Night in the city was not simply absence of day; it was a careful, humming architecture built by voice. From the highest terraces the Night-Singers worked their long, patient intervals into the velvet between roofs, coaxing the pale motes of stars back into the web the elders called the Sundered Crown. The Crown had been stitched and restitched since memory, a pattern of light and silence that kept the streets honest and the sea off-balance in a way the fishermen trusted. Elara moved along the ridge like a seamstress of sound, her breath measured, her throat empty of everything that was not pitch. Years of apprenticeship had taught her how to lay one note atop another so that tension would not build and snap a mote loose; she thought in harmonics and in the wooden names the High Cantor still used. Tonight the sky felt wrong at a distance, not in the brilliant way of a storm but as if a single string had been nicked. She told herself she could find the fray and mend it. She planted both feet, felt the slate via the soles of her boots, and began the sequence that would normally ease the Crown’s tremor. Her voice went out into the dark, an obedient, lucid thing. The first intervals answered as expected, little lights brightening as if inhaling, and Elara steadied into the long work. Then a note on the far arc tripped and fainted; a thinness slipped through the harmonics she had been taught to trust. Her second phrase tried to lift it and failed. The stutter moved like a cold under her ribs. Below the terraces she heard the harbor’s distant wooden groans and the soft, animal sound of people nodding off. A mote that had been humming like a bead of mercury thinned and fizzed, then separated into a scattering that slid away from the Crown and began to fall toward the river. Elara held the last interval until it died, then let out a breath she had not known she’d been keeping. The law of the Cantors was a quiet, absolute grammar: anchors were not to be set to living hearts. Her training held that a living anchor would draw life like a slow tide, and that the price for saving one person was often hidden and heavy. The High Cantor’s rule was old and iron-tipped; everyone knew it and most accepted it. Still, watching a mote shiver like a last pulse and tumble, she felt something she could not name shift in her chest, and the thought that someone might be reaching for it on the ground made her feet move.