By the time the bells began to toll, the game was already over.
The Outer Wards of Virelion had no clocks anyone trusted, but everyone knew the sound of the third bell. The first was a warning. The second was habit. The third meant shutters slamming, doors locking, ward-lines flaring with dull light as people prepared for Shroudfall.
Inside the back room of a lean-to tavern, with mildew in the walls and smoke in the rafters, four men stared down at the overturned clay cup.
Cassian Rael watched their faces instead of the dice.
The table was sticky with spilled beer and old grease. A single lantern swung overhead, flame guttering whenever someone moved too fast. The air smelled of sweat, smoke, and the sour tang of cheap spirits. It was the kind of room where people lost their coin, their temper, and occasionally their teeth.
"You cheating gutter brat," the big one said, his cheeks flushed red beneath a patchy beard. His name was Harl, but everyone called him Ox. He had the body for it—shoulders like stacked barrels, fingers like sausages, eyes small and mean in a wide face.
Cassian kept his gaze on Ox's hands, not his eyes. The man's fingers twitched, wanting to grab something—Cassian, the cup, the knife at his belt. Cassian noted the tremor in the thumb, the callus along the index finger where it gripped too tightly. Heavy grip, slow draw, poor control.
"I didn't touch the cup," Cassian said. His voice was calm, unhurried. "You can ask Grint."
Grint, the narrow man with the ink-stained knuckles and nervous laugh, looked between them and decided to be a coward. "I was pouring. My hands were on the jug. Didn't see a thing."
Of course he hadn't. Cassian had made sure of that.
The trick wasn't in the dice. It was the table.
Under Ox's elbow, the wood had a soft spot where rot had eaten through. A shift in weight, a nudge at the right time, and the table dipped for a heartbeat. The dice—ordinary, unshaved—rolled with gravity, not magic. The cup never had to be touched at all.
"Boy's half your size," the third man muttered. Old Vare, with his bad leg twisted under the chair and his eyes filmed with cataracts. "If he cheated, that's on you for letting him."
"I put three day's wages in that pot!" Ox snarled.
Cassian watched the spit fly from his lips, saw the vein bulge in his neck. Anger, but not yet the kind that killed. Not over this much money, not in this room, not with witnesses.
Not unless someone pushed him.
Cassian didn't push. He picked his moments carefully.
"You'll win it back next week," Cassian said. He swept a portion of the coins off the table and into a rough cloth pouch. Not all of it, not even half. Enough to make them feel they'd lost, not enough to make them desperate. "I'm not hard to find."
"You're not leaving with all—"
"The bells," Vare said quietly.
The third bell was still ringing in the distance, reverberating through the warped timbers and cracked glass. It was a low, heavy sound, like a hammer striking bone.
Conversation outside shifted. The laughter in the tavern's main room dipped, became sharper and faster. Boots scuffed. Chairs scraped. In the alley, someone cursed and started closing shop shutters.
Ox's jaw worked. He stared at the coins disappearing into Cassian's pouch, then at the doorway where the noise of panicked preparation filtered in. He hesitated.
Cassian could almost see the calculation behind the man's eyes. I could take the brat now… but then I'd be out on the street after third bell, and if the Shroud seeps into this end of the Ward tonight…
"Next week," Ox growled finally. "I'll have my turn next week."
Cassian dipped his head. "I'll bring more coins."
He didn't say: If you're still alive.
He left the last handful of coppers and two worn silvers sitting in the center of the table. A consolation prize. Not enough to win back what they'd lost, but enough that the anger had somewhere to go besides his throat.
As Cassian stood, the lantern light cut across his face. The others saw a narrow, pale boy of seventeen, dark hair hacked short with a dull blade, eyes an unremarkable gray. His clothes were patched but clean, boots resoled twice, shirt mended along the seams. He moved like someone who knew where the weak floorboards were without looking.
He stepped out into the tavern proper and into the noise of closing time.
The main room was a low rectangle of rough tables and stronger smells. Regulars were stuffing themselves into cloaks and coats, grabbing bottles for the road, arguing over tabs with the owner. A Gutter Spark—wiry woman with copper wire braided through her hair and a band of scratched metal around her wrist—shouted at a drunk touching her satchel and snapped him away with a crackle of visible static.
