The drop is maybe fifteen feet—short enough to survive, long enough to hurt. I hit the plaza stones wrong, my broken arm taking impact it can’t handle. Something snaps. Fresh agonyexplodes through my shoulder and down my spine. My legs buckle. I go down hard.
“Rathok!”
Hands on me. Ivalys. Her palms press against my chest, the sigil on her hand flaring as her gift reaches for my wounds. Heat floods through me—not burning, not painful. Healing.
“You idiot.” Her voice shakes. “You absolute idiot.”
“Told you.” I manage something that might be a smile. “Right behind you.”
She makes a sound that’s half laugh, half sob. Her forehead presses against mine. Her breath warm on my face. For one moment, the world narrows to just this—her eyes an inch from mine, her hands on my chest, her life tangled with mine in ways that have nothing to do with contracts.
Then the Ledger Hall collapses.
The sound is like nothing I’ve heard before. Three centuries of accumulated architecture folding in on itself. Stone and bone and paper and magic, all of it surrendering to gravity and the absence of the power that held it up. The ground shakes. The plaza cracks. Dust erupts upward in a massive plume that turns the twilight black.
We scramble backward. Gror helps me move while Ivalys keeps her hands pressed to my chest, pouring whatever healing her gift can offer into my broken body. We don’t stop until we’re across the plaza, pressed against the wall of a contract-scribe’s shop, watching the Hall die.
It takes a long time.
The twin spires fall first. They snap at their bases and tumble in opposite directions, wrapped in contract-ribbon that catches fire as they fall. One crashes into the plaza, throwing up a wave of debris. The other disappears into the buildings behind the Hall, taking them down too.
The main structure follows. The walls buckle. The roof caves. Floor after floor pancakes downward, each impact shaking the ground beneath our feet. Contract-fire spreads through the wreckage, consuming paper and wood and bone with hungry efficiency.
Finally, silence.
Where the Ledger Hall stood, nothing remains but rubble. A crater of collapsed stone and burning paper, settling into the catacombs below. Three centuries of Gravebind’s power, reduced to ash and memory.
It’s over.
∗ ∗ ∗
We sit against the scribe-shop wall, watching the dust settle.
Ivalys hasn’t let go of me. Her head rests against my shoulder, her hand still pressed to my chest where the contract-heart tore free. Her gift pulses gently through me—not healing now, just present. Reminding me she’s here. Reminding me I’m alive.
Gror sits on my other side. Silent. Staring at the rubble with an expression I can’t read. He’s thinking about his debt, probably. The contract that started all of this. The choice that nearly cost him his soul and his sister.
I don’t blame him. Never did. He was a tool, same as I was. The Ledger Master used him to get to Ivalys, and Ivalys to get to her mother’s legacy. We were all just pieces on a board that no longer exists.
“Is it done?” Gror’s voice is barely a whisper. “Really done?”
I look at the crater. At the flames still licking through the wreckage. At the contract-ash drifting through the air, settling on the plaza stones.
“He’s dead.” The words feel strange in my mouth. After so long in his service, I never imagined saying them. “The Ledger Master is dead.”
“But the contracts—the debts?—”
“Some will hold.” Ivalys lifts her head. Her voice is tired but certain. “The fair ones. The willing ones. Bargains where both sides chose freely and both sides benefited.” She looks at her palm, where the sigil still glows faintly. “But the fraudulent ones? The stolen souls? Those are free now. All of them.”
Gror exhales. The tension drains from his shoulders. “Then it was worth it. All of it.”
“It was.” Ivalys’s hand finds her brother’s. Squeezes. “It was.”
I watch them. Brother and sister, reunited. Alive. Free of the Ledger Master’s schemes. This is what she fought for. This is why she touched that contract in Gror’s apartment, why she descended into the catacombs, why she faced a monster that killed her mother.
Family.
I didn’t have that. Not since the Shattered Peaks fell. My family scattered. The few who survived became strangers.
