Chapter 17 Until It Burns Again
Until It Burns Again
ATLAS
The storm broke around me, my reach splintering before it could reach her. Her name burned in my throat, trapped there, unfinished. But the wards caught it, sealing the sound away and leaving only the hollow weight of silence behind.
I pressed my palm to the stone wall beside me until grit dug into my skin.
The hall smelled of rain and damp cedar, the air heavy with polish and old smoke.
They had kept it alive in my absence, sweeping stone, mending cracks, patching roof tiles.
Quiet work, hidden work. The kind that meant loyalty outlasted fear.
The court wasn’t whole, but it wasn’t gone.
“You look like someone kicked you out of your own storm.”
The voice came from the shadows. A figure unfolded from where he’d been perched on the arm of a cracked throne, grinning as though the world weren’t falling apart around us. Joren, the last of my brothers in arms and the first to mock me when I deserve it.
“You didn’t see her,” I said.
“I saw you,” he shot back, “and it wasn’t your most graceful performance. All that lightning and then… what? A strangled syllable?” He badly mimicked a choke. “Very inspiring.”
I should have ignored him, but the corner of my mouth betrayed me with the ghost of a smile. Joren had always known how to needle through my armor.
“She heard me,” I said. “That was enough.”
“Enough?” Joren laughed. “Atlas, if I whispered half a word to a girl and she bolted off thinking I was a thunderclap, I’d call that a failure not a victory.”
I let his laughter fall away. The hall answered with its own kind of sound, distant hammering from the eastern gallery, a low scrape of scaffolding shifting, the soft call of someone carrying ember pans across stone.
Not ruin. Work. The kind that only happens when people believe the thing they’re mending will be needed again.
“They risk themselves to keep this place breathing,” I said.
“They risk themselves because you’re back,” Joren replied, circling a pillar and tapping a chipped capital with two knuckles. “Don’t get sentimental on me, it makes you slow.”
“It makes me careful,” I tipped my head to the north transept. “Report?”
“Two ward-anchors identified inside Verdants line. One under the old aqueduct arch, one hidden in the bell foundry.” He shrugged. “They’re getting creative. I’d be impressed if they weren’t busy choking, you with your own weather.”
“Tonight.”
Joren groaned. “Of course, tonight. I forgot we rest when we’re dead.”
“You first,” I said, and he barked out a laugh.
“They can wall me out,” I said. “They can tangle my reach. But they can’t hold her forever. Not if this hall stands.”
“That’s generous of you,” Joren muttered. “Giving all the credit to the hall. Personally, I think it’s me keeping you sane.”
He wasn’t wrong. Without him—without the quiet hands that had held the pieces together—the court would have died and passed quietly into memory. Instead it endured, breathing shallow but stubborn beneath the weight of time.
His eyes flicked to the vaulted ceiling where faint runes still clung to the stone, dull as ash. “Those need to burn again. Without them, you’ll keep breaking yourself against their wards.”
I followed his gaze. The old sigils sprawled across the arches like veins gone dry. Once, they thrummed with stormlight, a net that bound every word and vow spoken here.
“They’ll burn,” I said.
Joren’s grin returned, sharp as a blade. “Good. Because I’d rather not die in a hall that whispers instead of roars.”
We took the lower paths down from the cliff as dusk bled into the streets, Verdant loved the play of respectability – the copper lanterns, the ivy scripted laws painted on plaster, the neat patrol routes you could set a clock by.
Joren tugged a rough spun cloak around his shoulders and adjusted the scar-smudge at his jaw.
“You look like a man who sells carrots and poor decisions,” I said.
“Perfect disguise,” he said “People confess to carrot sellers. It’s a known fact.”
The night market under the aqueduct ran as it always had, barrels of salted fish, wooden stands stacked with lamp oil, a man hawking cheap tin charms stamped with fake warding that would peel off in the rain. We drifted through the press and let the noise make us ordinary.
Our contact was a woman who kept her stall too tidy for a place like this. Bowls nestled in bowls; a row of clay teapots aligned like soldiers. Her scarf was dyed valley-blue, and her hands never shook when she poured.
Joren approached first, laid two coppers on the counter and said, “We’re looking for a quieter kind of heat.”
“Stoves in the back,” she replied, eyes not moving from the cups.
