The lower city ended in a cliff of slag and old promises.
Below the manufactorum's belly, a canyon of conveyors yawned open onto a floodplain where hab-blocks had slumped into their own foundations. The storm had shoved rain into every fracture until the buildings sagged like tired men. Out there, in the skeletal streets, a thousand mortals waited behind barricades of doors ripped from hinges and saints ripped from niches. They were workers with rifles, clerks with knives, children with rocks. Between them and annihilation crawled the oncoming host—a tide of cultists and scavenged engines pushed ahead by a will that wanted more than killing. It wanted proof.
"Signal net confirms," Jovan said at Aurelius's shoulder. "Their true blade is masked inside the press. Two daemon engines. One bearer." He named the bearer the way the Ten Thousand did—without superstition, without respect.
Aurelius stood at the lip of the conveyor canyon, rain striping his helm, spear across his back. The mortals had never stood this close to a Custodian before. He could hear their thoughts like pebbles hitting a steel plate—fear turned into obedience by the nearness of gold.
The Gift opened. Intent rippled through the enemy column: a thousand small hungers braided into one thick rope of purpose. He felt where it would pull, and when. He felt the engines simmering at the heart of it—furnaces stoked with lies, teeth for wheels. He felt the bearer, a needle of will threading the whole through.
And he felt the line of mortals behind him: a ragged seam, brave and brittle. If they broke, the habit of breaking would kill them before the enemy did.
"Name the goal," Jovan said, almost amused by the ritual.
"Keep the line whole," Aurelius answered. The words fit his mouth like a vow he'd made long before this rain.
The mortal captain looked up, throat working. "My lord… we will follow, but if they—"
"They won't," Aurelius said, not unkind, not loud. He stepped down from the lip and onto the cracked road, boots sparking little rings of light as Armament hummed through him in a quiet tide.
Something in the way the storm moved—pressure, smell, the feel of a crowd about to lunge—caught at a memory and pulled hard.
The Hall of Swords at night glowed like a reliquary full of sleeping wolves. Theta-Seven moved with a cloth in one hand and no sound in his feet, wiping dust from names older than whole continents had managed to be. The blades sang in their glass.
"Leave them hungry," the instructor had told him once. "Respect is polish. Worship is rust."
At the end of the hall, a rack waited with no glass—training polearms scarred and dowel-tight, wood dark where many hands had agreed with it. The one he reached for didn't sing. It listened back. Heavy. Balanced a finger-width forward of center. He took it, and the world in front of him acquired a hinge.
The crimson-sashed Custodian stepped from a shadow without being summoned. "Name the goal."
"Keep the line whole."
The man's baton lifted. "Action."
Theta could have blocked. He could have slipped the first cut and countered on the second. Instead he moved to where the blow wanted to pass, let Armament skin the haft and his forearms, and turned the baton into an inelegant slide along the pole. The stick hissed by. The space behind him stayed unbroken.
"Again," the Custodian said, not because Theta had done it wrong, but because doing it right once proved nothing.
They worked the hinge until Theta's wrists buzzed and his gums bled where his teeth had pressed too hard. Each time he chose the solution that preserved the space rather than the one that punished the strike. At the end, the Custodian touched the polearm's butt with one finger.
"You will be the place the world does not fold," he said. "But remember: when the time comes, you must also be the knife that closes the book."
The blade-rack listened and said nothing. The lesson parked itself behind Theta's breastbone and waited for rain.
The bearer loosed the host with a hand signal no mortal eye could have seen. Aurelius heard the decision bloom and was already moving.
"Jovan—left engine," he said through the link.
"Taken," Jovan replied, his voice the contentment of a man handed proper work.
Aurelius walked—not rushed—three paces forward of the mortal barricades and set the butt of his spear into the broken masonry. Gold in mud. A line a child could point to.
"Hold," he told the mortals. He didn't shout. The word went down the barricades like a brace hammered into a spine. Hands steadied. Sight-lines narrowed.
The host hit the first choke point in a scrabbling, screaming clot. The bearer's needle-will tugged them into a shape meant to wrap the Custodes and roll the line. Aurelius let Observation peel the plan. Then he did something he almost never did outside the Palace.
He widened.
