The summons came at Third Bell, not with a Warden’s bark, but with a slip of parchment slid under my door.

  Hollow 2147. Report to the Chamber of Inquiry. Immediately.

  The words were written in a precise, elegant hand I didn’t recognize. No signature. No threat. Just a command.

  My stomach turned to stone. They knew. Of course they knew.

  The walk to Floor Four was a march through a waking nightmare. Every Warden I passed seemed to look through me, their expressions not of anger, but of cool, clinical assessment. They didn’t grab me. They didn’t need to. The Tower itself felt like it was guiding me, herding me toward the one place I didn’t want to go.

  The heavy oak door to the Chamber of Inquiry stood slightly ajar. I pushed it open.

  High Sage Marius Korr stood at the window, his back to me, hands clasped behind him. The room was as I remembered—the books, the maps, the single candle fighting the shadowless light. On his desk, centered neatly on the polished wood, lay my father’s iridescent knife.

  “Close the door, Kieran,” Korr said without turning.

  I did. The click of the latch was deafening.

  He finally turned. He wasn’t wearing his ceremonial robes, just a simple tunic of dark blue. He looked almost casual. And that was more terrifying than any display of power.

  “Sit.”

  I sat in the same chair as before. The knife gleamed between us, the swirling patterns in the metal seeming to move in the candlelight.

  “An eventful night,” Korr began, moving to his desk but not sitting. He picked up the knife, weighing it in his hand. “A daring escape. A thrilling chase. A tragic betrayal. All the elements of a gripping tale.” He looked at me. “You must be exhausted.”

  I said nothing. My throat was too tight.

  “Lord Castor sends her regards, by the way. She’s quite impressed with your resilience. Said you handled the river crossing better than some of her seasoned operatives.”

  The name hit me like a physical blow. Castor. Not Lyra. Lord Castor. The Scion noble from the planning documents. She hadn’t just been playing a role for Korr; she was the role.

  “It was all a test,” I said, my voice flat.

  “An evaluation,” Korr corrected gently. “The Sanctum invests heavily in its assets. We need to know their limits. Their loyalties. Their… breaking points.” He set the knife down. “Young Caius’s plan was ambitious, I’ll give him that. The old conduit. The bribed guard. The Scion pickup. He’d been planning it for months, trading fragments of Tower gossip for Scion support. He thought he was building his own exit.”

  “You let him.”

  “We monitored him. His family has… connections. It was useful to see which Scion cells he contacted, what they promised him, what they wanted in return.” Korr’s lips thinned. “They wanted you, of course. Aldric’s bloodline. A potential key. Caius was just the delivery boy.”

  “What happens to him?” I asked, a strange pity cutting through my own fear. Caius had been a pompous fool, but he’d been a desperate one.

  Korr shrugged, a small, elegant motion. “He’ll be returned to his family. With a strongly worded warning about the consequences of interfering with Tower affairs. His lineage grants him a certain… insulation from harsher penalties. I suspect he’ll find himself on a remote estate, learning the finer points of crop rotation for the next few decades. A fitting end for a would-be spy, don’t you think?”

  So Caius had been lying about that, too. He’d never faced decommissioning. His noble blood was his get-out-of-dungeon-free card. The anger that flared was brief, smothered by a heavier weight.

  “And the Scions?” I forced the question out. “Lord Castor said she worked for Valdrence’s stability.”

  “She does. In her own way.” Korr leaned back against his desk, crossing his arms. “The Scions are a consortium of old families and merchant houses. They believe power—true power—should reside with those who have the wisdom and resources to wield it. They see the Taint not as a catastrophe to be contained, but as a resource to be controlled. They’ve been siphoning it for years, creating their little vials of temporary magic. They think that when the current system inevitably fails, they will be the new architects of the world.”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “And you just let them?”

  “We contain them,” Korr said, his voice hardening. “We monitor their operations, limit their reach, and occasionally… redirect their ambitions to our benefit. Castor’s faction within the Scions understands that open war with the Tower is suicide. So, we have an understanding. She feeds us information on her more radical rivals. We allow her certain… liberties. Last night’s operation served both our purposes: it identified active Scion agents in the field, and it tested your response to extreme pressure.”

  He made it sound so clean. So logical. A transaction.

  “What about my father?” The words were out before I could stop them, raw and pleading. “Aldric? Was that part of the test too? Showing me him down there?”

  Korr’s expression didn’t change. “Your family’s situation is separate. And complicated. Your father is where he needs to be. Aldric is where he has always been. Their fates are not bargaining chips in tonight’s little drama.”

  “You used them as leverage.”

