The road out of Gloomstep tried to be respectable. It straightened itself, put on a veneer of cobble, pretended it didn't lead out of a district that tilted wrong. Then it remembered where it came from and sagged in the middle, as if ashamed.
Jorn drove like a man who had opinions about roads and didn't trust any of them. The horses—one dignified bay, one creature that looked like a sketch of a horse drawn by a drunk—clopped along with patient resentment. Serah sat at the back of the cart, canvas lifted an inch, eyes on the world. Brother Maeron wedged himself opposite Kael and wrote without looking, the nib of his pen scratching like a tiny rat in a wall.
Kael discovered the cart had exactly three positions: upright, airborne, and profoundly personal with his tailbone. He accepted this as punishment from a universe with taste.
They cleared the city's outer gate by paying a bribe to a man with a hereditary mustache and no imagination. The man peered into the cart, saw a monk, a sullen young man, and a Sovereign badge glinting on a coat, and decided this was none of his business. He took Jorn's coin, gave a salute that injured tradition, and waved them through.
The countryside beyond Threnos' capital opened into sallow fields and frost-burned orchards. Winter was not due for months; it had sent an early scouting party anyway. The sky wore the Veiled Sun like a smudge behind gauze. Everything had a washed-out look, as if painted with water borrowed and never returned.
Kael let the rattle and sway lull his nerves until the echo of the hiccuped second—of seeing himself—stopped replaying in his head like a mean joke.
Serah broke the quiet first. "You ever been out this far?" she asked, not looking at him.
Kael shrugged. "I've been out as far as 'don't come back,'" he said. "Usually I come back because no one told me when."
Jorn snorted. "That's not an answer."
"It's an answer for me," Kael said, stretching until his spine made a sound like a door reconsidering. "What's on the menu? Choir ambushes? Bandits with a sense of humor? An honest day with no attempt on my life?"
"Third one's a fairy tale," Jorn said. "First two, yes."
Maeron looked up from his notebook. "You should all be aware," he said, "that we will cross the fringe of the Pale Belt by sundown if we keep this pace. Vector use will… misbehave."
"Define misbehave," Kael said.
"Amplified," Maeron said. "And prone to inversions. Your pushes will pull. Your heat will hide. Your light will sulk. The mist complicates boundary conditions."
"I love that you talk like that is normal," Kael said.
Serah adjusted the strap of her staff where it leaned beside her. "Jorn," she said. "Any rumors on the road?"
"Two caravans hit last week," Jorn said. "Not much taken. People dead, though—lungs crystallized, then boiled. Choir techniques. There's talk of a Crown transport charred on the inside and frozen on the out—"
He stopped himself.
"And?" Kael said.
Jorn flicked a glance at Serah. Serah didn't nod. She also didn't stop him.
"—Transport was moving a prisoner," Jorn said. "A Crown-Vector. High-tier. Broke containment."
Kael arched a brow. "Define 'broke.'"
"Gravity went sideways," Jorn said. "Then the road broke too."
Kael thought about his own ribs vibrating when the fortress had tried to fall and decided he did not want gravity to ever take things personally around him. "Name?" he asked.
Jorn shrugged one shoulder. "Not for us to know."
Serah's expression settled into that smooth neutrality that meant she had opinions and none of them were being shared.
Kael filed "mystery gravity convict" under problems future me can hate.
They rolled on. The Veiled Sun turned its dim face down a notch as the day wore itself out. The road curved toward the hills and the mist that gave the Pale Belt its name began to pool in the low places, thin and white like a sheet no one had the heart to tuck in.
"Jorn," Serah said. "Left fork at the marker. I want the bridge with the steel anchors, not the rope one."
"Bridge is rope now," Jorn said. "Steel got harvested by some fool last winter. We'll make do."
"Excellent," Kael said. "I love improvisation and collapsing into rivers."
"You can walk," Jorn said.
"I could," Kael said gravely, "but then where would I put my dramatic hand gestures?"
They reached the fork and took the left. Trees closed in—brittle branches, leaves like tired parchment. The road dropped toward a ravine carved by meltwater, the mist sloshing over its lip like a lazy tide. The bridge came into view: rope, planks, a suggestion of engineering.
Jorn slowed the horses. "She'll hold," he said, in the tone of a man lying to a child and a horse simultaneously.
"Anchor points?" Serah asked.
"Two stone posts," Jorn said. "That used to hold steel, yes. There's your tragedy."
