News travels differently in the terraces of Sunspire. Here, rumor rides on ropes and sings through windward chimes; it gathers like mist and can either nourish a town or smother it. By noon the plaza hummed with a new, acrid current: merchants cast furtive looks at one another; children held tacit counsel with their elders; even the usual swagger of the market guards had contracted into a brittle, watchful stillness.
Wenrel arrived at the square with Tavren and Elaris at his shoulders. Jorveth lagged behind, clutching a satchel of instruments — delicate things whose function Wenrel had not yet learned to name. Lysara was already there, an island of composed motion, watching the crowd with the same cool appraisal she had shown from the start.
"What's the tally?" Wenrel asked before Lysara could speak.
Elaris had a ledger of sorts open in her hands, the pages flecked with the marks of hurried script. "Minor disturbances overnight," she said. "Three stalls vandalized — not by beasts. The bindings of one merchant's wares were untied in a pattern that suggests deliberate resonance-tampering. A woman near the river reported dream-thin illusions: her late husband calling from the water." Her fingers tapped the page, anxious, precise. "And the lanterns across the western bridge stutter in the same cadence we've seen."
Tavren's jaw worked. "Kael Veyn's fingerprints are subtle but distinct. He leaves patterning rather than carnage." He let the word hang — a distinction that felt colder than any simple description.
From the far end of the square a cry split the market's breath: a shout, sharp and immediate. The crowd parted and Wenrel pushed forward. Near an overturned cart, a man lay curled on the cobbles — a merchant, his stall ruined, a smear of hurried blood against the stone. People clustered, some murmuring in earnest sympathy, others whispering suspicions with hungry eyes.
"It was an accident," someone said too quickly. "A wheel caught a rope." Others muttered that ropes do not sever themselves when no hand is near; that shadows do not cause stone to trip on their own.
Lysara moved into the small ring of onlookers with effortless authority. She knelt beside the merchant, checking pulse and wound with practised economy. "He'll live," she said, though her voice did not carry comfort. To Wenrel the words felt thin. A life spared still bore the brunt of fear's economy.
Kael's handiwork was never gratuitous. He sought to transmute trust into suspicion, to make a neighbor doubt another and let festering doubt do the rest. Wenrel felt it like a pressure along the threads, a deliberate plucking calibrated to yield maximum uncertainty with minimum trace.
Elaris crouched and brushed a finger along the merchant's spilled wares where the weave had been undone. The vine-threads there vibrated faintly, a pattern Wenrel had learned to read: a small sigil, three twists, an offset spiral. He knew that sigil. It had been left at the plaza last week, tiny and almost invisible, where only those looking for cadence would notice. Kael had been here — perhaps not with his own hand, but with his doctrine.
"Who would benefit from this?" Jorveth asked, voice dry. "The merchant gains nothing from distrust in the market."
Tavren's look was not at the merchant, but at the cluster of nobles' banners that flew over the eastern hall, their standard a seamed blue with the impression of an upraised hand. "When trust breaks, authority fills the vacuum. Someone will profit — either a noble who can levy 'protection,' a guild that can supply locks, or those who traffic in seeds of discord." He glanced at Wenrel. "This is a political instrument as much as a psychological one."
Wenrel felt the thread under his palm pulse — a small, hot tug like a reprimand. He had been learning technique, but this required judgment: to act would expose people, to refrain would allow doubt to calcify. He had to choose, and to choose was to accept the ledger's balance.
"Find the apprentice," he said at last. "Whoever carries Kael's method is not flawless; they will leave a trace if you know how to look." His voice did not waver — not because he felt sure, but because he had to sound so.
Elaris's eyes brightened with a scholar's fever. "There is a pattern to Kael's mimicry. He amplifies small emotional frequencies and then times them to local rituals — births, debts, harvests. Hear me: he uses ritual cadence as a scaffold. If he wanted unrest, today is no accident; he chose a day when the eastern merchants balance accounts." She bit her lip, then added with a steadiness that Wenrel took for resolve, "We can bait him. Make the cadence an open seam he cannot resist."
Lysara's hand came down, firm and final. "No entrapment that endangers innocents," she said. "We lure him with a pattern — a false ledger, a fabricated dispute — but we will position wards to protect citizens. Tavren, ready the guards at the bridges. Jorveth, lay your instruments around the western lane. Elaris, prepare the cadence-bait. Wenrel — you will be the anchor."
Wenrel felt his throat close slightly at that word: anchor. It implied weight and consequence. "Anchor how?" he asked.
"Hold the echo," Lysara answered. "We will make a small, convincing disturbance; you will imbue it with a tether we can control. If Kael's apprentice comes to refine the chaos, we will catch the hand that plucks the strings."
The plan was elegant and dangerous: create a controlled resonance, shine it bright enough to tempt, and then hold the memory-locus so that when someone else approached they could be unmasked. Wenrel's role — to be the Echo Anchor — would require that he fix a memory into the lattice and hold it against the world's erosive appetite. He remembered the cost of his last exertion: the ringing in his head, the fragile tremor at the edge of perception. Holding the echo longer would magnify that toll.
