The Extra's Rise

The second day began before the sun had the right to be up.

At 03:17, sensors along the Iron Line ticked from green to amber in a rolling wave. The Abyssal Kin came back in blocks, not streams. Their timing was tighter. Their lines looked cleaner.

Sable drew the new picture without commentary: three hard pushes at Duskline, Ironveil, and Blue Sluice, plus gnaws along tiles where the fence ran through bad ground. New icons appeared on the feed—rib frames fitted with hanging bells, null-priests in lacquer black with salt-white gloves.

"Hymn cannons," the Minister of Wards said. "They attack ward harmonics. Choir is ready."

On the ward floor, thirty elders took their places. The Aetherite core thrummed low. Engineers ran the counter-hymn patch again and set a fresh kettle on a hotplate.

"Nyx to Ironveil," Lyralei said, already pulling her helmet on. "Griffons hold Blue Sluice. I'll plug the first hole."

Marcus met Ian's eyes. The prince didn't need the invite. He was already moving.

"Duskline," Marcus said anyway, because saying it made it true for everyone else. "I anchor ground. You take the air. Same rules. No solos. No dead bravery."

"Yes, Father."

The flights launched into a sky lit by ward-tower pulses and drone lanes. The fence lights drew a faint line through the fog. In the pass, hymn cannons rang. The sound didn't boom. It rolled. Small, ugly ripples shivered across the road to the fence. The lights dimmed and came back as the choir's note swelled to catch the fall.

"Hold," Marcus said. His voice filled the inner net, steady as a drum that knew what it was for. The warders on the anchors straightened their hands and kept them there.

The Abyssal Kin poured out of the haze. Priests stepped, rang, stepped. Infantry threw black hooks at the fence and found no purchase. The salt-veiled things loped on all fours and left no prints. The rib-cage engines raised the bells higher, searching for the note that would open a seam.

Ian cut high and precise. Silver took left. Bronze took right. Gold hammered a wedge until it forgot it was a wedge and became two lines. Shock-lances cracked. Gliders fell like broken toys and did not rise.

"Watch the bells," Ian said. "If they cluster, break the cluster. The fence breathes after that."

They broke clusters. The fence breathed.

Ironveil went loud. Lyralei's bikes moved in two files along the strip her scouts had marked hard an hour earlier. The sand smiled under their wheels—one flex, then another. She didn't look down. She jumped the grin, landed on the other side, and cut through lacquer and matte plate where it met flesh. Behind her, Sand Viper sappers drove stakes and threw coils. When the sand tried to move again, it found a grid under its skin and stayed still.

Blue Sluice pushed back water like it had been built for nothing else. The membranes flexed, flexed again, and held. The wardhouse piped the counter-melody into the canal. Fish shook themselves and darted away. Storm-Griffons dove, made their cracks count, and climbed. One rider slipped again and slid across the membrane to the rail like a kid on a winter hill. He made a face at the camera and climbed back up. The clip went to the line. It wasn't strategy. It was breath.

Hours turned into sweat and habit. War did what war always does: tried to turn men into numbers. The South refused to let that happen. Casualties stayed low. The choir's note never failed. Engineers swapped overheated cores before they tripped. Medics worked in rhythm. The Iron Line did its job.

At 09:22, Duskline changed.

The air went thin. Drones drifted and corrected. The choir's note trembled for a heartbeat and then went steady again because thirty old women with rings on their fingers refused to give an inch. Sable drew three new lines on the ridge—no source, no trail, no label.

"Unknown," Sable said. "Not in catalog."

Marcus lifted his head. He didn't look confused. He looked like a man handing a knife to his own hand.

Ian felt it before the screens caught it. The world changed weight. His drake's chest hitched and then found a breath. His hands went dry against the grips. He had fought men. He had fought engines and songs. He had not fought pressure that felt like weather deciding to be mean.

A dark patch walked along the ridge. It didn't have legs. It moved anyway. Salt banners lifted without wind. Null-priests stopped ringing and bowed, all at once, to a thing that had not finished deciding how to stand.

"Back," Marcus said into the net. "Warders, anchors. Choir, close. Flights, no tricks. We hold until we can't."

Ian wanted to glance at his father. He didn't. He raised Gold to a height where he could see the whole pass and not the dark patch, because looking at it tugged at a part of his thinking that drew straight lines.

The ridge dimmed. Not shadow. Lack. Every sensor logged the lack and tried to describe it and could not. Sable put one word in a clean box: unclassified. The pressure rose. The ward-lights dimmed and steadied. The hymn cannons went quiet like someone had put a cup over them. The null-priests opened their mouths and began to sing something without words that still made the throat hurt.

Ian's knees felt light. His hands stayed steady. He guided his drake with the reins and with the trust they had between them. He had never seen a calamity. The stories were numbers and maps and a few lines of ash where cities used to be. He had believed the stories because he was a prince and believing was part of the job. He believed them with his chest now.

The dark patch chose a shape. Not a full one. Enough to make the mind try and fail to put a name to it. The pressure pressed against the fence and against the people and against the note itself.

"Describe," Marcus said again, a stone dropped into a loud place.

"Pressure field increasing," Sable answered. "Counter-hymn efficacy down nineteen percent and falling. Drone feeds losing sync above the ridge line. No visual operator. No analog."

Ian felt the seam in himself, the one he had been trying to step through for months, shift like a door opening and closing in the same second. If he pushed at it now, he could get it. If he pushed at it now, he could break in the wrong way and never walk right again.

"Hold," he told himself, the same way Marcus told the road. "Hold."

Down below, Marcus set his feet. Low Radiant is not bigger blows. It is a promise to the line that the line is real. He lifted his hand. He told the fence to be a fence. It agreed. He told the road to be a road. It obliged.

The dark patch took one step forward and made the pass feel small and wrong and open all at once.

The ward-lights along Duskline flickered to black for the span of a heartbeat and then burned back so hard the cameras washed white. The choir's note cracked like ice and then steadied because the women in that room would die before they let it go off pitch.

Ian's drake shuddered and found him. He breathed once, twice. He tasted metal at the back of his tongue. The men on the wall pressed their hands harder to the anchors. The Storm-Griffons on the Blue Sluice feed flinched though they weren't there. Even the bikes at Ironveil rolled back an inch as if the ground had exhaled.

The dark patch opened.

Not a mouth. Not a door.

A simple, wrong absence that touched the fence and the fence bent like a bow.

Ian's body knew the word before his mind did.

Calamity.

He tightened his grip. He did not look away.

The ridge split along a line no map had drawn, and something older than any drill began to come through.