Roseth
Lantern light scatters across the lake like drifting constellations.
The shoreline teems with people. Music spills from fiddles and drums near the docks.
It should feel like home but instead, dread coils low in my stomach.
Khaivor walks beside me through the crowd, silent and tense. His gaze never rests. It sweeps across rooftops, bell towers, temple banners, the restless water. Every movement carries urgency.
"We need to tell them," I say.
"They will not believe me." He groans.
"They will believe me."
He studies my face for a heartbeat before nodding once. We push toward the largest cluster of townsfolk gathered near the docks.
Khaivor steps forward first.
"You need to leave the shoreline."
Several people glance his way. Most turn back to the music.
"Her bell has been stolen," he continues. His voice carries easily above the drums, steady and measured, the voice of someone long accustomed to being heard. "It will be used tonight. During the ceremony."
A man near a cider stall chuckles and nudges his neighbor. "Festival rumors already, from our dark elf guest?"
Laughter moves through the cluster. Easy, dismissive, the kind of laughter that has always known how to make a thing smaller than it is.
My chest tightens. I step up beside Khaivor.
"I made that bell."
The words spread outward. The laughter does not die all at once. It fades the way heat fades from metal, unevenly, reluctantly, until the silence that follows feels almost fragile.
"Roseth?" someone calls from the back. "The bellsmith?"
"The same." I do not raise my voice.
"I forged that bell six weeks ago during the festival preparations. I know exactly what it does. It amplifies resonance across enormous distances, further than any bell in Kaynvu. In the wrong hands, during a ceremony where thousands are gathered at the water's edge—"
"What happens?" The question comes from a young woman cradling an infant against her chest, her voice stripped of everything except fear.
"It can shatter minds. Crack stone. Drive people to their deaths." I hold her gaze. "Everyone here is in range."
The silence breaks into motion. Not panic yet. Something more controlled, more frightening — the collective moment before panic when people truly understand they have no good choices.
"Father Orrick has the bell," Khaivor says. "He intends to ring it during the closing ceremony."
That lands differently.
"Orrick?" A merchant shakes his head. "That is the high priest of the lake temple. He has served this town for thirty years."
"He has spent those years preparing for tonight," Khaivor replies.
"And you expect us to trust your word over his?"
I step between them. "You do not have to trust his word.
Trust mine. I built the bell. I know what the frequencies do when they compound across open water with this many people gathered in one place.
" My voice does not waver. "Move away from the lake.
Find shelter in the stone buildings up the hill. Move now, before the ceremony begins."
A low vibration trembles through the ground beneath my boots.
Then the hum deepens.
Ripples spread across the lake in perfect concentric rings, undisturbed by current or tide. The flames inside the floating paper lanterns flicker sideways, all of them at once, as though something beneath the surface exhaled.
Khaivor's hand closes around mine.
"He has begun."
The lake erupts and a violent wave tears across the docks. Lanterns shatter against pilings. The resonance hits like a fist — not sound so much as pressure, a compression that drives the air from lungs and the sense from thought. Screams rip through the music before the music dies entirely.
Wood splinters. Stone cracks along old seams like something long held tight finally releasing. Windows burst in cascading explosions down the market street, glass raining bright and sharp across the cobblestones.
Panic spreads faster than I can track.
"Move away from the water!" I shout into the surge. "Into the streets, up the hill — move!"
The crowd fractures. Vendors abandon their stalls. A display of ceremonial bells crashes from a wooden rack, their voices ringing wildly and discordantly as they scatter across the ground. Children cry out for parents already ten steps away and moving.
Another wave of resonance detonates across the shoreline. The dock closest to the temple splits clean down the center and drops half its length into the churning water. A storage shed collapses at the seam, folding inward as though the sound alone pressed it flat.
Khaivor releases my hand.
He steps forward into the open space the fleeing crowd leaves behind him, and the air changes.
A beam that should have crushed two children against an overturned cart swings wide and drops harmlessly into the empty space beside them.
Shattered glass from the chandler's window fans outward and then simply stops, mid-arc, and drifts to the cobblestones slowly enough that the woman running beneath it clears the radius entirely.
Gasps ripple through what remains of the crowd near the square. A man freezes mid-stride, staring. A woman grabs her husband's arm, expression unreadable — not gratitude yet, not entirely, but something beginning to crack open in the direction of it.
Others stare with expressions closer to horror.
His hands tremble. The tremor starts in his fingers and travels up through the lines of his shoulders, visible even beneath the layered fabric of his coat. His breath comes measured and deliberate, the forced steadiness of someone rationing what they have left.
He cannot hold this much longer.
"We need another solution," I say, more to myself than to him.
A scream cuts through the chaos. "Rose!"
Vi.
I panic toward the sound of her voice. The crowd near the market street surges like a breaking wave, bodies pressing in from every direction as the second resonance shockwave rolls across the square. People shove forward blindly, no direction, only away, only movement for its own sake.
Someone stumbles and then another and a figure disappears beneath the crush that makes my stomach drop.
"Vi!"I scream.
I shove into the crowd without thinking. Then I see them
Brohm crouches low in the dirt between an overturned stall and the chandler's wall, one arm wrapped across Vi's shoulders, his broad back curved over her like a vault.
He braces against every shove and stumble that comes at them from the surging crowd, absorbing the impacts with the patient solidity of a man who has spent decades hauling grain and barrels and heavy things.
I drop to my knees beside them. "Vi, are you hurt?"
She looks up. Her copper braid has come half-loose, her jacket is torn at the shoulder, and soot streaks her cheek from a lantern that shattered too close. Her green eyes are sharp, fully present.
"I'm okay," she says, breathing hard. "A boy went down in front of me. I stopped to pull him up and lost my footing."
Brohm exhales, the breath shudders. "I thought I had lost you in it."
Vi turns to look at him. Something in her expression changes, the defensive edge she has carried for months softening in a single unguarded moment.
"You came back for me," she says.
"I never stopped looking." His voice is rough. "Vi. I am done. Done wasting time with arguments that don't matter. Done pretending I don't need you more than the brewery, more than being right, more than any of it."
"Brohm—"
"I chose pride. For months. It was the stupidest decision I have ever made, and I have made some genuinely terrible decisions."
She laughs, a broken, startled sound. Tears cut clean lines through the soot on her face. "You chose that place over our future."
"I chose stubbornness and called it the brewery." He cups her face in one broad hand, thumb tracing her cheekbone. "I'm choosing differently now."
"You should have said this months ago," she says.
"I know."
"You are the most aggravating person I know." She cusses as she grabs the front of his coat and holds on. "Good. Because I never stopped either."
Another shockwave detonates through the square.
The chandler's sign tears free overhead and spins into the street. Brohm throws his body over Vi again. I flatten against the wall beside them, pressing my palms flat against the stone
"Now," I say sharply. "We move now."
We drag them upright and push through the thinning crowd toward the upper streets. Vi moves under her own power, limping slightly but steady.
I look back toward the square. Khaivor still stands at its center.
His coat is darkened with sweat. His arms have dropped to his sides, but the air still bends around him, faintly, less controlled than before, the barrier thinning at its edges.
Two children crouch near the overturned music platform behind him.
He does not look at them. He does not need to.
He is already positioned between them and the water.
His legs are shaking.The knowledge lands like cold metal in my chest.
He cannot counter the bell. He can only absorb it, delay it, spend himself against it until there is nothing left to spend. Whatever Orrick unleashed beneath the temple, it was built specifically to overwhelm exactly what Khaivor is and I had no idea how to stop it.