The chamber where the Rulers met did not belong to any one season. Vines in bloom climbed faultless pillars of obsidian. Frost traced silver veins through the floor and never melted. Lanterns hung in air that held no breeze. The ceiling was a night sky that never repeated its stars.
Istaroth stood at the table first, hands folded, eyes lowered as if listening to a distant tide that only she could hear. She had already bent the river of time for a mortal child, and the echo of that choice still rippled through the room. Across from her, Asmoday arrived in a drift of quiet light. Space folded and refolded around her with the patience of a map being considered rather than drawn. Naberius came next in the hush of leaves, life itself breathing at her heels. Ronova did not enter so much as arrive, and with her came the smell of banked embers and old graves.
None of them sat.
"Begin," Ronova said. Her voice flattened the distance in the chamber. Her eyes were the color of coals at midnight, and they never softened. "You opened a corridor. You let the girl run."
Istaroth lifted her gaze. "I slowed the loop. Asmoday opened the door."
Asmoday inclined her head the slightest degree. "I did. The Astral Express runs whether we speak of it or not. I placed a platform where she could board. That is all."
"That is not all," Ronova answered. The candles in the chamber thinned, as if their flames were remembering what it meant to be consumed. "You carried a mortal past the walls of Teyvat while my sentence stood. You undercut the law that keeps our world from rotting."
"The law is not a cudgel," Naberius said, voice clear as spring water. The vines around her wrists opened tiny white flowers. "It is a trellis. It is meant to guide growth, not strangle it. Hine endured beyond measure. There is a difference between judgment and cruelty."
"Cruelty," Ronova repeated. She tasted the word and set it down. "She asked for longevity in my hall. I denied her. She challenged me. She lost. That is the oldest law there is."
Istaroth did not flinch. "And yet the oldest law bends when its consequences unmake the balance it exists to protect."
Ronova's gaze slid to Istaroth and held. "You cut time to ribbons for a mortal. You set precedent."
"I set a boundary," Istaroth replied. "The loops had become a chisel on the root of the world. Another dozen turned and she would have been nothing but a sound in the stone. You do not always hear what time hears."
Silence walked a slow circle around the table. At length Asmoday spoke, her tone as precise as the edge of a compass. "The argument is not whether the girl suffered. We agree she did. The argument is whether Teyvat remained the correct arena for her trial. It did not. Here, every road ended in the same room. Elsewhere, roads fork."
"Elsewhere," Ronova said, and her mouth curved, but no one would have called it a smile. "You would send a child into the cold between worlds and call it mercy."
"I am not sentimental," Asmoday said. "I am practical. Space is risk. But here she had none. A net that always drops her back at the same square is not a life. It is a jar."
Naberius stepped nearer the table. The carved constellations on its surface brightened as her shadow crossed them. "Hine's heart chose. Life answers choice. I stand by hers."
Ronova's attention drifted to the place on the floor where Hine had fallen more than once. She seemed to listen to those stains the way some listen to rain. "Do you think I did not see what you saw in her?" she asked quietly. "Tenacity is not holiness. If it were, every vulture would be a saint."
"You saw a rival seed," Naberius said. "You chose to salt the ground."
"It was within my right," Ronova said.
"And within ours," Istaroth answered, "to keep the roots from burning." She turned her face slightly, as if hearing a clock dim and brighten. "The Heavenly Principles will take note. We do not pretend otherwise."
"They already have," Asmoday said. A hairline fracture of light opened and sealed above her palm, a demonstration rather than a threat. "I felt the pull in the corridors when I widened the platform. A question was asked. Two more are on the way."
Ronova's eyes warmed by a fraction. "Good. Let them come. The Principles recall what happens when one of us overreaches."
"You list our names when you mean mine," Istaroth said. She sounded tired but not uncertain. "I am prepared to speak for what I did."
Naberius lifted one hand. "And I will speak for it as well. If cost is owed, I share it."
"I do not seek to hide behind either of you," Asmoday said. "I invited the train to slow. I invited it to accept her. That is on me."
Ronova's gaze returned to the table. "Three voices to one," she said. "So the tally is made."
"No," Istaroth said. She let the word fall like a stone into a basin and waited for the ring to fade. "We have not tallied. We have stated positions. We have not named terms."
Ronova's attention sharpened. "Terms."
"The girl cannot be hunted beyond Teyvat," Istaroth said. "We all know this. Your claim ends at the outermost wall."
"My claim ends when she is dead," Ronova replied. "Where it happens is ornament."
Asmoday took one measured step forward. Space flexed to make the step both long and short. "You will not send a scythe through my corridors. You know their rules. So do I. So do the Principles. If you slip a blade into a hinge, I will close that hinge on your wrist."
Ronova's face did not change. The chamber cooled anyway. "You would bite the hand that keeps your halls from filling with ghosts."
"My halls do not need your ghosts," Asmoday said. "They need thresholds that hold."
Naberius looked between them, then set her palm flat against the table, as if to remind it that something living touched its old stone. "This anger is not where our care belongs. The girl is on the rails. The question is what she will meet when she returns."
"When," Ronova echoed. "I prefer if."
"She will return," Naberius said. There was no vanity in the absolute. Only a gardener's certainty about a seed that has already cracked. "Life recognizes the direction of her heart. It will pull her back to the soil where it began."
