The wagons rolled out of the trees and into a mist that smelled faintly of iron.
Caleb peered through the small barred window and saw the world open into a gorge within the mountain itself: a cleft of black stone where light went to breathe and came back different. On either side, the cliffs had been polished as if by centuries of hands. Set into that dark face was a gate of pale stone, veined like marble, the arch carved with a crescent cradling a fang.
No sentry shouted. No horn sounded. The gate parted along a seam so fine the line vanished once it had opened. The column flowed through.
Inside, there was a city.
Not the shanties and patched roofs of human forts, not the smoke-choked sprawl of old towns. This was a place designed in whispers. Streets ran straight as rules. Buildings rose in disciplined tiers—black stone, white lintels, windows long and narrow like closed eyes. Crimson banners hung from balustrades, their cloth so deep it swallowed the half-light. Lamps the colour of garnets burned in glass cages fixed to doorways and corners, their flames steady and unhurried. No ash on the paving. No puddles. Even the wheel-ruts were symmetrical.
People moved along the streets—if people was still the word. Pale faces, dark clothes that didn't rustle. They walked with purpose but without haste, a measured glide that spoke of bodies that never tripped. No laughter. No hawkers. No dogs. The only sound was the soft percussion of iron-shod boots and the murmur of water somewhere under stone.
Caleb had not realised how hungry he was for order until the sight of it made his chest ache. It felt like stumbling into a drawing room after a storm: candles still straight, carpet unruffled, the tray laid with cups in a precise pattern that said someone cared enough to count. He told himself it was civilisation—another kind, another branch—but civilisation all the same.
The wagon halted beside a low, long building with a façade like a stack of closed books. The door opened. Two soldiers removed the short chains from his cuffs, replacing them with none at all. One held out a hand.
"Down," the soldier said. The voice was crisp, consonants precise. If there was an accent, it was the sort that had been cross-stitched out of a language by generations of tutors.
Caleb climbed down. The courtyard's paving was a mosaic: small black squares edged in white, the pattern repeating until it blurred. A pale figure in a robe, not armour, waited by the threshold. Their hands were bare and bloodless; their face might have been painted porcelain.
"Come," the figure said pleasantly. "We'll have you clean and comfortable."
He bristled, briefly, at being handled like a guest in the wrong story. Then the ache in his ribs reminded him of what comfort could be worth. He followed.
They went along a corridor lined with clear lamps. The light inside them had a faint red cast; it threw no smoke, no dancing shadow, only a soft, saturated glow. Alcoves held objects under glass—a book bound in untorn leather, a compass whose needle lay true, a chess set with pieces of black on white marble, mid-game and dustless. The air was cool and even. Somewhere behind the walls water travelled in narrow channels and made a civilised hush.
They showed him a small room with a bed that was not straw and not stone. There was a basin on a stand and a jug that steamed. There were clothes laid on a stool—grey, clean, soft. He stared at the bed as if it might argue.
"We will tend your injuries," the robed figure said, already folding back the bandage on his ribs with an economy that had nothing to do with kindness and everything to do with competence. "You'll find the garments fit. A steward will return with sustenance."
Caleb caught the word on his face and tried not to make a face with it. "Thank you," he said, because manners were a structure you could choose to hold on to.
They washed him—not like a mother washing a child, not like a medic in a hurry, but with the focus of a craftsperson cleaning a tool. Warm cloth, clean water, a salve that smelled faintly of crushed mint and something metallic. The robe-sleeves never dragged. The hands never trembled. When they had finished, he was left in the grey clothes with his hair combed back and his skin prickling with an odd, blood-warm wakefulness.
The steward arrived carrying a tray. There was bread—pale and even-crumbed—on a plate, and a bowl in which something dark steamed. The bowl was black, matt, and thicker than pottery.
"What is it?" Caleb asked, though he knew the shape of the answer that would be provided.
"Restorative draught," said the steward. "Fortified. Please sit."
He wanted to refuse out of spite and fear and a refusal to be made complicit in his own care. The smell rose up—iron and heat and a sweetness at the back of the tongue that the body recognised before the mind could catch it. His ribs ached. His throat felt lined with dust.
He sat.
The first mouthful went down like shame and relief. Not broth. He knew that now—knew it in the place that remembered copper on the tongue and the way the world steadies after it. He did not dwell on it. You can refuse to think a thing without making it untrue.
The second mouthful tasted less of fear. Warmth spread outwards from his chest, washing the pain in his side to a duller colour. His hands stopped the tiny, stupid tremor they had acquired since the collapse. He ate the bread without noticing he had stopped wanting to be seen not wanting it.
