The vault door screamed like a thing surprised into speech. It was not a loud sound—Moonforge iron never gave itself to noise—but it was a sound that carried the weight of a hundred careful hands. Sparks feathered from the rim where Thorne's warded picks kissed sigil grooves; the metal smelled of old heat and the faint, wrong sweetness of tempered memory. Inside, the vault was a ribcage of shelves and crates, each one cataloged and sealed with a clerk's neat hand. Lantern light pooled on oilcloth and stamped wax; the air tasted of flux and jasmine and the small, metallic tang of things that remembered.
They moved with the practiced hush of people who had rehearsed danger until it fit like a glove. Marcus kept the door and the perimeter; two facilitators watched the service stair and the corridor beyond. Keeper Sera carried witness packets and a Remnants seal; Calder walked with them under escort, his shoulders straighter than they had been at the forge. Luna's teacher cell waited in the anteroom, jasmine braided into their wrists; Thorne had a spool of sigildamp tiles and a warded lens that hummed faintly at his belt. Aria carried the Spiral Log and the small, private ache where a lullaby had been; she kept it folded like a vow.
The crate they sought sat on a low bench beneath a cloth, its broker flourish visible in the wax. Thorne eased the cloth back and the plate inside flashed like a small, dangerous sun. The microetch answered the warded reader with a thin, hungry note. For a heartbeat the apprentice who had been left in the forge's care—wrapped in a blanket and watched by a Remnants witness—stared as if the plate had called to him. A memory that was not his brushed his mind: a bell, a woman's scar, the taste of bread from a town he had never seen.
Aria moved before the thought finished. She stepped into the plate's bloom and sang a Redirect she had practiced in the Loom's quiet hours—an inversion that unhooked the plate's reach long enough to free the apprentice's borrowed image. The effect was immediate and violent. The plate's resonance folded like a struck chord; the apprentice's eyes cleared; the bench's air snapped taut. The cost came like a toll: Aria felt a cold absence where a private memory had been, a small, named thing she could no longer call. Her hands trembled; she steadied herself on the bench and tasted salt and jasmine and the sudden, sharp ache of loss.
Thorne cursed and fed the sigildamp a counternote that made the plate's overlay burn cycles to re‑model. The reader hummed and the plate's microetch stuttered. Calder confirmed the template: a broker variant with a pale codex marginalia. Beneath the plate, tucked into the packing straw, lay a ledger page—an accession stub with a clerk's initial and a private slip reference. Thorne copied the stub into a Remnants packet and sealed it with wax.
They had not expected the vault to be empty of danger. A shadow moved in the rafters—someone who had been watching the service stair—and a belllaugh echoed like a promise. The forger who had run the Moonforge's inner vault stepped from behind a stack of crates: broad‑shouldered, hair singed at the temples, a hammer at his hip with a sigil groove that matched the plate's geometry. His eyes were bright with the kind of fanaticism that comes from believing a thing is owed to you.
"You take what you do not understand," he said, voice like a file. "You think you can make law of memory."
Marcus answered with a motion that was all restraint and readiness. The forger laughed and swung his hammer in a wide arc. The first strike missed Marcus's shoulder by a breath; the second clipped a crate and sent a shower of sparks. The vault became a narrow theater of motion: hammer on iron, the scrape of boots on stone, the hiss of warded picks.
Aria moved to intercept, but the forger was not merely a smith—he was a craftsman of sigils and a dancer with grooves. He used the vault's moving platform, a low cart that ran on rails to shift crates between benches, as a stage. He leapt onto it and the cart began to roll, a slow, inevitable motion that turned the fight into a duel on a moving platform. Sparks flew like small stars.
Thorne fed a pulse through the warded lens and tuned a sigildamp tile to a microvariation that would make the forger's overlay attempts hesitate. The tile hummed and the air tasted of ozone. The forger's hammer found rhythm with the cart's motion; he struck with a Tidebind lunge that tried to retune the rails' sigil resonance and throw the Loom's wards off balance. Marcus moved to cut the forger's line, but the cart's motion and the vault's narrowness made a clean strike impossible.
