The underground chamber felt like a held breath that had forgotten how to exhale. Candles shivered in their saucers as if listening for their own names; chalk sigils glowed then dulled, a heartbeat out of rhythm. Aragorn pressed two fingers to the corner of his eye and found the familiar tenderness there—backlash nesting behind the brow like a thorny bird. The pain wasn't a wound; it was a receipt.
"How many?" Cyrus asked, setting a crate across the door as a bar.
"Three uses," Aragorn said. "Three seconds each." He did not add what the fourth second had cost him long ago. That ledger remained sealed even to himself.
From a side passage came the hush of leather on stone, the soft click of a lantern hood opening and closing to teach the flame discretion. A woman with ink on her fingertips stepped into the circle of the bell's quiet. Her hair was the color of pale parchment; her eyes were a blue that refused to be mistaken for kind. She carried a brass case under one arm like a scholar's bible and smelled faintly of sage and iron.
"Luna," Cyrus said, half-relief, half-warning.
"Aragorn," she replied, testing the name's balance on her tongue. "The brand on the wrist matches the sketch, the bell matches nothing I've ever diagrammed, and the city's grammar is having night terrors because of both. So yes, hello."
She knelt without asking and flipped open the brass case. Inside, plates of thin metal nested like the leaves of a mechanical flower. Each leaf was engraved with lines that did not stay where they were put. Letters crawled, reforming into different clauses when the light shifted. Luna pinned the corners with magnets and clicked her tongue.
"The Law Tower—Number Three—sits on a strata of conditional statements," she said. "Think of a lighthouse, except it robs ships instead of saving them. It broadcasts mandatory ifs and musts to every district on a timed schedule. It also houses the seal on your higher functions."
Aragorn looked down at the brand on his wrist. The zero-sigil warmed, as if listening to a familiar lullaby played badly.
"What does the seal demand?" he asked.
"Three anchors," Luna said, tapping the plates. "One, memory—chunks of it, to be taken as tithe whenever you exceed your current allotment of interference. Two, name—yours can be written or unwritten by those licensed to hold the quill. Three, witness—any miracle you perform must be ratified by a recognized authority or it will be undone at scale."
"That explains why saving a handful holds," Cyrus muttered, "but trying to save a street smears off."
Luna nodded once. "To unseal, we have to reach the Tower's core and amend the clause that binds you. The Auditor they're sending will arrive long before we can do it casually."
From above, faint as rain on glass, came the bleat of a horn drawing a single line through the afternoon. Everyone in the chamber winced as if a cold finger had flicked their teeth.
"You'll come with us?" Cyrus asked.
"I'll keep the map honest," Luna said. "And I'll keep him honest." She closed the case. "Backlash is not bravery. We need you whole."
They moved out with the bell wrapped in canvas and tied against Aragorn's hip, its weight familiar now, like a promise made in a courtroom and kept on a battlefield. Selene joined them at the first junction, eyes still rimmed in night despite the sun above ground.
"Upstairs is broth and prayers," she murmured. "Down here is rust and bad history. Keep close."
The tunnels were the bones of failed plans—rail tracks that connected nowhere, conduits that once hummed with bright ideas and now echoed with water. Twice they passed a wall where an older law had been painted over with a newer one; the brushstrokes had not cured properly, and letters bubbled like blisters. Selene's shadow smoothed them by touch so they wouldn't pop in anyone's face.
At a narrowing, a door of hammered brass blocked the way. No handle, only a plaque the size of a hand with a sentence engraved on it: ENTER BY YOUR OWN CONSENT. Beneath, a thin slot waited like a mouth that charged admission.
"Oath Gate," Luna said. "Step through and you sign. Step around and you trigger countermeasures that burn the signed consent into your bones anyway. The ethical kind of trap."
Cyrus snorted. "Ethical like a clerk who says please before he steals your breath."
Aragorn bent, reading the sentence the way a smith reads grain. "If I null the preposition that ties entry to consent," he mused, "it becomes two statements that ignore each other."
"Do it," Selene said, softly urgent. "The Auditor's shadow just crossed a steeple."
Aragorn placed his branded wrist to the plaque. The zero warmed; the bell hummed; the sentence unstitched in the middle with the sound of thread parting. The door sighed back into the wall, embarrassed to have postured so long.
On the far side, a gallery opened into a cistern where cold water stood neck-deep in a stone throat. Catwalks circled the pool, slick with condensation. In the water a shimmering net of letters drifted just below the surface, silver as fish and twice as quick.
"Don't break the net," Luna warned. "It records unauthorized crossings."
"Define unauthorized," Cyrus said.
"Anyone without a halo or an excuse," she replied.
They chose the narrowest catwalk and inched forward, hands skimming the wet wall for balance. Halfway across, a child's cough echoed from a ledge below—a small sound followed by the panic that always follows being seen by chance. A boy peered up from a cranny where the catwalk's shadow met stone. He had a satchel and eyes too large for safety.
