They called it a breach at first — a hole in protocol, a failure of locks and seals. The screens in the Guild Command Center never showed what followed.
Monitors hiccuped, then bled static. A dozen feeds stuttered and returned with scenes that refused coherence: soldiers clinging to air that would not hold them, lanterns ticking twice, and the steady, impossible calm of a man who ought not to be calm at all. Captain Ireth wiped his palm across a trembling display and tasted iron. He had read about sieges in books; he had never seen the world stall and sneeze.
"Where are they?" the commander snapped. The voice in the room tried to be authority and came out brittle.
"Perimeter is compromised at rings three and five," a tech said. "Multiple feed anomalies. Vault sensors report—" He coughed. "—temporal interference. It's like the pulse is fragmenting."
The room named things with the cold detachment of people trying to keep terror bureaucratic. "Send the Iron Cohorts. Lock the airlocks. Evacuate civilians from the east rings." Orders were barked like bandages. Nothing fixed the buzzing behind their teeth.
Above the woven screens and the paper maps, Velith burned in a thousand small ways. Smoke threaded through gear-works and relic lampposts that refused to explode all at once. On the streets, vendors stopped and stared as their wares hung suspended for a beat too long, then fell and broke as if embarrassed to have been seen.
Lirra moved like all quiet things do — fast, tidy, and designed to be ignored. She and the brute, Kest, were the two who'd been sent to the exhibition; their job had been diversion, to turn the city's eye away from the Vault. The plan had been elegant in drawings; it had been messier in motion.
They slipped through the Hall of Temporal Arts while the crowd's panic became theater. Lirra's blade reflected a hundred pale faces as she moved; Kest smashed locks and tossed relic cases aside like children dropping toys. The unregistered Seekers — Dalsin's mercs — met them in the Red Gallery like angry statues. The first clash felt almost polite: a test of posture, of who could look like they meant business the longest.
Then it wasn't polite. Glass showered. Raal's distant threads had done their quiet work; these men were tired and brittle, recruited for money and not for meaning. Kest's gauntlet punched through armor, noise like iron colliding with forgotten conscience. Lirra danced around the bigger men, leaving crosshatched cuts that bled slow and ragged.
When they pulled back from the vault's lower galleries, Kest carried a shard of something that hummed faint and wrong. Lirra wiped the smudge of blood from her blade, face impassive. "Did you get it?" she asked.
He didn't smile. He handed her the shard. A single fingertip brushed the surface, and it thrummed like a held note in the chest. "Piece," he said. "Piece and data."
Their exit was a calm thing wrapped inside alarm — a corridor they fell into after scores of men had been made quiet. They vanished into the city's underside with the kind of efficiency that made panic look almost tasteful.
On a blackened tower above the breached sector, Mael watched the city like a man checking the canvas of a painting he'd just torn. His coat was caked with relic dust and the dark of other men's blood. He let the wind play at his hair while the ruined city spat orange into the distance. There was no fear on his face, only that slow, terrible interest reserved for craftsmen and criminals.
He flexed his fingers and watched a drop of blood gather at his nail. It fell and hung in the air as if the street below didn't trust the drop to land on schedule. He smiled once, very small, and the motion looked almost tender. "Not bad," he said to the city, or to himself, or to the idea that the world could be reshaped by a measure. The words meant nothing; they were a label he put on a job done.
Back underground, the Ninefold stitched wounds with the blunt pragmatism of people who treated flesh like gear. The twins argued quietly over miscounts and placements; the boy sat with his broken spheres and didn't cry. Raal cleaned his hands and absently re-tied a thread that had burned into skin. No one spoke of regret. There was no time for it and, besides, regret felt like soft water — useless when you needed to harden edges.
A messenger stumbled into the Guild's command room at last, breath ragged and stained. He brought with him an image that rewired the officers' faces: footage captured moments before the breach, a slow, deliberate removal of a device from a pedestal deep in the Vault. The camera had recorded the arm — the hand that took it — but the thing itself was small, bright, and precise.
"Item stolen," the messenger gasped. "A core fragment. Small, but—" He could not find the word.
In the command room, the silence that followed had weight. Captain Ireth stared at the looping clip until the grain of the footage blurred. The Guild had lost many things. It had never, in living memory, had something taken from its heart while the city itself tried to catch its breath.
"Who did this?" the commander asked, but his question was half of a prayer.
A technocrat froze on his console and looked at the map. "They call themselves—" He swallowed the name before it became more than rumor. "Ninefold."
The word landed like cold iron. Outside, the city continued to remember and unremember its own streets. Fires flicked like slow, maddened pulses. Somewhere down beneath the stone, a tiny device rested in cloth as if it had always belonged to whoever held it.
This was not theft for coin. This was not a raid. It felt, even to Ireth's battered mind, like a message.
They had tested the city. And now they waited to see if anyone would dare answer.
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