Across the blood-mud flats of Rhavessan, the cities wear their sieges badly.
Some districts have been opened by Abaddon’s erasures and stitched back into continuance by Monday’s bonework so many times that local histories no longer agree on which material came first. Black stone ends halfway through walls and resumes in ivory. Femur arches shoulder facades whose original supports disappeared three occupations ago. Vertebral buttresses lean against buildings fractured by siege engines, Eschatid growth, weather, poor repairs, divine argument and the ordinary insistence of people who would rather live inside a damaged house than leave it to history.
The western quarter still bears Monday’s work from the day before. Long pale ribs brace the buried settlement beneath the salt, carrying load away from the priest-engine Abaddon stripped of command without taking its organs with it. Farther uphill, one school remains roofless and standing. A yellow X occupies the stone beside its door. Monday checks it every time she passes, though nothing has happened to make her distrust the mark. Along the eastern cliffs, the citadel survives on foundations Abaddon chose to preserve, the first major structure in several campaigns that bears the unmistakable scar of Obliviscence without having been reduced to absence.
Rhavessan has noticed. It always notices, eventually.
The planet takes damage into itself slowly, lets war settle into stone and bone and family memory before deciding what any of it means. By the time Rhavessan understands that something has changed, whole campaigns have already been fought over the consequences.
It simply takes longer than most people can afford.
Heat settles over the siege lines by midmorning, thick enough to turn armour into punishment. The wind comes inland carrying brine, iron, old smoke and the musky animal rot of Eschatids penned somewhere beyond the northern ridge. Salt has dried in white rims around the collars of soldiers who stopped attempting dignity before sunrise. At the edge of camp, engineers dismantle and rebuild the western trebuchet for the third time in two days.
Abaddon kneels beside it with his sleeves rolled above the elbow.
His breastplate lies on an overturned crate within reach, exposing the purple geosmin burning along his throat and across both forearms. The light beneath his skin has remained brighter since yesterday’s work beneath the city. Obliviscence had been forced into distinctions narrow enough to leave nerve beside command, organ beside doctrine, load beside ownership. His body has decided such restraint deserves to be recorded in violet.
The trebuchet is older than several dynasties and has inherited modifications from every one of them. Rhavessani timber forms the original frame. Later repairs introduced black coral, iron bands, whale sinew and one length of pale bone that Monday claims she did not grow, though it looks enough like her work to have started rumours among the engineers.
Ordinarily, Abaddon appreciates old machines because their problems are finite. Today, the machine has begun misremembering itself.
The vellum plan spread beside his knee shows a counterweight assembly secured by six iron pins. Abaddon counts seven in the actual frame, removes one, then checks the plan again and finds seven drawn there too. He studies the diagram long enough for the discrepancy to become undeniable.
The seventh mark fades beneath his eyes.
Nearby, an engineer stops breathing. Abaddon turns toward her, and several seconds pass before she manages to exhale.
“I saw it too, sir.”
“Log the change.”
Relief passes over her face with such immediacy that it is almost embarrassing.
Abaddon sets the plan aside. “Pin.”
One is placed into his palm. It is too broad for the hole.
He looks at the engineer responsible, and the woman looks down at the pin, toward the open tool chest, then back at him with the expression of somebody who has just discovered that all three objects have betrayed her independently.
“It fit ten minutes ago.”
“I believe you.”
That frightens her more.
Abaddon presses the pin against the opening and tests the timber around it before taking up a file. Half a millimetre comes away beneath his hand. He checks the fit again, drives the pin home, then steps back far enough to see the whole assembly.
“Weight.”
The crew resets the counterweight.
“Slack.”
Rope feeds through gloved hands until the proper length hangs free.
“Hold.”
The engine settles into itself with a long wooden complaint. Abaddon watches the joints, the iron bands, the old repairs inherited from people dead long enough to have become architecture.
“Release.”
The counterweight drops. Timber flexes under the load, bows through the motion, then returns to position without changing its mind about being timber. Abaddon keeps one hand against the frame for another moment, feeling for any tremor that does not belong there.
“Again.”
Around him, the engineers obey because their bodies have retained the sequence even while memory keeps misplacing pieces of it. One man checks the same knot three times. A provisioner opens a crate, closes it, then opens it again with the faint bewilderment of someone arriving late to his own gesture. A young sapper keeps humming four lines of a children’s counting song. Each time he reaches the fifth, his face empties; a nearby soldier supplies the missing words, forgets them herself two minutes later, and learns them from him when the cycle begins again.
Monday has taken up residence above all of this, hanging upside down from one of her own ribs with her knees hooked over the ivory and pale hair falling toward the trampled yard. Her cracked spectacles sit at their usual doomed angle while she examines a pouch of pebbles scavenged from a ruined fountain, occasionally flicking one toward an unattended metal target at the edge of the practice field.
The first strikes dead centre. The second follows it cleanly. The third turns halfway through the air and drops at her feet instead. Monday watches it settle in the dirt, then looks back toward the target.
“That was not the test.”
Abaddon does not look up from the trebuchet. “Stop throwing things.”
“I was conducting research.”
“You were throwing rocks.”
“The difference is funding.”
He tightens the next bolt while Monday swings gently from the rib above him, apparently content to let gravity do most of the work.
“Something is eating sequence.”
“The trebuchet has changed its own assembly twice.”
Monday’s swinging slows. “It started in the lower wards before dawn. One of my braces forgot which wall it belonged to and tried attaching itself to a bakery.”
Abaddon tests the bolt once more before glancing up at her. “Did it succeed?”
“It’s load-bearing now.”
His hand stills on the wrench.
Monday peers down at him. “The bakery is structurally excellent now.”
Abaddon returns to the bolt. “The brace?”
“Embarrassed.”
He looks up.
Monday considers that, then corrects herself. “Misaligned.”
“Better.”
She grins, then looks out over the camp. The grin fades.
“They’re getting worse.”
Abaddon checks the next fitting against the frame.
Monday swings herself upright and settles astride the rib. Some of the brightness leaves her face as she looks out over the camp. “I buried a sapper this morning. Only I also saw him eating breakfast after.”
Abaddon glances toward her. “Alive?”
“He complained about the porridge.”
“Then likely.”
“I asked whether I had buried him.”
“What did he say?”
Monday rubs one thumb across a notch in the bone beneath her, worrying at it before she answers. “He remembered the grave. He remembered standing beside me at the grave. He remembered being inside it. Then he remembered being hungry.”
Abaddon’s gaze travels across the camp.
The distortions have been accumulating for hours, but only now does he see how thoroughly the soldiers have begun accommodating them. Nobody cries out when a bucket appears several paces from where it was set down. Nobody remarks upon a line of drying shirts changing order between one glance and the next. A medic writes the names of her patients directly onto her forearm because the slate beside her bed has started replacing them with flowers.
Abaddon knows Obliviscence. He knows the wake his power leaves across a battlefield. He knows what happens when an order disappears from a chain of command, when a route is removed from memory, when the idea of ownership is pulled out of an arsenal and soldiers spend an hour staring at weapons they no longer recognise as theirs.
This is wrong. His absences are clean when he handles them well and catastrophic when he does not; they do not return wearing jokes.
A lieutenant approaches with her helm tucked beneath one arm. A pale band circles the fourth finger of her left hand, the ghost of some ring or promise the skin remembers even if the object itself is gone. She waits until Abaddon has finished checking the timber before speaking.
“Residual interference?”
Abaddon surveys the camp again: the medic writing names on her own arm, the provisioners recounting crates, the ropes and tools and structures developing histories nobody assigned them.
“Not from me.”
The lieutenant’s posture eases by a fraction. “You’re certain?”
“Obliviscence leaves absences. It does not return them altered.”
Above him, Monday shifts on the rib with a soft scrape of boot against ivory.
Abaddon glances up.
She has the unmistakable look of someone restraining commentary for reasons she considers charitable.
“Diligence.”
Monday pushes her spectacles higher with one finger. “I was only reviewing the number of times your magic has made the phrase leaves absences sound considerably less reassuring than you intended.”
The lieutenant looks between them.
Abaddon turns back to the trebuchet. “Review them privately.”
Monday settles against the rib again. “I can make no promises.”
He reaches for the next fitting, expecting the conversation to be finished, but the lieutenant remains beside the frame. She stands with the particular stillness of someone who needs a name for the problem before she can trust herself to work around it.
“What do we call it, sir?”
“Nothing yet.”
The lieutenant’s brows rise.
“Until we know the cause, stop calling it residual.”
That is enough. She nods once, some of the uncertainty leaving her posture now that she has an instruction she can use. “Yes, sir.”
She moves off toward the rest of the watch, already reaching for the slate at her belt. Abaddon turns back to the trebuchet and holds out his hand. The engineer beside him places another pin into his palm. He seats it in the frame and presses his hand against the timber to test the fit.
A faint tremor passes beneath his palm.
The machine remembers being a tree.
For one disorienting second, sunlight flickers green across his vision. Leaves move overhead where canvas and smoke should be, and something small and feathered settles onto a branch occupying the same physical space as the throwing arm. Damp bark fills his nose, followed by ripe fruit and soil still warm from summer rain.
Then the trebuchet returns.
Abaddon removes his hand slowly. Nobody nearby speaks. Even the engineer beside him has gone rigid, her fingers still curled around the remaining pins.
Monday has gone completely still above him.
“That wasn’t memory loss.”
Abaddon looks at the timber beneath his palm. “No.”
Monday leans forward over the rib, attention fixed on the throwing arm. “It remembered a previous state.”
“And imposed it.”
Her eyes move from the wood to him. Whatever amusement had survived the morning is gone now. “That is considerably worse.”
Behind them, the crew begins resetting the sling with far more care than before. Abaddon watches the ropes feed back through their hands, then takes his place beside the frame.
“Test.”
The counterweight drops, the arm rises, and the stone leaves the sling in a clean arc toward the stack of broken crates serving as a target. For the first half of its flight, it remains stone. Then, at the apex, green explodes across its surface. Branches burst outward, leaves unfurl in a rush, and a small bird appears just long enough to scream before the entire impossible tree crashes into the crates and collapses across the yard in a scatter of timber, fruit, feathers and one child’s wooden whistle.
Nobody moves.
Monday climbs down from her rib and crosses to the wreckage. She picks up one of the fruits and turns it in her hand. Yellow, soft-skinned, faintly fragrant with cinnamon.
“Have you seen these before?”
“Never.”
She bites into it. Abaddon stares at her.
Monday chews, looks up and catches him doing it. “What?”
“You don’t know what it is.”
“I know it’s fruit.”
“You know what it resembles.”
She takes another bite. “Still fruit.”
Abaddon turns away before the conversation can deteriorate further. Behind him, Monday examines the bitten flesh again, and her attention sharpens.
“This is from somewhere else.”
He looks back.
“I don’t mean another district.” She turns the fruit slowly between her fingers. “I mean somewhere else.”
The wind changes before he can answer.
Every soldier nearest the southern edge of camp turns toward it at once. The Eschatid musk carried over the ridge thickens for a moment, then disappears beneath rosewater, warm sugar, milk heated with cardamom, and the green scent of crushed stems.
Abaddon’s hand closes around Eidolon Breaker before thought catches up.
Monday’s bitten fruit slips from her fingers and lands in the mud.
At the southern perimeter, the sentries straighten, yet none of them sounds the alarm. That is the first true warning. A stranger walks into camp, and every person stationed there to stop strangers greets her with the quiet relief reserved for someone expected.
By the time Abaddon understands what he is seeing, the thought has already taken shape: the world has been making room for her for hours.
Two rose-gold rings travel before her at ankle height, rotating in opposite directions. Crescent eyes open along their circumference and blink independently, some studying the sentries, others watching the ground, one settling on a cook who immediately begins crying without understanding why. The rings emit a low tonal resonance that Abaddon feels behind his teeth.
Bare feet follow, then Clotho.
Coral-red skin catches the Rhavessan sun with living warmth. Her dress arrives in layers of extravagant pink, froth and bows and heart-shaped tailoring held together by an aesthetic that should look ridiculous on a battlefield and instead makes the battlefield appear improperly dressed. Her hair rises around her in buoyant sherbet coils, dense and soft enough to change the silhouette of her entire body. Plush ram horns curl close to her head under an opalescent sheen, while downy sheep ears turn toward separate sounds with small, independent motions.
Her eyes are crescents, too. Milky pink spills through iris and white until no ordinary anatomy remains, and red liner sweeps beneath each one in long upward strokes. When her attention settles on the nearest wounded soldier, tiny white flowers push suddenly through the gauze wrapped around his hand, stems slipping between layers of bandage and opening all at once against the bloodstained cloth.
