Page 16 of Embers of Midnight
We take watches. Ronan first. Caelum second. I take third. Darian last. It fits how we sleep and how we break. Ronan runs the fire like a dial—small cone, even draw, no sparks. He keeps the heat lens under the bedrolls warm enough to stop the bite, not enough to print a beacon. Caelum’s hours are quiet light control: he knocks the sky’s sheen down a notch and checks the tree line in slow sweeps, breath steady, shoulders loose. Vex roosts on the windward branch and tracks with his small head tilted. Morrow and Silks stay ink while the cold still argues.
When my turn lands, the sky is shallow blue at the edge and everything else is dark. I make a slow ring, boots set soft, count breaths in the trees and the gaps between them. No wrong cadence. No metal tick. I test the snow once—pressure, release—then lay a thin null seam across our approach path so a stray hiker reads the ground as boring. I check the shadow pockets I stitched earlier; edges hold. The fire sits inside the stones, low and clean. I listen until the noise in my head drops to the same floor as the forest.
I hand over to Darian with two fingers to his shoulder and a point north. He rises without a word, checks the Aegis radius, and sets a soft comb to strip the last static out of the air. I eat one mouthful of something lemon and sugar from Caelum’s tin, slide back under the blanket, and feel the heat lens do its job. Vex shifts once and settles. Morrow presses warm against my wrist;Silks tastes the air and stills. No wrong light. No wrong steps. We keep it.
Morning lands flat and cold. Ronan hands me a tin of coffee and a wedge of pan bread he fried in the lid. Caelum sets a small jar of something citrus on the crate we use as a table and does the 'be nice and spread it' look. Darian checks the map strip with a glove on and nods once at our line. We eat hot and quick because warm food makes better choices. Vex hops down to the rim of my cup, steals a crumb, and pretends it’s a favor to me.
“Eat before heroics. House rules,” Caelum says, tapping my knuckles with his spoon.
“I’d like to file a complaint,” I tell him.
“Denied,” Ronan replies without looking up.
“Twelve minutes,” Darian adds, voice even. “Light’s enough.”
We break the site clean. Ronan folds the heat back into the cold so the snow doesn’t rat us out; the crust sets and stops shining wrong. Darian scrubs our scent trail to nothing with a soft Aegis comb and checks the air pressure once like a habit. Caelum lifts the boredom over the campsite by a notch until it reads like a dozen other hollows; eyes will slide off it. I lay a thin null seam through the prints we can’t erase so any drone file stutters. Vex makes one fast high pass and drops a small once for done.
“North, then bend west,” Caelum says, already moving.
“River in eight hundred,” Darian confirms.
“Keep chatter low,” Ronan sets, and shoulders the med kit.
“I’m a vault,” I lie, and get the eye from all three for free.
Gear check, masks up, we go. Our boots find the firm line; breath evens. Northward, then west to catch the river’s path. The cold is work but not enemy. Snow sits tight. Trees make space, then close in. The air carries resin and a sweet edge of burned pine that’s old now, not new.
The clearing arrives like a cut. Black plate where the ground should be. Trees around it wrong—bark curled, resin solidified into dull lumps, one half a trunk slumped where heat took only one side. The smell is not recent flame; it’s cooked sap and a metallic singe under it. The air above the plate wavers with a heat that isn’t heat anymore—ghost heat, if that makes sense. The sun, such as it is, throws a weak flat light and the plate takes it and gives nothing back.
I take five steps around the edge and count. Flow lines. A center where it got hottest. The edge is messy; whoever did this pulled back late, not early. My ribs itch in a way I don’t name.
Ronan kneels at the rim and holds a hand over the plate. He never touches. He reads it like a stove without a thermometer. “The center was white,” he says. “Edge was panic. Control after.” He points with two fingers. “Here and here.”
Darian steps careful between prints and closes his eyes like it makes more space in his head for the world to talk. When he speaks, it’s flat, simple. “Fear,” he says. “Then hard control. Frustration under it. Not rage.” He tips his head.
“Good,” Caelum says. He slides his palm a half inch over a blackened twig and inhales so faint you’d miss it. “Hooves,” he says. “Not deer. Not moose. Weight heavier, line cleaner.”
I grin, “If it was a hellhorse, I’m keeping it”.
“That’s not a thing,” Darian answers automatically.
The itch under my ribs settles into a line. I do not say a word about it because I am not an idiot. I crouch by a root near the north edge and touch the grooves the way a locksmith would. My fingers come away with a taste only I feel—cold iron filament, thin gauge. Hunters were here at the rim after the incident. Not during. Footprints too—human, heavy boots, gear spacing. They walked. They didn’t run.
I click my tongue once. Silks peels off my wrist in a thin, precise unspool like ink poured in water and reassembling into a small, black serpent that shouldn’t exist and does. She kisses the root with her tongue and then writes an S along the bark that means: iron, no poison. She returns, slides under my glove, and settles. Warm.
“Hunters scooped the edge,” I say. “They didn’t cross. No prints on the plate. Either they got spooked by the heat shimmer or they were smart for once.”
“Both can be true,” Caelum says.
Ronan makes the face he makes when he’s choosing which thing to fix first. “Ward it,” he says. “No tourists. No drones.”
We hide the mess the way we always do when the world isn’t ready to be told the truth. Darian drags a soft radius around the rim that lifts the worst residue without turning the site sterile. Caelum folds the brightness along the tree line so eyes stop wanting to look straight at it. Ronan tempers the glass surface with a low heat pass from ten feet out so satellites don’t see a black mirror and get curious. I stitch null-seams into shadow pockets so any idiot who walks in filming gets a glitchy file and a dead battery. The forest looks like itself again, if you don’t know where to stare.
We stand for a beat. No one says the obvious thing, which is that the plate is the size of a small gym and whoever made it is either a bomb or a miracle or both. Caelum says it sideways. “What makes this shape?”
“Not dragon,” Ronan says, pinching the bridge of his nose with a cloth to keep the impatient soot off it. “Not mine.”
“Not angel,” Darian says. “I don’t burn like this.”
