Night slid over the city like ink poured along a ruler, straight and remorseless. The streets didn't darken so much as hush; shop signs forgot to creak, laundry forgot to stir. High above, Law Tower Three pricked the sky with a cold lantern light, its ribs of stone and script rising from a base stitched to the earth by clauses. At set intervals a pulse rolled outward—ifs, musts, therefore—smoothing rebel impulses the way a hand smooths a tablecloth.
They approached from beneath, through a drain that had once been a canal and before that a dream of clean water. Selene's shadow pried the grating open without a sound. Cyrus went first, shoulders turned to fit, axes on his back wrapped in felt to keep them from singing against stone. Tam, light as a rumor, carried the coil of wire and the bag of chalk. Luna brought the brass leaves, the magnets, and the voice that turned diagrams into doors. Aragorn carried the bell.
"Remember," Luna murmured as they crouched beneath a fan of rusted pipes, "the Binding sits two floors below the ground ledger hall. Entry requires a name that is spoken and believed. We will borrow one you are no longer using."
Aragorn nodded once. He could feel the old title like a coin under his tongue—heavy, cold, too large to swallow. "Spend it quick," he said. "Before interest accrues."
Selene guided them into a seam of darkness that seemed to be waiting for her; the walls narrowed, widened, then exhaled into a service corridor barely tall enough for Cyrus to stand. Lanterns slept in niches, each with a little plaque that read DO NOT WAKE WITHOUT A WITNESS. Tam stuck his tongue out at one as he passed, and the flame inside fluttered as if tasting the insult.
They reached a square door of gray stone inlaid with silver letters. The words weren't a warning; they were the lock:
ONLY THOSE WHO ARE WHAT THEY SAY
PASS WITH NAMES THAT HOLD THEIR WEIGHT
"Truth measure," Luna said softly. "Speak a name. If the place believes you, the door accepts it. If not, you get catalogued."
"Catalogued how?" Cyrus asked.
"Your name gets filed under 'pretender,'" Luna said. "Then any statute that applies to pretenders applies to you by default until the filing is amended."
Selene glanced at Aragorn. "You sure you want to drop a coin here?"
"No," he said. "But the jar is on the counter and we are thirsty."
He stepped forward. The bell warmed at his hip, a small sun hidden under canvas. The brand on his wrist—the zero—brightened to the color of old bone polished by handling. He spoke the title as if it belonged to someone he would never meet again.
"High Judge of the Seventh Proceeding."
The air folded around the syllables like paper swallowing a knife. The silver letters swam, tasting the name, testing it against themselves. Memory brushed his cheek: a dais, a bench, a gavel that was also a planet; his own voice explaining fairness to an immortal who had never been told no. The door shivered.
Truth loves context. The corridor had very little to give, and the Tower had much. The Tower decided the name fit well enough.
The door opened.
Beyond lay a stair that bent corners like knees and led to a chamber both simple and obscene: a circular room with a circular table and a circular hole in the floor where a spool of parchment turned slowly on its spindle. The parchment disappeared into the hole and returned, looped, as if the Tower fed itself its own rulings and called it a balanced diet.
At the table sat a figure in plain robes, hands folded, head bowed. No wings, no halo—only a pen and a cup of water, and the sense of someone who would prefer to be neither honored nor interrupted.
"A saint," Selene whispered, surprised despite herself. "Not their kind of saint. Ours. The kind who worked until their hands forgot how to beg."
The figure raised their head. The face was unremarkable and, for that, unforgettable: the kind you sit next to at a wake and tell secrets to by accident. Their eyes were the color of clear tea. "Welcome," the saint said. "We are the Witness."
Cyrus shifted his weight, ready in a way that read as respectful. Tam hid behind his thigh but peeked around, curiosity a glow under his fear.
"The Binding of Names," Luna said, not sitting. "We request access to amend a clause."
"Amendments require confession," the Witness replied. "Speak what you are trying not to say and write what you are trying not to write."
"Whose rule?" Selene asked dryly.
"Not theirs," the Witness said. "Not yours. The room's."
Aragorn stepped to the table. "If I confess," he said, "and write, will the Tower undo me with my own honesty?"
"The Tower cannot use what the room hears," the Witness said. "Nor can you leave with lies you have made truer by speaking them."
Luna's eyes met Aragorn's. She gave the smallest nod: this was the safest path likely to exist.
