The lake sang in one note stretched across three pitches, the sound not so much heard as inhabited. It came from the stone ribs beneath the basin, from the black water itself, from the thin night air where the bands of sky had dimmed to deep violet and ash-blue. The shore was a necklace of wet shale and weeping moss. Every few breaths a ripple moved like a thought across the surface, dimpling starlight that was not set into any coherent map. The hum laid itself along bone and tendon, found the cavities of the chest, and made them resonators.
They chose a crescent of shore where the ground held—flat enough for work, far enough from reeds that whispers would not be echoed by blades. Torian knelt first, testing the earth with the heel of his hand, not for traps, but for truth. The hum settled in his palm and answered. The Balance Coil at his belt woke like an instrument tuned over a long absence, its metal warming a fraction, its inner spiral picking up the lake's triad and returning it in miniature.
Skarn came down with stubborn dignity, the way cliffs accept storms. He did not lie until Torian asked him to. Then he eased his mass to the ground, ribs moving shallow, breath clipped at the end as if the air had grown teeth. The bandage over his flank had held the day and failed the night; the flesh beneath it throbbed—not in heat, but in a wrong rhythm that tried to convince muscle to become a pattern instead of meat. Spiral-glass residue, too small to see, too patient to mistake, had found a cadence under his skin and begun to spin itself into a design.
"It's in the music now," Torian said quietly, unwrapping the cloth. "It's listening to this lake. It wants to be a wheel."
Lyra slid in at Skarn's head and set both hands under his jaw where fur thinned and warmth gathered. She drew his muzzle onto her thigh, minding the weight like it was a crown entrusted. His eyes cut to hers—one long look in which the beast consented to be tended by a child and the child promised not to make him regret it. She smoothed the fur between his ears and spoke to him without asking his pain to answer.
"Feet under the wind," she whispered, the cadence of lessons whispering her calm back to her. "Not against it. You run until the earth is willing, then you lean. You trust the hinge. You don't chase lift; you invite it."
Skarn's ears flicked. The lake's hum answered her phrase as if she had laid a finger on a rim and set it in motion.
Torian set the coil on the ground beside the wound and turned it until its inner ring's line matched the lay of Skarn's ribs. The plates he had taken from the Ember Vault—thin ember leaves with their surgical diagrams—remained in his satchel; he did not need them for this. This was work of the hand and the ear. He pressed three fingertips above the worst of the flutter and found it: a secondary pulse, fast at first, then periodic, resolving toward the lake's lowest pitch and threatening to marry it.
"Listen," he said, and Lyra fell silent. He did not mean to her. He meant to himself and to whatever in him had refused to be only fire. He closed his eyes and let the lake's triad separate into its parts. Lowest—stone-deep, a long chant through bedrock. Middle—water's voice, a cold violin drawn across a dark string. Highest—air's thin glass above, brittle and perfect. The residue under Skarn's skin chased the middle, hungry for that steady center that did not tire. It would spiral there, tighten, and drive its will into tissue until the beast's own rhythm failed.
Torian set his left hand on the coil and his right two finger-widths from the wound. He asked the coil for the note between the middle and the low—a place where resonance could be held without being allowed to sing. The metal answered; the hum in it tightened, a held breath in bright steel. He exhaled and took a sliver of the Spiral—no more than a filament, no brighter than a thought—and laid it along the wrong rhythm under Skarn's skin. He matched, did not strike; he mirrored the spin until the residue believed itself seen.
"Good," he murmured when the flutter stuttered and tried to correct into him. "Come here, then."
Lyra kept Skarn's head still and kept talking. "Figure-eight when you're high and scared. It bleeds speed. You look where you mean to be, not where you are. Your body follows the future, not the ground."
A tremor ran through Skarn's jaw and into her thigh; she tightened her grip and bent forward so her breath touched his temple. The hum of the lake reached its middle pitch and stayed there for a long, long moment, the water deciding it would be the metronome for this hour and not be moved. The residue took that as command and surged.
Torian was waiting. He leaned a fraction and gave it a path—his palm, the coil, the ground. The Balance Coil took the first bright trickle like a well taking a poured cup: a quiet absorption, a small satisfaction. The residue was not liquid; it felt like argument made into light, a thin, hard thread of intention fighting to stay in a body it had misnamed as home. He coaxed it with the exactness of a man removing a hook from a fish he intends to eat but does not intend to punish. When it balked he changed his pressure rather than his will.
The lake shifted up to the high pitch and sang there, the air above the water turning the note to glass. Torian's arm markings answered. Lines along his forearm flared—violet, clean, not hot—and for a breath his skin looked written upon by lightning that had remembered him fondly. Lyra saw the glow at the edge of her vision and made herself not look. Looking would make the crown hunt him. They had work, not worship.
"Breathe," Torian said to Skarn, voice low enough that it laid itself under the beast's panting. "In on the second, out on the fifth." He didn't count aloud; he gave the numbers to his own heart and let it be caught.
Skarn tried to obey. When he failed, Lyra spoke through her teeth like a rider at a horse's ear, "With me. In. Out. Easy. Again," and the beast's breath found the lane she offered.
The residue fought harder when it realized it was being persuaded rather than destroyed. It tried to flee into deeper tissue. Torian would not let it. He lifted the coil a hair, turned it a degree, and closed the circuit: wound to hand, hand to coil, coil to earth, earth to lake. The triad under them resolved for a heartbeat into a chord that did not belong to water or stone or air alone. The hairs along Lyra's arms rose. The filaments of light under Skarn's skin shuddered and drew tight like threads suddenly owned by a needle.
