Chapter 281: Daybreak

"It's not dead," Mr. Hutton said, leaning on his student, barely able to stand.

"It's waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"Waiting for the one behind it to finish it off."

A chill ran down Richard's neck.

That pupilless eye was about to wake.

At the center of the ritual, Mrs. MacNeil pushed herself halfway up.

She pressed her left hand to the ground, her right still gripping the opening of the Anchor Network.

She looked up and glanced toward Mr. Hutton.

"Hold on."

The medium didn't move her lips; her voice spoke directly into Richard's ears.

The next moment, the Bone Bracelet on MacNeil's wrist lit up on its own.

The faded white glow of that Bone Bracelet had always been freezing cold.

But at this moment, a hint of warmth suffused the light, as if someone had breathed into it from far away.

The Silver Ring against Richard's chest also began to grow warm.

17 Flower Moon Street, Imperial Capital.

Inside the room that was never locked, yet could not be entered without permission.

The mistress of the house, who had been sitting motionless with her tea, set her cup down.

Richard looked around.

The mirrors behind the veil, every puddle that could cast a reflection, the window glass, the damp peeling walls... all simultaneously reflected the same indistinct figure.

A gray dress, hair gathered up, her features obscured by a layer of old fog.

Through Richard's Perception, the entire North District sank slightly.

"Turn the mirrors away."

A voice rang out through his Inspiration.

Following that single sentence, every mirror, puddle, and pane of glass in the Flipside turned away, no longer facing the tens of thousands of faces in the North District.

Even at this stage, she kept to her rule: the price of the mystical side must never be pushed onto the guests.

The very first thing she did upon appearing was move her guests out of the way.

She turned and looked at her disciple.

"Your junior brother's registry is very well written."

The medium flinched.

Madam Marie didn't say another word. She began to chant names to clean up the aftermath.

The first verse.

"You who sit at the shadowless noon, you who share the origin of light."

As those words fell, the night sky—stained by decades of chimney smoke—cracked open.

A sliver of the palest gold shone through the rift.

It pressed firmly down on the layer of ether that belonged to darkness and replacement this night.

"You who once divided day from night with a single glance."

The golden thread widened.

The water behind the veil was split into an above and a below.

Previously, once the pitch-black ditch water entered the Flipside, it became a bottomless realm of drowning.

Now, an impossibly fine, paper-thin layer of golden sand appeared on its surface, separating the top from the bottom.

The shadows in the water, caught by Mr. Reeve's silver thread, were drawn back up along this layer of golden sand.

They stood on the water's surface—half submerged, half above.

"You whose eyes burned to ash, whose flesh and blood became a torch, leaving only eternal light to shine upon the world."

As the final verse was intoned... every clock in the city simultaneously struck twelve.

Physically, it was the dead of night.

Whether it was two or three in the morning, the wall clocks should have pointed to the actual hour.

Yet in that instant, every clock in Briston, large and small, snapped to twelve o'clock.

The boundary between day and night was redrawn.

"You who stand in the eternally bright heart of the hearth, you who are one with the fire."

There was a second chant.

It was still Madam Marie chanting, but the tone of this verse was entirely different.

The first chant had been clean, cold gold.

This chant sank deep, carrying the residual heat of a smelting furnace that had been smothered for centuries.

"You who once divided the tangible from the intangible with a single hammer strike."

The ringing of a hammer strike echoed out. Drops of crimson seeped up from beneath the golden sand layer across the entire Flipside.

It was the dull red glow from the deepest depths of a furnace.

"You whose bones became the anvil, whose blood became the cast, leaving only the hearth fire to burn eternally upon the world."

The instant that final line was chanted...

The furnaces in the North District, the still-lit gas lamps, the unextinguished embers in household hearths—they all flared up simultaneously.

The flames all leaned in the same direction.

They tilted toward that humiliated entity on the far shore.

A Virtuoso of the Hearth Fire Tradition.

Just like the Sun, this figure was not in the city; both were far away.

They had simply followed Madam Marie's chant, lending the "attention" they had left in the area.

With the two honorable names chanted, the water of the Black Trench became transparent to the bottom.

At the bottom of this decades-old sewage trench, every white bone buried in the sludge was illuminated with perfect clarity.

