Rhavessan’s salt flats begin where the sea appears to have lost patience with land. 

For miles the world lies bleached beneath the sun, crusted white over old tidal beds where the water withdrew centuries ago and left every mineral behind to harden. Wind drives low across the flats in shining ribbons, scraping loose salt against black stone and packing the seams of Abaddon’s boots with grit. Westward, obsidian terraces climb in blunt shelves toward a sky burned almost colourless. Eastward, reefs of volcanic glass shoulder into a lapis sea, their edges sharpened by brine until the coast resembles the exposed jaw of something enormous beneath the water.

Omega is still at work here. 

Abaddon knows the difference between what Rhavessan was the last time he crossed these flats and what has grown since. 

Three processional markers he destroyed eighty-seven years ago have returned farther north, rebuilt from black coral around the broken bases he left behind. An Eschatid pit now occupies the hollow where an older shrine once stood; the Rhavassani did not reconstruct the temple after he erased it, only kept the ground and found another use for the devotion. Farther east, prayer cloth has been knotted around stone spurs that were bare on his previous campaign, while old drag marks disappear beneath newer ones and footprints end where entrances have been moved underground.

He has fought versions of this war for centuries. 

Rhavessan loses districts, retakes them, renames them, buries the evidence and raises something different over the same foundations. Children grow old between his departures. Priests he remembers killing acquire grandchildren who inherit arguments he had once believed buried with them. Eschatid grafts that were crude enough to kill their hosts within weeks have become intricate enough to share nerves, reinforce damaged bone and survive separation attempts that would once have been simple. Even the mistakes learn here.

Near the next rise, Abaddon passes a rib cage laid open beneath the sun with cloudy violet glass threaded carefully between the bones. He remembers when offerings on this part of the flats were left whole. Someone has changed the rite since then. He does not stop to wonder whether the alteration came from doctrine, necessity or the private invention of one worshipper; Rhavessan has taught him how quickly a private invention can become doctrine if it survives long enough.

He keeps the pace he has held since dawn, helm beneath one arm and Eidolon Breaker resting diagonally across the opposite shoulder. His campaign braids reach nearly to the backs of his knees, weighted with relic beads taken from battles old enough that only he remembers where some of them came from. They knock softly together whenever the wind catches them. Purple geosmin burns through the skin at his throat and wrists, brighter than it was when this return to Rhavessan began three days ago, every flare recording the accumulated cost of a campaign his body has endured in different forms for far longer.

Eidolon Breaker gives one low vibration against his shoulder just before Abaddon reaches the crest of the rise. He stops there and watches a square of salt ahead of him lift several inches from the flat. A pale hand thrusts through the widening gap, four fingers hooking over the edge while fresh bone thickens beneath the wrist and runs along the forearm into a temporary brace. The buried slab tilts farther. Another hand appears beside the first, and together they lever open a hatch that had not existed aboveground when Abaddon crossed this same stretch of salt that morning.

Monday climbs out of the planet.

She emerges shoulder first, grunting beneath the weight of a leather satchel, then rolls onto the flats and lies there for half a second with one cheek pressed to the salt. Furnace-yellow geosmin burns along the backs of her hands and threads the sides of her throat. Her spectacles have fared poorly underground: one arm is gone, the surviving lens has cracked into several radiating lines, and the frame clings to her face chiefly because Monday appears to have tied it behind one ear with a strip of tendon.

She sits up and empties a small avalanche of salt from her collar.

“Thicker cap this latitude,” she says. “Had to reinforce the last twelve metres twice. Somebody built a cistern under it about three hundred years ago and then forgot to tell the geology.”

Abaddon looks past her into the opening.

A ladder of pale ribs descends beneath the salt. Farther down, the tunnel curves west through a cage of grown bone whose struts meet at load-bearing angles, each joint swollen slightly where Monday has thickened it against the pressure overhead.

“You went alone.”

Monday drags her satchel onto the surface and begins searching through it. “For the survey.”

“That does not improve the decision.”

“I did improve the tunnel.”

She finds a stick of yellow chalk, crouches, and draws a broad circle across the salt between them. The pleasure comes back into her face now that the conversation has reached something measurable.

“Settlement’s larger than the old chart claimed. Three primary vaults, one ceremonial atrium, a mural hall, two collapsed residential branches and a central chamber the priesthood converted around an engine they should never have been allowed near. Forty-nine living citizens, as far as I could confirm without opening the sealed chambers. Seventeen are physically joined to Eschatids; another nine are moving independently. Three people have been sewn into choir rigs by the mouth. The engine itself is load-bearing.”

Abaddon’s attention returns from the horizon.

“Load-bearing.”

“Unfortunately.”

Monday adds three short marks to the chalk circle, then draws a line between them.

“The old Rhavessani built downward in layers. When Omega’s priesthood came through, they replaced parts of the central support system with living growth from the engine. Several vaults are hanging off the thing now. You erase it whole, and the settlement becomes a grave before anyone has time to appreciate your efficiency.”

Eidolon Breaker shifts slightly beneath Abaddon’s hand.

Monday points the chalk at it.

“That expression is exactly why I waited.”

“I could remove the command structure.”

“You could also remove the distinction between command structure and structure once you start burning too hot.”

His eyes narrow.

Monday’s grin barely survives the look. “Which is why we are going together.”

Abaddon studies the tunnel again. The bone supports are fresh enough that a faint yellow radiance still runs through them, each arch curving into the next with the practical ugliness of work made to hold rather than impress.

“How do you want to enter?”

Monday brightens. “Western atrium. I stacked ribs down through an old ventilation shaft and opened enough ceiling to give us height. We take the attached citizens first, then work inward. I can brace whatever you need left standing. You cut Omega out of whatever is still worth keeping.”

Abaddon studies the diagram at her feet. “Once the graft has entered the nerves, you may not be able to tell me which tissue still belongs to the host.”

“I can.” Monday wipes the chalk dust from her thumb against her pants. “I took samples from three of the attachments while I was below. The Eschatid tissue carries load differently once the host starts incorporating it, and the newer growth leaves a seam along the nerve sheath. It’s thin, but it’s there.”

His gaze settles on her satchel. “You removed tissue during the survey.”

“Very small pieces.”

“From living subjects.”

“They needed the pieces less than I needed the information.”

Abaddon looks at her for a long moment, then toward the open hatch. “Show me the seam.”

Monday tucks the chalk away and lowers herself onto the first rung. “That was the plan.”

She disappears into the salt, and Abaddon follows. The bone ladder gives beneath his weight before the braces along its sides thicken around the strain, carrying him down into the dark.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The first atrium was built for weddings, and Monday makes Abaddon stop beneath the entrance arch long enough to see what the priesthood chose to keep. 

Two femurs polished nearly pearl-white cross above them beneath a carving of hands joined by a tidal cord. Beyond, old pelvises have been fitted into the beginnings of a nave, their broad curves carrying a ceiling assembled from whale bone and shell. Every surface generous enough to take a mark has been written upon. Tide-bound marriages occupy one span; harvest fleets return beneath storm pennants along another; farther in, a child is lifted toward the sea at a naming rite, its tiny carved feet worn smooth by generations of fingertips passing over them on the way inside.

The later work cuts directly through the older history. A many-toothed mouth opens across the names beneath one wedding procession. An Eschatid bends over a row of kneeling figures whose original faces have been chipped away and recarved in worship. Black resin fills the grooves of an old king’s portrait, splitting his brow, cheeks and throat into dark branching channels.

None of the earlier carvings have been fully removed. The priesthood has used them as foundations, letting Rhavassan’s own dead carry the imagery that came afterwards.

Monday stands beneath the nearest damaged span with her head tipped back, following the cuts from one generation of work into the next. “They went through more trouble leaving this here than they would have spent grinding it flat.”

