They buried him beneath a sky that felt too bright for mourning.
The square before the ruined Spire filled with people in a slow, sorrowing tide, guild banners lowered, wardens in battered armor, engineers with oil-stained sleeves, scholars with ink on their hands.
The king and queen stood close to the bier, faces drawn but composed, around them the council moved stiffly, no longer divided into rivalries but firmed into the same raw grief.
A hush passed through the crowd when Agnes's coffin was set down.
Someone struck a slow bell, it sounded like a clock trying to count a life.
Dareth could not keep himself together. He crouched at the coffin's edge, feeling the weight of loss pressing down, and, when his shoulders finally gave, the sound he made was a small animal wail, too human, too fragile for the brass and banners around him.
Hands, students, wardens, old friends, came to his back, to his arms, and he let them hold him as if the world could be steadied by pressure alone.
Aurelia watched from the edge of the circle, a white bandage over her right.
The other eye took everything in, the king's heavy, private grief, the queen's hand clenched at her side, the faces of Arcane students who felt strangely too far from home.
Lysandra hovered near her shoulder, grip gentle and fierce. Kael stood a measure away, jaw clenched like a man who wanted to break something but kept the violence for the field.
Aurelia felt gratitude for them being there, a solid presence against a sky that refused to weep.
He carried the kingdom in his chest, she thought, and the image felt both right and insufficient. He chose to stand while the rest fled.
The king spoke first, voice low but clear enough for the square to hear. He did not talk about policy or blame. He spoke of duty and imperfect men who try to shoulder impossible things. "Agnes stood where others could not," he said. "He bought us breathing space with his life. The Spire will remember him as its shield."
There were speeches after, conservators, magi, a representative of the Arcane Academy, words that stitched grief into a narrative.
People placed trinkets on the coffin, a rusty cog, a child's tin ring, a scrap of a ledger.
After the ceremony, the work began. Mourning and rebuilding are threaded together. Tents turned into workshops.
Where guardians had trampled streets into raw mud, engineers and Arcane specialists laid temporary bridges and pumps.
Aramont's contingent did not simply stand on parade, men and women in Aramont gray moved with practical, efficient kindness, cartwrights setting planks, masons raising walls, guild engineers bringing spare parts and blueprints. Their presence steadied the camp like a brace.
For weeks, the city lived on a thin, fierce line between ruin and repair.
Children returned to classes beneath tarps, medics turned halls into wards, and taught survivors how to bind new scars.
Dareth organized teams with routes to clear, anchors to find, and broken wards to reinforce.
Aurelia went with them, where she could, and people watched her with new edges to their looks: respect, fear, curiosity.
Some offered thanks, some still lowered their gazes as if she were a bright thing that could scorch.
Aurelia accepted neither pity nor praise. She received a single thing: responsibility. I will not let his name be what dies with him, she told herself in the quiet hours, when the city slept in fragments, and the fires sputtered like sleeping embers.
Dareth's grief mellowed into a fierce focus. In the day, he moved like a man with two hearts, one for the Spire's practical needs, one for the memory of his friend.
At night, he sat with Agnes's old notes and maps by the glow of a salvaged lamp, tracing the same lines Agnes had once taught him to read.
Politically, the Spire stabilized, but not without cost.
Council meetings moved from the rancor of blame to the blunt, hard math of recovery: food routes, ward shifts, rebuilding priorities.
Some factions clung to old ambitions like sailors to wreckage, but the king's presence and Aramont's aid calmed most of the more dangerous opportunism.
A memorial committee formed, mixed with engineers and magi, to plan a permanent monument to Agnes, not a statue of a man in bronze triumph but a small hall of repaired things, a library of the Spire's instruments, where future students could come to read, to learn how fragile stewardship could be, and how one life might keep a thousand.
For Aurelia, there were quieter reckonings. At night, her Aspect still sent up tremors, faint echoes of the Core's memories, softer now, like someone speaking after a fever.
Friends mended her in the small ways that matter. Lysandra pressed snacks into her hands and joked too loudly in the mess to break the silence.
Kael kept watch until he looked like he hadn't slept in days.
Lucien slid a battered book into Aurelia's lap with a smirk that never reached his eyes.
Marlec and Seris watched them all with a tired protectiveness.
The Spire would rise again, battered, wary, and more cautious, and Agnes's name would be one of the quiet reasons it did.
-
Zerath Malcor moved through what had once been his home as if walking through a dream stitched from iron and ash.
A scaffolding span yawned where his street had stood.
Steam hissed from ripped canals. The air tasted faintly of hot oil and singed copper.
He kept his hands empty for hours, hands that once held forged tools could do little for grief, until he saw it, a child's wooden horse, paint bubbled and blackened, trapped in the jaws of a smashed automaton.
Beside it, a palm-sized cog lay half-melted; someone, some child, had carved a single initial into its rim: an L.
Zerath crouched and pried the toy free. The paint flaked between his fingers.
For a second, the city fell away, and he saw, impossibly bright, the small hand that had clutched his own, his daughter, laughing at a festival, falling asleep against his chest.
