The shelf carried them only so far and then became a language of moving plates, each basalt pane as precise as a thought and as treacherous as a belief held too long. Hairline seams ran between them—mechanical, not natural—polished smooth by forces that did not care for erosion and preferred revision. Heat lay over the plain in a low shimmer, not warmth so much as an implied equation: if you step here, the world will answer; if you step there, it will answer differently. Their shadows lagged—Lyra's wore a second pair of wings for three heartbeats after she folded the glider; Skarn's tail left its own opinion on the stone a breath before his body arrived; Torian's hands appeared in black on basalt before he lifted them.
Beyond the plates, the Engine rose.
It was not a machine in the way of cogs and steam. It was a crown of taut threads and slow rings suspended over the plain without visible support—thirteen bands of condensed chronology braided into a torus the size of a fortress hall, each band rotating at a different rate, each carrying a sound that was neither note nor number but urged the ear to pick a side. Between band and band ran vertical tethers—hair-thin at a distance, thick as wrists when the eye finally admitted scale—sunk into the basalt and humming with the fatigue of centuries spent resisting the concept of "done." Every revolution dragged at the Wound's throat, keeping it open, teaching the spiral to keep breathing when the world would have preferred to scar.
Torian stopped on the seam between two plates and let the Ember Vault's schematics unscroll behind his eyes. Lines and annotations returned with the patient confidence of tools that have been waiting to be asked. Anchor-threads fuse to geography at stress nodes—not at the obvious geometric center but where stress reconvenes after it thinks it has dispersed. The Balance Coil on his hip recognized the room the way a tuning fork recognizes a cathedral and hummed a question that was also an answer: where do you want me; I am already there.
Lyra shaded her eyes and looked up into the crown's slow thunder. The bands carried images caught in their glass—fragments of sky; a hand letting go of a rope; a field of wheat visible only at the edge; a child's jaw clenched against weeping. She watched a face pass—Torian's, fifteen years younger and furious—then vanish in the next band as a palm struck a table. It wasn't a gallery. It was a load map of decisions, each rotation taking its weight where it could, none remembering to set it down.
Skarn sniffed the plate they stood on and then the seam a hand's width from Torian's boot. He pressed his forepaw gently into the hairline and felt the plate sigh, the micro-torsion communicating up his bones the way old wind will talk to old scars. He set his hindquarters, testing what the plate above would do if asked to bear a larger truth.
"The gauntlet cuts," Torian said. The canyon let the words arrive when it had looked at them first and found them unarmed. "Three. Simultaneous or as near as we can pay. If we untie only one, the crown will shift into a new vice. We need to unlearn it mid-motion."
Lyra looked at him sidelong, eyes wide and earnest and older than the bones that held them. "Where?"
"Here," he said, kneeling and touching the plate's seam where Skarn had pressed. "Node one. Stress reconvenes after it fails to convince the northeastern band to behave. There," he pointed to a spirette—a stub of stone between plates with a ring scar scored around it, where threads had been retied too many times. "Node two. It trains the verticals to stand proud. And there." He lifted his chin to the very throat of the crown, where two bands crossed in a long, slow kiss that had become habit. "Node three. False marriage. Pretty and wrong."
"Assignments?" Lyra asked. Because if you don't ask for orders now, you will have to pretend you never wanted them when the world starts shouting.
"Skarn: one," Torian said. "You hold the plate and you hold the seam. Not with strength. With refusal. If the engine begs, give it manners. If it tries to take weight, shift your bones so what it takes is yours and never the ground's."
Skarn licked his teeth in a small, telltale habit he reserved for problems that required more than claws and less than humility. He stepped to the seam and settled, chest low, forepaws far apart, tail out; his shadow arrived after him, remembered another stance, and corrected itself with a sulk.
"Lyra: two," Torian continued. "You'll mount the spirette and ride the tether with the staff across your forearms. No ignition. The band will try to teach you its rhythm. You will say no politely. When I say 'now,' you'll lift and twist the ring scar a quarter-turn against the hand that cut it last time. Mind your teeth; the air will try to steal them for souvenirs."
She swallowed, then nodded, glider already whispering open as she stepped to the low spire, not to fly—there wasn't room to pretend wings here—but to make the staff into a bar that could be leaned on when the world forgot what vertical meant.
"And you?" she said.
"Three," Torian replied. "I'll lay the cut at the cross-band. It will want to make my line into a new rule. I will make it into an exception. When it tries to snap shut, I'll bend it."
"You can do that?" Her voice arrived late; her face had already organized itself to be calm if the answer was no.
"Yes," he said, and did not add that he would prefer not to have to prove it twice.
They took their places. The crown lowered its voice and leaned in.
Lyra climbed the spire as if the stone could take offense at being treated like a ladder. She straddled the ring scar and set the staff across it, palms down, elbows soft, fingers loose—rider's hands without reins. The band above sighed as her weight joined the conversation and tried to persuade her wrists that the gentlemanly thing would be to follow. She acknowledged the suggestion and took none of it. She matched her breathing to Torian's absent count. In on two. Out on five. The band pushed; she rolled it; the push became an agreement and resented it.
Skarn pressed into the seam until the plate answered with a hum too low for human hearing. He changed his angle a finger's width and the hum shifted into work. The vertical tether nearest him trembled in its set, then steadied—not because it had found a better doctrine, but because someone had finally given it a counterweight worth considering.
Torian walked to the crossing of the bands and let his eyes go out of focus until the glass stopped being pictures and became force. The Balance Coil warmed under his palm; its inner spiral tightened to a whisper that made his teeth itch and then eased—here is the place, but don't be clever about it. He lifted his right hand. Cold light gathered in his fingers, the Spiral answering like a blade drawn without show. He did not seek symmetry. He sought the off-beat—the half-count between the band's turn and the tether's sigh.
