Blankborn Prologue + Chapter 1

Cass is born Blankborn, which means she is destined for nothing. Until she finds her power

PROLOGUE



 

Ash Square, Varis — Ten Years Ago

Cass had never seen so many people stand so still.

The city usually smelled of fish and tar and frying bread, of dockwater and shouted bargains. Today the air tasted of ash and iron. All the noise of the Harbor Tier had been dragged uphill and pinned in place around Ash Square, held in breathless suspension.

Her mother’s hand clamped around hers. “Stay close,” she said, for the fourth time. Her voice had gone thin around the edges.

Cass craned her neck anyway.

The climb from the lower streets to the square always felt steep, but now the hill pressed on her legs in a different way. Every step carried them toward the place she had only heard about in muttered stories, the place where they brought people whose Myths had gone wrong. The buildings thinned as the ground leveled, and then they were there, spilling out among a hundred, two hundred, maybe more bodies packed tight around a ring of scorched stone.

Ash Square.

The paving in the center had gone dark and glassy, stone melted and frozen mid-scream. Around the black circle stood Scriptorium guards in blue and gold, their halberds lifted to keep the crowd back. Behind them waited a line of armored Mythbinders, crests shining, Storyshards glowing faintly at their throats or wrists.

And in the middle of the black stone, within a pale chalk circle, a single man knelt with his hands bound behind his back.

Cass stopped breathing. “Papa.”

Her whisper vanished into the silence.

Joren Arlen’s hair had grown longer since they took him. It fell ragged around his face, threaded with silver. He wore the plain grey of a condemned man, not the leather coat he had always worn on patrol. His Storyshard still hung at his neck, pressed flat against his chest by the weight of the binding chain. Even from here, Cass could see the faint pulse inside the crystal, a heartbeat of light that refused to die.

He looked smaller somehow. Or maybe that was the square, stretching him thin beneath too much sky.

Her mother squeezed her hand hard enough to hurt. “Don’t call out,” she murmured. “Do you hear me, Cassia? Whatever happens, you don’t call out.”

Cass nodded, though the words did not make sense. Of course she would call out. That was her father down there, the man who used to lift her onto his shoulders so she could see over festival crowds, who smelled of coal smoke and soap and the sharp ink they used to polish the metal around his Shard.

He was a protector. That was the story everyone knew.

The square disagreed.

Banners hung from the buildings surrounding the circle, deep blue cloth painted with the Scriptorium’s sigil: an open book, a quill laid across the pages like a blade. High above, the Spire climbed from the back edge of the square, stone narrowing as it rose, its windows glinting a cold, watching light.

The Inkwell Steps stood clear today, guarded. Cass had touched the carved names there once, on festival day. Blankborn names were never chiseled in that stone. The thought had never mattered before.

Someone shouted near the front. “Make way for the Quill.”

The crowd parted in ripples.

An Inkwright in white and gold walked out across the dark stone. A tall woman, skin the color of polished walnut, hair coiled and pinned so precisely it could have been part of a statue. Ink-stains marked her fingers even here, dark smudges against the spotless cuffs of her robe. She held a staff capped with a quill of black metal, its tip glimmering with unreadable characters.

Behind her came two more: a scribe burdened with a narrow chest of documents and a junior official carrying a slate board. They took their places just outside the chalk circle.

“People of Varis,” the Inkwright called, voice carrying clean and sharp. No magic that Cass could see, just trained projection. “You are gathered to witness the judgment of Joren Arlen, Mythbinder of Aspect Unbent Shield, sworn Oaths of Ward, Vigil, and Restraint. Formerly of Circle Hearthblade.”

Cass’s heart jumped at the name of the Circle. Hearthblade had been a word of pride in their house. Her father’s stories always ended there: We held the line. Hearthblade held.

Hearing it here felt wrong.

“Joren Arlen,” the Inkwright went on, turning to him. “You stand accused of Unmooring. You stand accused of violating your sworn Oaths. You stand accused of bringing the threat of Fableborn into the streets of Varis.”

Murmurs rolled through the crowd, a restless tide. Cass heard a hissed, “Monster,” from somewhere behind her. Heard someone else whisper, “He was one of ours, a guardian,” a third, “The Scriptorium would not bring him here without cause.”

Her father raised his head.

