The city was different at night.
Fog pooled thicker, smothering the lamplight, muting the clatter of carriages until only the distant toll of bells and the occasional hiss of gas flames remained. Elias drew his coat closer, his steps hollow on the cobblestones as he wound through the deserted streets.
The clocktower loomed above Grayharbor like a broken tooth, its upper windows shattered, its face frozen at ten past eleven. Once, it had marked the tides for sailors. Now, its gears were rusted, its interior abandoned. Few dared approach it.
At the base, the iron gate stood ajar. A gust of sea-wind pushed it open with a groan. Elias hesitated. His fingers brushed the folded slip of blank paper in his pocket—the note that had burned its words away.
He entered.
The stairwell spiraled upward, each step creaking under his weight. Dust thickened in his throat, cobwebs brushed his cheek. The air grew colder as he climbed, until his breath came in misty puffs.
At the top, a vast chamber opened where the gears of the clock had once turned. The moonlight cut through broken panes, slicing across the floor in silver beams.
He wasn't alone.
Figures stood in the shadows, hooded and silent. Five… no, six of them, forming a rough circle around the chamber. Their faces were hidden, their hands clasped before them.
One stepped forward. The hood fell back, revealing a woman with sharp cheekbones, her hair braided tightly down her back. Her eyes gleamed with unsettling clarity.
"Elias Graye," she said, as though reciting from a script. "You heard the word."
Elias swallowed hard. "Who are you?"
"We are those who remember." Her lips curved faintly, though it was not a smile. "We are shards of a whole that was broken. And you… you are a shard as well."
The others murmured in unison, voices low and resonant. The sound stirred the same vibration that had thrummed through Elias's bones on the docks.
He took a step back, but the woman's gaze held him.
"You think the Bureau safeguards knowledge? No. They devour it. They bury it beneath the Archive. But some truths will not stay buried."
Her hand lifted, palm outward. Lines of pale ink shimmered faintly across her skin—runes Elias could not decipher, twisting when he tried to focus on them.
"The shard spoke to you," she continued. "You heard its true name. Kaelith. Few survive the first whisper. Fewer still answer it. Yet here you stand."
"I don't understand," Elias whispered. "What do you want from me?"
The woman's expression softened, though her eyes remained cold.
"To listen," she said simply. "To carry what others cannot. To remember what others forget."
A sound broke through the chamber then—the groan of the clocktower's gears, unmoving for decades, shifting with a shudder. Dust rained down. The great frozen hand on the tower face twitched once, then stopped.
The circle of figures lowered their hoods. Their mouths moved, whispering the same word in unison:
Kaelith.
The vibration struck Elias like a hammer against the chest. His knees buckled, vision swimming. He clutched at the wall, gasping, as the broken moons outside seemed to flare brighter, their cracked surfaces bleeding silver light into the chamber.
When his sight cleared, the woman stood before him, holding out a small vial. Inside, liquid shimmered faintly, as though infused with starlight.
"Drink," she commanded. "If you wish to see what has been hidden."
Elias stared at the vial, trembling. Every rational part of his mind screamed to refuse, to run, to flee down the stairwell and never look back.
But the whisper pulsed again in his skull—soft, patient, inevitable.
Kaelith.
His hand rose, slow and unwilling, and closed around the vial.