The man jerks backwards with a raw shout and nearly overturns the stool beneath him, clutching his wrist to his chest while the medic beside him reaches instinctively for the bandage. The blossoms collapse before either of them can touch them. Petals shrink into themselves, stems withdrawing through the gauze until only a few damp green impressions remain where they had been.
Clotho’s ears dip. Her lips part, then press together, and for a moment she looks genuinely sorry that her attention had consequences.
“Sorry.”
Monday goes very still beside him. Her attention fixes on the soldier’s bandaged hand, then tracks Clotho with the intense focus she usually reserves for a structure that has somehow learned a new rule. The yellow beneath her skin brightens faintly, and one hand lifts a fraction before she seems to remember that reaching toward an unknown Multiversal Manifestation is probably poor field practice.
“She made the wound bloom.”
The words come quietly, almost unwillingly. Reverence catches in them despite her, sharpened by the fascination of a builder watching one of her oldest rules fail in front of her. Her gaze travels from the vanished flowers to Clotho’s halos, her horns, the wool-soft shape of her ears, already searching for the rule that connects any of it.
Abaddon feels the entire camp waiting on him. Nobody turns to ask and nobody breaks formation; attention gathers anyway. Sentries keep their hands near their weapons. Engineers stop pretending to work. Somewhere behind him, somebody sets down a crate too carefully. The question moves through the camp without being spoken: threat, envoy, god, disaster, ally.
He steps away from the trebuchet with Eidolon Breaker still in his hand, lowered but ready, its weight settling into the shape his body knows best. Clotho continues walking through the yard without acknowledging him. She passes within sight of the command line, within reach of soldiers who should challenge her, within the invisible perimeter every army teaches itself to defend, and gives none of it more attention than weather.
That is worse.
She pauses beside a stack of supply crates blackened along one side by an old fire. One finger trails over the burned plank, barely touching the grain. Green answers beneath it. A single shoot presses through charcoal-black wood, uncurling with impossible freshness until two small leaves open toward the sun.
Clotho smiles.
She bends slightly to watch the stem straighten. Several crescent eyes follow the new growth from scorched timber into light.
Monday moves first. She approaches from the side, leaving enough distance between them to pretend this is caution rather than fascination. Her gaze refuses to stay on Clotho’s face. It moves over the halos instead, tracking their rotation, counting the eyes, watching how the rings pass through shadow and sunlight. She shifts another step around her, then another, quietly changing her angle like an engineer inspecting a machine that has committed the personal offence of functioning without explanation.
Clotho notices. Monday either does not care or has decided curiosity outranks self-preservation.
Clotho turns toward her, and delight takes immediate possession of her face. Her mouth spreads into a broad grin, cheeks lifting beneath the milky crescents of her eyes while both sheep ears angle sharply forward. Several crescent eyes travel independently until all of them have settled on Monday.
Monday stops a few paces away.
Clotho takes her in without any attempt at subtlety. Her gaze moves over the cracked spectacles sitting crookedly across Monday’s nose, the pale dust caught in her hair and worked into the seams of her sleeves, the yellow geosmin glowing beneath her skin. She studies Monday’s hands longest: the chalk beneath one nail, the fine bone powder settled into the creases of her knuckles, the small cuts and calluses left by a morning spent forcing structures to behave.
Then her attention rises to Monday’s mouth. Both ears perk higher.
“Did you like the fruit?”
Monday goes still behind her crooked spectacles. Beside her, Abaddon turns his head.
Clotho looks between them, then points vaguely toward the practice yard behind Monday. “The yellow one. You ate two bites.”
Monday glances back. The bitten fruit still lies where she dropped it when the wind changed, one side bruised into the mud, its golden flesh exposed beneath the torn skin.
“It tasted like cinnamon.”
Clotho’s grin widens. “It was supposed to.”
Monday looks back at her. A crease appears between her brows.
“That was yours.”
“I grew it.”
“Out of a projectile.”
Clotho’s gaze wanders past her toward the trebuchet, then farther across the yard to the wreckage of its test shot. Broken branches lie across the shattered crates. Yellow fruit has rolled into the wheel ruts. Several loose feathers remain trapped against a splinter of timber, stirring whenever the wind reaches them.
“It had been stone long enough.”
Monday stares at her for a moment, visibly testing the sentence for some concealed piece of useful information.
“You turned ammunition into an orchard.”
“Only briefly.”
“There was a bird.”
Clotho glances toward the feathers. One of the eyes in her outermost halo follows the same direction a moment later.
“It remembered one.”
That arrests Monday more effectively than anything else has. Her eyes flick from Clotho to the wreckage, then back again. “The tree remembered the bird.”
Clotho tips her head, sherbet hair sliding against one horn. “The tree remembered lots of things.”
For a second, Monday seems to forget that she came over here angry. Her gaze lingers on Clotho a beat too long, and that tiny betrayal is enough.
“I like you.”
Monday’s lips part, but no answer comes. The lapse is so brief Abaddon might have missed it if he were not already watching both of them with growing suspicion. Then she remembers herself and squares her attention back on Clotho. “You rearranged three braces, turned a staircase into a spiral and gave a tenement a window overlooking an ocean that is nowhere near this hemisphere.”
Clotho folds her hands neatly at her waist, all attentive innocence. “Was it a nice ocean?”
“It was in the wrong hemisphere.”
“Blue?”
Monday’s expression tightens with the particular irritation of someone being forced to concede a technically accurate point. “Beautiful, actually.”
Clotho beams, visibly pleased with herself. Monday cuts a glance toward Abaddon, but he offers her nothing. Her stare sharpens with the accusation anyway: Coward.
Abaddon ignores it and turns his attention fully toward the stranger. “Clotho.”
Her head turns.
Something in the battlefield shifts with it. The heat has not changed, yet the air against Abaddon’s skin feels suddenly thinner, every nearby sound separating from the next: the scrape of a boot through salt, canvas snapping once in the wind, somebody breathing too quickly behind him. Even the soldiers seem to feel the adjustment. Bodies straighten across the yard without any order passing between them.
Abaddon knows the name.
He knows it from briefings thick enough to require their own archive shelf, from military records whose threat assessments contradict their theological annotations, from arguments between officers who had never seen her and scholars who had never stood within reach of anything they attempted to classify. Life. Manifestation. Echonianetic. A being whose existence forces theology into bureaucratic forms until both become inadequate.
None of those documents mentioned the sheep ears.
Clotho studies him with open delight, her attention travelling over Eidolon Breaker, the violet light beneath his exposed skin, and finally his face.
“Abaddon.”
His grip tightens around the glaive.
She says his name easily. Too easily. There is no caution in it, no ceremonial weight, no careful testing of title or rank. She speaks it with the familiarity of someone remembering a room she has already entered, a thing whose shape she knows before touching it.
They have never met.
“This is an active warfront,” Abaddon says. “State your purpose.”
Clotho’s eyes widen a fraction, pink light gathering more brightly through them. One sheep ear tilts forward while the other angles briefly toward Monday, catching the movement beside him. Monday has shifted half a step closer without seeming to notice herself doing it, every trace of her earlier irritation gone beneath naked fascination.
“Purpose,” Clotho repeats. She rolls the word slowly across her tongue, visibly entertained by its edges.
“Yes.”
Her mouth curves. “What a little box.”
Abaddon’s expression does not change. One hand remains closed around Eidolon Breaker, the glaive held low beside him while violet light moves faintly through the fissures of his exposed skin.
Clotho glances toward Monday. “Does he always organise conversations before having them?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
Their answers land together.
Monday turns her head toward him by degrees, eyebrows climbing behind her cracked spectacles. Abaddon keeps his attention on Clotho and refuses whatever accusation she is attempting to conduct through eye contact alone.
“You entered a Crown position without challenge, altered military infrastructure, interfered with personnel memory and compromised siege equipment.” He gives each charge its own space, not raising his voice, not allowing her brightness to alter the shape of the interrogation. “State your purpose.”
Clotho rocks once onto the balls of her feet. Layers of pink fabric stir around her ankles, bows and hems lifting before settling again, while the rose-gold rings around her ankles continue their slow orbit. Several of the crescent eyes embedded within them remain trained on Abaddon even when she tips her head.
“Maybe I wanted to see you.”
“You have.”
Her grin deepens.
“And now I am seeing more.”
The rings turn around her ankles. The movement is slight, almost lazy, yet several of the eyes along their circumference open wider and settle on Abaddon’s hands. They study the dark fingers wrapped around Eidolon Breaker, the violet fissures burning beneath his wrists, the faint residual tremor left there by yesterday’s work. His skin prickles beneath their attention.
Monday’s gaze follows theirs. It drops to his hands for only a moment, lingering on the violet light beneath his wrists before lifting again to Clotho. The glance is enough. Clotho’s smile sharpens with delight.
“Yesterday,” she says, “you learned to leave things.”
The words settle between them with more weight than their softness should permit. Around the trebuchet, work thins without stopping completely. A wrench turns once and no farther. Someone near the supply crates shifts their footing. The whole yard seems to lean toward the conversation while pretending it has better things to do.
Abaddon’s face remains unchanged. He has had thousands of years to teach it obedience.
Monday has had considerably less practice; her brows draw together, curiosity sharpening into recognition as Clotho continues.
“People. Nerves. A school. An ugly engine with very good bones.” Her attention moves briefly toward one of Monday’s ivory braces before returning to him. “You kept cutting and cutting until the cut became small enough to let something live beside it.”
Abaddon steps forward. The movement is enough to make the nearest engineer retreat half a pace before catching herself. “How do you know that?”
Clotho smiles. There is no embarrassment in it, no surprise at having been caught with knowledge she should not possess. If anything, the question seems to reward her.
Monday’s hand drifts toward the nearest exposed brace. Her fingertips hover a breath from the ivory, close enough for the yellow beneath her skin to catch along its polished surface, but she stops short of touching it. Behind Abaddon, leather draws sharply across leather as one of the soldiers readjusts their grip on a weapon.
One of Clotho’s ears turns toward the sound before the rest of her does. Her gaze wanders across the soldiers ringing the yard: tightened hands, lifted shoulders, bodies prepared for violence from something that has yet to behave like an enemy.
“Being frightened won’t hurt my feelings.”
“No one here has agreed to your terms for that instruction.”
Clotho looks back at him. Her smile deepens by degrees, gaze lingering on his face with newly sharpened interest.
“You make fear stand at attention before you’ll let anyone call it fear.” Her head tips slightly. “Your father does that.”
The muscles across Abaddon’s shoulders lock beneath his shirt.
Monday’s gaze cuts to him at once. It drops to the hand closed around Eidolon Breaker, then rises again to his face, searching the change Clotho’s comparison has drawn out of him. The fascination she had been giving Clotho has found a second subject now, and this one is standing close enough to feel it.
Clotho lifts two fingers to the bow at her throat and smooths the edge of the ribbon between them. “Do you dream about the people you leave?”
Abaddon gives her nothing.
She does not seem discouraged. “The ones you remove?”
“Name your intent.”
Clotho’s fingers pause against the ribbon.
“Do you dream about your father?”
Monday turns sharply toward him. Abaddon keeps his eyes on Clotho.
Beneath her, the rose-gold rings begin to hum. The sound enters low and sweet, almost beneath hearing, then deepens until the ropes hanging from the trebuchet tremble against the frame. Salt grains skitter across the lid of the nearest crate. Farther down the line, a horse stamps and throws a brief spray of sparks from the stone.
“This theatre is under my command,” Abaddon says.
His voice carries cleanly across the yard, steady enough to gather the soldiers’ attention and give them something familiar to fasten themselves to.
“Rhavessan is under active Crown operation. Whatever authority you exercise elsewhere ends at my line. You do not acquire jurisdiction here by walking into it.”
Clotho tilts her head.
“Uncrowned General.”
The title finds an old place beneath Abaddon’s ribs. His fingers close harder around Eidolon Breaker before he can stop them, leather creasing beneath his palm.
Beside him, Monday goes quiet. Her cracked spectacles catch a brief flare of rose-gold as she looks at him, then away again. She has heard the title. Worse, she has heard what it did.
Clotho comes another step closer. Her bare feet barely disturb the dust between them, while the lowest of her rose-gold rings passes near enough to Abaddon’s boots to lay warm crescents of light across the black leather.
“What will you do when this war ends?”
Abaddon looks down at her. “Take the next assignment.”
