Heat came soft at first, like a neighbor’s oven through a thin wall.
Then it came honest.
Flame nosed along the underside of the collage floor, tasting shadow-tape, teasing ash paste, probing ribbon, licking the red stitch with a tongue that believed itself inevitable. Smoke lifted its old cathedral of gray and tried to seat itself in the villagers’ lungs.
“Buckets,” Dominic said, already moving. He levered his blade out of the mosaic and flipped a tile that had remembered being a well. “Here. Names to water.”
Kael slid to his knees with a laugh that showed too many teeth. “Right, lovely—let’s bail a book.” He shadow-scooped; the darkness came up wet and real.
Sal spread his torn ERRATA like a basin. Words cupped liquid. “Speak into it,” he told the crowd, dizzy with sacrilege. “Say y