Night came early with a deliberate hush. The market square, under Lysara's directive, became a stage. Woven into the stalls was a contrived dispute: a ledger with numbers misaligned, voices raised just enough to be heard, an alleged debt that stung a struggling vendor. Elaris, Jorveth, and a handful of trusted merchants played their parts like actors; Tavren's men kept the crowd at a slight remove while Lysara watched like a hawk. Wenrel stood in the center of it, palms outstretched, feeling the cadence like a nascent instrument.
He placed the echo as gently as one might set a moth upon a windowsill: a bright, small impression of an authoritative voice promising both retribution and recompense — a memory that, if plucked later, would sound undeniable. He anchored it to the merchant's laugh, to the creak of a cart wheel, and to the chime of the market bell. He filed the tether with care, binding it with a tiny, deliberate sigil Elaris had taught him — a loop inside a ring, meant to call and hold. For a few breaths the echo hummed steady; Wenrel felt the tether like a cord through his chest.
Then Kael's apprentice came.
Not with swagger but with a measured, almost courtly step. He was younger than Wenrel expected, hair cropped and unadorned, wearing nondescript garb and carrying a satchel. His eyes, however, had the same metallic gleam Wenrel had seen in Kael; they cataloged rather than saw. He paused at the edge of the staged dispute and, for a heartbeat, Wenrel thought him innocuous.
He reached out with fingers that did not touch, and threads rippled.
The apprentice's hand twisted the tether; where Wenrel had tried to hold, the intruder sought to retune. The echo bowed and then shivered — a note changing out of tune under a practiced hand. Wenrel felt the strain as a physical ache: the anchor held, but the pull was intense, as though the world itself tugged to reclaim what he had set down.
Wenrel pushed back with the small measure of control he had. He fed the tether a secondary memory — the merchant's genuine laughter, a softer filament — to steady it. The apprentice recoiled as if slapped, eyes narrowing in irritation more than pain. He withdrew, then tried again, subtler, slipping a misaligned flourish into the tether to make the memory sound false. Wenrel felt the echo twist, a knot forming in the tether.
That was the moment Lysara sprung her net. Tavren's men closed in with practiced efficiency, forming a human lattice that hemmed the apprentice in. Elaris's instruments clicked and sang; Jorveth's rods traced the air and lit with a faint blue that Wenrel knew signified containment. The apprentice tried to flee, twisting his body in the grip of sudden dozen hands, and a small blade flashed — harmlessly — as if testing the edges of their resolve.
They took him to the eastern hall. Under questioning, the youth was defiant and oddly composed, refusing confession but leaving fragments: a whispered mention of refinement, of chaos as method, and, finally, a name Wenrel had not expected to hear in that context — Veyn.
Afterwards, when the market had resumed a brittle normal, Wenrel sat alone for a long time, hands folded. The anchor had done its job; the apprentice had been caught. Yet the victory tasted of iron and ash. He had held firm, but in doing so had felt the cost: a ringing behind the eyes, a small numbness at the base of his tongue, and a fatigue that did not belong to his muscles. He had anchored the echo, but the world — and whatever watched beyond it — had made note of his effort.
Elaris came to sit beside him, her expression unreadable. "You did well," she said. "But understand; Kael does not only teach technique. He shapes want. He finds those whose ache for meaning is raw and gives them a doctrine to justify it. The youth will be replaced unless we find the tutor." She tapped the ledger idly, thinking aloud. "And he will not act alone."
Wenrel looked up at the latticework of ropes that braided over the terraces like veins. In the dark between the branches he thought he saw, for an instant, a pale filament as thin as breath — not from Sunspire's trees but from somewhere else, a place whose geometry was not meant to be read by men. He shivered, the memory of the cocoon corridor from his earlier vision brushing his mind like cold silk.
Somewhere, an indifferent seam in the sky had noticed their action. It had taken measure of the boy who anchored echoes. Kael's game had widened. The apprentice might be caught and supplanted, bidden to vanish into a back alley of someone else's ideology. But the method — the doctrine — spread like mold, and it liked damp, dark places.
Wenrel rose, steadier than he felt. "We'll look for Veyn," he said. "We'll find who teaches and who funds. And I will learn to hold an echo without paying so much for it."
Lysara's hand closed over his forearm in a rare gesture of warmth and admonishment. "We will strengthen your footing," she said. "But know this — the world is weaving. Some threads we cannot touch without altering the loom. Be measured. Be merciful when you can, and ruthless when you must."
As the night settled and market lamps blinked on like patient stars, Wenrel felt both smaller and more integral to the tapestry than he had before. He had measured a thread and had been measured in return. The balance was delicate, and the ledger of consequence had begun to write itself in letters both small and indelible.
Outside the hall, beneath the eaves where the mist gathered thickest, someone had scratched a tiny sigil into the wood: the spiral within a ring. It was faint, almost private — but to those who listened for cadence, it read as a promise: the pattern spreads, and with it, the question of whether Sunspire would hold.