everything myself?"
Below, the city was already choking, windows slammed shut, people scrambling for breathers, prayers whispered to both code and flame. Above, the generator throbbed, defiant, desperate. A living cathedral, equal parts sanctuary and prison, and every Volrok was a worshipper at its feet.
Rudger moved with the confidence of a man whose faith was measured in gears and bolts, not prayers. When he entered the generator tower, the rest of the team parted like oil on water, each face a pale mask of relief and anxiety. No one dared follow him—not yet. This was sacred ground, and Rudger was both priest and executioner.
He flicked on his personal lamp, its old beam cutting a wavering path up the spiral stairs. The steps, slick with the eternal sweat of condensation, wound up and up, disappearing into the shadowed guts of the machine. Each landing opened onto a narrow platform, ringed with pipes, control panels, and the living heart of the generator—pistons taller than men, vent stacks thrumming with barely-contained pressure.
At every level, he paused, pressing gloved fingers to cold metal, listening for the telltale whine, the misaligned heartbeat, the whisper of failure in the breathing of the beast.
Each section of the generator was its own world:
The first level: filtration and intake, a labyrinth of mesh and filter stacks, groaning with the labor of cleaning an alien sky.
The second: chemical mixing arrays, where volatile compounds spun in armored glass, turning the clean Asirian air into something only Volroks could breathe—alchemy, necessity, heresy.
The third: compressors and pressure regulators, an orchestra of hissing valves, steam, and warning lights, forever on the edge of red.
Rudger muttered to himself, cursing softly, reverently—his own liturgy.
"Left her too long, did you? That's right, talk to me...what are you hiding, old girl?"
Every inch he climbed, the pulse of the machine grew more erratic, less certain. He could feel it in his bones, the panic, the press of a thousand lungs depending on his hands and no one else's. For a moment, he almost wished the Ash Mothers would try something now. Let them try to drag him out, see how long they'd last without the generator's faithful high priest.
He reached the top platform, sweat beading under his collar. Here, in the shadow of the exhaust stack, the control hub blinked a code only he could read:
Pressure drop—zone four.
Critical error—system override engaged.
Manual reset required.
Rudger's lips tightened into a grim smile.
"Of course. Nothing for it but to get your hands dirty."
Below, Saera waited in the doorway, torn between awe and worry, watching her father become the man everyone depended on, the man who still couldn't hear her.
Rudger crouched at the core junction, hands moving over pipes, seals, and relay nodes with the intimacy of an old lover. Everything gleamed, no corrosion, no wear, no telltale streaks of lubricant out of place. The gauges, once tapped, flicked obediently back to green. Circuits hummed their usual song, the pressure tanks thrummed steadily and sure.
He frowned, knuckles rapping on a console as if the answer might be hiding inside the steel itself. "Come on, talk to me. You're too quiet. Too clean. That's not how things break around here."
He checked the data logs, every service, every filter change, every warning light cleared, all by the book. The other engineers, rookies and old hands alike, had done everything right. He could see it in the work, the little marks and notations he'd taught them to leave. No one had cut corners. There was nothing to blame. Nothing to fix.
Yet the error persisted. The system's sensors screamed of imbalance, loss, danger, while the body of the machine remained perfect, unbroken, as if the generator itself was gaslighting him.
A cold prickle crawled up Rudger's spine.
"Machines don't lie," he muttered. "And if they do, it's because someone's telling them to."
He leaned back, sweat cooling on his brow, forcing himself to breathe. The familiar tang of engineered air tasted strange now, almost... sweet, almost like the memory of a dream he'd once had as a child. Or a nightmare. He shook his head. No. Nonsense.
But the feeling grew: something was wrong, but it wasn't the machine.
He stared at the main control panel, the error code blinking like a slow heartbeat. Then, for a split second, he saw it, no, felt it, a shimmer in the air above the console, like heat rippling off a road, like a mirage. Something the eye wanted to slide off, something his rational mind dismissed as exhaustion.
But Rudger had lived too long to ignore the tickle of a hunch. He pulled his multimeter, ready to check every wire, every current, every quantum link. If this was sabotage, he would find it. If it was a glitch, he would erase it.
But as his hand hovered above the panel, the lights flickered—not a surge, but a... pulse. Like the machine was breathing.
He froze, the hairs on his neck rising.
"Not possible," he whispered. "Not you too..."
Below, the sound of nervous voices echoed up the tower. Lives waited on his verdict. But for the first time, Rudger hesitated.
Maybe, just maybe, this wasn't a problem he could fix.
