Morning broke clean over Eschatopolis, as if the city had remembered how to breathe.
The Knight Guards did not sound trumpets when Regalus Winstar Cael Bellator arrived. 'The Unyielding Sun' preferred quiet doors. A plain carriage. A short escort. A gaze that weighed rooms without raising dust.
He met Alexander Lysandross first, ink stained fingers, a ledger under his arm, the exactness of a man whose thoughts march in rows.
Then Marcus Theron, a mountain without one slope, sleeve pinned neat, chin steady, the map of recent pain traced only in the pause between breaths.
On a table in a sunless room lay the iron plate the patrol had pried from hollow bricks,
a line of Zodiac signs that was orders in superstition's clothing. Regalus's hand hovered over it, not touching.
"Libra at the scales. Virgo at the wells. Capricorn under stone,"
he murmured.
"A route nobody thinks to read in daylight."
Alexander nodded.
"Your audit last night shook the right branches. We found three carts without destinations and two ledgers with perfect sums...too perfect."
Marcus's mouth tugged in something almost like a smile.
"Perfection is a wall. I prefer doors."
Regalus looked up.
"Then let's find the hinges."
He did not mention the message that had reached him under moonlight, tempos braided into a whisper, the signature of a ghost who thought like a scholar and hid like a soldier. He had decided one thing in the dark.
'He would hunt the wound, not the messenger.'
***
By noon, Regalus wanted streets, not reports. He dismissed the carriage and walked.
In the West Sector, Luna returned to the city like a bell remembering its note, hair sun, licked from travel, hands smelling faintly of sugar and soap.
"Three weeks with Mother on the road,"
she declared, pushing a small paper packet at me.
"Candied lemon peel. Don't say no."
"I would never insult a gift from a merchant,"
I said, already biting into it.
The peel was sweet enough to trick you into not flinching at the sour.
She peered at me.
"You look thinner. And older. Which one is on purpose?"
I laughed, and the sound surprised me.
"Ask me again when I know."
We walked the row of stalls where truth comes wrapped in loud voices. Somewhere behind the clamour my mind continued its own work, code routes, drop points, the places where ink dries wrong.
Then a hush moved through the lane, the way water smooths before the river narrows.
Regalus had stepped into the market.
He wore no rank on his breast, but people recognize weather even when it's not raining. Alexander shadowed him with a clerk's patience. Nathaniel closed space like a shield without edges. A few paces away, Marcus slowed as if his breath had remembered the weight of a battlefield.
Luna tugged my sleeve.
"That's—"
"I know,"
I said softly.
The Sun had come to walk our streets.
Later, in the small court behind the guildhall, I sat on a stone bench with a book open to a page I wasn't reading. A fountain whispered in a language water never translates.
Regalus crossed the court alone and took the far end of my bench as if it were a threshold neither of us needed to cross.
"Good afternoon,"
he said, voice unadorned.
"Good afternoon,"
I answered.
Silence can be a test. It can also be a kindness. He let it be both.
"You're Marcus Theron's son,"
he said at last, neither a question nor a claim.
"Caelus."
He inclined his head.
"Regalus."
We watched the water claim and reclaim its own surface.
His gaze dipped to the book on my lap.
"What holds you so still? history or poetry?"
"Herbal compendium,"
I lied with a polite shrug.
"Poetry that pretends to cure headaches."
He made a sound that might have been a laugh.
"The best remedies rarely admit what they're treating."
A breeze moved across the court, lifting the fountain's spray into a thin veil. He watched it, then asked, almost casually,
"I heard you're training with Darius. Does the training going well?"
"Darius is trying to murder me slowly,"
I said.
"Which I'm told is a sign of affection."
"Hmm. He reserves quick deaths for people he doesn't believe in."
He glanced toward the lane that led to the clinic.
"And how's your mother?"
"Too kind for this world,"
I said, then corrected myself.
"Or stubborn enough to make it kinder."
"A precision upgrade,"
he murmured.
"And your father?"
I swallowed.
"He always jokes about it. It helps everyone but the arm."
"Men carry silence heavier than shields,"
he said, still studying the play of water and light.
"If he laughs, it's so you don't have to."
We let a few heartbeats pass. The market's clamour folded into the court's quiet until even the birds sounded careful.
He nodded toward the paper packet peeking from my pocket.
"Lemon peel?"
"A friend returned from the road,"
I said.
"She thinks sugar cures melancholy."
"It does,"
he said.
"It simply refuses to admit the dosage."
A small smile found me before I could stop it.
He let the moment stand, as if testing whether the ground between us could carry weight.
Then his tone shifted by a degree no ear would mark, and the shallows gave way.
We watched the water claim and reclaim its own surface.
With eyes that pity me. He said,
"When I was younger,"
"I mistook resolve for a fist. I thought it meant not bending. Age has improved my metaphors,
Resolve is a reed, it survives storms because it knows when to bow."
"And when does a reed refuse?"
"When bowing becomes drowning,"
he said.
Then, after a breath,
"Your father understands this. He stood between others and the flood and paid with a piece of himself. That is a debt the city does not know how to count."
Something in my chest did a quiet, painful thing.
"He jokes about it."
"Good men do,"
Regalus said.
"To keep their children from learning grief before its hour."
We let the fountain speak for a while.
"What do you teach your soldiers?"
I asked.
