With a choked gasp, Lilian lunged from her seat, reaching through the open window as if she could snatch the bird back. The clay bird responded not with the flutter of a living creature, but with a jerky leap. Its tiny wings beat against the air with a scraping sound, like pebbles grinding together. It launched itself into the violet darkness, its flight heavy and unnatural, before disappearing over the rooftops.
"What was that?" Bastet whispered, coming to stand behind her.
"It was mine," she said, her voice hollow. "Bastet, that bird… I made it. In the workshop today." She turned to face him. "The sculpture came to life."
She stared at him, then her gaze drifted past him, toward the thousands of inert, broken statues littering the city outside. "We knew Thomas and the others were stone. But I thought… I thought they crossed over during the purple sun. That it was a one-time thing." She shook her head, a new understanding dawning in her eyes. "But the bird was clay just a few hours ago. This city… It brings statues to life. Actively."
Bastet's gaze lingered outside the window, to the sculpture of a fractured lover whispering to a headless neck. "So, Thomas, Gaius and the others… they were statues. The ones that weren't too damaged to wake up." He barred the shutters, plunging the room into the dim, flickering light of their single candle.
"Yes," Lilian whispered, wrapping her arms around herself. She began to pace the small room. "But that's not all. Today, in the workshop, I was mending a statue of a minotaur. The Sculptor told me it was a 'shipment from the coast.' That the artistry was done elsewhere, long before the piece reached his workshop."
"I was in the quarry, hauling massive blocks of marble onto Wesian carts. The same carts we saw leaving the city. So they're shipping the marble out. It gets worked on, and is then brought back in as finished statues…"
"As statues of monsters. And the city brings them to life…" The realization hung in the air between them, sharp and terrible. Lilian stopped pacing, her eyes locking onto his. "They are using this place. They're… building a legion of stone." She bit her nails, her face contorting as she shook her head. "But… that's not possible. An army of stone? A force like that would be legendary. It would be in every history book, every chronicle. But there's nothing. Not a single word of this."
Bastet walked to the fireplace and stared into the embers, but his eyes were seeing the tireless, rhythmic work of the stone figures in the quarry. "You're right. If this place was a weapon factory, Wesia would have armies of these things. They wouldn't leave this to a handful of cripples. They'd move in with their terrible efficiency, and bleed this place dry. So, why don't they?"
"I don't know," Lilian said, running a hand through her hair in frustration. "But there has to be a limitation. A reason this isn't a mass-scale operation. Something to explain why these things aren't crawling around everywhere."
"Maybe it's because they can't leave the city?" Bastet looked through the gaps of the barred window. "The magic only works while they're here?"
"An army that can't march to war? Then what is it for? Why build it at all?" She bit her lip. "And if the minotaurs are confined to the city, how come we haven't seen any of them? If they're here, where are they?"
Bastet swallowed hard. The pieces refused to fit together. If the army could not leave the city, why build it? And if it could leave, why wasn't it everywhere? He had no answer. But he knew this was getting dangerous, far more dangerous than he initially thought. Folly's Edge hummed on his hip, as if enjoying itself while he gritted his teeth, his fingers clenched around the wooden fox.
The picture was almost complete, and there were no signs of any kind of connection to Maria. He had been dumb to listen. Why would the Baron ever choose to give him real clues to finding her? Was it not far more likely that a master of insanity would give him a mad hope, one that would lead him to his own demise? And that was all a place like this could do. "I don't know," he finally said. "But right now, our goal is to rest, find a map, and leave before those carts return. We don't get tangled in a dangerous war game."
"Leave?" Lilian shot back, turning on him with a sharpness he hadn't heard before. "Bastet, did you hear what we just discovered? Wesia is building an army in a city that doesn't exist on any map. This is… a threat to my home. I can't just return without any answers."
A cold dread washed over Bastet, the image of Wesian soldiers marching through Briskwood burning in his mind. An army of stone. An endless, tireless legion to carry out their bidding on a continental scale. The thought was a sickness in his gut. But then he looked at the fierce, determined girl before him, and the weight of his promise crashed down again.
"Your duty is to stay alive," he countered, his voice hard. "That was my promise to your father."
"You saw what Wesia did to those children in the forest," Lilian shot back. "Now imagine what they'll do when they conquer all of Aetrea. This army could do that. It's not something I can turn my back on and ignore."
"And what do you plan to do, Lilian? Walk down there and talk to them?" He stood up, gesturing at the dark, heavy tome on the table, and then at Folly's Edge on his hip. "This is what we have," he said, his voice dripping with irony. "A blade of folly that whispers falsehoods, and a book of madness that you're too afraid to open. And that's it. If something happens and there really is an army, how are we ever going to get out of that mess?"
