They give it a name to make it smaller: a disturbance on the river.
Rhosyn brings the order at dusk, her coat damp from fog, a smear of soot on her cheek she hasn't noticed. "South docks," she says, handing me a slate sealed in wax. "Warehouses seven through ten. Witnesses say smoke with no fire, screams with no bodies, and birds won't land on the roofs. Council wants you there in person."
"They want to see if the Abyss answers me," I say.
"They want to see if you answer them," she returns, and waits while I break the seal.
The slate holds a map of the docks and three names: Rhosyn, Arcanist Therin, Initiate Varo. A squad of three, plus me. Not an army. Not a leash, either. A leash would be heavier.
We move through Bastion at twilight when the lamps swing low and the city smells like coal and citrus peels and the river's cold breath. Therin meets us at the foot of a stair that spits us into the warehouses—winter hair, staff humming like a hive in his grip. The initiate is all nerves and jaw, sweat slicking his brow, knuckles white on his sword. He tries to stand taller when my shadow brushes his boot.
"Varo," I say. "Breathe."
He does, a shaky inhale he hadn't noticed he'd stopped taking.
The warehouses crouch along the quay like teeth. Rope coils slump like sleeping snakes. Barges tap the pilings with hollow knocks. Warehouse Seven's door is propped open with a broken crate. Something has charred the lintel from the inside. No light within. No movement. The air tastes wrong—metallic and sweet, like fruit left too long in a sealed jar.
Rhosyn signs with two fingers—we go—and the four of us slip into the dark.
It breathes us in.
Inside, the ceiling ribs vanish into shadow; ropes hang like kelp. Therin lifts his staff; a ring of pale light blooms and clings to the iron nails, reluctant to go farther. The floor bears drag marks in looping arcs that begin and end in nothing. I hear water where there shouldn't be water. The river is outside. The river is here.
Varo stiffens. "Do you hear—"
The whisper arrives like fog seeping through cloth. Not words—pressure. Not voices—reminders. A cradle-song sung in reverse. My shadows lift their heads and scent the air; their posture mirrors a wolf pack's when they catch something that is not prey and not predator but home.
A smear of darkness pools under the stacked crates near the center, where the floor has warped and gone soft. Soot and wet wood meet in a bruise. Rhosyn points. I nod.
"Therin," I murmur. "Dispel first. I don't want to cut what I can close."
He sets the staff's butt down, rings spinning faster until the sound bites. A lattice of copper light crawls over the boards. The bruise drinks it like rain on dust. For a heartbeat the warehouse looks normal. Then the bruise widens.
"It's not a rift," Therin says quietly. "Something hungry. Something that remembers a door."
The floor opens.
The first thing out is a hand, white as paper and wet to the wrist. It grabs the edge of the boards and pulls itself free without the rest of a body attached. Fingers flex, nails black. Then an arm follows that isn't an arm—tendons of smoke, bone like riverglass, a face without features pushing up as if through ice. The air goes colder. Varo's blade shudders in his hand.
"Hold," I say, and step forward.
Shadows flood to meet the thing like water meeting water. There's a pressure when they touch, like two tides arguing about which way gravity goes. The thing splits, doubling, its edges smearing. It smells like damp ash and old sorrow. Beneath all that: a sweet, rotting note that means worship to someone, somewhere.
"Back," Rhosyn orders the initiate, and he obeys without shame, adjusting his stance so his fear has room to breathe but not rule him.
The thing reaches for me. My veils rise—a sleeve of cool night—and its grasp slows, thickens, the way tar swallows a thrown stone. I move sideways, to draw it off the others, to pull its center away from the worst churn in the floor. It follows like a moth follows heat, except its hunger is colder. The second one sidles for Rhosyn. She doesn't wait; her hooked blade catches the air where a knee ought to be and the thing folds in that spot as if remembering what joints were. She steps through with soldier's economy and tears it wider. It goes thin, thinner, and howls without sound.
Therin's next ring detonates into runes that hang in the air like snow. Where they land, the ash-thing hisses and shrinks. Where they miss, the floor sours darker. He grits his teeth. "It's keyed to—something old. Someone fed it with belief."
The word belief snaps a different part of me awake. My shadows answer like a choir.
Little ember, the Goddess purrs at the edge of hearing, amusement and pride braided together. They prayed into a hole and the hole learned to answer. Show them a better altar.
"Veyra!" Rhosyn—warning, and not for the thing. The floor yawns.
