20 · Beneath the Weight of Roots

side chamber was a kitchen.

Pots hung from corroded hooks. A row of marks on the wall measured children's heights. Ivara lit another lamp and discovered the last all belonged to one year: families stopped staying long enough to watch them grow.

On the hearth was a stone carved with a name that looked like a recipe. The mage read it twice before understanding it was a prayer. It asked Ilyndra to let the bread rise without the damp rotting it. Her mother's language, used for something so simple, tightened her throat.

Ivara had not disowned her origins. That was what she always said when someone suggested it. She learned the old languages, studied their songs and fought errors in catalogues. But she avoided speaking like her mother in important rooms. She mocked her superstitions about empty pots. Once she returned home hungry and corrected a word before embracing her.

The woman died two years before Ivara received her post. Her last letter asked whether her daughter had enough winter

clothes. Ivara took nine days to answer because she sought the least offensive way to ask her not to send more handmade garments.

She sat beside the hearth. The abandoned kitchen offered no forgiveness. She did not know who lived there. It might have been someone who despised her mother for being poor. Yet there was a language she had reduced to childhood shame, asking that the bread not spoil.

Neris sat opposite.

“I don't know how to cook what my grandmother made either.”

Ivara gave an involuntary laugh.

“This isn't a recipe.”

“Doesn't matter. If she were alive, she'd still reproach me.”

The mage read the prayer aloud. Her college accent altered the vowels. She stopped and began again, remembering her mother arguing with a shopkeeper. The words recovered a rhythm absent from every treatise.

Beran found a blocked drain beneath the hearth. He dug out soil with his chisel. Water began receding and exposed a strip of children's drawings: a boat with legs, a large-eared figure, a sun

that looked afraid.

Elyen crouched to look. He had taught a nephew to draw animals. During the last campaigns, he and his father argued so much he stopped visiting the children. He had no right to blame them for that absence.

He took out paper to copy the animal boat. Perhaps he would bring it to the boy if he could find a first sentence that was not a defence.

Before leaving, Teren picked a pot off the floor and put it on the hearth. He did not know for whom. It seemed a less intrusive way to honour the house than consecrating it to his own god.

Darkness covered the kitchen again when they put out the lamp. This time none mistook it for a place that had always been empty.

In a niche they discovered the portrait of a dwarven woman with a hammer in her lap. The name was Hara. She had been buried without her right arm.

Beran sat before her.

“They always said she escaped

by the river.”

The gravestone bore a text in two hands: “She stayed. She could not save everyone.” Beneath it, a third had added: “That did not make her stop trying.”

Hara's story was written on the adjoining wall within an unadorned frame.

She did not die in the Hall of the Pact. She held the door while Madruga escaped, then left with three guards through the water corridor. She lost her arm when a beam trapped her while climbing to the refugees' neighbourhoods. They took her to the Barrows because it was the only shelter that could stay dry.

She lived forty-six days.

Beran read the figure several times. He had imagined an instant death, a final hammer blow, something one could recite without speaking of the time a person must go on having a body after catastrophe.

Hara argued with her carers because they would not let her get up to inspect a wall. She complained about the food. Dictated plans. Asked them not to credit her with

saving people she had never managed to see.

In one note, the woman who tended her wrote that she dreamed of water every night and sometimes insulted those who tried to wake her.

The engineer sat on the floor.

He did not find in her a version of himself meant to prove he would survive with dignity. There was a person before him who had also had the right to be unbearable, not to want to learn, to ask for help too late.

Ivara read a correction to the plans aloud. Hara had struck out “action of the custodian” and dictated “actions of the custodians.” The copyist kept both because she insisted the change be visible.

She trusted neither a kindly lineage nor a superior city. She wanted maintaining the stones to require separate wills, capable of interrupting one another.

Serik stared at the text.

“A shared order can still be wrong.”

“Yes,” Maera said. “But at least someone has to persuade more than one person.”

They did not present

it as a solution to power. It was an obstacle built by a woman who had seen what happened when obstacles were removed to act faster.

Beran laid the bell beside the gravestone and picked it up a moment later. He had wanted to honour her by parting with something loved, as in stories. The idea felt foreign as soon as he saw the object on the stone.

“It's mine,” he murmured.

No one argued.

Before leaving, he wrote down the forty-six days. If he ever spoke of Hara in the mines again, he would begin by saying she had to live them.

They found no key in her tomb. They found conduit plans and a warning about the seals: boundary pieces could be moved between anchors, but must be seated by wills willing not to own the passage. Repeating a sentence would not suffice if actions denied it. Each stone kept the bond between those who opened it.

“A machine that demands honesty,” Maera said. “Someone should have warned

them about us.”

Beran shook his head.

“It demands that no one can operate it alone. The rest comes afterwards.”

In the Oath Crypts, weapons stood driven into the ground and cloth wrapped unembalmed bodies. These were not the great lords of the tales. Their monuments stood nearer the entrance. Here rested those who had made them keep their promises.

The suits of armour began moving when Serik crossed the central circle. There were no bodies inside. Old bonds of watch still clung to the iron.

“What did you swear?” a voice asked from the wall.

The paladin raised his shield.

“To protect those who cannot protect themselves.”

“On whose orders?”

Serik looked at the swords turning towards him.

“That's what I came to find out.”

The first blade struck his shield's rim. The sound was lost among the roots.