The summons arrived as a breath on glass.
It fogged Aiden's kitchen window from the outside—even though the morning was warm—and wrote itself in neat, pale script only he could see:
CONVENTION OF CONTENDERS: CONVENE.
VENUE: NEUTRAL FIELD.
ENTRANCE: THOSE WHO DARE TO SPEAK.
Kai whistled low. "Polite and threatening. Fancy."
Liora, already dressed in gray that made her vanish between light and shadow, touched the pane with two fingers. Her braid was a line of severity down her back. "Neutral fields only feel neutral to those with armies."
Porcelain stood in the doorway like a patient footnote. "Bring nothing you aren't willing to have quoted back at you."
Aiden looked at his wrist. The brand had softened since the Seventh Night—still present, still warm, but no longer breathless with demand. Under STATUS: CONTENDER, a single dot pulsed like a heartbeat. He could sense the Field behind it—not a place but a posture the world put on when power wanted to pretend to be polite.
"Let's go," Kai said, rolling his shoulders. "We arrive late, we look weak."
"You arrive loud, you look weak," Liora corrected. "We arrive precise."
Porcelain's mouth considered a smile and decided against it. "We arrive present."
They stepped out. The city made breakfast noises, deciding not to notice them. Aiden closed his eyes, and the cloak rose around him with the tenderness of a familiar storm. He whispered the word that had rewritten trials and forced gods to wear manners:
"Forum."
The street peeled open like a page turning, and they walked into the margin.
The Neutral Field was a rotunda of unowned names.
Columns circled a floor of pale stone that reflected no one. Overhead hung a dome of clear sky that did not belong to any weather. Around the circumference, tiers of seats held a crowd that was more sensation than faces—a weight of attention, a murmur of appetite. Some were human. Some were not. Some were the kind of things that make languages pretend to be smaller.
In the center, a mosaic mapped no nation: lines of gold running to a point, lines of shadow running from it. Where those met, an inlaid ring bled words in a slow, careful crawl.
Speak. Be heard. Pay as you persuade.
Kai took one look and muttered, "Place gives me hives."
"You can't afford hives here," Liora said. "They bill by welt."
Porcelain scanned the tiers. "Note the veils," he murmured.
Aiden saw them: boxes screened by gauze that wasn't fabric so much as a refusal to be identified. The Council's silhouettes sat there, not descending, but present enough to make the air taste like iron filings.
At the far curve of the rotunda, a dais waited; on it stood a lectern grown from the same stone as the floor. Behind that, on seats less a throne than a habit of being obeyed, sat three figures in pale robes—the Clerks of Forum. They were not Council; they were older or younger than that. They were the arithmetic that made councils possible.
"Petitioner Aiden," one Clerk intoned, voice gentle and exact. "You have been named Contender. You may set your matter before the Field."
Aiden stepped into the ring. The mosaic cooled underfoot, then warmed, then settled: calibrated. The cloak settled heavier across his shoulders, not hostile; aware.
He drew a breath. Not too deep. Not staged. "My matter is simple: The city will not pay for what the System wants from me. No collateral. No proxies. No weight borrowed from those who are not in the room."
"We heard you name that condition in Terminal Night," another Clerk said. "Do you propose it as principle?"
Aiden felt Liora's attention sharpen behind him. Porcelain's silence shifted, a threat half-unsheathed. Kai smelled of coffee and good trouble.
Principles were expensive. Principles became prices.
"Yes," Aiden said.
The Field shivered, pleased. The word PRINCIPLE carved itself delicately into the stone, and an almost-audible ledger somewhere wrote new entry.
Applause—a susurrus, uneasy—moved the tiers, then was joined by a clean, clear laugh that rang like a bell on a cold morning.
A figure hopped the rail and dropped into the arena as if gravity enjoyed her company. She landed beside Aiden with a smile designed to start rumors and end conversations. Her coat was slate, her boots were the kind that looked like secrets, and her eyes were a blue that had learned mischief precisely.
"Seraph Vale," she said, extending a hand as if they were at a fundraiser and not a formalized risk of annihilation. "Contender. Recently promoted. Terrible at sharing spotlights."
Kai leaned toward Liora. "Friend?"
"We will see," Liora said.
Porcelain's head tilted. "We will price."
Seraph watched Aiden not the way predators watch prey, but the way thieves watch doors. "You've made the Council angry enough to assemble in daylight. That's useful." She nodded toward the veiled boxes. "They hide when they do not lead."
"You're here to help?" Aiden asked.
