Morning breaks like a bruise over the city, purple first and then the yellow of an old knife. Smoke from the temple ruin folds into the low light and turns the streets the color of ash. Cyrus leads Aragorn along an artery of alleys where laundry lines and prayer flags hang limp, their threads occasionally fluttering even when the wind does not move—signs that parts of the world are sliding against each other.
At the next corner, Cyrus puts a hand to Aragorn's chest and nods toward the boulevard. "Tax hour," he murmurs. "Keep your head down unless you want a hymn stuck through it."
A procession advances down the open road with bureaucratic precision: white-robed clerks bearing ledger-rods, armored angels marching in pairs, and at the center a gilded palanquin where a priest-scribe lounges beneath gauze. The palanquin's canopy is carved with punctuation marks—hooks and dots and bars—that catch the sunlight and throw it as lances across the crowd. Civilians stand in lines, wrists bared. When a ledger-rod touches flesh, light leaks out in thin strands, siphoned along grooves into crystal tithing jars. Children sway, suddenly sleepy; elders slump as if a chair has been pulled out from under their years.
"The tithe is life," Cyrus says quietly. "A breath here, a heartbeat there. Small sums today, bankruptcy tomorrow. They call it mercy because it's not a blade."
Aragorn tastes iron in the air again—the metallic tang of words being enforced. The brand on his wrist warms in sympathetic anger. He studies the flow of power, the way each rod drives a single clause into a person's body and invites the body to agree. It is consent pried open with a crowbar. He can see the sentence. He can also see where to cut it.
"Three seconds," he reminds himself, as if speaking to the pain waiting with its finger raised.
He steps from the alley into the light.
The nearest clerk-scribe's mouth shapes sacred syllables. Aragorn lifts his hand, fingers spread as if feeling for rain, and pinches the connecting word that makes the sentence legal—an if that shouldn't be there, a should twisted into a must. It snaps between his fingers like a thread. In a circle of ten paces around him, the rods fail to bite. Light refuses to leave flesh. The jars remain dark.
The crowd doesn't cheer. They don't dare. They simply exhale like swimmers touching a wall at the end of a lane.
The failure travels up the rods into the wrists that hold them. Angels pivot, heads tilting with mechanical grace. The priest in the palanquin pushes his veils aside, pupils narrowing to the bell hanging at Aragorn's hip. "Contestation," he says, delighted. "A fugitive clause."
Cyrus appears at Aragorn's left like a door slamming shut. "We do this fast," he growls. "Cut, grab, gone."
Aragorn nods. He plucks a second thread—elsewhere, meanwhile—and phrases in the clerks' mouths turn to meaningless breath. Cyrus uses the stutter to heave a child out of line and shove him toward the alley. A woman with chalk on her fingers meets the child with open arms and runs without looking back.
A spear of sunlight howls down from the nearest wing. Aragorn catches the thread of time and blinks the world; the spear petrifies into glass for three seconds of possibility. Cyrus tackles a pair of elders into the alley's shadow. Aragorn releases the thread just before pain blooms behind his eye, and the spear crashes into stone with a sing of heated gravel.
The priest-scribe finally rises, robe pooling like spilled milk. "The law is merciful," he croons, raising a pen like a knife. "Lay down your bell and we will only remove what you will not miss."
Aragorn rolls his shoulder to shake feeling back into his arm. "What I won't miss," he says, "is you speaking here."
He reaches not for time but for the smallest hinge in the sentence the priest is assembling. He cancels a single command verb as it is born. The sound that follows is not a bell; it is the clatter of a word dropping to the floor before it can be said. The priest's pen scratches uselessly in air, unable to find a law that will stand.
Something moves above them, delicate as a spider crossing a glass bowl.
In the shade thrown by a hanging banner, a woman folds out of darkness like a silken knife. Her hair holds moonlight that shouldn't exist at this hour; her eyes assess, not admire. She stands where a shadow should be and yet remains more real than the wall behind her. The soldiers don't see her. The priest does, and goes very still.
Selene steps forward until her bare shadow overlaps Aragorn's. "If you're going to pick a fight with daylight," she murmurs, voice cool, "you should at least be good at running."
Cyrus grins without looking. "He's good at stopping things," he says. "I'm good at carrying them once they stop."
"Mm." Selene's gaze flicks to the bell. "And I'm good at making the people doing the killing forget they were ever here."
She throws her hand and the boulevard lengthens into night. It does not grow dark for everyone; only the taxmen feel dusk fall across their senses. Their feet find cobbles that no longer exist; their hands grope for ledgers that slide away like minnows. The civilians remain in daylight, confused to see their persecutors walk in place as if through tar.
The priest-scribe does not stumble. He steps sideways into a layer of reality only he is licensed to inhabit and lifts his pen again. Light gathers at its tip, not flame but punctuation—an exclamation point shaped like a nail.
