Archive of Our Own

There was no hope left for Clara Mire.

Lark was bound against a blindingly white wall emblazoned with the golden symbol of the Trust. Thin, sturdy ropes beaded with Caenum looped over and around her dozens of times like a cocoon, tightly binding her legs together and forcing her arms to stretch out to either side. The restraints were threaded through shackles so tightly they pinned her upright against the wall. The shackles had clearly been hastily drilled into the wall sometime in the previous day, but that didn’t mean the workmanship was shoddy—the amount of nails that kept them hammered in was several steps beyond overkill. The whole damn set-up was beyond overkill. Even Lark, with all her competence and uncanny luck, had been rendered unable to escape several preventive measures ago. 

Lark was to die within the day. 

It’s true that the Trust had no jails, but Lark was not a person, per se—she was a liability. An imbalance in the books. She was the Imbalance, in fact, and that title overwrote all presumptions of personhood. So Lark was handled as all matters of Trust financial import were: securely contained within the Central Vault. Lark had come to the Vault with the purpose of bringing an end to it. Things went wrong, to put it mildly, and now this place seemed more likely to be the end of her.

She had fought viciously when she was first captured and brought to the room, angrily jerked against her chains of Caenum for hours in the hopes of loosening them. Nothing worked. Her struggle was as hopeless as a fly straining against a web. Just outside the door were dozens of guards prepared for every contingency, and Lark had no idea what happened to the rest of the Breach members that were with her in the Arca. 

Eventually, Lark fell perfectly still, trying to conserve her strength and ignore her instincts, all of them blaring at her to run, run, RUN. There was nowhere to run anymore. The spotlight had found her.

The brightness in the chamber left a persistent, dull ache in her head. Even when Lark closed her eyes, there was no darkness to find solace in. The light insidiously slid through her eyelids, infiltrating into her body with an all-consuming angry red glow. She decided to keep her eyes open. Everything in the room was spotless, opulent white and gold, perfect sharp angles designed to reflect the light and illuminate the symbol of the Trust on the wall. Lark almost, almost found comfort in the black and imperfection of the Caenum draped around her. She was the only shadow to be found here.

Across from her, the door creaked open, someone stepping inside to visit her. Lark already knew who it would be and showed no surprise, made no movements, just regarded them with an unmistakable icy danger.

The visitor could not meet her in the eyes. What a fucking coward, Lark thought.

“Lark,” Phineas Thatch said miserably. “I’m sorry.”

Around his neck was a simple necklace brimming with high-denomination beads of Valor.

Lark didn’t say a fucking thing to him, just stared him down with a predator’s gaze. 

He valiantly tried to continue. “It—it was a mistake. A bad one. But I’ll fix it Lark, I will, I’ll—“

Lark allowed herself to raise a single eyebrow, judgment radiating out of her in palpable waves. Phineas cut himself off mid-sentence, his face tormented, both of them clearly remembering her response to him the last time he had said something similar back in Sequester. It wasn’t like he had proved her wrong in the meantime.

Phineas’ eyes were big, wet, and unsure—a look she had seen before and sure as fuck wasn’t falling for again. He wore a high collared shirt that he had tucked his abacus into, almost as if trying to conceal it. However well you could possibly hide such bright, gaudy beads, anyway. Lark knew all too well how blatantly he once wore his black bead of Caenum, even when he was supposedly no longer a Trustee. He wore his debt more openly than his fortune.

“I don’t want you to die.” Phineas concluded softly, his hands clenched awkwardly at his sides.

There was no sympathy to be found within Lark. “Should have thought of that before you turned me in.” She said, her voice so low he had to strain to hear it. “Was it worth it? You’re finally Valorous, just like you wanted. Jumped into the arms of your Consector yet?”

Phineas flinched harshly, which grimly pleased Lark. 

“I—no. He—we—no.” He fumbled through his words, pain written over his expression, trying to pull himself together. Lark just fixed him with her steadfast, tired gaze, her mind and limbs alike both feeling like dead weight. 

“It wasn’t worth it, Lark.” Phineas finally managed to say. “This—“ He yanked harshly at his abacus. “Means nothing. I’m not truly Valorous, I’m not good , I failed you and the Breach and—“ He needed to take a few deep breaths. “If I could go back to the Arca and not do what I did… but I can’t. And I realize that. And you never need to forgive me, but I will save you.” He finally met her eyes. “I promise.”

Lark just stared at him, unblinking and totally silent. Phineas sighed wearily, scrubbing his face, his eyes red. He clearly had a sleepless night, maybe even had been crying recently. However, as unbalanced as he may have appeared, when he drew his hand away there was a new tenacity in his expression. She didn’t trust it though, never would again.

“I'm here to ask what the new plan is.” Phineas said, more assertively than anything else he’d said so far. “Can you give me an idea to help break you out?”

And Lark… said nothing. She said nothing for several minutes. She said nothing when Phineas asked again. She said nothing when he pleaded with her to not give up hope. She said nothing when he paced urgently and spun useless ideas into the air, giving her desperate side glances all the while. She didn’t have anything to say, not to him at least.

“I’m going to come back later.” Phineas eventually concluded after what felt like eternity to Lark. He seemed to have formulated a plan on his own, having finally given up on receiving any input from her. “We can make this work. There’s still a chance. I—I’ll make sure there’s still a chance.” She wasn’t listening.

He turned to leave, another empty promise falling uselessly out of his lips, swearing to be back, to do whatever it took to prevent her death. She just wanted him gone. It wasn’t until his hand was on the door handle, about to step out that Lark broke her silence, her quiet voice cutting through the air and straight through him.

