Thirty breaths remained before the falling sliver of pale light reached the cedar roof edges of the hillside shrine. As the four of them sprinted down the frost-crusted mule track toward the shrine’s terraced walls. Meanwhile, Soran took her station on the high rock spur above the hospice gorge, Seyun risked a glance upward. High over the northern ridge, the backup facets of the sky-slit ring were shifting in a distinct, hungry rhythm. Ignoring Daro’s Early Jade and Ilyra’s Deeper Bronze as they searched the hillside for one clear signed name.
For three hundred years, first across the contested valleys of the old sects and then through twenty winters wired into the Hollow Summit, every crisis in these mountains had ended the same way: Nara Soth stepping into the center of the sky to take the full weight of judgment onto her own shoulders. Her captors had counted on that reflex. The Listening Crown had been engineered around it. And even now, the dropping blade tilted its upper edge three degrees westward. It waited for her Crown aura to flare above the shrine roof so the upper ring could lock its permanent anchor onto her.
At the stone steps where the upper terrace path split from the muddy lower courtyard gate, Daro Kesh paused half a beat and looked back at the white-haired woman. “The roof ridge gives the cleanest line if you intend to meet it in the air, Nara.”