"Third bell already?" someone groaned. "Thought we had more time—"
"Shroudfall's been creeping earlier all month," another replied. "Means the Cycle's turning, don't it? Priests say it's a sign."
"Priests say everything's a sign."
Cassian slipped through them like water, avoiding grasping hands and stumbling bodies without seeming to try. The coins in his pouch clinked softly. A few eyes followed the sound, but nobody stopped him. Too busy. Too afraid of being on the street when the Shroud thickened.
He paused at the tavern's door. The iron-banded wood was scarred from old impacts, and someone had carved a crude sunburst symbol into it—The Final Dawn's mark—before smearing it with some kind of resin that glowed faintly when the Shroudfall came.
"Boy," the owner called from behind the bar. Thick-armed woman, sleeves rolled up, scar along her jaw. "You walking home alone?"
"Be faster that way," Cassian said.
"You got a place to be?" Her eyes flicked to his pouch with a knowing look. "Shroud likes folk carrying too much shine."
He shrugged. "I'll be inside before it thickens. Don't worry, Ma."
She snorted. It wasn't a title, just a name the Ward had given her, but she played the role anyway. "I never worry. It doesn't help. Get going."
He stepped out into the street.
The light had gone strange already. Virelion's Outer Wards were a maze of lean-tos, stacked brick tenements, and jumbled shacks built from whatever people could salvage. Smoke crawled through the alleys from cookfires and chimneys, clinging low. Clotheslines hung between upper windows like crude banners. Rats scuttled in the gutters.
Above it all, the sky was a flat, bruised purple, the sun no more than a sullen smear behind thickening cloud. As the third bell tolled, faint lines—sigils carved into doorframes, thresholds, and rooftop charms—began to glow. Some shone steady white. Others flickered, underpowered. A few guttered and went out entirely.
Those houses would have bad nights.
Cassian tightened his grip on his pouch and moved.
He knew this Ward like he knew the lines on his palm. An alley here led to a dead end when the Shroud thickened, because the fog pooled in the low spots. That courtyard there had a broken ward-plate, and people had vanished there last winter. The stairs along that wall creaked on the third step—sound enough to draw something's attention if it drifted too close.
He walked the route he'd calculated a dozen times before, picking paths that kept him in sight of solid ward-lines and heavy doors. His feet kept the rhythm while his mind tallied his winnings.
Nine silvers, twenty-one coppers. Enough to pay Ma for his bed and food for another week. Enough to buy a new knife, maybe. Enough to have made Ox angry, but not desperate.
If I pushed for more, he might've waited for me outside, Cassian thought. And then I'd have had to break his hand. That would make trouble. This way, he'll sit in the tavern and complain until the next bell, then go home and forget the sting in the dull ache of life.
He walked past a narrow side alley and stopped.
The air felt… wrong.
Not wrong in the usual way of the Outer Wards, which was a constant stew of smoke and rot and too many people. This wrongness was quieter. A thinning. The hair on his forearms rose. The ward-line scribbled above the alley—a jagged sun symbol scratched into stone and filled with chalk—flickered.
He turned his head slightly and looked down the gap between buildings.
Under the dim sky, the alley should have been only dark and full of refuse. Instead, halfway down, the shadows seemed to thicken, folding over each other like wet cloth. A smear of movement moved the wrong way across the wall, sluggish and sideways. For a heartbeat, the bricks looked softer than they should be, like charred bread when you pressed it.
Someone at the mouth of the alley was staring too.
A girl of maybe ten, clutching a threadbare shawl around herself. Her eyes were too big in her narrow face. She'd stopped in the middle of the street, looking toward the thickening shadow, mouth parted.
"Keep walking," Cassian said, without raising his voice.
She flinched and looked at him, like she hadn't realized anyone else was there.
"What?" she whispered.
He jerked his chin down the street. "Home. Inside. Doors. Now."
"But—"
The shadow in the alley twitched. A faint whisper drifted out—barely sound, more the idea of sound. Something like a sob, stretched and reversed.
A hairline crack split the ward-sigil's glow.
Cassian stepped between the girl and the alley, putting himself in the line of whatever might decide to emerge. His hand moved without conscious thought, finding the small knife under his coat—not much against anything real, but people were more likely than monsters right at the fringe. Usually.
"Go," he said, still calm. "The Shroud's early tonight."
