Inside, the elders slid back into their roles like muscle memory. Brenn handed his tea to a shaking woman without a word, then produced another cup from nowhere. Aydin watched and felt something in his chest loosen in the dumbest, most human way.

  Then he smelled it: hot broth and soft root, salt and pepper bite, something fatty and honest that clung to your clothes. Stew. Real stew.

  Outside the warehouse, in the ward-yard, they had built a cafeteria out of scavenged parts and stubbornness. Benches and tables of cut crystal sat in uneven rows, edges chipped and sand-scuffed, each surface catching bowl-light and throwing it back in pale flashes. Shallow bowls of glow-crystals lit the yard without flame, and for a moment the light made it look less like a disaster and more like a hard night people intended to survive.

  At the center sat a pot, crystal too, thick-walled and half-translucent, veins of light running through it as if it remembered being part of something larger. It simmered on a squat stone base carved with old grooves, steady as if normal was a choice you could make by force.

  Kids were already there, of course they were, swarming Khalen the way gulls swarmed a dock. One demanded candy, another grabbed his coat, and a third squealed “Captain Khalen” like those words were a spell.

  Khalen sighed like it pained him, then reached into a pouch and produced hard candies wrapped in wax paper like a man who had made this same mistake in every town on the coast.

  “You’re all terrible,” Khalen said.

  The kids cheered anyway.

  Aydin stared at the crystal pot because his brain needed something that wasn’t alarms and posts and Voss’s voice.

  “What is that,” he asked.

  “Dinner,” Khalen said, tossing a candy without looking.

  Lyra stepped into the yard too, drawn by the normalness like a moth to light. Her hands went to her sleeves out of habit and she caught herself mid-motion. She picked up a stack of cloth bowls instead and re-centered them, perfectly aligned, like that might help.

  Aydin couldn’t help it, a laugh bubbling out of him before he could stop it. Lyra’s eyes flicked to him, sweet smile, and then her teeth caught her thumbnail for a quick scrape, sharp and efficient, like she was clearing grit off a blade.

  Aydin shut his mouth again because he had seen it, the private tell under the polish, and it hit him harder than it had any right to.

  Brenn appeared beside the pot with a ladle like he had been assigned by fate and started pouring stew into bowls. Maera took one, inspected it like a resource report, then ate like she had been hungry for three days. Orren took one and kept flipping his token between bites. Selka hummed, ladled for someone else, and never broke cadence.

  Aydin stepped closer and reached for a bowl.

  A shoulder drifted into his path.

  Rand.

  Thick-shouldered, close-cropped hair, that dockside confidence like the world owed him space. He moved as if it was an accident, as if the yard was tight and Aydin was the one who had not learned how to stand yet. Aydin stopped short. Rand didn’t apologize. He took a bowl he didn’t look like he wanted, raised it just enough for Aydin to see it, then tipped it and let a single drop of stew slosh over the rim onto Aydin’s boot, not enough to matter, enough to mean something.

  Rand smiled, petty and pleased, then stepped aside, like he had been generous.

  Aydin’s cut thumb pressed into the rim of his own bowl. He didn’t feel the pressure. He watched the blood smear anyway. Brenn’s eyes flicked to it and he said nothing, just slid Aydin a cloth strip already torn and already the right size. Aydin wrapped it one-handed, badly, because he couldn’t feel where the knot was biting.

  Rand laughed once, too loud, like he had scored a point in a game only he was playing, then looked away, satisfied.

  Aydin decided not to make it a thing.

  He ate.

  It was hot, real, tasted like salt and root vegetables and something smoky, and for a stupid second his eyes went prickly and he pretended it was the steam. He ate faster to prove something to himself, then his brain, because it couldn’t leave a mystery alone, found the problem.

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  “Where did you get an endless stew pot,” Aydin asked.

  Khalen’s grin turned faintly smug.

  “Dungeon,” he said, like that explained everything.

  “The dungeon you cleared to build Stonehaven,” Aydin said.

  Khalen nodded.

  “Found it in a side room,” he said. “Along with the light-crystals. Along with half the benches you’re sitting on.”

  Aydin looked at the crystal pot again.

  “What does it do,” he asked.

  “Whatever you put in it keeps going,” Khalen said. “If you feed it mana.”

  Aydin’s stomach made a sound like it had been waiting all day to complain. He hadn’t realized he was hungry until someone made it normal. He took another bite, then, mouth half full, asked the question that had been lurking behind his teeth since the word dungeon hit the air.

  “What happens if you put something bad in it.”

  “If you dump it all at once,” Khalen said, “it empties like a normal cauldron.”

  Aydin frowned.

  Khalen’s grin widened.

  “And yes,” he added, “I tested how to dump it.”

