After the Applause
The city woke sore.
Not wounded—just stiff, as if it had carried something heavy for too long and only just set it down. The squares were quieter than usual. Voices were lower. People moved with the careful courtesy of those who had seen each other laid bare and were still deciding how to behave afterward.
Iria felt it in herself too.
Without the tension of the decision pressing against her thoughts, exhaustion rushed in like floodwater. She slept past the first bell—an indulgence she had forgotten how to allow—and woke with the sense of having missed something important.
She hadn't.
The Concord sent no messages. The council issued no directives. The city continued, tentatively, to exist.
That unsettled people more than crisis ever had.
"Nothing's broken," Kael said as they walked the eastern tier, watching shopkeepers reopen one by one. "That's what feels wrong."
"Yes," Iria agreed. "We've been trained to expect fallout."
They passed a wall where new paint layered over old slogans. Someone had written WE CHOSE in careful, uneven script. Beneath it, smaller and messier: NOW WHAT?
The question followed Iria all day.
Requests trickled in—not demands, not emergencies. Clarifications. Next steps. Gentle panic disguised as practicality.
She answered what she could. Deferred what she couldn't. The want stayed quiet, subdued by fatigue.
In the afternoon, the Concord requested a debrief.
Iria agreed—on her terms.
They met in a public archive, shelves of uncensored records lining the walls. No doors were closed.
"You surprised us," the envoy admitted. "This model should not have worked."
"It didn't," Iria replied. "It held."
The envoy considered that. "Temporary systems tend to harden."
"So do permanent ones," Iria said. "The difference is whether they can be questioned."
A pause.
"You've made yourselves difficult to govern," the envoy said at last.
Iria smiled faintly. "That was the point."
When they left, Kael leaned against a shelf and laughed quietly. "You just told the Concord they're unnecessary."
"No," Iria corrected. "I told them they're optional."
That night, Lumi joined Iria on the roof, sharing a bottle of something sharp and herbal.
"You look older," Lumi said mildly.
"I feel it."
"That's not a complaint," Lumi added. "Just an observation."
They watched the city breathe.
"I keep waiting for regret," Iria confessed. "For someone to say we chose wrong."
"They will," Lumi said. "Many times. About many things."
"And?"
"And you'll keep listening."
The want stirred faintly—less hunger now, more memory.
After the applause, after the arguments, after the fear, what remained was work. Slow, unglamorous, unending.
Iria stood and stretched, joints aching.
"This part doesn't scare me," she said.
Lumi smiled. "It should. It's where most revolutions fail."
Iria looked out over Noctyrrh—imperfect, awake, unfinished.
"Then we'll have to do something radical," she said softly.
"Which is?"
"Stay."
And in the quiet that followed, the city did not demand more.
It simply continued—
learning how to live with the choice it had made.