He felt a presence behind him, and he turned, almost scared. Saera, "What are you doing here? I thought I sad you should wait outside, this is complicated machinery," But Saera did not speak, she approached the console, slowly, as if someone was calling her.
Rudger froze, one hand still gripping his tool. He watched as Saera approached, her eyes not on him but fixed somewhere far away, as if she was moving in a dream, called by a song only she could hear.
"Saera, this isn't..."
He stopped. The words tasted wrong. His voice sounded like it belonged to another life.
She ignored him. Or maybe she just didn't hear. Her fingers hovered above the touchscreen—a screen that no Volrok technician could coax back from the dead. A chill traced down his spine, old superstitions scraping the back of his mind.
Her hand landed gently, almost reverently, upon the console. The glass beneath her skin shimmered—not with voltage, but with something more primal, something that vibrated deeper than code.
And in an instant, the world shifted.
The generator, that iron heart of their city, which moments before had howled with frantic alarms, shuddered and fell silent. The lights blinked green, steady and serene, as if nothing had ever gone wrong. The air itself changed: not just cleaner, but somehow lighter, sweeter, less hostile.
Even the city outside stilled, as if every tower, every pipe and piston, every weary engine, had just remembered how to rest.
For the first time since his exile began, Rudger could hear the wind, soft, honest wind, whistling through a crack in the tower wall. The usual cacophony of mechanical life was gone, replaced by the purring thrum of a contented beast.
Saera's eyes cleared, confusion flickering across her face as she pulled her hand back. She looked at Rudger, wide-eyed, uncertain.
He stared at her, searching for a trick, a flaw in the glass, some hidden explanation.
But there was none. Just the silence. Just the impossible.
Rudger's voice, when it came, was soft and rough as old stone:
"What... did you do, Saera?"
She shook her head, tears glinting at the corners of her eyes. "I don't know," she whispered. "I just... felt it. Like it was hurting. Like it needed me."
Rudger, for once, had no clever answer. No theory. No defense.
He looked at his daughter, the hum of the world stilled, and for the first time in his life, wondered if maybe, just maybe, there was something in the air after all.
The radio hissed on his belt, voices tumbling in, urgent and confused:
"Master Rudger, sector 17, green across the board—requesting update!"
"Essos 34—miracle readings, boss. What did you do?"
"Chief, this is command. Please respond!"
But Rudger didn't answer.
He couldn't.
All his years, all his mastery of machine and logic, meant nothing compared to what he'd just witnessed. Saera, his daughter, stood before him, her hand still pressed to the dormant console, eyes shining with something that was not just light. Not just awe. Something more.
The city outside was silent, a living thing holding its breath.
He heard the frantic calls, the repeated demands for orders. But in this quiet, Rudger could only stare at Saera, his thoughts spiraling, the old certainties turning to dust.
She turned to him, voice small, frightened, and wondrous all at once.
"Dad... I didn't mean to. I just... felt it needed me."
He tried to speak, anything, a joke, a curse, a father's comfort, but nothing came.
For the first time, Rudger, the master of engines, the untouchable, was silent.
And the silence was the loudest sound of all.
* * *
When they finally stepped out from the tower's iron ribs, the street was alive with silence.
Engineers crowded the base of the generator, faces upturned, uncertain, their voices hushed as if afraid the quiet might shatter. People spilled from doorways, slippers on cold stones, robes hastily thrown over nightclothes. Old men who'd sworn never to leave their beds, mothers holding their children, all of them drawn by the unnatural hush—the absence of the machine's endless song.
Some clutched their breathers to their faces, more out of habit than need. Others simply stood, heads cocked, listening to the impossibility: the city without its growl, the air suddenly gentle, as if the world had forgotten how to rage.
As Rudger and Saera walked home, eyes followed them. The whispers grew:
"What happened?"
"Did you hear it? The quiet?"
"Was it them? Did Rudger fix it again?"
But no one stepped in their way.
Saera's skin prickled. She glanced sideways. There, beneath the broken archway at the end of the street, stood Kossara.
Her robes swallowed the lamplight, face half-hidden in shadow. Only her eyes, silver, sharp as polished bone, fixed on Saera with a ferocity that cut through the crowd. In that look was accusation, awe, and something else, recognition. A message carried in silence: I see you, Saera. I see what you are becoming.
Saera hesitated, her heart hammering, then looked away. When she glanced back, Kossara was gone, only the echo of her gaze burning in the night.
