Chapter Two: The City That Watched the Sky
The city had learned to look upward long before it learned to look inward.
Every street curved subtly toward the Watchtowers, as if even stone and brick understood where power truly lived. From anywhere you stood, if you tilted your head just enough, you could see at least one of them—white spires rising impossibly high, their silver caps gleaming even on the cloudiest days.
The elders said the towers were built to honor heaven.
Everyone else knew the truth.
They were built to watch it.
I had grown up beneath their shadows, measuring my days by the way sunlight slid along their sides. As a child, I used to count them from my bedroom window, whispering their names the way other children whispered prayers. North Tower. Bell Tower. Witness Tower. The tallest of them all—the Ascendant—stood directly in line with the forbidden hill beyond the city walls.
My mother used to pull me away from the window when she caught me staring.
"Looking too long makes them curious," she would say.
I never asked who they were.
I already knew.
On the morning after my sixteenth birthday, the city woke as if nothing had happened.
The storm was gone. The sky was a dull, obedient blue. Merchants opened their stalls, children ran through the streets, and the bells—those same bells that had screamed through the night without hands to move them—hung silent and harmless in their towers.
People preferred it that way.
Normal was safety.
Normal was survival.
Only I noticed the cracks.
A stone carving near the eastern gate had split cleanly in two, its angelic face erased by the fracture. Feathers—real ones—lay scattered along the gutters, already being swept away by city workers who refused to meet my eyes. And when I passed beneath the shadow of the Ascendant Tower, I felt it again.
That sensation.
Like being measured.
By midday, rumors had begun to spread.
Some said the bells rang because a great sinner had died. Others claimed the sound meant heaven had turned its face away from the city—always the most terrifying possibility. A few whispered that an angel had come too close, had nearly crossed over.
Those whispers stopped abruptly when elders passed nearby.
I kept my head down, my hands buried deep in my coat pockets, my heart still racing with the memory of the hill and the storm and the certainty that had driven me there.
I had gone to the forbidden place.
And I had come back.
That alone should have terrified me.
Instead, it felt like the world was holding its breath.
The lower archives were colder than usual when I arrived. The stone walls sweated with damp, and the candle flames burned low and unsteady, bending as though responding to a breeze that didn't exist.
My father sat at his desk, hunched over a stack of parchment, his pen scratching methodically across the page. He didn't look up when I entered.
"You're late," he said.
"I was walking," I replied.
His pen paused.
"Where?"
"Nowhere important."
That earned me a glance—sharp, searching, and just a little afraid.
"Stay away from the towers today," he said quietly. "The elders are unsettled."
I almost laughed.
The archives were divided into levels, each descending deeper beneath the city. The upper floors held public records—births, deaths, property claims. The deeper you went, the older the texts became, until language itself began to change shape, letters curling into unfamiliar forms.
I worked where my father told me to work.
But my eyes kept drifting downward.
To the locked gate at the far end of the hall.
The one marked with a symbol I had learned to recognize long ago.
A circle, broken by a single vertical line.
Interdicted Knowledge.
I wasn't supposed to know what lay beyond that gate.
Most people didn't even acknowledge its existence.
But I had seen the inside once, years ago, when a careless archivist left the lock undone. I had glimpsed shelves of blackened scrolls, their edges burned, their bindings cracked as if something inside them had tried to escape.
Angel records.
Not the sanitized versions taught in temples.
The real ones.
Today, the lock was new. Stronger. Etched with silver runes that hummed faintly when I stood too close.
Heaven was paying attention.
"You," a voice said behind me.
I turned to see Elder Caelum standing at the end of the aisle.
He was tall and unnaturally thin, his white robes falling from his frame like draped bones. His eyes were pale—almost colorless—and when he looked at you, it felt like standing in open wind.
"Walk with me," he said.
It wasn't a request.
We moved through the archives in silence, our footsteps echoing softly. The deeper we went, the colder the air became. I could feel the pressure building in my chest, that same heavy awareness I'd felt beneath the towers.
"You climbed the hill last night," Caelum said at last.
My mouth went dry.
"I don't know what you mean."
He stopped walking.
"So young," he murmured, turning to face me. "And already so practiced at lying."
I said nothing.
"Do you know why children are forbidden from meeting angels?" he asked.
I swallowed. "Because we're unworthy."
Caelum smiled thinly.
"No," he said. "Because you are unfinished."
He stepped closer.
"An ending is simple. A beginning is dangerous."
He raised his hand, and for a moment I thought he might strike me.
Instead, he placed two fingers against my forehead.
The world tilted.
Images flooded my mind—blinding flashes of light, cities burning beneath wings of fire, humans kneeling in terror and awe as radiant beings descended. I felt fear so vast it stole my breath.
Then—emptiness.
A void where choice should have been.
I gasped, staggering back.
"That," Caelum said softly, "is a world without free will."
I stared at him, shaking.
"Angels are not guardians," he continued. "They are conclusions. When they arrive, a story is over."
My sister's voice echoed in my memory.
One of them promised to come back.
"You're afraid of us," I whispered.
Caelum's expression hardened.
"We are afraid of what you could become," he said. "And you have already drawn their gaze."
He leaned in, his voice dropping to a near whisper.
"If an angel speaks to you—if you hear its name—you will be erased."
I met his eyes.
"What if one already has?" I asked.
For the first time, Elder Caelum looked uncertain.
That night, as I lay awake in bed, the city quiet and obedient around me, I felt it again.
That presence.
Not above me.
Not watching from the sky.
But waiting.
Close.
Very close.
And I understood, with a clarity that frightened me more than any threat:
The city watched the sky because it feared heaven.
But heaven—
Heaven was watching me.