She stared at him for a second more. Then fear, the real and practical kind, finally pushed through whatever curiosity or dread held her in place. She ran, bare feet slapping the stones, darting past him toward a row of squat houses with glowing ward-frames.
Cassian lingered one breath longer, watching the alley.
The thickened shadow swelled, then receded, like a lung exhaling. The ward-sigil flared, bright and desperate, then went steady again. The smear on the bricks straightened into ordinary, cracked mortar. The wrongness faded to the usual, manageable level.
He released the knife slowly.
Early seep, he thought. The priests will call that a sign, too. They always do.
He turned away and kept walking.
His home, such as it was, waited above a cooper's workshop three streets over. The stairs up were narrow and steep, with one broken riser he never stepped on. At the top, a door patched with three different kinds of wood and edged with a thin strip of dull metal opened into a low-ceilinged room.
A simple ward-circle was carved into the threshold: no priest blessing, but the chalk was fresh and the lines were sharp. Someone cared enough to keep it maintained.
Inside, there were four beds—if thin mattresses on pallets counted as beds—a small table, and a battered chest with a warped lid. Two of the beds were empty. One held a boy of twelve with a missing left ear, snoring softly. The last was occupied by a woman in her forties sitting cross-legged, mending something by the light of a smoky oil lamp.
"Cass," Mara said, without looking up. Her fingers worked the needle with easy precision. "You're late."
"Had a game," he replied, closing the door carefully behind him. He slid the bolt across. "Bells came quicker than I expected."
"The bells always come quicker than you expect." She bit off a thread with her teeth and knotted it. Her hair, once dark, was more gray than black now, pulled back in a rough braid. She wore three charms on a leather thong around her neck, each from a different faith. "How much?"
He loosened the pouch and poured coins onto the table.
Her eyes tracked them, quick and sharp despite the lines around them. "There's a church tithe collector going around tomorrow," she said. "They'll want a bite."
"They can choke on the Ward's mistakes," Cassian said.
She snorted. "I'll have your share hidden, don't worry. Bed."
"I'm not a child."
"You're a boy who walks cards with men who could snap you in half," Mara said. "Being clever isn't the same as being invincible. Sleep before the Shroud thickens. If it's bad tonight, it might press on the wards. Heard it's been doing that in the South Wards."
Cassian set three silvers aside and nudged them toward her. "For the bed. And the food. And for the boy's replacement ear when you find a way."
Her mouth twitched. "I told Jonn years ago he needed his ears and his sense. He didn't listen with either." She swept the coins into her apron. "You eat?"
"Bread at the tavern." Stale heels soaked in weak broth, but it had been enough.
"Then get off your feet." She picked up another scrap of cloth. "If you feel the wards twitch, wake me."
"I felt something on the way," Cassian said.
She paused. "Real?"
"Half." He described the alley, the thickening shadow, the way the sigil cracked and then steadied. Her face tightened as she listened.
"Mm. A taste, then. The Shroud's sniffing. All the more reason to lie down and not go wandering after ghosts." Her eyes softened, just a fraction. "Close your eyes, Cass. You can count your coins again in the morning."
He didn't argue. There was no point. He stripped off his outer coat and boots, set the knife under his thin mattress where he could grab it in the dark, and lay down.
The ceiling was low enough that, lying on his back, he could see the splintered beams clearly. Someone had carved shapes into one of them—a child, by the clumsy lines. Circles, stick figures, a sun with too many rays.
He listened to Jonn's snoring, Mara's soft humming thread through the room, the muffled noise of the street below as last-minute preparations crested. Doors slamming. Bolts sliding. A baby crying. Someone shouting for a lost dog.
The third bell's echo faded. For a moment, there was a strange silence, as if the whole Ward held its breath.
Then, very faintly, he heard it: a rustle, like distant leaves, but there were no trees. A low murmur, like voices speaking under water. The Shroud, brushing against the world.
Cassian's eyes drifted shut.
He dreamed of fire.
Not the contained, domestic fire of hearths and lamps, but a wall of flame stretching from horizon to horizon, devouring cities made of unfamiliar stone and metal. People ran, their faces dissolving as he tried to look at them. Above it all, a sky split into spiraling rings of light and dark, turning, turning, turning—
He stood in the center of a vast circle made of ash, something heavy in his right hand. The world shuddered, fractured, then began to rewind. The ash flew upward, reshaping into buildings, people, trees. Time ran backwards, screaming.