Aragorn lifts his palm flame. It is small and honest and refuses to be dramatic. When the puncture of law drives toward him, the flame licks the intention in the stroke and eats it like a moth eats cloth. The nail falls as harmless brass.
Selene watches the exchange and, for the first time, lets surprise show. "You're not just a thief of seconds," she says. "You're a judge."
"Was," Aragorn answers, and feels the word bounce around a chamber where memories should be.
"Former titles don't save neighbors," Cyrus cuts in, yanking another citizen from the queue. "But former titles do make angels mad. We've got about twenty breaths before the choir decides to sing."
The choir decides to sing on breath nineteen. Sound arrives like a wall. The angels' wings vibrate with syllables that can push kneecaps to cobblestones and hearts into self-accusation. People clutch their ears. A child laughs and then screams, unable to tell the difference between the two sensations.
Aragorn can't cancel all of it. He chooses a single note and removes its permission to exist here. The harmony stutters. The wall develops a doorway exactly wide enough for a fleeing line of civilians. Selene tears a seam in the shadows to lay a hidden path along the edge of the boulevard, and Cyrus, swearing happily, becomes a moving barricade.
The priest-scribe steps into Aragorn's reach as if he has not seen dozens of his collection points burn to nonsense. "You are unauthorized," he whispers. "So let us authorize you." He raises his pen toward Aragorn's wrist brand, aiming to rewrite the zero into a manageable digit.
Aragorn meets pen with bell.
He doesn't strike. He only lifts the bell between brand and pen. Its presence creates a small grammar in which the priest's clause cannot find a subject. The nib scratches across nothing. The priest's hand shivers. For the first time his eyes focus not on the bell or the brand but on Aragorn's face, as if a veil in his mind has slid aside to reveal an old portrait.
"Oh," the priest says softly. "It's you."
"Who?" Aragorn asks, knowing the answer only as a feeling of stairs rising into fog.
"The reason the law wears armor," the priest says, half wonder, half fear.
A trumpet blows above the clouds, long and lazy, as if the person to whom it belongs has been waiting to be needed. The angels on the boulevard look up with relief. The clerk-scribes breathe easier. Even the palanquin's poles seem lighter, as if the house staff expects to be dismissed soon.
Selene's eyes narrow. "They're sending a herald," she says. "One of the auditors. Not the kind that checks numbers."
Cyrus spits a blood-thread onto the cobbles and grinds it under his heel. "Then we're done here."
They are, because more is not the same as better. Selene collapses her shadow-path, gathering stragglers with the brisk tenderness of a midwife. Cyrus hauls the last of the elders into the alley and wedges a barrel so the press of bodies doesn't crush anyone against the brick. Aragorn backs toward the mouth of the lane, canceling whatever verbs try to make arrest lawful in his immediate vicinity.
Before he goes, he leans close enough to the priest's veils that their breath warms the same inch of air. "Tell your choir director," he says, "that this street has discovered the joy of bad acoustics."
The priest smiles, and there is a melancholy in it, like a man recognizing an old song in a new bar. "He already knows you're singing again."
They retreat into the maze, moving fast but not frantic, because panic gets people killed and calm gets them almost killed, which is better. The bell keeps time against Aragorn's hip. It does not ring. It doesn't have to. The sky's attention has been acquired.
At a fork that smells of wet lime and soup, Selene stops them with a palm. "Test over," she says, studying Aragorn head to foot. "You're the one I was warned about. The one who might break the bars or break the cage with the animals still inside."
"What did the warning tell you to do?" Aragorn asks.
"To watch which you choose," she says. "And then either join you or kill you."
Cyrus snorts. "Let's aim for join."
Selene tilts her head. "So far, judge, you cut the law to save breath, not to make the air quieter for yourself. That's one mark in your ledger." Her gaze slides to the bell. "But you carry an alarm that makes the worst people look up. That's one mark the other way."
Aragorn opens his mouth and then closes it. Honesty is a habit, not a tool. He lets the silence be the answer it is.
"Very well," Selene says, as if concluding a private hearing. "I'll lend you my night until you teach me why you burn what you burn." She steps past him, eyes leaving him last of all. "This way. The Nexus will want to see your brand before the auditor sees your neck."
They move again. Alleys trade places like cards in the hands of a lazy dealer. Twice, walls try to forget they are walls, and twice Selene's shadow presses them back into being. Aragorn keeps his fingers loose and ready around seconds he cannot afford to spend. Cyrus hums a soldier's tune under his breath; the rhythm keeps the people behind him from sprinting.
Behind them, the boulevard cleans its wounds with fire. The choir retunes. The gilded palanquin adjusts its veils. High above, something legal and lethal begins its descent, and the air grows crystalline with expectation.
The bell does not ring.
It only warms.
— End of Episode 2 —
Key powers this episode: Clause Cancel (micro—removes a key verb/connector within a small radius), Judgment Flame (burns compulsion in a strike), Chronos Bare (3‑second blink, used sparingly under backlash risk).
Focus cast: Aragorn, Cyrus, Selene.