A boy named Tovin ran between stalls with a paper kite tied to his wrist.
He darted past lanterns that caught the sun and tossed his head back to laugh at birds that wheeled above the market.
"Prince Kael's coming!"
The hawkers cried, piling colorful cloth and mana-lamps in neat rows.
Fountains sang.
The aroma of fresh bread, spiced meats, and sweet sugar filled the lanes.
Tovin's small hand brushed a merchant's apron.
"Do you think he will throw candies?" he asked, eyes wide.
On a shaded bench, Old Marten watched the same crowd with different eyes.
He had hauled stone and timber to build the city's first wall.
He had buried friends in wars no one remembered now.
The great tree at the center the one everyone bowed to for luck and bread had been a sapling when he was a boy.
Marten tapped his cane, smiling once at the sight of dancing children.
"Let them be happy," he said to the woman next to him.
"A city that sings keeps dark things away for a while."
Lysa, a young woman who polished crystal lamps in a shop by the eastern gate, tied her hair up and swept the steps.
She kept a small coin jar behind the counter and dreamed of leaving for the southern isles.
The talk in the taverns was all about Kael the heir of Gravemont, the stormborn youth who commanded elements like a king commands breath.
"If he finishes his tour here,
" Lysa told a friend, "maybe the merchants will bring better silk.
Maybe I can go see the sea."
The city lived like that for a day bright, noisy, ordinary.
Nobles rode in carriages, adventurers traded maps, guards stood at corners with bored faces and glittering spears.
Children practiced throwing wooden knives.
The temples chimed for luck.
The world felt whole.
In the present, the same streets were different.
Smoke crawled through alleys.
Stalls burned.
Aelina's guard dragged the merchant who had once laughed at Tovin into a ditch; his eyes were wide and empty.
Cries rose like a new bell.
From the palace ruin came distant tremors not the ripple of Kael and Charles, but deeper, heavier. The three titans that had split the sky moved like rolling mountains.
Ice hissed down the western roads.
Flesh crawled through the southern alleys and sucked the warmth from men's veins.
Stone thundered along the eastern wall.
Tovin's kite burned in his small hands.
He coughed and looked up at the same branches he had once run beneath the great tree that had been a promise now shuddered at the center of everything.
Old Marten pushed himself to his feet and helped a neighbour stumble.
Lysa gripped her broom and then, because fear makes a person act, she ran, pulling a small child behind her.
Kael watched it all from the courtyard, but his eyes were not only on the battlefield.
For a heartbeat he saw Tovin's kite, Marten's cane, Lysa's sweeping.
Past and present braided into one blistering image of what the city had been and what it would not be if he failed. His jaw tightened.
His anger folded into something harder than fury responsibility.
The calamities did not politely wait while nobles argued.
They carved the city into four pieces with their passage.
Market cries became bone-splinters.
The sound of splintered glass echoed like a terrible chorus.
Kael's breath came fast.
For the first time the duel felt smaller and the city larger, and something in him shifted.
Darius moved like a man who had given the shape of battle to his bones. He took the eastern road with the first lines. Soldiers fell in behind him, shields locking, spears bristling. His face was a plain mask of focus. Behind him, the ruined gates still smoldered; Obryxis' shadow hung heavy on every rooftop. Darius did not look at the mountain of stone. He checked his men, raised his blade, and stepped forward.
Aelina ran west with five royal guards at her heels.
The wind on her skin was cold; her breath came in steam.
Cryoveth's frost had already stained the cobbles white.
She tasted metal and ice and the fear that sharpened her senses.
Her hands trembled for a second then she steadied them and opened her lungs to the wind.
Aelina had spent her life learning the graceful turns of aircraft and ceremonial breezes.
Now she would learn to cut through a storm.
Commander William of the Shadowairs moved through the southern quarter like smoke.
His bow was slung across his back, a dwarven-crafted thing with little runes along its limbs.
He barely spoke. Shadows seemed to lift and fall with his foot.
Morvane's stench clung to the air like old blood. William closed his eyes for one instant and then opened them with the look of a man readying a trap.
All three advanced through the city in a single sweep, lines of men and women behind them.
The cameras of fate panned from one to the other: Darius raising his voice, "Hold the shield! Drive the colossus back!" Aelina whispering to her guard, "Focus the currents speed, not force.
" William's reply was a single nod.
They split to their stations: Darius toward the eastern riot of broken stone, Aelina into the glittering white blizzard of the west, William into alleys that reeked and moved by themselves.
The city watched as its defenders became a trio of blades against the three-headed threat.
The royal palace rose like a crown above the city.
Its gates were sealed.
Inside, the command room thrummed with a thousand small movements maps spread, messengers perspiring, captains demanding to be heard.
The king took his place at the head of the table with the weight of the city on his shoulders.
Around him were generals with lined faces, nobles whose hands still smelled of silk, and leaders of the sovereign guards men who moved in darkness and struck where the enemy did not expect.
Kael's mother sat wrapped in a cloak of ash, eyes like flint.
The room smelled of smoke and incense and something else: urgent iron.
The king rose and the chatter fell.
"We will not watch the capital die," Aerion said, voice low but steady.
He pointed to a map with trembling fingers.
"The army waits, but I will not send them to slaughter without aim.
There must be objectives."
A general, face drawn, asked the obvious question.
"My king what are the orders?"
"Move the citizens toward the castle," Aerion said.
"We can rebuild stone.
We cannot restore lives.
Make the castle our bastion.
If the worst comes, it must stand as the last line."
"Objective two?" the general asked.
"Protect the great tree.
It is the heart of this city."
Aerion's voice shook, but the decision had the ring of iron.
"And protect what lies in its hollow."
He did not say the word aloud, but in the low hum of the room it was understood a relic, a thing of value that must not fall into the wrong hands.
"Deploy sovereign guards to the tree," Aerion ordered.
"Split our forces one to hold the approaches, one to guard the vault."
He stared each officer in turn in the eyes.
"And if there is a way to end this horror kill them. Kill the calamities."
A drumbeat began somewhere beyond the walls as riders sped out to carry the orders.
Messengers leapt into the night with banners.
The army would move.
Soldiers at the walls readied themselves.
Across the capital, a thousand small lights blinked into motion and began to march.
But orders were only the start.
The city had already bled.
The tree shivered in the center like something that understood every danger moving toward its roots.
Outside, steel and blood prepared to meet mountain, glacier, and hunger.
To be continued....