Abaddon has seen the same habit elsewhere on Rhavassan, although rarely preserved this beautifully. Temples become ossuaries, civic halls acquire altars, old family emblems survive inside newer devotional marks until children born three occupations later can no longer say which symbol came first.

“Erasure leaves a before,” he says. “This makes the conquest look inherited.”

Monday runs her thumb across the edge of a severed tide-cord, careful not to disturb the carved hands beneath it. 

“So you leave the old wedding in the wall and teach their grandchildren it was always leading here.”

“That has been the practice.”

There is enough history in the answer that Monday glances at him, but whatever she might have asked is interrupted by a faint scrape beyond the western columns. Her attention changes at once. 

One hand rises, directing Abaddon’s gaze toward the sound while the other reaches for the nearest structural rib. Yellow radiance travels from her fingertips into the old bone and disappears through the wall, following the joined supports farther than sight can. Monday goes still while the atrium returns itself to her through pressure: weight against columns, vibration through floor, the small repeated disturbances of bodies attempting to remain quiet.

“Thirteen,” she says after several seconds. “Three in choir bindings. Two with dorsal grafts. The woman behind the western column has Eschatid growth through the lower ribs and pelvis, and there’s enough host tissue wrapped around it that I’ll need to see her moving before I can give you a clean boundary.”

Abaddon shifts Eidolon Breaker from his shoulder into his hand.

Monday catches his wrist before he can advance, less to restrain him than to hold his attention on the warning. Her fingers do not span the armour beneath his glove. “The older grafts are carrying host nerves now. If you read the entire attachment as foreign, you’ll take pieces of the Rhavassani with it. Let me identify what her body has adopted before you remove anything.”

His gaze moves from her hand toward the western column. “The seam may already be gone.”

Monday releases his wrist. “Which means we stop treating the graft like a piece to be cut out. Follow the command through it and leave whatever her body has already incorporated.”

Eidolon Breaker lowers a few degrees. Abaddon’s attention returns to the shadow beyond the column. “Show me where to start.”

The woman comes out from behind the column before either of them reaches her.

She moves badly. One leg has learned a stride the other cannot match, forcing her hips sideways with every step. An Eschatid lies grafted across her back from shoulder to pelvis, its narrow body drawn tight along her spine. Two forelimbs disappear beneath her rib cage. Black tissue travels from its breast into the base of her neck in braided cords, then resurfaces beneath the skin along her jaw. Its skull hangs beside her own with such close alignment that their cheeks nearly touch.

Her eyes find Monday first. The Eschatid opens its mouth; the woman’s jaw opens with it.

Whatever sound should emerge catches somewhere between the two bodies and tears loose as a single raw cry.

Abaddon sees the commands before the woman manages another step. Obliviscence has never required language to arrange itself into words; intention acquires structure once something has been forced to obey it long enough. Four imperatives travel through the graft and into her body, each entering by a different route.

Advance.

Kneel.

Offer.

Kill.

Monday is already moving. A white cuff rises around the woman’s forward ankle, then broadens into a brace along the opposite knee, holding both joints inside the range they were already trying to occupy. She leaves enough room for the woman to shift her weight and enough flexion to lower herself safely if the graft forces her downward. What she removes from the movement is momentum.

The Eschatid jerks hard against the restraint and screams through the Rhavassani woman’s throat. Yellow geosmin brightens along Monday’s hands while she watches the reaction travel through the graft, following each pull from creature to host and back again.

“There,” she says, pointing toward the base of the neck. “Three bridges across the thoracic spine. The upper two are integrated; she’s rebuilt nerve around them. Leave those alone for now. The lower bridge is still carrying command without sharing much sensation.”

Abaddon approaches along the woman’s left side, where the graft gives him the clearest angle. Her eyes track him immediately. Recognition contracts her pupils; her breathing turns shallow enough that each inhale barely moves the Eschatid’s limbs beneath her ribs. She knows who he is. On Rhavassan, nearly everyone does.

He has been coming here for centuries.

Some families teach his name alongside prayers. Others use it to frighten children away from old battlefields. Some districts show paintings of him as a monster with his glaive buried through the planet; others depict the same weapon cutting Eschatids from human backs beneath Alpha’s sun. He has lived long enough to become both stories without belonging completely to either.

The woman stares at Eidolon Breaker.

Monday keeps her eyes on the graft. “Lower bridge first. Follow the command through it. Leave the nerve beside it.”

Abaddon finds the relationship she means.

Move for me.

He removes it.

The Eschatid convulses so violently that the brace around the woman’s ankle groans beneath the transferred force, yet her own leg remains where Monday set it. A second command flashes through the black tissue at her throat, close enough to the host nerves that Abaddon can feel the temptation to take the entire structure at once.

Speak for me.

This time he separates the order before Eidolon Breaker moves. The command disappears. The woman’s mouth stays open after the Eschatid’s closes. She drags in a breath entirely out of rhythm with the creature on her back, chokes on it, then coughs until a sound emerges that belongs to her alone.

“Please.”

Monday’s attention never leaves the graft. “I hear you. Keep your weight where it is.”

More bodies begin shifting beyond the columns, the disturbance travelling through the old wedding atrium in claws against shell, bare feet across bone and the low wet movement of attachments pulling against flesh. Monday feels the first tremor enter the structural rib beneath her hand. Abaddon hears another answer it from the northern passage.

They have been given all the time the room intends to allow them.

The response comes from every side at once. Rhavassani bodies shift behind the remaining columns, Eschatid claws scrape across shell mosaic, and something much heavier begins striking the floor in the northern passage with enough force to send each impact through the old wedding bones beneath Monday’s hand. She looks upward, finds the nearest load-bearing arch, and sends yellow radiance through it before the next blow lands.

Bone answers her in a rush.

A new rib curves down from the ceiling and thickens under its own weight. Monday catches the lower end while it is still growing, swings herself onto the rising span and climbs with it, each placement of her hand calling another support out of the existing structure. 

By the time the first free Eschatid enters the atrium, she has crossed above it on a bridge that began as empty air. The creature runs on six limbs and wears stolen ribs over its back, each plate burned with narrow lines of prayer that stretch and wrinkle whenever its shoulders move. Monday watches its first three strides, measures where the weight is going, then changes the room beneath it.

“Two—three—five—eight.”

The sequence passes under her breath while pale wedges rise from the floor in corresponding intervals. 

The first redirects a forelimb. The second catches one of the rear joints half a step later, and the creature’s own speed finishes the work, turning its body sideways until its shoulder crashes into the mosaic. Monday grows a curved brace over its neck before it can recover, then extends the same structure upward to support the damaged arch above it. Restraint and repair become the same act in her hands; every piece she adds solves more than one problem because she refuses to waste material on a single purpose.

Abaddon works beneath her.

Eidolon Breaker has spent centuries making Rhavassan simpler. He knows how an Eschatid gathers itself before a leap, how the older ones curl the forelimbs inward and the newer breeds carry more force through the spine. 

When one launches from the eastern aisle, he reaches for the command completing the motion rather than the body performing it. The creature leaves the ground with every muscle already committed and loses continue somewhere between ascent and landing. Its limbs fold beneath it when it comes down.

Another Eschatid opens its mouth with a liturgical sound gathering behind the teeth. Abaddon has heard versions of that prayer spoken in seven dialects and sung through instruments built from more species than he remembers. 

He removes the imperative buried inside it. 

The jaw closes before the first syllable can escape, and the creature recoils from its own silence, shaking its skull while the muscles around its mouth search for an instruction that is no longer there.

The Rhavassani joined to them require something harder.

Abaddon has severed grafts before. He has killed hosts whose bodies could no longer survive separation, cut Eschatids out of soldiers while battlefield medics held organs in place, and watched Rhavassani priests improve the practice from one generation to the next until the distinction between parasite and anatomy became increasingly expensive to recover. Eidolon Breaker would happily settle the question for him. Obliviscence prefers categories broad enough to make the work final: infestation, conversion, enemy. Once accepted, any one of those could become a door through which the entire joined body disappeared.