The tiny skeletons of children;

The thick, heavy bones of workers, scarred around the joints;

The pelves of the elderly, as thin as roof tiles;

Corpse after corpse, paved from the floodgates down along the Black Trench to its unseen end.

Light was judgment; to illuminate was to weigh.

Every single white bone was flawlessly illuminated by that layer of light.

The golden thread did not pause for anyone for even half a second.

It swept along the length of the Black Trench.

The dead who answered the call were weighed and reclaimed, one by one, by that gaze.

Mr. Reeve's clothing collapsed within the golden light.

There was no one underneath—only a puddle of black water that quickly evaporated completely.

From an extreme distance, that pupilless eye blinked open.

The still water beneath Richard's feet suddenly sank.

That eye swept its gaze over his patch of still water a few times before slowly withdrawing.

The Sun's golden light had finished its task, and the Hearth Fire's dull red glow settled upon the streets.

The neighborhood that had been crushed by the shockwaves of the Virtuosos' clash, along with the sections that had been dragged into the veil and distorted, were smoothed out.

Half a house that had collapsed into the rift of the veil was pressed back into the material realm;

The wooden beams that had burned to charcoal without bizarrely falling apart knitted their grain back together.

The Hearth Fire stood back up what needed to be stood up, and erased everything that absolutely could not be left in front of mortals.

...In the crushed areas, the roof beams remained slanted inward and downward.

It did not change this detail, nor was there any need to.

..................

But before the dust finally settled, Mrs. Weir from Slag Alley was sleeping rather restlessly tonight.

The old woman was in her sixties and had a bad back.

She hadn't hoarded much coal this year, and by the end of March, there wasn't much left in the coal shed.

Tonight, hearing the long, drawn-out blasts of the factory whistles, she knew something major had happened in the city.

The old woman sat on the edge of her bed, a worn cotton-padded jacket draped over her shoulders.

"Meow..."

The cat in the yard had been missing all night.

"Meow..."

She called out a few times, but the cat didn't answer.

Over by the coal shed, a creak rang out.

Mrs. Weir looked up.

The wooden door of the coal shed hung half-open.

It was pitch black inside.

"Meow?"

She lit her small gas lamp and leaned toward the door.

"Old woman."

A voice drifted out from the coal shed.

Mrs. Weir's hand trembled.

It was her husband's voice.

The old man had been dead for over twenty years.

"Old woman, do we have enough coal for next year?"

The voice continued talking to itself, "Go buy another cart on credit in a couple of months. Pick the good stuff, don't let them fool you."

Mrs. Weir stood in the doorway, cradling the small gas lamp.

In her youth, she and her husband had made their living at the mines. Later, he died of illness during the cholera outbreak that swept across Briston.

She had raised their son all by herself, but then her son passed away too, leaving her alone at the end of this alley.

She had seen everything.

The old woman took two steps into the coal shed with her lamp, then stopped.

She suddenly remembered something.

When her husband was alive, he had never once set foot in the coal shed.

That bastard had thought the shed was too dirty.

No matter how cold the winter got, he had always made his wife go to the shed to fetch coal while he sat inside smoking his pipe.

"Old woman."

The voice in the coal shed called out once more, "Do we have enough coal?"

Mrs. Weir blew out the lamp.

She reached back and locked the wooden door of the shed.

Once it was secured, she dragged over a small stool and sat on the shed's threshold.

Facing that locked wooden door, she started cursing.

"If you were really him,"

The old woman cursed without pausing for breath, "Then you'd know that what I hate most in this life is people calling my soul in the middle of the night."

"If you were really him,"

"You'd know that he never went into the coal shed."

"If you were really him,"

"You'd know that the key to this shed hangs right on his picture frame during the day. And instead of grabbing it, you run in here to call for me?"

She sat on that stool all night, cursing all night.

The voice in the coal shed never called out to her again for the rest of the night.

During the second half of the night, every factory whistle in the city let out a long, continuous blare.

They blew for the entire night.

One blast drowned out the next, pinning all those faint, whispering "soul-calling voices" across the city firmly beneath the noise of the whistles.

Old Crowley had given the order for the whistles.

During the first half of the night, he had gathered all the major factory owners from the North District, the Western Suburbs, and the docks who knew a little something about the mystical side. Together, they sounded every factory whistle in the city, forming an impregnable fortress of sound.

