The silence that fell over Fish Street was unnatural. It was broken only by the high, singing whine of the golden binding runes stretched taut across the carrier’s back. Pella Rook knelt in the white stone dust twelve inches from the entity’s craggy stone flank. Her apprentice wand remained in her tool apron, unused and unneeded. She closed her eyes, tuning out the murmuring crowd, the distant bells of the High Terraces, and the rattle of Eren’s tools. She was listening for the spaces in between.
Her pause sensitivity—the very trait that the College test judges had branded a fatal defect and a sign of spiritual weakness—was now her main instrument. When academy summoners spoke, they shouted nonstop loops of forcing golden syntax, drowning out the spirit’s natural deep ring with ear-splitting magical pressure. But every clockwork system, even a magical binding, had a sound return. Every pulse had an interval. Every breath had a breath out.
She heard it clearly now: a tiny, heartbeat gap between the pulse of the main binding glyph and the feedback return from the granite block. The golden light flared crimson for three hundred split seconds, died to dull amber for fifty split seconds, then flared again. In that split-second pause, the spirit was not bound. It was simply listening in the dark.