Monday has spent the morning refusing him those doors.

A man rushes them with an Eschatid graft sunk deep along one hip, the black tissue disappearing beneath muscle before resurfacing at the base of his spine. Monday catches him between two low braces and calls down the relevant path without leaving her perch overhead. Abaddon follows the command rather than the graft, isolates the order forcing weight through the fused joint, and removes only that. Violet radiance climbs from his wrists nearly to his elbows with the effort of holding everything else apart.

The Rhavassani man collapses onto both hands. His back continues rising and falling.

Monday sees it from above. “Better.”

Abaddon has already turned toward the next body. “Keep giving me seams.”

“Keep leaving me people.”

Neither of them needs more than that.

They move deeper into the atrium together, Monday changing routes before the Eschatids can settle into them and Abaddon stripping command out of bodies whose tissue he would once have considered beyond useful separation. The old wedding hall becomes crowded with new architecture: narrow braces curling around ankles, lattices protecting spines, temporary ribs taking the weight of cracked columns while the fighting travels around them. Monday’s Fibonacci count resurfaces whenever the geometry becomes difficult, numbers passing through her teeth while yellow growth races ahead of her decisions.

Then the atrium answers from below.

The sound enters through the bones before either of them hears it in the air. Every arch takes the same low vibration. Shell tiles chatter beneath Abaddon’s boots; dust loosens from the ceiling and falls across his shoulders while Monday turns toward the central doors, following the stress through her nearest brace.

The next impact splits it.

“That’s bad.”

She is already descending when the doors begin opening inward.

What enters through them has been made from enough separate anatomies that the eye struggles to decide which one should govern the whole. 

A whale-shaped skull forms the forward mass, its lower jaw pierced through with organ pipes that descend into a chamber of pumping red tissue. Above it, ribs rise in several vaulted tiers, enormous enough to imitate the architecture around them. Three human mouths have been incorporated into the breastplate and sewn closed with red thread. The lower body travels on jointed pillars taken from old altars, fragments of ceremonial carving still visible near the floor where names, tide-symbols and portions of devotional scenes now bear the weight of something they were never made to carry.

Abaddon recognises parts of the design.

He destroyed an earlier priest-engine outside Sarth Mora a century and a half ago. That one had walked on six columns and required an entire choir to regulate pressure through its throat. The Rhavassani have solved both problems since then.

The first step cracks the wedding mosaic.

The second transfers enough force into the ceiling that two old supports split and one of Monday’s fresh ribs begins to buckle.

She follows the fracture upward, swears, and throws both hands over her head. Yellow radiance tears through her arms. New bone drives itself into the failing gaps and widens until the western span settles across it. Monday drops several inches beneath the transferred load before her legs lock again.

Abaddon brings Eidolon Breaker forward. “I can remove it.”

“And the western vault with it.” Monday’s eyes remain on the ceiling while she traces the stress outward. “Central spine is carrying the chamber behind us and part of the residential level above that. They’ve grown the settlement into the engine.”

The priest-engine advances another step. One of its altar-limbs swings through a pillar and sends polished bone exploding across the floor.

Abaddon studies the red chamber beneath its ribs. “Tell me what can go.”

“Its purpose.”

His gaze cuts toward her.

Monday shifts one foot beneath herself and thickens the brace taking her weight. “Keep the load system. Keep the organs. Keep anything the rest of the settlement has started depending on. I want whatever makes this thing worship, convert, command and kill gone.”

“You are asking Obliviscence to distinguish theology from anatomy inside something built to make them identical.”

“Yes.” The corner of her mouth lifts despite the strain. “I brought you because you’re very talented.”

The engine opens its mouth.

Monday lets the ceiling settle onto the brace, ducks beneath the first sweep of a jointed limb and runs for the exposed underside. She slides the final distance across powdered salt and drives both hands into the framework beneath the red chamber. Bone surges from her palms into the engine itself, threading alongside older supports before splitting around them, building redundancies wherever she finds a point whose removal would carry too much consequence with it.

This is the part Monday loves.

Abaddon has watched her enjoy violence before; that is easy. Plenty of soldiers enjoy violence. Monday becomes most alive when destruction creates an engineering problem difficult enough to resist her. 

Her attention races through the priest-engine faster than her hands can follow, yellow light burning beneath her skin while she tests one junction, abandons it, reinforces another, then drives a brace through an opening barely wider than her wrist. Every new piece makes the structure less dependent upon the commands Abaddon is preparing to remove.

“Abaddon.” Her voice comes through the cage of bone. She points toward a cluster of tissue behind the forward ribs. “Start there. Erase the order. Leave the organ.”

The instruction gives him what he needs.

Eidolon Breaker lowers toward the engine, and Obliviscence opens.

Generations of worship have been built into its movement. Serve is braided through the muscles lifting the forward pillars. Consume regulates the chamber drawing matter into itself. Convert travels through the pipes and into the three sewn mouths. Omega’s name repeats through smaller commands everywhere Abaddon looks, attached to functions the settlement now requires in order to remain standing.

He takes serve first.

The engine jerks violently enough to throw its weight toward the west. Monday catches the redistribution before the ceiling does, swearing through clenched teeth while three new struts branch from her scaffold and take the strain.

Abaddon finds consume and removes it. One bank of organ pipes goes quiet. Convert follows, and the three mouths sewn into the breastplate cease their humming so abruptly that their next breaths become audible.

“Again,” Monday calls.

He goes deeper. The oldest command is also the broadest:

Belong.

It has been allowed to spread far beyond the priest-engine. Abaddon follows it through the red chamber, through the altar-limbs, into the grafted Rhavassani still scattered through the lower settlement. The command has lived inside some of them long enough to overlap with sensation, balance, pain, hunger. For the first time since entering the atrium, he understands why Monday insisted upon taking samples before she let him descend.

Violet radiance reaches his hands.

Monday looks up from beneath the engine and follows his attention into the lower grafts. “It spread farther than the tissue samples showed.”

“Into the hosts.”

“Yes. Leave the nerves where they are and keep following the command.”

Abaddon looks back into the structure. “It will be narrow.”

“You’ve done narrow all morning.”

Abaddon returns to the command.

He has erased belong before. There are kingdoms that once possessed provinces no map remembers, military orders whose own survivors lost the concept of membership while standing beneath their banners. Taking the whole word would be simple.

Rhavassan has survived too many simple solutions.

He follows the command until possession finally reveals its object.

Belong to Omega.

Eidolon Breaker moves through that relationship alone.

The priest-engine comes down onto Monday’s scaffold with a groan that travels through every structural bone in the settlement. Its great skull lowers until the jaw nearly touches the mosaic. Organ pipes release one collapsing chord. The altar-limbs fold joint by joint while the red chamber continues pumping, carried now by the framework Monday has grown around it.

Above them, the ceiling holds. Monday stays beneath the engine until the weight has finished redistributing. Sweat runs down the back of her neck and darkens her shirt between the shoulders; the yellow geosmin around her hands has faded to a weak intermittent glow, but her attention keeps travelling over the supports, checking each one in turn before she permits herself to crawl out.

She sits among the old wedding carvings with one knee drawn up, dust streaked across her clothes and the preserved arch rising behind her. When she looks at it, her laugh comes out breathless and pleased.

“That was beautiful.”

Abaddon plants Eidolon Breaker beside him. His gaze travels from Monday to the scaffold, then upward to the several tonnes of priest-engine now resting above it. “You had enough weight on you to break your spine.”

“And now I don’t.”

“Monday.”

She tips her head toward the western arch. “Look.”

He does. The old stone remains seated where it has endured for generations. No fresh cracks have opened along the joints. The wedding carvings remain whole beneath the load, their worn figures still holding hands under the curve of the arch.

Monday lifts one tired arm and points overhead, wearing the exhausted satisfaction of a builder whose argument is currently supporting several tonnes of evidence.