He drew the cup of water closer. Reflections flattened on its surface—the brand on his wrist, the bell under canvas, the faces of those who had trusted him to come back with more than explanations.
"I agreed," he said, "to be sealed. I agreed because I thought I couldn't be trusted—by my enemies, by my friends, by myself. I bargained for a gentler cage and signed with a name I no longer deserve."
The Witness watched him gently. "What do you want amended?"
"The part where my acceptance becomes consent indefinitely," he said. "I accepted once, under circumstances that would shame a courthouse. I do not consent now."
"Write it," the Witness said, and slid a slate forward with a stick of chalk like a white bone.
Luna moved to his shoulder, not touching, but present the way walls are present—useful, if you push right. Aragorn wrote:
AN ACCEPTANCE GIVEN UNDER EXIGENCY SHALL NOT BE CONSTRUED AS OPEN-ENDED CONSENT.
The words looked like they had always wanted to exist and were grateful to have been asked. The Witness read them and then, to everyone's surprise, smiled.
"Good craft," they said. "Now pay the fee."
Cyrus reached instinctively for coin he didn't carry. Selene's hand went to her shadow as if it might hold a purse. Tam, horror dawning, clutched his satchel.
"What fee?" Luna asked, even though her mouth had already flattened into the line that meant she knew.
"A name," the Witness said. "The room requires one name in exchange for unbinding another. It need not be yours, but it must be held by you, and you must let it go."
Aragorn's throat tightened around instinct. Names are levers; pry them up wrong and the world tips. He could spend the title he had spoken at the door, but titles are hats more than faces. He could spend one of his enemies' names, but that would be theft, not payment, and the room would spit it out like gristle.
"Take mine," Tam blurted, brave in the worst way. "I can run without it."
"No," Selene said, sharp enough to cut the offer in two. "You'll get lost, and the city will chew you into someone useful to it instead of someone useful to himself."
Cyrus exhaled through his nose. "I have two," he said. "One my mother gave me. One the army did. The army can keep theirs."
The Witness shook their head. "Purchased names are receipts, not gifts. The room does not accept receipts."
The bell warmed, and Aragorn knew, as one knows which step will creak in a childhood home, what the right coin was.
He set his palm on the canvas-wrapped metal. "There is a man," he said, "who was the High God of Time and Justice. He sat on a bench too high to see the floor. He believed the law was a kind machine if built by a careful hand. He is not here anymore."
Selene's breath caught. Luna turned her head, not away, but aside, giving privacy to a public act. Cyrus watched without blinking because soldiers know the value of not looking away. Tam leaned forward, despite himself, because children are always there when the world renames itself.
"I release his name," Aragorn said, steady. "I will not use it to enter doors or tell myself I am right. If anyone asks where he went, tell them he retired to a garden that does not grow."
The Witness inclined their head as if offered hospitality. "Accepted."
The chalk line of his amendment bled down the slate and into the floor, where it caught on the slow-turning spool of parchment and tattooed itself along an inch that would repeat every revolution. The brand on Aragorn's wrist cooled like iron after rain. Something heavy lifted from the hinge of his thoughts. The cage did not open. But one bar remembered it was only a bar.
The floor shifted.
Out of the round hole, a column of letters rose like steam and congealed into a figure in white with a face like an empty book and voice like a gavel with opinions. It wore no wings. It wore authority the way mountains wear snow—inevitable and occasionally fatal.
"The Auditor," Luna said through her teeth.
"Correction," the figure intoned. "Assistant Auditor. The Auditor is busy signing other cities."
"Busy man," Cyrus muttered. "Let's make him busier."
The Assistant's eyes, if absence can be eyes, rested on the Witness. "Unauthorized amendment detected."
"Authorized by the room," the Witness replied, serene as a held hand. "Proceed accordingly."
The Assistant turned to Aragorn. "Confession acknowledged. Title surrendered. Countermeasure: Confession must be ratified by a recognized authority, or the amendment will be treated as private conscience and ignored."
"That's your trick," Selene said, disgust sharp as citrus. "Make repentance administrative."
"Recognition is available," the Assistant continued, unfazed. "A saint may ratify."
All eyes returned to the Witness. They looked at Aragorn, then at the bell, then at the slate where the sentence still glowed like a coal. They set their pen down and folded their hands as if to pray, or to refuse.
"Do you believe," the Witness asked Aragorn softly, "that he is gone?"