Something enormous watched from behind his eyes, peering out through him at the burning world.
Again, it said, in a voice like grinding gears and falling stone. Again. Again.
Cassian reached out toward the center of the circle, toward a pulsing, mechanical heart embedded in the ground. Sigils he didn't recognize—yet knew intimately—spun around it, forming and unforming.
He touched it.
The world shattered.
He woke with his heart beating too fast, breath coming short.
The room was dark. The oil lamp had burned low. Mara slept on her pallet, one hand resting near a small wooden charm. Jonn snored on, sprawled halfway off his mattress, blanket tangled around his legs.
Cassian stared up at the carved beam until his breathing slowed.
The images slipped away as he tried to hold them, like smoke through fingers. Only impressions remained: heat, turning rings, a grinding, patient voice.
Again.
He rolled onto his side. The ward-line at the door glowed a faint, steady white. Outside, the sounds of the Shroud were a little stronger now—whispers at the edge of hearing, rustles that might have been cloth or claws.
He closed his eyes again. This time, he fell into a sleep without dreams.
....
Morning came with the thin gray light of Virelion's smog-filtered dawn and the clatter of barrels in the street below. The air smelled of woodsmoke, spilled beer, and the faint metallic tang that lingered after a bad Shroudfall.
Cassian sat up, checked the knife under the mattress, then swung his legs over the side of the bed. Mara was already up, hair tucked back, ladling thin porridge into bowls from a dented pot.
"Good," she said. "You're awake. Eat."
He slipped on his boots and coat and obeyed. The porridge was mostly water and oats, but there were a few precious slivers of dried fruit. Jonn surfaced from his nest, blinking blearily, and made greedy noises as he grabbed his bowl.
"How bad?" Cassian asked between bites.
"Not as bad as it sounded," Mara said. "Two houses lost their wards near the river. Three missing, maybe four. A patrol priest came by at dawn; says the Draft's been moved up."
Cassian's spoon paused halfway to his mouth. "Draft?"
She glanced at him. "…You didn't hear that part last week, did you?"
He'd heard rumors, of course. The Church of the Final Dawn had been running Nightmare Drafts for years—dragging a portion of each district into the Shroud to "serve and be uplifted." But the Outer Wards didn't always get pulled in every Cycle. There were quotas, politics, other Wards closer to the city's center to bleed first.
Mara set her bowl down, lips pressed thin.
"They posted the new quotas two days ago. I hoped they'd skip our slice, but…" She jerked her chin toward the door. "Go look."
He finished the last of the porridge, wiped the bowl with a scrap of bread, and set it aside. The knife went back into his belt. Habit made him check his coin pouch again, as if the money might have vanished in the night.
On the street, the Ward felt… anticipatory.
People clustered in small groups, talking in low voices. Someone had tacked a fresh poster to the side of the cooper's shop. It bore the stylized sunburst of the Final Dawn, lines neat and black, ink not yet smudged by weather.
Cassian shouldered closer.
"—they can't take her, she's only—"
"—Draft don't care how old, long as they can walk—"
"—better than starving in the gutters, maybe—"
The poster listed block numbers and names in neat, impersonal script.
His eyes tracked down the page. Block 7-A. 7-B. 7-C. Names.
Rael, Cassian.
His finger found it before his mind fully accepted it. The letters were clear. No smudge. No mistake.
For a moment, there was no sound at all. The Ward's noise faded to a dull hum, like he was underwater. The memory of the dream rose unbidden—flame, ash, turning rings, the grinding voice.
Again.
He waited for fear.
It didn't come.
What arrived instead was a quiet series of calculations.
The Draft meant a Nightmare Zone. Nightmare meant Shards. Shards meant Paths. Survival meant power—real power, not the kind scraped together from small cons and careful thievery. It also meant death, in large, tactless quantities, dealt mostly to people who did not think ahead.
"What are you staring at?"
The voice was female, close by. Cassian looked up.
She stood half a pace from him, also reading the list. A girl his age—maybe a little younger, maybe a little older, it was hard to tell under the grime and tangled hair. Her eyes were an odd shade between brown and green, and they were far too bright for this street. Her clothes were patched but well chosen; the coat had been cut down from something better.
Her finger rested three lines above his.
Senn, Lyra.