Conqueror's rose—not as a crushing crown but as a low, tidal drag that pulled the enemy's courage out of their legs. He kept it narrow, a corridor laid like glass across the street. When they stepped into it, lesser wills recognized themselves and faltered. Not broken. Recognized. It made cowards of some and skeptics of others. It made the engines hesitate a half-breath when hesitation meant inefficiency.
For the line behind him, he did the inverse.
He opened the part of himself forged on the Kept and let it run backward, not into the enemy but into the men who had chosen to stand. Not compulsion. Not theft. A quiet that allowed bravery to become useful instead of loud.
The first volley from the barricades cut clean. The second did not scatter. The third landed where it was meant to—on joints, on throats, on the places that refused to learn.
The left engine lunged, chain maw clattering. Jovan met it, guardian spear turning into a lever that hated waste. He took a knee to ground the force and pushed; Armament flared in a smooth, economical corona. Teeth shrieked. Metal unlearned how to hold itself together.
The right engine veered toward the weakest segment of the mortal line—two teenagers with a flamer and more faith than sense. Aurelius stepped once and was there.
He did not kill the engine first. He set his fist against its cheek and refused. The punch wasn't speed; it was weight with a direction, the mountain's vow concentrated into a knuckle. Plates buckled inward like breath. The machine-spirit inside howled, not angry—relieved. It had wanted to stop.
The bearer's needle flicked—adjustment, contingency. Good. Plans that bled were still plans. Aurelius took the spear in both hands and walked the engine back, each thrust a sentence of three words: Not. Through. Here.
Cultists tried the flanks. The drag of his will snared their feet. Mortals behind him found their rhythm. Somewhere in the press, Jovan laughed once, a bark without joy, the way a good craftsman does when a join fits flush.
The bearer showed himself at last—a man-shaped gap in the crowd, sigils crawling like old guilt across his armor. He carried a staff of black iron that had learned bad lessons.
He looked at Aurelius and did a thing he had survived many times: he tried to break the room with self. The air narrowed. The rain hung. The host surged with a cheer not made in throats.
Aurelius stepped off the spear's butt and went to meet him.
Conqueror's met Conqueror's in a pressure that pushed gutter water uphill. Buildings remembered their weight in sudden detail. The mortals nearest the clash staggered; the ones behind them leaned forward as if against wind.
Aurelius did not push harder. He went quieter. The Kept rose in him—the memory of a slab that wanted nothing so hard it made everything honest. He let that honesty flood his bones until his will made no noise at all.
The bearer's power—ostentatious, barbed, persuading—found nothing to hold and slid. His eyes widened a notch. That was the opening.
Aurelius advanced one measured pace and put the spear through the staff just below the hand. Armament skinned along the blade; black iron parted; fingers followed. The bearer tried to speak a god's name with half a mouth.
"Don't," Aurelius said, and put the blade under the sternum and up.
The surge collapsed inward. Not a rout—those came with sound. This was a forgetting. Men who had pushed a heartbeat earlier realized they were not the kind who pushed; engines remembered fatigue; courage drained like heat from a cooling pan.
Jovan's engine died loudly. The last cultist in front of the teenagers turned and ran into a wall he had hoped was a door.
The rain started again, as if it had taken personal offense at the pause.
Aurelius stepped back to the line and set the spear's butt on the stone. The teenagers with the flamer stood very straight and pretended their hands weren't trembling. He pretended not to see.
"Clear," Jovan said, though there were still pockets to clean and paperwork to hate.
Aurelius let the Gift fold inward until the world was only rain on gold and the slow exhale of a thousand chests. The line behind him was still a seam, still ragged. But it had not broken, and the habit of not breaking had taken a first breath.
He turned his helm toward the mortals. "You held."
The captain swallowed, eyes bright with relief and rain. "We… had help, my lord."
"You had decision," Aurelius said. "Keep it. It will be needed again."
He looked out over the floodplain to where the manufactorum's towers looked like teeth chewed down to sore gums. The wanting out there had not ended; it had shifted. Somewhere below, cells waited to be built around things that desired to be open. Somewhere above, the Palace's long shadow kept its own counsel.
A message clicked over the long vox. A voice with too many burdened vowels and too clean a channel. Off-world priority. Shadowkeepers requisition. Vault designation to follow.
Jovan angled his helm. "More work."
"Always," Aurelius said.
He lifted the spear. The mortals stepped back as one.
"Advance," he said, and the line that had not broken moved forward to make another.