Erika loved the quietest hour of the guild.

  The hall, stripped of voices and bravado, revealed itself in that hour. Long tables scarred by knife tips and tankard dents. Benches worn smooth where restless hands had drummed out impatience. The job board sagging slightly at one corner where too many desperate notices had been pinned at once.

  Without bodies to fill it, the guild was not grand.

  She stood alone at the central table, sleeves rolled to her forearms, and surveyed the remnants of the day. A half-finished drink abandoned near the west wall. A chair tipped back too far. Mud tracked in from the road and left to dry in a careless crescent.

  It was most beautiful like this.

  No boasts about contracts taken.

  No whispered trouble about contracts failed.

  No low arguments over coin, pride, or rank.

  And—most precious of all—the Song was muted.

  No bright, structured melodies of practiced incantation.

  No subconscious hum that threaded through the city like an invisible loom, weaving intention into air.

  Just stone, wood, and the faint, honest creak of a building settling into itself.

  Erika closed her eyes.

  For a moment—just a moment—she allowed herself the indulgence.

  A world without the Song.

  No unseen current tugging at the marrow of men.

  No invisible harmonies bending will into shape.

  No pressure to do anything.

  Just silence.

  Not the tense silence of something waiting.

  True silence.

  Complete.

  The kind that did not ask to be interpreted.

  Her shoulders eased by a fraction.

  In such a world, there would be no need for guilds. No contracts pinned in desperation. No hunters pushing past exhaustion because the Song had thinned somewhere it should not have.

  There would be no need for Vice-Guildmasters.

  No need for her.

  Is what she wanted to believe. A kind of dream a child would have before the world forces them to grow up.

  Her breathing slowed.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  The guild seemed to settle with her, the rafters no longer straining, the stone no longer holding memory in its pores. Even her aura—so accustomed to bracing—loosened along her spine, a mantle set gently aside.

  For a heartbeat, she was not responsible for anything.

  Not the staff.

  Not the contracts piling up with monster sightings.

  Not the thinness in the Song that only a handful of them could truly feel.

  Just a woman standing in an empty hall.

  Just breath.

  Then—

  A note.

  So faint she almost mistook it for memory.

  High. Delicate. Mechanical.

  Not sung.

  Wound.

  Her eyes did not open immediately.

  The sound threaded into the silence with unnatural care, like a needle piercing silk. One measured chime, then another, spaced evenly apart. The melody did not belong to the ambient weave of the world. It did not rise from will or faith or incantation.

  It clicked.

  Turned.

  Played.

  Her aura tightened before she consciously commanded it to.

  The music box.

  Sawyer’s.

  The realization arrived not with alarm—but with inevitability.

  The melody crept along the floorboards, brushing against the legs of tables, slipping beneath the job board, curling around the pillars. It was gentle. Almost innocent in its tone.

  Almost nostalgic.

  That was what made it dangerous.

  Erika opened her eyes slowly.

  The hall had not changed.

  The lanterns still burned low. The mud still dried near the door. The abandoned drink remained untouched.

  But the silence she had cherished moments ago was no longer whole.

  It had been claimed.

  The tune continued—soft, patient, unhurried. Each note precise. Each interval deliberate. It did not demand attention.

  It assumed it.

  Her jaw tightened.

  The music did not swell. It did not crescendo.

  It simply persisted.

  Tick.

  Chime.

  Turn.

  As if winding the world itself.

  Erika did not move at first. She let it reach her fully. Let it settle against her senses. The melody was not oppressive. Not like the Abyss pressing at the edges of perception.

  It was intimate.

  Closer than that.

  Familiar.

  Her shoulders, which had eased in imagined peace, straightened once more.

  The dream dissolved without protest.

  A world without Song was a child’s fantasy.

  A world where even silence could be played like an instrument—

  That was reality.

  The final chime of the sequence rang faintly through the hall.

  Then began again.

  Slowly.

  Creeping up on her, one measured note at a time.

  The melody continued its patient rotation.

  Tick.

  Chime.

  Turn.

  Erika did not look toward the door.

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  She didn’t need to.

