The Stone That Kept the Dawn

Eloin had learned to read the city by light. Not charts, not songs, but by the small shifts of color that crawled along roofs and hung like breath over the river each morning. There were places where mornings came long and kind, where doors opened to a wash of gold that lingered until people chose to step into afternoon; there were places where light arrived in pinches and slips, a thin promise that vanished before tea. That rhythm was not weather and it was not chance. It flowed from a single living thing at the heart of the Hall of Morning: the Dawnstone, a coral-bright crystal set like a heart beneath a vaulted ceiling. It did more than glow. It knew the city.

To most folk, the stone was something like a clock and a priest mixed together, an object people bowed to without quite understanding why. Master Varan, the appointed steward, had taught Eloin the careful rituals that kept the stone steady: the feathered brushes for dusting, the measured bowls of warmed air, the slow turning of the brass dial that listened to the stone each dawn. Eloin had apprenticed to the Hall because his hands were steady and because his brother Lio liked to press his forehead to glass and whisper about the way light felt. He could not have guessed his reasons would be tested so soon.

The Hall itself smelled of warm metal and turned wheat—an aroma that meant security to those who lived on steady mornings and fear to those whose hours were bought and bartered. Eloin’s quarters were a lean room on the Hall’s east side where he and Lio shared a narrow bed, a window that caught the first thin sliver of color and a cupboard that held two plates and a single spoon. Lio woke with the dawn and hummed little tunes as he braided straw or ran errands. He collected nothing but curios: a smooth pebble, a shard of blue glass, a phrase he liked to say on windy days. He had a laugh like a kettle beginning to sing.

On the morning the stone stuttered, Eloin woke to the sound of his brother’s breath slowing. The window held a grayness where gold should have been. It was not the kind of dim that meant cloudy weather; it felt like someone had closed the city’s eyelids. Eloin hurried into the single-room warmth. Lio lay curled on the pallet, his breath even but thin as if the morning had ceased to press itself against his ribs. Eloin shook him. His brother did not respond. A question rose in Eloin that had no small answer: how could sleep so deep have come with no scent of fading or fever, no fevered face? Lio’s skin held the pale blue that sometimes followed long nights, but there had been no long night to earn it.