25. Calla
CALLA
Ihave not left the tall window of my chambers since last night. And now, the first light of dawn filters through Galmoleth's endless storm.
The room is as immaculate as it was the day Rothgar first brought me here. Obsidian floors gleam beneath intermittent flashes of lightning, and silver-leafed branches shimmer softly in the corner.
My thoughts return, again and again, to the conversation we left unfinished.
Rothgar had believed everything I told him about the abandoned western spire. I never questioned that.
Not yet.
We need evidence.
If I move too soon, Malakor walks free.
The reasoning is impossible to fault. I understand the politics better now than I did when I first walked into his gardens with nothing but desperation to bargain with.
An accusation against a spire lord cannot rest on instinct or outrage.
It requires proof that can withstand scrutiny from demons who have spent centuries perfecting the art of dismantling one another.
Knowing that changes nothing for the people still trapped beneath that spire.
Remaining inside these chambers while they continue to suffer... How is that any different from surrender?
My gaze lands on the silver-leafed plant beside the hearth.
Rothgar left it before departing for the palace, an awkward kindness from a man who has never found comfort easy to express.
Its branches have been trained to grow into a perfect shape, beautiful only because someone decided exactly where they belonged.
At last, I push myself to my feet before hesitation can persuade me to stay.
My cloak still hangs where I left it. I fasten it around my shoulders, pull on the worn boots that still carry red dust from the human quarter, and slip quietly through the corridors without giving anyone the chance to ask where I’m going.
It takes little effort to slip through the abandoned service passage I’d discovered weeks ago. When I emerge into the lower streets, whoever has been assigned to watch over me is almost certainly searching the wrong corridors.
I do not allow myself to wonder how long it will take them to discover I’m gone.
I keep my head down as I weave through the familiar streets, resisting every instinct to linger. Each passing moment is borrowed.
I find Cora’s stall exactly where it’s always been.
Cora is bent over a basket of mended clothes when I reach her stall. The sight of her there—alive, unchanged, still carrying on with the ordinary work of her day—loosens something in my chest.
She glances up at the sound of my footsteps, and the worry on her face eases the moment she sees me.
“Calla.” She says my name with something very close to relief.
“I’m glad you’re still here,” I admit.
Her expression softens. “I wasn’t certain I’d see you again.”
“Neither was I.”
She studies the street behind me anyway before lowering her voice.
“Was everything all right at the spire?”
The question catches me off guard. How do I explain that everything is both better and worse than before?
“Lord Rothgar believes me,” I say at last.
“And?”
“And believing isn’t enough,” I admit defeatedly.
She doesn’t ask what happened between us. She has lived long enough to recognize the look of someone carrying disappointment alongside hope.
Instead, she reaches beneath the stall and produces two chipped mugs.
“The tea’s terrible,” she says, motioning for me to follow. “But you’ll drink it anyway.”
We sit on the narrow bench tucked beside her stall where passing customers can scarcely hear us over the hum of merchants and shoppers.
I untie the small cloth bundle I’d carried from the spire and lay the weaver’s shuttle across the bench between us.
Then I tell her everything.
I tell her about the hidden lightning-works beneath the abandoned western spire, the rows of imprisoned humans forced to move focusing crystals until their bodies gave out, and the weapon Lord Malakor has been building beneath the city’s feet.
I explain what Rothgar recognized the moment he saw the storm-moth thread still caught inside the shuttle’s groove—that only sanctioned lightning-works possess material like this, and that Old Man Theron’s discovery had placed him directly in Malakor’s path.
By the time I finish, Cora’s hands have curled tightly around the shuttle, the mended cloth forgotten in her lap. She stares at the thread as if seeing it differently now—as if it has become proof of everything she feared.
“They took him and so many others to work these conduits?”
I nod, unable to shake the memory of those exhausted faces bent beneath impossible labor.
“Rothgar believes we can expose him,” I say quietly. “He just needs evidence so strong, no one in the King’s court can dismiss it.”
She snorts softly. “They’ll have plenty of evidence by the time everyone’s gone.”
The conversation trails away beneath the noise of the market. Around us, merchants continue calling to passing customers as though nothing has changed, while Cora and I share the same fear that has lingered ever since Old Man Theron vanished.
Cora rubs absentmindedly at the handle of the mug before looking back at me.
“I walk half this district every week. Delivering mended clothes, bread, blankets when someone’s managed to scrape together enough coppers. People talk while I’m there. Sometimes they don’t even realize they’re telling me something important.”
I feel myself leaning forward.
“What sort of things?”
“Who hasn’t opened their shop. Which family suddenly needs extra bread. Which child keeps asking when their father is coming home.” She pauses. “People remember one another around here.”
“Then that’s where we begin,” I say, feeling the shape of an answer slowly emerge. “If Lord Rothgar needs proof, then we’ll help him build it.”
I look down at the shuttle resting between us.
“Let’s write down everything we know,” I say, turning the parchment toward us both. “Who disappeared. Where they lived. Where they worked. Who saw them last. Every person Malakor took had a life before they disappeared, if we can trace those lives, we may find the threads that lead back to him.”
As the ideas come, they gather momentum of their own.
Cora begins naming the families she knows, speaking slowly enough that I can keep pace with my writing. The Jensens. Theron. Mira’s husband. Two brothers who worked the grain lifts before disappearing within days of each other.
None of them stand out because of who they were. They stand out because this quarter notices when one of its own fails to come home.
If someone remembers the day they vanished, what they were carrying, whether anyone approached them beforehand—anything that felt ordinary at the time—we write it down.
We spend the next hours filling the parchment together, separating idle gossip from memories worth preserving. With every name we add, it becomes easier to imagine how Cora’s quiet conversations might strengthen the case Rothgar is trying to build.
The King’s court may demand evidence, but evidence begins with people whose stories are remembered clearly enough that no one can pretend they never existed.
“I’ll start today,” she continues. “Quietly. No one needs to know why I’m asking.”
Emotion catches unexpectedly in my throat.
One person’s memory might be doubted, and a single account may be challenged, but it is far harder to dismiss an entire community remembering the same disappearances, the same dates, and the same empty places left behind.
A quiet sense of purpose fills me as I fold the finished parchment.
The distance between Rothgar and me still aches like an unhealed bruise. I miss him with a force that surprises me, and I hate that our first real fracture came only after we finally learned how to stand beside one another.
But grief and love are poor reasons to stop moving.
I cradle the mug between my hands, listening to the market continue around us with its familiar rhythm. It is strange how ordinary the world can seem while so much suffering remains hidden beneath it.
The names waiting on the parchment between Cora and me are a quiet reminder of everyone still missing.
This is the work I can do. So this is where I begin.