  There was a rhythm to this ritual. A pattern worn into her nerves by repetition.

  The music would play just long enough to announce itself. Not loud. Not demanding. Simply present. A courtesy before intrusion.

  Then—

  Three knocks.

  Measured.

  Evenly spaced.

  Never hurried. Never hesitant.

  She could almost feel them before they came, like pressure building behind wood. Her aura adjusted instinctively, not flaring, not coiling—simply bracing for the predictable irritation of it.

  The first knock should have come now.

  Silence stretched instead.

  The music box continued.

  Tick.

  Chime.

  Her brow furrowed faintly.

  The second knock—late.

  Still nothing.

  The absence of the expected rhythm unsettled her more than the melody itself.

  She shifted her weight, boots grinding softly against stone. Her gaze finally lifted toward the main doors. The bolt remained in place. The wood stood firm and unbothered.

  No shadow passed beneath the threshold.

  No movement disturbed the lanternlight.

  The third knock—

  Did not come.

  The music stopped.

  Not gradually.

  Not wound down.

  Stopped.

  The silence that followed was not the one she had indulged in earlier. This one felt alert. Listening.

  Then—

  A voice.

  Not muffled by distance.

  Not casual.

  Clear.

  “Vice-Guild master.”

  Sawyer did not raise his voice.

  He didn’t need to.

  The words carried through the door with precise weight, as though the wood itself made room for them.

  Erika’s shoulders straightened fully.

  Shock came first—clean and sharp.

  Not because he had come.

  Because he had spoken.

  Her pulse spiked once, hard enough that she felt it behind her ribs. Her aura reacted before thought could catch up, tightening around her frame in a thin, controlled sheath. The lantern flames nearest the door flickered in response.

  This must be serious.

  He did not waste his voice.

  Not on routine.

  Not on minor disturbances.

  Not on things that could be solved with steel alone.

  She could count on one hand the times he had addressed her like this—directly, without the intermediary of that mechanical melody or the ritual of three measured knocks.

  When was the last?

  Her mind reached backward instinctively.

  The guild hall in daylight.

  A request delivered through chaos.

  Vice-Guildmaster. Let me hunt.

  That had been one.

  Before that—

  She struggled to recall another instance where his voice had carried weight rather than restraint.

  Most nights, it was the music box that announced him. A polite intrusion. A warning before presence. The rhythm predictable enough to become background irritation.

  But this—

  It was strange. Very strange.

  Her fingers curled slightly against her palms as she stood motionless before the door.

  He sounded steady.

  Not frantic.

  Not breathless.

  Steady was worse.

  Steady meant certainty.

  Her gaze fixed on the wood grain in front of her, tracing the shallow grooves carved by years of weather and hands. The door felt thinner than it should have.

  She realized, distantly, that she could not remember the last time she had simply heard him speak her title without steel beneath it.

  Without distance.

  Without that faint, abyssal echo that sometimes lingered at the edges of his tone.

  Tonight, there was none of that.

  Only clarity.

  Her jaw tightened.

  If Sawyer was alarmed enough to abandon habit—

  Then something had already crossed a threshold.

  Her boot shifted back an inch, grounding her stance. The earlier dream of silence felt laughable now. Childish.

  This was the world.

  Not quiet.

  Not merciful.

  Alert.

  Listening.

  Sawyer stepped fully into the hall, the lanternlight catching the pallor of Lina’s face and the slackness in Gabriella’s limbs.

  Erika’s breath hitched.

  Not visibly.

  But sharply enough that her chest tightened.

  For half a second—no longer—her gaze snapped from the girls to him.

  Blood on his coat.

  Tears in the fabric.

  That uncanny steadiness in his eyes.

  Her mind leapt where it should not have.

  “You—what did you do—”

  The accusation broke free before she could cage it.

  Her aura flared violently, heat snapping through the air. The lantern flames guttered sideways as if struck by wind. The floorboards creaked beneath the sudden pressure.

  Sawyer did not move.

  He did not recoil.

  Did not harden.

  He simply stood there with Lina draped across his back and Gabriella held securely in his arms.

