At day, the city calls me Caelus.
By dawn, the city listens to Cicero.
I used to think a name was only a sound.
Now I know it's a door. The more you use it, the more it opens, until you forget which side you're standing on.
If logic never lies, then why does it split me in two?
I closed the shutters, dimmed the lantern, and set the coin on my desk,
a thin disc of silver etched with a single ridge around the edge, the silent mark of Cicero Winston.
I didn't need a crest. A line was enough. A horizon between what I am and what I must be.
Aether hummed at my fingertips as I tuned the carrier field, soft, narrow, disciplined. A thread.
I built the first node of my 'Whisper Net' the way a watchmaker learns a pulse, patiently.
Carrier: low-amplitude aether ripple braided with ambient mana to avoid detection.
Keying: spoken syllables folded into tempo rather than tone, if intercepted, it reads like meaningless breath.
Cipher: the Thespian Zodiac as a cultural one-time pad, Aries to Pisces mapped to twelve positions, order equals route, month equals timing, sign equals drop. No one suspects superstition when the church calls it superstition.
The first listeners I recruited weren't soldiers. They were people the city ignores, a bellmender beneath the South Bridge, a laundress on the river stairs, a boy who sold roasted chestnuts outside the Registrar's Hall. I never met them as Caelus. I never met them as Cicero, either.
I met them as instructions.
Cicero Protocol, Rule of Three
1. Never say a name.
2. Never walk the same road twice.
3. Never transmit while thinking of yourself.
'That last rule is harder than it sounds.'
Within a week, the Net began to breathe, tiny pulses carrying small truths, a ledger amended at midnight, shipments rerouted to cellars that don't exist, ink orders doubling for offices that never send letters. Noise, all of it.
The Astronomers' Guild appeared in my reports like a stain that won't wash out. Funding from the Capital. Staff rotations without public notice. A survey team "measuring humidity" in tunnels where humidity drowns you without a survey.
And everywhere, chalk sigils the size of a fingernail, drawn near wells, bridge footings, and boundary stones. Virgo. Libra. Capricorn. Not fate. But appointments.
Virgo = South markets, third bell of morning:
paper moves when eyes are tired.
Libra = Gatehouse scales, last light:
weights recorded, bribes memorized.
Capricorn = Granite arches, moon above the left tower:
stoneworkers paid twice.
It wasn't astronomy. It was logistics written in a language people had learned to stop reading.
I keyed the Net and sent 3 threads at once, each braided with a different sign-order and tempo mask.
To Nathaniel Valor :
'ARIES–LIBRA–PISCES'
'Start–Weigh–Vanish'
"Counting goes wrong where coin meets oath. Watch the scales at dusk. The books don't match the bridges."
To Alexander Lysandross:
'VIRGO–CAPRICORN–GEMINI
Verify–Build–Echo'
"Old marks, new stone. The guild builds under the city using names that repeat themselves."
To Regalus Winstar:
'SCORPIO–VIRGO–LEO–AQUARIUS'
'Hide–Verify–Authorize–Change'
"The Capital's hand silences what the ground repeats. If you want truth, read it under moonlight, not banners."
Each line dissolved as it left my lips, the air itself swallowing the syllables and returning only the rhythm.
Aether makes a cruel mirror, it shows you the thing you're trying not to be. As the last thread faded, I caught my reflection in the black window and, for a heartbeat, I didn't know which name belonged to the mouth that moved.
***
Far from my window, beneath the Knight Guards' headquarters, a man unrolled a map under an open skylight. The moon silvered the ink.
Regalus Winstar Cael Bellator,
The Unyielding Sun, did not speak.
He listened, like the way a river listens to the stones that split it.
When the cipher thread reached him, he did not call for scribes. He dimmed the torches and stood in the lunar quiet.
"Scorpio. Virgo. Leo. Aquarius,"
he murmured, letting the sequence set like bone.
He moved 4 markers on the city chart,
a black well,
a sealed stair,
a captain's office,
a disused aqueduct.
He had seen such orders before, in border wars where messages needed to be remembered even when paper burned and tongues broke.
Regalus let out a long breath, his jaw tightening as he stared at the faint pulse of mana fading from the message.
"You move like smoke that refuses the wind,"
he muttered, voice low and edged.
"Even the Sun can't cast a shadow long enough to catch you."
He paused, the flicker of irritation in his tone.
"Damn it, Cicero... You think like a scholar but hide like a ghost wearing a soldier's armor."
He did not smile. Regalus rarely smiled. But something in his eyes softened, the way iron softens when it decides not to break.
Then he tamped the map flat and gave 3 quiet commands, one to Catherine Joan Eleanor, one to Hannibal Nelson, one to a courier whose name never made it to paper.
The trap he laid was simple:
watch the Scales at dusk,
count the stonecarts by moon,
audit the ink that never dries.
He wasn't hunting Cicero.
He was hunting whatever Cicero was already hunting.
***
Morning brought sunlight and sanctuary. Samantha waved from the library steps, I lifted a hand that felt heavier than a hand should.
She asked me about grammar.
I answered.
She asked me about rest.
I lied.
When she laughed, it hurt.
Not because I didn't want to hear it, but because the sound made me remember Caelus, and 'Caelus' had started to feel like a 'costume' I took off when the city got dark.
Later, Father caught me adjusting the sling on his empty sleeve.
He chuckled softly, the kind of laugh that tried to hide pain behind warmth.
"You'll ruin the knot if you keep fussing like that,"
he said.
"I just want it to sit right,"
I mumbled.
"You always tied mine when I was little."
Of course it's a lie.
I didn't know any of Caelus childhood memory.
But...