The cart creaked onto the first plank. The bridge groaned like a drunk reconsidering his promises. Kael leaned out and peered into the gorge. Water moved down there in a sulky trickle, threading through rocks like a vein.
The fog thickened as they reached the center of the span.
Kael felt it before he heard anything: a tickle at the base of his skull, the sensation he'd identified as the world putting a hand over its own mouth. Motion sharpened. Sounds—leather creak, rope strain, horses' breath—got little edges.
"Serah," he said, very softly.
She'd already lifted the canvas. "I feel it."
Jorn's hands tightened on the reins. "Talk to me."
"Company," Serah said, keeping her voice level. "Left bank. Back from the trees."
Kael squinted. The fog slurred the world into suggestion, but something dark stood where fog should have been lighter. Several somethings. Cloaks. Hoods. Choir? Bandits? Cult?
"Don't stop," Serah said. "Don't run. Straight and steady."
Jorn clicked his tongue. The horses obeyed because they were good creatures who did not deserve any of this.
A figure stepped onto the far side of the bridge—a woman in traveling leathers, hood back, hair cropped short as a punishment. She carried no obvious weapon. She carried herself like a weapon anyway.
"Road's closed," she called, voice carrying clearly across water that should have swallowed it. The mist did that: put its thumb on the scales of sound as it pleased.
Jorn didn't slow. "By whose word?"
"By mine," she said. She took three steps onto the bridge's far end and the planks did not dare complain. "And by the Choir behind you. You're welcome."
Kael turned his head. The shapes at their back were closer now, slipping through the fog without ripples. No color. Just the sense of approach.
"What's our girl?" he asked Serah, low.
"Vector," Serah said. "Potential Aspect. She walks like gravity owes her rent."
"Ah," Kael said. "So that prisoner."
Serah didn't answer.
The woman on the far side put her palm flat against the left-hand anchor post. The post flinched. The rope went taut enough to sing.
"Stop the cart," she called. "Unless you want to learn to fly sidewise."
Jorn hauled. The horses obeyed because they were saints. The cart lurched and settled, swaying over a drop that became suddenly very less optional.
The woman walked onto the bridge. She did not hurry. The fog peeled away from her as if offended.
Halfway across, she stopped. Serah stepped down from the cart bed with controlled grace and met her gaze over ten yards of nothing.
"Lysa," Serah said.
"Serah," the woman returned.
Kael stared from one to the other. "You two know each other. I love coincidences."
"Not coincidences," Maeron murmured. "Attractor states."
"Please don't say 'attractor states' on a rope bridge," Kael said.
The shapes in the fog behind them paused, as if perhaps reconsidering their life choices.
Jorn said, without moving his lips, "If this goes wrong, boy, you take the right rope and make friends with it."
Kael licked his lips. The rope hummed, a low, tight note. He could feel its fibers argue with tension like teeth grinding in sleep.
"What do you want, Lysa?" Serah asked.
The woman—Lysa—watched her with an expression like a weathered stone that had remembered being a face. Her eyes were pale and overbright, like frost over black water. "Protection," she said. "Until I can think."
Serah's jaw ticked. "If you'd stayed in your cell, no one would be hunting you."
"If I'd stayed in my cell," Lysa said, very calmly, "the cell would have fallen into itself and then the gaol and then the district. It was a bad day."
"Every day is a bad day near you," Serah said.
"Likewise," Lysa said.
Kael raised a hand. "Hi," he said. "Kael. I move things stupidly. Are the Choir behind us yours?"
"No," Lysa said, and the ghost of a smile flickered and died. "They're everyone's."
Right on cue, a voice carried through the fog behind the cart. Mild. Certain. "Travelers. Lay down your arms and your sins. Turn over the asset and the Apostate, and the road will open."
"The Apostate being me," Maeron said, sounding faintly pleased.
"And the asset being me," Kael said. "Rude that they list me second."
Serah stepped sideways until she stood between Lysa and the cart. "They won't cross while we're on the span," she murmured. "But they'll cut the ropes if they decide the drop does the work for them."
Kael flexed his fingers. Every instinct he had pointed toward a handful of stupid: yank the motion out of the bridge's sway, dump it into the Choir, use the cart as a bowling ball. The Pale Belt hummed mischief under his skin like an invitation to a dance he shouldn't attend.
Lysa put a hand on the rope. The humming note changed, deepened. The entire bridge settled, a little—weights reassigned, lines persuaded to behave.