“The kind that burns on paper,” he added. “The kind that draws lines no one should cross.”
That caught her attention. She glanced up from her work.
“You bring the paper?”
I slid a folded scrap out of my sleeve, not a map, not a letter, an old recipe for toffee, written in a hand she would recognize.
The name in the corner wasn’t mine. It belonged to a boy she once promised a home and lost to Verdant’s press.
Her mouth tightened into a thin line. She tucked the recipe into her apron and gave us two teacups.
“Walk,” she said.
We strolled like men with nowhere to be while she described the guard’s new rotations in a voice meant for sugar prices.
“Mandate shifted,” she said, ladling tea into air that smelled like fennel and ash. “Ward-keepers double at the second bell. They’ve seeded anchor-iron under the third arch of the aqueduct. You’ll know it because it doesn’t breathe.”
“Doesn’t… breathe?” Joren asked.
“Wind goes around it,” she said. “You’ll feel it when you’re close. Your kind always do.”
We left coins that were too heavy for tea and moved on, melting with the crowd until the aqueduct’s black ribs cut the sky.
“You always had a way with hearts, Atlas,” Joren said lightly.
“And you always have to talk when silence would do,” I said.
“It’s a service I provide.”
The third arch drank the wind. Even the babble of the market thinned as we stepped beneath it. Anchor-iron sat under the flagstones where the mortar lines darkened, and their air pressed in close, sour as old coins.
Joren crouched, slid a pry iron from his boot, and levered up the first stone.
“You get to do the glamorous work,” he said. “I’ll sweat.”
“Trade,” I said and pressed my palm over the gap.
Storm light wanted to gather, instinct as old as my first breath. But the anchor twisted it, fed it back on itself. If I muscled through, I’d burn out – again – and buy us nothing but a brighter failure.
So, I worked smaller, a slower thread, teasing the charge into the iron like water into a dry rope. The metal whined and Joren winced.
“You know that sound punches the spine, right?”
“That’s the point,” I said. “Hands.”
He held the pry firm while I bled the charge into the ground. The iron sighed as the last thread of binding unwound, fine as a filament.
Joren lifted the anchor free with a grunt. “Ugly little thing. Like a nail for a giant coffin.”
“Pocket it,” I said.
“For my collection,” he said, tossing it into a sack. “Are we melting these later, or are you going to make me a necklace?”
We set the stones back in place. The wind moved again, soft through the arch. Sound returned in layers, the markets pitch, a baby’s wail, a carts loose wheel.
“One,” Joren said. “Foundry next.”
The bell foundry didn’t sleep. It brooded. The heat punched from its mouth in a steady pulse, and the hammers inside struck a tempo that made my teeth ache.
“Anchor?” I asked.
“Pit’s rim,” Joren murmured. “They hid it in plain …”
Footsteps. Not the shambling workers rhythm. These were measured. Leather and metal and the sound of a man who never needed to run to catch what he was hunting.
Joren slipped behind a stack of sand molds. I flattened along the wall and let the furnace’s heat blur my outline. A figure passed under the lantern, long coat, hook blade at his hip, and the faint shimmering of ward dust clinging to his throat like a second skin.
Eryndor’s order. Not him, but one of his. The hunter paused where the slag cooled. If he turned his head, he would see me. If he stepped left, he would see Joren. I counted my breaths, made them match the bellows. The furnace exhaled and so did I.
“Report,” the hunter said, voice low, and another figure emerged from the furnace light, thin, soot smeared, eyes darting. A watcher. A neighbor who sold his fear for a stipend and told himself it was duty.
“No movement,” the watcher said. “Ward hum’s steady. If they come, we’ll hear it.”
“See that you do,” the hunter said, and moved on, boots ringing on iron.
We didn’t move until the step echoes bled away.
Joren let out a breath like a curse. “I liked that not at all.”
“Next time,” I said, “you take his coat. I’ll take the blade.”
“Next time,” he said, “you try to not look like a sin walking.”
I smirked. “Anchor?”
We found it hammered into the pit’s rim, disguised as a support spike. This one resisted longer, the foundry’s pulse fed it, and the ward rode the heat like a river.
