They had wrapped him in rope and shame like a husk. The binder sat on a stool in the council hall, shoulders slumped, glass-scarred lips splitting as he tried to find words that were not still full of song. His hands were laced with cord; his eyes glittered like flint struck wet. Around him, the Ashborn filtered in and out—guards, smiths, the Warden's smith with a hand still smelling of iron—and all of them watched like people who had been given a story to swallow.
Kaelen stood opposite him, the Warden-sigil thudding low beneath his skin. That heartbeat was a metronome now, a private clock he could not turn off. The lack of the laugh had grown into a shape he could name in his chest: absence. It was a new thing to carry alongside the old weight of the shard.
"You sing for them," Kaelen said. "You make things answer."
The binder's mouth twitched. "We sing what they teach us," he said. His voice was a coarse thing. "They taught us an old tongue and paid better than a stable through a winter. You and your mountain pluck at stone—Crown taught us how to pluck at men."
"Why?" Serenya demanded. Her axe leaned within reach, an accusing shadow.
"To make the earth obey," the binder said. "To make the Maw answer them. To raise teeth where teeth have slept. They promise safety for the clever. They promise crowns for the faithful." He spat blood into a cup at his feet. "You use the Warden's mark and expect it to be secret. The Crown will learn tongues as every cook learns recipes. They do not need to be clever if they have the right notes. They just need time."
Neren, who had been hunched over the broken cradle all morning, lifted a smear-stained face. "What notes? What pattern do they sing?"
The binder's eyes went sharp like a blade's edge. He leaned toward Kaelen, and the hall seemed to tighten its breath. "There are three elements," he said. "A coil to hold the song, a chorus to push it, and a channel to carry it. You broke their choir for a night by smashing a cradle. They called and adapted. The bigger plan is not a single cradle but a spire—many cradles in chorus tuned by a central heart. Build the heart, and the whole mountain sings back."
"Where?" Kaelen asked before he could think to weigh the danger of question. The conduit flared faint at his wrist like an answering eye.
The binder's gaze slipped somewhere not in the hall. "They call it a Glass Spire," he said. "In a hollow three marches down the valley, a place of black mire we call Fallow Mire. They chose the damp because the ground there takes song easy. The Spire will be a tower of glass and coil, a throat for the choir. If it sings whole, seams will open not as one but like teeth across a jaw."
The hall shifted; even the smith who kept silent for winters made a thin sound. Lira pressed her palm to her chest, feeling the old runes of the Warden's voice thrumming in her bones. "Fallow Mire," she repeated. "It is where the Crown stores dead machines and where binding rites have been tested for years. They would not risk the heart without protection. It will be a fortress."
"They cannot finish it if we strike now," Kaelen said. The thought came like a sharpened tool. "If the Spire falls before they light the heart, they cannot form a choir. It buys us time."
Serenya's face hardened into the geometry of command. "We cut the Spire. Tonight. A blade strike and we come home with the knowledge and with a scar to tell the story."
Varik nodded, but there was a slowness in his agreement, a way his mouth tightened a moment before he spoke. Kaelen caught the small shadow in the man's eyes—some thought leaving like an insect beneath his skin.
"Who will go?" Lira asked. "This is not the place for many. The Hollow Flame might take advantage."
Eldan's wife—safe now, wrapped in a blanket—stood at the doorway like a small, stunned figure and asked in a voice that had learned to be careful, "Will you come back?"
Kaelen looked at her and felt something in himself answer without the voice he had given away. He could not recall the exact curlicue of his sister's laugh, but he could summon the shape of protection that had always sat beside that memory. He had paid; he had not bankrupted himself of will. "We will come back," he said, and the words had the sound of a promise he meant.
They left a watch and took a team small and fast: Serenya and Varik, two veterans who knew the gullies like knuckles, Daren and Neren for speed and cunning, and Kaelen with Lira. Eldan could not go—his crime and his conscience tied him to the stronghold—but his map was carried like possession.
Night fell like a blade-edge. They moved through the valley soft as thought, the conduit a whisper in Kaelen's arm that told him where the stone was sympathetic and where it was not. He used it sparingly—coaxing a small seam to bear a thrown stone, guiding a ledge to mask their passage—because every time it pulsed, the hollow inside him reverberated. It had taken a sound; it gave an ache instead.
They reached Fallow Mire by moonrise. The place smelled wrong: a sweetness like old rot mixed with the metallic edge of rune-ash. The Crown's work lay half-finished there—towers of scaffold and a skeleton of glass rising like ribs. Men—hundreds of them—moved like weavers among coils. Lights burned at regular intervals; the Spire was already a throat of sorts, the lower rings built and the hollow top waiting to be crowned.
"We do not hit the front," Serenya murmured. "We split their signal, take the choir's heart, and burn the coils."
Varik's hands tightened around his spear. "And if Hollow Flame is here? Or worse—if we walk into a trap?"
Kaelen's conduit half-answered with a small, cold sing. He felt a line stretching toward the Spire—an answering pattern that looked like a thin vein of song. It was controlled, not raw; the Crown had learned patterns and already wove small safety runs. But it was not yet whole. There were seams they could cut.