Aria climbed the cart's edge and met the forger midstride. The duel was close and brutal: metal on metal, breath and sweat and the smell of hot iron. The forger's strikes were precise, meant to break sigils and to force a resonance; Aria's counters were improvisations—Redirects and small, sharp inversions that unhooked a fraction of the forger's graft. Each time she used a Redirect the cost bit: a small memory line thinned, a taste or a lullaby slipped like sand. She kept count in her head and in the Spiral Log, because costs were not abstract; they were the ledger's teeth.
At one point the forger feinted and the cart lurched toward a rack of plates. A broker flourish flashed in the lantern light and a plate clattered to the floor. The forger lunged to reclaim it; Aria twisted and drove her blade across his forearm, a clean, nonlethal cut that made him drop the hammer. He snarled and reached for a shard of glass, but Marcus's spear found his side and pinned him to the cart's rail. The cart shuddered and came to a stop.
The forger's eyes were bright and furious as Marcus bound his hands. "You don't understand what you break," he spat. "You think you save people by stealing their pasts. You make them into instruments."
Keeper Sera stepped forward and read the custody terms aloud. The forger's protest was a thin thing in a room that had just held a fight. The Remnants' scribe copied the apprentice's narration and the accession stub into triplicate; the plate was wrapped in oilcloth and sealed in a double‑warded box. Calder, hands shaking, signed the witness sheet and pointed to the clerk's initial on the stub—an administrative hinge they had been tracing.
They did the small, human work that made law possible. The apprentice, still trembling, described the memory that had come to him and how Aria had unhooked it. Keeper Sera pressed the Remnants seal to the witness sheet and stamped it with wax. Thorne sketched the plate's microetch in shorthand and fed the pattern through the matchers to confirm the pale codex ghost. The ledger page was copied and sealed; a microetch replica was made for demonstration under Remnants custody.
The cost of the breach was visible. Aria sat on a crate and pressed her palms to her face. The blank where the lullaby had been felt like a missing tooth; she could not hum the line she had once used to soothe a child. Thorne, who had tuned the sigildamp, reported a small fog at the edge of his hearing. Luna, who had held a NoListen in the anteroom to protect witnesses during the breach, rubbed her temples and admitted to a ringing that would not leave for the night. Keeper Sera recorded each effect in the witness packet and stamped them in triplicate.
Before they left the vault, Thorne fed the plate's microetch through the warded lens one last time. Beneath the broker flourish and the pale codex ghost, a faint notation appeared—an older geometry that matched the Bonebridge disk's diagrams. The shard they had quarantined in the Loom's lower workshop had a sibling in the Moonforge's plate: a marginalia that suggested the Pale Codex's reach was wider than they had thought.
Aria wrote the day's entry into the Spiral Log with hands that shook but did not falter: Moonforge Vault Breach — forger detained; broker plate matched Veiled Crossing variant with pale codex marginalia; accession stub recovered and notarized; apprentice witness recorded; Aria performed Redirect during breach; cost recorded: Aria permanent loss of named memory (mother's lullaby); temporary disorientation; Thorne operator haze observed; Luna reports ringing ears from NoListen deployment; plate quarantined under Remnants custody; microetch marginalia matches Bonebridge disk geometry; prepare targeted subpoenas for private slip manifests; prepare sealed microetch replica for Council demonstration; rotate operators and teachers to mitigate cumulative haze.
They sealed the log and the packets and left the Moonforge before dawn. The apprentice was taken into Remnants care; the forger was held under custody for questioning; the plate rode in a double‑warded box beneath Keeper Sera's cloak. On the road back, Luna walked close enough that their shoulders brushed, a small, steady contact that did not need words. Aria let the warmth of the braid in her palm settle against the hollow where the lullaby had been and felt, with a clarity that was almost a prayer, that every victory would carry a price.
The Moonforge had given them a ledger page and a plate and a human witness; it had also taken a memory and left a mark on their bodies and their records. The rope had tightened; the patron committee's face was closer now. They would follow it with witnesses and sigils and public packets until daylight showed every stitch.