  And that was when reason slammed back into place.

  Their injuries did not match what she knew Sawyer was capable of.

  Lina’s sleeve hung in blackened tatters from elbow to wrist—cloth scorched through where the heat had burst outward instead of obeying her. Beneath it, her skin was marbled in deep purples and blistered reds, burns layered over bruising that traced the violent recoil of a Song forced beyond its shape. The damage climbed her shoulder and licked up along the side of her neck.

  Her throat looked worse.

  Dark, spreading contusions wrapped beneath her jaw, the flesh swollen and heat-bitten as if the fire had tried to claw its way out from the inside. Each breath scraped. When she swallowed, it was slow and visible—an effort measured in pain. This had not been a clean casting.

  She had not Sung Ignite.

  She had forced Flare into existence and paid for it.

  Gabriella bore no such burns.

  Her hands were unmarked—no blade cuts, no scorch residue at the fingertips. Instead, her fingers twitched faintly at her sides, movements without intent. Her gaze did not track the room. It did not settle on faces. Her pupils were too wide, too empty, fixed somewhere past what was real.

  There were no wounds on her skin.

  The injury was behind her eyes.

  Faint capillaries had burst along the whites, thin red veins spidering outward as if something had pressed too hard from within. Her lips parted occasionally, shaping silent fragments of a melody that no longer belonged to her. Not a Song cast.

  A Song endured.

  She had been a conduit.

  Something poured its will through her—heavy, invasive, absolute—until there was nothing left in her mind to resist with. What remained was breathing. Reflex. A body upright because it had not yet remembered how to fall.

  Partially present. Partially gone.

  Erika forced her aura down.

  Not extinguished.

  Contained.

  The violent flare that had snapped outward folded back into her frame, compressing until the air steadied and the lantern flames stopped straining sideways. The guild hall exhaled again—but this time it was braced.

  She stepped to the table where Sawyer had laid them.

  Lina’s breathing scraped faintly in her throat. Gabriella’s fingers twitched, chasing a rhythm that no longer existed.

  Erika did not let her hands shake as she examined them. She adjusted Lina’s shoulder carefully, taking in the scorched fabric, the blistered skin, the deep bruising climbing toward her jaw. Then Gabriella—no external wounds, no steel marks, no burns. Just those unfocused eyes and the faint tremor behind them.

  Song backlash.

  Assimilation pressure.

  Her jaw tightened.

  “What happened?” she asked, voice level.

  “A Great Olm.”

  He said it plainly.

  No drama.

  No apology.

  The name alone was enough.

  Erika went still.

  For half a heartbeat, frustration surged up so sharply it nearly cracked through her composure.

  “Of course it was,” she muttered under her breath.

  Her hand dragged down her face, stopping at her jaw as she exhaled sharply.

  “Damn it.”

  Not at Sawyer.

  Never at Lina or Gabriella.

  At the situation.

  At the quiet hour she had dared to enjoy while two of her juniors had to suffer.

  Her boot struck lightly against the leg of the table—not enough to move it, just enough to ground herself.

  “It couldn’t have been something simple,” she whispered to herself. “No. It had to be that.”

  Her gaze flicked to Sawyer.

  “Did you kill it?”

  He replied with a single word.

  “Yes.”

  She closed her eyes briefly, tension bleeding out in a tight breath.

  “Good,” she said.

  Then her focus snapped fully back to the present.

  “Lock the doors,” she ordered. “No one else comes in.”

  Her hands moved with practiced efficiency now, checking Lina’s pulse properly, lifting Gabriella’s chin to inspect her eyes.

  “Set both of them flat on the ground. Get me clean water. And cloth. Now.”

  Her frustration didn’t fade.

  It was redirected.

  Into motion.

  Into control.

  Sawyer scrambled in his own right as he searched for the items Erika requested. She realized his confusion and gave him a different task.

  “Wait. Nevermind, go and get father Francis. We need a High priest to treat the one with blue hair.”

  She received a simple nod before she was left alone to care for the two.

  The quietest hour of the guild was gone—and in its place was the reason the guild existed at all. Camaraderie.