I used to think power made people evil.
But now I see—it's not the power.
It's the *purpose.*
The names move through the city like knives in shadow.
*Calin of the Gilded Vow*
*Yvenna, Twin-Tongue*
*Marrow, the Glass Whisperer*
*Thorne the Gravedancer*
Four seals. Four enemies.
At least, that's what I believed.
Lira and I split the work.
We don't strike.
We *listen.*
We *watch.*
Calin parades as a king of coin and cruelty, all smug grins and velvet threats.
But beneath the show, he's siphoning gold from crooked nobles and feeding it to the gutters—into bread ovens, clinics, warm beds. Quiet, clean help for people no one else sees.
"Why the mask?" I ask Lira.
"Because mercy is weakness in the Threadless," she replies.
Yvenna lies with the ease of breathing.
But her lies protect messengers—truth-bearers hunted in alleys. She forges false letters, arranges fake deaths, builds escape routes into her riddles.
A silver tongue, yes. But she uses it like armor.
Her sister burned in the Threadless purge.
She swore no one else would die voiceless.
Marrow doesn't speak. Not with his mouth. Not since he sewed it shut.
But his silence is not emptiness.
It's *storage.*
His sanctum holds vaults of stolen truths—recordings, spells, forbidden testimonies.
I see a list of defectors he's hidden. Names etched into bone.
He's archiving rot.
Waiting for a day he can bury it in light.
Thorne has a reputation soaked in death.
The Gravedancer, they call him.
But I find him in a graveyard he built himself—one name at a time.
He carves their stories into stone. Murmurs over bones.
A priest of consequence.
Not pride.
I expected monsters.
Instead, I found people chained by guilt, by fear, by duty twisted too far.
Not innocent. Not clean.
But not lost.
I return to the safehouse before sunrise.
Wren waits by the window. Eyes sharp. Hopeful.
"You learned something," she says.
I nod.
"I thought they were beyond saving."
"And now?"
"I'm not sure."
Later, alone, I feel the ring warm against my skin.
It hums—not loud, not urgent. But *present.*
Like it's *listening.*
I think back to what it's shown me since the day I slipped it on.
I've felt it *break iron* with a pulse.
*Light a path* through blind darkness.
*Sharpen my senses* until I saw attacks before they landed.
*Track someone I couldn't see,* not with my eyes, but through something deeper.
I've felt it *bend space,* *echo voices,* *turn fear back on those who wield it.*
And never once has it lied.
It never *speaks.*
But it *acts.*
Each time I needed something—I didn't even have to ask.
It *knew.*
Tonight, it hums with something new.
Not aggression.
Not judgment.
Something closer to... *choice.*
It's telling me the truth:
I don't have to kill them.
Not yet.
Because this ring wasn't made for war alone.
It was made for *command.*
And when I close my hand around its weight, I understand—
It doesn't just break chains.
It *fastens them* too.