The memory made something unclench behind his sternum.
A wail tore from the collapsed timber behind him, someone had found a mother beneath a beam. Zerath turned away. He had to do something steadier than scream.
He curled his fingers around the wooden horse and crushed it.
The brittle toy cracked with a sound that landed in his chest like breaking bone.
The person beside him made a noise that was not a sob and not a laugh, it was the gap where language had been.
People began, with clumsy care, to lift the dead. To others, they were numbers, nameless casualties. But to him, each face was a story he knew.
The baker, whose bread his daughter once adored, was warm and sweet on winter mornings
The sewist, who had mended her torn sleeve, laughed as she promised to outgrow it too quickly.
The stablehand, who taught her how to braid a horse's mane.
The singer, whose voice had filled the square the night she danced carefree.
Every body was a thread pulled from the tapestry of his daughter's life, and with each recognition the weight pressed harder. She was gone because of this incident, and now so were they.
As the townsfolk carried their dead, mourning and duty became the same act. He watched, hollow, knowing that with each body lifted, another piece of his daughter's world was gone forever.
Zerath's hands shook, but he worked. At dusk, when the city cooled and the ruins dimmed to charcoal, he walked alone to the parade grounds, cog like a small, hot thing in his palm.
He turned it between his fingers until the etched L caught the weak moon and threw it back. "Who do I hold accountable?" he asked, no one in particular.
The answer came like cold iron: everyone. The men and women who had braided life into brass and called it progress.
The commanders who ordered as the smoke swallowed the streets.
The academies that taught children to shape power without teaching the cost.
Zerath pressed the cog to his lips like a coin in a vow. "I will return what I have lost," he said, and the words shaped themselves into a purpose he had not asked for.
Not mercy. Not revenge in the bright, easy way. Something slower and more deliberate.
"I will make the hands that made these machines taste what it is to lose," he whispered.
Somewhere beyond the shattered skyline, an automaton's distant sensor blinked to life, answering nothing in particular.
Zerath folded the cog into his palm and walked back into the ash with a step that no longer belonged to the frightened father but to a man beginning to build a plan.
He would survive. He would gather what others threw away. He would be careful. He would be patient. The world would pay attention when he made it bleed.
-
They travelled home the slow, dusty way, carriages instead of clockships because the Heart's death had taken the Spire's breath with it.
The road smelled of coal and wet leather, townspeople pressed to see them pass, hats lifted and hands trembling with gratitude.
Aurelia sat wrapped in a wool cloak, Lysandra's fingers finding her palm now and then.
When Lysandra lifted a careful hand toward Aurelia's eye, Aurelia turned her face and let the touch be small and steady.
It hurts less today, she thought, feeling the faint sting like a tide under skin. It will take time. It remembers the Heart's pulse.
Kael, unusually blunt, cleared his throat at the mention of the wound. "How's the eye?" he asked, and when she shrugged, he hesitated, then said the thing that had been burrowing at him since the vault. "That final thing you used… the darkness. Are you—" He let the question hang, raw and ridiculous and entirely sincere.
Aurelia's mouth flattened. She did not want to name the shape she had worn to stop Agnes, "I don't want to talk about it," she answered.
Kael read the words and closed his mouth, the silence that followed was an agreement made without ceremony.
At the gates of Aramont, the streets were a braided roar. Parents and siblings rushed forward.
Aurelia's family saw her, and they closed around her. Sebastian's arms were stiff around her. Rowena's laugh trembled into a sob.
Their relief knocked the breath out of her in a way victory never had.
Rowena's voice trembled. "You're safe…"
Sebastian's hand was rough on her shoulder. "I'm proud of you," he said. "I heard you and your classmates helped save the Imperial Spire." He straightened, a soldier's pride in his posture. "In honor of the Royal Cavalry as well," he added.
"You returned," her mother said, her voice soft. "This is enough."
"You did well in the name of Caelistra," her father said proudly.
Aurelia let herself be pulled into them, hugged and clapped and kissed, the odd little ceremonies of those who had almost lost someone.
The gratitude and tears were honest and fierce, and for a moment, she let herself belong to it.
Later, the royal family led the Arcane delegation to a public square for a ceremony, speeches that blurred into one another, the king's slow approach, the crown glittering in the autumn light.
Professors and students who had aided the Spire stood in a line beneath banners.
Lucien's father stepped forward to pin the medal.
When he reached Aurelia, his smile was formal but kind. She bowed and received the cool weight of the medal on her chest.
On the surface, she performed the things expected of her, a proper bow, a short thanks, but inside the room where her feelings should have lived was a pale, echoing hollow.
She had watched people die. She had killed a person.
They cheer for a thing I unmade, she thought, and the image of Agnes, his last, terrible, human look, floated up unbidden.
The medal lay warm against her chest, the crowd's shouts rolled over her like surf.
She mouthed the words and smiled because that was what was required.
Afterwards, she stepped back into the press of faces and applause, shoulder to shoulder with friends and survivors.