He glanced at her hand, then at her face. She caught the direction of his gaze and snorted.
"Yeah," she said. "Lucky me."
Around them, a patrol of Church wardens in pale tabards moved into the street, ringing small hand-bells and calling for those on the list to assemble. Their tabards bore the Final Dawn's sunburst, embroidered in gold thread that caught the weak light. A Radiant Warden trainee walked with them, armored in polished leather and steel, the air around him faintly brighter than the rest.
"Draft candidates for Outer Ward Seven," one of the wardens shouted. "Present yourselves at St. Hollow's before second bell! Failure to appear is dereliction of sacred duty!"
Lyra rolled her eyes. "Sacred duty," she whispered. "Is that what we call being shoved into nightmares until we break?"
Cassian studied the wardens. Their posture. Their formation. The way the Radiant trainee's hand rested on the hilt of his sword—not tense, not loose, just ready. His armor was new, but his eyes were not naive.
Running wasn't an option. Not now. Not for him. Not from them.
Not yet.
He stepped back from the poster.
"You going to cry?" Lyra asked, tilting her head. There was no malice in it. More… curiosity. "Or run? The alley behind Marlo's is a good one if you want to try. The wardens always check it first."
"Then it's a bad one," Cassian said. He met her gaze. "Are you running?"
She hesitated, then shook her head. "Nah. Might be it's better inside than out when the Shroud gets worse. At least in the Draft they give you a weapon."
"That's optimistic."
"That's what I do," she said. "Someone has to, or people start jumping off roofs." She stuck out her hand as if they were about to make a trade, her grin lopsided. "Lyra. We can walk to our doom together, if you like. It's always nice to have company when the world's burning down."
Images from his dream brushed his mind again: a burning horizon, a grinding voice. He ignored them and took her hand.
"Cassian," he said. "And the world's not burning. Not yet."
Her fingers were calloused but warm. She gave his hand one firm shake, then let go.
"Come on, Cassian-not-yet," she said. "Wouldn't want to be late for our sacred duty."
They joined the trickle of names from the list making their way toward St. Hollow's, the small, soot-stained church that served their part of the Ward. Behind them, Mara watched from the workshop doorway, arms folded tight across her chest, jaw clenched.
Cassian didn't look back. He'd already taken that picture and stored it—Mara in the doorway, gray braid, hard eyes, ward-line glowing faint around her. If he made it back, it would be one more data point. If he didn't, it would erode like any other thing left in the Shroud.
The church loomed at the end of the street, a blocky structure of gray stone set a little apart from the crooked tenements. Its sunburst sigil was carved huge above the door, inlaid with cheap gold leaf that had flaked in places. The double doors stood open, light spilling out, the smell of incense heavier than the smoke.
Wardens checked names at the entrance, matching faces to the list. A Glass Quill scribe sat at a small table just inside, ink-stained fingers flying as he annotated a ledger with cramped, precise writing. His eyes flicked up at each candidate, as if memorizing them, then dropped back to his pages.
When Cassian stepped forward and spoke his name, the scribe's quill paused for a fraction of a heartbeat. His gaze sharpened, focusing on Cassian's face like a scalpel point.
Cassian held his stare without blinking.
The scribe's lips pressed together. He wrote a small additional symbol beside Cassian's name, then waved him through.
Lyra elbowed him lightly as they moved into the nave, past rows of plain wooden pews and faded banners.
"What was that about?" she muttered.
"Nothing," Cassian said.
The heavy doors swung shut behind them with a dull thud that swallowed the noise of the street.
Inside, the air was cooler. The stone walls deadened sound, trapping it. Murals of the Final Dawn's myths flaked along the walls—depictions of a rising sun burning away monsters, of shining figures walking through darkness unscathed.
At the far end, near the altar, a cluster of priests in gray and gold conferred around a shallow, sigil-carved basin. The air above it shimmered faintly, like heat. Shards, Cassian realized. There were Shards in the stone, powering whatever ritual would ferry them into the Nightmare.
His heart beat a little faster, not from fear, but from a sharp, focused anticipation.
Nightmares killed people.
They also gave power to those who walked out.
Lyra sighed quietly beside him, following his gaze.
"Well," she said. "I suppose that answers the question of what we're doing today."
Cassian nodded once.
The Cycle had turned. The bells had rung.
It was his turn to step into the dark.