She knew the shape of him better than her own hands. That stubborn lift to his chin remained. His eyes searched the crowd.

Her mother dragged her a little farther back, into the shelter of a stone pillar at the square’s edge.

“They said he hurt people,” Cass whispered, the words scratching her throat. “He didn’t hurt people.”

“Hush.”

“But—”

“Quiet, Cassia.”

Her mother’s eyes never left the man in the circle. They shone with a brightness that did not match the weak autumn sun.

Cass bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.

The junior official stepped forward with the slate, reading from lines already marked in careful script.

“On the third day of Turningmonth, in the ward of Southbridge, Joren Arlen did cast Verses beyond the bounds of his Oaths. Witnesses declare he refused to retreat when order was given. Witnesses declare he spoke words not his own, in a voice not his own. Witnesses declare his Aspect began to twist toward Fableborn state.”

Cass remembered that day. The way her father came home late, face grey with exhaustion, his coat torn and smelling of smoke. How he sat at the table with his hands around a cup he never drank from. How he said, very quietly, “Some orders should not be written.”

Her mother had pressed her fingers over his Storyshard and whispered the Ward Oath with him, the one Cass knew by heart: I stand between harm and the helpless.

Nothing in that moment had felt monstrous.

“Do you contest the charges?” the Inkwright asked now.

Joren Arlen laughed softly.

The sound drifted across the dark stone in a way that made the hairs on Cass’s arms lift.It held no humor, only a rough sort of amazement, the sound of a man who still could not quite believe where he had ended up.

“I contest the story,” he said.

The words carried well enough that the first rows heard them. They rippled back, distorted. By the time they reached Cass, she caught only fragments.

“… story…”

“… contests…”

The Inkwright’s teeth ground together.

“Your Myths are not yours to edit,” she replied. “They are bound for the good of Caldera. You were given an Aspect of defense. You were given Oaths crafted to hold you steady. You chose to break them.”

“I held the line when they ordered the purge,” Joren said. “They claimed the infection in the district was too high to contain, that burning the neighborhood would save the city. I told them I wouldn’t light the match.” His gaze moved across the square. “When you told me to stand aside and let the Fableborn devour the Fringe. I held.”

The crowd murmured more loudly now. Not all of them agreed. Cass could taste their unease.

“Stop him,” one of the other officials hissed. “He will—”

“Let them hear,” Joren cut in, louder. “Let them hear what you wrote.”

His Storyshard answered his anger.

The crystal against his chest brightened, its soft pulse sharpening into a burn. Light threaded through the binding chain, slipping over his shoulders, mapping lines down his arms beneath the grey cloth. For a moment he looked the way he used to look when he came home late from patrol and lifted her laughing, his skin humming faintly with power as he pretended to be a giant.

The hum became a low, sour buzz.

It entered her teeth and made her jaw ache. The air over the black stone rippled. The square remembered fire.

One of the Mythbinders on the line stepped forward, palm raised. His Aspect crest, hammered into the metal of his breastplate, showed a blade wreathed in ink. When he spoke, his voice carried the steady cadence of someone reciting verses that had been drilled into his bones.

“By Verse Ink-Bound Silence, we still the stray words that may unmake. By Verse Circle of Restraint, we hold the fraying story fast.”

Power shimmered around Joren, a translucent dome settling over the chalk line. His Storyshard flickered, resisting.

The Inkwright’s eyes narrowed.

“Joren Arlen, Aspect Unbent Shield, your final words are spent.” She lifted the black metal quill in her hand. “Caldera does not kill lightly. But a story that turns Fableborn must be cut at the root. For the safety of Varis. For the safety of all.”

Cass did not understand each phrase, yet something in the rhythm of them sounded rehearsed, polished, used too often. This speech belonged to a play they had performed before.

Her father bowed his head.

For a heartbeat, Cass thought it was in acceptance. But his voice drifted, softer again, meant only for himself or the stone beneath him.

“Stories are not yours,” he said. “They are ours. They are mine.”

The air above him tore.

Cass had seen her father cast Verses around their home when no one was watching. Tiny things. Sparks dancing above his palm to entertain her. A shield of clear light against the rain when the roof leaked. Those spells came out smooth and precise, the way a song should sound when the singer knows every note.

This was not that.

