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A young apprentice sky-mason uncovers a fracture in the city's keystone and discovers a cache of missing pledges suggesting the authorities are consolidating the anchors that hold the skyline. As a public installation looms, she proposes a daring alternative that asks the city to pledge aloud and to root its covenant in a living presence rather than a hidden chest.
The Third Spire rose from the city like a practiced hand, carved and balanced so precisely that the line where stone met sky looked as if someone had laid a ruler across the world. Kestrel Oren moved along that line as if it were a familiar trail, the tempering rods warm beneath her palms and the soft music of the lattice humming under her touch. Sky-masons spoke of listening rather than doing; the craft was less hammer and more attunement, feet set against the old geometry and voice soft enough to be mistaken for wind. She had apprenticed here for years, taught to read the faint veins of levitation that ran through the sky-stones, to sense where a pledge had been set and where it had been pinched into place.
Below, the plaza kept its usual churn: carts, vendors, the blunt business of the city. Above, the keystone crowning the Spire breathed in a slow, practiced rhythm. Kestrel had been checking the micro-tensions along the south seam when a sound like a bell that had never known a peal broke through the steady hum. The lattice there went discordant, the harmonics gone uneven, and a thin fracture spidered outward. Hesper Vann, who had been crouched across from her with the patience of old glass, looked up with a slow, pinched stare. They were both sky-masons and therefore never surprised by trouble; they were trained to be surprised into skill. This surprised them into alarm.
Stone sighed and split. A wedge of the sky-stone flaked off like a scab, and with it came a glimmering wash of levitation-sheen that spilled down the face of the Spire and answered gravity like a second wind. Where it struck the plaza a stall umbrella knit its supports back together out of silence; where it brushed a cloth merchant the man's eyes fluttered and the day’s memory fell away from him as if it had been a dropped coin. He stood blinking, unable to recall the bread he had folded in his hands that morning or the shade of his neighbor's child. Small things misbehaved—candles smoldered too late, a lamplighter's pole lost its grip—but the true terror was the fracture itself and what it suggested about the hidden anchors inside the stone.