The Wound felt the plan the way a storm feels a promise. The lens in the haze, far off and very close, tilted. Something like a voice leaned across the plates without sound. Mine, it had told them before. Now it said a different word: Count.
"You first," Torian murmured, and the world let the syllables arrive when they had already been spent.
He cut.
The line wasn't a slash. It was bias: a tiny arc that refused the easiest path and chose the truer one a fraction to the left. Cold Spiral slid into glassy band, through vertical thread, into the second band, returned a hair thinner, met its own entry wound and did not complete a circle. The crown bucked as a habit lost its handhold. The bands tried to grab the line, to say ah, good, a rule—but the arc was crooked in the way of honest things and would not serve dogma. The cross loosened.
"Now," Torian said.
Lyra lifted. The band above shoved. She let her wrists go slack just long enough to teach it arrogance, then twisted the staff a quarter-turn against the memory etched into the scar. The ring flared with silent lightning—heat that wasn't heat; light that remembered being pain. Her teeth ached. The scar slipped, then seated in a new set.
"Hold," Torian breathed, and Skarn held.
He took the weight that the plate, for one ugly instant, refused to admit it had promised to carry; he rolled it along the chain of bone from wrist to shoulder to spine to hindquarters and into the ground—ground that tried to be a suggestion and was reminded how to be a fact by a beast who owned the dignity to insist on it. The seam bucked. His claws did not dig deeper. He eased. The hum under him ceased to be complaint and became labor again.
The Engine fought like a doctrine being contradicted by a patient man. It tried to torque the cross back into compliance; Torian bent the line more—not with force but with refusal made into geometry. It tried to teach Lyra's wrists a better class of obedience; she gave it the courtesy of listening and then did the impolite thing correct. It tried to ask Skarn to trade resistance for spectacle; he stood like a wall a master mason would be proud to call his, no ornament, all promise.
A fine white dust fell from the crown—unspooling memories ground soft—the taste of old vows and old failures and the sweat of men who had taken their boots off at the end of days like this and stared at the ceiling because sleep could not possibly be enough payment. The bands' rotation fell out of sync and then into a new sync, the kind that would hold without stubbornness. The vertical tethers stopped rising like the backs of tired soldiers and settled into their sockets with the shy relief of honest work finally allowed to be modest.
The coil cooled in Torian's palm. He stepped back from the crossing. Lyra let the staff rest without surrender and slid down the spire with knees that had opinions and would keep them to themselves. Skarn let the plate have itself back and shook one forepaw once as if flicking off arrogance that had had the nerve to get on his pads.
The crown lowered an inch. Not collapse. Compliance. The throat of the Wound, beyond, changed color—not brighter, not darker. Deeper. The air between the plates thickened and then clarified, as if a decision had been made three rooms away and the walls were patiently passing the word along.
The haze at the far edge quivered. The lens returned—closer now, a head's height above the plates, the size of a shield, the absence where features should have been reflecting only the idea of faces and finding them insufficient. It did not speak. It tilted—curiosity becoming degree, then tactic. Between one blink and the next, the plates around them reset their arithmetic: Lyra's shadow took a step she hadn't; Skarn's breath arrived as sound before his chest moved; Torian's hand appeared in black on stone with a blade of cold light already in it when his fingers were still empty.
The Engine was done. The owner of the wound was not.
"Forward," Torian said, because backward would let the margin think it had learned them. The corridor that had not been there a breath before took shape, by consent not by craft—two bands of worlds on either side lifting to make a path as narrow as a thrown coin and twice as honest. The basalt ahead dropped away into a hundred rooms layered like shale, each one lit with the kind of light that knows the difference between memory and prophecy and prefers the latter. At the lip of the first room stood a frame of pressure-glass—a doorway that held no door and a mirror that held no reflection.
Inside the glass, a man stood.
Not Torian. Not anyone who had ever had the decency to be someone else. He was all angles, built for sprinting and for killing the breath between two words. Flame coiled his forearms in iron bands. His eyes were a white too clean to be called color. The crown over his brow burned wrong—too sharp, too literal, a crown that had been built because one had been seen and not because it had been earned. He looked sideways when Torian looked straight. He smiled a different smile a heartbeat before Torian's thinned.
Lyra touched Torian's sleeve—two fingers; he did not look at her; it was enough. Skarn lowered his head and inspected the glass with nostrils tasting for living; his ears flattened in distaste when the answer was: not yet.
"They're not here," Torian said, voice small on purpose, the way you speak in a library stocked entirely with dangerous ideas. "Not lives. Versions. It's keeping them near. It will move them when it thinks we deserve the demonstration."
Lyra swallowed. Her throat bobbed once, twice, and held. "We don't," she said, and her shadow agreed late.
"We won't ask," he replied.
They stepped across the threshold. The room beyond changed its mind three times about how tall it was and then decided to impress them with obedience instead. The floor carried the three of them without asking for applause. The walls held still with visible effort. The next frame of pressure-glass opened ahead with the smooth liar's grace of an invitation.
Behind, the crown settled into its new duty and did not call them heroes for doing a job that should always have been done. Ahead, the Wound inhaled, the way a host inhales before offering theater disguised as proof. The lens drifted back into haze, the better to watch without being accused of eavesdropping.
"Keep your hands," Torian said. It meant: don't touch what touches back. It meant: don't reach for futures that can reach further. It meant: remember what we cut and what we didn't.
Lyra nodded once. Skarn's tail wrote a short, savage curve on the dust. They went on.