The crown hummed like a beam holding more roof than wood. Even with the Proxy Anchors—Elyna's cadence, Sorrel's ward-tuning, Mara's clinic mesh—the strain kept finding Derek's bones.
The High Priestess brought a narrow lacquer box to the mirrorless gallery. Inside lay a ribbon of sigils inked in dried scarlet, the script so old it looked like a scar that had learned to read.
"There is another path," she said. "It moves power through what the gods cannot counterfeit—your own life. Life-force magic heals where liturgy fails. But every casting spends you."
"How much?" Derek asked, already knowing the shape of the answer.
"Measured in years," she said. "If you are prudent—two. Perhaps less."
He looked past her to the city—the braziers, the clinics, the breath-marks stamped into loaves at dawn—and felt the wall lean his way, asking to be held.
"Teach me," he said.
The ribbon wound his wrist. It warmed, and something in him opened like a sealed account long forgotten by its owner.
[DISCIPLINE UNLOCKED]
Life-Force Magic ("Vitae Channel")
Effect: Heals ignore ordinary resistances; purges deep blights
Cost: Converts personal years into casting fuel
Initial Ledger: ~730 days (approx.)
Mitigation: Lantern Chorus - small; Anchors - minimal (risk rebound)
Advisory: Use for plagues, bone-deep curses, structural soul wounds
Note: Do not bind Anchors to Vitae channel.
"Not alone," Elyna murmured, as if to bruise the rule into his skin.
"Not alone," he agreed, and hoped it could be true.
Training stripped gentleness from the work. Life-force did not glow; it tugged—a quiet subtraction that left rooms colder for having been warmed.
The first soldier Derek healed had a wound no stitch could argue with. Derek set his palm, pulled thread by thread, and felt a year slide off his ribs like a coin left on a counter and not picked back up.
The man sat up, unscarred, astonished. Derek managed to say drink water before the room tilted.
Elyna caught him. "Rest."
"Later," he said, and walked until later became a hallway he didn't remember crossing.
Days turned into a curriculum of debts. His hands found fevers and unmapped infections; his breath learned how to coax marrow to remember itself; his nights grew thin where sleep failed to gather.
Mara counted him like a patient she refused to lose. "You are measuring wrong," she scolded after the seventh vitae casting in two days. "No one is worth all of you. Not even all of us. Pace it."
Nox tried jokes that knuckled sorrow into math. "Vitae spend yields huge returns—if the fund manager doesn't die."
Sorrel rewrote wardlines to catch secondary strain. "I can earth the echo, not the cost," he warned. "If you insist, at least insist cleanly."
The circlet stopped feeling like metal. It felt like a ledger balanced just this side of honest.
[VITAE LEDGER]
Estimated Remainder: 603 days
Drain Trend: rising
Anchor Link: automatically disabled during Vitae channel (safety)
Recommendation: Enforce Quiet Hours; redirect minor miracles to Anchors
Elyna posted a Quiet Hours schedule in every clinic and hung a bell by Derek's desk with a note: Two rings = water. Three = sleep. She rang three when argument grew useless.
He slept, sometimes. He woke smaller.
Hope grew like ivy on a wall that knew how to hold it. People told each other: the Empress touched my mother's chest and her breath opened; the Empress pressed my boy's wrist and his fever fell like bad weather leaving town.
They did not see Derek step behind a screen afterward and lean his head against the cool stone until the world agreed to widen again. They saw a sovereign whose hands did not miss, a legend already rehearsing itself.
The High Priestess cornered him at twilight when his shadow wobbled and tried to sit without him. "You are giving too much."
"They need me," he said, eyes on the window where lanterns rose like measured stars. "If I stop, the wall sags."
"Walls sag and stand," she said. "Keystones crack and end."
Elyna didn't argue. She brought bread, and the way she held the plate said eat this like a promise. He did. It tasted like someone saving a slice from morning for the person they love who never gets to the bakery in time.
The system whispered what everyone could see.
[REGNAL HEALTH]
Keystone Strain: 48% → 61%
Vitae Ledger: 471 days
Public Support: REVERED (9/12 districts)
Advisory: Delegate ceremonies; refuse spectacle; protect sleep
Note: Do not sing alone.
By refusing spectacle he made a better one: a sovereign who left balconies to others, who chose the alley over the avenue, who said the words that kept the street from spending itself to ash—Protection before pomp. Breath before tribute. Wards bound to you, not me.
The court learned to clap for absence. The city learned to stand for itself.
Winter put knives in the air and called them mornings.
Derek's breath plumed like a small herald he couldn't afford. He kept Quiet Hours with a soldier's severity and broke them when the ledger inside his bones didn't carry enough to dawn.
Elyna knelt on the woven rug beside his chair and took his hand the way one picks up a cup that matters. "What about your hope?"
He could not joke with her. "I have you," he said simply, and the truth of it hurt in a right way.
Sorrel set a hand to the wall. "Something's building in the marsh. The ward hears it like a fever waiting to declare itself."
Nox stopped pretending indifference. "Patterns from three eras end one way: the winter plague arrives late and hungry."
Mara stocked vinegar and boiled rags and made lists, the way priests write liturgy. "If it comes, clinics first. Lantern cadence every hour on the hour. We triage hope."
The advisory no longer bothered with embroidery.