I did what I had to do, she told herself, a small, private truth. That does not mean it is done with me.
Around her life resumed in ragged, beautiful ways, letters to write, a world to help mend.
But the blankness at the center of her chest did not fill. It was a wound that would have its own slow weathering, one step at a time, one small day after another.
-
Headmaster Veyron stood in the Hall of Concord beneath a rain of voices.
Councilors condemned him for recklessness, for nearly costing the Empire's future its brightest students.
"You sent them," one councilor said, blunt as a hammer. "Into a situation you could not control. Into a foreign polity already strained by arcane machinery. Reckless."
Another voice, colder, added, "You endangered students under your care. Do you understand the weight of that breach?"
The royal ministers leveled quieter, colder accusations of negligence, dereliction, and endangerment of students.
The king did not raise his voice once, but the single sentence he delivered cut deeper than all the rest,
"You sent them into a kingdom that died screaming. You carry that stain now."
Veyron bowed, accepting every word without defense. He did not argue. He only asked, before the tribunal dispersed, "Are they fine?"
"Yes," the queen answered. "Because they saved themselves."
After the public business ended, the penalties took shape in quieter corridors: formal censures, an order to review Arcane's protocols, invitations to resign that he did not accept, but which cut away some of his authority.
The Academy's Board required reports, transparency, and new oversight, changes Veyron agreed to without argument. He would not hide behind bureaucracy, he would change it.
But the legal consequences were only the prosaic half of it. The other part happened at night.
He walked the campus alone, through the student square, past the workshop windows where lamps still smoldered into blue, and he went to the infirmary.
He sat beside bunkbeds where bandaged arms and plastered cheeks held the furtive proofs of survival.
He read doctors' notes, asked questions, and listened to profane, trembling details.
When nurses looked up and saw his face, many of them flinched.
He met with the families, Mothers, fathers, and guardians who came to him with anger.
Some could not bear to look at him. Others searched his face for the stubborn, careful man they had trusted in other days and found it, and in that, dissolved some of their fury.
The work of making amends was not a public ceremony but a slow, private code of returned calls and listening and small things done correctly, arranging for therapists, securing funds for recovery, ensuring those who had been scarred, physically or otherwise.
Some of the Board demanded his resignation. Some parents wanted more.
In the end, the Academy granted the entire expedition a year-long leave, officially for recovery, unofficially to give time for wounds to be tended and for politics to settle.
Veyron accepted the Board's terms, he would remain, but under heavier scrutiny and with new committees standing over his shoulder.
He signed each reform with the same clean hand he used to sign permission slips.
But reform could not fix memory. The public stain remained, colleagues whispered, a few parents still stared at him with reproach, and some of the students could not yet look at him without a little of the old trust turning to frost.
The Spire was rebuilt, its Core at last destroyed, but the echo of its failure clung to everyone who had walked those streets.
Time passed like a slow tide.
Aurelia moved through her days as if her feet barely touched the ground, lectures she no longer attended, sunlit courtyards she once loved now feeling too broad, too bright.
Every quiet moment risked drifting back to the vault… to Agnes's last breath… to the weight of her blade cutting through him as the Core forced her hand.
Sometimes she woke thinking she still felt his blood cooling across her fingers.
One evening, Lysandra slid a glass across the table toward her, taking a delicate sip of her own.
They sat on the terrace overlooking the gardens, lanterns swaying in a gentle breeze.
Students laughed somewhere distant, the world kept moving even when she couldn't.
"You're quieter than usual," Lysandra said softly. "Something wrong?"
Aurelia blinked once. Her voice, when it came, was level and smooth. "It's nothing."
Lysandra frowned, unconvinced, but she didn't push. Instead, she leaned back, swinging her legs idly under the chair, giving Aurelia space.
Across from them, Kael watched, not staring, not intruding, just observing her with that unsettling ability he always had of seeing what she didn't say.
He caught the way her fingers trembled when she lifted her drink… the tiny flinch when laughter echoed loud enough to mimic a scream… the hollow quiet behind her eyes.
He said nothing. Not yet.
He only lowered his gaze, jaw tightening once.
Aurelia isn't fine.
But he would wait for her to speak first.
And Aurelia, still gentle, still polite, still holding everyone else together, sat there, the memory of Agnes's final, broken smile threading through her calm façade like a hairline crack spreading under glass.
Inside, the wound had not even begun to heal.
Far away, under a quiet sun, a porcelain teacup shattered.
Uriel froze where he sat beneath a tree, fingers trembling faintly.
He exhaled once, long and almost weary, his wings flickering faintly before settling again.
"…So," he murmured, leaning back in his chair, eyes narrowing toward a horizon only angels could see.
"I can feel it. Lucifer's power."
His voice dipped, amused and resigned in equal measure.
"Finality."
He pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned. "Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. And of course I can't do anything—no, not a thing—because the Covenants have half a dozen eyes on me at all hours."
He let his head fall back against the chair, staring up at the leaves.
"Lucifer… what are you doing down there?"
The wind rustled.
The tea dried on the grass.
And the omen settled.