Law Tower Three did not sleep so much as hold its breath and count. Every window was an eyelid with a number written on the inside; every stair agreed with its neighbors about how many feet were allowed to pass. At the core, below the hymn floors and above the confession well, the ledger hall rotated slowly like a planet that believed orbit was a virtue.
Objective, whispered over bowls of broth before midnight: reach the Registrar, the script that could unwrite a person with a well-formed sentence, and replace its bite with due process. Secondary: seed clauses that protected aliases, nicknames, and names-in-progress so people could live without needing permission from their birth certificates.
"Names are levers," Luna said, laying out brass leaves on the table. "We're going to sand the fulcrum."
"Good," Cyrus grunted. "I never liked being moved by people I didn't invite."
They went in through a maintenance shaft that had memorized boredom and was offended to be useful. Selene wrapped them in a night so thin it looked like honesty; patrols walked past without feeling excluded. Tam tied his chalk to his wrist with string and breathed fast the way children do when they're excited and pretending not to be.
Halfway up, a gate asked for a name. Not out loud; in the way the floor warmed or cooled under each foot, the way the air pressed letters against the tongue like pills. Selene tilted her head. "It wants the one we answer to," she murmured. "Not the one we brag with."
Aragorn considered the coin he had spent in the Binding room, the title that was no longer his. He tasted three other options that would open the gate and shatter something delicate. He let them go. "Stranger of Three Seconds," he said instead—the name the city had given him when rumors ran faster than he did.
The floor approved. It liked local names. The others followed suit.
"Night Seamstress," Selene said with a dry smile. The floor purred.
"Steel-Mouth," Cyrus offered. The floor grinned back, the heat of a forge.
"Leaf-Sorter," Luna said, and the air made room for someone who fixes what people break.
"Runner," Tam declared, trying on pride like a new hat. The stairs pulled him up the next riser as if in on the joke.
At the top of a narrow spiral, the ledger hall opened like a lung. Shelves climbed into shadow, full of nameplates and case files. Desks formed channels for clerks who were not present; pens hung from hooks and dreamed of verdicts. At the center, under a dome of unlit glass, sat the Registrar—an altar shaped like a writing desk, with a pen the size of a spear and a page that refused to end.
Between them and it, a carpet of fine dust was arranged in lines and circles that would be runes if runes had passed an audit. Luna squatted, held her breath, and watched the dust breathe back. "Inkstorm traps," she said. "Step wrong and the pen finishes whatever someone began about you."
"Terrible sense of humor," Selene murmured, and watered the dust with shadow until the lines blurred and forgot their punchlines.
Aragorn's skin prickled, hairs lifting at the nape. He recognized the sensation before the mind supplied the word: being hunted by something that knows your footsteps better than you do.
The Artemis-hound padded into view between two filing stacks and did not bother to look intimidating. It was lean, gray, and almost pretty, with eyes like polished bone and a collar of narrow quills. It nosed the floor where time had been smoothed earlier that night and then fixed on Aragorn with the calm of an animal bred to chase exactly one kind of prey.
"Memory-tracker," Luna breathed. "It hunts missing frames."
"No blinking," Selene said, low, already widening the darkness around its paws so it would have to choose between shadow and balance.
Aragorn lifted a hand an inch. "If I run three seconds, it will run four," he said. The bird behind his eye stretched a wing and settled. He let it.
They moved as if they were music and the hall demanded a slower time signature. Cyrus took the left, a walking parapet. Selene overlaid the aisles with route-lines only she could see. Luna's magnets clung to corners; letters slid an inch the wrong way. Tam planted small NOs and NOT TODAYS on handles and thresholds like charms sewn into a hem.
The hound kept pace, not closing, not losing ground, as patient as arithmetic.
At the Registrar, the pen raised itself a fraction. Courtesy, invitation, warning. Luna flipped open two leaves and revealed a diagram like a harp. "Three strings," she whispered. "True name, used name, imposed name. They've braided them so tight one tug jerks the neck."
"We separate them," Aragorn said, "and make the imposed name ask permission."
"Requires a witness," Selene reminded. "And ours is busy believing in us."
"Then we witness each other," Cyrus said, unembarrassed. "It'll annoy the right people."
They began.
Luna spoke the clause: "A name given without joy shall be provisional." She laid magnets to make it true.
Selene added the route: "A used name shall be shelter, not bait."
Cyrus drove the stake: "A man's enemies cannot write his headline."
Tam, grinning, chalked on the Registrar's foot: ASK THEM FIRST.
Aragorn lifted the bell and let it hum into the pen's listening metal the way a tuning fork hums into a piano plank. Then he placed his branded wrist on the margin the pen liked to use for exceptions and wrote with heat: ALL UNWRITING REQUIRES DUE PROCESS AND THREE MORTAL WITNESSES WHO KNOW THE BEARER BEYOND THEIR TITLE.