“I should’ve killed you when I had the shot.”

Phineas paused at the door, his expression tortured. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, searching for something to say—and all but fled, scrambling out the door as he left her to her confinement once more. 

Lark drifted in and out of consciousness for the next few hours. Her whole body was tingling uncomfortably, her limbs falling asleep from the awkward position and tightness of the restraints. Her Fold-scar burned in all the light exposure. She had never felt more like an old, exhausted woman in her entire life. 

She was instantly awoken from her light, uneasy sleep when she heard a muffled conversation from outside her door—someone communicating with the guards posted outside. She scowled, bracing herself for the inevitable moment of being led to the slaughter. But when the door opened, instead of a phalanx of guards, it was a refined, older woman draped tastefully in an absurd amount of Valor.

Imogen fucking Loxlee.

“Hello, Clara.” Imogen said mildly. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Lark watched her warily as Imogen firmly shut the door behind her and walked closer. Where Lark was made for the shadows, Imogen was made for the light. She was radiant even given the circumstances, approaching Lark with a graceful poise that more befitted greeting an important dignitary than her husband’s murderer.

Imogen hesitantly reached out, her hand paused in the air waiting to see if Lark would react. When Lark didn’t do anything, Imogen brushed her fingers against the Caenum wrapped around Lark’s person, feeling the divots and imperfections with a vague curiosity.

“All this for one man,” Imogen said distantly. Her eyes flicked up to meet Lark’s. “I owe you everything, Clara Mire.”

Lark nodded slowly, as much as her constraints allowed. “So grateful about it you’re going to let me die, huh?”

Imogen slowly exhaled, almost but not quite a sigh. “My hands are as tied as yours. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Cut the bullshit.” Lark bit out. “You don’t care that I’m being executed. It’s all the same to people like you. People like him .”

Imogen’s eyes fluttered shut, her wrinkled face falling easily into the pattern of a pained expression. She didn’t seem afraid of Lark at all. “I know that you must not believe me. There’s nothing I can do to convince you, but… it pains me so deeply that you are to die. I came as soon as I could to see you, to say—you saved me, I suppose. My husband… he was a Valorous man. But he was not a good man. You are the only other to know that.”

“That’s an understatement.” Lark said gruffly. “I’d kill him again.”

Imogen Loxlee looked Clara Mire straight into her eyes. “I’d let you.”

With that, Imogen seemed to have said what she wanted to, and took a step toward the door, her Valor beads faintly clinking together like a soft wind chime.

“Wait.” Lark said.

Imogen turned back to look at her.

“That’s it?” Lark felt that old helpless rage bubbling inside her chest, the one she’d been carrying since thirteen years old. “You come in here and thank me, knowing you can just leave and wash your hands of it all once I’m dead. Not going to use any of that Valor, pull any of those strings to get me out of here?” Lark curled her lip. “All those pretty words mean nothing if you’re not willing to back them up. It doesn’t matter if you’re sad if you don’t do anything about it. You’re Imogen fucking Loxlee. Either do something, or don’t waste the time I have left before I die.”

Imogen Loxlee looked at her for a long, sorrowful moment. “I am a Valorous woman, Clara Mire.” She whispered. “But I am not a good one.”

And she left without another word, her heels clacking delicately on the marble floor.

Lark yanked hard, once, twice, against her chains. The Caenum dug into her body, scraping against her skin, but she didn’t stop. Pinpricks of blood dripped out, staining the spotless white floor—the blood from her right side was a normal human red, but the blood from her left, Fold-scarred side was pure, inky black. Lark screamed , releasing everything she had left within her, shoving it into the white void, a battle cry and a mourning wail at once. The bloodcurdling sound echoed, pinging forcefully off the walls, the resonant properties of the room swelling the scream into something larger than itself. She would not die without a fight. She spent her whole goddamn life running in vain. She had been caught, the lark had been caged, but she would choose to fight now if it was the last thing she did. Lark strained—

“Am I interrupting something?” A deep, wrecked voice asked with amusement. “Do I need to come back later when you’re done having this lil tantrum thing?” 

Lark looked up sharply, and there in the doorway was the Tripotentiary himself in all his terrible glory, a permanent toothy smile festooned upon a pulsing skeletal head. He was adorned in ceremonial vestments, yoked in Valor like a prize cattle. Lark thought Imogen was loaded? This guy took it to a whole new level. Black ichor sluiced lazily, close underneath his translucent skin, constantly siphoned into the portable medical pump hissing rhythmically beside him. His Valor glistened in the light the way his opalescent skin used to, and she wanted to feed him every bead and watch him choke on it.

Their eyes met, gold catching ink-stained white, and a jolt of something pierced through the two of them. Lark felt it slithering up her Fold-scarred arm, from the palm of her hand all the way up to the tendrils that marked her left cheek. Across the room, Weepe flinched, just for a brief second, and the pump hissed with a little more vigor. He shook it off quickly, returning to the easy amusement he walked in with, but Lark could have sworn he regarded her with a little more unease than he would have liked to admit to himself. She couldn’t quite say how she knew this, only that she did. 

“Well, I lied, I really can’t come back later.” Weepe, eager to show just how well he had regained his composure, grinned horribly at her. At least, she thought he grinned—it was a little hard to tell with his whole… deal. “After all, you are gonna die real soon. We gotta schedule to keep.”