Light burst from his Storyshard in jagged spikes, stabbing at the inside of the restraining dome. Lines of force crawled over his skin, beneath it, through it. His back arched. Every Oath that had ever been carved into that crystal flared all at once.

She heard some of them, jumbled together.

I stand between harm and the helpless. I yield when commanded by higher quill. I never raise shield against the hand that writes.

The second and third did not belong in the same breath as the first. Even Cass, who barely understood the words, felt that they ground against each other.

The dome around him vibrated. The Mythbinder who had cast it gritted his teeth, sweat standing out on his brow.

“Unmooring,” someone in the front row whispered.

The murmurs sharpened into fear.

Joren’s face twisted. His hands tore free of the rope without touching it, fingers bending in directions they were not meant to go. Light sank into his skin and pulled, tugging his limbs longer, warping his outline. The grey cloth of his shirt blackened and flaked away in places. Dark scales crawled down his arms, each one bearing the faint ghost of a shield sigil.

One of the poster sketches Cass had seen on a tavern wall flashed across her memory: a warning drawing of what happened when an Aspect twisted into a Fableborn. A constant fight between story and flesh until both broke.

She had thought it an exaggeration.

Her father’s bones sounded wrong as they shifted.

The restraining dome fissured.

“Hold him,” the Inkwright snapped.

Two more Mythbinders stepped in, layering their Verses onto the first. Ink-lines etched themselves into the air, forming a tighter cage. Joren’s warped body slammed against it, testing every seam.

“Papa,” Cass whispered again.

Her mother’s grip trembled.

“Don’t,” she rasped. “He needs to see you safe. Stay still. Stay quiet.”

The creature in the circle was still her father. Cass knew that under the scales and stretched limbs and the not-quite-human way his head jerked. He turned within the cage until the ruin of his face aligned with the crowd on their side.

His eyes found her.

All the wrongness faltered there. In that gaze she saw the man who carried her home when she fell, the one who whittled wooden animals for her on winter evenings, the one who always promised, “I will come back.”

He tried to lift a hand, but the cage tightened. Sparks sprayed where warped fingers touched the ink-lines.

“Cassia,” he said.

Her name came out broken, threaded with another voice. Something deeper, echoing, layered through his. She felt that second tone in the soles of her feet, in her stomach, in the back of her skull.

The Myth inside him speaking.

“Papa, stop,” she whispered, not sure whether she begged him or the thing.

The Inkwright thrust the black quill forward.

“Behold,” she called to the crowd, seizing the moment. “This is the fate of a story that refuses its Oath. This is why we bind, why we watch, why we cut when we must.”

Her words scraped.

Joren shook his head. Shards of light flew from him, dissolving before they reached the dome.

“You changed it,” he gasped. “You rewrote my Oath. You made me choose between your command and the children behind me. That is not what I swore.”

The whole square flinched.

The Scriptorium scribe shouted over him, reciting counterwords. “The accused’s words are corrupted by Unmooring. The Myth speaks through him. No truth can be trusted now.”

But Cass had heard him speak the warding Oath at their kitchen table, long before any of this. She knew what he had promised then. Protect, not obey.

The contrast seared itself into her mind.

One of the Mythbinders stepped closer to the cage, his own Storyshard lighting with a deep blue fire. “Permission to end this, Quill,” he said, voice tight. “The story has frayed beyond recall.”

The Inkwright nodded once.

“Do it. For the safety of Varis.”

They moved like a practiced chorus.

Four Mythbinders stepped in, forming a square around the cage. Their Aspects shone in metal and cloth and scar: a sword; a shield; a chain; a pair of scales. Their Storyshards blazed, each a different hue. Their voices rose together, not in the calm recitation of ordinary Verses but in something heavier.

“By Verse Final Margin, we cut away the stain.

By Verse Binding Stroke, we close the tale.

By Verse Ashfall, we scatter what remains.”

Cass did not understand the words, but she felt the world lean in to listen.

Power poured into the cage. The ink-lines thickened, brightened, coiled inward, wrapping around Joren’s contorted form. He roared, or the Myth inside him roared, or both. The sound had nothing human in it and still held his grief. It rattled the glass in the surrounding windows.

“Stop,” Cass said. She did not realize she had spoken aloud until her mother’s hand clapped over her mouth.

Too late.

Joren’s head snapped toward the sound.