"Talk later," she said to Serah without looking away from the rope. "Decide now."
Serah's gaze flicked once to Kael. He had time to shake his head minutely. He did not say, I'll do something stupid. He didn't have to.
"Fine," Serah said.
"What's the plan?" Jorn asked.
Serah's hand lifted, two fingers drawing a fast, hard line in the air. Heat jumped to obey, a path laid under what had been mist. It wasn't flame. It was temperature priority. Anything crossing that line would—should—shed heat into it.
"Kael," she said. "No theatrics. Gentle. Hold the sway steady and when I say, let it go."
"You're asking a lot of me," Kael said.
"I know," she said.
Lysa closed her eyes. The left-hand rope went heavier. The right-hand rope went lighter. The cart shifted, lurching left, then corrected as she redistributed strain across the span with the easy arrogance of someone who had taught ravines to be elsewhere.
Behind them, the fog stirred. Dark sleeves lifted. A bowl chimed once. The air pressure changed.
"Pulse incoming," Jorn snapped. "Reactive. Brace lungs."
Kael snatched the motion of the chime mid-air and bent it into a loop that fed itself, like a dog chasing its tail. The pressure wave that should have chewed oxygen slipped to the side and snarled uselessly against Serah's line, shedding heat it didn't want to lose.
The Choir, to their credit, did not panic. They never did. They simply reached for another technique. The fog around them thickened into a sheet.
"Ready," Serah said.
"Say the word," Lysa said.
The word was now.
Kael took the sway of the bridge—the long, lazy pendulum of wood and rope over a gorge—and packed it into a tight, held vibration, not allowed to express itself. Lysa wrenched the strain she'd redistributed back to neutral and then, for a sick, absurd second, to opposite. The ropes screamed.
"Release," Serah said.
Kael let go.
The bridge became a whip.
The vibrations he'd bottled snapped outward. The span bucked, dove, rose. The mist bounced like breath knocked out of a giant.
Serah's heat-line roared into sudden life as the air shredded across it.
The first ranks of the Choir had committed. They met a world that had decided to move without them. Feet lost purchase. Robes tangled. A bowl tumbled from someone's hands, spun across a plank, and slid into the ravine, where it rang once and then sounded extremely surprised to be water.
Kael stole their stumbles, swept them into one direction, and pushed. It was an ungentle, stupid thing that would have broken ankles if the Pale Belt hadn't cushioned his choice with spite. The front line went back three paces all at once, like a tide changed its mind. The second line collided with the first. The third raised their hands to counter and the bridge kicked again, the timing ugly enough to make counters go wrong.
Lysa's right rope creaked. She shifted a fraction of its load to the left with the intimacy of someone redistributing guilt.
"Enough," she said. "Before I drop us all to make a point."
Kael eased the span into a smaller sway. Serah's line cooled, still hungry but patient now. The Choir behind them had learned something—not fear, but math. They faded into the fog with the uncomplaining competence of men who would try again later, from a different angle, with better variables.
The woman on the far end of the bridge—Lysa—watched them go like a widow watching rain walk off.
Jorn let out a breath. The horses flicked their ears in agreement.
Lysa stepped off the bridge and onto their side, as if stepping onto a different argument. Only then did she look at Kael directly.
"You," she said, as if identifying a species. "Are the wrong kind of dangerous."
Kael put a hand to his heart. "Thank you. I strive."
Serah's mouth twitched. "Lysa Tren," she said to Kael, because she had decided to share names now that it mattered. "Crown-Vector. Former."
"War criminal," Lysa said, helpfully.
"Alleged," Jorn said.
"Witnessed," Lysa said, without heat. "Are you taking me to Aerialis?"
Serah hesitated. "Yes," she said. "If you don't break the cart by looking at it."
"I'll ride," Lysa said. She did not say I'll keep the bridge from collapsing after you go, but Kael felt the way she left a portion of herself behind in the anchor posts, a memory of weight she could tug from a distance.
They got the cart moving again. Kael watched the shape of Lysa in the mist as she ran alongside for a twenty-count, then swung up onto the rear with the economy of a practiced soldier. She did not ask for a seat. She crouched by the tailboard, one hand on the frame, as if braced for a world that tipped wrong.
"Why are the Choir hunting you?" Kael asked, because someone had to talk and it was never going to be Jorn.
"They hunt everything that accelerates the end," Lysa said. "I accelerate things by existing."