A few members of the Tripotentiary Guard issued forth from behind Weepe, bringing in a large dark cloth and a ladder. Climbing the ladder, they tacked the cloth to the ceiling, drastically dimming the main light source of the chamber, bringing the ambience down to a twilight level. There was a part of Lark that was pleased when all the guards made efforts to avoid her, as if they were afraid—even as chained up as she was—that she would bite like a cornered animal. In a few moments they completed their task of darkening the room. With sharp salutes at the Tripotentiary they marched out, leaving the Most Valorous and Most Caenemous alone to regard each other in the dimness.

“Clara Mire, alias: Lark.” Weepe mused. He went up to a wall opposite her, leaned against it without a care in the world. “So nice to finally see you in the flesh. Sorry for the delay on the whole “you dying” thing. We’ve had our hands a bit full, cleaning up the little mess you and your friends left in the Arca. Milton Fleit’s fucking dead now and so my Archauditor had to spend the entire night recalculating your whole damn balance which was a teensy bit hard, y’understand, because you and your Breach buddies blew the Caenum reserves up. So we gotta lock you in here til we got things taken care of and that’s been swell. You liking the place so far? Enjoying the hospitality?”

Lark glared at him.

“Whoa there, calm down. You wanna smoke? I’m gonna smoke.” Weepe said. He took a cigar out of his pocket and lit it. Despite his words, he did not offer one to Lark—not that she would have taken it from him, anyway. “I know I look a little different these days. I’m Tripotentiary of the Trust now, the King Triangle, a real big fancy fucking bigwig.” He took a deep puff, blew a smoke ring straight at Lark’s face. “But you woulda known me as Moc Weepe when we were both down on Midst.” He winked a translucent eyelid. “Remember me?”

Lark said absolutely nothing. Weepe took it as the rejection it was.

He put a hand to his chest. “Aw, Ms. Mire, you hurt me, you really do. I remember you. Kind of. Once. Across the room. When I was drunk. Come to think of it, that might not have actually been you.” He laughed, a deep, raspy huehuehue forcing its way through his destroyed vocal cords. “You should for sure remember me though, Ms. Mire, I co-ran that Black Candle Cabaret. I understand you came over there a few times. D’ja like our drinks?” He smiled, a smug, skeletal thing, and took another drag of the cigar. “Or maybe you liked the bartender better?”

Something twitched in Lark’s jaw. If there was one goddamn thing I managed to do right in my life, she thought. It was getting Sherman and Tzila back to Midst and far the hell away from this guy.

“Nah.” Lark rasped out. “I only went there for the usual, five ounces.” Weepe’s eyes flared in recognition at the coded request. “Guess I’m finally seeing where it came from, huh?” 

Lark looked meaningfully at the black blood that writhed just underneath Weepe’s skin, and Weepe visibly startled—or at least, Lark could just tell somehow that he was startled. His gaze hooked onto Lark’s Fold-scar, its dendritic, dark appearance blending in with her Caenum chains. The depths of his inkshot eyes were unreadable, but Lark felt the spiderweb twang in a complicated pattern of fascination and horror. While her powers may have been initially borne of his blood, she had transmuted them into something entirely hers. The Trust may have adored Moc Weepe and loathed Clara Mire, but the Fold protected Lark and infected whoever this translucent, sick man was. The Trust would kill Lark and someday the Fold would kill Moc Weepe—Lark felt a grim satisfaction at this, the perfect symmetry of a mutually assured destruction.

“Well, whatever gets you in the door.” Weepe found his voice again. “Bet you woulda liked some of our nude shows if you stuck around. Ey, too late now, I guess.” Weepe shrugged, intentionally projecting a casual aura. “Before we get on with the Rebalancing, I gotta take care of some policy stuff. Just making sure we have things on record in the books, close them up, get the job totally done, you understand. My Archauditor insisted. So,” Weepe fixed her with his gaze. “Clara Mire, do you have any idea where the Breach may be now?”

So the other Breach members had managed to escape the Arca. Lark took in that information passively, allowing no surprise or intrigue to cross her expression. She just stared at him, eyes unimpressed. Lark always had that way of making you feel like an idiot for asking stupid questions. Weepe, however, was unphased, taking another puff of his diminishing cigar.

“You don’t know where any of them went? Hieronymous Loxlee? Agatha Ledge? That one media intern… I’m gonna be completely honest, I forget her name.” He casually stamped his cigar out on the wall, leaving a dark ash circle against the pristine white marble. “Saskia del Norma?”

Lark let the silence linger for several long, uncomfortable moments. “The Trust must be real desperate to ask me anything at this point.”

Weepe, bizarrely, smiled. “Hmm. Did you know, Ms. Mire, that the Trust put me in charge specifically for the purpose of catching you?”

He didn’t wait for a response, not that Lark was offering one. “Centuries of rules and hierarchy, overwritten overnight. A whole damn kingdom given to King Triangle, a cabaret owner from Midst. Why the fuck would the society full of uptight stick-asses do that?” Weepe shrugged amiably. “Because of you. You kill one guy, and everyone around here’s terrified of you. Terrified of what you represent. Terrified of some old lady from good ol’ Midst.” 

He spread his hands. “But now you’re caught. It turns out the the big bad Imbalance has a heartbeat like anyone else, thank god. The Imbalance can be killed dead, an eye for an eye, and these people can clap and say it fixed the whole damn economy. Bravo, Mr. Tripotentiary did his duty for the good of the Trust. Time to go back to normal now.” He steepled his long, spidery fingers. “But it’s a damn shame there’s a new enemy out there. A scarier enemy than even Clara Mire, that’ll make even more Notaries wet the bed at night. An enemy that successfully infiltrated the Arca with explosives. While it’s no Maximillian Loxlee, the murder of Senior Notary Milton Fleit is still a pretty big demerit.”