  Lyra made a sound that might have been a laugh if she would allow herself that, then caught her father’s gaze through the warehouse doorway and her posture refined into perfection again. Smile softened. “Yes, Father,” already waiting in her throat.

  Aydin watched it happen and kept chewing like he hadn’t noticed.

  He failed.

  Voss went to the worktable again and started sorting stones, not a lecture, work. He picked one up, studied it, then tossed it into a reject bin.

  “Rot-touched,” he said.

  Maera’s jaw tightened. “Waste.”

  “Trouble,” Voss corrected, without heat.

  Khalen leaned on a post and looked like he was enjoying himself, of course he was.

  Aydin sat on a crate near the ward-yard edge and ate and watched Lyra move between the warehouse and the yard like she belonged to both worlds and liked neither one enough to relax in. Rand watched her too, then watched Aydin watching her, lip curling like he had decided what kind of person Aydin was. He leaned toward another young man and said something low. The other man laughed too loud, then looked at Aydin like he had been handed an assignment.

  Aydin lifted his bowl a fraction, dead-eyed.

  Sure.

  Add it to the list.

  Rand drifted into Aydin’s space again, shoulder-first, not hard, just enough to say: I’m here, and you’re new.

  Aydin stared at his bowl, then at Rand, then back at his bowl, and something in his face shifted, small and bright, like a match caught.

  “My bad,” Aydin said, and moved like he was clumsy.

  He wasn’t.

  He pivoted, lost his balance on purpose, and the bowl tipped. Stew poured in a slow, perfect arc, warm and rude, right onto Rand’s boots. It soaked. It slid. It found seams and stitching and the places oil hadn’t touched yet, and it kept going like it had a personal grudge. Not a splash. A commitment.

  For half a second nobody spoke.

  Rand looked down.

  Looked up.

  “Are you serious,” Rand said, very quietly.

  Aydin lifted both hands, palms out.

  “Crowded yard,” Aydin said. “You’ll live.”

  One of the kids giggled.

  Khalen’s mouth twitched like he had just watched a coin land on its edge.

  Rand lunged, not a knife, not a weapon, a shove and a grab and a fist that wanted to land because fists were simple and the world had gotten complicated.

  Aydin dodged the first swing on timing alone.

  He slipped the second too, stepping back and sideways. Rand chased his own momentum, already committed.

  Rand came again, faster now, irritation turning into embarrassment and embarrassment turning into a decision. Aydin tried to slide past.

  Rand clipped him with an elbow, messy and unplanned, just enough to ruin the footwork.

  Aydin’s boot skated on packed sand and he went down on his hip with a grunt, more offended than hurt.

  “Hey. Rude,” Aydin said.

  Rand surged toward him, breath high, hands open like he was going to haul him up just to throw him down again. Maera started to move, candy forgotten in her fist, and her voice sharpened in a way that made a few heads turn.

  “Enough. Not in my yard.”

  Khalen lifted a hand, easy, intercepting her without touching. His eyes stayed on Rand like he was watching weather roll in.

  “Give it a second,” Khalen said. “Let it show itself.”

  Rand took one more step.

  And his left arm changed.

  Not smoothly. Not like a trick. It seized up mid-motion, fingers spreading, then locking. The skin turned pale-grey in crawling patches, stone trying to remember the shape of a man.

  Rand’s eyes went wide, surprise first, then fear right after, because he felt it too.

  His arm dropped heavy. The weight yanked his shoulder down.

  He tried to pull back.

  He couldn’t.

  The stone kept going, clumsy and wrong. It dragged him forward as if his own body had decided to betray him in front of everyone.

  “Wait,” Rand blurted, and it came out smaller than he wanted.

  The stone arm swung down anyway, not aimed, not careful, just falling with too much mass behind it.

  Aydin’s breath caught.

  His hands moved before his brain got a vote.

  Sand snapped up between them, waist-high then chest-high in a blink. Grains locked tight as if they had been waiting for the command all night.

  Rand’s stone arm hit it with a dull, ugly thump.

  The wall held for one heartbeat.

  Then Aydin pushed.

  Not up.

  Out.

  The sand wall surged forward, a shove from a giant hand. Rand’s ruined boots slid, stew smearing as he skated. His stone arm pulled him off-balance.

  His eyes went even wider as he realized he could not stop his own weight.

  “OH,” Rand started.

  The wall hit him fully.

  Rand went flying, launched and ridiculous, arms windmilling, stew dripping off him as he smashed backward through a crystal divider that had been pretending to be a wall. The crystal flexed, cracked, and popped apart in a shower of bright shards that skittered across the yard like spilled dice.

  Rand landed on his back with a heavy whump and a startled yelp that cut off halfway.

  He blinked once.

  Then his eyes rolled, out cold.

  Silence held for the length of one stunned breath.