Noon came dressed as civility. Banners wore their straightest hems. The Guildhall polished its steps until they could scold shoes. A dais had been raised just high enough to make men look reasonable from below.
Damien walked without rush, Selene at his left, Mira in the current of the crowd, Riven carrying nothing that could be mistaken for a crest. The fig leaf seal rode in a plain folder under Damien's arm. Nameless Wake smoothed shoulders from brushing his sleeve; Processional Right found a route even at noon—thin as thread, but there.
The moderator waited with the patience of someone paid to be exactly in the middle. He wore a gray coat that would never take ink and a smile that could be laundered. To his right stood Asher Drake, one hand near the Bloodreign Spear as if it were a lectern. The Spear didn't glow. It implied.
"City," the moderator said, palms open, voice carefully public. "We're here to speak about two truths: the need to address our streets and the need to shelter our people during these…unusual hours. I thank White Crown for order. I thank the bellsmen for morning."
Polite breath from the crowd. A few faces tipped toward Damien, not lingering. A name was moving through the square without a handle to catch it.
"Mister Drake," the moderator continued, "you raised a curfew with restraint. Mister…" a small pause, honest ignorance or crafted "…Damien. You raised a house without an address. Help us write a boundary."
Asher's gaze passed over the crowd and rested on Damien the way a river rests on a stone because that's where it must decide how to go around. "Addressing," he said mildly, "is memory. A city that knows itself can be kept. Those who refuse numbers often mean to refuse responsibility."
Murmurs. Truth enough to sound like all of it.
Damien set the folder on the dais edge without stepping up. "A house is not a number," he said. "It is a threshold. We filed a municipal shelter charter—obsolete but never revoked. It binds consent and protection within a door's hearing. The fig is our counterseal."
He lifted the leaf-marked paper once. The moderator leaned forward to see the ink without touching it. The crowd's sound changed a hair, the way people sound when a piece of paper becomes a room.
Asher did not glance at the charter. "Shelter is admirable," he agreed. "But houses without addresses become holes in the net. Men fall through them. So do laws."
Riven stepped to the dais foot, hands in plain sight. "Threshold law," he said, voice level. "Name your harm aloud if you mean to bind it here. That's the rule we carry."
The moderator's smile didn't move. "We're not binding anything. We're speaking."
"Then don't bring chalk," Mira said, and every surveyor with a rod felt their hand remembered.
Asher turned his head a fraction, the way a man does when a bead murmurs near his collar. "No weapons, no song," he reminded pleasantly. "We all agreed."
Selene's mouth tilted. "Ring isn't song."
The moderator made a calming gesture, learned in rooms with carpets. "Perhaps a demonstration," he offered. "Mister Drake, number the dais for the safety of the crowd. Mister Damien, show us how your charter behaves."
A neat trap. Optics either way. Damien rested his palm on the folder to feel the grain steady under his hand. The thin handwriting wrote once across his UI and vanished:
—Bring a door.
He breathed. Night Door warmed. In the shadow of the dais rail, a line of shade learned a frame. It drew itself upright, ordinary as a back-alley hinge. The square didn't gasp. It buzzed, the small sound people make when a rumor walks past.
Damien opened the door.
The fig tree's shade fell across Guildhall marble. Clay, ledger shelf, the lamp's honest ring of soot—Nocturne looked out at the city and did not flinch. The house's Threshold Peal threaded under the noon noise like a cat through chair legs.
"Within this door's hearing," Damien said, still below the dais, "sponsor writs must name their harm aloud. Numbers applied without consent fail by morning. That's the charter we filed."
The moderator's smile asked, Are you quite sure? Asher's eyes said nothing at all.
A surveyor in clean sleeves stepped forward with a stencil. The Spear's light gathered, not bright—authoritative. The man lifted his brush to paint a neat 1 on the inner jamb where a house keeps its memory.
Riven didn't move. He didn't have to. The peal sounded once, small and exact. "Name your harm," he said.