"I'm here to be seen helping," she corrected, pleasantly. "Which is more help than most things offer. And I've filed a motion that will test if your principle is a sword or an embroidery."
The Clerk's pale voice slid in. "Motion noted—Vale, Seraph: Motion to Vacate Collateral Pathways in Municipal Boundaries."
Murmur became weather. The rotunda's tiers leaned as one: hungry.
Seraph flashed teeth. "Your city is bleeding into Forum. People are seeing what they shouldn't. If your principle stands, we can bring a ban: no harvesting from the unmarked within defined precincts."
"Ban?" Kai echoed. "Like a—fence?"
"Like a sentence that refuses to be reversed," Liora said, approval hiding in precision.
Porcelain's eyes cooled. "Bans invite exceptions."
"Exceptions are where we live," Seraph said cheerfully. "Shall we dance?"
Aiden felt it—the Field narrowing benevolently, the rules the Clerks wore sliding a little toward him because he had brought them a principle instead of a complaint. He stepped half a pace so the lectern and Seraph were both in his peripheral. He kept his voice level.
"I second the motion," he said. "I submit testimony: seven nights. The System's methods are incompatible with the city."
A Clerk raised a placid hand. "Testimony requires proof or precedent."
Seraph's smile widened. "I've brought both."
She snapped her fingers. The air filled with sheets of thin, glowing script: Impact Statements. Flight attendants crying in empty galleys after inexplicable turbulence. Nurses charting "night terrors—unknown etiology" on wards that smelled of antiseptic and fear. A chess club in the park stopping midgame because the boards had reflected a set of rules none of them knew; a bus driver who had braked for a child who wasn't there, then sat shaking while the bus's cameras recorded nothing at all.
Aiden saw his city inside those pages. He saw the System's shadow measured in human ledger lines: late shifts missed, rent short, food bought badly because someone couldn't stop shaking. He felt rage wake like a second spine.
"Precedent," Seraph said, flicking two more sheets into being. "Cordon Orders from distant precincts—cities that learned, too late, to draw circles where the Forum would not drink."
Porcelain's gaze ticked to those. "Enforced how?"
"With enforcement," Seraph said lightly. "Which brings us to the other half of the motion: teeth."
The rotunda agreed—that felt like good television to it. The veil-boxes didn't move, but Aiden could sense attention sharpen: Council listening not to be persuaded, but to make inventory.
A Clerk gestured. "Opposition?"
A voice rolled from a lower tier, smooth as lacquer and twice as slippery. A man walked into the ring with steps that said he had practiced walking where attention lived. He wore a suit too perfect to be human, and his eyes were mirrors.
"Sable Quinn," Seraph murmured, tone curdled. "The Council's favorite adjunct."
Quinn inclined his head to Aiden, to Seraph, to the clerks—never too low. "A ban on collateral within a municipal boundary is charming," he said. "It assumes jurisdiction. The Field exists where power insists. Your city cannot tell the tide when to go home. It will merely drown politely."
He lifted a hand. The stone under Aiden's boots showed time-lapse—a map of encroachments, little starbursts where Forum had bled through in other places. Some had been cordoned. Later clips showed the cordons bending, then bursting.
"Precedent cuts both ways," Quinn said, all sympathy. "The System declines to be fenced."
"Then it can be fined," Aiden said, before caution could change his mouth. "The ban attaches penalties to breaches. Monetary in places that understand money. Essence where money is a rumor. Break the circle, pay the price."
Murmur became a ripple. Even the veils twitched.
Quinn's smile flickered, a card trick found and fixed in mid-air. "And who enforces fines against a weather system?"
"Those who breathe it," Liora said, stepping into the ring at Aiden's shoulder with a permission the Field granted her because she asked it in the right grammar. "Because we will be here. Because we know the cost. Because the city is not a client; it is a home."
Porcelain did not step forward. He never steps forward. His voice simply arrived where it needed to be. "And because precedent will learn to run downhill. You've priced fear. Now price fury."
Quinn's eyes reflected Aiden back at himself. "So you propose, Contender, to tax the System for doing what it is."
Aiden held the mirror-gaze. "I propose to require it to account for what it breaks."
The Clerk's pale voice cut the ring into measures. "Motion to Vacate Collateral Pathways—modified to include penalties. Arguments heard."
The mosaic underfoot warmed. Numbers neither human nor divine gathered their skirts. The Field took a vote the way storms do: by deciding which city to visit next.
One by one, lights rose in the tiers—glowing consent from powers whose names would take pages to draw. A few flares in the veils. One veil did not move.