Boards break. The river speaks up through the gap, not with water but with remembrance: faces that leaned to pray here, palms that pressed the wood, coins dropped through for luck. The current turns those offerings over like tongues worrying a tooth.
"Varo," I say without looking, "get to the door. Anyone runs past you, trip them first, ask later."
"Y-yes," he says, and his boots scrape from my left as he moves.
I step into the bruise.
My shadow doesn't just spill—it roots. Threads push between boards, find the seam where soaked timber meets pilings, and latch like ivy with iron thorns. I drop my hand and the darkness obeys, a net thrown, a lid pressed down. The ash-thing stutters and tries to go thin enough to pass through my weave.
"Therin. On my count."
He understands without being told what count, and that is why I will keep him alive. The rings slow—three, two, one—and when I yank my net tight he drives a spike of copper light through the middle as if nailing stormcloth to a mast.
It holds.
The thing thrashes, slips, divides—two, then four, then a dozen paper-thin hands scrabbling for edges. My net sings with the strain. Splinters lance my calves where boards buckle. Cold creeps up my bones like water in winter boots. I think of our kitchen floor wet with soup, of my sister laughing while she tried to mop it with a towel that just made a different mess, and I yank harder.
"Rhosyn!" I call.
She's already there, blade hooking, hauling. She doesn't cut; she drags, pulling the largest piece free of the net's edge and flinging it bodily into Therin's waiting lattice, where it chars from ash to smoke to nothing and the smell of damp grief fades to the smell of iron.
For a heartbeat we gain ground.
Then the warehouse door slams. Not open. Shut. The draft dies. The scent changes.
A slow clap comes from the loft above.
"Elegant," says a voice I know and do not—like honey over glass. A man leans on the railing, silhouette cut against the weaker dusk beyond the high windows. Red silk at his cuff. A signet glints. Not Darius. The ring bears MORVAIN—the merchant house whose ledgers could buy and sell soft kings.
"You brought a rift-eater to a faith-slick floor and tied it," he says approvingly. "The Council's little monster is teachable."
Rhosyn's blade lifts a fraction. "Identify yourself."
He ignores her. "There's a cost to every binding, Empress. Question is—who pays it?"
He flicks two fingers. Shadows pour from the loft like spilled ink—not mine. Men drop from the beams, boots absorbing the thud. Masks cover their faces to the nose, cloth red to match the cuff—Morvain salt-men, dock-knives who sell their hands to whatever ledger orders it. Half land behind Varo. Half between us and the back egress.
Of course. Not just a disturbance: a stage set. Not just a test: a trap with an audience and an accountant.
"Varo!" I snap.
"I see them!" His voice cracks, but his feet do not. He meets the first with a parry that would have been good enough if the man hadn't fought dirty; a knee comes up, Varo folds with a wheeze—and a second later, to his credit, he headbutts the man's teeth out and takes the knife anyway.
Rhosyn goes for the handful on our side like a storm taught to walk: hook—rip—step—elbow. Two fall. A third learns why you do not lead with your wrist into a captain's blade. Therin flings light in short bars that stick to throats and wrists when they can, to eyes when they must.
The net jerks in my hands. The ash-thing tries to split again, to slide out the sides while my attention is precious inches away. I put my knee into the boards and make myself a hinge. Pain lances white up my thigh. I feed it to the darkness. The net cinches tighter. Wood groans.
"Enough," says the man above, bored now. He tosses something small and glittering. It lands at my feet with a sound like a coin hitting a plate and cracks open.
The warehouse goes colder than river stone.
The thing under my net surges, not bigger but more confident—as if someone whispered its true name into its ear. My weave blanches like frost in reverse. A hole opens in the middle and I taste a place I remember: the Abyss, raw and sweet and endless, where nothing weighs anything unless a will decides it should.
Little ember, the Goddess purrs again, pleasure dark as wine. Say it with me.
I do not speak aloud. I consent.
Shadows bloom from me—not just down, not just out, but through. Every line I am, every rib, every knucklebone, every tooth lays claim to the space around it. The net stops being a trick and becomes an edict. The hole remembers that everything here is supposed to be heavy and hard and obedient to edges.
The surge buckles. The ash-thing cries with no mouth and finally breaks the right way: into powder that is only powder, into wet that is only wet. The bruise on the floor shudders and begins to shrink.
The room doesn't cheer. It lunges.
