Chapter 59. Fires and Sandglass

The fire crackled low in the basin, flickering blue at the edges now. Nerin stirred it once with a twisted iron rod and let the coals hiss.

Outside, the wind was rising again. You could hear it clawing at the tower stones, searching for purchase.

Adria didn’t speak right away. She sat with Royce’s note still in her hand, reading the words again and again. Not for their meaning—for the shape of them. The way the loops curved, the pressure in the strokes. Even here, he wrote like someone hiding a tremor.

Finally, she asked: “How many others came before me?”

Nerin didn’t look up.

“Three, in my lifetime,” she said. “More, if you count the bodies and not the names. The construct doesn’t choose easily. It waits. It learns.”

Adria leaned forward. “And you—what was your role?”

“I was meant to translate the pattern,” Nerin said. “The original sequence. A code woven into light and thought. Our theory was that the construct didn’t want to consume—it wa