“Exactly.”

Once its commands are gone, the priest-engine becomes easier to read.

The obscenity remains. Bone still bears load where stone once failed; pipes carry pressure through chambers that should never have been grown; living tissue flexes slowly beneath the graftwork, keeping an old support network active long after the hands that assembled it have died. Fragments of altars continue holding up walls beneath carvings made for worshippers whose names have worn away, and through it all run Monday’s new braces, pale additions threaded among the priesthood’s work wherever age, violence, or bad engineering left weakness behind. Omega’s purpose has been cut out of the structure. What people did in service of that purpose remains embedded everywhere.

Monday rises carefully and makes a slow circuit of the base, testing one support with her fingertips, then another. Dust clings to her palms. At the western side she presses her weight against a brace, watches the adjoining bone take it cleanly, and gives a small nod.

“There,” she says. “Now it has an afterwards.”

A thin sound answers from inside the breastplate.

Abaddon turns first.

The three women sewn into the engine have begun trying to breathe around their stitches.

Eidolon Breaker is already in his hand when Monday sees where his attention has gone. She climbs back onto the collapsed frame before he can choose a cut and crouches beside the nearest woman, studying the swollen mouth and the darkened thread drawn through it.

“Hold them still. I want to see where the thread enters.”

Abaddon lowers the weapon. He braces one hand against the ruined engine instead, taking its shifting weight while Monday works.

The first singer recoils from her touch. Her cheeks are swollen around the sutures, several of them dragged through old scar tissue where the flesh has been opened and closed before. Monday catches her jaw gently between one palm and the heel of the other hand, waiting until the woman stops pulling away long enough to let her look. A narrow sliver of bone grows from the edge of Monday’s thumbnail, fine enough to slip beneath the first stitch. She angles it upward and cuts away from the lip.

The woman flinches. Abaddon feels the engine answer through his arm and bears down harder against the frame.

Monday moves to the next stitch.

By the time she reaches the last, tears are running freely down the singer’s face. The thread comes loose wetly and drops across Monday’s knuckles. She draws her hands back at once. The woman turns aside and coughs until her whole body shakes, one hand clamped over her newly opened mouth.

Monday does not reach for her again.

The second singer has fewer sutures and more scar tissue. The third never looks at Monday at all. Her eyes remain fixed on Abaddon while the stitches come free one by one, tracking Eidolon Breaker, his hands, the black armour, every movement he makes. He keeps the weapon lowered and gives her nothing else to follow.

When the final length of thread falls onto the broken frame, Monday climbs down and points toward the western passage.

“Go that way. The atrium behind us is clear.”

None of them move. One woman raises both hands to her mouth. Her fingertips travel over the places where the thread had been, touching each torn point with the wonder and terror of someone reacquainting herself with a boundary she had stopped expecting to possess.

Monday waits.

When she speaks again, her voice is gentler, though the instruction inside it remains firm. “You do not have to decide what any of this meant today. You do not have to decide what you believe now either. Get out of the building first.”

The eldest looks past her toward the dead command architecture: the severed devotional lines, the broken altars, the priest-engine still standing because Monday has taught its remaining pieces how to carry one another without worship.

“What happens to it?”

Monday follows her gaze upward.

“Tomorrow can argue about that.”

For now, that is enough.

The first woman steps away from the engine. The others follow after her, unsteady at first, then faster once the western passage opens ahead of them. Their bare feet cross the shell mosaic and vanish beyond the arch.

Abaddon remains where he is until the last footfall is gone.

Monday has already retrieved her notebook by the time he turns back. She braces one shoulder against the nearest of her new supports and begins to write, the page trembling beneath a hand that has poured too much geosmin into keeping several tonnes of Rhavassani history from joining the floor.

“Three choir subjects recovered alive,” she murmurs as the pencil moves. “Command architecture removed. Primary load preserved.”

Abaddon looks over her shoulder. Monday immediately angles the notebook against her chest.

“Write your own report.”

“You were about to include me.”

“I was about to include the part where you followed an instruction.”

“Remove it.”

Her pencil stops.

“No. Anomalies belong in the record.”

Abaddon looks at her for a moment, evidently deciding whether the argument deserves to exist, then turns and starts toward the next passage.

Monday waits until his back is to her before adding another line. The pencil moves quickly this time.

He does not ask what she wrote.

The priest-engine remains beneath the old wedding vault when they leave it, stripped of the commands that once made worship and anatomy indistinguishable yet still carrying the damage those commands required. Monday’s pale braces hold among bone, pipe, altar stone, and living tissue, preserving whatever can still be made useful without preserving the purpose that mutilated it.

High above, the first Rhavassani marriage procession continues across the ceiling. Worn figures travel beneath their tidal cord with their hands joined, carrying forward a history that neither war nor priesthood managed to grind completely away.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

They spend the afternoon removing Omega from Rhavessan without allowing the planet itself to become collateral to the distinction.

The work grows harder as they travel inward.

In the mural hall, Monday stands beneath a ceiling split by decades of pressure and sends pale reinforcement into the fracture while reading aloud the names carved across the bones beneath it. Dead carpenters. Tide singers. Blacksmiths. Midwives. Children whose surviving records remember that they once won school races. She pronounces every name before she covers the nearest weakness with new support, preserving the inscriptions even when the people named there would have despised her on principle. Hatred does not make a beam stop carrying weight. Neither does death.

Abaddon works along the lower wall.

He removes a liturgy that compels obedience and leaves the lullaby sharing its metre. From an old priest’s memory he cuts the location of a reinforcement chamber while leaving the names of the man’s daughters untouched. Eschatid-tacks come apart one relationship at a time beneath Eidolon Breaker, each connection opened carefully enough that the living structure does not collapse around the absence. Violet fissures climb farther along his arms as the hours accumulate, reaching nearly to his shoulders, and the tremor in his hands grows strong enough that the weapon occasionally answers it.

Sometimes he takes too much.

Obliviscence was built for erasure at scale. Abaddon is forcing it into surgical work, and the difference has consequences. A command nexus loses the prayer instructing citizens to surrender their children to the priesthood; three addresses vanish with it. Farther east, he removes an Eschatid-routing map and takes the old numbering of half a street. The buildings remain exactly where generations placed them, but the sequence above their doors no longer belongs to anyone’s memory. House Seventeen follows House Thirty-Two, and no living person can explain why.

Abaddon stands in the road afterwards with Eidolon Breaker lowered beside him, staring at the blank places above three doorways where numbers have become marks without history.

Monday reaches him a few moments later. She studies the houses first, tracing the surviving sequence with her eyes. Then she looks at his hands, the fissures nearly at his shoulders, the minute instability travelling through his grip.

“Your margin’s gone.”

“There are four chambers below us.”

“I counted them.”

“I can continue.”

“Your last cut took half a street with it.”

His gaze shifts to her.

Monday closes the remaining distance and looks at his hands again. “Four chambers can wait ten minutes. Those addresses won’t come back.”

“They cannot remain.”

“They won’t.” She glances toward the pavement, following the buried architecture beneath it. “Your hands need to settle before you touch another nexus.”

“I can control the cut.”

“You intended to keep the street numbers.”

Abaddon looks back toward the houses. Three blank places sit above the doors, the stone still carrying marks whose meaning has been taken from everyone who might have explained them.

Monday leaves him with that for a moment. Then she steps beneath his right arm and sets her shoulder against his back.

“Put some weight here.”

He remains upright.

Monday adjusts her footing. “You’re compensating already. Stop.”

His eyes lower toward her.

“I can hold you.”

For several seconds he gives her nothing. Monday stays where she is, shoulder planted firmly beneath him, waiting with the same patience she gives an overloaded brace after adding a second support beside it.

Eventually his stance loosens. Some of his weight settles across her.

“More.”

He gives her more.