The Clerk turned their face upward. "Council?"
Silence. Then: a single, small lift of light—no more than a match across a cathedral.
Liora's breath hissed out—she did not smile, but precision softened. Porcelain's eyes did not change; approval, for him, was simply a cessation of warning. Kai punched the air so hard the Field turned it into applause to keep the furniture from breaking.
"Motion carried, with stipulations," the Clerk said. "Cordon parameters to be drafted. Penalty schedule to be negotiated. Enforcement to be recognized through Convention-recognized agencies."
Seraph clapped softly, because she knew how victory should be dressed. "See? Sword, not embroidery."
Aiden's bones ached like coins with memory. He felt something structurally significant slide one half-inch in the world—and lock.
Quinn's smile did not fail; it adjusted. "Very moving," he said. "And now, Contender—since you have enjoyed a small feast of attention—permit a procedural matter I filed at dawn."
The Clerk's hand rose again. "Adjunct Quinn—Motion to Compel Antecedent Oath."
The words cut the air into thinner slices.
Seraph's cheer flattened. Liora's eyes went winter. Porcelain's quiet sharpened to edge.
Kai blinked. "English?"
"A motion to force a first principle," Liora said, too calm. "To nail him to a vow. If he accepts, it becomes his Antecedent—the thing no later clause can override."
Quinn spread his hands with elegance that wanted to hide its claws. "The Field has indulged you, Aiden. Your Forum gambit. Your public ledger. Your ban. Charming disruptions. But what are you? What won't you sell when the room is on fire?"
"I already said—no collateral," Aiden replied.
"Yes," Quinn said gently, "and that is a sectoral principle. Useful. Narrow. I invite you to be… larger."
The Clerk looked at Aiden. Not unkind. Not kind. Accounting in human shape. "You may decline at cost. You may accept at cost. Cost is the Field."
Seraph's hand closed briefly over Aiden's wrist, not to claim, to remind. "They want to fix your axis. Spin you there until you forget how to move."
Kai stepped in front of him, eyes fierce and stupid and perfect. "Then we don't give them the axis they want."
Aiden looked past the lectern, past the Clerk, past the veils, at the piece of sky no weather owned. He remembered seven nights. Mirrors. Scales. Writs. The moment the world had stayed because he asked.
He could refuse. Pay a fine. Lose a little ground and live another day.
Or he could say the sentence that would make or break every day after.
He lifted his branded hand. The Field leaned in because it loves courage and because it loves wrecks.
"Antecedent," Aiden said, and his voice did not waver. "No ruling shall cost the innocent their dawn."
Silence. Not absence—intake.
The rotunda's stone took the sentence like it had been designed to hold no other. The letters scored themselves deep. The veils shifted in a wind named precedent. Something in the city turned its face toward morning.
Quinn bowed, expression perfectly schooled. "So witnessed."
The Clerk's gavel did not fall; nothing so crass was necessary. They simply inclined their head and the world took notes.
"Oath recorded."
The Field exhaled like a theater at the end of a dangerous scene. Seraph's grin returned, feral this time. Liora's shoulders lowered a measurable degree. Porcelain's stillness unfroze by a fraction—the rarest of approvals.
Kai grabbed Aiden by the back of the neck and pressed foreheads. "No ruling shall cost the innocent their dawn," he echoed, as if trial-checking the fit in his mouth. "Yeah. That's us."
Quinn adjusted his cuffs and smiled the way storms smile at levees. "Then let us see," he said softly, "whose rulings meet morning."
He stepped back into the tiers, already a whisper in seven languages.
The Clerk lifted their hand once more. "Next matter: formation of agencies for enforcement. Contender Aiden—appoint your proxy."
Aiden blinked. The Field loves to ask for names when you've just spent all your breath. He drew a breath anyway.
"My proxy," he said, "is Kai."
A shock went through the rotunda—the humor, the gall, the audacity. The Field likes audacity; it can charge for it.
Liora did not smile, but the corner of her precision tilted. Porcelain looked at Kai like a sculptor looks at marble that might choose its own pose.
Kai grinned so hard the air wrote objection and crossed it out. "Hi. I'm very qualified at not shutting up."
Seraph laughed out loud. "Oh, they are going to hate you."
From the veils, a single, reluctant glimmer: acknowledgment. They had wanted a functionary. They got a brother.
The Clerk nodded, serene as math. "Proxy recognized."
The session would go on. It always goes on. The Field is a river. It expects you.