The pen trembled. The page shivered. Somewhere in the hall, a drawer slid itself shut as if it had been eavesdropping and felt rude.
The hound chose that moment to move. It loped, not fast, but inexorable, and when it reached them it did not leap. It exhaled. The breath smelled like rainy stone and school corridors. Soundless, a mouth opened in the air and bit at Aragorn's shoulder—an attack composed entirely of "and then."
Three seconds peeled away from him and tried to crawl into the hound's throat.
"Mine," Aragorn said, steady, refusing to chase them. The bell steadied on his palm. The fire on his arm tightened like stitching. The seconds hung between them, indecisive.
Selene bled shadow into the gap, thickening the seconds so they had texture. Luna tied a magnet to a thread and swung it once like a pendulum to teach the seconds a new rhythm. Cyrus stepped into the space the bite had opened and became a wall there too, the kind of wall memories prefer to lean on rather than pass through. Tam, bless him, wrote STAY on the floor with such determination the chalk broke.
The seconds settled back into Aragorn like errant geese deciding winter could wait. The hound blinked, the first admission it had miscalculated tonight.
"Good dog," Cyrus said softly, and meant it without contempt. "Go hunt a different thief."
The hound lowered its head and, not insulted, padded to the edge of the hall where a draft brought it the scent of a clerk who had shaved an hour from the night shift for a nap. It followed, delighted to have honest work.
"Registrar," the Auditor said from the dome, voice thin through glass and distance, "note attempted vandalism."
"Registrar," the Witness said from nowhere a voice should be, "note community correction."
The pen froze, as if listening to two conductors and remembering it preferred to play for rooms that paid attention rather than crowds that paid.
"Finish it," Luna hissed.
Aragorn finished the amendment, then slid in two more while the page's posture was still thoughtful: ALIASES ARE LAWFUL BRIDGES, NOT CRIMES; NAMES MAY GROW; NO NAME MAY BE TAKEN BY PEOPLE WHO WILL NOT EAT WITH ITS BEARER. The last curl of the last letter sank into paper with a sound like a small oath kept.
The dome above tinted, annoyed light trying to find a tone between sermon and siren. Selene tugged the night's hem, and the hue misread the room and settled for moon.
"Extraction," she said.
They withdrew along their own footprints because those are the only ones you can trust in a house that writes roads under your feet. Twice, the inkstorm traps tried to complete someone else's sentence about them; Luna erased the predicate with her thumbnail and replaced it with a period. Tam left two magnets on a shelf to confuse tomorrow's audit.
At the gate that asked for names, the floor warmed as if asking for a goodbye. "Stranger of Three Seconds," it murmured in its way. "Night Seamstress. Steel-Mouth. Leaf-Sorter. Runner."
"Keep those safe," Selene said. "They're cheaper than funerals."
They descended into the shaft. The hound, having treed a nap, padded back and sat at the top of the stairs, tail pecking dust. It watched them with the courtesy of a professional. It would prefer not to chase prey that had learned to stay whole. It would if asked.
On the street, the air didn't taste like paperwork. The city had posted more NOs than anyone had ordered. A woman on a stoop tried her old name on like a coat after hemming it and found it finally fit. A boy practiced writing RUNNER on a fence, then erased it and wrote TAM, because someday he might need both.
"They'll try and reverse it," Luna said, not to darken the mood, but because light prefers a surface that doesn't lie to it. "They'll claim our witnesses are biased. They'll claim our joy is coercion."
"Then we'll feed them better witnesses," Selene said. "Nosy neighbors. Busy midwives. Men who owe you salt."
"And we'll feed the day the minute I stole," Aragorn added. "Today or tomorrow. But soon."
Cyrus rolled his shoulders, Oath cord resting easy. "Next target?"
"Cathedral of Chains," Luna said. "They keep the Covenant law there—the one that lets sacrifice masquerade as engineering."
Selene nodded once. "Bring a mirror," she told Aragorn. "We'll make them look at the people they call necessary."
He tapped the bell. It answered like metal that had learned a song and liked it.
Above, the Auditor watched and wrote nothing, which is a kind of writing. The Witness, wherever they were, set down their pen and drank water like a victory.
The Tower kept spinning. But now it had to count differently.
— End of Episode 8 —
Key powers this episode: Alias sanctuary (legal clause), Due‑process amendment for unwriting (three mortal witnesses), Bell hum as pen retuner, Shadow pathing and inkstorm blurring (Selene), Magnet grammar drift (Luna), Oath presence as memory wall (Cyrus), Chalk negations (Tam), Artemis‑hound memory bite resisted without time‑blink.
Focus cast: Aragorn, Selene, Luna, Cyrus, Tam; Auditor (overwatch), Witness (remote), Artemis‑hound.