The first white step was warm beneath Neris’s hand.
Heat traveled through the stone in a slow pulse, like blood moving through an enormous buried body. The names carved along the stair shone silver in its wake. Each belonged to a person who had stood here before Valdyr existed, before the observatory, before the academy had learned to call hunger a tradition.
Sella leaned hard against Neris as they descended. Ilyra followed with one arm around Sella’s waist, while the rescued students crowded behind them. Their boots scraped the narrow steps. Above, the broken lens room receded into a circle of snow-bright light.
“Read them,” Sella whispered.
Neris touched the nearest inscription with two fingers.
The name entered her like a struck bell.
Eydrun.
She saw a woman kneeling in darkness, palms pressed to a door of black stone. Around her stood eleven others. They wore no crowns and held no weapons. Their faces were young. Their robes were patched at the elbows. One man had blood running from both ears as something on the other side of the door scraped against the world.
A voice spoke from beyond the seal.
Give me the names, and I will keep the door.
Eydrun opened her mouth. The vision broke.
Neris jerked her hand away, breathing through the pain in her skull.
“What did you see?” Ilyra asked.
“A bargain.” Neris looked down the stair. “The first one.”
Sella’s fingers tightened around her sleeve. “The names show what the stone remembers. Keep moving.”
“You knew this was here.”
“I knew there were wardens. The lattice showed me their shapes and the order of the steps. It never showed me their faces.” Sella swallowed. “It showed me what happened after they gave themselves away.”
The next name waited beneath Neris’s hand.
Kjarran.
She left it untouched.
The stair curved around the well’s inner wall. Beneath the steps, a shaft dropped beyond the reach of the white light. Foundation commands streamed down through it in pale threads, the academy’s gathered authority winding toward the dark. They brushed the names without entering them.
At the sixth step, one of the rescued students stumbled. Ilyra caught him before his shoulder struck the wall.
“Stay close,” she said. Her voice had become hoarse. “The stair is choosing where it puts its weight.”
A tremor ran beneath their feet. Three steps ahead, a name blurred. The carved letters loosened and began to crawl across the stone like pale insects.
Neris reached for it.
“Don’t,” Sella said.
The name vanished before Neris’s fingers touched the step.
Below, the lock knocked.
The sound rose through the shaft and drew a red line across the seam beneath Neris’s throat. Her jaw clenched. The line pressed upward, seeking the place where her name lived.
“Neris Vey,” Ilyra said sharply.
The words struck through the pressure.
Neris turned. Ilyra stood two steps below, one hand braced on the wall and the other gripping the shoulder of the boy she had caught.
“Say it again,” Neris said.
“Neris Vey.”
Sella lifted her head. “Neris Vey.”
The students joined them, uncertain at first. Then their voices gathered in the shaft.
“Neris Vey. Neris Vey. Neris Vey.”
The red line beneath Neris’s throat shuddered. The ancient pressure retreated a fraction.
The academy had spent years reducing students to ranks, vessels, and measured yield. Here, in the old well, a name spoken by another person carried more weight than any foundation command.
Neris placed her palm over the mark. “Keep doing that if I stop answering.”
Ilyra’s face tightened. “That is not a reassuring instruction.”
“It’s the one I have.”
Sella gave a thin, breathless laugh that ended in a cough. Ilyra steadied her while Neris continued down.
At the bottom of the stair, the well opened into a chamber older than the mountain’s dressed foundations. The walls were made of pale stone veined with dark mineral. Twelve pillars surrounded a circular pit. Each pillar bore a name at its base, and each name had been cut through with a second inscription in a later hand.
The first names were deep and careful.
The later ones were titles.
Warden. Keeper. Sovereign. Judge. All-Father. Queen of the Dead. Storm-Bearer.
The titles had been carved over the people until the original letters nearly disappeared.
Neris understood then. The Starving Court had not begun as gods. They had been made into gods by the weight of their bargain, by centuries of worship and sacrifice and the academy’s insistence that their masks were more important than the faces beneath them.
“They gave their names to the door,” she said.
Sella stared at the pillars. “And the Court took what remained.”
