The next day, Bram ended up at the Stone of Accord without meaning to.

The Stone of Accord sat in a small plaza in the heart of the Verge, surrounded by tenements that had seen better centuries. It was maybe three feet tall, grey granite worn smooth by weather and hands. Nothing special about it, really, just a block of stone with words carved into its face in letters that were half-eroded by time.

Bram had passed it a thousand times growing up. Had used it as a landmark, a meeting place, a spot to sit when the tenement got too loud. But he'd never really looked at it before.

The inscription was in Old Reach script, the language Kithari elders still spoke when they didn't want outsiders understanding. Bram's grandmother had taught him enough to read it, though he was rusty.

He knelt in front of the stone and traced the letters with his finger.

Here was sworn the First Accord between the Children of Earth and the Wardens of Truth. In partnership, not dominion. In balance, not conquest. Let those who come after remember: we were not enemies but kin.

Partnership. Balance. Kin.

The official histories said the Binding Wars had been necessary. That dragons had ruled tyrannically, that humanity had risen up in justified rebellion, that the Kithari had been liberated from draconic oppression.

But this stone, carved by Kithari hands, in Kithari language, long before the Gilded wrote their version of events, told a different story.

Not liberation. Betrayal.

Not enemies. Kin.

Bram sat back on his heels, staring at the weathered words.

What if the partnership had been real? What if the "liberation" had actually been the moment everything broke? What if the Binding Wars weren't a triumph but a wound that had never healed, just been covered over with propaganda and pretty words and three hundred years of insisting the lie was truth?

A woman's voice spoke from behind him.

"They wanted to remove it, you know. Twenty years ago. Called it 'historically inaccurate.'"

Bram turned.

An old woman sat on a nearby bench, Kithari, her skin darker than his, her hair white and wrapped in red cloth. She held a basket of mending in her lap, her hands moving with automatic precision even as she watched him.

"Why didn't they?" Bram asked.

"Because we sat on it." She smiled, showing gaps where teeth had been. "Thirty of us, oldest folks in the Verge. Sat right here for three days. Wouldn't move. Eventually they decided it wasn't worth the trouble."

She set down her mending and studied him with eyes that were sharp despite their age.

"You're the Stagg boy. The one who went to the Academy."

"Yes, ma'am."

"How'd that work out?"

Bram's laugh was bitter. "Not well."

"Hmm." She returned to her mending. "My grandson went too. Different year. He was brilliant. Top of his class in structural theory. They failed him anyway. Said his magic was too 'terrestrial.' Too much like dirt and not enough like light."

She said it matter-of-factly, like stating the weather.

"What happened to him?" Bram asked.

"He took a job with the Pistonheart. Died in a coolant leak five years later. He was twenty-six." She pulled thread through fabric, her movements steady. "They sent us a letter saying he'd been a valued employee. Used the word 'unfortunate' three times."

Silence settled between them, heavy with all the things that couldn't be said but everyone knew.

"You thinking about jumping?" the old woman asked.

Bram startled. "What?"

"I've seen that look before. On my grandson's face, couple weeks before the leak. On my daughter's face before she walked into the canal. On half the young people in the Verge who can't figure out how to keep living in a world that keeps telling them they're wrong-shaped." She looked at him directly. "So I'm asking: you thinking about jumping?"

Bram's throat closed up. He hadn't been thinking about it consciously. But his feet had carried him to high places the last few nights. The tenement roof. The bridge over the Below's main canal. Places where gravity offered a solution to problems that had no other answers.

"I don't know," he said honestly.

The old woman nodded like this was a reasonable response. "Well. If you decide to, do it somewhere that won't traumatize children. And maybe leave a note for your mama so she doesn't spend the rest of her life wondering if she could've done something different."

She said it without judgment, without trying to talk him out of it, just offering practical advice about the logistics of despair.

It was the strangest kindness anyone had shown him in days.

"But maybe don't," she added, returning to her mending. "Maybe stick around and see what happens. Sometimes the world surprises you. Usually not in good ways, but sometimes."

Bram looked back at the Stone of Accord, at the words about partnership and balance and kinship between humans and dragons.

"Do you think it's true?" he asked. "What the stone says?"

"Does it matter?" The old woman tied off a thread, bit it clean. "True or not, believing it kept my people alive when the Gilded wanted us erased. Believing we were kin to something powerful, something that couldn't be completely destroyed, that's what let us survive."

She stood, gathering her basket.

"Maybe the dragons are all dead and gone, boy. Maybe the stones are lying. But the lie kept us breathing when the truth would've killed us." She touched his shoulder as she passed. "You find a lie that keeps you breathing, you hold onto it until something better comes along."

She walked away, leaving Bram alone with the memorial to a partnership that might never have existed, to a kinship that might have been propaganda from the losing side of a war.

But it was the first thing in five days that had felt like it might be worth believing.

🐉

For several nights, sleep stopped working properly.

Bram would lie in his attic crawlspace, listening to the Pistonheart's rhythm through the building's bones, thump-thump, thump-thump, and feel like he was being counted down. Like the heartbeat was marking time until something inevitable happened, something he couldn't see but could feel approaching.

The space felt smaller every night. The sloped ceiling pressed down. The gaps in the boards let in cold air that smelled like smog and other people's coal smoke. The sounds of the Verge, the Karpovs' leak, the Cuttles' arguments, babies crying, couples fighting, the endless ambient noise of too many people in too little space, infiltrated his skull until he couldn't tell where the city ended and his thoughts began.

The dreams, when they came, were worse than wakefulness.

He dreamed of filing cabinets that stretched into infinity, each drawer full of names that turned to ash when he touched them. He dreamed of the Aethelian Node, cracking and cracking and cracking, the fractures spreading until the entire examination hall shattered like glass. He dreamed of Rosalie Radcliffe taking notes while he drowned in a pool of his own magic, her pen moving in precise strokes, cataloging his dissolution.

And underneath all of it, a sound he couldn't quite hear, not with his ears, but with something deeper. A vibration. A presence. Something vast and patient and waiting.

The magic didn't help.

It was getting harder to control, or maybe he was getting worse at trying. Small incidents kept happening, accumulating like evidence of his fundamental wrongness.

When he got angry, which happened more often now, sharp and sudden, over nothing things, lights flickered. When he touched metal, it warmed under his palm. When he walked through the Verge at night, his shadow stretched too long, at angles that didn't match his body.

Once, standing in the kitchen while his mother washed dishes, he'd felt the flood start to build. The pressure in his chest, the heat in his hands, the feeling of water behind a dam that was cracking.

The bowl in his mother's hands had started to vibrate.

Just slightly. Just enough that water sloshed against the sides, that her grip tightened, that her eyes went wide.

Bram had fled to his attic before anything worse could happen.

Idina didn't mention it. She just dried the bowl carefully and put it away, her hands shaking.

The next morning, she'd tried to comfort him.

"It's not the end," she said, touching his arm while he picked at breakfast he couldn't eat. "You're brilliant, Bram. Something will work out. It has to."

But her hands shook when she said it.

She was lying, and they both knew it, and the lie was getting harder to maintain with every day that passed without work, without prospects, without any evidence that the world had space for what he was.

🐉