My first attempt flared and snapped. Pain speared up my arm, bright and pointless. Joren’s hand was suddenly on my shoulder, anchoring. Not stopping me. Just reminding me he was here.
I went smaller again. Threaded charge into the spike on the offbeat of the hammers so the ward couldn’t ride the surge. The iron shivered, then softened, then released with a breath like a man finally admitting a lie.
“Two,” Joren whispered. “We keep our lungs tonight.”
We were almost clear when a shadow peeled from the far wall. “You there!” A guard, not the hunter- young, anxious, wearing fear like a poorly tailored shirt. His spear waivered. “State your business.”
Joren stepped forward, all easy grin. “Delivery for Master Hefflin, charcoal for the morning pour.”
“At night?” The boy said.
“Charcoal doesn’t care what time it is.” Joren spread his hands. “You want the slate? It’s in my other coat, back at the kiln.”
The spear tip dipped. “You can’t be here.”
“You’re right,” Joren said warmly. “We’ll go.”
The boy hesitated and glanced toward the interior door but then nodded once. He didn’t want trouble, he wanted orders. We gave him the wrong ones with enough confidence that he mistook them for the right kind.
“Good evening,” Joren told him. “You’re doing fine.”
Once we stepped outside and could finally breathe again, he said, “You see? Handsome.”
“Reckless,” I replied, a grin tugging at the corner of my mouth.
He gave a loose shrug. “Differing schools of thought.”
We cut back through the lower ward, then up the service stairs to the cliff path. By the time we reached the hall, sweat had cooled to salt and the wind off the ridge smelled like iron and rosemary.
The night crew waited in the side chamber, four of ours and two who weren’t. Not yet. But they had the look of men hoping to change that.
A map was sprawled across the table with small stones marking the wards we’d already cracked. A girl with a milk tooth still loose asked, “Is it true the runes will sing again?”
“Yes,” Joren said, at the same time I did. “If we do our work.”
“They’ll sing,” Joren repeated, softer, catching my glance. “When we’re ready.”
We fed them, counted tools, and set the street routes for watchers who would be ours instead of Vedant’s by the week’s end. Joren kept the jokes coming, enough to cut the fear without making light of the risk.
When the room emptied, I stood by the open arch and watched the ridge lightning in the distance. Joren leaned there beside me like he had nowhere else to be.
“You can’t keep burning yourself to a cinder on her name,” he said finally. No humor in it now. “If you snap the tether, we lose the court and you. I am not doing this alone.”
“I won’t snap it,” I said.
“You always say that right before you go and try to set yourself on fire.”
“It worked enough to reach her,” I said, and that was the truth I wouldn’t put down.
He raked his hair back, “You’re impossible.”
“So, they tell me.”
He bumped my shoulder with his. “Try sleeping at least, pretend your mortal for an hour.”
I didn’t sleep. I walked the upper gallery, where the floor still held the ghost of a mosaic-storm, birds in blue stone, a broken ring of white like a moon shattered and re-laid.
I had stood here as a boy and felt the hum of the runes ring in my bones.
Later, as a man, I had sworn vows under them.
I could not remember those words now without remembering the shackles that followed; memory is never kind enough to separate the sweetness from the cost.
People think storms are excess. They aren’t. They’re balance overdue. All the heat the earth keeps too long rises, and the sky takes it back, and if it hurts, that’s because it works.
I set my palm to the arch where an old sigil curled, dull and ashy. “Wake,” I said softly. “Not for me. For them.”
Nothing. It would not answer a lone hand in the dark. The whole net had to be whole again—corners and keystones, chimes and the singer’s circle, every piece set in place.
It needed a court.
We would have one. The hall would be more than standing, it would be alive enough that when I reached for her again, I wouldn’t be answering alone.
A few hours later Joren and I returned to the nave when the sky paled with a light that never quite claimed to be dawn. Joren was already cataloguing the anchors we’d lifted counting the ways we might melt them down, unmake them into nails for our own doors.
The dead lines stared down from the arches, hollow and cold. “You will burn,” I promised them. “And so will every wall between her and me.”
Somewhere beyond the ridge, thunder rolled, too far to be an omen, close enough to feel like an answer.
Joren didn’t look up. “Good,” he said. “I’d like a fire to warm my hands.”
“You’ll get more than that,” I said.
“I’m counting on it.”