The surveyor's mouth opened. "Clarity and—" He stopped. The word tasted wrong. He reached for the safer one. "Children—"
"Name the harm," Riven repeated.
The man's eyes flicked—Spear, moderator, Asher. Asher's look did not help him. The brush lowered a degree.
"Withdrawn," the moderator said smoothly. "This was only to test—"
"Test away from a door," Selene suggested.
There was a little laughter at that, unexpectedly human. Laughter is worse for optics than shouts.
Asher stepped at last, a pace forward, a pace sideways, claiming a new piece of marble the same way he claimed a narrative: by standing there first. "Permit me to offer a…compromise," he said. "Addressing Act routes will detour public processes—bellsmen, markets, funerals. In exchange, houses—all houses—acknowledge that civic peace can request entry when danger is clear and present. A hand raised against the city cannot hide under a fig leaf."
He had put the blade exactly where it wanted to cut. All houses. Not just Nocturne.
Damien did not look at the crowd. He looked at the door. "Threshold law already allows shelter from real harm," he said. "Name it and you enter. The city knows the difference between a hymn and a raid."
Asher's head tilted, amused without admitting it. "And who decides what is real? You?"
"The door," Riven said quietly.
Mira had taken two steps back without seeming to. It put her beside a boy with a lamp in his eyes and flour on his cuff, and beside a baker who had come to see his hour done properly, and beside the watchman from the southern foundry who had wandered here as if by accident and stood where a bell would carry best.
The moderator lifted his palms. "We have minutes left and much ink to dry." He turned slightly toward Asher. "For the optics, if you would—just a number on the edge of the dais, something innocuous."
Asher obliged. The Spear wrote in the air as if the marble were an idea. A 7 began itself, clean and clever.
The door rang. Not loud. Right.
The 7 hesitated, the way a hand does when it wonders whether it's writing on a window.
"Name your harm," Riven said, because the rule was the rule.
Asher's eyes met Damien's. For a heartbeat something almost like candor crossed them—I don't say things I don't mean in public rooms. Then the look turned to patience again. He didn't answer.
The 7 hung, wet with light. A breeze took the tail that would have made it inevitable. It wavered.
The crowd's sound changed again, that subtle turn when a city decides it has seen enough to call a thing by its name later over bread.
The moderator coughed a smile back into place. "We will… adjourn for drafting," he said quickly, and began to thank people with his hands.
Asher lowered the Spear without lowering anything else. He shifted the light just so, so that a boy's laugh would not appear in the photo and a fig leaf would.
Damien closed the Night Door halfway, leaving the shade of the fig on the marble like a promise. He didn't step onto the dais. He didn't leave the street.
"We'll post the charter," he said. "At the water clock. At the tower. At any door that asks."
Asher's voice didn't rise. "Post what you like," he said. "Numbers are patient."
"So are bells," Selene answered, almost kindly.
The crowd began to unstitch itself with the same competence it had mustered in fear the night before. Vendors remembered their trays. A child asked a too-loud question and was shushed with a smile. A patrolman looked at his chalk and at the fig shade and put the chalk away without being told to.
The Spear drew back its light. The 7 on the dais edge faded like breath on glass.
Damien slid the door shut. The house's ring settled into the hinge.
—Public custom seeded: Threshold speaks.
—Scaffold directive updated.
The next line arrived like a coin tipped across a table into his palm:
—Anchor X: Take back a name that is not yours.
—Hint: A traded name returns in other mouths. Hear what the city calls you—and bind it before he does.
Mira's eyes had already found the new seam in the afternoon. "They've started saying it," she murmured.
Across the square, a vendor called it to draw customers and not be brave; on a balcony, a woman said it to judge whether it would fit; at the corner, the watchman tried it on his tongue and found it serviceable.
Bellmarked.
Asher watched the word move, then looked back at Damien. For once his patience had a weight.
He turned away first.
Damien stood a beat longer, feeling the door's quiet at his back. Then he breathed and started down the steps into the city, where the name was already walking faster than any man could.