Monday shifts one foot, finds a better angle, and begins walking. She does not congratulate him for yielding or turn the concession into a conversation. Abaddon moves with her, Eidolon Breaker hanging lower at his side while the tremor gradually spends itself through his hand.

At the next intersection, Monday studies the road leading toward the buried chambers.

“I’ll take the first one. You can have the second when your hands settle.”

Abaddon says nothing.

Monday keeps his weight against her shoulder and leads them inward.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

They reach the surface near dusk.

Rhavessan’s upper city climbs in broken terraces around the salt basin, its shape interrupted wherever war and conversion pits have eaten whole neighbourhoods out of the slope. Some surviving houses still carry tide-colours along their shutters, blue and mineral green fading beneath years of salt. Others have stretched beast-hide across doorways where timber ran out generations ago. Smoke rises from chimneys patched so many times that no two courses of masonry belong to the same century, each repair sitting visibly atop the last.

A cohort waits beyond the western gate.

Rib-mail covers their chests in overlapping plates. Several soldiers hold heavy harnesses attached to Eschatids standing low beside them, their bodies marked with the old graftwork Abaddon has spent the afternoon cutting out of walls and memories. At the centre of the formation, their commander sits on a palanquin built from old shoulder bones. A tide calendar covers the lower half of his face, its inked marks descending beneath his collar and disappearing into the armour below.

Abaddon’s hand closes around Eidolon Breaker. Monday notices.

Her gaze moves across the cohort instead: weapons, harnesses, the commander’s posture, the distance they have chosen to keep from the gate. She wipes one dusty palm against her coat.

“Let me find out what they came here expecting.”

“You have thirty seconds.”

Monday looks up at him.

“That is why people consider you poor company.”

“They continue to speak to me.”

“People keep using cracked stairs too. I still mark them for repair.”

His expression does not move.

Monday sighs through her nose and starts toward the gate. “Thirty seconds, then.”

The cohort commander looks her over from ruined spectacles to salt-caked boots, lingering on the dust ground into her coat and the pale residue of spent geosmin along her hands.

“You speak for the Crown?”

“No.”

A murmur travels through the soldiers behind him.

Monday hooks her thumbs into her belt. “I speak for the work below your feet. Your lower settlement is still standing because I have spent eleven hours keeping several centuries of terrible decisions from landing on your relatives.”

“Our people chose Omega.”

“Some of them.”

“All.”

Monday’s yellow eye narrows behind the cracked lens. “I opened three mouths that had been sewn shut.”

The commander bares his teeth, but she continues before he can answer.

“Seventeen people had Eschatids joined directly into their bodies. Others were carrying commands through their nerves deeply enough that one bad cut would have killed them. I found instructions telling bodies when to kneel and where to walk.” She rubs a thumb across the edge of her belt, scraping away a crust of salt. “Call the willing ones willing. Leave the others out of your count.”

The soldiers behind him have gone still.

The commander’s fingers close harder around the arms of his palanquin. “You would tell us what freedom looks like?”

Monday makes a tired face. “I have enough work without defining freedom for an entire planet.”

His expression shifts.

“What I can give you is seven days.” She gestures toward the terraces behind him. “Release the Eschatids. Cut the remaining tacks. Let everybody eat something that was not assigned by a priest, sleep without a command running through their spine, and wake up long enough to discover which choices are still theirs.”

A soldier near the rear lowers his eyes toward the harness in his hands.

“After that,” Monday continues, “curse us. Decide Alpha is a tyrant. Decide Omega was right. Decide both of them have exhausted you and spend the rest of the week praying to the sea. I genuinely do not care. I want seven days in which the answer comes from the person giving it.”

The commander looks past her toward Abaddon, who has remained near the gate with Eidolon Breaker lowered at his side.

“And when the seven days end?”

“If you still want the Eschatids back, I expect to be somewhere considerably farther from here.”

“You presume we require your permission.”

Monday glances over her shoulder toward the western gate.

“No. You require the hinge.”

The commander turns. The enormous arch has changed while his attention was elsewhere. Its ancient metal pins are gone. Fresh bone now passes through every joint in clean pale lengths, thick enough to bear the gate’s weight and fitted closely enough to govern the width of its opening.

One of the soldiers swears. Monday folds her arms.

“For seven days, people fit through it. The Eschatids do not.”

“You altered our city.”

“One hinge.”

“You had no right.”

Monday glances back at the gate. “The old pins were failing anyway.”

For the smallest instant, Abaddon’s mouth threatens to move. Monday notices. She has the good sense not to mention it.

The commander looks from her to the altered gate, then beyond it to the citizens gathering along the street. One harness has already been lowered to the ground. Farther back, a woman is working a buckle loose from an Eschatid’s flank while the soldier beside her watches without intervening.

The commander’s anger remains. Grief remains with it, older and harder to separate from everything Rhavessan has become. He sits with both for several seconds before looking back at Monday.

“Seven days.”

Monday nods. “Eat before you decide what to do with them.”

He gives her a long, unhappy look, then signals the cohort.

They withdraw by degrees. Harnesses creak. Rib-mail catches the last light. The palanquin turns toward the upper terraces while the Eschatids are led away from the western gate and toward the outer pens, some obediently, some dragging their feet through the salt.

Abaddon waits until the last of them has cleared the road.

“You gave me another tool.”

Monday looks up at him. There is no ceremony in the statement. He does not soften it into thanks or dress it in anything easier to receive. He simply gives her the fact.

“You already had it.”

“No.”

She studies him.

“You stood still.”

“Because you gave me a reason.”

Monday considers that while picking dried blood from the side of one thumb.

“Then I lent you one.”

Abaddon’s gaze remains on her. “What do you call it?”

“Time.”

He looks toward the road the cohort has taken, then back toward the gate that will remain narrow for seven days.

Monday starts toward camp.

“People make different decisions after they’ve eaten.”

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Monday builds their shelter from the salt upward.

Pale ribs push free in long arcs around the brine stove, curving toward one another until they overlap at the crown. Tendon follows, binding each joint while Monday circles the growing dome on hands and knees, pressing at seams, testing the give, correcting two angles that offend her. She makes a second circuit before deciding it will survive the night. By the time she crawls back inside, she has acquired two battered cups and a packet of powdered calcium from somewhere in the camp.

She pours half the packet into Abaddon’s drink.

He watches the pale powder vanish beneath the surface. “No.”

“You have been using Obliviscence since dawn.”

“That does not require this.”

Monday gives the cup a small stir. “Your skeleton has contributed all day. I’m paying it.”

“It tastes terrible.”

“You’ve swallowed blood.”

“I did not enjoy that either.”

“Your standards remain intact.”

She pushes the cup across the stove. Abaddon considers her, the drink, and whatever argument he might still make against both. Then he takes it and drinks.

Monday settles cross-legged beside the stove with her waxed notebook balanced against one knee. Her handwriting is squat and economical, built for blood, rain, collapsing structures, and occasions when the page may later need to be folded around somebody’s broken finger.

Rhavessan. Western settlement. Forty-nine living confirmed.

She records the seventeen citizens separated from Eschatid-tacks. The three singers receive their own line, with a note beneath it concerning damaged scar tissue and follow-up care. When she reaches the priest-engine, she writes:

Command architecture removed. Primary load preserved.

Her pencil remains over the page for a moment, then she adds:

Afterwards possible.

Across the stove, Abaddon turns the tin cup slowly between his hands. Rhavessan’s last light comes through the ribs behind him in pale bars, crossing his armour and the heavy fall of his loosened braids. Beyond the shelter, the upper city has begun illuminating itself one terrace at a time. Lamps appear in windows that survived the war. Fires burn behind shutters patched by people who were born centuries after the first campaign and inherited its damage anyway.

“My father values me because I remove.”

Monday’s pencil stops midway through the next line.

She does not look up immediately. The stove gives a wet pop between them, sending a brief curl of mineral steam toward the roof.

Abaddon is watching the city.

