Ira woke with the tang of metal on his tongue and the earthy, unsettling smell of alien soil in his nose. He blinked, disoriented, realizing he hadn't planned to fall asleep—just to rest his eyes for a moment. The memory of that silent exchange with Nox lingered, leaving him heavy and hollow, as if some part of him was still caught in that suspended space. Fatigue had dragged him under before he could resist.
Now, the city's version of morning crept in: not a true sunrise, but a slow, uncertain brightening of endless twilight. The violet glow of the fungus ebbed, replaced by a pale, sourceless light that seeped across the sky like a breath held too long finally let go. The warmth of the shared secret was still there, a tiny, private coal in the chill of the engine room. But the cold, hard data of the ship's condition was also waiting for him, patiently superimposed over the pipes and conduits. The numbers hadn't changed.
The fracture was still there. And the Swap's clock, a silent, immense pressure in the back of his mind, ticked ever forward. He found Zadie and Rust on the plaza, standing over a spread of tools and scavenged parts laid out on a tarp. They were speaking in low tones that stopped as he approached. The air didn't just cool; it became meticulously neutral. "Morning," Rust offered, his voice carefully casual. He was polishing a lens from a broken rangefinder, his movements too deliberate.
Zadie just nodded, her eyes on a schematic of the lift-core ventilation system, but Ira could feel her attention, sharp and wary, locked onto him. The performance was back on. The crew, dutifully assessing their chances. It was a pantomime, and they were all terrible actors. Ira crouched by the tarp, picking up a twisted strut bracket. "This is from the port impact," he said, his voice flat. "The mountain's memory." He met Rust's eyes. "You were right. It got personal. "Rust looked startled, as if he'd expected a command, not an acknowledgment. He just grunted. Ira let the silence hang for a beat, then stood. The decision he'd crystallized in the night was a hard knot in his throat. He couldn't mend the ship in time. He couldn't mend them.
There was only one path forward that had any probability of success above zero. "The repairs here are palliative," he stated, not looking at them, looking instead at the impossible skyline. "We can make her fly, but not far. Not through what's coming. And not before the world rearranges itself." Zadie's head came up. "So what's the plan, Finch? Another scenic route through a storm?"The old bite was in her voice, but it was dulled by a real fear. She was waiting for the next catastrophic, map-driven gamble. "No," Ira said, and the simplicity of the word made them both look at him fully. He finally turned to face them. The mask of the cold Cartographer was gone. In its place was a weary, grim honesty they hadn't seen since the mountainside. He let them see the fatigue, the weight.
He let them see the man beneath the map, because he needed them to believe what came next. "The plan is a trial. One I have to undertake alone." Rust's hands stilled, cloth halfway around the lens. "Another trial? Here?" Ira shook his head, searching for words that might actually reach them. "Not here. The Map—it's pointing me somewhere else. A forge, but not the kind you build things in. It's more... an idea. A place to try to fix what can't just be patched together. To learn how to hold things steady when everything wants to fall apart." He tried to explain, hoping they could feel the difference in his voice—less certainty, more need. "You want to fix the ship? With… magic?" Zadie's skepticism was a wall."I want to learn how to make it endure," Ira corrected softly. "The Swap isn't just movement. It's change. It's stress.
If I can understand how to anchor something, to make it resist being unmade…" He trailed off, the scope of it sounding mad even to his own ears. But it was the only thread. "And we're just supposed to sit here in Fungus Ville while you go on a field trip?" Rust's question wasn't hostile; it was bewildered. "You guard the ship," Ira said. "You rest. You…" He paused, his gaze sweeping over them, this fractured crew he loved and was losing. "You remember how to be a crew without me." The words landed heavily. It was the first time he'd ever acknowledged the possibility of his absence not meaning their end. It was a gift, and a surrender. Zadie studied him, her engineer's mind warring with her distrust. "How long?"
"The Map doesn't measure time . But… not long. A day. Maybe two. If I'm not back by the time the second band of the rift storm brushes the city's edge…" He didn't finish. They all knew what it meant. He didn't wait for their permission. He couldn't bear to see the relief that might flicker in their eyes. He simply turned and walked away from the Greywater, from the tarp of broken parts, from the last fragile pretense of normalcy. He followed the Map's pull, a gentle, insistent tugging behind his navel. It led him away from the plaza, into the winding, silent streets of the spliced city. He passed the cathedral-skyscraper, its stone and glass a permanent, grotesque kiss.
He walked down a cobbled lane that ended in a field of twisted, copper-colored reeds that chimed softly in a non-existent breeze. The forge wasn't a building. It was a place where the world was thin. He found it in a small, circular clearing where the fungal growth stopped abruptly. The air shimmered like a heat haze, but it was cold. In the center stood a single, anvil-shaped stone of pure, matte-black obsidian. The ground around it wasn't earth or fungus, but a mosaic of shattered tiles, each one a fragment of a different map—a sea chart here, a star chart there, a child's crayon drawing of a house wedged between intricate geometric proofs. The Trial of the Forge, Nox's voice murmured in his mind, no longer flustered, but solemn. "To mend, you must first understand how it broke, To anchor, you must feel the pull of the deep current. Are you ready, Cartographer?"
Ira stepped into the circle. The air pressure changed. The sounds of the strange city vanished, replaced by a profound, humming silence. He approached the anvil. "What do I do?" he asked, his voice small in the vast quiet. Show me what is broken. Ira thought of the Greywater. Not as a list of parts, but as a whole. The pride of its flight, the sting of its wounds, the fear in its corridors, the love and betrayal within its hull. He poured the memory of the ship—his ship, their home—into the space before the anvil. The obsidian drank the thought. The mosaic of tiles at his feet began to glow, each one projecting its fragment upward. A shimmering, phantom image of the Greywater materialized above the anvil, but it was wrong.
It was transparent, and running through it like cracks in ice were lines of brilliant, painful light—the stress fractures, yes, but also other lines: the rusty-red pulse of Rust's trauma, the cold, blue shimmer of Zadie's distrust, the sickly yellow echo of Nihil's violation. The ship was a web of breaks, physical and spiritual. "To mend the vessel, you must choose which breaks to seal and which must remain as part of its story. You cannot fix everything. Choose, Finch, What is essential?" The Trial wasn't about wielding a hammer. It was about making a terrible, yet compassionate, choice. It was the forge of judgment. Alone in the silent, thinning world, Ira Finch began the hardest work of his life. Not mapping the world, but deciding what in his small, broken corner of it was worth saving.