They had become ghosts that worked like priests.
When Jin vanished, the world did not pause to mourn him. The world rearranged itself around the empty space he left. The Tribunal fractured into whispers and shadow courts; the Concord's formal structures weakened but did not die. Cities rebelled in hidden ways. Slaves vanished from manifest lists. Contracts rewrote themselves by the hour. In the hollow chest of those changes, the four of them—Camellya, Shen Yan, Su Lin, and Xue Yiran—kept moving, each in a different corner of the fracture, each with a single shared obsession: find Jin, bring him home, fix what they had broken.
By the start of the second year the war had become less explosive and more surgical. They no longer tore down walls with swords and runes as often as they unpicked seams—expert thieves in systems of power. Camellya built a web of contacts across the Academy of Seers and the old archives; Shen trained a cadre of fighters who learned to bleed in silence and use the artifact graft as the living symbol of survival; Su kept freeing people and feeding rumor to people in power; Xue sat like a white sentinel in the Crystal Library, reading through silent hours until the ink on her fingers stained blue.
Aurelion—Ardentis—hovered in their thoughts like a rumor that refused to die. The name came first from a smuggled merchant's ledger: "two names, one city," it said in cramped handwriting, and a sigil that looked like an obelisk surrounded by moons. Then a priest on the outskirts of the Concord muttered of a place "outside the ley, inside the song." At first it was just gossip. Then it became a pattern. Then it became a map drawn in the margins of censored files, in the secret histories Camellya could unlock with a single twist of an elder sigil.
They learned the hard part quickly: Aurelion did not sit on any ordinary map. It was a fragment that had been slipped aside when the world broke—a city that had been folded out of the continuum and stitched to a different seam. To reach it you did not cross borders or traverse passes; you had to step out of sequence. The Concord's records called the process transcendence. The old sects recorded a dozen methods—dream-portals, blood-lines, temple-conjunctions—but none of them was true for a city like Aurelion. What Camellya found in the Third Vault was a line that mattered: you had to listen the world into opening.
It was not metaphysics without teeth. It required instruments—those shards that Jin had chased, the harmonics of the obelisk, and a living anchor that could hold a mind in place while the world bent. Whoever could make the rhythm would waltz across the seam. Whoever failed would be swallowed by stuttering time.
That knowledge changed everything.
Camellya built a plan that smelled of inevitability: gather anchors, learn the harmonic, and push through. She had the sealed contracts and the tiny victories they'd carved at the Tribunal—altered verdicts, broken bonds. She had access to the Academy's vaults. She could draw a map of resonance. But she did not have the anchor Jin had become—until she trained a network that could simulate one.
Shen became that anchor, in a way. The prosthetic arm had been a crude miracle—an artifact graft forged from divine ore and sequence marrow stolen from a ruined reliquary. It fit into the shoulder like a foreign sun, rods of humming metal, spiraled filaments that connected to his nerve endings. For the first months he hated it. It throbbed with other people's commands, whispered with the voices of stone. But then he learned to temper it. The arm was a stabilizer: when he linked it to an engine of harmonics—Camellya's tuned sigils, Su's blood-marked seals, Xue's crystalline chants—it acted as a tether. In the hollow math of transcendence, a false anchor could become real enough to carry you to Aurelion's seam.
They tested the mechanism in abandoned places, in the ruined halls of the Concord's old servants. Shen would sit at the center of a circle while Camellya arranged sigils and Xue hummed; Su kept watch and fed their warmth into the system with small sacrifices—candles, oil, the pinch of her own blood to make the loop close. The first attempts produced only vertigo and dead dreams. The second attempt collapsed a small pavilion into a folded echo that vanished with the dawn. The third attempt brought partial success: a smell of spice and sea, a flash at the edges of sight where a tower should have stood for one breath of night before the seam closed.
They were improving. But the thing about progress when the world is reshaping itself is that you owe it a heavy price. Rumors of their experiments slipped out the way tobacco smoke does—thin trails that reached the wrong ears. The shadow-Judges noticed. The anti-authors sharpened their pens. They began to pull at threads: a scribe disappeared, a registrar rewrote a map and then could not remember why.
And yet they continued.
Through those months, their lives splintered into more than missions. They went back to the places Jin had loved and catalogued what he had left behind: a single silver coin with an etched sigil, the scar on a door where he once carved a rune, a tea cup with a hairline crack he never bothered to fix. Shen walked the campgrounds where he had trained Jin years ago and practiced the moves they had once shared: not to recreate the past, but to keep muscle memory alive. Xue sat in Jin's old room and read until the dawn. Su spent nights with freed children and taught them how to hide from tribunals. Camellya took to sleeping with one eye open, the other on maps and numbers, and she grew paler.
It was during one of those late nights that Xue found a book.
She had been working the Crystal Library's restricted indices—a slow, methodical search for any reference to transcendence specific enough to Aurelion. Her fingers brushed a ledger bound in slate where the binding was wrong; when she opened it, a thin sheet fluttered out. On it someone had written two names and a method not in the vault's catalog: the titles "Ardentis" and "Aurelius," scribbled like a single melody. Beneath them, someone had written, "To pass: do not walk; listen. Lose not the self that anchors; let the seam remember your shape."