Something flickered across Lark’s face, and Weepe smiled wider. 

“Do you see, Ms. Mire?” He asked. “We’re playing the long game here. Once you’re dead, your whole deal of “most Canenemous” just passes onto the next schmuck. The schmuck is instantly made from a nobody to a threat overnight. The longer the threat is out there, the more the schmuck is transformed into the monster under the all the babies’ beds. This cycle doesn’t end with you, Clara Mire. The way the Trust functions is on the back of an Imbalance. Ergo, there will always need to be a Balancer in response.” He gestured, broadly and grandly, at his whole general self. 

“It’s not the beads that make the Trust.” His eyes were far away from Lark, power-hungry and lost in calculations. “It’s the people who make the rules. It’s the people with the power to change the rules. My Archauditor taught me that.” The Tripotentiary, living proof of a changed rule, smirked. “The Trust loves their rules so much that everybody, even the Breach, starts thinking they’re ironclad. Fuckin’ idiots. The Breach didn’t lose when you got captured. They lost as soon as I was put in charge.”

The Tripotentiary’s words snapped around the room as he pushed his damaged voice to its limits. For such a weak, sickly man, he held an air of satiation in his stature, like a shark that had been following the scent of blood finally caught up to the source. 

In the wake of his grand speech, Lark loudly and irreverently snorted. 

“Big talk for a man without enough time left to play ‘the long game.’” Lark said. She raised an eyebrow at his wheezing pump. 

Weepe abruptly did not seem like he was having fun with her anymore. “Well, aren’t you charming. Okay, this has been swell but we’re gonna wrap this financial chat up now. Let’s get this Rebalancing on the road. Hey,” Weepe opened the door and called out to someone outside. “Come on in, my good buddy, I’m ready for you to bring her out.”

The door opened, someone walked in, and in a sudden heap of a moment Lark, Moc Weepe, and Phineas Thatch were all coexisting in the same room regarding each other. The last time this happened was in the wake of an explosion. There was no explosion this time—at least not physically—but it still felt cosmically resonant, earthshaking, volatile. Three different brands of firecrackers waiting on the spark.

Phineas’ open blue eyes were locked onto Lark’s golden ones, and there was a resoluteness in his face she had only ever seen once before: that time in the mailcar with the wail, when she stood at the lever and he waited for her to make the choice on whether he’d live or die. It’s as if ever since that moment he’d been waiting on her judgment, at peace with whatever she decided. At last it was time to make the call. He was dressed in the distinctive armor of the Tripotentiary’s Guard, looking every bit like the enemy she had been conditioned to run from, the enemy she thought he was since the first moment she saw him covered in Sherman’s blood. 

What the fuck are you doing, kid? Lark thought at him. 

“This Thatch guy right here, I think he’s my new best friend.” Weepe was saying. He slunk an arm around Phineas’ shoulders, and Phineas didn’t shudder but it was a near thing. 

“I’m like the new Mr. Consector, you know? Like a better one with more Valor and no stick up the ass. And this guy here, we all have thought he fuckin’ died on Midst, but then he come all the way up here and still knows who the boss is! He can tell the management’s changed and keeps being trusty, if ya don’t mind my little joke there. That’s why Thatch is the best, uh,” Weepe trailed off, looking gleefully pensive as he tried to remember something. “Ah, fuck. It starts with an ‘a.’ Adalaca. Asecli. Advil. Whatchamacallit. Thatch, what the fuck’s your thing again?”

Phineas closed his eyes, grit his teeth. “Adsecla.” He whispered.

Weepe snapped his fingers in sudden remembrance, right by Phineas’ ear. “That’s the bitch. Yup, when I first got here all I was hearing is that you were super fired for beating up Sherman until he was a bloody little pulp, but you know what? When you bring us Clara Mire on a silver fucking platter your generous King Triangle gets you a job again and says you get to be the, uh, Adsexa forever.”

The Adsexa in question did not look particularly thrilled at this. He actually looked more like he might throw up.

“Anyways,” Weepe said. “Thatch requested that he be the one to personally escort you to your execution. Said that because he was the one that turned you in he should have the honor to bring you to death.” He shrugged carelessly. “I think that sounds pretty morbid, so it’s okay by me. Let’s hurry this thing up.”

After a nod from the Tripotentiary, Phineas took a few assertive steps toward Lark, holding a key ring in his hands. He unsubtly caught Lark’s eyes, determination shining through. She felt her heart sink into her stomach.

“Oh, wait just a second,” Weepe called out in a languid tone, right as Phineas was reaching to unlock the first of Lark’s confines. “I just thought of a better idea. Adsexa, you’ve been promoted again. Looking at her mean scary glare, I just remembered she murdered the last real Valorous guy and now, well, I’m feeling a little spooked. Drag your big ol’ muscles over here instead. You’ll be my personal best buddy bodyguard, and I’ll get those other guards I don’t give a shit about to unlock Ms. Mire there.” Weepe clapped twice for the rest of his Guard to enter the room, and the doorknob began to jiggle in response to his command.

Lark saw Phineas’ panicked expression when his half-formed plan crumbled around him, and she saw the soldier’s gleam in his eyes take stock of the situation—his glance flickering around the space in quick succession, one, two, three, four. Lark, Weepe, door, guards. A simple equation.

Instinct took over, and Phineas reacted in a matter of moments. He leapt backwards, a precise movement that had him slamming all his weight back against the door, ramming it shut against the guards trying to enter. One millisecond. 

