"Okay," Aydin said, and his voice came out smaller than he wanted. "Lead the way."
Khalen didn't answer right away. He just turned and started walking like the street belonged to him, like the night was a route he'd memorized, like chaos was a thing you stepped around the way you stepped around a puddle.
Aydin followed because his knees still didn't trust him. And because the other option was standing in the lane where the Riftbasilisk demon had just turned into a rain of meat and crystal, which felt like tempting the world.
The Veil shimmered beyond the posts, a faint skin of light stretched around the settlement. Not bright. Not proud. Thin.
When it rippled, Aydin tasted salt at the back of his throat, like the air itself had been brined.
Stonehaven smelled like burnt salt and wet sand, like sea-wind had gone through smoke and come out angry. People moved in broken patterns that didn't quite add up.
A man laughed while he sat in the dirt and pressed both hands to his own face like he couldn't believe it was still there. Two women argued in whispers over a child's blanket, then both started crying when they realized the child was fine and the blanket didn't matter.
Someone rang a bell once, soft, like checking if their own hearing still worked.
People wore color on their bodies like armor, braided strings threaded with crushed crystal polished smooth, talismans that clicked softly when they moved. A woman twisted a white strand so tight it bit her wrist.
Two kids traded blue chips like game tokens, grinning too hard for the night they'd just survived.
Aydin flexed his fingers.
Nothing.
He pinched his thumb to his forefinger hard enough to blanch skin. No sting. He only knew it hurt because it should have.
His hands looked normal, but they felt like borrowed tools someone had forgotten to return. He kept opening and closing them like he could wake sensation back up by sheer stubbornness.
Khalen glanced at him once, quick. "You picked a hell of a night to discover nerves."
Aydin swallowed. "My nerves are filing complaints."
Khalen huffed a laugh like that was acceptable, then pointed, chin first, toward the posts that marked the wardring.
Aydin squinted at the nearest one. Driftwood, rough-cut timber, a chunk of mineral lashed on with braided cord and resin seams.
Little bells hung from the cords, and the cords themselves had chips of cloudy crystal knotted into them, sea-glass smooth.
He nodded at the grooves packed with something pale. "Is that… salt?"
"Salt, resin, and whatever the Rim-Mother lets us keep," Khalen said. "Don't knock it. We're still breathing."
The Veil behind them shimmered like tired glass, faint dust haloing along it whenever the wind hit.
"The Veil's thin tonight," Khalen added, like he was commenting on weather. "Stone-Lit, barely. Don't breathe on it."
Stone-Lit.
Aydin filed that away. He tried to imagine calling a barrier "thin" the way you called soup thin, and that made it feel real.
It also made it feel worse.
They walked past half-finished palisade sections and boats pulled up on the sand like exhausted animals. Nets were piled on bows, rope stiff with salt, and the whole settlement looked like it had been built in a hurry and then forced to keep building mid-punch.
Aydin caught himself staring at a row of doors, each with the same bell-hook, each bell ready.
"Okay, I have a question that feels like a bad idea," he said. "Bells?"
"So the demons pause long enough for you to grab a kid and run," Khalen said.
Aydin blinked.
Khalen nudged one bell with a knuckle. The crystal inside it was cloudy, crushed and re-fused into a smooth bead. "Old story says the ringing stings their heads. Like biting foil."
"And you believe that?"
Khalen's mouth twitched. "I believe in noise. I believe in people waking up."
The bell swayed. The bead caught lantern light and flashed once, dull and pretty.
"And sometimes," Khalen added, quieter, "the Veil jitters and the crystal sings before it does."
Aydin stared at the bead.
The wind was steady. The street was loud with breathing and muttering and someone's laugh that kept trying to turn into sobbing.
One bell down the lane rang anyway, a single clean note with no hand on it.
Nobody looked.
They just kept moving. The mother with the green cord touched her bead without looking up, like it was a reflex, like a prayer she didn't believe in.
Aydin's mouth twitched despite himself. "Great. Love a home security system that sings by itself."