Clotho’s smile falters. Her ears lower first. The bright curiosity that has carried her through the camp recedes with them, leaving her mouth softly parted and her eyes fixed on him with an attention suddenly stripped of play. For several seconds she simply studies his face.
“You already had somewhere else to be.”
“I have responsibilities.”
“That isn’t what I said.” Her voice has gone quieter. “You answered me with work before you considered whether there was anything else.”
Abaddon’s expression hardens. “There is always something else.”
Monday shifts beside him, bone dust whispering from one sleeve as she folds her arms.
“You didn’t come into an active siege to ask him what he plans to do with his free time. You’ve interfered with half the camp, rearranged my structures and spent the last several minutes asking questions that sound more like conclusions. So what are you actually testing?”
The tenderness leaves Clotho slowly. Her lips curl again, smaller this time, while the rings beneath her begin another languid revolution.
“Whether he knew.”
Abaddon’s voice lowers. “Finish that sentence.”
At last, Clotho’s gaze lifts fully to his. Her eyes narrow, and the smile that follows carries none of her earlier innocence.
“That you’ve already started changing.”
Violet light surges beneath Abaddon’s skin. The geosmin along his throat and forearms flares hard enough to wash the undersides of his sleeves in purple. Eidolon Breaker answers in his grip with a low vibration that travels up the haft and settles deep into his hands.
Around them, the camp begins to come apart at its smallest agreements.
A rope worries itself free from a hitch that has held since dawn and drops in a loose coil to the dirt. At the medical station, a medic opens her mouth to call for blood and falters halfway through the request. Her eyes fall to the red soaking steadily through her patient’s bandages; she knows what she needs, can see it leaving the body in front of her, yet the word itself has vanished.
Abaddon’s grip closes harder around Eidolon Breaker.
Clotho’s attention drops immediately to the weapon. Then to the violet blaze beneath his wrists. Then, slowly, back to his face.
The crescent eyes set into the rings circling her feet open wider. Their orbit quickens just enough to stir the dust around her bare toes. Her grin spreads.
“Something answered.”
Abaddon’s gaze hardens. “You’ve seen enough.”
Clotho points toward the violet light still burning beneath his skin, then lets her finger drift higher toward his face. “Not the weapon.”
Monday moves before Abaddon can answer. She steps into the narrow space between them, close enough that one of Clotho’s outer rings passes beside her boot and washes the leather in rose-gold. Her hand stays near the exposed brace at her side. She does not touch the ivory, though her fingers flex once toward it.
“Whatever you’re trying to learn from him, leave the soldiers out of it.”
Clotho turns fully toward her.
The grin fades. The rings circling her bare feet lose some of their restless speed as Clotho studies Monday from the ground up: the planted boots, the squared shoulders, the hand waiting beside the bone, the yellow geosmin burning brighter beneath her throat.
“Diligence.”
Monday lifts her chin.
“You build because you think tomorrow deserves support.”
The yellow beneath Monday’s skin strengthens along her hands. Her fingers close into her palm, bone dust whitening the creases between them.
“My work is mine to answer for.”
Clotho’s head tips slightly. “Everything alive is my business.”
“No.”
Both of Clotho’s ears spring upright. Monday stays exactly where she is.
“No. You don’t get to make that sentence true just because you’re old enough to frighten grammar.”
Abaddon turns his head toward her. Monday has already forgotten he is there. Every bit of her attention is fixed on Clotho, chin raised while the bone brace at her side gives a faint answering glow.
Clotho stares at her. Then her whole expression breaks into delight, and the rings at her feet begin turning faster again.
“You are wonderful.”
Monday’s brows draw together. “You have known me for less than ten minutes.”
“You ate the fruit.”
“That was research.”
“You were angry about the ocean.”
“It was in the wrong hemisphere.”
Monday studies her for a long moment, visibly reconsidering what sort of creature she is dealing with. “Your standards are concerning.”
Abaddon closes his eyes for one brief second.
When he opens them, Clotho has already turned back toward him. The grin has narrowed, though the pleasure remains tucked into the corners of her mouth.
“What would you be,” she asks, “if nobody needed you to remove anything?”
The answer leaves him before he has time to examine it.
“Useful elsewhere.”
Clotho’s lips part into a small, round shape. Beside him, Monday stops moving altogether, her hand suspended just short of the bone.
Abaddon hears the weakness in his answer only after it is beyond recall.
Clotho’s shoulders loosen. Her ears dip slightly outward, and when she speaks again, the playful lift has left her voice.
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“You have my answer.”
Clotho studies him for another moment. “What would you be?”
Abaddon looks past her toward the citadel.
The war has occupied enough centuries of his life to possess landmarks inside him. He knows what season the western salt bridge disappears beneath floodwater. He knows which Rhavassani families favour Eschatid grafts along the spine and which prefer the pelvis. He knows the smell of their funeral resins. He has killed priests whose grandchildren later commanded batteries against him. He has returned so many times that parts of the planet remember him through architecture rather than history.
Take that away. Take away command, the Crown, every reason Alpha has ever found to point him toward something that requires ending. Leave him with Eidolon Breaker in his own hand and nothing waiting beyond the blade.
He finds nothing he wants to give her.
Clotho waits.
She does not fidget or fill the space for him. Her halos continue their slow rotation around her ankles, eyes blinking one after another while the camp strains around the absence of an answer. Monday has gone very still beside the nearest brace. She pretends to inspect a hairline crack in the ivory with far more attention than it deserves, though Abaddon can feel the direction of her listening.
“That question has no relevance to this campaign.”
Clotho’s mouth opens on a small laugh. It is bright, almost pleased, and somehow worse for how little force she puts behind it.
“You do know.”
Abaddon’s gaze comes back to her.
“Leave.”
The rose-gold rings around her slow until their rotation is barely perceptible. Clotho looks away from him and takes in the camp she has already unsettled: soldiers tying scraps of ribbon around their own wrists so identity can survive another lapse, engineers testing fastenings they checked minutes ago, medics covering their arms in names, Monday’s pale ribs climbing through Rhavessan stone wherever ordinary architecture has failed. Her eyes linger on each small adaptation with open interest.
“Not yet.”
The world shifts around her. There is no doorway, no flare of power, no theatrical rupture in the air. The distance between Clotho and Abaddon simply ceases to mean what it did a moment before.
One instant she stands within reach of Eidolon Breaker; the next, she is several paces away without having crossed the ground between. The rings follow through space that offers no resistance, their eyes closing one after another in a travelling sequence. The last remains open long enough to turn toward Monday and give her a single unmistakable wink.
Then Clotho is gone. The yard feels abruptly too large without her in it.
For several seconds nobody speaks. The trebuchet gives a low wooden creak behind Abaddon, ordinary enough to sound obscene after everything else. Somewhere near the medical tents, a soldier bends sharply at the waist and vomits into the dirt. Another man begins swearing under his breath while checking the ribbon tied around his wrist.
Monday stares at the empty patch of ground where Clotho had stood. Her shoulders remain high, one hand still hovering near the bone brace.
“Good news.”
Abaddon turns toward her.
Monday rubs one hand over the back of her neck, leaving a pale streak of bone dust near her collar. “I hated that.”
For one brief, treacherous instant, the words so did I come close enough to speech that he feels the breath prepared for them. He lets it out through his nose instead.
“Document everything.”
Monday looks at him properly then. “Everything?”
“Every alteration. Every lapse. Every structural change. Start with the camp and work outward.”
Her eyes stay on him. There is a question in that look now, made obvious by Clotho’s last accusation and the violet light that has only just faded beneath his skin. Every alteration leaves very little room to exclude the man giving the order.
Monday glances toward the empty stretch of yard where Clotho vanished, then back to him.
Her mouth opens.
Abaddon waits.
After a moment, she closes it again.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Night does not repair Rhavessan. Once the sun drops behind the salt ridges, the distortions seem to find more room to spread.
Monday sleeps in pieces atop a watch platform she built from interlocked vertebrae, curled beneath a field coat with one arm hanging over the ivory rail. Before lying down, she writes MONDAY across the inside of her left palm in thick black grease pencil and ties a yellow ribbon around the opposite wrist. Neither mark is magical. That is the point. Ink should remain ink. Cloth should remain where it is tied.
At midnight, the ribbon knots itself around her thumb.
Monday wakes immediately. She lifts her hand into the moonlight, studies the new knot with narrowed eyes, then untangles it one-handed and reties the ribbon at her wrist. She lowers herself back onto the vertebrae and closes her eyes again, choosing sleep with the stubbornness of someone refusing to reward reality for bad behaviour.
Abaddon does not try.
He sits beneath a campaign tent whose canvas still carries the faint sweetness of incense from the temple it became during the afternoon before remembering that it was canvas. The lamps burn low around him, leaving warm bands of light across maps, report sheets and the shallow metal bowl holding the relic beads he removed when he undid his campaign braids. His hair hangs loose almost to the backs of his knees, heavy purple lengths spilling over his shoulders and down his back while he works.
He has redrawn the southern ridge twice.
The first map lost the supply road halfway through the survey. The second invented a route directly through a basalt wall that has existed longer than the current siege. His third attempt has remained accurate for nearly an hour, which tonight qualifies as an achievement.
Abaddon knows Rhavessan well enough to command without a map. He could name the approach to the southern ridge from memory, estimate the distance between the citadel and western supply line by march time, tell an officer exactly where the ground begins to soften after rain. He keeps drawing anyway.
Routes matter because people agree that they lead somewhere. Distances matter because armies die when commanders decide geography is negotiable. There is comfort in putting one point onto vellum, drawing a line toward another and finding that it reaches its destination without theology, childhood memories or an alternate history appearing somewhere along the way.
He blinks.
The map changes.
The citadel remains where he drew it. So does the ridge. Everything between them has been replaced by thick, earnest strokes of waxy colour laid down by a child’s hand. Soldiers grin beneath helmets large enough to swallow their heads. Siege engines roll on wheels shaped like flowers. The western camp has acquired a blue dog twice the size of the medical tent, complete with a tiny crown and four legs of dramatically unequal length.
Near the bottom edge stands Abaddon.
Eidolon Breaker is a long black stroke in one hand. The rest of him has been rendered as a towering dark shape beneath two vicious diagonal eyebrows. Whoever drew him decided a mouth would add nothing useful.
ABADDON’S PLAN.
The O has been given a smiling face.
Abaddon remains motionless long enough for the lamp beside him to burn visibly lower.
“Monday.”
Her answer comes faintly through the canvas from somewhere above and outside. “I’m sleeping.”
“Come here.”
“I remain asleep.”
“Now.”
A pause follows, then the scrape of bone, a muffled curse and a heavy thump against something outside the tent.
A moment later Monday pushes through the flap wearing one boot and half her coat. Sleep has flattened her hair along one side, her spectacles sit even more crookedly than usual, and MONDAY remains written boldly across the palm gripping the canvas.
Then she sees the map.
Her eyes widen behind the cracked lenses. Her mouth closes so abruptly that her cheeks puff for a second, but the grin escapes anyway, spreading as her gaze moves from the flower-wheeled siege engines to the enormous blue dog and finally to the vicious diagonal eyebrows representing Abaddon.
Monday leans over the table for a closer look. Only then does she discover the tiny crown perched between the dog’s ears.
A strangled sound escapes her.
Abaddon’s eyes narrow. “Diligence.”
She clamps both hands over her mouth. It accomplishes nothing. Her shoulders begin to shake as she bends over the map and makes a visibly doomed attempt to recover herself.
Abaddon waits.
Monday manages one breath. Then she looks at the crowned dog again and whatever remained of her composure gives way. Laughter breaks through her palms, muffled and helpless enough that she has to brace one hand against the table.
He lets it run its course. Eventually Monday straightens and wipes beneath one eye with the heel of her hand before pointing at the drawing.
“You have a dog.”
“I do not.”
Her finger traces the ridiculous blue animal. The crown has been drawn with particular care, three uneven points tipped in yellow. “You look happier in the drawing.”
“It has no mouth.”
“That may be why.”
Abaddon begins rolling the map before she can catalogue any further improvements to his disposition. The vellum curls beneath his hands, swallowing the dog, the flower-wheeled siege engines and most of his severe little portrait before Monday catches the far edge.
“Wait.”
The change in her voice stops him; her amusement has vanished. Monday bends closer, holding the map open with one hand while the other moves toward the southern ridge. The child’s waxy line at the southern ridge is thicker than the rest, pressed hard enough into the vellum to leave a shallow groove beneath the colour.
“This is tomorrow’s route.”
Abaddon follows her finger. “The route we planned.”
“Except she marked the choke.”