Maeron made a small delighted sound that he disguised as a cough. "We all accelerate the end by existing," he said. "It is the human condition."
Jorn shifted the reins. "We could also be quiet and make less end."
Kael leaned back against the canvas. The bridge faded into fog behind them. The road ahead bent like a thought trying to avoid itself.
"So," he said. "Do I get the bedtime story? The valley? The falling army?"
Lysa's pale eyes slid to him. "No," she said. "But you get a warning."
"I'm not good at those," Kael said. "I treat them like dares."
"This one isn't," Lysa said. She tipped her head toward the dim sun, toward the world that had gone grey too early. "If you keep laughing," she said, "learn to laugh quieter. They're listening."
"'They' being the Choir? The Crown? The cults?"
"The dead," Lysa said. "And the thing wearing your face."
Kael's mouth went dry. He swallowed and found his humor where it always hid—behind the lump in his throat.
"Bad news," he said lightly. "I only have one volume setting: obnoxious."
"Then die quietly," Lysa said, mild as weather.
Serah's gaze flicked between them. "We won't be dying," she said. "We're going to Aerialis. We'll put rules around this."
Maeron smiled in the way that made Kael want to push him off the cart just to test gravity's commitment. "Rules are a story we tell ourselves," he said. "Reality nods along until it yawns."
Jorn clicked the horses up a notch. "No philosophy until we're off the Belt," he said. "The mist hears you and tries to agree."
The mist agreed. It thickened, then thinned in indecisive sheets. The road forgot how to be straight. They drove through a copse of trees that had all leaned as if they'd once heard a loud noise to the east and never recovered. Ice rimed the edges of puddles that hadn't existed a heartbeat earlier.
Somewhere—a long way off, or very close and shy—a bell rang twice.
"What was that?" Kael asked.
Lysa and Serah spoke over each other.
"A warning," Lysa said.
"An echo," Serah said.
Maeron tucked his notebook away like a man hiding a cookie from fate. "We're close to a thin place," he said. "The Choir marks them for pilgrims and for hunters. If we leave a scar here, it will sing for years."
"Let's not sing," Jorn said. "Let's get across."
They did, with the slow, careful patience of people handling a drunk dragon with a hangover. The Belt's far edge came up on them like a trick; one moment the world was muffled and damp, the next the air had weight again and the sun remembered it owed the land a grudging glare.
They pulled into a stand of windblown pines beyond the mist and let the horses breathe without arguing with physics. Jorn hopped down and checked hooves and harness; the man made competence look like a sacrament. Serah paced the perimeter, the little heat that clung to her leaving faint thawed footprints in frosted grass. Lysa stood very still, like a blade pretending to be a person.
Kael found a rock, sat on it, and rested his head in his hands.
The image of himself at the alley's mouth came when called. It always did. The older him wasn't cruel in the memory. He was simply there, an answer at the end of a question Kael hadn't finished asking.
He looked up and found Maeron watching him. Of course he had. The monk peered at people like he was trying to memorize them before the world changed the handwriting.
"Want to tell me what you saw?" Maeron asked.
"No," Kael said.
"Will you anyway?" Maeron asked, hopeful.
Kael stared at him. "It was me," he said, because once you started talking to Maeron you found yourself saying the part you shouldn't. "Older. Wrong eyes. Like someone had taken the heat out of them and left the shape."
Maeron's face did something—regret? triumph? fear?—and then smoothed. "And you felt… doubled," he said, half-statement.
"For a moment," Kael said. "The second replayed itself like I'd done the thing before and the world wanted to be consistent."
"Consistency is a guess," Maeron murmured. "You whispered a different guess. It agreed."
Kael rubbed his thumbs over the bridge of his nose. "Stop sounding reasonable about insanity," he said. "It makes me feel normal."
"Normal is a story too," Maeron said.
Jorn returned to the cart. "We've got two hours of light and a bad stretch ahead," he said. "We make a cold camp by the half-fallen mile-stone, upwind of the old quarry. Then push at dawn."
"Aerialis by tomorrow?" Serah asked.
"If the road behaves," Jorn said.
"The road never behaves," Kael said cheerfully, sliding off his rock.
They got moving. The Belt lay behind them like a dream badly told. Ahead, the land rose into the long spine of the Shatterfront, where Aerialis hung like a dare. Kael could feel it from here already in the way his teeth ached when he thought of edges.