He smiled, faintly, but real.
"Then I guess it's your turn now."
For a moment, silence filled the room. Just the sound of the breeze slipping through the window, and his steady breathing beside me.
"Caelus,"
he said quietly,
"you don't have to carry everything I've lost."
I hesitated, fingers frozen on the knot.
"I just… don't want to lose anything else."
He placed his remaining hand on my shoulder, firm yet gentle.
"You won't. Not if you keep that heart of yours. Live smart, not brave."
This time, his voice wasn't a warning...
it was a hope.
I smiled faintly, blinking away the sting in my eyes.
"I'll try, Father."
He squeezed my shoulder once.
"No. Don't try. Just live. That's enough for me."
I listened to his words.
Solemnly.
And then I went back to the desk, closed the shutters, and reopened the horizon coin.
"This is Cicero Winston,"
I whispered to a room pretending to be empty.
Which of us—
No...
Which of 'me' said that?
***
The day's drops came in thin and sour. No revelations. Only damage written small.
A Registrar's clerk ordered parchment graded for damp cellars, yet his office sits on a hill.
A stonecutter's guild billed for blocks to a "well repair" under a street with no wells.
A letter sent from a church annex used sand to dry ink, old habit for secrecy but the annex uses blotting cloth for everything else.
None of this proves a cult.
All of it proves a plan.
In every scrap I could see the same bite mark, The Tower moving with clean hands while someone higher washed the blood for them.
I drew a spiral on the corner of my notes. It wasn't art. It was a guess. If the city were a shell, whatever we heard in the sewer was not a scream. It was a hum.
I widened the Net, barely, adding two relay knots in places that drink sound, the bathhouse vault at South Gate and the grain silos near the river. Air slows in heat and in wheat, it holds rhythm better there. The pulses would be slower, safer, less likely to scatter.
A rule I wrote for myself as the candle guttered:
"Cicero Protocol, Addendum"
'If they start speaking your name, stop speaking at all.'
The trouble is, rumors mature faster than facts. By dusk I heard it, 2 officers on the barracks roof, sharing a skin of sour wine.
"This 'Cicero' again. You think he's real?"
"Real enough for Regalus to move two divisions last night."
"Then why can't any of us find him?"
"Because we're looking for a man. Maybe we should be looking for a ghost instead."
Pffttt...
I almost laughed.
Then I didn't.
The Knights arrived at the Gatehouse scales as the day bled into evening. They did not raid. They counted. Every sack weighed twice, every mark recorded once by hand and once by memory.
Two merchants complained. One clerk vanished to "fix a door" and didn't come back.
At the aqueduct, a quiet team unsealed a padlocked arch and found nothing but dust, until a torch held high revealed a chalk scar in the keystone.
Libra, drawn small as a thumbnail.
In the captain's office, the ink account balanced with mock perfection, all columns equal, all numbers clean. Until Catherine, bored of silence, asked why a storeroom that "doesn't exist" requires two new locks a week.
Each clue was a drizzle, not a downpour. Regalus didn't need a storm. He needed proof of weather.
He got it at moonrise when a cart of "broken bricks" rattled down a street paved last month. Hannibal tapped one brick with his knuckle, listened once, and smiled without warmth.
"Hollow,"
he said.
"Bricks shouldn't echo."
Inside, wrapped in straw, he found a single iron plate etched with a line of meaningless letters. Not letters. Orders. The Thespian signs arranged as a route nobody living would think to read.
I felt the answer before the Net carried it back, the way a room feels different after someone has left it. The city had flinched. Not much. Enough.
I wrote three words:
"It breathes below."
Then, without thinking, I signed it —C.
---
"It breathes below"
—C
---
I stared at the mark until the ink dried.
Caelus. Cicero. The same initial. A trick of convenience. A trap of identity.
I tore the slip and fed it to the flame.
On my way to bed, I passed the mirror and stopped.
The boy who looked back at me had my eyes… but someone else's posture.
"Who are you?"
I asked him.
He did not answer.
Masks don't talk unless you put them on.
I leaned closer, staring into my reflection, the flickering candlelight splitting my face into halves.
One side still looked like Caelus Valen, son of Marcus and Selene.
The other…
was the voice that whispered through aether and shadow.
Cicero Winston.
The name I forged that night wasn't random.
It slipped out like an instinct, something my old self remembered.
"Cicero…"
Marcus Tullius Cicero,
a man who believed that words could hold an empire together.
A scholar who fought tyrants not with swords, but with his tongue.
They silenced him, eventually…
But even when they cut out his tongue, his words still echoed through history.
And Winston…
Winston Churchill,
a man who stood against despair, holding a nation together with nothing but stubborn hope and iron words.
He once said,
"Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision."
Perhaps I wanted to remember that.
Maybe that's what I am,
a man who hides behind words,
trying to keep the world from falling apart with logic and lies.
Or maybe I just needed names that reminded me what humans sound like when they refuse to surrender.
I glanced again at the mirror.
The lantern burned low, shadows creeping over my face until only the eyes remained, steady, tired, and hollow.
"Cicero Winston,"
I whispered.
"The voice that speaks when I can't."
The name didn't echo this time.
It stayed inside,
where it belonged.
I blew out the lantern and lay in the dark, listening to Eschatopolis pretend to sleep.
Somewhere beneath the stones, they're building a door.
Somewhere above the stones, a man with sunlight in his name is counting breaths in the moonlight.
Tomorrow, I'll tighten the Net.
Tomorrow, I'll speak again without saying who I am.
Tonight, I'll try to remember the sound of my mother's voice when she says Caelus, so I don't forget who needs to live,
If Cicero has to die.