Dawn came thin and metallic, like a blade rasping against its sheath. The forges burned at half flame while smiths bent to the wounded; chants rose in the infirmary and the soft pap of bandage on flesh. The valley smelled of smoke and sand and the cold sweetness of melted crystal. Men moved as if waking inside armor—stiff, slow, thinking of small mercies rather than big plans.
Kaelen walked the yard with his hands behind his back, feeling the Warden-sigil pulse under his sleeve like a second, patient heart. Each beat was a reminder and a command. He had used the conduit; he had paid. The mountain had accepted its coin. Now others counted that sound and sharpened knives around it.
Eldan's wife sat on a low bench by the infirmary tent, wrapped in a wool cloak and staring into the scalded distance. When she saw Kaelen she stood, knees knobbly, and the look she gave him was a complicated, human thing—relief braided with new terror.
"You saved my life," she said simply, voice hoarse. "You gave me breath back."
Kaelen shifted, awkward and unschooled at gratitude. "You live because men moved," he said. "Because they chose not to let you die."
Her gaze slid to the courtyard where Eldan stood in the knot of soldiers being held for questioning. The quartermaster had the hollow, pinched face of a man who had been caught with a blade in his hand and a child trembling behind it. He refused to look up.
"Will they… punish him?" she asked.
Kaelen felt Lira's hand at his elbow—light, firm. "We will judge," she said. "Not as the Crown judges. We will ask why, and then we will act. If he lied to save her, that is one thing. If he betrayed us for greed or spite, another."
He glanced toward the stone table in the council hall where Eldan sat chained, not cruelly but enough to keep hands honest. Serenya and Varik flanked the interrogators. Neren had rolled out a scrap of the Crown's glass lattice and worked over it like a curious rat, while Ralk and Jessa stood by the gate like two dark teeth.
Inside, Eldan's confession was not an epic. It was small, ugly, and true: men with crystal in their mouths had found his trail on a road where his wife had been. They had held a blade to her throat, whispered a ledger of names, and priced a mercy he could not refuse. "They said if I did not help they would burn my daughter first," he said in a voice that broke with the heat of recollection. "I thought I could mislead them. I thought they would be satisfied. I was a coward."
Serenya spat a curse that left her mouth looking clean of sentiment. "Cowardice is craft for some men," she said. "But the Crown uses fear. It is no forgiving thing."
Lira's eyes softened for a heartbeat at not-quite-the-pain of the man. "We will not be cruel," she said. "We will make him useful. He knows their timetables now. He knows how they signal and where they stage. That is worth more than his head."
Kaelen listened and thought not of punishment but of calculation. The binder had learned, and that learning had teeth. They had more than suspicion now: they had the names of corridors the Crown used while moving the machines, notes on signal burns, and a single scrap of glass Neren claimed had a faint rune—something like the echo of Crown-speech, but older, and bent inwards.
"Heard this from Neren?" Kaelen asked.
Neren nodded, hair limp with his fever of obsession. "It is not a full pattern. The Crown has borrowed old keys and turned them into a choir. Their devices do not merely run on gears now—they sing. If they arrange enough voice and crystal, they can make the mountain answer as we do—for them. That is how they were trying to open seams simultaneously. A choir of glass to force the Maw."
The taste of copper rose in Kaelen's mouth. "If they learn to make the Maw answer on demand, they can open teeth by the dozens," he said. "Not just here. Across the range."
Lira's fingers tightened on the hem of her robe. "We cannot let the Crown learn the Warden's language better than we do. We cannot let them hold the keys to every seam."
A plan formed like a bell ringing from the inside. Strike where the Crown organized its choir: the staging fold three miles down the valley, a cove where their team of tinkerers and binders rebuilt the damaged device. Eldan—guilty, frightened—knew the path and the watch rotations. A small, desperate strike might break the Crown's ability to coordinate their ritual. It might buy them another week.
Kaelen looked at Serenya and Varik. Both had the same tired, tight expression men wore when they accepted a plan they did not love but understood. "We go tonight," he said.
Serenya barked the details; Varik grunted his assent. Lira refused only that they be careless. "You will not burn the night with fire. Wards, shadows, movement by the bone," she said. "We will steal through them, not run them down."
They moved at dusk, as they always did—this small band now a ritual of survival. The valley had ears and teeth; they would have to be ghosts.