Khalen gave him a look. "Comforting's tomorrow. Tonight's just 'not dead.'"
They passed a kid trotting through the sand holding a fist-sized glow-crystal like a night-light, its pale shine making his cheeks look softer than they had any right to after a breach. The kid's mother followed with one hand on his shoulder and eyes that never stopped scanning the posts.
A green-chip cord wrapped her wrist twice, tight, like she'd earned the right to stand here.
And under it all, threaded through smoke and salt wind, Aydin caught something warmer. A stew smell, thick and stubborn, like someone had decided hunger was not allowed tonight.
Stonehaven felt young.
Like it still believed trying mattered.
Aydin swallowed. "Tell me what this place is before my brain invents something worse."
Khalen didn't look back. "Stonehaven. Expansion settlement." He jerked his head toward the darker shape of the ocean beyond the buildings. "Crownhaven's the city."
Aydin waited.
Khalen sighed like he'd been forced into kindness. "People leave Crownhaven for a shot. Land. Trade. A future their kids can own."
He glanced back once. "Crownhaven sells safety. Monthly. Forever."
"Taxes?" Aydin guessed.
Khalen made a face. "Taxes," he agreed. "And you pay in 'yes sir.'"
He lifted his chin toward the sea-dark beyond the buildings. "And you don't ask questions that point centerward."
He glanced at Aydin again, eyes sharp. "You heard it yet? The world's flat. The Edge eats you. The Mother waits out there."
Aydin stared at him.
Khalen's mouth twitched. "Yeah. Everyone's got a story that keeps kids from doing something stupid."
Aydin tried to keep his face neutral. His chest still felt full of glass. "I'm new," he said carefully.
Khalen snorted. "Yeah. You've got 'new' all over you."
They turned a corner and the street widened. Ahead, a long building squatted low in the sand, a warehouse, not a temple, not a cathedral, just wood and rope and a roof that looked like it had been patched with whatever the ocean had allowed them to keep.
Lantern light spilled from its open doors. Inside, the noise changed, not screaming, work.
Voices calling names, hands moving, tools clinking, someone shouting numbers like this was a market and not a disaster.
Khalen slowed a half-step. "This is the hub. Ward-yard. Supply. Triage when the night goes bad."
Aydin's gaze snagged on a corner inside that looked too clean. It was the only clean thing he'd seen in the whole settlement.
Someone had tried very hard to keep that corner free of grit. A table, folded cloth, tools aligned like they had opinions about straightness, a basin of water that hadn't turned muddy yet.
And at the center of that clean island, a girl in pale robes moved like she'd been born inside pressure.
Lyra.
Her hair was red, not pretty-story red, real copper-bright, pulled back hard and still shedding loose strands that caught lantern light like sparks. Her skin was sun-browned and bronze, the kind of tan you only earned by living where wind and salt tried to peel you alive.
She had big eyes that went gentle first, sharp second, and a smile that made fear forget itself for half a second.
A man stopped shaking when she looked at him, then she shoved a bite-stick into his teeth like she was pinning a nail.
"Five on the left!" someone shouted.
"Four. If you can't count, carry," Lyra corrected without looking up, fingers already tying off a bandage.
A man groaned as she stitched. She didn't coo, didn't hesitate, just leaned in and did the work like pain was a schedule.
Her hands were clean, but the skin at her knuckles was cracked raw. Salt and resin had eaten it down to honesty.
A gust of sand tried to claw into the warehouse through the open doorway.
Lyra's free hand snapped out. A translucent pane of light flared into place, curved like moon-glass, catching the wind and redirecting it hard enough that grit skittered sideways across the floor instead of into the clean corner.
"Not into my clean corner," Lyra said, still smiling, still not asking.
The barrier hummed faintly, not loud, felt. Aydin felt it in his teeth.
Lyra's sleeves were long, too long for work. She tugged one cuff down by a careful finger, as if cloth could be a boundary.
Aydin realized he was staring.
He didn't even have the dignity to pretend he wasn't.