  “I presented you with reality,” he said, his tone final. “The reality is that you have a unique gift. The reality is that your family is deeply entangled in the history of the Taint. The reality is that you can either rage against the confines of this Tower, or you can learn to understand the power within it.” He pushed away from the desk. “The offer stands, Kieran. You can return to your cell, to the drills, to watching your friend Tavin deteriorate day by day. Or you can begin real work. With your father. You can learn.”

  He wasn’t going to tell me anything about them. Not where they were, not what they were doing, not if they were okay. He was dangling the idea of them to keep me compliant.

  “What about Tavin?” I whispered.

  For the first time, a flicker of something like genuine weariness passed over Korr’s face. “2146 is fraying. Rapidly. The suppressants are losing efficacy. His disc has been glowing at baseline for 72 hours. The voices he reports are no longer faint. He’s begun… responding to them.”

  A cold dread poured into my veins. “What does that mean?”

  “It means the seal is not just weeping, Kieran. It’s cracking. And when it breaks, what’s inside won’t be Tavin anymore.” He said it with the detached air of a physician stating a prognosis. “The medical wing is doing what it can. But some paths only lead one way.”

  I stood up, the chair scraping loudly. “I want to see him.”

  “That’s not advisable.”

  “He’s my friend!”

  “And he is becoming a threat,” Korr said, his voice dropping to a dangerous calm. “To himself. To others. To you. Sentiment is a luxury the Sanctum cannot afford, Hollow 2147. Not when the instability of one can trigger a cascade in others. You, of all people, should understand that now.”

  The finality in his voice was a door slamming shut. There would be no visit. No goodbye.

  “Return to your quarters,” Korr said, turning back to the window, dismissing me. “Consider your path. The door remains open. But not forever.”

  I was led out by the same silent Wardens. The walk back to Floor Nine was a blur. The Tower’s hum seemed to mock me, a constant reminder of the machine I was trapped inside. Korr’s words echoed: Some paths only lead one way.

  I thought of Tavin’s trembling hands. His whispered counts. The desperate hope in his eyes when the knife had eased his pain. That hope was gone now, replaced by whatever horrors were speaking to him from within.

  I reached the dormitory corridor on Floor Nine. It was silent, the time between bells when Hollows were either at duties or sequestered in their cells. My door was just ahead.

  But I stopped.

  Tavin’s door, next to mine, was wide open.

  A strange, oily light spilled from within, not the clean white of the Tower’s luminescence, but a pulsing, shadowy gloom. And from the doorway, a thin, acrid plume of black smoke drifted into the corridor, carrying with it a scent of ozone and burnt sugar.

  My blood ran cold.

  I took a step forward, then another. I could see figures moving inside Tavin’s cell. Two Wardens in medical whites, their backs to me. And on the narrow bed, a shape…

  A choked sound escaped my lips.

  Tavin was convulsing, his back arched off the mattress. The black smoke coiled from his mouth, his nostrils, the pores of his skin. His eyes were wide open, rolled back so only the whites showed, vibrating with the same dark energy. The veins on his neck and arms stood out, black as ink against his greyish skin.

  One of the Wardens held a syringe filled with a glowing blue liquid—the emergency purge. The other was speaking into a small communication rune, her voice low and urgent.

  “…confirmed. Intake 2146. Fraying beyond salvage. Manifestation of physical corruption. Orders?”

  A pause as she listened to the reply. Then, grimly: “Understood. Containing for transport to Deep Isolation.”

  They hadn’t seen me. I stood frozen in the corridor, watching as my friend thrashed, consumed by the very thing we’d been trained to hold. The whispers in my chest were silent, a held breath.

  One of the Wardens turned, finally noticing me in the doorway. Her expression was not unkind, but it was utterly closed. “Hollow 2147. Return to your cell. Now.”

  I looked past her, at Tavin. His shuddering stopped for a second. His head lolled toward the door. For one heartbreaking instant, his eyes cleared, the black smoke receding. He saw me.

  His lips moved, forming a silent word. Help.

  Then the darkness surged back, swallowing the green of his irises, and a low, guttural groan filled the room, a sound that was nothing like Tavin’s voice.

  The Warden stepped between us, blocking my view. “Your cell. Now.”

  I stumbled back, the image of Tavin’s smoke-wreathed form, of that final, silent plea, burned into my mind. I fumbled with my door handle, fell inside, and shut the world out.

  I slid to the floor, my back against the cold ivory, listening to the muffled sounds from next door—the scuffling, a sharp hiss from the syringe, a final, choked gasp, and then… silence.

  The heavy, suffocating silence of an empty room.

  From the wall beside me, where Tavin’s counting used to whisper through the stone, there was nothing. No count. No breath. No friend.

  Just the Tower’s endless, indifferent hum.