She flinched as if he had struck her. Her gaze fell to the grimoire. "I don't open it because it's not a book," she looked down. "It is a piece of the Baron's mind, bound in leather. To open it is to invite him in. My father taught me about texts like this. They don't just contain knowledge; they contain the nature of their author. Reading it would… attune me to his madness. It would break my mind." She looked at the dark sword resting in his hand. "The same is probably true of your blade. They are not gifts."
"Even worse," he countered. "So we run. Your Covenant has its own armies, its own spies. If this place is as important as you think, they already know about it. Let's not risk our lives for nothing."
"No," Lilian cut in, her voice suddenly sharp with a scholar's certainty. "They don't. That's the point." She grabbed one of the dusty tomes from the floor. "This is the history of the Veridian Kingdom. I've been reading. The Covenant knows the official story, the one Wesia let slip. We don't know it as Statia, but I've seen illustrations of this city, and it finally clicked when I read the kingdom's name. They know it was a haven for artists, a city that was itself a masterpiece, designed to win the Grand Contest for the Maker's throne. Every corner, and every plaza was filled with marble statues. And they know it fell to the purple sun two hundred years ago when the statues came to life. There were no survivors."
She looked him directly in the eye, her expression grim. "Everything the Covenant teaches about Veridia says this ended two hundred years ago. The city is supposed to be a dead ruin whose location was lost. So we cannot assume anyone knows what Wesia is doing here. And you know that's important."
A tense silence fell between them. Bastet could not refute her logic, but neither did he relent. His promise to her father still stood between them. Lilian saw it in his face. She could not convince him. And in that moment, she made her decision.
***
The next day passed in a state of unspoken conflict. The work in the quarry was a grueling, sun-drenched ordeal of sweat and aching muscles, performed together with the unnerving diligence of the stone-men. By evening, the villa had settled into a watchful silence, and Bastet found himself second-guessing their decision to stay.
Thomas had given them a seven-day clock, but what if the Wesian carts returned sooner than that? The speed at which they were loading the wagons worried him. When they arrived, they had watched about two dozen carts leave Statia. By the end of today, seven replacements had already been loaded and sealed. If there was something he knew about Wesia, it was that they were brutally efficient. He fully expected a shiny breastplate to be there and waiting as soon as the final wagon was ready to go.
They were probably already looking for them. And even if they weren't, if they left the city on the last day like they originally planned, it would look suspicious. Thomas would report it to the Wesians that arrive, and they'd only have a day of head-start before they begin their hunt in earnest. That thought was a cold knot in his gut. They had to leave earlier, perhaps as early as tomorrow. He would have to discuss it with Lilian. His shoulder did not hurt as much, but it was still not doing good. The bruise on his ribs from Stormbridge's collapsed wall looked purple. But he could push through.
He spent the last of the daylight hours exploring the immediate surroundings of the villa, noting potential escape routes and hiding spots. He tried to sketch a crude map of the valley, but his memory of the world outside this cursed city already felt like a fading dream. He asked Thomas for a map, but he claimed not to have one. Perhaps he was lying, or perhaps his theory that the stone-men couldn't go out of the city to explore really did hold weight. He spent the evening hours studying Folly's Edge, practicing slow, deliberate movements to understand its unnatural balance. When he went back inside, Lilian was a silhouette in the candlelight, surrounded by a fortress of open, rotting books. He watched as she let out a quiet, frustrated sigh and pushed a brittle tome away, the answer she sought still eluding her.
Bastet sat across from her, staring into the fire. His hands reached for one of the ancient, brittle maps Lilian had unearthed from a book. They were completely unreliable. The purple sun had already twisted the borders of the world many times since their writing. His frustration was a bitter taste in his mouth. What was the point of this escape, of this desperate flight, if he couldn't even find his way home?
Home. The word echoed in the silence of his mind. And with it, an image of his sister, Maria. Not the hazy, terrifying memory from the Cleansing, but a simpler one. Her laughing as she tried to braid a crown of wildflowers, her tongue stuck out in concentration. A wave of weariness washed over him. The grueling labor in the quarry, the sleepless nights, the constant, gnawing tension, it all came crashing down at once. His head slumped against the cool stone of the wall. He told himself he would just rest his eyes for a moment.
He woke to a room that was colder than it should be. The fire had died to gray embers. The barred window stood open, a faint, pre-dawn breeze whispering through it.
"Lilian?" he called out, his voice a low rasp.
The only answer was the profound silence of the stone city.
He stood. The books she had been studying were still spread across the floor, surrounding a space where she should have been. A sudden, cold dread seized him. She was gone.
He searched the small villa with a rising panic, finding nothing. No note. No sign of a struggle. She had simply vanished. He slumped onto a stool by the cold hearth, the weight of his failure crushing him. He had promised Kreil he would keep her safe.
Then he heard it. A faint, dry, rhythmic sound of scraping from the hallway, just outside their door.
He grabbed Folly's Edge, his heart pounding, and crept toward the heavy oak door. He peered through the small gap at the bottom.
A small, gray shape was dragging itself across the floor in the darkness of the hall.
It was a hand.