Aragorn considered the bench, the gavel, the kindness that had broken because it was not tempered with doubt. He considered what his hands had done when they were sure they were right. He considered the boy he had almost dropped because a memory wanted him to be someone else.
"Yes," he said. "And I believe he should stay gone."
The Witness touched the slate with two fingers. "Ratified."
The Assistant paused as if listening to an earpiece only law can wear. "Acknowledged," it said. "Countermeasure withdrawn." It lifted its head toward the ceiling. "However. Presence of a bell of cancellation detected. Escalation authorized."
"Oh good," Cyrus said. "Escalation."
The far wall peeled into a doorway that hadn't existed—a bureaucrat's smile. Behind it lay a shaft that drifted heat and the smell of iron blooming in stone. Selene's eyes flicked to Luna; Luna's to Aragorn; Aragorn's to the bell.
"The Tower's heart," Luna said. "And below it…the old volcano the city pretends is extinct."
"Where the first Origin was chained," Selene added quietly. "Fire."
The Assistant folded into steam and sank back into the hole. The Witness stood. "I cannot go with you," they said, regret and resolve braided. "But I can give you this."
They reached under the table and produced a cord no thicker than a quill, woven from threads of midnight and morning. "A line between what you mean and what you say. It frays under fear. Keep a hand on it in there."
Cyrus slung it across his chest as if it were a sash of rank. Tam's eyes went round with the right kind of envy—the kind that inspires practice.
"Thank you," Aragorn said.
"Bring back a world where I am unnecessary," the Witness said. "I would like to retire to a garden that does grow."
They stepped through escalation's smile.
Stairs spiraled inside the shaft, cut into rock shot through with red memory. Heat licked their shins. The bell grew almost too warm to touch, but not quite; it remembered furnaces with fondness. Far below, something breathed the way a kiln breathes. Tam wiped sweat off his nose and pretended it was courage.
At a landing marked with a sigil that looked like a flame deciding whether to be a letter, they stopped. On a plinth sat a guardian carved from basalt, its chest cored with a crystal that flickered like a heartbeat under black glass. Runes ran along its arms: EVERY STRIKE MAKES ME STRONGER.
Cyrus smiled without humor. "I hate those."
"Don't hit it," Luna said. "Starve it."
Selene laid a palm on the floor. Shadows pooled around the guardian's feet, thick as oil, slowing whatever agreement it had with the stone. Aragorn raised his hand and called a flame that didn't burn, only judged, and pointed it not at the guardian but at the sentence on its arms. The brand on his wrist warmed to the exact temperature of a promise kept.
"Every strike makes me stronger," Aragorn read, and then pinched the hinge that made the boast universal. "No. Every strike makes you comprehensible."
The runes stuttered. The next blow Cyrus landed wasn't a strike. It was a statement, and statements don't feed the guardian. They define it. The basalt shuddered, confused by grammar, then cracked along a seam it hadn't known was a seam until someone labeled it.
"Down," Selene said, eyes lifting as if she could see the Auditor's quill through stone. "Before the next escalation learns to read."
They slipped past while the guardian remembered how to be rubble. Heat rose in sheets. The tunnel opened into a cavern whose ceiling was a cathedral of cooled waves. In the center, chained to a dais of iron law, burned a font of fire that didn't flicker. It waited. It had been waiting a long time.
"Origin," Luna breathed. "Fire."
Cyrus, sweating like a forge that tells the truth, grinned. "Finally. A problem I understand."
Aragorn stepped toward the dais, the bell humming in agreement with the flame, the zero on his wrist answering with its own small gravity. He could feel the way the Tower had written the chain—beautifully, cruelly, a necklace around a throat told it was a collar for its own good.
"Careful," Selene warned. "Origins burn bargains first."
"Then let's make a better one," Aragorn said.
From the shaft above, a draft fell cold as paperwork. The Auditor proper had begun to descend.
"Fast," Luna said.
"Brave," Cyrus said.
"Quiet," Selene said, and the darkness obeyed her.
Aragorn set his palm between fire and law.
"Let's renegotiate."
— End of Episode 4 —
Key powers this episode: Old Title (spent to open the gate), Room of Witness (confession and ratification), Clause Editing on constructs, Shadow binding, Oath cord (intent-speech tether).
Focus cast: Aragorn, Selene, Luna, Cyrus, Tam, the Witness, Assistant Auditor.