Monday taps the eastern shoulder of the ridge. A five-petalled flower interrupts the route there, drawn heavily enough that its centre has scored the vellum beneath the wax. It sits directly over the crossing Monday intended to reinforce at dawn.
Her fingertip passes once across a petal.
“She’s ahead of us.”
“She may be guessing.”
Monday studies the flower. “Gods guessing is rarely cheaper.”
Abaddon takes the map from beneath her hand and finishes rolling it, more carefully now. He sets it apart from the others rather than returning it to the stack, then keeps one palm over the vellum for another moment.
“Wake the watch captains. Nobody moves between posts without a physical marker. Anyone reporting memory loss gets paired with someone who can still track sequence.”
Monday reaches the tent flap before looking back. “What are we calling unaffected?”
“Anyone who still remembers asking the question.”
Her nose wrinkles. “Ugly standard.”
“It is what we have.”
She pushes the canvas aside.
“Monday.”
She stops with one shoulder through the opening. When she turns, the last of the sleep has left her face.
Abaddon remains beside the table, his thumb resting against the edge of the rolled map. “If your structures change again, watch what they start responding to before you force them back into their original shape.”
Monday lets the flap fall closed and comes fully back inside.
“You think she’s using them.”
“I think she has already altered what they answer to.”
Her gaze drops to her hands. Lanternlight catches the weakened yellow geosmin beneath her fingers, dulled after a full day of building. She turns one palm upward. MONDAY still runs across it in thick black grease pencil, stubbornly legible.
After a moment, she asks, “What would you do?”
Abaddon looks at her.
Monday flexes her fingers once. “If Eidolon Breaker changed the terms on you. You reached for one function, and it gave you another.”
His eyes move to the glaive resting within reach of the table. Eidolon Breaker has been with him long enough that its balance requires no conscious accounting; he knows the distribution of its weight through his hand, the slight pull of the blade when he turns his wrist, the vibration that precedes Obliviscence answering through it.
He gives the question the consideration it deserves.
“I would find what it had begun answering to.”
Monday stays quiet.
Her thumb passes once across the grease-pencil letters on her palm, smudging the edge of the D. Something in her face settles into recognition rather than reassurance. She looks from her own hand to Eidolon Breaker and then back to Abaddon.
She nods.
This time, when Monday leaves, she lowers the tent flap carefully into place behind her.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Morning arrives incorrectly.
The sky pales first in the west, washing the wrong horizon in thin silver while the east remains dark. A few sentries look up when it begins. None of them bother calling attention to it. Rhavessan has given the camp too many impossible things to catalogue, and by now surprise is being rationed alongside everything else.
By the time true sunlight reaches the salt flats, Monday has discovered that every structure she built the previous day has been altered.
None of them has failed.
That would have angered her less.
The long ivory brace beneath a damaged tenement now forks around a family shrine, dividing its load cleanly to either side of the little alcove. Candles still burn beneath it. Carved names remain visible through old smoke stains, and none of the offerings stacked along the back wall has been crushed or displaced. The staircase Monday grew for the provisioners has added a landing of its own, curving toward a sealed apartment where three elderly Rhavassani have apparently been hiding since the siege began. Farther south, the defensive rib wall along the road has opened a row of narrow arches at child height, each one just wide enough for a small body to pass through without stepping into the exposed street.
Monday walks the altered line with both hands buried in her hair. By the fourth structure her spectacles have slid nearly to the end of her nose. She shoves them back up, examines the forked brace from three angles and finally says, with obvious resentment, “She improved them.”
Abaddon stands beside the nearest arch, looking through it toward the protected strip of ground beyond. “Operationally?”
Monday drops one hand from her hair. “Yes.”
“Then use them.”
Both hands come down. She turns on him so sharply that several pale strands remain caught between her fingers.
“They’re mine.”
Abaddon looks from Monday to the altered wall. “They are bone.”
“I grew them.”
“Yesterday you told me to keep anything the settlement had started depending on.”
Monday’s mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
Abaddon waits while her eyes travel unwillingly over the evidence surrounding them: the shrine still intact beneath its redistributed load, the new landing disappearing toward the sealed apartment, the little arches opening safely through a wall she built to keep bodies on the opposite side.
“That was a priest-engine,” she says at last.
“It was carrying a city.”
“These are my structures.”
“They are carrying people.”
Monday stares at him. One finger rises slowly until it points directly at his chest.
“I dislike you.”
“You’ll endure it.”
She makes a sound through her nose and turns back toward the wall.
One of the new arches darkens.
A small Rhavassani girl ducks through it with a shallow bowl clasped against her chest. Her bare feet leave narrow prints in the salt dust as she steps into the road, then stops when she finds Monday standing directly in front of her.
Monday stops, too.
For several seconds neither moves. The girl looks from Monday to the ivory arch above her head, then back again, uncertain whether she has crossed some boundary she was not meant to. Monday follows the glance. Up close, the alteration is even more irritatingly competent. The opening preserves the wall’s load, keeps the child below the exposed sightline and places her exactly where the buildings give the most cover toward the waterline.
Monday shifts out of the way. The girl passes her without a word and continues down the road, bowl held carefully level between both hands.
Abaddon leaves the silence alone.
Monday watches until the child disappears behind the next building. Her hands fall from her hair, and some of the tension she has carried from structure to structure eases out of her shoulders.
“It stays.”
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
The noon briefing is worse.
A scout returns from the southern ridge powdered in salt and red dust. He kneels beside the command table, one hand still braced against his thigh, and begins his report with such rigid concentration that every word seems to require holding in place until the next can replace it.
“The western Eschatid trench shifted two companies toward—”
He stops. His mouth remains open for another second, then his eyes move helplessly across the map.
“Sir. I had the destination.”
Abaddon waits.
The scout presses two fingers against his temple. “I knew it all the way back.”
Monday slides a cup of water toward him. “Drink. Then give us what survived.”
He obeys immediately. After several swallows, he sets the cup down with both hands and tries again. “Western trench. Two companies. Movement began shortly before noon. Southward at first, then east. I lost the final position.”
“We have the movement. Southern ridge. Their known reinforcement path still crosses the basalt choke here.” Abaddon turns to the map and settles one finger beside the marked route. “We close it before the citadel can move another column through.”
The chalk line beneath his hand disappears.
Nothing announces the change. No flash, no tremor, no ripple through the vellum. One moment the route runs white across the map; the next there is bare surface beneath Abaddon’s finger.
Every voice around the table stops.
Monday bends closer. “She can hear the plan.”
Abaddon takes up the chalk and redraws the route.
The mark vanishes behind his hand almost as quickly as he makes it.
He tries once more. This time the chalk refuses the line entirely. It curves away from the route, circles neatly around his fingertip and closes itself into a five-petalled flower.
A lieutenant swears beneath her breath.
Abaddon studies the little bloom. Chalk dust clings to the side of his finger where the route should have been. After a moment, he sets the chalk down.
“We march without the map.”
Nobody argues.
The table breaks into motion. Officers gather written orders before the pages can reconsider them. The scout finishes his water and repeats his surviving observations to the lieutenant beside him, who writes them directly against the inside of her vambrace. Someone folds the useless vellum anyway and tucks it beneath an arm, whether from habit or the increasingly unreasonable hope that paper might eventually remember how to behave.
For now, bodies remember roads longer than paper remembers ink.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
The southern ridge rises from Rhavessan like the spine of something buried badly, its length shouldering up through the salt flats in black, uneven vertebrae. Basalt teeth break through packed white salt and iron-red mud, some narrow enough to slice a boot sole, others broad enough to have acquired names during campaigns whose beginnings have vanished from ordinary record. Trenches wind between them through old excavation cuts that generations of soldiers have widened, reinforced, collapsed and dug open again until the hillside resembles a wound repeatedly persuaded to remain useful.
Eschatids occupy the forward pits in dense clusters beneath stitched-hide awnings, black bodies layered together where the shade is deepest. Limbs overlap without any visible concern for individual anatomy. Shell catches in wet flashes between folds of hide; mouths open and close along forms Abaddon has learned better than to classify from a distance. Above them, Rhavassani infantry line the parapets with ancestral charms carved into the rims of their helms, thin pieces of shell, violet glass and polished tooth worked into old protective patterns. They flash whenever a soldier turns toward the climbing Crown line.
Abaddon knows this ridge intimately enough to resent it.
He has taken it four times.
Rhavessan has taken it back five.
There are places along the western shelf where he can still remember which bodies were lying there two occupations ago, though erosion and subsequent artillery have long since removed any evidence that his memory is correct.
Monday travels beside him with bone growing beneath the soles of her boots in a narrow ivory seam. Each step leaves another length behind, filling cracks, flattening treacherous angles and giving the ranks following them a surface capable of carrying weight. She usually hums while she works, some fragment of a tune repeated until the structure is finished or somebody complains.
Today she has stopped.
By the first hundred paces, Abaddon finds himself listening for a tune that never comes.
The Crown line climbs in a wedge he has used on this terrain before. Its forward point narrows between two shelves of basalt, shield-bearers packed close enough to protect the soldiers behind them while the rear units feed inward through the gap. Sappers move low along the left flank with tools strapped close to their bodies, waiting for the order that will send them into the side of the Eschatid trench rather than through its teeth.
The formation has worked here before; that is why Abaddon feels the error before he can name it.
The Rhavassani move early.
Their forward line withdraws from the shelf several seconds before his runners carry the order designed to punish precisely that position. Shields vanish behind the upper trench. Eschatids pull back with them, leaving the Crown wedge an open path through.
Abaddon watches the foremost Crown ranks pass through the opening. For a few seconds the gap remains invitingly clear, broad enough to swallow the point of the wedge.
Then Rhavassani soldiers rise from behind the basalt shelves they had abandoned moments before.
The opening seals around the advancing ranks.
Abaddon checks his stride hard enough that the soldier behind him nearly collides with his back. Beside him, the ivory seam beneath Monday’s boots stops growing mid-step. She follows the movement uphill through the broken basalt, eyes tracking the returning shields and closing lines until her expression tightens with the same conclusion already settling in his.
“They knew.”
“They moved before the signal existed.”
Monday’s mouth tightens.
The first Eschatid howl rolls down from the parapet.
It begins low enough to feel through the soles of their boots, then climbs into a ragged animal note. Abaddon hears the command hidden inside it immediately. Kneel. The imperative rides beneath pitch and pain, carried toward the Crown ranks inside the sound itself.
Abaddon turns Eidolon Breaker in his grip. He removes the command before it reaches the second rank.
The howl survives.
Its meaning does not.
Soldiers flinch beneath the noise, teeth setting and shoulders tightening, yet their legs remain beneath them. Nobody drops. No foreign command settles into muscle or joint.
Their knees remain theirs.
Then the arrows leave the ridge.
Hundreds rise almost together, dark shafts cutting through the pale Rhavessan sky. Abaddon tracks the first descent—
—and half of them stop.
They hang above the Crown line in perfect suspension, iron heads angled downward while fletching trembles behind them in the wind. The arrested volley casts a broken pattern of shadows over helmets and shields.
Monday drags her attention back uphill. The fascination remains, but it settles behind the harder concentration already returning to her face.
The suspended volley falls. Hundreds of arrows strike the salt around the Crown ranks in a dry scatter of wood and iron, raising little bursts of white dust without finding flesh.
Through the settling salt, a single rose-pink petal crosses Abaddon’s vision against the wind.
He follows it upward.
There was no balcony on the ridge a moment ago. There is one now.
Ivory rises from the basalt in long curved supports unmistakably shaped by Monday’s hand, ribs interlocked beneath a broad platform projecting absurdly over the active battlefield. The structure has even furnished itself with a decorative railing.
Monday makes a small, wounded sound beside him.
Clotho leans over it.
Today she has somehow found more pink. Fabric pours over the rail in gathered layers, bows nesting among bows until her skirt seems capable of furnishing a small wedding by itself. Soft folds spill around her bare feet while the rose-gold halos turn behind her ankles, their crescent eyes blinking independently down at the battle. One watches the Crown wedge. Another follows an Eschatid dragging itself into cover. Two have settled on Monday.
Clotho rests both forearms along the railing and peers over with the bright interest of somebody who has been given excellent seats.
Monday cups both hands around her mouth and shouts up toward the impossible balcony. “Stop stealing my architecture!”
Clotho straightens behind the decorative railing and answers by cupping one hand around her own mouth. “You make excellent balconies!”
“That wasn’t the assignment!”
Abaddon raises Eidolon Breaker before Monday can continue the argument.
“Clotho.”
