The silver sigil on the map was a nail hammered into the coffin of their anonymity. Red sigils were soldiers hunting a fugitive. Gray sigils were agents seeking an asset. But the silver bell of the Choir of Threnody… that was a hunter of souls, and its methods were not of this world.
"A god," Ravi repeated, the word a bitter absurdity. "I spend my whole life being pathetic, and I end up here, failing my way into divinity."
"Stop thinking like you," Lyssara snapped, her fear sharpening her words into a weapon. "You're not you anymore. You are a story. And a new, very powerful faction just took over authorship."
She began pacing, her bare feet slapping against the cold stone, the dry blanket still clutched around her shoulders. "Aurelise will try to cage you with law. The Warden will try to crush you with force. But the Choir... they will try to claim you. They won't put you in a box; they will put you on an altar. And a god on an altar is just a prisoner with better decorations."
He understood immediately. To the Warden, he was a threat. To Aurelise, a tool. To the Choir, he was a validation. Proof. An answer to their prayers that would chain him just as surely as any iron shackle. All three were a death sentence for the quiet, invisible life he craved.
"What do they do?" he asked, his voice low. "How do they hunt?"
"They don't hunt. They listen," Lyssara explained, her mind already shifting, analyzing the new enemy. "They're attuned to... resonances. Shifts in the city's faith. They can read the collective emotion of a crowd like a text. The fear and awe you generated in the market, it was like a lighthouse beacon to them. They can follow the trail of your myth, trace the whispers back to their source."
"So they're listening right now?"
"Yes," she confirmed grimly. "Which is why we have to give them something else to hear." Her pacing stopped. Her head tilted, her eyes gaining that familiar, dangerous glint of a predator finding a new angle of attack. "We can't erase your story. So we have to write the next chapter before they do."
"And what story is that?" he asked, a sense of weary dread settling over him.
"The story of a god who punishes the greedy," she said, a slow, wolfish smile spreading across her face. "Aurelise and the Warden are fighting over you, but the source of their power, the lifeblood of their war, is money. Coin. Marked Sols that flow through this city's arteries. We are going to give their system a heart attack."
The plan was as audacious as it was insane. Lyssara, using the Nethervault's detailed maps and archives, identified three key nodes in the city's financial network. The first was a fortified tollhouse on the Grand Bridge, which collected tariffs for House Thornwyn. The second was the Warden's primary tithe collection center in the merchant's quarter. The third, the most secure of all, was the central mint, where raw bullion was struck into the Imperial coins used to pay both Aurelise's agents and the Warden's Watch.
The targets weren't people. They were buildings. Stone, mortar, and iron vaults.
"Are you insane?" Ravi said, staring at the blueprints Lyssara had projected onto the scrying table. "You want me to walk up to the city mint and... what? Lean on it until it falls over? I almost brought down a tearoom by accident. A planned demolition will level a city block. And it's not exactly subtle."
"Subtlety is over," Lyssara countered, her voice ringing with a newfound, almost fanatical zeal. "We traded subtlety for survival the moment you unmade that guard's sword. Now, we use the truth as our shield. They think you are a walking disaster? A force of divine retribution? Let's show them what that actually looks like."
"They'll know it was me!"
"They'll suspect," she corrected. "But they won't have a man holding a smoking hammer. They will have a tollhouse that collapses under its own 'rotten foundations.' A tithe-hall whose vault door 'inexplicably warps' in its frame, sealing itself shut forever. A mint that suffers a 'catastrophic structural failure' in its foundations, sinking half a foot into the mud and grinding all production to a halt."
Her eyes were blazing. "We will not be seen. We will not be caught. There will only be the rumor, spreading like fire through the city: a holy war has begun. Not of swords, but of collapsing stone and ruined fortunes. The city's wealth, the very coin that fuels its corruption, is being cursed. Touched by the Quiet Sun. And anyone who hoards it will see their vaults turn to tombs."
The strategy was brilliant, terrifying, and utterly apocalyptic. It was Lyssara weaponizing the consequences of his power on a scale he could barely comprehend. He wasn't just breaking things anymore. He was breaking the systems that held the city together.