The steward watched his face as a reader watches a page. "Better," they said neutrally. "Walk when you wish. The quarter is safe. If you require assistance, touch the bell."
They indicated a small silver disc inset in the wall. It had no rope, no clapper. Caleb pressed it out of reflex. Somewhere inside the building a sound happened that did not travel to his ear, and yet he knew it had rung.
When the steward had gone he sat for a while, listening to the quiet. The city's hum came through the window—a domestic murmur built out of footfalls and flowing water and the whisper of cloth. Not a raised voice in it. He laughed, a tired, incredulous sound, and pulled on the soft shoes they had left. He wasn't a prisoner, not visibly. He went out.
The corridor remained empty, as corridors in well-run houses somehow are. A stair brought him to a balcony overlooking a square. The square was a lesson in angles. A fountain stood in its centre, water rising and falling in a slow, perfect arc that never splashed. People crossed it along lines that didn't quite intersect, giving each other distance without apparent thought. On one side, an open front showed benches and tables tidy as a diagram—library, school, something like that. On another, a forge stood silent; the anvil shone, but no soot touched the lintel. Beyond, an arcade ran into streets he couldn't see the end of. There were no children. A figure swept the paving with a broom of pale twigs. The sweepings did not raise dust.
He took the stairs down and walked. No one stopped him. Heads turned, politely, to acknowledge his presence; a few people inclined their own by a degree or two, as one might mark a passing dignitary without calling attention. The eyes were wrong—a clarity without warmth—and yet no malice found him.
He passed a doorway where two figures in dark coats knelt with bowls and brushes, scrubbing the stone where something had stained it. The smell was light and high—like wine spilled and dried. He didn't linger.
At one corner a trio of armoured soldiers stood without resting their weight on one leg. The one in the middle had a half-cloak pinned with a disc of black metal and silver thread. Their helmets were on. Their visors hid faces that might as well have been the same. He made himself walk past them as if his feet belonged to him.
A narrow street carried him to an outer walk where the city wall looked back out into the world. From here he could see the mist pooling beyond the gate and the steep slopes that fell away into forest. The air carried a finer cold. Along the parapet, men in dark travelled slowly in pairs, their boots making exactly the same sound at exactly the same cadence. Beyond the wall, at the edge of sight, figures were at work with long hooks at a place where the ground had a darker cast. The smell that came on the air from that direction was a distant metallic sweetness. He pretended he didn't recognise it. It made pretending easier.
He stood until his breath stopped wanting to fog. The sky did not change. It was neither noon nor evening; the light in this place seemed to choose a steady dusk and hold there. Lamps were lit and did not brighten the day so much as deepen it. When he turned back, a man in a long dark coat had appeared as if conjured by the decision.
"Master Caleb," the man said, smiling with lips and not particularly with eyes. "I am charged to ensure your comfort."
"You know my name," Caleb said without rancour. It was not a question.
"We do." The man's voice was smooth as poured ink. "You will find the Dominion of Crimson Dawn is an ordered realm. Our Lord values records. Please—allow me to be of use. Do you require more sustenance?"
Caleb flinched at the word and smoothed that flinch into a shrug. "I could… I could try the bread again." He heard his tone, light and foolish, and hated it.
"Of course. And a draught."
He opened his mouth and then shut it again because he was not going to argue about vocabulary with a man whose job description might include removing his throat. "Fine," he said, and surprised himself by adding, "Thank you."
The man inclined his head, a movement so small it seemed fitted to the hinge of the neck. "It is our purpose to tend." He stepped aside, and some part of the city breathed around them—doors opening before the hand reached for them, the air freshening without a window visible. Caleb wondered how long a person could live like this before forgetting how to push.
Back in the room—or one like it; he was certain and not certain at once—another tray waited, neat and inevitable. He ate because saying no didn't seem to change the existence of the bread. He drank because his ribs had stopped aching after the first bowl and one tends to repeat anything that moves pain from the centre to the edges. He told himself it tasted less wrong this time because he had eaten first. He told himself many things.
Later he walked again, a smaller circuit. A woman in ivory sat at a table under an archway and wrote in a ledger with a pen that never blotted. Two men in grey played chess without talking and lifted their hands at exactly the same moment to move pieces that weren't the ones Caleb would have moved. He passed a window with thin panes and, for a moment, caught his reflection. A tired man, cleaned and dressed, eyes rimmed with a night that had not finished. Nothing strange. The relief he felt was too large for such a small mercy. He told his shoulders to lower themselves.
As the hour changed in a way the sky didn't, a bell rang. He didn't hear it. He felt it, as if the stones under his feet had chosen to remember sound. People flowed towards doorways. The lamps deepened in colour by a degree. Somewhere in the far part of the city a door closed with the decisive softness of a promise kept. He returned to his room because the corridor wanted him to.