"Hey!" Cyrus hissed. "Who put you—"
The boy flinched, slipped, hit the water. The net brightened as if fed. Luna swore. Selene stabbed a finger, and the boy's shadow thickened like a rope—but the water dragged him sideways, toward a glass pipe where letters churned like a mill.
Aragorn moved.
Three seconds is not a lot. It is just enough to be a god if perfect and a corpse if wrong. He blinked time, and the water crystallized into a slow thought. The boy's limbs became deliberate; the net tangled as if trying to remember which knot to tie next. Aragorn stepped off the catwalk onto a moment that could not bear weight, reached, and caught the boy's collar.
Pain went off behind his eye like a struck bell. This one came with something extra: a memory slipping its leash. He smelled summer rain on hot stone. He saw a door that was also a sentence. He heard a voice saying, gently, "We will give you a kinder prison, child," and recognized his own agreement.
He almost dropped the boy.
Cyrus' hand clamped his elbow. Selene's shadow-cable grabbed the boy's belt and hauled. Luna slapped a strip of copper across the nearest support pillar and hissed a word that chewed the net's attention like a dog with a shoe. The three seconds ended with a crash like crockery; water returned to being water in a hurry, angry to have been paused.
They sprawled together on the catwalk. The boy coughed and coughed until the coughing couldn't find anything else to do and stopped. He looked at the four of them with awe and calculation, the way street kids look at miracles—wondering what the invoice will say.
"Name," Cyrus said, gentler than his axes would suggest.
"Tam," the boy rasped. "Runner for the soup lines. There's a back way to the Nexus from here. I was… I was trying to prove I could do it."
"You did," Selene said, tying a knot in his satchel cord so it wouldn't betray him again. "Now prove you can follow instructions."
Tam grinned, because children forgive faster than gods and make worse promises.
They hurried on. The cistern let them out into a switchback that climbed past niches where saints of old laws sat headless and bored. Above, the horn sounded again, closer. In the stuttering light that filtered down through grates, dust motes arranged themselves into sentences and fell apart before they could be read.
"What did you see?" Luna asked quietly without looking at Aragorn. "When you stepped into the water."
"A bargain," he said, and let the word ring until it stopped echoing. "I agreed to a gentler cage."
"That's how they sealed you," Luna said. "An acceptance can become a foundation stone. We can break stones. We just have to do it where the ceiling will not come down on the city."
They reached a door that wasn't there until Selene convinced it to be. Beyond lay a room with a table, a map, a jug of water that had been generosity three hours ago and was now strategy. The map was the Tower's plates mirrored in charcoal on linen, annotated in three hands: tidy, jagged, and furious.
Luna spread her brass leaves beside it. Lines matched lines; disagreements became instructions. "There," she said, pointing to a knot of clauses at the Tower's base. "The Binding of Names. That's where they keep the script that can unwrite you."
Aragorn touched the linen where she pointed. The bell warmed as if a small animal had curled around it for comfort.
"We go tonight," Cyrus said. "Before the Auditor drops his truth down our throats."
"Tonight," Selene agreed. "Shadows are longer. And some of us work for them."
Luna ran a fingertip along one clause, then another, like a harpist testing strings. "Understand: to get in, we will need a name. The gate requires one to be spoken and believed. If we use yours, they will tighten the seal and call it consent. If we use mine, they will take my license. If we use his—" she tipped her chin toward Cyrus "—they will declare the Oath he carries null, and the people bound to him will suffer."
"Use mine," Tam said immediately, proud of his own courage.
"No," the three adults said at the same time, startling the map.
Aragorn breathed once, slow. "There is a name I can spend," he said. "A title that belongs to a man who is not here anymore. It may still open doors that should have stayed shut."
Selene's mouth softened, the iron in her gaze tempering to something almost kind. "If the man is truly gone," she said, "then let his ghost do some lifting."
A hush settled, the kind that arrives when a plan finally chooses its shape. Cyrus rolled his shoulders like a boulder preparing to be useful. Luna began to repack her plates, everything in its place because the place is part of the spell. Tam watched as carefully as a pickpocket learning a parish priest's route.
The bell, under its canvas, warmed a fraction more.
From the street above, a new sound fell down the stairwells and through the cracks: a pen scratching against something not paper. All five of them looked up. The ceiling dust trembled into fine lines, and for a second Aragorn thought he could see the letter that line would become.
"The Auditor is signing the summons," Luna said. "We are officially expected."
"Good," Cyrus said, baring his teeth.
Selene blew out the room's candles with a thought. "Then let's be on time."
Aragorn set his hand on the bell. The zero-sigil on his wrist pulsed once, a heartbeat agreeing to more work. He had three seconds, and pain, and friends, and a city that did not know its own strength yet. He also had a title he could spend like a coin he no longer believed in.
"Tonight," he said, and the word behaved itself.
— End of Episode 3 —
Key powers this episode: Chronos Bare (3‑second time blink; severe memory‑linked backlash), Clause Cancel (door consent split), Judgment Flame (compulsion burn), Shadowwork (Selene), Origin Decipher/Mapwork (Luna).
Focus cast: Aragorn, Cyrus, Selene, Luna, Tam (new).