Even through the fighting, the name reaches her. Clotho turns at once, the movement so immediate it almost feels like she had been waiting for him to call. Her face brightens when she finds him below, and she lifts one hand in a cheerful little wave over the railing.
Then the enemy attacks.
Abaddon drops his attention from her before irritation costs him soldiers. Rhavassani infantry pour back over the shelf while Eschatids climb through the trenches beneath them, black limbs finding purchase along basalt faces no ordinary animal could ascend.
“Second rank, left brace. Sappers forward. Runners, carry regroup to the eastern—”
Three runners stop simultaneously. Their message cords are coming apart.
Braided colours slip through their fingers strand by strand, knots loosening themselves without being touched. One runner catches his cord before the whole thing falls into the mud and stares at it, bewilderment growing across his face while red, blue, white and gold separate in his palm.
“What does this mean?”
Abaddon looks down at the colours.
Mine.
Yours.
Command.
Receipt.
Ordinary agreements worked into cord and pigment until an army can move because thousands of people have decided that one arrangement of colour means the same thing to all of them.
Clotho’s presence has reached inside that agreement.
The runner pulls the loose cord farther from his belt, staring at it with increasing unease. “I don’t think this belongs to me.”
“Keep it.”
The soldier looks up at him.
Abaddon holds his gaze. “You do not need to know what it signifies yet. Keep it in your hand and remain beside me until the meaning returns.”
The runner swallows, closes his fist around the strands and nods.
The other two move closer without being told.
Across the formation, the same failure begins multiplying. A blue flag rises for advance and loses its agreed meaning before the second wave sees it; soldiers watch the fabric move and understand only that somebody is holding something blue. A horn sounds regroup, but several men turn toward it with the stricken expressions of mourners because somewhere between brass and ear the call has become lamentation. Hand signs last longer. Bodies remember motions after language abandons them, but even those begin fraying once Clotho’s influence reaches the officers responsible for interpreting what one raised fist or two crossed fingers are supposed to demand.
From her balcony, Clotho claps enthusiastically.
Monday jerks her head toward the balcony. “Do not applaud while you’re dismantling my signal network.”
Clotho leans farther over the stolen railing, eyes bright. “They remembered each other.”
“They’re improvising because you broke it.”
“And they still moved.”
Monday stares up at her. “That was not praise.”
Clotho’s grin pulls wider. “You keep saying that like praise is the part I’m collecting.”
An Eschatid breaks through the left line hard enough to scatter two Crown soldiers and send a shield skidding across the salt. Its forelimbs bite into the broken street, black joints folding and unfolding with obscene speed as it angles toward the opening in the formation.
Monday reacts before anyone can call to her. One hand snaps out, yellow geosmin flaring beneath her wrist as she reaches for the bone already threaded through the ground. A spear should answer; instead, ivory erupts several paces away.
Monday’s arm remains extended while the bone arches upward over three Rhavassani civilians trapped behind a collapsed wall. Ribs curve together above them in a broad canopy just as loose masonry sloughs from the damaged facade. Stone crashes across the new shelter and breaks around its sides, leaving the people beneath untouched.
Monday freezes. For one stunned second, she simply stares at what her own magic has chosen to build.
The Eschatid keeps coming. Abaddon steps into its path and turns Eidolon Breaker in his grip.
Advance.
He removes the command.
The Eschatid’s next stride collapses halfway through itself. Its limbs lose the shared purpose holding them in motion, claws scraping uselessly across the street before the whole body pitches sideways and strikes the ground with enough force to throw up salt and red dust.
Monday barely looks at it. Her attention has dropped to her own hand.
Her hand is still lit when another length of bone answers somewhere behind her without being summoned. Ivory pushes through rubble beside a cellar entrance, curves downward, then divides itself into shallow steps beneath an elderly Rhavassani woman struggling to climb through the broken opening. A narrow rail grows along one side within reach of her hand.
Monday slowly lowers her arm.
The old woman grips the rail and climbs.
“No.”
The stair does not hesitate. One last step pushes itself through the rubble, smooths its own edge, and settles beneath the old woman’s weight. The rail curves neatly into her palm.
Monday strides toward it with both hands already brightening yellow. “No. You are mine.”
She plants one palm against the newel of bone. The material is warm beneath her skin, alive with the familiar current of her own geosmin, unmistakably hers in origin and completely indifferent to the shape she is demanding from it.
Clotho’s voice floats down from the balcony, sweet enough that several soldiers nearest the wall visibly tense.
“Are they?”
Monday’s head snaps upward. “I grew them.”
Clotho leans farther over the ivory railing, sherbet curls spilling around her cheeks while one sheep ear tips toward Monday. “And that settles it?”
For a moment Monday has no answer.
The bone beneath her palm moves.
She jerks her hand away as the defensive wall running along the street begins to unfold. Ribs that had been locked together against enemy advance separate in sequence, their ends bending overhead until the barricade becomes a long covered corridor. Openings widen at either end. A cluster of Rhavassani civilians sees the passage and runs for it, ducking beneath the ivory while shell fragments strike harmlessly across the roof above them.
Monday grabs one of the ribs.
“Stop.”
Yellow light races from her wrist into the structure. She pulls, trying to close the wall back into the configuration she built.
The bone resists.
There is no violence in it. No recoil, no attempt to throw her aside. It simply bears against her hands and continues opening, patient and inexorable, placing its own purpose against hers and refusing to yield. The final rib settles into place while the last civilian disappears safely through.
Monday’s fingers remain locked around it.
Colour drains from her cheeks. Her jaw tightens hard enough to sharpen the muscles beside her mouth, and the yellow beneath her skin burns brighter as she looks from the corridor to the balcony above.
“Stop making them kind.”
Clotho lowers herself until her chin rests between both hands on the railing. The crescent eyes in her halos blink lazily around her ankles.
“I haven’t given them kindness.”
“You changed what they do.”
“I changed what they can hear.”
Monday releases the rib. “Hear what?”
Clotho’s lips curl upward, smaller now, pleased without mockery.
Monday turns.
All along the ruined street, her bonework is moving.
A fractured support lengthens beneath a wounded Rhavassani soldier who has collapsed against a wall, curving until his weight can rest somewhere other than his broken leg. Across a shell crater, two sections of ivory lower toward one another and lock into a bridge while civilians scramble over it. Farther down the road, masonry shears loose from the upper floor of a damaged house. One of Monday’s ribs lashes outward and catches the falling stone.
Beneath it stand two Crown infantrymen and a Rhavassani medic.
The bone curves over all three with exactly the same care.
Monday watches the medic drag one of the Crown soldiers farther beneath the shelter. Her lips part, ready with another objection, but nothing follows.
Above her, Clotho’s posture changes. Her elbows leave the railing, and when she speaks, all the teasing brightness has gone from her voice.
“Everyone.”
Abaddon hears Monday draw breath, then the world turns toward him.
Nothing visible disappears at first. The command table still stands where it was dragged into the street, maps pinned beneath stones against the wind. Crown flags snap above the broken roofs. His officers remain in their positions, weapons drawn, rank cords and sashes intact. What vanishes is the agreement connecting all of it to Abaddon.
He feels the loss before anyone around him understands what has happened. One moment the officers beside the table are arranged around the fact of his authority; the next, that fact has been lifted cleanly out from among them. Rank remains. Training remains. The Crown remains embroidered across cloth and stamped into armour. Yet the invisible line by which an order leaves his mouth and becomes something another person recognises as binding has ceased to exist.
Obliviscence wakes under his skin.
Abaddon did not summon it. The affinity responds on instinct to the opening Clotho has made, violet heat crawling through the fissures along his forearms because command has suddenly become vulnerable enough to erase. His command.
Eidolon Breaker begins to vibrate between his hands. Abaddon closes both fists around the haft.
Across the street, Clotho’s eyes widen with delight.
“You didn’t call it.”
His officers begin to understand.
One reaches for the sash crossing his breast, fingers lingering over the insignia before he slowly pulls it free and looks down at it with the blank concentration of someone handling an object found in another person’s quarters. Another officer turns toward Abaddon and studies him too long. Recognition remains in her eyes. So does memory. The certainty beneath both is gone.
The runners stand closest. Their message cords have completely unravelled, red and blue and white hanging separately between their fingers with no agreement left to bind colour to instruction.
Abaddon drives the butt of Eidolon Breaker into the street. Stone cracks beneath it.
“Stay where you are.”
Several soldiers obey from training alone. Others shift their weight and look toward the people beside them, searching faces for some substitute for the missing compulsion to accept his voice.
Clotho’s halos hum. The sound rolls across the formation, low enough to make loose buckles tremble against armour.
Abaddon feels his command slip farther. Obliviscence follows it eagerly.
It would be easy. Easier than everything he forced it to do yesterday.
One clean conceptual absence and no one here would need to wonder why his orders no longer carried authority, because the relationship itself would never have mattered.
Abaddon locks the power inside himself. Violet light floods the fissures from his palms to his elbows and climbs beneath his sleeves. Eidolon Breaker shudders hard enough that the metal rings around its haft knock together.
Monday’s attention snaps to him. Her eyes drop to the violet light burning through the fissures of his forearms, to Eidolon Breaker trembling between his hands, then to the officers around him beginning to hesitate over a command structure that had been unquestioned moments ago.
“Abaddon.”
“Work.”
That reaches her.
No insignia is required for it. No runner carries it, no cord preserves its meaning, no officer repeats it down the line. Monday knows the voice that gave it, and Abaddon knows what she will do with the instruction.
She turns back to the road. Her hands hover above the ivory for one furious second, then she stops asking it to fight.
A crater has split the road ahead, broad enough to break the retreat into two exposed streams. Monday plants her boots at its edge and throws both hands forward.
“Fine. Carry.”
Yellow light burns beneath her fingers. Ivory surges from the earth in two broad sweeps, meets over the broken ground and locks itself into a bridge wide enough for civilians, wounded soldiers and stretcher teams to cross together. Monday watches the span settle, jaw tight, then points toward the sagging roof of a house farther down the street.
“Brace.”
Columns burst upward beneath the failing beams. Bone cups the damaged floor from below and redistributes the weight through the surviving walls before another stone can fall.
Monday turns again.
“Open.”
A rib wall that had spent the morning sealing off an exposed lane separates down the middle. Its sections curve outward and roof themselves over, leaving a protected passage through the rubble.
Something fierce remains in Monday’s expression while she works. Her teeth stay set. Yet the anger no longer sends her hands backwards to reclaim what the bone has become. Her eyes follow each structure through its movement now, watching where it chooses to place support, where it refuses pressure, whose weight it decides to carry.
Fascination has gotten in beside the fury.
Monday has spent most of her life understanding work through mastery: know the material thoroughly enough, understand the forces acting upon it, and build usefulness into shape. Clotho has forced her into a far uglier problem. The material still knows Monday. It still answers her geosmin. It has simply begun answering the world around it, too.
Monday looks once at the civilians crossing the bridge she did not originally intend to build, then she raises both hands again.
Diligence has never required her to like what the work teaches her.
“Protect whoever is closest,” Monday tells the bone. Her hands spread over the yellow-lit ivory, fingers flexing with every new branch of growth. “I don’t care whose banner they came under. If they’re under the load, carry them.”
The structures answer immediately, bone moving across the street wherever weight threatens a body.
This time Monday does not fight the direction of the growth. She follows it, adjusting thickness where the bone begins to bow, widening a footing before it can shear loose, feeding yellow light into whatever the structures have already chosen to become.
Clotho’s laughter carries down from the balcony.
Monday keeps both hands on the work. “Do not congratulate yourself. I am solving the problem you made.”
“You stopped asking them to be weapons.”
Monday adjusts the growing span without looking up. “They kept giving me better answers.”
The delight in Clotho’s face only grows.
Monday glances up long enough to point two bone-dusted fingers at her. “You are still not getting credit.”
Clotho presses her lips together with visible effort. One sheep ear twitches. The restraint lasts perhaps a breath before laughter escapes her again, bright enough to carry over the fighting.
Monday mutters something that the collapsing masonry thankfully swallows.
Around Abaddon, command continues to come apart.
A standard bearer lowers the Crown pennant from his pole. He turns the cloth over in his hands, staring at the insignia stitched across it with the troubled concentration of someone who remembers every line of the design and none of the agreement that once made it authoritative.
“Sir.”
Abaddon turns toward him.
The soldier looks from the pennant to Abaddon’s face. “I know why I came to Rhavessan. I know my company. I know what we were ordered to hold.” His grip shifts uneasily on the pole. “I cannot remember what gives you the right to order me.”
