Alaric Vale had grown used to the sound of laughter. It was sharper than blades, crueler than spells, and more constant than the wind that forever howled through Greyspire's high courtyards.
The laughter always came at his expense.
He lay on his back in the dust, breath shallow, blood running warm at his collar. A mortal—an untrained city duelist with nothing more than callused hands and borrowed steel—stood over him, the tip of a sword pressing against his throat. The blade cut a faint line, enough for Alaric to feel the chill sting as a bead of blood traced down his sternum.
"Yield," the duelist said. His voice carried no malice. Just certainty.
Alaric's chest rose once, then fell. He wanted to spit, to curse, to rise. But he had learned long ago that pride and survival rarely shared a bed.
"I yield," he rasped.
The steel lifted. The duelist gave a small, neat salute and sheathed his sword. "No shame in it," he said, almost kindly. "You fight like you don't believe your legs belong to you."
The courtyard erupted in laughter—apprentices in grey robes, stewards with their bronze pins, even instructors who should have known better. To them, Alaric was not a man, not even a failure. He was a jest told too often yet still funny.
He rolled to his knees, dust clinging to sweat-slick skin, and pressed a trembling hand against the cut at his throat. He told himself his hands shook from adrenaline, not fear. Fear had been burned out of him years ago.
The ring on his right hand drank his blood like it always did. Dull iron, pitted and old, yet smooth on the inside. Whenever his blood touched it, the air cooled, and a hollow presence stirred—like a cellar door opening beneath the world.
He closed his fist, hiding it. The ring had been on his finger for ten years, since the day he'd woken in the Order's infirmary with death already behind him. He still bore the scar from that lesson. He had never discovered where the ring came from. Only that it never left him.
"Alaric Vale."
The voice cut through the laughter, calm and polite, as if politeness were a rule rather than a virtue.
Alaric turned. Scribe Ingram approached, thin, spectacled, carrying a slate board against his chest. Behind him stood two stewards in rust-colored cloaks, faces carefully blank. Bad news often wore such masks.
"I'm bleeding," Alaric said.
"I can see that," Ingram replied. "Good that you can too. Walk with me."
They passed beneath Greyspire's archways, where sunlight sliced through narrow slits in the walls, painting the stone with fractured panes of gold. The halls smelled faintly of chalk dust and old ash, like a library that had once burned and never quite forgotten.
"You participated in voluntary sparring," Ingram said conversationally.
"Voluntary?" Alaric's voice was flat. "He invited me with a shove."
"A traditional invitation," Ingram answered, and Alaric could not tell if the man jested. "Besides, he was a contracted sword from the city. We do like to pay locals to bruise you all evenly."
They turned down a damp corridor, the air cool and heavy. Underwell damp. The ring on Alaric's finger warmed faintly, the hollow stirring like something shifting in deep water. He ignored it.
"Why am I needed?" he asked.
"Lottery," Ingram replied with cheer that didn't reach his eyes. "Steward rotation."
Alaric stopped. "No."
"Yes," said the scribe, still walking. "You know the rules. Every year, apprentices rise or are cast out. Stewards hold the pillars. You hold nothing. The Order has many tasks, and danger must be shared democratically."
"You mean randomly."
"Exactly."
The lottery chamber was tall, cold, and crowded. A hundred apprentices, stewards in rust, instructors with silver braid, and at the dais, Maera Sable, forge-mistress of the lower furnaces. Her gaze was obsidian—hard, sharp, unblinking. Alaric had met that gaze once. It had cut deeper than steel.
The slate board glowed. Names shifted like frost across stone. The lottery began.
One by one, names flared, divisions filled—Furnace, Construct, Patrol. Each assignment was a gamble of burns, exhaustion, or graves.
Alaric's ring pulsed. A hollow knock beneath his skin. Not now, he thought. Not here.
The board wrote his fate in letters of cold light: VALE, ALARIC — FURNACE.
The laughter came again, sharp as glass. Relief for them, humiliation for him.
He stepped forward, signed his name with steady hand, and listened as Maera's voice, smooth as polished stone, sealed his lot.
"Report to the second underlevel at dawn. South crucible. If you crack it, I'll throw you in."
"Yes," Alaric said.
"Don't call me that."
"Yes."
At dawn, the underlevel roared with heat. The crucible glowed like a mountain's heart. Chains rattled in the fire's breath. The ring on his finger thrummed cold.
Apprentices brought him a parcel wrapped in oiled cloth. Inside lay a fan of strange craft—ironwood frame, vanes shimmering with frost and flame. Frost-Fire Veil, etched small along the spine. A tool both gift and threat.
Maera's expression flickered when she saw it. "Who gave you this?"
"Anonymous."
"Convenient," she said, and handed it back. "Keep the fire to a singing blue when I say. Smother it when I say. Do neither when I don't. If the crucible cracks, you mend it. Then I'll throw you in."
Alaric flicked the fan open. Heat and cold kissed his skin in equal measure. The crucible sang, a sound between hunger and relief.
The ring pulsed again. The Underwell stirred.
Hours bled away in heat and sweat. When Maera finally ordered him to stop, his muscles trembled, his collar was damp, and the crucible sighed as if disappointed to be silenced. Maera studied the cooling cores and gave a curt nod.
"Not entirely useless," she said. For her, that was devotion.
Before Alaric could leave, two stewards descended the stair. Rust cloaks, blank faces, the sound of authority. One held a slate. The other carried a sealed note.
"Alaric Vale," the slate-man called. "By order of the Steward's Council."
Alaric broke the wax. Inside, a single line of neat script:
Your name has been drawn. Report at moonrise to the high roster hall. Assignment: Rotation.
His throat tightened. He had just been bound to furnace duty—now another lottery clawed at him? The Order delighted in this kind of cruelty: keep the weakest always moving, never letting them grow roots, never allowing them to find their balance.
"Rotation?" Maera asked behind him. Her tone was unreadable, but the apprentices froze as though she'd spoken a curse.
Alaric folded the note carefully. "Lottery," he said, the word sour in his mouth.
"Of course it is," she replied, turning back to her cores with deliberate disinterest. If she cared, she did not show it.
The stewards didn't wait for him to respond. They turned as one and marched up the stair, their boots ringing against stone until the sound vanished into the higher levels.
Alaric exhaled slowly. His chest ached as if he'd been holding the breath since the courtyard. The ring on his finger pulsed once—hollow, final—like a distant door shutting.
He slipped the folded note into his cloak and glanced at the Frost-Fire Veil hidden beneath the fabric. A tool, a gift, a trap—he did not know. But he would need it. He always needed what others thought he didn't deserve.
Moonrise was only hours away.
Ingram's voice echoed in his memory, light and cruel: When you fail to die, you'll be very employable.
He climbed from the underlevel, heat falling away with each step, until the cold air of Greyspire bit his skin. The sky through the arrow-slit windows was already bruising with twilight.
At the top of the stair, he paused. Shadows clung to the hall, long and sharp, and for the first time all day the laughter was gone.
Only silence waited.
And silence, he thought grimly, was worse.