Evening frowned down as they rattled past skeletal orchards and a field where scarecrows had had their faces painted with crowns and then scratched off. Travelers passed them sometimes—farmers, peddlers, a group of men with empty scabbards and the tired look of soldiers unemployed by peace. Some made signs warding off evil when they saw Serah's badge. Some made the same sign when they saw Kael's face.
He waggled his fingers at both kinds.
They made camp a little before full dark at the half-fallen mile-stone, which tilted like everything else on this side of the world. Jorn kept the fire small and mean; Serah let it be warm anyway with invisible interventions. Maeron brewed a tea that tasted like apologies.
Lysa did not sleep. She sat with her back to the cart, head lowered, eyes open to a distance no one else could see. When the wind shifted, Kael could hear rocks settle where there were no rocks, as if gravity were walking barefoot around their little camp, deciding whether it liked them.
Kael volunteered for first watch because he wasn't going to sleep either and because giving himself reasons to not sleep made it a choice rather than a failure. He sat on the tilted mile-stone and watched the stars sulk. The Veiled Sun had finally had the decency to leave. The night wore the Black Halo as a smudged ring low on the horizon, darker than dark, wrong against the sky.
He threw a pebble at it out of spite. The pebble complained about his aim.
"Terrible plan time," he told the night.
The night, rude, did not applaud.
Bootsteps scuffed behind him. Serah stepped up, cloak around shoulders, staff cradled like a promise she didn't want to make tonight.
"You should sleep," she said.
"So should you," he said.
"Rank," she said lightly. "I order you."
He did a tired flourish. "Commander."
She stood beside him in silence long enough that the quiet felt companionable rather than waiting. At last she said, "You did well on the bridge."
"I did what you told me," he said. "Very off-brand."
"You kept it gentle," she said. "That was on you."
"Felt like sitting on my own hands," he said. "I prefer juggling knives."
"Stop," she said, laughter hiding under the word. It warmed the rock he sat on. "If you truly don't know restraint, we can't train you. We'll cage you."
He looked at her. "You say that like it isn't already the plan."
"It isn't," she said, and let him hear the piece of her that hated cages more than chaos. "Aerialis will try. I will try harder."
He believed her, for a moment. It was a dangerous feeling. He filed it under things to give back later if they break.
"Serah," he said. "If I … If I listen to the world wrong and it answers—if I become—"
"The thing wearing your face," she said softly.
"Yeah," he said. "That."
Serah stared at the Black Halo. "Then we stop you," she said. "Or you stop yourself." A beat. "Or you do something stupid and holy that none of us would think of."
"Stupid and holy," he said. "My specialties."
"Get some sleep," she said, gentler than she allowed herself often. "Tomorrow you meet people who think they can write rules for heat and light and gravity. You'll want to be well-rested to annoy them."
He saluted with two fingers to his brow in a gesture that had belonged to a dead-eyed future and decided to steal it back. "Aye aye," he said, and let himself slide into the thin blanket and the thinner comfort of exhaustion.
He slept badly, which was unexpectedly an improvement over not at all. He dreamed of a street hiccupping its breath, of a barrel of pickled cabbage exploding in reverse, glass shards pulling themselves out of skin and becoming a lamp again. He dreamed of standing on a chain that held a city in the sky while below the world offered him every way to fall.
In the dream, a voice that was his said, We both know how this ends. In the dream, his voice said back, Yes. Loudly.
Dawn arrived wearing a bruise. They packed quickly. Jorn had them moving in a rhythm that felt like a drill he'd needed to live. The cart growled over ruts trying their patience. The land rose, stubborn and scarred. On the ridge to their right, structures began to appear: pylons of black stone studded with metal veins, humming faintly even from this distance.
Aerialis woke on the horizon: a geometry too confident to be natural, a cliff shouldering into the sky, chains like frozen waterfalls pinning an impossible city to an impossible edge.
Kael sat forward as if distance shortened when you wanted something.
"Home sweet hazard," Jorn said.
"Don't call it home," Serah said. "It hears."
Lysa said nothing. Her hands were tight on the cart's frame. Gravity around her crouched low like a dog with wary eyes.
Brother Maeron had stopped writing. He tucked his book away and crossed himself with a gesture that belonged to a god who had never existed but who enjoyed being remembered anyway.
Kael grinned at the sight of Aerialis, because it was either grin or prepare to meet it solemnly, and solemnity never did him favors.
"New city," he told his heart. "New stupid."
His heart, traitor, agreed.