"To be harvested," Ronova said.
"To be welcomed," Naberius answered.
Istaroth breathed in as if counting. "Terms," she said again. "No knives in the corridors. No snares at the platforms. No nets thrown at the first step she takes home."
"You ask me for three mercies," Ronova said. "Ask me for a fourth. Ask me to greet her with sweet tea."
"I ask you to keep your oath to the walls," Asmoday said. "You have kept it before."
"I kept it when keeping it did not make fools of us," Ronova said. She finally sat, and the chair accepted her as the night accepts water. "You took a mortal from my judgment. You now expect me to wait with hands folded until she strolls back wearing borrowed crowns."
"You expect her to stroll," Naberius said softly. "I expect her to crawl."
Ronova studied Naberius for a long, unblinking moment. "You love them," she said. "All of them. Inconveniently."
Naberius did not deny it. "Life is inconvenient," she said. "It spills. It returns where it is not wanted. It insists."
Istaroth moved her hand in a slow arc and the ceiling's constellations shifted. One star brightened, then dimmed. "The Principles will ask for a ledger. We will show them one. We will account for every second moved, every door opened. If they demand weight in return, let them lay it on me."
"You offer yourself as counterweight," Ronova said. "That is sweet. It is also irrelevant. The moment the rails deliver her back, I will return to the honest language of my office."
"Then honor this much," Asmoday said. "Give her one crossing of the threshold untouched. If she steps into Teyvat and you strike in the first breath, you will prove that none of us can keep a promise worth the word."
Ronova lifted her gaze to the false sky and considered a star that looked older than the others. "One crossing," she said at last. "If she returns walking and not carried, if she returns with her name and not another's, if she returns at all. One breath."
Naberius closed her eyes as if a weight had slipped from between her shoulder blades. "One breath can be a world."
"It will not be," Ronova said. "I will make sure of that."
"Then let us make sure of something else," Istaroth said. She pointed to the table. The runes around its rim began to move. Not spin, not race. Move, like caravans seen from a very great height. "We will mark the promise here. One crossing unchallenged. We will mark another. No pursuit beyond the outer wall. We will sign with our offices, not our names."
Ronova watched the runes slide into their bed. "I will sign with mine," she said. "And I will rest a hand on the scythe while I do."
Naberius touched the table and the runes warmed. "I sign."
Asmoday traced a small square in air. It folded into the table and became a door that did not open. "I sign."
Istaroth let the tiniest tick of sound enter the room, like the first tooth of a clock setting. "I sign."
Ronova placed two fingers on the edge. The ink that was not ink darkened to a shade that only appears in charcoal after rain. "I sign."
The marks settled. The chamber exhaled. Somewhere far beyond its walls, a rail hummed very softly, as if remembering a passenger who had already become a story on a different wind.
"Now we wait," Istaroth said.
"I do not wait," Ronova answered. "I prepare."
"For what?" Naberius asked.
"For the moment the child becomes a lever others think they can pull," Ronova said. "You are not the only ones who have watched her. There are gods who think they are kings. There are kings who think they are gods. There are cities that eat hope with bread. I will not chase her between worlds, but I will teach any hand that reaches through my window what it means to be burned by an old house."
"Poetry does not make a threat smaller," Asmoday said.
"It makes it honest," Ronova replied.
Naberius let her palm hover over the place in the stone where Hine had lain. The stone did not warm, but it listened. "When she returns," she said, "let her see a door, not a spear."
"When she returns," Ronova said, "let her see both."
Istaroth's eyes reflected a sky that the room did not own. "She will hear me when she needs to," she said. "I will not steer her, but I will answer if she calls. I doubt she will call often. She has learned the cost of asking."
Asmoday looked toward the invisible point where her corridors began. "The Express knows her now. It will not coddle her. It will not betray her either. Rail is honest. It arrives or it does not. It is cut or it holds. I prefer such company."
Ronova finally rose. Her shadow remained on the chair for a heartbeat, then gathered itself and followed. "Do not mistake my consent for blessing," she said. "You chose against me. I did not forget how to count."
"You are not asked to bless," Naberius said. "You are asked to remember that endings can be tended, not performed."
Ronova turned at the arch. "I remember everything," she said. "That is my job."
She left. The temperature lifted. The lanterns forgot to fear their own flame.
Asmoday glanced at Istaroth. "The Principles will send a messenger."
"I know," Istaroth said. "I wonder which. The gentle one who weighs, or the one who brands."
"Prepare for both," Asmoday said. She tilted her head. For a brief instant, the chamber saw what she saw. Rails curving through a sea of black glass. A distant station lit by a soft, patient gold. A girl standing very small on an impossible platform, hand inside a satchel that held a shard that remembered her name.
Naberius smiled without showing her teeth. "She will find a friend soon," she said. "Life is good at that."
"It is also good at giving enemies the same road," Asmoday answered.
"Then let her feet learn the rhythm," Istaroth said. She half closed her eyes, and the ceiling's stars realigned by the width of a breath. "The next turn is already in motion."
They did not speak again for a while. The chamber accepted their quiet. Outside it, Teyvat held its breath, the way a great forest does when a storm has passed and another considers whether to come ashore.
Far off on rails that never rusted, a whistle sounded like a promise no one had yet tried to break.