The roar of industry covered the voices calling out names.

This city had no church bells to protect it, but it had its whistles.

In a small booth over at the shelter, Margaret sat leaning against the wall.

Evelyn's head rested on her mother's lap.

"Mom, the boiler room is so loud."

She mumbled groggily, "Where did we put my bag of flour?"

"It's by your feet," Margaret said, her hand stroking her daughter's hair.

"Oh."

Evelyn closed her eyes again.

She was a completely ordinary person; she couldn't hear those faint, whispering soul-calling voices echoing beneath the city tonight.

But her mother could.

Margaret leaned against the wall, her eyes half-closed.

"Margaret."

A voice called out to her.

She opened her eyes.

Outside, in the main hall of the shelter, hundreds of people were packed tightly into the underground space.

The sounds of coughing, crying children, the humming boiler room, and the blaring factory whistles outside blended together.

Her husband, guarding the entrance to their booth with his Hunting Rifle close at hand, had already fallen fast asleep.

"Margaret."

But now, another man's voice was calling her. It sounded very young.

In his early twenties.

Back when she was still with the Ashford family, doing fieldwork alongside her peers.

There had been a young man back then who was best friends with her eldest brother.

At the age of twenty, he had died on the Northern Highlands during a routine field mission.

She hadn't heard that voice in many, many years.

"Margaret, over here..."

"Our squad is missing one person right now."

"Come over here..."

Margaret looked down at her daughter, sound asleep on her lap.

Evelyn was breathing evenly.

She carefully shifted her daughter's head onto a nearby duffel bag.

Then, she straightened up and walked toward the small, locked door.

After two steps, she stopped.

She turned and glanced down at her feet.

Bending down, she took off her wool boots.

She placed them upside down, soles facing up, against the threshold of the hall.

With upside-down shoes, spirits couldn't recognize the direction of the home's entrance.

It was an old custom passed down from the Celtic priests, older than the Empire itself.

She walked back to where she and Evelyn had been sitting.

She dug out the spare shoes she had packed in their luggage, placing them upside down in the corners, pair by pair.

Then, from the very bottom of the duffel bag, she pulled out a small bottle.

Inside the bottle was coarse salt.

Margaret poured a ring of coarse salt around the small spot where Evelyn lay, and then scattered another ring around her husband.

When she was done, she sat back down and gently moved her daughter's little head back onto her lap.

"Mom," Evelyn murmured in her sleep.

"Yes?"

"Where are your shoes?"

"Mom isn't cold," Margaret said. "Go to sleep."

"Oh."

Evelyn fell back asleep.

Margaret didn't close her eyes for the rest of the night.

That voice called out to her countless more times.

Later, the voice asked, "Margaret, what is your daughter's name?"

Margaret looked down at Evelyn.

She began to talk to Evelyn.

"When you were five, you opened Mom's jar of rock sugar all by yourself. You grabbed a handful and stuffed it into your mouth, but you silly child, you choked on a piece so big it got stuck in your windpipe."

"I called your father home in a panic. He was so terrified he didn't even take off his hat; he just scooped you up and ran three streets over to the clinic."

She recounted one story, and then another.

The little embarrassments of Evelyn's childhood:

Spilling a bag of flour all over the floor;

Dropping her mother's silver thimble down the drain;

Tearing a page out of her brother's workbook to draw rabbits.

Trying to bake cookies for the first time and pulling out a tray of charcoal, crying in the kitchen out of sheer frustration.

Margaret told these stories one by one, right up until the sky began to lighten.

The factory whistles never stopped.

Evelyn would occasionally be woken up by the noise, only to roll over and fall right back asleep.

That voice called to Margaret all night long.

And for that entire night, she didn't answer it once.

As dawn approached, the voice began to fade.

Its final words were very soft: "Have you been living well?"

Margaret kept her head down, looking at the daughter in her arms.

She answered in her heart, 'I've been living very well.'

The voice dissipated.

Margaret leaned down and pressed her face into her daughter's hair.

The sweet scent of butter still lingered in Evelyn's hair.

Outside the shelter, the morning light gradually washed over the city's rooftops.

The clatter of a coal cart's iron wheels drifted over from a distant street.

One rumble after another.

In Briston, day had broken.