He braced backwards and swung his feet out, keeping the door forced shut while acrobatically kicking forward. His armored boots impacted solidly into Weepe’s chest, sending the Tripotentiary tumbling to the floor. Two milliseconds. 

Lark felt the series of events unravel before it happened. Phineas hurled towards Weepe, ready to deal the finishing blow. She saw a snapshot of Phineas’ young face, his forehead creased, eyes narrowed, and lips thinned with righteous fury. His gauntleted fist smashed toward the Tripotentiary’s awful see-through cheekbone. Three milliseconds.

In the instant before the fist connected, a black syringe stabbed directly into Phineas’ neck.

Phineas and Lark noticed at the same time that Weepe’s hand had slithered out of his robes with a supernatural speed, holding a now-emptied syringe. They both noticed that Phineas’ punch had not landed because he no longer had a fist, only squirming black goop in its place. His muscles began to violently seize and spasm, making him fall hard to the floor with a sickening squelch noise. Painfully amassing his last bit of motion, he turned his head in Lark’s direction and opened his mouth—to speak? To scream?—and could only drip out black ichor from where it was overfilling his mouth and leaking out of his nose. Dark slime leaked out from underneath his chestplate, his skin churning and bubbling like a pot boiling over. 

Lark hurled herself forward, thrashing against the chains shackled to the wall. Her left arm strained, her hand reaching towards Phineas uselessly. Opalescence skittered of its own volition around her blackened fingertips. She fought with all her remaining strength, unsure why she was even doing so. Lark did not know why she thought she needed to reach Phineas, but some strange feeling said she could do something if only she could reach him. 

The shackles squeaked with effort but held tight. It was no use. Despite all of her strength, Lark was pinned. Phineas’ eyes, gazing sightlessly in her direction, were subsumed by squirming black. 

Weepe stood slowly out of the puddle that was once Phineas Thatch. Thick black goop slid off his robes like liquid mercury. Hissing loudly, his pump clattered erratically, creating a strange syncopated sound alongside Weepe’s shallow breathing. The dimness of the room cast long, strange shadows upon his face as he moved, making him look ghastly and unreal. He seemed more monster than man, a figure from the ghost stories Lark’s mother told her as a child. Cold and dangerous eyes met hers across the room, and Lark felt as if something in his countenance had been ripped open and exposed to her for the first time. Something truly calculating and clever beyond the posturing and jabbering. Something that poisoned the very Fold beneath his flesh.

A strange sound pulled the attention of both Weepe and Lark to the floor. The only thing left of Phineas was his abacus, dropped into the puddle of hissing and steaming Fold solute. As Lark and Weepe watched, the liquid slowly ate through a Valor bead’s enamel covering like acid, exposing its tiny mica core. As soon as the black liquid hit the speck of mica, both reacted wildly—a tendril of Fold whipped back and forth, flinging the mica clear across the room with a sharp zing! It grazed Lark’s cheek, leaving a faint scratch. 

The Tripotentiary Guard flung open the door just as the Valor-laden abacus began to burst like popcorn in the microwave, dozens of tiny mica cores coming into contact with the acid-like Fold solute. Flecks of mica whizzed around the room, while the puddle on the ground churned and snapped with a hungry malice. 

The Guard quickly flipped down visors and held up polished-mica shields. Two of them quickly escorted Weepe out of the room, while the rest came to unlock Lark from her chains. They skirted carefully around the black puddle. The scattered mica particulates were gradually slowing, rainbow-reflecting crystals suspended weightlessly in the air. That made it easier for the guards to brush them aside with their shields, carving a path out for the unarmored and vulnerable Weepe and Lark.   

The guards unlocked the shackles, leaving Lark draped in chains but no longer held against the wall. Her numb limbs tingled painfully as more circulation returned. Two guards roughly grabbed her by either side, dragging her forward. They took two steps before her legs buckled, and she followed the movement to drop heavily to the ground. 

In front of her, the Fold puddle that once was Phineas bubbled softly. Its volatility was rapidly fading, a few half-melted Valor beads still rolling around in the ichor. She reached her scarred left arm out towards the puddle. As she leaned forward, the tearror solute managed to finish corroding one final Valor bead, and the mica speck unexpectedly sliced toward her outstretched hand. Its trajectory just missed going clean through her arm, instead leaving a nasty gash from the tip of her finger, across her palm and wrist, and all the way to her elbow. 

The guards grabbed Lark and hauled her up, none too gently. She clutched her injured arm—the left Fold-scarred one—to her chest, placing pressure on it, but as she was pulled up she managed to subtly brush her right hand’s fingers through the puddle. Black ichor clung to the fingers on her unscarred side, and she closed her hand shut, keeping it unseen. 

“We’re gonna need a janitor or somethin’ in there real quick, some kinda vacuum cleaner.” Weepe was saying when Lark and her entourage came out the door, back to his usual self. “ Someone made that nasty mess all over the nice white floor and that’s gotta get cleaned up. Some Company member can do it.” His face suddenly lit up. “You know what, get Jonas Spahr to do it. I bet that guy knows his way around a cleaning product.” 

A guard ran off to accomplish just that.

“Alright.” Weepe turned his horrible grin to Lark. “Let’s get outta here. This has been a long time coming, Clara Mire.”

*****

The Loxlee Lights factory was always so loud.

When Lark thought back to that time in her life, that was the most prominent sensory memory. The omnipresent hum of electricity. The scrape of metal against metal. The bubbling of vats. The zap and crackle of welding. The ringing of glass. People barking orders across the space. Occasionally, the sound of screams. 