"That duty is the art of lending your strength to the weak without charging interest,"
he said.
"And that the weight of light is not its glory, but its heat. Light reveals. Light warms. It also burns. You must learn where to stand so others can stand in its circle without blistering."
I heard the echo of my own late night thoughts and did not flinch.
"And power?"
"Power,"
he said,
"is not to be known. It is to protect without a name."
His eyes did not move from the fountain.
"The most dangerous men are not those who wish to be seen, but those who can bear never being thanked."
Something in the air shifted, like the instant before a coin lands and decides which world is face-up.
I chose a small truth that was not a confession.
"What if the city forgets the ones who bear it?"
"Then you have done it well,"
he said.
I smiled, but it wasn't a happy shape.
"That sounds like erasure."
"It is,"
he said gently.
"Of the self. Not of the work."
He rose then, as if the bench had given us its measure. At the archway, he paused.
"Sugar helps,"
he added, almost to the fountain.
"So does telling the truth to someone who won't write it down."
The water resuming its old argument with gravity, the lemon peel suddenly heavier in my pocket.
Later...
He asked about the market, the guildhall, the books that travel more than people do. I answered with what any attentive boy might know, prices, routes, which scribes switch inks when the sun drops. He did not praise and did not press.
"Do you read ciphers?"
he asked after a time.
"Only fair ones,"
I said.
"The kind that want to be solved."
"And unfair ones?"
"They usually hide in plain speech,"
I said.
"They rely on the reader's hunger to be impressed."
A corner of his mouth moved.
"Do you admire hidden things, Caelus?"
"I just admire the economy of them,"
I said.
"A short word that carries a long road."
He looked at me then, fully, as if measuring a boat by the way it rides the wake it made.
"You listen like someone who has learned the shape of rooms,"
he said.
"Rooms have shapes you cannot see until you stop trying to be the tallest thing in them."
My pulse ticked once too loud.
"I listen because I am small."
"That is a kind of wisdom,"
he said.
Somewhere beyond the wall, a bell counted the hour. Alexander appeared at the court's archway, paused when he saw me, and approached with a quiet nod.
"Commander,"
he said to Regalus,
"the scalehouse accounting is ready."
Regalus stood, smoothing nothing. He did not offer a hand, and I was grateful, I wasn't sure which name would reach for it.
"Caelus,"
he said,
"a city survives because strangers keep promises to each other. Your father has kept more than his share. Learn from him. But do not copy him."
"Why not?"
"Because imitation spares you from choosing,"
he said.
"Resolve is the art of choosing twice, once for the world, once for yourself."
He turned, then stopped as Marcus entered from the opposite side. For a heartbeat, the two men regarded each other, the Sun and the Mountain, each nodding at the weight the other carried.
"Commander,"
Marcus said.
"Leader,"
Regalus answered.
He glanced back at me.
"You have your father's eyes."
"I borrowed them,"
I said lightly.
"And returned them without scratches, I hope,"
Marcus added, almost smiling.
Regalus's gaze moved between us, father and son, two halves of a lesson, and then he left with Alexander, the air cooler after he was gone.
***
I found Luna at the corner where the baker sells yesterday's bread to people who know how to make it new again.
"You vanished,"
she said, arms crossed.
"So did you for three weeks."
She huffed.
"I brought candied lemon peel. You brought nothing."
"I brought you a story,"
I said.
"About a man who carries light carefully so the rest of us don't burn."
She rolled her eyes.
"That's not a story. That's a sermon. Tell me later."
Her voice softened.
"Your father looked proud when he saw you."
"He always does,"
I said.
"I'm trying to deserve it."
"Start by eating,"
she said, pressing another paper packet into my hand.
"Hungry boys can't be heroes."
I nearly told her that I didn't want to be a hero. I wanted to be a hinge.
But you don't give hinges to children. You give them sweets and safe streets and the illusion that doors stay open by themselves.
"Thank you,"
I said instead.
***
Dusk. The city changed keys.
I walked the narrow lane behind the clinic where mother keeps a potted herb that refuses to die. In my pocket, the horizon coin warmed against my skin as if it had learned the temperature of my thoughts.
I could have used it. I could have braided another whisper into the air, updates, routes, the bite marks of a plan that keeps its teeth cordially covered.
But Regalus's words had found poor soil and planted anyway.
'Power is not to be known. It is to protect without a name.'
A mask can be a tool. It can also be a habit.
I stopped under the eaves and listened to the city decide what to forget tonight.
Resolve, he'd said, was not a fist.
Duty, an uncharged loan.
Light, a heat that needs a hand between it and the skin of the world.
I thought of Father tying knots with a hand he no longer had.
Of Luna bringing sweets like a truce.
Of Alexander counting numbers until they confessed their lies.
Of Regalus counting breaths in the moonlight, hunting weather, and not storms.
And I thought of Cicero Winston, the voice I had built to speak when I could not, a ladder I had climbed so high that the ground felt like a rumor.
'Who am I when the ladder is gone?'
Night gathered itself neatly over Eschatopolis.
At the window, I traced a circle on the fogged pane with one finger, small, anonymous, complete. Then I wiped it away.
Tomorrow, there would be ledgers to unsettle, bricks to tap, routes to redraw. The Tower still worked in the grammar of absence, and somewhere beneath our feet, something breathed.
But tonight, I set the coin down and let the room be only a room