She carried it like contraband back to the shrine where they met.
When she told them, Camellya's face lost the usual cords of anger and calculation. For a moment she looked like someone who had just discovered a key in a room full of doors.
"It's not a portal," Camellya said. "It's an invitation. The city will accept those who can be sung into place."
"How do we sing it?" Shen asked.
"You don't," Su said. She was tired but fierce. "We let it choose, but we give it a body to choose. Shen's arm can hold the harmonics long enough. Xue can script the chorus from the Crystal Library. Camellya can tune the seals. I will walk the streets and find someone who remembers the old songs, an elder or a cult." Her mouth hardened. "There are still fringe cults that survived the Tribunal's rewriting. They live in alleys and refuse to be edited."
"And I will give the order," Camellya said. "We prepare. We go as soon as the iron is warm."
They did not leave immediately. They prepared like people putting themselves into a machine that might not spit them back out. They practiced the choruses—Xue taught subtle runs against the clear note of a crystalline bell; Camellya adjusted the sigils to match the frequencies her fingers felt in the air. Su traveled and returned with a woman named Maris, who had a voice like gravel shaken through glass and who sang old songs that pulled at the seams of a person's soul. Maris had once been a priest of a forgotten coastal shrine; her throat had been seasoned by salted wind and grief. When she sang, the room held its breath.
On the night they attempted transcendence properly, Aeronhelm's moon was stripped to a blade. The four assembled in a courtyard of mossed stone far from the Tribunal's ruins. Shen sat in the center, prosthetic arm stripped to its core and wired into a lattice of sigils etched around his knees. Camellya stood at his back, moving the seals like a keyboard. Xue's voice prepared the counterpoint; Su and Maris raised the hum—a low note that undercut the others, an anchor tone.
The chant began as wind. It built into a wave. For a moment, Shen's breath hitched; the prosthetic thrummed.
Shen felt something reach for him, the way a net catches the foot. He held still.
The courtyard blurred. The stone beneath them became softer, like damp clay. Time thinned; minutes stretched to long droplets. For a heartbeat Shen felt the most tranquil thing he had ever known: he thought of Jin's laugh when he'd once joked about soup, of a foolish small kindness Jin had shown, and the prosthetic hummed like a second heart.
And then the seam opened.
It was not a doorway. It was a space folding out—a slit in the world that revealed the edge of a city like a painting peeled back. For a breath they saw towers that did not belong to any map, banners that flickered between two colors at once. A scent flooded them—incense of ironwood and something sweet, like a memory of rain.
"Keep him anchored," Camellya cried. "Hold the note!"
Shen's jaw was set. The prosthetic screamed in a voice like metal on stone, and something in its cogwork melted into a harmony it had never known. It was painful, ragged, holy. His arm was both his burden and the thing that carried them.
They pushed, singing and sealing at the same time. Su fed the sigils with her blood-smoked ribbons; Xue's crystal voice ran through the lattice and made the air stand on edge. For a moment Shen felt himself dissolve and then reorganize. He saw Jin—no, an alley where Jin had once walked—touched by the odd city.
But the seam was not a tunnel to be bargained with. It tested what you were willing to leave behind. The chorus demanded small things—memories, names, the taste of tea, the scent of smoke—tiny sacrificial pieces of what made them themselves. Those who loved Jin gave what they could. Shen, who had lost his arm, poured his old anger into the sigils; Xue surrendered a memory of a victory she had once claimed; Su gave a plate of her brother's last meal in silence. Camellya, always measured, burned a ledger of settlements she had once planned to profit from. They lost those things and did not die. They became lighter and sharper.
When the fold bared open fully, it was not wide. But it was big enough for one living thing to step through.
They could not step after Jin. The seam would not accept them without an anchor. It accepted Shen, who had been made into one.
Shen reached a trembling hand through the rip and saw—then felt—the presence like a comet. For a blink he thought he had caught Jin's sleeve, a thread of a coat, but the thing on the other side was not stable enough to clutch. It was suggestion, a scent, a breath. The seam closed as quickly as it had opened, leaving Shen with a weight in his chest like someone missing.
They had failed to pull Jin out. They had only scratched the edge. But what they saw—and the proof of seeing—was enough to make all of them sick with hope and anger.
Aurelion was real. It had shelter for a broken man. It might accept him. It might also consume him. The knowledge broke open every gate they had left in themselves. For Camellya it hardened resolve; for Xue it sharpened grief; for Su it became a vow; for Shen it was a brand. They had been given a path—not a path into the city, but a path to the edge. They would learn a better song. They would gather more anchors. They would return.
They left the courtyard with the prosthetic arm tinged in a thin sheen of new alloy. Shen's gait was uneven; the graft had changed. So had they. The year without Jin had taught them to move through a world that would not stop changing. They had become the kind of people who could try again.
Night folded into morning, and the stitched cities of the shattered realm watched from their glass windows while the four of them walked back into the world, each step a beat in a song that had not yet been finished.