Even when Lark and her mother went home from their shifts, there was no respite. In the small factory tenement housing, walls were thin. Lark would lay in bed and hear the crying of babies, wet hacking coughs of the mica lung-inflicted, the couple next door screaming at each other.

“I can’t sleep.” A young Lark—Clara, at the time—had said to her mother, one night when the couple’s fight had crescendoed to them noisily breaking dishes and slamming cabinets just on the other side of the wall from her bed.

Her mother had hummed sympathetically, sitting at their rickety two-person table. She was sifting through the contents of her worn, well-loved leather bag, the pieces all scattered on the table. Clara went to sit by her mother and look at the trinkets as well. Their arrangement was nonsensical to her, but she knew that looks could be deceiving. 

“The majority of islets on the Mediun are said to be still undiscovered by people.” Her mother had said, her eyes flitting over the array of objects. This was the way she often spoke: abrupt, without preamble or transition. It was entirely up to her listener to follow along. “They must be so quiet.”

Clara was grateful for her mother’s soothing voice. “The Fold would be there, right?” She asked. The idea of it was completely alien and strange to her. “It would be dark all the time?”

“Not all of the time.” Her mother said, “On the Mediun, it would only be dark for part of the day. But yes. The Fold would be there.” 

Her mother ran a light fingertip over the divots of the bird skull on the table. She was a woman with a serious countenance—not that she was stern or bristly, per se, but moreso in that she weighed the world very carefully. Everything mattered to her. Even when Clara was a young child, there was nothing she could say that her mother would not pause to consider thoughtfully, and reply with every word intentionally placed. 

“It was dark all the time where my mother and I moved from.” Her mother said. “The outskirts of the mid-Abyss… we had a little farmhouse. I don’t remember much of it. We left when I was about your age. At the time, with the Unification Wars in the Baronies…my mother hoped it would be better here.” 

She went silent for several long moments, lost in memory. “Someday,” she eventually concluded, picking up the bird skull and holding it gently in her hands. “You and I may leave here too. We could go to a quiet islet on the Mediun, where it is not dark or light all the time. It must be beautiful, with all the nature. Peaceful.”

Clara looked at the objects scattered on the table, then at the bird skull clutched protectively in her mother’s hand. “Do you… see that?” She asked in a hushed, awed tone. She knew well of her mother’s abilities. 

The worry lines creasing her mother’s face deepened, and she let out a slow, measured breath. Her face was unreadable as she caressed the bird skull one final time, then placed it back down on the table, far away from its original position. 

“I see that you will eventually find a place where it is quiet.” Her mother finally landed on. She reached out to firmly squeeze Clara’s hand. “We both will.”

Clara nodded resolutely, and her mother’s eyes turned soft and molten. “Now, back to bed, my little lark.”

*****

Lark wished she could plug her ears against the noise. 

A large crowd jostled and clamored, the layers of their gasps and murmurs striking like flint against her eardrums. The sickly sweet voice of the Archauditor’s babbling gave her a toothache, grinding her teeth against it. Teletherics hummed too close by as the media circled like vultures. Worst of all was the pounding drumbeat of her heart echoing throughout her entire body as Lark, brave as she was, contemplated death. 

She was back where it all went wrong, in the Arca. A spotlight shone on her as she stood at the point of a grand and gleaming triangular platform, the Tripotentiary and Archauditor in symmetry to either side of her. A formation of Company guards fanned out behind them, chests straight and armor sparkling in a show of strength. Imogen Loxlee stood in a place of honor off to the side, allowing her an ascended spot above the crowd. 

Lark was covered even further in Caenum, as impossible as it seemed. Her abacus covered her in a carapace-like shell, turned into this burdensome body suit of gnarled beads, concentrating around her feet in sturdy boots so heavy she could scarcely walk. Every single bit of Caenum—and there were hundreds of thousands—was high denomination. Each bead was displayed, none were covered up. Even Lark, as long ago as her life in the Trust was, felt the old wound of revulsion at the inapproachable sight this abacus made of her. 

The Archauditor Goldfinch spoke zealously into a microphone, teletherics hanging on her every word. For security purposes, the in-person audience was limited to only Upper Trust, but the entirety of the Trust and beyond listened live to their teletheric devices at the edge of their seats. At least five sketch artists were posted around the room, scribbling the proceedings furiously for the papers and history books. Notably, there were no Incendiary Imaging Devices, since the reveal about Agatha Ledge’s Breach pastimes re-opened investigations on some of the Device’s old explosive “accidents.”

The ruin the Breach had brought to the Arca had been fixed overnight, the fire damage and hole in the floor smoothed over with a glossy white material. It almost blended in perfectly, returning the chamber to its former glory, unless you were looking closely to see where two slightly different shades of white met in jagged, harsh angles. The loss of the Caenum silo made room for the audience piled into the Arca, a tremendous crowd all jostling elbows with each other. They glanced with mixed glances of awe, anticipation, and unease at the spectacle of Clara Mire, the Tripotentiary, the glorious Valor silo. Lark wondered how much they did or didn’t know the truth of the previous day’s events. 

“Due to the Valorous dedication of our Tripotentiary, and the endless vigilance of you, our beloved Trustees, we have managed to curtail the Breach and bring Clara Mire to justice in one fell swoop.” The Archauditor was announcing passionately. Her hands were pressed reverently to her chest, just above the ornate necklace that was her Valor-laden abacus. 