Several soldiers nearby hear him. Abaddon feels their attention move with the question. He lets it.
“Then do not rely on that.”
The standard bearer blinks.
“Do you still know your unit?”
“Yes.”
“Can you identify the civilians in this street?”
The man looks toward the broken houses, the wounded being carried beneath Monday’s bone, the Rhavassani families trying to move clear of the fighting. “Yes.”
“Do you know which direction gets them out of the line of fire?”
A pause. Then, firmer, “Yes.”
“Use that. Keep your people together, keep the road open, and if you lose another part of the sequence, tell whoever is beside you before you act on the gap.”
The soldier looks down once at the pennant in his hand. Whatever authority the cloth once carried has not returned. He nods anyway.
Abaddon points toward the eastern side of the street. “Take them through.”
The standard bearer turns and calls his unit together by name. They go with him.
Across the battlefield, Clotho has gone quiet.
Abaddon looks toward the balcony. Her grin has eased, though the brightness has not left her face. Every open crescent eye fixes on the soldiers who move without any recovered certainty that he is entitled to command them.
“You stripped the rank away to see what remained,” Abaddon says.
Clotho leans her forearms against Monday’s decorative railing. “I wanted to know what you would protect when nobody had to obey you.”
Before he can answer, stone bursts from the arch behind him.
An Eschatid drives through the opening with enough force to take half the wall with it. Black graftwork pulses around its neck and shoulders, the command node beneath the flesh beating in an ugly rhythm as it turns toward the nearest Crown soldiers.
Abaddon pivots. Eidolon Breaker rises with him.
Obliviscence opens easily around the creature. He could take the whole body. The possibility presents itself with the familiar simplicity of a door already unlocked: flesh, graft, command, recognition, continuity. One act and nothing occupying that space would remain capable of becoming a problem.
Instead, Abaddon follows the command inward. He finds the imperative threaded through the graft at the Eschatid’s neck, separates it from everything carrying it, and removes only that.
The creature falters mid-charge.
Its next step lands without purpose. Momentum carries it forward another pace before a Crown soldier crashes into its side and drives both of them into the road.
Ivory surges across the ground before either body can land badly. Monday’s bone curls around them, catching soldier and Eschatid alike in the same broad cradle and holding them apart without crushing either.
Clotho’s ears spring forward.
“You left the rest.”
Abaddon looks up at her. “The rest was unnecessary.”
For once, Clotho does not laugh. Her mouth curves slowly, and the rings at her feet turn through the dust with an almost languid ease.
“Yes,” she says.
The softness of it unsettles him more than her delight did.
Then Clotho lifts one hand.
The battlefield opens.
For a fraction of a second the street seems to lose depth. Broken walls flatten into painted planes; soldiers, rubble and bone stretch into impossible distances while the sky above Rhavessan folds along an unseen seam.
When the world settles again, the street has become a stage. The battlefield remains beneath it; the stage has descended through what was already there.
Rhavessan remains visible at every seam: broken walls, smoke, soldiers and civilians moving through the same ruined streets, Eschatids threading the gaps between structures with their black bodies slick beneath the salt light. Over those things, another reality begins laying claim. Planks assemble themselves across the cobbles in long polished runs. Velvet curtains fall from nowhere and snag on the outer curves of Monday’s ribs, draping themselves there with insulting elegance. Footlights appear along the stage’s edge and bloom one by one without flame. Where a shell crater had split the street, an orchestra pit opens instead, and instruments rise into it already tuning themselves, strings winding upward in bright disagreeable notes.
Monday stares at the spectacle swallowing her work. Her gaze catches on the velvet draped across the ivory supports, and her expression tightens.
“Take the curtains off my ribs.”
Painted scenery follows. Flats rise behind the stage in broad strokes of childish colour: a Rhavessani citadel too bright to be mistaken for the real one, a black ridge, a white road, and on that road a tall painted figure holding a weapon edged in purple.
There is no name beneath him.
Clotho is suddenly seated in a theatre box grown from Monday’s own bone, one leg folded beneath her, pink skirts spilling over the rail in layered folds. At her bare feet the rose-gold rings continue their slow orbit, crescent eyes blinking toward the stage.
“Abaddon.”
He does not answer.
She leans farther over the rail, delighted already. “Come up.”
“No.”
The stage lengthens under his boots with a soft wooden groan. When he looks down again, he is standing on it anyway.
At the opposite end, a stair of bone thrusts up beneath Monday and deposits her there against her will. She throws a look down the length of it, then up at Clotho with flat murderous clarity.
“I am going to kill her.”
“You won’t,” Abaddon says.
Monday turns toward him. “You say that like it settles the matter.”
“It doesn’t improve your chances.”
“Neither does hers.”
From above, Clotho claps once. The curtains draw wider. The false theatre brightens. Around them the actual battlefield slows beneath the pressure of her attention. Soldiers, civilians, even the Eschatids seem to find watching easier than resisting, their gazes pulled stageward by the same invisible hand.
“Perform,” Clotho says.
Monday’s mouth hardens into a line. Abaddon raises Eidolon Breaker. Clotho points.
The painted figure behind him changes at once. First the weapon disappears from its hand. Then the armour vanishes in clean swaths of colour. The Crown crest worked into the backdrop fades until nothing remains but the outline of a man: tall, dark, purple-eyed, empty-handed.
Abaddon looks at it.
Clotho’s voice reaches him from every side of the theatre at once, sweetened by velvet and wood and false acoustics. “What remains?”
He swings without answering.
Eidolon Breaker passes through the scenery in one black-violet arc. The painted figure vanishes from the waist upward, erased cleanly enough that the lower half stands alone for half a breath before the whole image buckles and dissolves. The footlights dim. Somewhere in the orchestra pit, one violin string goes slack with a miserable little sigh.
Clotho tips her head. “That is still removal.”
Abaddon turns the glaive toward her box.
Before he can move, Monday slams both palms against the stage.
Bone erupts between them.
Any other battlefield engineer might have made a prison of it. Monday’s ivory arcs rise thick and fast, curving outward to redistribute force. Ribs cross and anchor through the stage in a broad white lattice, making a sheltered centre rather than a cage meant to crush. Every joint widens at the base. Every spur directs strain away from the bodies within.
Clotho’s eyes widen.
Monday bears down harder, yellow light flaring beneath the skin of her hands. “You don’t get to keep reaching through him.”
The sentence seems to surprise her almost as much as anyone else. Her gaze flicks sideways toward Abaddon; irritation follows immediately, sharpened by the fact that she heard herself say it.
She grimaces. “Temporarily.”
Abaddon glances at the bone rising around him. “How reassuring.”
Monday points a finger at him without lifting her other hand from the structure. “Do not make this sentimental.”
“I understood the perimeter.”
“That would be wise.”
Clotho smiles down at the lattice around him, the delight in her face gone softer now, almost luminous. “You built him somewhere to stand.”
Monday’s jaw sets. “I built a perimeter.”
“Close relations,” Clotho says.
“Be quiet.”
At Clotho’s feet, the rose-gold rings quicken.
Every crescent eye opens.
The pressure hits the bone all at once.
Monday’s knees dip under it. The ivory groans from end to end, stress racing visibly along the ribs in pale shudders. She swears, then changes the architecture on instinct, shaving away decorative excess, widening the base, splitting the load into three additional supports that root through stage-plank, cobble and buried stone below.
Clotho watches the adaptation with open delight. “Again.”
Monday bares her teeth at the sound of it. “You are intolerably like him when you do that.”
“Then you recognise quality.”
Abaddon plants Eidolon Breaker through the stage. The glaive drives through polished plank and whatever illusion holds the theatre together, punches into the cobbles beneath, and sinks farther still until its blade finds the older Rhavessani stone buried under every version of the street Clotho has laid over it.
Obliviscence pours downward. Until now he has used it through distinction, cutting command from obedience, instruction from nerve, imposed meaning from whatever body or structure had been forced to carry it. This is different. For the first time since Clotho arrived, he gives the affinity something almost brutally simple.
Here.
This point.
This ground.
This body.
Nothing else.
He gives Obliviscence nothing external to seize upon. No title or rank, no formation arranged around him, no chain of command extending his will through other bodies. He leaves Alpha outside the boundary too, along with every campaign and century that taught him to measure himself by what could be ended at his hand.
What remains is immediate enough to resist interpretation. His weight over this patch of ground. The placement of his feet. Both hands around Eidolon Breaker. The fact that he occupies this point because he is standing here, and no authority beyond his own body is required to make that true.
Around the glaive, the world resolves into cleaner terms.
The change travels outward as a gradual settling. The stage remains, but its planks stop shifting beneath competing instructions. Monday’s lattice becomes legible as bone again, each support carrying weight along paths she understands. Her breathing, ragged from the pressure against the cage, reaches him clearly across the small radius. Beyond its edge, the nearest soldiers glance down at their boots and recover where their own bodies end and the ground begins.
Abaddon keeps one hand around the haft and closes his eyes.
Point. Edge. Spine. Balance. Grip.
The inventory comes easily. He learned it through repetition before he learned most of the languages he speaks, until weapon and body could be understood without title, campaign or witness. Before a battlefield can become strategy, it is weight distributed through feet. Before a weapon can become purpose, it has an edge, a balance, a place for the hand.
He speaks aloud, voice low and even.
“Weight through the rear foot. Left hand above the guard. Don’t lock the shoulder. Don’t chase the blade with your eyes.”
Monday looks toward him despite herself.
Abaddon continues. The instruction is meant for no audience in particular; he gives it to the body standing inside the cleared radius, to the feet planted over Rhavessani stone and the hands that still know exactly how to hold the weapon between them.
“Ground before target. Target before movement. Movement before force.”
The cleared space widens another step.
Clotho’s influence presses against its boundary and finds little purchase. What remains is practice worn into the body, position chosen and maintained, a man standing on ground he has decided not to surrender.
Abaddon opens his eyes.
He has not changed position. Eidolon Breaker remains beneath his hand, its blade fixed through theatre plank and cobble into the older Rhavessani stone. His boots are where he placed them. His weight still belongs to him. The discovery ought to be too small to matter after centuries of command, inheritance and war.
Instead, it catches painfully beneath his ribs.
Across the lattice, Monday looks at him. Her attention stays on his face long enough to catch whatever escaped his control there, then drops without comment to the ivory supports beneath her hands. She adjusts the angle of one rib that has begun to bow under Clotho’s pressure and grants him the mercy of pretending she saw nothing at all.
Clotho is less courteous. Both hands have risen over her mouth. The rings circling her bare feet have slowed nearly to stillness, every crescent eye open, while her sheep ears stand fixed toward him. For once, delight has given way to an attention so complete that she has forgotten to decorate it.
Abaddon closes his hand around Eidolon Breaker.
“Again.”
A tired laugh escapes Monday before she can contain it. She shifts her footing beneath the cage and leans her weight back into the structure. “That, at least, sounds familiar.”
Clotho lowers her hands.
Pressure gathers against the lattice.
The first force arrives through the upper ribs and drives downward. Bone bends with a deep ivory groan. Monday’s arms shake beneath the returning load, yellow light strengthening through her fingers as she widens one support and feeds the excess strain toward the street beneath them.
Obliviscence strains with her.
Abaddon feels all the openings Clotho has left across the battlefield. Command has already loosened from obedience. Names have begun slipping from memory. Soldiers stand inside identities whose edges have been worried thin enough that one careless reach could take far more than he intends. His affinity turns instinctively toward those vulnerable seams.
He denies it access to every one.
Instead, he follows the pressure beyond Monday’s perimeter, past the Crown ranks and the civilians moving beneath her shelters, until he finds the Eschatid trench above the road.
Then he lets Obliviscence go.
The first Eschatid is charging when the erasure reaches it. One instant the creature fills the trench mouth with shell, grafted flesh and a roar broad enough to carry down the ridge. The next, the space is vacant. No blood strikes the stone. No body falls forward to preserve the shape that occupied it.
Abaddon narrows the next cut.
A second Eschatid disappears from beside the firing shelf. Farther along the trench, he takes only the grafted command node pulsing beneath another creature’s throat and leaves the body staggering behind it. The worship-mark carved above the emplacement goes next, its grooves disappearing from the basalt while the wall itself remains untouched.
Each absence ends exactly where he places it.
Monday feels the passages opening through the lattice and changes her structure around them. The ivory does not resist Obliviscence. Ribs spread, new gaps forming wherever his power needs a route outward while the weight-bearing arcs close more securely around the people within.
Clotho watches the two systems accommodate one another. Her ears rise.