Morvain knives converge, desperate to change the story while there's still story to change. One comes for my back. Cas appears between him and me like a rumor taking shape. He spins the man's wrist, steals the knife mid-arc, and uses it to slice the strap that holds another's breastplate in place. "You do love a warehouse," he says lightly, as if commenting on the weather.
"You're late," I answer, because every other answer would be something that exposes more than a knife ever could.
"I brought a gift." He kicks the glittering thing the Morvain man dropped; it skitters, sputters, and goes dull. "Counter-sigils. Don't ask who from."
Another red-cuffed man lunges for Therin; Cas trips him and smiles like a fox that's already eaten the hen. "And I'm here strictly as a civic-minded spectator."
"Then spectate with your hands," Rhosyn grunts, hooking and wrenching a shoulder out of joint.
We work. It isn't pretty. It is efficient. Varo finds a rhythm, fear melted into competence; his blade work is ugly but he does not get fancy with ugly, which saves him. Therin's bars of light lose their polish and gain teeth. Rhosyn moves like a short sermon on consequences. I keep one hand on the warehouse's wound and the other free enough to oppose whatever bright idea throws itself within arm's reach.
Up in the rafters, the Morvain man claps again, slow. "This is a ledger," he calls down. "The Tower writes assets on one side, losses on the other. We're adjusting the columns. If you don't like what your name adds up to, Empress, change the math."
"You just tried," I say, and my voice echoes wrong because I'm still holding a part of a door closed that wants to learn to be a mouth. "I adjusted back."
He laughs once. "Then we understand each other." He steps away from the railing and vanishes into the dark like a coin into a pocket.
The last knife-man decides he has no paycheck rich enough to be worth his current position and rolls for the door. Rhosyn lets him. I do, too. The story of what he saw needs legs.
The floor still hums. The bruise is the size of my hand now, then a coin, then nothing. When it goes, the chill lifts. The warehouse breathes a damp, ordinary breath.
I let go.
My knee shakes. The bruised boards don't. I stand slow, like a woman who knows exactly which muscles are going to shout at her tomorrow. Rhosyn sheathes her blade with a sound like the clean close of a drawer.
Therin leans the staff against his shoulder and exhales. "Keyed to Morvain sigils," he says, eyes on the glittering husk Cas kicked. "Altered with… something devotional."
"Devotional to what?" Varo asks, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, pupils still large with adrenaline.
I meet his eyes. "To me. Or to what they think I am."
The boy swallows. Therin's mouth tightens. Rhosyn looks at the ceiling as if she could see the man on the beam through timber and tar. "We'll need names," she says. "Ledger names. The Council won't ignore this, even if they'll pretend to."
Cas spins the stolen knife once and offers it hilt-first to Varo. "Keep it. Souvenir," he says, then glances at me, gray eyes unreadable and smiling all at once. "You are good at choosing where the blood stops."
"Tonight," I say, and the warehouse hears me, and the river, and the shadows, and something else that nestles in my bones and purrs.
We step into the fog. Shouts rise farther down the quay as watchmen realize the part they should have been playing. Behind us, Warehouse Seven settles with a creak, just wood again, just nails, just the memory of hands that dropped coins and prayers through a floor because a merchant told them the river would answer.
Rhosyn falls in beside me, matching my slower pace without remarking it. "Council will call this a success," she says. "Darius will call it a provocation. Morvain will call it an opening bid."
"And you?" I ask.
"I call it the first time tonight that I'm sure we came out alive by choice and not accident." She glances at Cas over my shoulder. "Keep your fox on a leash."
"He isn't mine," I say.
Cas laughs softly behind us. "That's what all the best stories say, right before they become true."
The river knocks a barge against a piling with a hollow thunk. Lamps smear light across water that wants to carry every secret to sea, slow and patient. The city listens to itself breathe.
When we reach the street, a boy runs past bare-footed and stops dead at the sight of me, sugar stuck to his cheek. His eyes flare. He bows his head because something in him wants to, and then looks up again because something in him has to. "My ma says you're trouble," he says, earnest. "My da says you'll save us."
"What do you say?" I ask.
He thinks, tongue pushing his cheek. "I think you don't miss."
I nod as if he'd given a report. He grins and sprints away, shouting to a sister I can't see.
Rhosyn snorts. "There. A balanced verdict."
"Balanced is a word the Council loves," Therin mutters.
"Balance is a scale," I say. "I'm the hand."
And the night takes that, too, and tucks it somewhere near its heart for later.