“The most heinous crime in Trust history, that flooded our society with so much Caenum we thought no hope could ever return, is being Rebalanced today before our very eyes. This is proof. This is proof to all of us that it is possible. This is proof that the Trust can rebuild from the attacks against us, stronger than ever. We, all of us here together, are demonstrating that no matter how deep the debt, if we work hard enough, if we are good enough— “ The Archauditor’s saccharine voice turned steely. “The flow of Valor we add to the cosmos can drown any amount of Caenum.”

Music started to play, a glorious, triumphant song filled with brass and drum.

“This is our symbolic representation of our capabilities.” The Archauditor’s passion rose in tandem with the swelling of the music. “With this action, we strike the Imbalance from the record. With this action, the Trust is purified. With this action, we demonstrate that the culmination of our Valor is enough even to overwhelm the greatest Caenum accumulated in history.”

Lark began to feel a creaking under her feet. Her heartbeat doubled in pace despite herself.

Remember that platform they were standing on?

It was suspended above the open silo of Valor. 

And Lark was standing on top of a closed trapdoor. 

“For the good of the Trust,” the Tripotentiary said in his ruined voice. The music crescendoed. “We commence the Rebalancing.”

The trapdoor opened beneath Lark and she plummeted.

She knew how this was going to operate, the physics of how this functioned. The concept was similar to how people die in grain silos—the surface of the grain acts like quicksand, sinking the person deeper and deeper in until the pressure renders them immobile and they are quickly suffocated. Swap out grain for millions of pearl-like beads, and you would have the imminent method of Lark’s demise. The Trust’s over-obvious symbolism on full display: the Imbalance literally drowned by Valor. Killed via purification. 

For a split second before impact, Lark was falling through the open air.

Lark was falling through the open air, and she thought of Midst.

She thought of the blazing hot desert days constructing her hut-house-shack, meticulously building it plank by plank until it suited her satisfaction. She thought of fiddling at her workbench, customizing her tools and weapons with a deft hand. She thought of incense burning in a cozy room while she cooked the fresh catch on the stove. She thought of driving her monocycle, kicking up clouds of red dirt and feeling the wind in her face. 

She thought of putting a bandana around an old dog, a kindred spirit, that sometimes could occasionally be called a friend. She thought of the bartender with the kind smile and his daughter with the clever eyes. She thought of the little town up the hill from the desert wastes.

Lark was falling through the open air, and she thought of home.

Her feet smacked the surface of the gleaming Valor and immediately began to sink.

The sheer weight of all her Caenum dragged her down with terrifying rapidity. Instinctively, she tried to kick her feet, but they were made sluggish by weight and the jostling only caused her to sink faster. In a matter of moments, Lark was swallowed up, the darkness of her Caenum completely engulfed by white Valor beads.

As the Valor rose around her head, Lark’s vision was consumed by the bright shifting beads rattling against her body. They filled her ears, got caught in her hair, stuck into the hollow of her throat. The cosmos’ unidirectional gravity pulled her inexorably down, down, down, the process hastened by the weights of Caenum chained to her feet. She was trapped as never before. Heaviness below, as her body was pulled in a final descent. Heaviness above, as the pressure forced on her body increased with every inch further she sunk into Valor.

Lark knew she had no time to lose. Compiling all the strength she had left, she fought against the current to stretch her Fold-scarred arm in front of her, moving as if in slow-motion. The nasty gash on her arm the mica particulate had given her was steadily bleeding, black blood welling and staining the Valor beads that brushed by. 

Already it was getting difficult to breathe. Breathing in with her nose only caused beads to press against her nostrils, stoppering any oxygen from entering her body. The pressure around her became heavier, and heavier, crushing her chest and beginning to immobilize her limbs. The sparkling Valor around her seemed to be the whole cosmos. There was no end to it—around, below, above. She could not hope to fight an enemy such as this. Indeed it hardly seemed to even be an enemy, instead far more like a force of nature. If it was possible for Lark to be totally surrounded by inky black Fold, why not a roiling mass of shimmering white? The cosmos was defined by natural opposites. Un, Fold. As above, so below. An endless and deadly haze.

Lark struggled to keep her thoughts in order, to fight the exhaustion threatening to sink her as surely as the Valor. Blood leaked steadily from her arm, making her head spin.

She had to accomplish this. For the Breach. For Midst. For Sherman and Tzila. For her mother.

But as she tried to move her other arm, she found she could not. The well of energy within her she had relied on her entire life was dried up. She had sunk too deep, had wasted too much time. She was too old and too tired. She was going to die and she was going to fail. It was over before it began.

Lark closed her eyes and waited for death.

Everything went completely dark and silent.

At last.

But… wait, that wasn’t completely right. She wasn’t dead yet. She could still feel the rustling of beads moving past her skin, the crushing pressure against her body. Yet as she closed her eyes, the rattling noise rasping against her eardrums and the omnipresent white glowing simply… stopped. She was surrounded by darkness and silence in a place that should have been filled with light and noise.

Lark felt the familiar yet uncanny sensation of warmth slithering along her scarred arm.

Her Fold-scar grew and stretched of its own volition, wrapping around and dousing her entire arm in a pure black. The scar raced down her left side, scrawling like an ink stain spilling over across her body. The branches on her left cheek stretched and roved across her face— 

—as the scar lacerated her left eye.

Darkness fanned out under her eyelid, submerging the white and gold of her eye into the pure liquid black of a pupil. It hit like a lightning strike, a realigning of her brain to allow something unfathomable to slide into place just there. A gain of control over reality hand-in-hand with a loss of some. 

An inhuman burst of revitalization arced through her body. Her right hand snapped open, the dark ichor that once was Phineas Thatch still clinging to fingertips. In an impossible move, she cleaved her hand through the endless ocean of Valor and plunged her fingers into her bleeding wound.