“You’re choosing the edge now.”
Abaddon gives her no answer.
“You could take everything the opening gives you.” Her gaze follows another narrow absence through the trench. “You keep stopping.”
Monday is breathing hard beside him. “If you are going to narrate, make yourself useful and take some of the load.”
Clotho’s mouth curves. “You would hate my solution.”
“I already hate your solution.”
One corner of Abaddon’s mouth lifts before he can stop it. The expression is gone almost as soon as it appears.
Clotho reacts like dawn has broken across his face. Her ears spring forward, her cheeks lift, and the rings at her feet accelerate through the dust as every crescent eye turns toward him at once.
Abaddon feels the expression die immediately.
Monday looks from him to Clotho and understands enough to become irritated on his behalf.
“Leave his face alone.”
“I didn’t touch it.”
“You are still watching him with half a theatre’s worth of eyes.”
Clotho looks down at the rose-gold rings circling her feet. One by one, several of the crescent eyes slide shut until only a scattered few remain open.
Monday looks from the rings back to Clotho. “That is not an improvement.”
Clotho’s mouth twitches.
Before Monday can continue, a sharp report travels through the lattice. The central rib splits along its inner curve, a pale fracture racing several inches before stopping beneath the load.
Monday abandons Clotho immediately. She drops both hands to the damaged bone, palms blazing as she feels the strain shudder through the structure.
“Stay.”
Yellow light drives through the bone. The structure shudders beneath her command, attempting to hold the shape she has given it while pressure continues gathering along the upper spans.
The crack lengthens. Monday’s face tightens. She closes her eyes, breathes once through her nose and loosens the force she has been pouring into the structure.
When she speaks again, the word carries less demand.
“Carry.”
The cage answers immediately. One overloaded rib lowers and thickens where the strain is greatest, while two neighbouring supports take part of its burden. The fracture stops travelling. Weight begins moving through the lattice again instead of piling itself against the shape Monday had first demanded of it.
She keeps one palm against the bone as the new distribution settles beneath her hand, then opens her eyes.
“You let it answer.”
“I gave it a less stupid instruction,” Monday says, still feeling along the altered load path with her fingertips.
Clotho’s smile begins to return.
Monday does not look at her. “Do not become pleased with yourself.”
That only makes the smile worse.
Clotho steps down from the theatre box. She makes no use of the bone staircase. Her bare foot lowers into open air, and the distance beneath it simply ceases to be inconvenient. Another step brings her closer to the street. With each descent the rose-gold rings follow at her feet, chiming softly when their edges pass through the false light of the stage.
Monday straightens behind the lattice as yellow geosmin gathers more strongly beneath her skin. Beside her, Abaddon draws Obliviscence inward until its hunger lies close and contained against his body.
Clotho stops just beyond the ivory bars and studies Monday first. “You kept asking your bones to prove they were yours.”
Monday’s fingers curl around the nearest rib. “They are mine.”
“And when they protected someone you hadn’t chosen, you let them.”
“They were built to carry load.”
Clotho tips her head, one ear angling forward. “You changed what counted as load.”
Monday’s mouth pulls sideways as she feels the weight travelling through the structure beneath her palm. “I corrected an inadequate specification.”
That earns a visible brightening from Clotho, though she manages to contain the grin before it fully takes over. Her attention shifts across the lattice to Abaddon.
“You did the opposite.”
He waits for her to explain.
“When nobody remembered why you were entitled to command them, you kept giving them ways to leave alive.” Her eyes drop to Eidolon Breaker, then to the small radius of ordinary ground still holding around him. “When your power offered you everything that had become easy to erase, you chose where it stopped.”
Abaddon’s stare hardens. “You did not come here to teach me.”
“No.”
The answer arrives without apology.
Monday’s gaze moves between them.
Clotho rests one palm against the ivory lattice.
Pink blossoms burst beneath her hand.
They spread through the grooves of the bone in tiny clusters, petals unfolding one after another across the pale surface until Monday looks down and visibly recoils from the floral occupation of her structural support.
“Stop doing that.”
Clotho smiles at her but keeps her hand where it is.
“I came because I was curious.”
Monday’s attention sharpens. “About him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Clotho turns her face toward Abaddon.
For several seconds she says nothing. The battlefield persists around the theatre: distant steel, wounded voices, the splintering report of damaged masonry, all of it beginning to press through the artificial acoustics Clotho laid over the street.
Then her crescent eyes settle on the violet fissures beneath Abaddon’s skin.
“Because holes make interesting gardens.”
His fingers close more firmly around the glaive.
Monday looks at Clotho with undisguised revulsion. “That may be the worst thing you have said all day.”
Clotho’s ears lift.
Monday catches the response forming on her face and points at her. “Do not take that as encouragement.”
Clotho presses her lips together, visibly unsuccessful at being chastened.
Around them, the theatre begins losing its claim on the street. The first sound to return properly is the fighting.
Clotho turns toward the Rhavassani ridge.
The surviving Eschatids have withdrawn beyond the outer trench, their black forms disappearing through cuts in the basalt while the Crown line reorganises below. No formal order has restored itself yet. Soldiers gather by recognition instead: company beside company, wounded calling for familiar voices, whoever still remembers a medic leading whoever does not. Beneath Monday’s bone shelters, Crown and Rhavassani injured lie within arm’s reach of one another because nobody presently possesses enough certainty about banners to make separation more urgent than bleeding.
Clotho watches them for a long time.
Some of the brightness leaves her posture. Her shoulders lower beneath the extravagant pink, and the rings circling her bare feet slow until their rose-gold light barely stirs through the dust. Even her ears settle loosely against her hair.
The weariness lasts only a moment before she gathers herself again.
“I think that is enough for today.”
Monday’s head whips toward her. “For today?”
Clotho looks back.
“You are not leaving that sentence lying around like a promise to return.”
One sheep ear lifts.
Monday points through the lattice at her. “There is no recurring engagement here. Nothing has been scheduled. Nothing has been agreed upon.”
Clotho’s mouth begins to curve.
“That was not a scheduling suggestion.”
“I hadn’t considered a schedule.”
“You still shouldn’t.”
“Now I have.”
Monday lunges toward the bars. Clotho steps backwards, and reality parts behind her.
The opening is scarcely wider than the line of her body, a bright seam cut through smoke, ruined stone and the false remnants of the theatre. The rose-gold rings at her feet reach it first. They tilt and fold through one after another, crescent eyes closing as each disappears beyond the battlefield. Pink skirts follow in rustling layers. Her sherbet curls rise around her horns in a wind that touches nothing else.
At the threshold, Clotho stops.
Her attention finds Abaddon one last time.
The grin is gone. So is the teasing brightness that has accompanied nearly every discovery she made in him. She simply looks at him, quiet and intent, holding his face in her gaze for one lingering second.
Then the seam closes. The theatre does not disappear with her.
For several breaths it remains imposed across the street, suddenly ownerless. One violin draws its bow weakly across a string and produces a thin, uncertain note.
Monday points at it. “I have had enough from you as well.”
The bow lowers.
Monday watches it settle. “Acceptable.”
Without Clotho to sustain it, the rest begins coming apart. Velvet thins into coloured smoke and drifts from the ivory ribs. Painted scenery pales until Rhavessan shows through it, first in fractures and then all at once. The polished stage planks sink through one another and return the battered cobbles beneath their feet. The orchestra pit closes over the shell crater it borrowed, leaving broken stone where strings and brass had been.
Monday’s lattice alone remains.
She releases her hold gradually. Yellow light recedes beneath her hands while the ribs lower around them, settling into their own weight now that there is no impossible pressure bearing against them. Supports that had spent the last several minutes carrying gods, magic and argument return to the simpler labour of carrying themselves.
Abaddon draws Eidolon Breaker from the ground.
The instant the glaive leaves the buried stone, the cleared radius gives way. Everything Clotho had loosened comes rushing back without order.
A soldier nearby folds over with both hands against his face and begins to cry before he seems to understand why. Another starts laughing, the sound climbing too high and refusing to stop. Across the street, someone shouts that he remembers his mother’s kitchen—the blue tiles, burnt onions, a chipped bowl beside the stove—and then demands whether anyone can tell him if the woman herself ever existed.
Names return before faces. Faces arrive attached to the wrong hours. Commands reassemble without the certainty that anyone ever had the right to give them.
Monday lowers herself onto the nearest rib. She does not bother with dignity. She sits heavily, stretches both legs in front of her and plants her palms against the ivory at either side. Each breath lifts her shoulders and leaves them trembling on the descent. Bone dust has worked into her clothes, her spectacles have migrated halfway down her nose, and the yellow beneath her skin has dimmed to a tired glow.
Abaddon remains standing for a while longer. His gaze rests on the place where Clotho’s theatre box had been. Nothing remains there now except smoke crossing the ridge and a stretch of ordinary ruined sky.
Monday draws another breath.
“I hated nearly every part of that.”
Abaddon is quiet long enough that she seems to expect nothing from him.
“So did I.”
Monday turns her head. He can feel her looking at him.
Abaddon keeps his attention on the ridge. “Diligence.”
Monday’s mouth twitches. “I was going to let you keep that one.”
“Then do so.”
She leans back onto her hands and, for once, does.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
The ridge looks worse after Clotho leaves because it has become ordinary enough to count.
That is how war restores itself. Once the impossible withdraws, damage becomes logistics.
Monday spends the next hour walking the civilian quarter and inspecting everything her bonework changed while it was answering rules she had not given it. She dismantles two warped barricades, a stair that now terminates inside somebody’s pantry and a ribbed awning whose enthusiasm has exceeded its structural purpose.
More of the alterations survive her. This bothers her considerably. She keeps them anyway.
The child-height openings have become evacuation routes, and the tenement stair survives after a head count finds six people above instead of the three listed on the morning survey.
By the time Abaddon finds her beneath it, she is staring upward at the extra sweep of ivory bracing that has grown around the family shrine.
The little alcove should have been crushed when the eastern wall shifted. Instead, bone cups the plaster niche from beneath, leaving its painted saints, burnt incense and chipped offering bowls untouched.
“You’re keeping it,” Abaddon says.
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t what you told it to build.”
Monday looks up at the ivory brace again. “No. Irritatingly, it understood the problem better than I did.”
He waits.
She rubs both hands down her face, smearing dust across one cheek. “I despise personal growth.”
“Then record it as a corrected specification.”
Monday lowers her hands and gives him a tired, poisonous look. “I regret teaching you that phrase.”
“You used it repeatedly.”
“Not for you.”
Abaddon continues toward the rampart. Monday catches up.
From above, the stronghold bears the visible overlap of three different intentions. Rhavassani stone still determines the bones of the city, old streets running between buildings repaired and rebuilt through generations of siege. Monday’s ivory crosses it in sudden pale geometries: bridges over breaches, supports beneath facades, shelter ribs arcing over courtyards and alleys. Abaddon’s contribution appears mainly where things cease. Streets open into blank patches where command sites once stood. A battery emplacement ends at a wall with no machinery left to explain its purpose. Along the northern edge, abandoned Eschatid pits breathe smoke into the cooling air.
The war remains everywhere. They have taken the southern ridge. They have severed another section of the cult’s military infrastructure and forced the surviving Eschatids out of the outer trench. By any campaign measure Abaddon has spent centuries learning to respect, the day can be entered as a Crown success.
Rhavessan makes such accounting look small.
The worship remains in houses where families still mark their doors. It survives in bodies altered for service, in prayers remembered by children, in burial customs, kitchen rituals and names carried through generations that have endured more campaigns than some Crown officers will see in a lifetime. Another position has fallen. The belief that built it has not.
Monday leans against the rampart. Blood has dried in a dark streak along one cheek, and her torn sleeve hangs open at the shoulder. The white-yellow of her geosmin has faded toward amber beneath her skin.
“She broke the day.”
Abaddon looks over the city. “She left before it ended.”
Monday turns her head toward him. “You make survival sound administrative.”
“It requires administration.”
Her mouth pulls crooked. “That may be the bleakest reassurance I’ve ever received.”
“It wasn’t reassurance.”
“No,” Monday says. “That would have been alarming.”
Below them, medics and engineers move through the quarter with boards, water, chalk and lists that have already been rewritten several times. Someone has begun marking the dead again. Someone else is checking the marks.
Monday worries dried blood from one knuckle.
“Are you going to tell Alpha?”
“About Clotho? Everything that affects the campaign. Her presence, what she did to memory and structure, the loss of command recognition, her interaction with Obliviscence. He’ll have the full report before we deploy again.”