The first strike was that night. They moved through ancient sewer tunnels depicted on the Nethervault maps, emerging into a damp maintenance cellar a block away from the Grand Bridge tollhouse. Lyssara stayed behind, monitoring the Watch patrols on a portable scrying-slate taken from the vault's armory—a disk of polished obsidian that mirrored the main table's display.
Ravi, cloaked and hooded, felt like a ghost haunting the foundations of the world. He found the keystone of the primary support arch, exactly where Lyssara's schematics had indicated. The stone was massive, perfectly set, designed to bear the weight of the entire structure for a thousand years.
He placed his hand upon it.
The fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach. But this time, it was mixed with something else. A grim, detached curiosity. He wasn't flinching or stumbling. He was acting. Deliberately.
He didn't push. He just let the passive, terrible reality of his body seep into the stone.
He felt the tremor begin, a low, deep vibration that traveled from his palm up his arm. The stone groaned, not with the sound of cracking, but of its internal structure giving way, its molecular bonds losing their integrity. It was the law of unmaking, applied with conscious intent. Fine webs of stress fractures bloomed across the surface of the keystone. Dust rained down from the ceiling.
He held his hand there for ten seconds, counting each beat of his terrified heart. Then he pulled it away.
He didn't wait to see the result. He fled back into the tunnels, back to the silent safety of the vault, his heart pounding not just with fear, but with the awesome, terrible feeling of having lit a fuse on the world.
Back in the command chamber, they watched the scrying table. For nearly an hour, nothing happened. Then, a single red sigil on the Grand Bridge flickered. Then another. Then the entire cluster of guards stationed there erupted into a frantic, chaotic swarm.
The bridge hadn't collapsed. Not yet. But according to Lyssara's frantic interpretation of the encrypted Guild-courier messages she could intercept with the table, the tollhouse guards were reporting that the bridge was… sagging. The entire thousand-ton stone structure was groaning, shifting on its foundations. They had evacuated the tollhouse just moments before its floor buckled and the south wall developed a crack wide enough to see the river through.
The Grand Bridge, one of the city's main arteries, was now impassable. House Thornwyn's tariff revenue was cut off at the source.
They hit the tithe-hall next, then the mint, over the course of the next forty-eight hours. Each attack was the same. A quiet touch in the deep of night on a critical structural point. A timed, delayed, catastrophic failure that seemed to come from nowhere.
The city began to panic.
It was no longer just the Watch and a single noble house who were afraid. It was every merchant, every moneylender, every guild master. The city's economy was grinding to a halt. Trade slowed to a trickle. No one trusted the integrity of their own vaults. Wealth had become a liability, a magnet for divine wrath.
And through it all, the whispers changed. They were no longer of a jinx or an accidental saint. They were of a powerful, unseen deity who had declared war on the city's corruption. Kaelith Ardentor's sermons grew bolder, attracting massive crowds who hung on his every word about the "Quiet Sun's Judgment."
In the Nethervault, Lyssara watched the map, a grim smile on her face. "Look," she said, pointing to the silver sigil of the Choir. It had not moved. "They're paralyzed. They dare not condemn these acts—they are too popular with the masses who see this as righteous retribution. They cannot endorse them, because they don't control the 'god' responsible. We have trapped them with their own theology."
She then pointed to the red and gray sigils. The Warden and Aurelise were hemorrhaging money and authority. Their agents were defecting, their mercenaries going unpaid. Their power was bleeding out into the streets.
It was a total victory. A strategic masterpiece.
But as Ravi looked at the chaos displayed on the table, he felt a cold dread that went deeper than anything before. He looked down at his own hands. The instruments of all this chaos.
"Lyssara," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "The world. Every time I do this… I can feel it."
"Feel what?" she asked, her attention still fixed on her victory.
He struggled for the words. "It's… weaker. The groans of the stone… they're lasting longer. The tremors are spreading further. It's like… it's like the world is bruising. And the bruises aren't healing."
He finally looked her in the eyes, forcing her to see the terror in his.
"We're not just breaking their vaults, Lyssara. I think we're breaking the city itself."