"Now," Torian said, and he pulled.
It was not a wrench; it was a long, stubborn drawing, a cloth unspooling from a snag. The Balance Coil drank. The metal did not heat; it filled. Torian's right hand shook once at the wrist; he locked his elbow and let the tremor run where it would not spoil the work. The markings along his forearm climbed to the elbow and thinned to fine lines above, every nerve singing the wrong song and being made to hear the right one instead. He smelled iron, then limes, then the clean clay smell of Ember flame that isn't fire at all. His spine tried to lift him out of himself; he made it stay.
"Thermals," Lyra said, because she could not bear to say nothing and because her mouth had a duty. "You don't trust the shimmer—read the land. Ripples in glass mean lift; dull means sink. You look for soft first. You feel later."
Skarn bared his teeth at nothing. His eyes went wide and then narrowed—focus regained by force. He pressed the weight of his head into her thigh and held still. The lake dropped to its lowest pitch and stayed there, the ground under them answering like a drumhead touched by a hand to stop the ring. Torian felt the residue let go at last—two long threads, one short, the smallest meanest stubborn thing at the end like a burr. He took all of it.
The coil thrummed. The hum skated along his bones and left splinters of fatigue in every joint. The last bright filament jumped for his palm and he gave it a better argument: a quiet circle of cold flame hovering half an inch over the coil's throat, a place designed to offend nothing and accept everything. The filament met it and went out, not burned, unwritten.
He let his breath go. The markings along his forearm dimmed by degrees, leaving the skin unremarkable again except for the memory of being used well. His hand shook in earnest now that work refused to distract it. He set the coil down and braced it with the heel of his other hand until the metal's inner ring stopped spinning like a coin someone had flicked and walked away from.
Lyra did not move until he nodded. When he did, she loosened her grip and laid Skarn's head gently to the ground. The beast's eyes blinked—one slow, one slower—and then closed. His ribs went wide once, then fell into a new pace not chosen by pain. Torian tore clean cloth into fresh bands, packed the wound with ground leaf and ash that knew how to hold edges to their obligations, and bound it with a wrap that honored movement and forbade stupidity.
"Scars?" Lyra asked, the question simple as water.
"Yes," Torian said. He smoothed the fur down so the cloth lay kind. "He'll wear a line. White. Long."
"Good," Skarn murmured, his voice the sound winter makes in a tree. "So you both shut up about it." The edges of his mouth didn't move; the humor lived in the weight he abandoned to the ground.
Lyra bent and put her forehead to his for the space of a breath. "You flew, you know."
"Hmph."
"Better than me."
He snorted, which might have been agreement and might have been the body expelling the last of a pain it had decided to refuse.
Torian sat back on his heels. The coil in his lap held the residue like a song in a closed room, a quiet, caged dissonance that would need to be bled into stone by morning or it would seek a new ear. His hands had steadied. The fatigue did not leave so much as settle into a place where it could be carried.
Above the lake the bands of sky began to crawl toward day. Not sunrise—this world had forgotten how to do that clean—but a reordering of light. A pale stripe resolved at the far horizon, then two deeper ones above it, violet grading to iron-blue, blue lifting to ash. The lake kept singing. The chord softened into a single line, then divided again, then fell silent for a count of seven as if catching its breath before picking up the work.
They made a low fire—not for heat, but for courage—and put it between Skarn and the water as if fire, even small and well-behaved, could act as guardian. Lyra ate dried fruit she could not taste and watched the way the white of moss gleamed at the lake's edge. Torian wrapped the coil in oiled cloth and set it in a niche of stone, then sat with his back to the beast and his shoulder brushing Lyra's, the touch unremarked and necessary.
"Will it come back?" she asked at last, when the bands brightened enough to give the question shape.
"If I've matched it wrong," Torian said. "If the lake teaches it a new verse. If we're foolish." He looked down at Skarn's flank, at the bound weave that hid the worst of it. "If he insists on being proud."
"Ha," Skarn said without opening his eyes.
Torian's mouth tilted. "We cut the node under this lake tomorrow. Its song will settle when the anchors let it. That will make the residue less clever. Tonight we sleep while the numbers are in our favor."
Lyra's fingers kept moving in Skarn's fur even after his breath deepened into the steady heavy rhythm of a body that had earned rest. She found a burr and worked it out. She found nothing else that needed handling and left her hand where it was anyway. When she looked up, the bands had shifted another step toward day. The far shore gleamed like a blade's spine.
"Thank you," she said to the night, not sure whether she meant the beast or the man or the lake that had kept its music and allowed them this.
Torian did not answer, because thanks is a word to be shared when it will not be overheard by anything that would use it against you. He let his head ease forward until his chin touched his chest for a moment. He did not sleep until he was certain that when sleep took him it would not steal anything.
Skarn slept at last. The new scar showed through dark fur even under bandage—a thin, straight white where the Spiral had tried to teach its wrong lesson and been corrected. It would mark him when he ran. It would tell the truth when mouths were tired.
Dawn did not arrive; it assembled—bands crossing bands until the world could be read again without lies. The lake tightened its song, held it, and said nothing about the night that had passed, which is how water forgives. Torian rose without sound, lifted the coil from its niche, and looked out across the dark mirror where the node waited under the music like a thorn under skin.
"Work," he said, and the word did not land like a sentence. It landed like a promise.