The route that Eldan suggested took them around a razor of basalt and into a fold where cranes and trolleys had been hidden among pines. Men moved in thin lines there, running repairs and winding crystal filaments. The staging fold was lightly guarded, because the Crown trusted the hum of the machines more than it feared the dark.
Kaelen felt his conduit hum in quick cadence as they crept toward the heart of the fold. It answered to the mountain like a metronome in a cathedral, and beneath that the shard's old murmur wanted to pluck the strings that would make men fall silent. He forced it down; stone was careful. Stone had to be used like a surgeon: precise, not shattering.
They struck fast and true. Varik and Serenya cut sentries with the quiet of butchered ropes, hands hard and certain. Daren and the scribe Neren slipped between coiled cables, cutting the crystal binders' cords where they lay like webs. Lira's wards made them difficult to smell; their shadows seemed to leak into the bark around them.
At the core of the fold lay a cradle of glass and iron: a smaller device than the one at the pass but precise—an engine for tuning pitches in the Crown's choir. Men in black worked at it, whispering in the piercing dialect of binders. They had not expected this kind of theft. They had expected siege and the slow attrition of armies, not the blade of a few desperate souls.
The strike went like bread—taking in the warm and sharp center. They smashed the cradle's tuning plates and burned the coils with a small oil that hisses like a scalded serpent. The machine convulsed, threw off a high-pitched ring that grated at teeth, and died. Men tangled with cords and glass. The binder's retinue, caught off-guard, fought with the ragged fury of men who lost their toys.
Kaelen saw the binder himself, not the proud one who rode the big machine but a lesser lieutenant with hair like a dry reed and a face that had not been kind in youth. The man choked on smoke and glass and tried to sing a pattern to steady his fellows. Kaelen closed on him with shadow that pinched but did not kill; the binder clawed at the air for words, his mouth forming old syllables that had once been used to carve seals in stone.
Lira struck his hand with a ward-blade and the music died. "They cannot sing tonight," she said. "Take him."
They dragged the binder into the pines like a netted animal. The man, impaired and choked, spat blood and truth. "We were told to find teeth," he croaked. "To learn the old tongue and harvest what answers. The Crown… it pays with promises of place and safety. We were promised a new order."
Kaelen looked into the binder's eyes and saw more than threat: he saw hunger braided with a kind of small, dangerous hope. The Crown was not only cruelty; it was seduction. It offered stability to the desperate. It offered purpose to the men the world had left to rot.
On the ridge above them, a torch winked. Not an Ashborn light. A Crown runner, late to his watch, signalling in the shallow code of glass. Someone up there still moved as if a choir could be rebuilt in a night.
Kaelen's conduit pulsed. The mountain spoke a small, terrible thing: They will not be stopped by one broken cradle. They will change rhythm. They learn.
He felt, in that instant, the hollow he had traded for the key like a mouth in his chest. He could not summon the sound he had once taken for granted—the laugh of his sister—and the absence rang as a bell. The binder in their hands was a scrap of knowledge; a broken cradle was better than a whole one. But it was not end.
They bound the binder with rough cord and dragged their prize to a place where they could watch and learn what he knew. Eldan's wife wept when she saw them; she pressed a baked crust into Kaelen's hand and muttered thanks that tasted like fear and gratitude folded into one. Kaelen moved like a man who had traded pieces of himself for a table of bones.
That night, as sentries circled and bandaged men muttered prayers to worn gods, Kaelen sat and listened to the conduit's low ping. He had stolen a cradle and a binder. He had saved a woman. He had not saved his laugh.
From the shadows of the yard a shape slipped free—silent, purposeful. Varik stood under the moon with his cloak wide and his face turned away. Kaelen thought to call him, to ask what weight had shifted in the man's jaw, but a runner bolted across the yard and the moment broke like thin glass.
The mountain hummed and something else answered far below—a low, slow toll that could have been joy or appetite. Either way, it was not for the Ashborn alone.
Kaelen rose and watched the valley breathe. The binder would speak in the morning. The Crown would change its song. The Hollow Flame might take what they had unearthed and shape it into a different weapon.
He had bought a night and paid a private price. The war had widened its mouth once more.
Outside the watch-tent, the runner's torch flared to signal a message to the Crown's lines, and in the wavering light Kaelen saw, for the briefest slice of time, a glint of crystal at a hand's wrist—an armament of binding, not yet named. The binder's choir would mend. They would come again.
He closed his fist until his nails bit into the skin. The conduit pulsed like a heartbeat under his palm. He could not call a certain laugh. He could call a plan.
He would need both.