“There are campaigns where everything expected of me can be described by what no longer exists when I finish. Armies. Roads. Commands. Names attached to things people should have stopped obeying centuries earlier.” His thumb moves once around the rim of the cup. “Sometimes the report is only a list of absences.”

Monday closes the notebook around one finger to keep her place.

“And today?”

“I left more than usual.”

“You did.”

His gaze returns to her, then drops briefly to the notebook in her lap, where the last visible line reads Afterwards possible.

“You are loyal to him differently.”

Monday’s brows rise. “To your father?”

“You leave things.”

“Whenever they’ll still carry weight.”

“You preserved the murals.”

“They survived the priesthood. I saw no reason to finish the job for them.”

“The houses.”

“Still houses.”

“You gave people seven days in which they may decide they want Omega again.”

“I gave them seven days with their own nerves.” She rubs a thumb over the dried salt along her wrist. “What they do after that belongs to them.”

Abaddon looks through the shelter ribs toward Rhavessan. The city has gathered more lights while they have been talking. Small ones. Uneven ones. A lamp crossing an upper window, another kindled near the western terraces, cooking fires appearing wherever the surviving streets widen enough for families to sit outside.

“You consider preservation a form of service.”

Monday thinks about that while she reaches over to nudge another piece of fuel beneath the brine stove.

“Destruction is work too. I’ve done enough demolition to respect it.” She settles back onto one hand. “Rotten beams come out. Failed joints come out. Sometimes you find a wall carrying so much poison through everything attached to it that saving the wall means losing the house.”

Abaddon glances toward her.

“But I like repairs better,” she continues. “You finish and somebody else gets to use what you touched. They can paint it badly. Put a door somewhere idiotic. Curse whoever built it. Tear half of it down fifty years later because they’ve decided they need a bakery.” Her mouth pulls faintly at one corner. “That is usually a good sign.”

His eyes travel upward along the pale ribs of the shelter.

“You assume tomorrow will use it well.”

“I assume tomorrow will use it.”

The stove crackles between them.

Monday turns the notebook over in her hands. “I don’t need to approve of what comes after me. I need to leave enough standing that something can.”

Abaddon keeps looking at the shelter roof for a while. Monday eventually opens the notebook again and finds her place. She manages another line before the pencil stops.

“There’s something else.”

Abaddon looks at her. Monday’s expression has acquired the particular concentration she usually reserves for discovering an unexpected crack halfway through a load-bearing wall.

“Sunday sent me a message.”

Abaddon lowers his cup slightly. “Concerning?”

“Your father.” That earns her his full attention, enough that Monday closes the notebook over one finger and settles back against the shelter rib. “He has apparently been behaving strangely around General Ohuang-Zhùróng. Sunday spent several paragraphs establishing the severity of the situation before supplying anything I could use.”

“What does strangely mean?”

“He touched her face.”

Abaddon stares at her long enough that Monday’s mouth twitches.

“Sunday considered the gesture self-evidently catastrophic.” Wind slips through the open side of the shelter and sends a scatter of salt across the floor. Monday watches it gather near the stove before adding, “She also touched his antlers.”

His cup stops turning. “He allowed that?”

“Apparently. This was worse.”

“According to Sunday.”

“According to Sunday, most things are worse.” Monday taps the end of her pencil against the notebook. “He eventually worked his way through your father’s judgment, dignity, personal boundaries, and the likely collapse of several standards he considers foundational to civilisation. Somewhere inside all of that, I learned there was a woman involved.”

Abaddon’s attention sharpens. “Who?”

“Kohana Ohuang-Zhùróng. General. Visitor. Purple hair.” The name produces no recognition, though Monday watches him for one anyway. “Sunday says she looks at Alpha without remembering to be properly intimidated by him, which I suspect is the part he finds most offensive. The face and antlers merely gave him evidence.”

Abaddon’s fingers tighten slightly around the cup. For the first time since she mentioned the message, his interest loses its family-irritation quality and settles somewhere more serious.

“What does my father want from her?”

The amusement leaves Monday’s face. She sets the notebook aside.

Monday studies him for a moment before stretching her legs toward the stove. “You took a long route to that question. Sunday thinks they want each other.”

“My father wanting something has historically been dangerous for the thing wanted.”

The humour leaves her face.

Abaddon keeps his attention on Rhavessan, where lamps continue appearing across the terraces beyond the shelter ribs. “He understands refusal when it comes from an enemy. Rebellion gives him something to oppose. Treason gives him something to punish. He knows what to do with distance.” His thumb passes slowly over the rim of the cup. “Someone close enough to love him and still free to leave is harder.”

Salt scratches softly across the outside of the shelter.

Monday looks down at her hands. Bone dust remains packed beneath three fingernails. “You think he’ll decide wanting her means she ought to stay.”

“I think my father has spent most of existence deciding what everyone else ought to do.”

She turns one hand over, examining the dried geosmin along her palm. “Could be useful.”

Abaddon finally looks at her. “Useful.”

“Load finds bad construction.” Monday reaches up and presses her palm against the rib beside her, testing the joint from habit. “You can draw a beautiful arch. Brace it everywhere you expect trouble. Leave it standing long enough for everyone to admire it. Put enough weight on it, and every shortcut eventually introduces itself.”

“You are comparing my father’s attachment to structural failure.”

“I compare most things to structures. They’re easier to understand.”

His eyes lift briefly toward the pale dome overhead.

Monday gives the rib one final push and lowers her hand. “If he has spent all this time building relationships around people who cannot truly leave him, Kohana is going to put weight somewhere none of them ever did. We’ll find out what holds.”

A faint violet glow moves through the fissures along Abaddon’s wrists.

“You sound pleased by the prospect.”

“Interested.”

“You want her to ruin him.”

Monday considers that carefully enough that the stove pops twice before she answers.

“I want him to have to make room for somebody he cannot own.”

Abaddon goes still around the cup. Monday leaves the sentence alone, reaching for her notebook again without opening it.

After a while, his gaze returns to Rhavessan. “She may not want him. She may leave.”

Monday rests her thumb along the notebook’s waxed edge. “She can.”

His grip loosens slightly around the cup. “He’ll have to live with that.”

Monday looks toward the city lights.

“That would be new.”

Abaddon looks back toward Rhavessan. The city has settled into its night shape beyond the shelter, terraces marked by scattered lamps and cooking fires, the western gate a dark interruption lower on the slope.

For a while, Monday assumes the conversation is finished. She has opened the notebook again when his voice reaches across the stove.

“Does Sunday think my father loves her?”

Her pencil stops.

Monday looks up slowly. “You’re the first person tonight to use that word.”

His attention snaps back to her. “I asked what Sunday thinks.”

“Sunday thinks your father is in trouble.” She rolls the pencil once between her fingers. “He also spent three paragraphs describing a cheek touch, so his scale may need calibration.”

Abaddon does not smile. “That is not love.”

“I didn’t say it was.”

His mouth tightens, and Monday watches him turn the cup once more between his hands. Whatever answer he was hoping to extract from Sunday’s report clearly is not in it.

She closes the notebook.

“You’re finished for tonight.”

Abaddon glances at her.

“Your hands have been shaking since the eastern district, the fissures are almost at your shoulders, and you drank half a cup of calcium only after arguing with me about it.” Monday sets the notebook beside her bedroll and points toward his. “Sleep before you make tomorrow more expensive.”

He looks toward the city one last time, then sets the empty cup down.

No objection comes.

Monday watches him begin unfastening the heavier pieces of his armour and decides that this, more than anything else he has done all day, proves how tired he is.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Abaddon is asleep before Monday finishes checking the western joint.

That convinces her more thoroughly than anything he said about his condition. He has left Eidolon Breaker within reach, one arm folded beneath his head, loosened braids spread across the bedroll while the violet fissures along his wrists fade by slow degrees. Monday gives the shelter one final circuit, presses two fingers against a tendon binding near the crown, and returns to the stove.