For a breath, the Myth rage vanished from his eyes. Only her father remained, trapped inside a body betraying him.

“Remember,” he whispered. The word reached her through cracks in the spell, carried on the last sliver of space between them. His mouth formed more that the magic stole away. She could read them anyway.

This is not the story.

Then the cage closed.

Light crushed inward. The world went white at the edges of her sight. She heard snapping crystal, stone groaning, a gust of wind that smelled of burnt ink and blood. Heat licked across her face. Her mother turned, wrapping both arms around her and bowing low, sheltering Cass beneath her body.

Something vast passed through the square. Not wind, not sound, but a pressure that pressed tears from her eyes. For a heartbeat she almost saw it: threads stretching from her father’s Storyshard up into the sky, straining toward the Mythsea beyond sight.

Those threads broke.

When the light faded, the cage was gone.

Joren Arlen lay crumpled on the black stone, body twisted and still, scales already crumbling away. His Storyshard hung in the air a moment longer. A crack webbed through its center. The glow inside flickered once, twice, refusing the ending, then went dark.

The crystal fell and struck the stone.

It shattered into dozens of tiny, colourless fragments that skittered across the glassy surface.

Cass stared at them, throat locked. Her mother’s arms tightened, not letting her run forward.

The Inkwright lowered her quill.

“The story is concluded,” she announced. “Let this stand as warning and assurance. The Scriptorium will always cut away what threatens to unmake our world.”

People began to breathe again. Some crossed themselves. Some nodded, faces clenched with grim approval. A few turned away, sick. Guards stepped forward to collect the shard fragments into a cloth-lined box.

One shard had bounced farther than the rest.

It had rolled to the very edge of the blackened circle and lodged in a shallow crack there. No one noticed it as they moved about the corpse. It lay where the clean stone of the rest of the square met the scorched ring, a single, chipped piece of dead glass.

Cass could not take her eyes off it.

In that shard she saw kitchen lamplight on her father’s hands, the way he once scooped her up after she fell in the Harbor Tier and said, You’re all right, little inkspot, the story does not end here. She saw him standing in the doorway in his Circle coat, promising he would be home by dawn.

None of that fit with what the Inkwright had just called him.

The crowd broke apart, already weaving neat tale-shapes: the loyal Scriptorium, the dangerous Mythbinder, the necessary ending.

Cass stood on the edge of Ash Square with her mother’s arms still around her and felt something inside her refuse that.

The square smelled of ash and soap and metal. Her father’s blood had left only a faint smear on the black stone, already drying. The official story floated over everything, tidy and complete.

This is not the story.

The words he mouthed burned in her chest, nestling there beside the image of the overlooked shard.

She did not have the power to shout it at the crowd, or to reach the shard, or to drag her father up and demand they start over and tell it right. She had nothing at all except that tiny, stubborn certainty.

One day, it would be enough.

For now, she gripped her mother’s shaking hand and let the Scriptorium’s version of the tale roll out across Varis, already twisting.

ONE

Selection Morning

The city smelled of polish and worry on Selection morning.

The streets had been scrubbed for Selection morning, smears of fish and ale washed away, leaving air sharper than usual. Cass wore a grey-blue dress from a secondhand stall, seams she'd resewn herself. Polished boots, cracked. For the Gutter, that counted as fine.

She stood halfway up Grey Lane with one hand pressed to her stomach.

People streamed past: parents flanking stiff-backed teenagers, boys pretending calm, girls fussing with sleeves that wouldn't lie right. Clusters appeared from side streets, joining the river flowing uphill toward Ash Square.

The Spire of the Grand Archive pushed into the morning, pale stone and narrow windows catching early light. Blue banners fluttered from its heights.

The Scriptorium had strict rules about Selection, and they did not let you forget.

Cass's fingers found the blue thread bracelet at her wrist—her father's knot, retied by Rema that morning. For luck, Rema had said. For something that is yours.

Rema had taken her in after the square swallowed the rest of the Arlens and never quite let go again.

A bell pealed. The sound rolled down from the higher tiers until Varis hummed with layered metal.

“It’s starting,” someone murmured.

“Not yet,” another voice said. “They like to make us bleed first.”

Cass fell in step as the crowd moved.

Gutter buildings leaned together, laundry strung between windows. Faces in doorways tracked the youths, some proud, others wearing the guarded look of people watching a game they couldn’t join but couldn’t ignore.



