The tower's inner stair was as narrow as a wrist, stone worn to a soft trough by feet that had stopped a century ago. Damien's fingers slid along the cold rail; dust turned the pads gray. Above, the night made a square of deeper dark where a mouth opened to air, and the Blood Eclipse pushed its red tide through the crack as if testing the old mortar.
—Anchor II located.
—Requirement: Hold the tone no one can hold.
They climbed without talking. The city dropped away behind them in layers—market clatter, flute over bells, the quick hiss of a cart's iron rim on wet stone. At the third landing a black window gave them the river: a thin blade of light cutting the quarters. The Eclipse made it seem higher than it was.
Selene checked the angle below with a glance that said she had walked towers in worse nights. "Two blocks back," she murmured. "White Crown patrol. They've got a scry bead—basic line-of-sight. We keep moving, we're a rumor."
Damien nodded and took the next coil of stairs. The shadeglass bound to his wrist pulsed once then settled, heartbeat-answering. The bellmark on his UI brightened. As they reached the sixth landing, the crack in the tower widened into a rent through which the night poured like water from a broken jar.
Here the sound changed. It didn't grow louder; it grew truer. The bells of the city throbbed in his bones—clocks, handbells, chimes, something that was probably an enterprising vendor's frying pan. Behind them all lay a longer note, almost imperceptible, as if the stone itself were remembering how to sing.
Selene stopped with him in the notch of the wall and looked up. "You feel it."
"Yes."
"Good." Her mouth tilted, not quite a smile. "That means you have a chance."
The stair opened into a circular room where the tower's great bell should have hung. It didn't. A shadow of it remained—a duller circle on the rafters, a weather-dark stripe where a mouth had kissed stone through winters. Ropes dangled with no jobs. Pigeons had made plans and then abandoned them. Red light from the crack found a path across the floor and drew a line to the far rail.
Damien stepped into the center and the line followed him like a spill choosing a slope.
—Hold.
—Do not let the tone break.
—Warning: interference expected.
"What tone?" he asked, soft.
Selene tapped the rail with the back of her knuckles. The tower answered with a faint hum—one plank answering another a half-story away, a sympathetic breath. "Every bell is two notes and a ghost," she said. "The ghost is the part that makes a city know its own hour. This tower lost the ghost when they took the bell. Under eclipse, the ghost wants a body. You'll have to be it."
"Stand here and become a bell."
"Hold, not become." She walked the edge, measuring the echo. "A bell rings down the spine. Don't let yours collapse. And if they come—" She nodded toward the stair well. "I'll try not to kill anyone you'll need later."
He said nothing to that. He put his feet where the circle's center felt truest and lifted his chin slightly as if about to take a note in a choir. The shadeglass cooled, then warmed; the bellmark dimmed and brightened on his interface like a steady breath. Somewhere below, a cart wheel struck a loose cobble and cracked the silence. The tower took that crack and stretched it, making a line of sound so thin he might have mistaken it for wind.
He matched his breath to it. In on two. Hold on four. Out on six. The line steadied. The crack in the tower glittered red as if a harp string had been plucked and held.
The first interruption arrived not as footsteps but as polite caution. The White Crown patrol stepped into the room with their helms off and their palms slightly open, staves reversed to show no violence. It was the kind of presentation that read well in sponsor footage: firm, human, merciful.
"Mr. Nightfall," the leader said. Even his voice had the veneer: concern brushed with authority. "You're trespassing during an event. Please step away from the center. You may continue to participate after a brief review."
Selene moved between them and the circle without looking like she had; her cloak did the work. "He's busy," she said.
"Ma'am," the leader said, and dipped his chin the exact degree required by good training. "We aren't here to escalate."
Damien did not turn his head. He didn't have that motion to spare. The tone in the stone wavered when his attention moved and steadied when he brought it back. The instruction hadn't been metaphor; the moment he wavered, the line broke. He fixed on the hum threading under the world and kept it.
The second patrolman—young, sharp gear, eyes a little too bright—took a step he wasn't supposed to. Selene noticed. He stopped. The leader let out the smallest breath and reached toward the air with two fingers, measuring something invisible. He had done this before: reading a room's currents, counting heartbeats, deciding where shame would land if someone tripped.
"Please," he said. "We have authority to—"
"Authority," Selene said, "stops at stair three. This is an eclipse anchor. Step into the circle, you break it. Break it, the tower drops a floor you can't put back." She tilted her head. "Do you want that on your footage?"
He hesitated. He didn't, and that hesitation saved Damien the motion of turning. The tone tried to split—one thread tracking the patrol leader's voice, another Selene's consonants. He pulled both into the same line and held until the split decided it had been a single line all along.
On his UI, the handwritten script ticked once.
—Stability: marginal.
—Interference: moderate.
—Countermeasure available.
The text blurred into a glyph—a ring opening and closing, the suggestion of a mouth. He understood it without knowing how he understood it. He lowered his shoulders a fraction, let the breath go lower, and then let the lowest part of it linger like smoke skimming stone. The tower liked that. The tone thickened.
The young patrolman took another step. Selene sighed. "Don't," she said. "I'm being kind."
