Dawn came up brittle and gray, and the Black Lattice sang like a saw.
They stood in the last fold of the ridge with the valley poured out below—rows of ward-stones like rib bones, black iron lines strung between them, every thread humming the Council’s law. The air bent around it, refusing birdsong, refusing warmth. It felt like stepping to the rim of a throat.
“Once we touch it,” Mireya said, staff pressed to the ground, “it wakes all the way. No half measures.”
Dominic tightened the strap across his bitten forearm. “We don’t half anything.”
Kael’s shadow ran the lip of the hollow and came back thinner. “It will try to write us,” he said lightly, as if talking about weather. “Try not to make good parchment.”
Lena met each of them in turn. “Today we break it. We all pay some,” she add