Monday watches him for a moment. “You answered everything except what I asked.”
Abaddon looks at her.
“She made you part of the experiment. Then she tore command out from under you to see what answer survived.” Monday folds her arms against the rampart. “I assume that part becomes mysteriously irrelevant.”
“The interference is relevant. Her method is relevant. The questions are not.”
“She chose the method because of the questions.”
“She said she was curious.”
“And you believe that covers it?”
“It is what she said.”
Monday lets out a tired breath and looks back over the city. “You are going to hand Alpha a complete account of a Manifestation taking apart his army and somehow leave yourself out of it.”
“I am not part of the tactical assessment.”
Monday looks back at him. “That’s the part you keep excluding.”
Abaddon’s expression hardens. “It does not belong in a campaign report.”
“That is exactly what concerns me.”
He gives her nothing more.
Below them, a Rhavassani woman approaches the bridge Monday had spent ten furious minutes trying to turn back into a barricade. Two full buckets pull at her arms. The ivory span gives slightly beneath her first step, redistributes the weight through its ribs and carries her across the crater without spilling either one.
Monday watches until the woman reaches the opposite street.
“For what it’s worth, your answer was still terrible.”
Abaddon glances toward her. “You will have to specify.”
“The next assignment.”
“I remember it.”
“I would hope so. It was this morning.” She shifts one shoulder against the rampart, eyes still following the woman with the buckets. “Clotho asked what would be left if nobody needed you to remove anything, and you answered by finding somebody else who might.”
Abaddon looks back across Rhavessan.
The question is easier to tolerate in Monday’s mouth. She has no apparent interest in opening him to see what falls out, and once she has made the observation, she leaves it where it landed.
Below, the woman disappears beneath an awning with both buckets. A medic waves three soldiers toward the bridge. Monday’s bone takes their combined weight without complaint.
Eventually Abaddon says, “It was a poor answer.”
The tension around Monday’s mouth eases. She does not praise him for recognising it or ask whether he has found a better answer. She leaves the question where he put it.
Monday remains against the rampart.
Below them, Rhavessan keeps carrying its wounded.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
They leave the ridge near sunset.
The column forms badly.
Nobody trusts signals yet, so officers walk the ranks and give instructions face to face. Units count themselves, lose confidence halfway through, start again and eventually settle on numbers reliable enough to march with. Names are checked against bodies wherever possible. Water goes out before ammunition because half the force has been sweating since dawn, and Clotho’s interference has left several soldiers unable to recognise thirst until their hands begin shaking.
Abaddon finds one of them sitting against a collapsed wall with a cup balanced uselessly between both palms. The soldier cannot be more than twenty. He is staring into the water with the concentration of someone waiting for it to explain itself.
“Drink.”
His head comes up. “Sir?”
Abaddon points to the cup. “All of it.”
The young man looks down again. Something in his face suggests the instruction has reached him before the reason for it has. He takes one swallow, pauses, then another. By the third, his body remembers thirst faster than his mind does, and he drinks hard enough that water runs over his lower lip and down his chin.
Abaddon stays until the cup is empty. He checks the soldier’s pupils, then his hands.
“Find another before we march.”
“Yes, sir.”
Abaddon moves on.
Monday has watched the exchange from several paces away. When he passes her, she only shifts the length of bone under one arm and falls into step.
Behind the column, her structures withdraw from the positions they are abandoning. Long ivory spans separate at their joints or fold into sections manageable enough to salvage. Anything still serving civilians remains where it stands.
A Rhavassani man lifts one of the discarded lengths and asks whether he can use it for a cane.
Monday looks at the length of bone in his hands. “Crown engineering inventory.”
The man starts to give it back, shifting awkwardly onto his good leg as he does. Monday’s eyes follow the movement, then drop to the injured one. Her mouth tightens.
“Keep it until you no longer need it.”
He pauses. “And if that takes a while?”
“Then Crown engineering will survive the loss.”
His smile breaks wider. He tucks the bone back beneath his arm and limps away, laughing.
By the time they clear the district, Monday has left more bone behind than she takes with her. The yellow X beside the school remains where she found it. A small crowd has gathered there to watch the Crown column leave, but Nilo is not among the children clustered near the doorway. Abaddon searches their faces once before the road carries him past.
The northern road climbs through old siege country. Cloud thickens over the flats until evening turns violet-grey and drains the last warmth from the stone. Monday spends the first mile moving between engineers, checking equipment and arguing over whether a cracked brace deserves the expense of hauling it back to camp. Once the column settles into a rhythm she accepts, she drifts toward Abaddon.
For a while they walk without speaking.
Then Monday says, “Do you ever think about children?”
Abaddon turns his head.
Monday manages another step before the question catches up with her. Her mouth tightens.
“That was poorly constructed.”
“It was unusually personal.”
“It was not meant to be.”
Abaddon waits. Monday kicks a loose stone from the road. It bounces twice before rolling into the ditch, remaining gratifyingly stone-shaped throughout the process.
“I was thinking about Alpha,” she says.
Abaddon glances at her. “That has not improved the route between subjects.”
She adjusts the strap of her equipment case higher against her shoulder. “What I meant to ask was whether you think he knows what remains of him when the Crown is removed.”
Abaddon faces forward again. The road runs pale through the darkening flats, bordered by old siege scars and the occasional broken foundation. Behind them, boots scrape stone in an uneven rhythm while officers continue counting people who have already been counted twice.
“You began with children.”
“I took a wrong turn.”
“A substantial one.”
Monday grimaces. “I spend my life designing structures. Apparently conversation falls outside my professional competence.”
The answer comes close enough to amusing him that she catches the change at his mouth, though she has the sense not to comment on it. For several paces she leaves the question alone before adding, “You needn’t answer that one either.”
Abaddon looks at her again.
Monday keeps her attention on the road. “I have learned something today about demanding answers from people who have not offered them.” She does not name the person responsible for the lesson, and Abaddon does not require her to.
They make it another half mile before Monday’s restraint fails. “She was extremely interested in you.”
Abaddon’s expression flattens.
Monday exhales through her nose. “I know. I lasted longer than I expected.”
“Clotho announced her curiosity often enough.”
“She also converted an active battlefield into a theatre just to examine you.” Monday adjusts the strap at her shoulder. “I am allowing generously for differences in divine temperament, but that still seems excessive.”
“Your sample size is one.”
She considers that while they walk, then sighs. “Annoyingly valid.”
Abaddon turns his attention back to the column, apparently satisfied that the subject has reached its end. Monday gives him perhaps twenty paces before adding, “Still. ‘Holes make interesting gardens.’”
“Diligence.”
Monday lifts one hand. “I would like it entered into the record that I did not invent that sentence.”
“There is no record.”
“I remember it.”
“Your memory was compromised this morning.”
She turns toward him with genuine offence. “That was uncalled for.”
“It was documented.”
Monday mutters something about hostile command environments and spends the next several minutes attending pointedly to anything that is not Abaddon.
By the second mile, however, attention begins travelling through the column. A few soldiers farther ahead slow without instruction; others turn their heads toward the same patch of evening sky. Someone near the front raises a hand, and the gesture travels backwards through the ranks until Abaddon follows it upward.
Something bright is descending through the smoke.
At first he takes it for ash catching the last of the light. Then it turns, exposing a colour no fire on Rhavessan has any business producing.
A feather drifts through the violet-grey evening, violently pink against the bruised clouds. It passes over the first rank, slips beside the point of an upright spear and catches a crosswind that carries it gradually toward the centre of the road.
Toward him.
Abaddon stops. Monday follows his gaze and goes still beside him while the rest of the column slows around their interruption.
The feather completes another lazy turn before settling across the back of his hand.
Monday draws breath. Abaddon looks at her, and whatever she had been preparing to say remains behind her teeth.
Up close, the resemblance is worse. The pink is nearly the same impossible sherbet shade threaded through Clotho’s hair, bright enough to look obscene against the grime-darkened leather of his glove.
He could dislodge it with a turn of his wrist.
Instead, Abaddon resumes walking.
The column gathers itself and moves with him. The feather rolls into the crook of his thumb, where it travels for several dozen paces through the old siege country. He makes no attempt to shelter it when the wind moves across the road, but he does not brush it away either. It simply remains, almost weightless and absurdly bright, while boots scrape stone and the evening closes over Rhavessan.
Monday keeps her attention ahead.
Eventually the wind strengthens enough to catch beneath the feather. It lifts from Abaddon’s hand, circles once beside his shoulder and climbs behind the marching column until the smoke takes its colour.
The place where it rested feels suddenly bare.
Abaddon keeps walking.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Camp receives the returning column with the relief of a place that has spent the day uncertain whether its army still exists. Sentries raise their spears several seconds too late. Engineers abandon half-repaired equipment to meet people at the gate, calling names before they can make out faces through the dust. A medic begins counting the returning wounded before the first stretcher reaches her, loses her place when someone catches her in an embrace, starts again and immediately loses it a second time.
Monday gets twenty paces beyond the gate before stopping to stretch. Her shoulders and upper back crack in several places, loud enough that one passing engineer glances over and decides against commenting.
“I am going to sleep between two siege engines.”
Abaddon continues beside her with Eidolon Breaker in hand. “You are going to sleep in your quarters.”
“The engines are closer.”
“They can also kill you.”
“If they crush me, tell everyone I died respecting their craftsmanship.”
“That will not improve the report.”
Monday falls back into step. “I want them to know I trusted them.”
“They are machines.”
She turns her head toward him. “After today, I am unwilling to make statements that broad.”
Abaddon considers the objection and discovers that recent evidence has made it irritatingly difficult to dismiss. Monday sees the pause and immediately mistakes it for permission.
“I’ll choose two with compatible load distributions.”
“You’ll choose neither. Debrief in one hour.”
Monday stops so abruptly that an engineer behind her has to veer around.
“One hour?”
“Yes.”
She stares at him with the exhausted disbelief of a woman discovering that bureaucracy has survived an encounter with the incomprehensible. “I spent most of the day physically contesting a Multiversal Manifestation.”
“You spent a considerable portion of it arguing with one.”
“She turned my defensive works into balconies.”
“And you argued about that too.”
“She commandeered my ribs for a theatre.”
“I was present.”
Monday gestures back toward Rhavessan with one filthy hand. “At what point in that sequence did you decide I should still be responsible for paperwork tonight?”
“When we survived it.”
Her hand drops.
Abaddon keeps walking.
Monday catches up several strides later, looking offended by both the answer and its administrative logic. “I hate the Crown.”
“Include that in your debrief.”
He leaves her at the first branching row of tents to decide whether exhaustion or spite will get her to the debrief on time and continues toward command.
Inside, everything is where he left it. The map lies rolled beside the central table, and when he opens it beneath his hands, ordinary campaign lines spread across the paper: supply routes, distances, artillery ranges, the southern ridge, damaged roads and confirmed Eschatid positions.
The child’s drawing is gone. The corner that had held the blue dog and flower-wheeled siege engines has returned to blank paper.
Abaddon studies it longer than there is any practical reason to, then he reaches for a fresh report sheet.
Outside, Rhavessan continues beneath the siege. In the western district, one of Monday’s altered stairs carries another civilian safely down from a building it was never designed to reach. Beneath the salt, a priest-engine emptied of worship continues bearing the weight of a city. The yellow X beside the eastern school remains among twenty scratched initials. Farther south, Eschatids return cautiously to trenches changed alongside them, every wall, body and command system carrying less than it did at dawn.
Abaddon dips the pen.
Multiversal Manifestation identified: Clotho.
He waits for the ink to settle before continuing.
Direct interference observed across memory, command architecture, material function and Obliviscence.
The next sentence takes longer.
Crown forces retained operational cohesion through local autonomy following central command degradation. Civilian preservation remained viable throughout the disruption.
Abaddon reads it twice. Local autonomy sits unpleasantly on the page, accurate in a way he has not yet decided whether he likes. He leaves it unchanged.
Beyond the tent wall, Monday’s voice carries from somewhere among the engineers.
“She put curtains on my ribs.”
A man answers too faintly for Abaddon to distinguish the words.
“Yes, curtains. Velvet. I was load-bearing scenery.”
Someone laughs.
“I am not exaggerating.”
A tool drops outside and strikes the ground with a dull metallic clatter. It stays where it falls.
Abaddon closes his eyes.
For the first time since morning, nothing changes because he has stopped watching it.
When he opens them again, the map is still a map. The ink remains where he put it. Beyond the canvas walls, Rhavessan continues in all its damaged, measurable certainty.
Abaddon lowers his pen to the report and writes the next line.