The dark ichor of Phineas Thatch met Lark’s Fold-riddled blood.

An incredible, almost chemical reaction occurred at the two substances met. The inert acid of Phineas Thatch’s remains, the magic of Lark’s lifeblood. Both of them originating from something siphoned from Moc Weepe’s veins, transmuted into something beyond what they started as. 

Phineas’ black ichor sought newfound fuel in the surplus of blood. It remembered its hunger, and taught the idea to everything it came into contact with. 

No one noticed anything immediately wrong outside the silo. The triumphant song was reaching its grand finale, the Archauditor was waxing poetic for the closing remarks. Imogen Loxlee, whose eyes had not left the spot Clara Mire had vanished into, heard it first. A deep rumbling juxtaposed against a faint ringing, like tapping silverware against a wine glass.

Imogen Loxlee immediately began climbing down from the platform at a speed unbecoming of her age and status, and then the crowd began to scream.

Inside the silo, Lark beheld a tearror.

Above her, a ravenous monster of darkness raged, pulsing and swelling like a lung. Valor beads roiled around the liquid obsidian as it grew, being shoved against the glass walls to make room for the intruder. Prolonged exposure against the surface created that familiar hissing noise, and Lark could see the first layer of their enamel shells begin to melt. 

Lark was tethered to the beast by blood, darkness draining from her body up in a tendril to feed the tearror. The gash on her arm opened wider and wider as the tearror demanded an ever-increasing amount of fuel, endlessly hungry. 

As she looked at the ravenous tearror, Lark could not help but remember the toxic ichor that ran underneath Moc Weepe’s transparent skin. You have released poison straight into the bloodstream, she thought.

Valor beads began to pop, and mica flew like the spray of bullets.

The thick glass of the silo became peppered with fractures, allowing for faint screams from outside to make their way to Lark’s ears. The pressure pressing down on her lessened as Valor beads fell into the tearror and in short order mica particulates were flung out. A conversion rate like the Trust had never seen before.

As the amount of Valor beads drastically decreased, Lark found she could breathe again, though as her body instinctively gasped for greedy mouthfuls the air felt sharp and stinging. Scratches appeared on her body as she narrowly survived near miss after near miss of flying mica specks. Even if she somehow managed to avoid those hazards, blood still drained from her body in a steady upward stream, pulled into the tearror like a black hole. As the tearror ran out of Fold-riddled blood, it went for the next best thing, and Lark’s ink-black hand began to unravel itself at the fingertips, transmuted from flesh into fuel. Her vision swam and her mind began to cloud. 

Lark knew that she was not saved. She knew she was still doomed. Asphyxiation may no longer have been the method but the end result was the same—whether from a well-placed mica particulate or simply from sheer blood loss, her demise was still imminent.

But if she couldn’t run, she was taking the whole place down with her.

The tearror had taken over the upper half of the silo by now, the cracked glass only barely keeping it in. In sparse glances outside, she could see people fleeing, armor glinting. An alien flash of fear and frustration darted through Lark’s mind and she innately knew it came from Moc Weepe, sparking a glow of vindication from her she hoped he could feel too.

Lark’s left hand was gone, and yet her arm still remained outstretched above her, darkness pulled from her body in a torrent. The tearror was just above her head by a few feet, and Lark instinctively ducked her head down lower to avoid it, thoughts of the Moonfall making her apprehensive. This was angry Fold, tumultuous Fold. Unpredictable Fold. You did not want to get caught up in this.

An image flashed unbidden through her mind. A woman’s dead body, dissolved in Fold solute at a factory.

Like mother, like daughter, Lark thought bitterly. She missed, suddenly and vehemently, the worn leather bag of trinkets, unsure where it wound up when the Trust seized her. It was the only object she had carried with her throughout her entire life, that perhaps Lark could be considered sentimental about. 

But then, a new thought emerged, a gentler one. Perhaps even a divination. 

“I see that you will eventually find a place where it is quiet.”

The smell of Midst filled Lark’s nostrils. Verdant and dusty, the smell of sawdust and heat and wind. The last hurrah of a dying mind or a tearror byproduct, Lark couldn’t say, but she looked up at the tearror’s glossy surface and was reminded of Unset. Lark wasn’t the kind of person to stop and admire Unrise and Unset every day. She didn’t have time. But she felt in this moment that maybe she had missed out on something vital that she had never known to look for.

Screams, the rattling of Valor, the ringing of mica, the hiss of tearror. Sound upon sound upon sound. 

The thing about Fold that makes it so special is that it listens. The thing about Fold that makes it so terrifying is that it responds. What are you thinking? What do you want? What are you afraid of? Who are you? Who could you become?

Lark was connected to the tearror by a lifeline, and she could not help but listen. This tearror was angry. It was protective. It wanted to consume. It wanted to be released from its glassy cage. It wanted to run. 

What do you want, Lark?

Just the impossible. Just to reroute the current of the cosmos. Just to turn back the Timekeepers’ buoy and unravel the past. 

Belonging.

The first time she submerged into the Fold, the fog of darkness settling into the very molecules of her being like a warm blanket.

Peace.

Smile lines on a handsome face, a cool drink passed along the counter after a long day, a girl sketching on a barstool.

Safety.

Calloused hands gently holding a bird skull, eyes going molten and soft, a soothing tone, “my little lark.”

Stop running, and reach.

A body, dissolved into Fold.

Lark reached up and let the tearror consume her. 

*****

The silo shattered in a silent explosion of tearror, mica, and corroded Valor.