Cass recognized more than a few of them. The fishmonger stood in his doorway, arms dusted with scales. A boy leaned against the wall, same one she’d raced to the docks years ago, now holding a bucket instead of running.

He caught her eye and saluted. “Bring a good story back to us, Cass. We need one.”

Her throat closed. She lifted her chin, promise or panic, she couldn't tell—and the crowd swept her toward Southbridge.

The walk to Ash Square never seemed long when she took it for errands. Today the slope felt stretched. Every step landed too loud in her ears.

She told herself it was only the bells.

At the top of the lane, the road opened onto Southbridge, a stone span over one of the city’s canals. Traffic thick with carts and grudging merchants.

Amid all that came the other kind of procession.

An enclosed carriage rolled up from the lower road, its wheels smoother, its paint not yet chipped by salt. The house crest on its door showed an inked feather and a spray of coins. Two Mythbinders walked either side of it, coats cut from good cloth, boots made for patrols that did not spend much time in fish scales or gutter sludge.

Each bore a Storyshard that glowed even in daylight.

One had theirs set at the collarbone, nestling in an intricate metal setting shaped as a rising sun. Pale gold light throbbed inside the crystal, steady and sure. The other wore a shard that seemed to hold stormlight, a dim, roiling grey that never settled.

When the carriage reached the bridge, the driver snapped the reins, not in impatience but to announce their presence. The crowd parted at once.

Cass’s whole line peeled back, pulled by some invisible force. She stepped until her shoulder hit the parapet. Cold stone met her spine. The Mythbinders did not look at them as they passed. Their gazes stayed forward, expressions in that careful, calm arrangement Cass had seen on festival days: neutral enough to avoid offense, serious enough to suggest they were always thinking of duty.

She risked a glance into the carriage as it rolled by.

A boy sat inside. He had the smooth hands of someone whose work did not blister the palms. His coat was new, deep blue with silver stitching. A Storyshard did not yet hang at his throat, but he sat with the posture of someone who already wore one, spine straight, chin tipped slightly up. The woman beside him fussed with the fold of his sleeve. Her own shard, a small crystal threaded with soft green, rested against her collar.

The boy turned his head toward the Gutter line, letting his gaze slide over them. His eyes paused on Cass for a heartbeat, taking in her mended bodice, boots that had seen three winters, hair she had tried to tame. His expression did not twist openly into disdain. It simply cooled, the look one gives a window with nothing worth seeing beyond.

The carriage moved on, wheels clattering, Mythbinders walking in even steps, escorting one boy to the same square where hundreds of others would stand without anyone to clear their path.

Someone near Cass muttered something rude under their breath. The words did not reach the boy.

The bells tolled again, closer this time.

Cass’s stomach pulled tight. The bridge dropped away beneath them as the road curved up to the higher tier.

The air changed as they climbed. It always did. Smell first: less fish, more bread, a hint of flowers from some alley garden tended by someone with time for roses. Sound next: the shouts of the Harbor Tier fell off behind them, replaced by a different hum—carts, upper channels, arguments behind better-built walls.

The buildings straightened as well. Here, the angles were cleaner, the stone newer. Cracks in plaster had been filled with mortar rather than cloth. Doorframes aligned properly. The little idols and ward-charms above them were carved from actual wood, not drift scraps.

The Gutter bled into mid-city without a line on the ground to mark it. You could still feel the border. Cass always did.

She kept her eyes on the road ahead, but she could feel the looks from doorways. Some curious. Some weighing. A few openly disapproving. Mild disapproval was almost a kindness; it meant the watcher had the time and comfort to be offended rather than afraid.

She would have preferred indifference.

“Do you think they keep count?” the boy from earlier, whom had introduced himself as Jori asked. “Of how many of us come from which street?”

A girl in green shouldered her way to Cass’s other side, cheeks flushed from the crush of the line. “They say it is the Mythsea that chooses, not the Spire,” she said. “That is what they always say.” She did not sound sure.

“I’m Lira,” she added after a beat, remembering her manners.

“The Mythsea does not keep ledgers,” Jori said. “People with quills do.”

Cass listened with half an ear. Her own breath had taken on a rhythm that did not match her stride. She forced it slower. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The air tasted of dust and fresh water.