Her notebook is waiting where she left it. So is Sunday’s message.

Monday stares at the correspondence marker for several seconds before reopening it.

She has already read the thing once. Twice, technically, because the first pass had been consumed largely by trying to determine whether Sunday was reporting an actual threat to the Crown or suffering a private theological crisis over someone touching Alpha’s face. By the second reading she had extracted the useful material: General Kohana Ohuang-Zhùróng remained at the palace, Alpha appeared interested in her, Sunday disliked every visible consequence of that interest, and nobody had died yet.

The rest had required interpretation.

Monday scrolls back to the beginning.

Diligence. I am informing you of a development concerning His Majesty because you possess sufficient distance from the palace to receive this information without immediately becoming another participant in the problem. General Kohana Ohuang-Zhùróng remains here. Her conduct toward His Majesty continues to exceed every reasonable allowance of familiarity, and His Majesty continues, inexplicably, to permit it. This afternoon she touched his face. I do not mean that her hand passed near him during conversation, nor that contact occurred accidentally while either of them was moving. She placed her hand against his face and left it there. He did nothing to prevent this. More troublingly, his response suggested that prevention had not occurred to him. I have served him long enough to distinguish restraint from distraction. This was distraction.

Monday reaches the end of the paragraph and rubs at the bridge of her nose beneath the ruined spectacles. She remembers reading this portion earlier in the day and checking twice for an attachment containing casualty figures.

There had been none.

She scrolls.

There has also been an incident involving his antlers. I include this separately because I refuse to allow the preceding matter to diminish its significance through proximity. General Ohuang-Zhùróng touched them. Again, His Majesty permitted this. You understand the degree to which those structures are physically sensitive and personally significant to him, so I will not waste language explaining why allowing an armed foreign general to place her hands there represents a departure from every standard by which he ordinarily governs access to himself. She displayed no reverence during the act. This appears to have improved his disposition.

Monday stops there. She had stopped there the first time, too. 

The next sentence remains exactly where she remembers it.

I am aware of how that sounds.

Monday bites the inside of her cheek and continues.

I have reviewed the sentence twice and found no more defensible arrangement of the facts. She speaks to him without fear, challenges him openly, occupies his attention at inconvenient intervals, and has developed the intolerable habit of looking pleased whenever he becomes angry with her. He, in response, has begun looking pleased while becoming angry. I consider this development structurally unsound.

Monday slowly lowers the notebook.

Her eyes travel toward the nearest shelter rib.

“Structurally unsound,” she murmurs.

She had missed the insult the first time because she had been attempting to determine whether Sunday meant this literally.

Apparently he had simply decided to borrow her vocabulary.

Monday brings the notebook back up.

The final paragraph is the one she remembers best, largely because it is where Sunday ceases cataloguing offences against palace decorum and accidentally arrives at something useful.

I do not know what His Majesty intends. This is the part I find most concerning. Desire is easier to evaluate once it has declared an objective, and whatever exists between them has not yet done so. General Ohuang-Zhùróng does not behave like someone seeking rank, protection, wealth, access, or approval. She appears entirely prepared to leave whenever she wishes, and His Majesty appears aware of this. I have seen him tolerate refusals from enemies with greater ease than he tolerates the possibility that she may simply choose something he did not provide. Nevertheless, he continues to seek her company.

Monday reads that section twice. The second time, the humour drains out of it, then Sunday resumes being Sunday.

I would ordinarily classify this as poor judgment and wait for the consequences to educate him. Unfortunately, he is Alpha, and consequences involving his poor judgment tend to acquire geography. I therefore recommend vigilance. I do not recommend interference unless necessary. General Ohuang-Zhùróng has already demonstrated that attempts to control her increase the likelihood of escalation. I dislike that I have had to learn this. I dislike her. I dislike this entire situation. I suspect His Majesty is in trouble.

Monday reaches the end and remembers, too late, that Sunday had added something afterwards.

The postscript waits beneath the formal message, timestamped six minutes later.

She touched the antlers, Diligence.

Monday closes her eyes. Across the shelter, Abaddon shifts once in his sleep and settles again. She lowers her face into one hand, shoulders moving with laughter she refuses to let become loud enough to wake him.

Six minutes.

Sunday had survived six entire minutes after finishing the report before deciding the matter had not been adequately conveyed.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Monday wakes before dawn and finds Abaddon already gone.

His tracks cross the salt toward the eastern quarter, broad impressions darkened where the night damp has gathered in them. She follows while Rhavessan wakes by degrees around her. The last communal fires are collapsing into red coals; shutters open above alleys still blue with early morning; somewhere farther downhill, someone is drawing water through a pipe that complains all the way through the wall. Abaddon’s trail leaves the main road near a roofless school and ends in the courtyard.

The building is small enough to make his presence seem excessive. One wall has fallen outward into the yard, leaving a classroom exposed to the sky. Low benches survive in crooked rows beneath a writing slate gone grey with weather, and twenty initials have been scratched into the plaster beside the doorway at child-height. Some are shallow. Others were cut so deeply that years of erosion have taken the wall around them while the letters themselves remain.

Monday walks past Abaddon and places her palm against the names.

“This stays.”

“The western wall is failing.”

“I saw it.” She takes a piece of yellow chalk from her coat and draws a large X beside the doorway.

Abaddon watches the mark appear. “Meaning?”

“Leave this alone.” Monday caps the chalk with her thumb. “No erasure. No burning. No barracks. No requisition. No temple. No inspired person deciding the children need a better wall before asking the children.”

His gaze returns to the X. “One mark.”

“I have limited chalk.”

A faint scrape comes from beneath the nearest desk.

Monday turns toward it and finds a boy folded into the narrow space below, both knees drawn tightly to his chest. Dust has settled through his hair and into the creases of his clothes. He studies Monday first—the cracked spectacles, the dried blood at her sleeve, the chalk still in her hand—before his gaze reaches Abaddon standing behind her. His body pulls tighter around itself.

Monday lowers herself to the floor where he can see her without looking past Abaddon.

“Morning.”

The boy’s lips part, though no answer follows.

“We’re taking the Eschatid-tacks out of this district,” she tells him. “The school stays.”

His eyes travel toward Abaddon again. “My uncle says the Crown deletes.”

Monday glances back over her shoulder. “Your uncle has evidence.”

Abaddon steps across the threshold.

The boy recoils hard enough to strike the underside of the desk.

Abaddon stops immediately.

For several moments he remains among the little benches, immense enough that every proportion in the room seems to have been designed in protest against him. His horns rise close to what remains of the lintel; one shoulder nearly brushes the writing slate when he turns. He looks at the boy, then at the desk sheltering him, and lowers himself onto one knee with care, bringing himself nearer to the scale of the room without pretending he could ever belong to it.

Monday turns her attention toward the scratched initials beside the door. She has already learned that Abaddon does certain things more easily when nobody watches him perform them.

Metal clicks softly against armour. From beneath one plate he draws an old military pin and rests it in his palm. Most of the violet enamel has cracked away. Someone has removed the legion crest so thoroughly that only a smooth depression remains where an insignia once declared allegiance.

The boy peers at it from beneath the desk.

“It belonged to a legion that no longer exists,” Abaddon says.

That brings the child’s eyes up to his face.

Abaddon extends his hand far enough that the pin catches the early light. “No one has a claim to it now.” The boy hesitates, then crawls forward until one hand emerges from beneath the desk. “You can.”

Small fingers close around the pin. Monday looks over despite herself.

Very little changes in Abaddon’s face. The severity remains, along with the exhaustion the night did not fully remove, yet his hand stays open for a moment after the child has taken the pin, empty now in a way that feels strangely different from the absences he described beside the stove.

Monday saves him from having to notice her noticing.

“What should I put on the wall?”

The boy looks at her.