[FORECAST]
Event: Winter Blight (variant)
Spread: exponential without Vitae countermeasures
Collateral: clinics overwhelmed; chorus falters
Vitae Requirement to arrest spread: catastrophic (single casting)
Costs: 300–400 days
Kernel: adaptive mode — will not intervene
Note: Do not sing alone. (It underlined it.)
Derek drew his fingers across the circlet. "If it breaks the chorus," he said, "we lose everything we built."
"You lose you," Elyna whispered.
He took a breath to answer and felt how thin it had become.
The plague came like frost you don't notice until your breath hurts.
Clinics filled; lanterns shook in hands that couldn't stop coughing; the ward hummed a key too close to collapse. Derek walked to the city gate and turned so the wall and the people were both in front of him.
"On my breath," he said, and the Keepers heard and lifted the count. Elyna to his left. Sorrel at the nexus stone. Mara in the doorway of the river clinic. The High Priestess between braziers, staff grounded like a promise.
Derek reached for the vitae channel and felt the Anchor links try to rise. He severed them with a thank-you and a grief that did not have room to speak. "Not this," he said aloud. "You don't pay this one."
He raised his hands.
The city breathed. He pulled—thread through thread through thread—so much that the world edged white and stayed there. Plague peeled back. Fevers loosened their grip one neck at a time. The chorus faltered, then steadied, guided by Elyna's fierce metronome. Children stopped shaking. Old women sat up and cursed winter. The kettle on a clinic stove sang as if someone had told it a good story.
Derek kept pulling until the ledger inside him hit zero and asked for tomorrow.
He gave that too.
The last of the blight lifted as if embarrassed to have stayed. People sobbed with the rude, relieved sound that tells the truth too quickly for dignity.
He fell to his knees.
Elyna was already there, hands on his face, the linen at his ear turned red in one brief, honest line. "Look at me," she said. "Don't leave yet."
He found her eyes. They were the city's eyes, the wall's, the boy in Southditch's, the old woman's in the clinic, the harvesters' mirror-blank rejection of mercy—no, not those. Never those.
He tried to smile. "We kept… time."
"You kept us," she said.
The air wrote once, not like a ledger but like a confession.
[VITAE CASTING — CITYWIDE]
Infections reversed: 93% (remaining treatable)
Chorus Integrity: restored
Vitae Ledger: 0 days
Keystone Strain: released
Status: TRANSFER COMPLETE
Advisory: Rest.
He let the crown rest against his palm, felt its hum resolve into a note he'd heard once before, holding a child's wrist under a red moon while the city learned to sing.
"I… did it," he whispered. "Long enough."
"More than enough," Elyna said, and held him as if holding could convince the world to keep him.
He breathed out, and the breath did not return to him; it went where it had been going all year—into walls and braziers and other people's lungs.
The crown did not fall. The wall held.
They told the story quickly at first—the way grief needs to hear itself—and then slower, with detail where detail would do good.
The Lantern Charter became law not only in the letter but in habit. Clinics moved into the ledger's top line and stayed there. The Keeper Choirs learned new harmonies that didn't require a sovereign at the center. Children counted to four when thunder woke them; bakers stamped breath-marks into crust; tithe rolls flexed with harvest and storm.
Elyna kept time for a city and refused a title big enough to hide her work. Sorrel tuned wards until their hum was a household sound. Mara trained a generation of field surgeons who called themselves mercies and would not let anyone make a shrine of their tools. The High Priestess chaired the Keeper's Council and brought the Charter to every court that tried to forget it.
In the glasshouse, moonvines put out winter blossoms for the first time anyone could remember. Nox, Archivist Extraordinary, wrote the plainest book of his life and titled it How Not to Lose What He Gave Us.
Strangers still paused at dusk to breathe together. Not as ritual. As maintenance.
And when the story reached the part where the Empress gave everything, the tellers did not end it with silence. They ended it with the only line that made sense of the ledger he kept:
The only way to win was to survive—
and sometimes survival meant spending a life so that many could keep theirs.
Above the wardline, the lanterns climbed the night in their steady arithmetic, and the wall hummed in a key that sounded like a city remembering how to be alive.
The world around Derek blurred, the way light smears on water. Elyna's tear-streaked face faded; the weight of his fading breath pressed down and then let go. He had given all he had. It should have been over.
Instead: a lurch, a white flare, the sickening tug of something rethreading him—and then silence.
When vision returned, it wasn't to Ameloria or the warmth of Elyna's arms. Towering spires cut a sky wired with glowing sigils. Floors reflected light that seemed to come from inside the stone. The space felt unreal in the way a game does: rule-bound, humming with intention.
He looked down. Hands—delicate, steady, feminine. A new balance in his frame. A different breath in his chest.
A name rose, sure as tide: Minji. It sounded like something he had always owed himself and was finally allowed to collect.
Memories shifted to make room. Not a dying sovereign, but a woman—young, strong, alive—standing in a guild hall whose banners remembered wars and rent receipts alike.
A console blinked into being with the cheerful tyranny of a tutorial.
[TRANSIT RECORD]
Source: Ameloria — Keystone complete (Lantern Charter ratified)
Carryovers: Doctrine Imprint (Lantern Sovereign A), Keeper's Dividend (B)
Host Pattern: "Minji" — viable
Prompt: ACCEPT TRANSFER?
"Accept," she said, and the interval closed around her like a perfectly cut key finding its lock.