Ahead, between the buildings, a sliver of empty sky opened up. Just past that gap lay the square.

Her fingers closed around the folded scrap in her pocket. The paper had gone soft at the edges from handling. Rema’s letters were still there all the same, dense and blocky.

For luck. Eat. Do not faint in front of the Quills.

Cass’s mouth twisted. Fainting was not on her list of allowed embarrassments. Neither was running, or crying, or turning around to go back down the hill and pretend this day had never happened.

She had wanted this since before she had words for it. Since the first time she watched her father’s Storyshard glimmer against his throat in the half-light of their kitchen and asked why it followed his heartbeat. Since the last day she had seen him in this same square, light tearing him apart.

A Myth had destroyed her family. Still she wanted one.

If she walked away now, without even giving the city the chance to choose, she would live the rest of her life wondering what might have formed between her hands.

She stepped through the gap.

Ash Square opened in front of them, wide and pale under the climbing sun.

The place was bigger than memory had left it. Or perhaps that was ten years of avoiding it talking. White stone paving spread out in all directions, clean lines radiating from the center. The buildings that ringed it had trimmed their windows for the occasion, flags hanging from balcony rails. Scriptorium banners draped the face of the Grand Archive, whose massive steps rose behind a raised wooden platform.

And in the middle of all that brightness sat the blackened ring.

A circle of stone, darker than the rest, glassy in places where heat had once fused the surface. The stone still looked greasy where the ink had burned.

Cass’s steps slowed without her permission.

The last time she had crossed the lip of this square, the crowd had been packed tight, the smell of sweat and fear thick enough to taste. Her mother’s hand had clamped on her shoulder hard enough to bruise. Joren Arlen, Mythbinder of Aspect Unbent Shield—her father—had knelt in the circle now standing empty, light crawling under his skin until it tore him apart.

Three days later, the Spire had sent word that her mother had “succumbed to strain” in its care. They hadn’t brought a body down.

The memory tried to rise like bad saltwater in her throat.

Ten years, she told herself. Ten years between that morning and this one. The stone is the same, but you are not.

She made herself walk. One step onto the square. Then another.

The officials had organized the space with the same efficiency they applied to everything. Chalk marks divided the candidate area into zones, each one facing the platform. Wooden boards had been hammered into temporary posts, painted with rough letters.

HARBOR & GUTTER.

NORTH VARIS.

SOUTH VARIS.

Near each sign waited a scribe with a roster in hand, ink already smudged on their fingers.

Cass angled toward the board marked for her and the others from the low streets. It stood closer to the side of the square, well clear of the scorched center. That was some small mercy.

The press of bodies thickened as more youths arrived. Cass was jostled once, twice, the third time hard enough that she planted her feet and jolted back on instinct.

“Sorry,” the girl behind her said quickly. The apology turned into a breathless laugh. “I did not expect there would be this many.”

Cass glanced over her shoulder. The girl’s eyes were wide, pupils blown with a mix of excitement and fright. It made her look younger than she probably was.

“It is Selection,” Cass said. “Anyone who can walk up a hill comes.”

“And some who cannot,” Jori muttered. He nodded toward a boy further up, leaning heavily on a stick. The boy’s father hovered near the edge of the square, as close as the guards would allow, his face a careful blank.

Cass’s gaze tugged back to the black ring again, then to the base of the Inkwell Steps.

From here, she could see the lowest slabs with names carved into them. The letters were crisp, refreshed every few years. A handful of people stood near the foot of the stair, heads bowed, fingers tracing familiar lines. Families of those whose myths had ended well. Names the Scriptorium claimed proudly.

Blankborn names never joined them. She knew that not from speeches but from conversations cut short when she came into earshot.

Once, in one of those half-heard arguments, she had heard an Inkwright’s temper slip: “Past seventeen, the Mythsea almost never answers,” he had said. “Blankborn designation stands unless a miracle walks out of the water.”

She did not realize she had been staring until someone said her name.

“Cassia Arlen?”

She flinched, heart slamming against her ribs, then saw it was only the scribe at the Harbor & Gutter board. He had his roster in hand, neat columns of names already marked. His hair was going thin at the temples, his robe ordinary brown. The ink on his fingers looked more permanent than any crest he might have once worn.