"We can't leave him," the leader said. "You know that."
"Then wait."
They did not wait. The young one moved again, and this time there was nothing in it but obedience to an order he had already given himself. Selene tapped the rail a second time. The tap bloomed into a short, soft wave that hit the patrolman at knee-height and made him shuffle instead of stride. He didn't fall. He looked surprised to find himself a foot to the left of his plan.
The leader gave her a look that could have been gratitude in a kinder room. Then he took out a scry bead and lifted it to eye level. The bead caught eclipse light and threw it in a lace across the rafters.
"Crown Actual," he said into the bead, the words of someone who expected to be listened to. "We have Nightfall at Tower Nine, anchor state unknown. Request disposition."
The bead answered with a close, amused baritone that turned the air colder just by being recognized. Disposition: nonlethal. Keep the scene. I'm speaking with city works to cut access from below. Do not interrupt the rite. We don't want the tower on our heads. A pause, almost affectionate. Tell Damien he's doing good work for us.
Damien kept the tone anyway.
"Message delivered," the leader said. His eyes met Damien's for the first time, and something in them softened. "You hear that?"
He heard everything. The bells, the city, Asher's calm possession of space he had not earned, the old habit of wanting to answer a friend when a friend spoke, even if the words were being poured through a bead. He held the tone as if it could be a wall.
Selene came close enough that he could feel the warmth off her sleeve. "Ninety more heartbeats," she said as if telling a child how long until the light changed.
He counted. On sixty, the tone tried to slip out from under his feet. He imagined it like a taught string and put a finger on it in his mind. It settled. On eighty, something above them moved—the ghost of a clapper that was not there knocking against the idea of a bell. Pigeons fluttered, but did not fly. On ninety, the bellmark on his UI flared like a lantern under cloth.
—Anchor II accepted.
—Resonance bound.
—Skill unlocked: Bellmark Veil.
—Effect: Curves incoming force along held tone; strengthens with breath control.
The room exhaled. The patrol leader lowered the bead as if it had grown heavier. The young one blinked twice, found himself with his boot on the wrong line of floor, and stepped back, affronted by geometry.
Selene let go of a breath he had not noticed she was holding. "Good," she said. "I was not in the mood to explain rubble."
The leader made a decision then, a small one that would never show up on a ledger. "We're done," he told his partner. "Log 'ritual under observation.' We'll file a note about unsafe access." He looked at Damien. "If you come down the north stair, you won't see us."
"Thank you," Damien said, and meant it.
They left. The room regained its echo. The red on the crack paled to a darker gray.
Selene looked at his wrist where the shadeglass pulsed and then at the glyph nestled by the crescent. "Veil," she said. "That will keep you alive as long as you remember to breathe."
"I tend to," he said.
"Not everyone does."
Below them, a murmur ran through the city—news moving, not sound; the way crowds know something has happened without being told where. A trumpet blatted, off-key. Someone cheered. Someone argued about the price of bread because bread did not care for eclipses.
Damien stepped to the rail and took in the northern quarter. White Crown banners lifted slightly in the breeze. In the cathedral square a column of light had been raised for spectacle, pure optics. Asher would be standing on the edge of it, looking as if he had nothing to prove and proving it anyway.
His phone buzzed in the real world: a phantom memory of vibration. The immersion pod translated the gesture into a gentle nudge of UI. A message slid open on its own, signed with a seal rather than a name.
A city is a collection of kept promises, Damien. Don't make yourself the exception. Walk away from the towers. I'll find you a place to stand where you won't hurt anyone.
The thin handwriting wrote across it, indelicate as a nail on glass:
—Scaffold directive updated.
—Anchor III: Trade a name to the river.
—Hint: Names are loudest when they are given willingly.
Selene leaned beside him on the rail. "Well?"
"The river," he said.
"The river," she agreed. "Which name?"
He looked down at the water sliding between districts, gathering the city's lights into long, torn coins. Names ran there already—streets, houses, promises. The bellmark warmed his pulse. The veil lay over his shoulders like a thin cloak.
"Not his," Damien said. "Not yet."
He turned from the crack and took the north stair. The tower carried their steps down in a rhythm that felt like a heartbeat re-learning its measure. Outside, the patrol had kept its word; the square that should have been crowded was momentarily empty, a space shaped by absence. He and Selene crossed it without looking left or right. The Eclipse hung above the rooftops like a patient wound.
At the river's lip, where the stone balustrade dipped to let people lean and be braver than they were, the water caught a deeper red. He rested his hands on the cold parapet. Behind them, somewhere in the streets, a procession bellsman tested a new route and found he liked the way it turned. A child laughed, stopped, and laughed again.
Selene's reflection stood beside his in the black water. "You're sure."
"No." He watched a paper lantern drift under the bridge and find its own way into an eddy. "But I'm done being where he expects me."
The river moved on. Above it, thin text formed once more:
—Begin when ready.
—The river takes what is offered.
Damien uncurled his fingers, and the city waited as if it would be kind if it could. He drew breath, and the bellmark veil rose like a quiet exhale around him.
He said a name.