Seyun didn’t step all the way back through the upper bronze door.
Instead, he sat on the third cast-bronze tread below the upper threshold. There, he could brace his open Account Book against the curve of the stairwell wall, hear every breath of the twelve testers in the warm vault below his boots, and listen to Nara Soth’s voice in the freezing starlight three feet above his head.
Inside the ring of thirty-six star-fallen iron needles, Nara Soth looked from Ilyra’s grounded spear to the top of Seyun’s head visible in the open doorway.
“You’re asking why I fought Balance for two hundred winters, White Bough girl,” Nara said. Her voice carried clearly into both chambers through the hollow bronze column so that even Mina and Mother Renn below paused by the third bed to listen. “To understand how the abbey rotted, you have to understand what Sel Oran was actually trying to build three hundred winters ago—before anyone carved a rule onto a stone tablet.”
She lifted her chin slightly toward the spear-width opening in the apex of the dome. There, the winter wind hummed across the mountain crest.
“You have all heard the trial elders in Oran talk about Heaven’s Measure as if it were a judge sitting on a cloud with a pair of brass scales,” Nara said. “Sel Oran was an array mason before he was a fighter. He spent forty years walking the northern fault lines from the salt sea to the high passes, measuring…