They moved in two waves. Kaelen led the smaller team to the west where Neren said the coil-houses were weakest. Varik and Serenya wound the northern flank with heavier irons to cause a diversion. Lira walked the center with a violet light that made the glass glimmer like insect wings.
They struck like ghosts. Neren slipped among the coil-houses and set small charges—not to blow the Spire but to break the tuning plates. Lira's wards kept their breath thin and old. Kaelen used the conduit to push a seam under a scaffolding; the ground folded and the lattice the Crown had been building for a choir sagged like a net cut loose. Shouts rose—sharp as glass.
The binder's men reacted faster than Kaelen had hoped. They were trained, not by virtue but by the Crown's doctrine: when music broke, panic was an answer. Men poured from tents to stoke failing coils; others beat at the flames that Neren had set to temper plates. The Spire's lower rings convulsed and sang a wrong note. The valley threw back a sound like a groan.
Then, farther along the ridgeline where Varik had been posted, something moved that did not belong to their plan: a pale shape, the chain-beast they had unearthed, dragged by a band of Hollow Flame acolytes. Its glass eyes caught moonlight and threw it like a signal. The beast lunged into the fray not under Ashborn control but pulling toward the Spire, and around it men shouted—Hollow Flame voices, rough and hot.
Kaelen's chest went thin the way a bell does when you strike it wrong. The Hollow Flame had not come to burn a seam; they had come with the beast to take and temper what the Crown had uncovered. The valley had become a triad: Ashborn, Crown, and Hollow Flame—each hungry for the Spire's throat.
Varik's voice cut across the clamor with something like pain. "They've set the chain to pull a rig into the heart!" he shouted.
A device, rigged with ropes and winches, had been lashed to the chain-beast. The Hollow Flame planned to drag parts of the Spire into a refining cradle meant to remeld the thing into a weapon. If they succeeded, the Glass Spire would not be only a choir—it would be a forge that birthed instruments of binding.
Kaelen ran. He moved not with the reckless hunger the shard whispered but with the steadier thought of a man who'd given away a laugh and needed to buy small mercies with careful knives. He reached the flank where Varik fought, where the chain-beast pawed and the Hollow Flame's red-wire leader sang a forcing note to a drum of metal.
Varik's spear found wood and rope and flesh in a furious arc, but one of the Hollow Flame's metal clamps bit into his leg. The man grunted and the clamp latched. For a second Varik's eyes softened in a way that made Kaelen's gut tighten: an old obedience under pain.
"Varik!" Kaelen cried.
Varik turned. For a heartbeat Kaelen thought he saw the man's face split in two: the warrior he knew and something else the clamps suggested. Then he shoved, grunted, and the chain-beast took another step forward.
Someone struck the binder's horn; a note rose thin and terrible, and the Valley answered in three discordant chords. The mountain's hum under Kaelen's skin rose into a scream. In that scream the conduit shoved images into him—snatches not his own: a child's hand, a smith's smile, the warmth of a winter hearth—and then cleanness: a name he could not quite call, the syllables slipping like water.
He fell to his knees, not from force but from the sudden hollow the Maw had opened in him. The bargain had bought a key; it had also given the valley reason to wake fully. The chain-beast pulled with a terrible, mechanical hunger; the Hollow Flame's rig began to fit the stolen coils into a new pattern.
"Hold!" Kaelen roared. He did not know if it was command or prayer. The word carried, and men on all sides flinched like sailors in a squall.
Lira took his hand. Her fingers were warm and steady. "You cannot hold every seam," she said, not unkindly. "But tonight—find the place your hand can close."
Kaelen looked up. The Spire's heart flashed with a pulse of light as someone—Crown or Hollow Flame—struck a match to a note. The air tasted of glass and blood and the warm, terrible possibility of final songs.
He breathed, found the rhythm of the Warden-sigil in him, and let the conduit answer—not to the hunger but to the protection. He pushed stone like a closing jaw under the chain-beast's feet. He wove shadow to slip the Hollow Flame's lines. He aimed his hand where a hole could be made in the Spire's scaffolding and where the chain-beast's harness might catch and break.
The valley held its breath—and then everything happened at once: a snarl, a snap of cable, the chain-beast rearing, men screaming, the Spire giving an angry, wrenching sound that sent a dozen men tumbling into the mire.
They bought an hour. They paid for it with sweat and clawed skin and one of their veterans with a torn shoulder. Varik lay breathing hard, scars white on his leg where the clamp had bitten, eyes closed and not untroubled.
Kaelen stood amid the ruin and the small, hollow victory and felt the brand under his skin like a new, foreign fist. They had cut the Spire's throat enough to slow the choir, but the valley had shown its teeth: the Hollow Flame had taken a part of the chain-beast and might yet temper it into something crueler; the Crown had been bruised but not broken; and Varik's clamp had shown them how easily men's wills might be bent if pain was applied in the right syllables.
Above, in the dark, the mountain hummed once more. The Maw had tasted song. It wanted more.
Kaelen looked at his hands. They were not as steady as they had been before the bargain. He had a key now; he had spent a memory to hold it. The hole inside him felt like an instrument rewired. Tonight they had saved a stretch of earth. Tomorrow, someone would decide whether to use the key to close a mouth—or to force it open wide.
He would need more than muscle to answer that.