Ilyra descended the last step. “The gods were the wardens?”
“The wardens became the gods.” Neris moved closer to the nearest pillar. “Valdyr fed them students so they could keep existing. The original seal never needed a harvest.”
A sound came from the pit.
Stone dragged over stone.
Every foundation command above them tightened. The white threads pouring through the well pulled toward the circular opening. The chamber’s pillars flickered, and the later titles began to glow.
The lock knocked again.
This time, one of the twelve pillars cracked from top to bottom.
The name beneath it vanished.
The title remained.
A voice entered the chamber without crossing the air. It spoke through the spaces between the students’ names.
OPEN.
The boy beside Ilyra screamed. Two others dropped to their knees, clutching their heads. Their names slipped from their mouths in broken pieces, syllables falling away before they could finish them.
Neris stepped into the circle.
The unfinished mark at her throat opened like a thin red door. Cold rushed through her chest. The circular pit showed her a depth beyond stone, a place where distinctions had worn down to a single pressure. The presence beyond the lock was not asking for a vessel. It wanted a way to enter a world where every name could be rubbed smooth.
Her feet moved toward the pit.
Sella seized the back of her coat. “The center.”
Neris stopped.
“What?”
“The stair sequence ends here. The old wardens stood around the center. The lock needs a witness between the names.” Sella’s grip weakened, but she did not let go. “It will try to make you the missing warden.”
“I know.”
“No. You know what it wants. You don’t know what it costs.” Sella’s eyes were fever-bright. “If you stand there, the mark will finish. You’ll become a door with a person’s memory trapped behind it.”
The foundation commands pulled harder. Above them, stone groaned. Valdyr was feeding its remaining authority into the well, and the old names were beginning to fail one by one.
Neris looked at the students gathered against the wall. They had followed her because the academy had hunted them. They had no weapons for this chamber, no lattice, no divine title to protect them. Their only defense was the names they kept saying aloud.
Sorn had offered to make Neris part of Valdyr’s story. The presence beneath the lock offered to make her part of its mechanism.
She stepped into the center.
Sella’s hand fell away.
The mark beneath Neris’s throat completed its outer curve. Pain drove her to one knee. The pit opened beneath the circle, and the chamber filled with voices speaking names that were not names anymore.
Neris pressed both palms to the stone.
Her unmaking magic spread outward.
She touched the foundation commands first. They carried Valdyr’s old instructions: retain, rank, intensify, offer. Neris pulled the words apart and left the force behind. The commands collapsed into strands of clean magical pressure, stripped of every student’s designation.
Then she reached for the twelve pillars.
The titles resisted. They had been fed for centuries. They carried worship, fear, and the Court’s terrible authority.
Neris began with the oldest name she had seen.
“Eydrun.”
The first pillar answered.
A woman’s face appeared in the pale stone. She looked exhausted, furious, and unmistakably human.
“Kjarran.”
The second pillar answered.
One by one, Neris spoke the buried names. Sella supplied the order when Neris faltered. Ilyra took up the last three with a voice that shook but did not break. The rescued students kept repeating Neris’s name behind them.
The old wardens woke inside their pillars.
The later titles cracked.
From beneath the pit came a roar without sound. The presence struck upward, and the red seam at Neris’s throat split her skin. Blackness reached through the mark, searching for the center of her.
Neris seized the remaining academy force and drove it into the ring of awakened names.
The foundation commands wrapped around the pillars instead of the pit. They became a brace, immense and unstable, holding the old lock closed without claiming a single living student.
The pressure on Neris’s name broke.
The presence withdrew below the stone.
The final title fell from the twelfth pillar.
For a moment, the chamber held only the original names and the sound of people breathing.
Then a voice spoke from the pit, closer than before.
“Wardens fail.”
Neris rose, blood running beneath her collar.
“Then we’ll build something that isn’t one.”
The lock struck the underside of the chamber.
Above them, somewhere in the observatory, the academy began to lose its bells.
Next
With the old wardens briefly restored to their names and the academy’s commands bound around them, Neris must learn what Valdyr’s failing bells are calling before the Sleeper finds another way through.