The city slowly returned to itself, but the silence lingered. Every ear was tuned to it. Every heart wondered what it meant. And for the first time, the machines purred beneath the weight of an older, stranger magic, one that had chosen a girl who could not yet name her own power.
They crossed the threshold of their home in silence. Rudger dropped his tool bag at the door with a thud that seemed to echo through every bone in the walls. The city behind them was still, too still, a hush so deep even the machines held their breath.
Without a word, he filled the kettle, set it on the battered stove, then rummaged through a tin for the last of the decent tea. When it was ready, he poured, hands trembling just enough to betray the storm inside him. He didn't ask if she wanted any; he just set the chipped cup in front of her and pulled out the chair across from hers.
Then he reached across the battered table, found her hand, and held it. His thumb traced the scars on her knuckles, the little half-moon from the first time she'd tried to fix the air vents by herself. How long had it been since he really looked at her? Not as the city's prodigy, not as the cleverest wrench in Essos, but as his daughter?
He cleared his throat, voice rough but steady.
"All right, Saera. You got my attention. I need to know everything, and I mean everything. No more hiding. Not tonight."
She looked up, the lamplight carving shadows beneath her eyes, and in that moment, she was so young, so old, so impossibly fragile and strange that Rudger almost flinched.
"I wish I could explain it to you, Dad," she said, her voice trembling on the edge of something she couldn't name. "But I feel like... like it has something to do with what's happening to me. I am changing. I feel it. But I can't explain it." Her shoulders hunched. "It's like something's moving inside me. Not bad, just... different. Like the world wants something from me, I don't even understand."
Rudger stared at his daughter as if seeing her for the first time—not just a collection of quirks and brilliance, not just the child who rebuilt radios from scrap, but something more. He set the tea down with shaking hands, the cups clinking louder than the generator ever had.
He tried for gruffness, but the words came out softer than he intended.
"Saera, you know machines. You know me. I don't like magic. I don't believe in ghosts or chosen ones or any of the Ash Mothers' tricks. But what happened tonight—" He paused, swallowing hard. "I've never seen anything like it. That tower... You calmed it. You, not the drills, not the circuits. The city went quiet for you."
Saera wrapped her arms around herself. Her voice was barely more than a whisper.
"It's not just tonight, Dad. I keep dreaming about the mountain, about the sky. About places I've never seen. And when I wake up, I know things I shouldn't. Sometimes I can feel the generators breathing, the wires humming, the air itself calling out for help. It's like... like part of me isn't mine anymore."
He reached across the table, covering her hand with his own, grease-stained and trembling.
"Listen, little bolt," he said, using the nickname from when she was small, "Whatever this is, you're still my daughter. I won't let them take you, or lock you away, or—" He broke off, voice catching.
Saera's eyes shimmered, a sadness in them deeper than fear.
"Maybe you can't stop it, Dad. Maybe I don't want to stop it. But I need you to believe me. Even if it scares you. Even if it means..." She trailed off, unable to say the word.
He squeezed her hand, silent for a long moment, the steam from the tea swirling between them.
Finally, he managed:
"We'll figure this out. Together. You and me, alright? Ash Mothers, sky, miracles, whatever comes. You're not alone."
And for the first time that night, Saera let herself believe it.
The kettle shrieked, a sudden, sharp sound that shattered the fragile hush between them. Before either could move, the radio crackled to life on the shelf above, its static a warning bell, slicing through the night.
"Master Rudger, you are expected in the Ash Mothers' Grand Chamber. Now!"
The voice was curt, metallic, no warmth, no room for refusal.
Rudger's jaw clenched. He didn't flinch, but Saera did. He caught the flash of fear in her eyes, the way her shoulders tensed, hands curling tighter around her mug.
"I'm coming with you," she whispered, voice barely more than a breath.
He shook his head, voice gentle but immovable. "No, you stay here. I'll be back. I know what they want. They want to know what happened, what I did. I'll find a way to explain." He tried for a smile, but it faltered at the edges.
Saera's protest died on her lips. She watched as he moved to the door, heavy boots echoing on the floorboards. Just before he stepped out, he paused, turned back, and leaned down to kiss her forehead, the same way he always had, since she was small and fearless and the world was simple.
This time, the touch lingered a moment longer, as if trying to memorize the shape of hope.
He looked into her eyes, just for a heartbeat, all pretense gone.
"Stay safe, bolt," he said softly. Then he was gone, swallowed by the night and the waiting judgment of the Ash Mothers.
And Saera, alone in the flickering light, stared at the closed door, a thousand questions and worries crowding her heart, the silence of the city suddenly louder than ever before.