The steward awaited him as if they had always been there. "You will sleep," they said, which was both an instruction and an offer. "If you wake hungry, ring."
He nodded and they left. The door didn't click. He tried the handle. It turned under his palm. No lock. He laughed, one sharp breath. A cage with the door left open is still a cage if the world beyond is walls.
The bed was not soft enough to be insulting. He lay down and found the place where his body fit the mattress. The sheets smelled faintly of nothing. The quiet had acquired a texture—like velvet rubbed the wrong way. He closed his eyes because there was nothing to look at that wasn't itself.
Sleep took the first shift.
He woke from a dream that didn't stick to him—Elara's hand falling out of his, and dust, and the sound of rock—into a room that hadn't moved. His mouth was dry. Not thirsty, exactly. Dry like air you can't swallow without it scratching. He sat up and listened to himself. His heart ticked quietly in his chest, slow and regular, like a clock that had been wound by someone careful. He felt… steady. Steadier than he had any right to. The ache in his ribs was a memory rehearsing itself. He flexed his fingers. The cuts had closed. Not a miracle. Not a crime. Both.
He swallowed and found a hollow. It wasn't hunger as he understood it. It had nothing to do with stomach or the heaviness behind the eyes that says food or sleep. It lived along the tongue and at the hinge of the jaw and in the warm run of veins down his neck and inside his forearms. It was the feeling you get when you have been given a sweet you didn't know you liked and someone puts the jar back on the shelf and you are suddenly seven again with pockets.
He laughed under his breath, no humour in it. "Get a grip," he told the ceiling. "You're a grown man."
His gaze went to the small table without permission. The black bowl sat where the steward had set it. Empty. Clean. He had finished it without remembering the moment when the bottom showed. He licked his lip and tasted mint and something beneath the mint that had nothing to do with plants.
"You're fine," he said softly. He said it the way you tell a horse to walk past the thing that looks like a snake and is only a rope. "Sleep."
He lay back. His body went dutifully heavy. The hollow did not fill. It wasn't a throb. It was a suggestion. A little would be nice. Sugar after a meal. A splash more tea when you should have stopped. A bad habit disguised as a treat.
He turned onto his side. The pillow remembered the shape of his head, which made him want to throw it. He sat up again and scrubbed his hands over his face. His palms smelled clean. His mouth asked for the opposite of clean.
"You don't need it," he said, and then, very quietly, because there was something shameless about saying it loud, "You could have just a sip."
He stood. The motion felt easy, which did not help. At the wall the silver disc that was not a bell waited. He put his fingers near it and didn't touch it. If he pressed it, the steward would come. Another bowl would appear. He would drink, and the hollow would say thank you, that will do for now, and the part of him that kept lists would score a small, unsatisfactory line in the margin of the day.
He took his hand away. He paced. The room accepted his steps with the good manners of stone. He sat. He stood. He went to the door and opened it onto the corridor and the quiet that had learned to be an atmosphere.
Three doors down a pale shadow moved—someone passing, perfectly unhurried. No guard stood in sight. No lock waited to punish disobedience. It would be simple to walk to the end of the corridor and turn the corner and find the steward by the small table where ledgers were tallied and bowls filled.
He leaned his head against the doorframe and closed his eyes. Elara's face came to him, not vivid, not a vision, but in the ordinary way memory offers you the thing you can't have yet. He pictured telling her about a city where the lamps did not flicker and the bread did not stale and the water ran inside the walls like a tame river. He pictured her mouth pressing into that line it made when she wanted to forbid a thing and knew forbidding made it bright.
"Just hunger," he said, and it sounded plausible. The bow inside his chest relaxed a fraction. He smiled at his own stupidity and went back to the table and looked at the empty bowl because looking was cheaper than ringing the bell.
His hand reached before he knew it, as if checking whether emptiness remained empty. The black surface was smooth and cool. He set the bowl down.
"Maybe just a little more," he whispered.
The room didn't answer. The quiet made space for the bell to be rung.
He stood there with his hand an inch from the silver disc and let the want turn over once, slow as a coin. Then he took it back. He sat on the bed. He stared at the door as if watching a threshold taught it not to open.
Sleep came stubbornly; it arrived anyway. The hollow went with him into it, small and neat and dangerous in the way ordinary things are when repeated.
Outside, the Dominion of Crimson Dawn carried on with itself. Lamps burned; water moved; boots made weather. No bar crossed any door. No lock clicked. The cage was a city that asked politely, and the first thing it had asked of Caleb was almost nothing at all.