Cass pushed her way forward until she stood in front of him. “Yes,” she managed.

“Age?” he asked, though his gaze had already dropped to the list.

“Seventeen.”

“Sixteen at last count,” he said. “But we will trust you to have moved on since.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “You are here, that is what matters. You are on the list.”

Of course she was. They had been counting possible candidates since she was small enough to hide behind her mother’s skirt. Still, hearing it said eased some tightness in her shoulders.

He scratched a mark beside her name.

“Stand with the others,” he said. “When they call Harbor and Gutter, you will go in that order. Do not wander. Do not faint. And if you vomit, aim for the stone, not my shoes.”

A smile wanted to pull at Cass’s lips. She kept it to herself, gave a quick nod, and stepped back into the line as he called the next name.

Lira squeezed in beside her a moment later, cheeks flushed. “They spelled my name wrong,” she whispered. “I did not dare correct him. You think the Mythsea cares how it is written?”

“I think the Mythsea cannot read,” Jori said. “Probably for the best.”

Cass barely heard them. The nearer she stood to the center of the square, the more aware she became of the number of eyes on this space.

People packed the edges. Parents, siblings, neighbors. Tavern owners on their doorsteps. Dockhands and shopkeepers who had found excuses to leave their posts. Scriptorium guards ringed the square in a measured pattern, halberds grounded, faces turned toward the candidate lines with the practiced look of people told to watch for trouble they would rather not find.

Mixed in among them, Cass caught a few robes of white and gold. Inkwrights moved with the same steady intent she imagined for thoughts inside a head. Their presence was more unnerving than the blades.

A Circle cut across the far side of the square, slipping into a gap left by the guards. Five people: four carrying shards and crests, one hauling a pack. Their coats were marked with a symbol Cass knew too well: a blade set upright against a stylized hearth.

Hearthblade.

Her breath hitched.

This was not her father’s team. That had been scattered after his Unmooring, disbanded under the polite fiction of reassignment. These faces were younger, or harder, or both. Still, the crest pulled her gaze the way a memory-thread might.

The woman walking point had close-cropped hair, iron-grey at the temples, and the easy stride of someone used to carrying both weight and eyes.

Her Storyshard burned a deep red-orange in its setting. Cass imagined the heat of it even from here.

The woman’s gaze swept the candidates once, weighing and discarding, and moved on to the guards and the exits and the angles of approach. She did not look at the black ring. People who worked too close to the square often learned not to.

Cass did not realize she had turned to follow the Circle with her eyes until Jori elbowed her lightly.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

It was not the whole answer, but he accepted it. Everyone here had pieces of themselves they were not planning to show in front of the Spire.

She fixed her attention on the platform instead.

Inkwrights arranged inkstones and scrolls on the lectern. Assistants checked the position of the crystal-tipped staff that would be used in the Selection ritual. Someone polished the surface of the wood until it gleamed.

One of the robed figures glanced up at the sun’s position, and nodded to a bell-ringer waiting near the Archive steps.

The first clear chime struck the air, sharper now that it came from this close.

Cass’s pulse matched it.

This is it, she thought. By sunset, they will have something to call you that is not just Cass from above the fishmonger.

The thought steadied and terrified her in equal measure.

She touched the thin bracelet under her sleeve one more time, the knots pressed into her skin. Her father’s fingers had shaped those loops. Rema’s had tightened them. No Inkwright had touched that thread. For now, it was the only binding on her.

Her gaze slid once, unwillingly, to the scorched circle at the heart of Ash Square.

Ash still sat in the cracks. From a distance the stone looked clean, but up close faint streaks showed where something worse than fire had struck it. Her father’s Storyshard had shattered there, light torn apart by Verses meant to keep everyone else safe.

The official story of that day had been told so many times in Varis that people could recite it over ale without thinking. Joren Arlen, Unbent Shield, had broken his Oaths. Joren Arlen had risked Unmooring in the streets. Joren Arlen had been cut.

Cass watched the Inkwrights take their places on the platform and thought of the way his eyes had looked when he found hers through the cage.

Remember, he had tried to say.

She did.

The bells rang again. The murmur of the crowd died. A polished voice rose over Ash Square, preparing to tell a new story.

Cass stood in the line marked HARBOR & GUTTER, her hands starting to tingle, and waited for the moment they would ask her to hold them out.