“Your name,” she says, lifting the chalk. “Unless you want me to write ‘boy under desk,’ which is accurate but inconvenient.”

“Nilo.”

Abaddon becomes still.

Monday’s chalk pauses against the plaster.

She looks at him once. Recognition has already crossed his face and disappeared somewhere behind the discipline that has carried him through centuries of this planet. He offers no explanation, and Monday has spent enough time excavating Rhavessan to know that some things are damaged by digging before anyone has decided they are ready to be found.

She turns back to the wall and writes beneath the yellow X.

School. Nilo.

The boy remains beneath the desk with the old pin enclosed in his fist. Abaddon rises, careful of the broken lintel, and steps back into the courtyard.

Monday pockets the chalk and follows.

They leave the school standing.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The eastern citadel consumes the rest of the day.

By late afternoon, storm clouds have gathered over Rhavessan in vast dark shelves, climbing inland from the sea until lightning begins moving between the upper towers. The citadel rises directly from the cliffs in black coral and old architectural bone, its foundations tethered to the rock by chains thick enough to carry houses. Three civilian terraces cling beneath it to the same stone. Their windows burn gold one below another, stubborn points of domestic light beneath fortifications built to survive sieges, marking families who stayed too long, could not leave, or inherited homes already trapped beneath somebody else’s war.

Monday finds the command node beneath the central spire.

She kneels beside the exposed structure and sweeps salt away with the side of one hand. Black coral closes around a knot of living nerve tissue threaded through old bone, while command-lines radiate outward toward barracks, siege platforms, Eschatid pens, and the towers above. Several thicker roots disappear beneath the floor and descend into the cliff.

“Come here.”

Abaddon approaches and follows the roots with his eyes until their destination becomes clear.

“The terraces.”

“Yes.” Monday presses two fingers beside one of the deeper lines, feeling the faint movement inside it. “The garrison is using the same network that holds them against the cliff.”

“If I remove the node, their coordination ends.”

“So does part of the foundation.”

For a while, neither of them speaks.

The arithmetic has been waiting for Abaddon all his life. Evacuate whoever can be reached. Count whoever cannot. Remove the command structure before the enemy can recover. Accept the lives beneath it as the cost of ending the battle.

Eidolon Breaker enters his hands. Monday rises beside him. She does not tell him what to choose. She only steps far enough back to give him room and remains within reach.

The weapon begins to sing.

Purple radiance spreads through the fissures along Abaddon’s wrists as he reaches into the node. Commands unfold around his awareness in interlocking branches, accumulated through centuries of revision and graftwork.

Defend the citadel.

Obey the priesthood.

Protect the Eschatids.

Kill those bearing Alpha’s mark.

He moves deeper and finds what existed before the priesthood learned to thread obedience through the same tissue.

Anchor.

Carry.

Distribute.

The military system and the civic foundation have grown through one another until several commands occupy the same living material. A nerve carrying instructions to defend Omega’s claim also regulates tension along the western terrace. A line feeding obedience into the garrison shares tissue with a pressure route preventing half the cliff face from shearing away. Rhavessan has spent centuries making war load-bearing.

The tremor returns to Abaddon’s hands. Monday sees it strengthen along the weapon and says nothing.

The easy answer remains available. His father would understand it. Most generals would. Rhavessan has survived cities burning before.

A woman fused to an Eschatid at the spine returns to him instead.

Only what is theirs.

He remembers the priest-engine settling safely onto Monday’s scaffold after the command architecture came free.

Erase the order. Leave the organ.

Then a roofless school: twenty initials cut beside a doorway, a yellow X, an old military pin disappearing into the hand of a child called Nilo.

Abaddon changes his grip. The first military command disappears. Across the ridge, a war horn dies halfway through its call.

He removes another. Two siege engines grind to a stop, their forward limbs folding uselessly into the salt. The third command is harder. Its roots have been wound directly through an anchoring line, obedience and support sharing the same tissue so completely that Eidolon Breaker catches both when he reaches for either.

Violet light climbs toward his elbows.

Monday comes closer. “Need a brace?”

“Stand by.”

She plants her feet beside him and watches the node.

Abaddon follows the tangled meanings until he reaches the point where they diverge.

Defend Omega’s claim.

Beneath it, older and simpler:

Hold the terrace.

Pain moves through both arms while he keeps them separate. Eidolon Breaker cuts. The first instruction vanishes. The second remains.

The node convulses hard enough to crack coral around its housing. A cry travels through the citadel’s pipes and rushes outward across the cliffs. Soldiers stumble wherever the command leaves them. Eschatids turn in confused circles, waiting for instructions that never arrive. One siege platform lists against a tower and stops.

Below them, the civilian terraces remain fixed to Rhavessan.

Abaddon takes the final priestly command. The node goes quiet. His knees nearly go with it. Eidolon Breaker strikes basalt before he does, and he braces both hands against the weapon until the weakness passes enough for him to remain standing.

It comes suddenly, hard against coral and armour, darkening the salt around their feet within seconds. Monday wipes water from the cracked lens of her spectacles and looks down toward the civilian quarter. Lights remain in the windows. Farther along the ridge, one yellow X is still visible beside the roofless school.

“You left it.”

Abaddon draws a breath through the pain behind his ribs. “The civilians required the foundation.”

Monday looks at him, and he catches the satisfaction on her face before she can turn back toward the terraces.

“I heard you.” Her gaze settles on the lights still burning beneath the citadel. “I’m pleased about the foundation.”

Abaddon gives her a long look.

Monday’s mouth curves anyway. “It held.”

She turns back toward the city. Below them, the garrison has begun lowering its weapons. Some soldiers simply sit where the vanished commands left them, staring at their own hands or at the people beside them. An Eschatid crawls beneath an abandoned siege platform, folds itself into the narrow space, and refuses every attempt to coax it back out. Nobody appears eager enough to force the issue.

Rain thickens until the terraces below shine black and gold.

Monday wipes her spectacles again. “Count.”

Abaddon looks at her.

She waits beside him, water running from her hair and coat.

He understands.

The western settlement. Forty-nine living beneath the salt. Seventeen people separated from Eschatid-tacks that had claimed their bodies. Three singers touching mouths that belonged to them again. A priest-engine stripped of worship while its useful bones continued carrying the dead. Seven days in which a city could discover what it wanted without another command wrapped around its nerves. A school left standing beneath the morning sky. One child beneath a desk.

Nilo.

Now a citadel whose weapons have gone quiet while the homes beneath it remain attached to the cliff.

Monday watches the count move through him without asking to hear any of it aloud. Eventually her mouth twitches.

“You missed one.”

Abaddon turns his head slowly enough to serve as a warning.

Monday pushes her cracked spectacles higher. “A mysterious general with excellent heels.”

His eyes close. Her laugh escapes anyway, brief and bright beneath the rain. She has enough sense to let it end there.

When Abaddon opens his eyes again, he looks down at Rhavessan. The storm has swallowed most of the horizon, leaving the city gathered beneath them in wet stone, patched roofs, wounded streets, and lamps that continue burning wherever people have chosen to keep them lit.

“Do you think he can carry it?”

Monday knows immediately that he has left Rhavessan behind.

She follows his gaze toward the terraces, toward foundations surviving because the thing built for war above them was forced to surrender one purpose while retaining another.

“Seven days might help.”

Abaddon glances at her.

Monday shrugs one shoulder. “People make different decisions after they’ve eaten.”

That earns her the faintest movement at the corner of his mouth.

The storm passes fully over Rhavessan. Water pours from the black cliffs, catches in broken gutters, runs across old roofs and Monday’s new braces with equal indifference. Somewhere below, a western gate opens only wide enough for people. Three former singers discover what their voices sound like when nobody else has put words inside them. In a roofless school, Nilo turns an ownerless military pin over between his fingers.

Abaddon watches the city carry all of it.

“Let him try.”

Monday glances toward him. Whatever else belongs after the words remains his.

She leaves it standing.