The front latch snapped like dry pine. Cold air rushed over the threshold, reeking of burned camphor and powdered saltpetre. Out past the flagged porch, standing square in the pale grey mist of daybreak, Eneko Goiko raised an iron bell. Chalk ran in blinding, perfect arcs around his boots, carving the soft mud into a geometric slaughterhouse. "The hour is struck, Ibai!" Eneko’s voice boomed off the slate roof. "Step aside or burn with the residue!" He did not wait for an answer. Eneko swung the bell down. It hit a bronze tuning spike driven deep into the dirt. A ringing blow struck the cottage rafters. Mortar sprayed from the ceiling in dry white puffs. The iron hearth tools rattled against their hooks, and Lide crumpled against the wooden frame of her loom with an ear-splitting wail. Her hands clawed at her own chest. Her edges frayed, pale silver ribbons tearing loose from her skin like frayed wool caught on brambles. "Lide!" Ibai stumbled over a stool, his knees hitting the stone flags. "It pulls," she cried out, her fingers digging uselessly into her translucent ribs. "Ibai, it is cutting the weft!" Outside, Eneko began the fourth stanza of the Great Severance, each Latinate syllable dropped like lead shot into the soil. The ambient silver currents of the valley buckled. They inverted, turning jagged and sharp, scouring the walls to bleach every vestige of warmth from the cottage. The timber lintel groaned under the strain. Nausea churned in Ibai's gut. His hands shook so hard he dropped his slate pencil. For months, years, he had bowed his head whenever Eneko corrected his posture, whenever the preceptors docked his rations for reading the banned apocrypha. He had always shrunk back, apologising for taking up room in the hall, choosing silence over the scorch of ridicule. Not today. Not in this room. He scrambled for the clay bowls lined along the worktable. Dried indigo roots. Crushed stems of *aintzin lore*. Bitter elderberries steeped in salt. Substances the Lumin preceptors labelled poison, blasphemy, filth. "Lide, listen to my voice!" Ibai barked, his pitch sharp, stripping away every ounce of his usual meekness. "Give me the shuttle! Touch the iron bowl!" "I... I will taint you—" "Touch it!" She reached out. Her pale fingers plunged into the wet indigo mash. The cold from her touch turned the dye black as pitch, frosting the lip of the earthenware bowl with rime. Her lingering warmth, the ache of her lost years, bled straight into the crushed pulp. It was raw spirit, unpurified, wild, and utterly forbidden. Ibai dipped his bare hands into the slush. He spun toward the open doorway, dragging both palms across the floorboards in a wide, sweeping half-moon. The dye bit into the grain of the oak. It hissed, smoking with the pungent scent of winter mint and summer loam. He did not recite the clean, sterile canticles of the chapterhouse. Instead, he sang the low, rhythmic ditty Lide had hummed while beating the warp—a weaver's counting tune. *One over, two beneath, catch the wind before it weeps.* Outside, Eneko had just raised his ritual athame to strike the final severing blow. "By the light unyielding, dissolve this mire!" He drove the blade into the bronze spike. The shockwave cracked the flagstones on the threshold. But it did not shatter the room. It struck the arc of blue pulp and slammed to a dead halt, throwing up a blinding spray of sapphire sparks. The cottage floor groaned, the counter-ward biting back with the stubborn strength of an ancient oak root. Eneko stumbled back half a pace, his boots skidding in the churned grass. His face blanched. "What is this? What have you done to the circle?" "I held the door!" Ibai stepped into the frame, his sleeves soaked in dark dye, his posture rigid. His breath came in thin, shallow rasps, but his feet did not give an inch. "Stand down, Eneko!" "You are weaving her into the ward!" Eneko’s shout cracked with genuine horror. He gripped his athame with two white-knuckled fists, channeling another pulse of white, sterilising heat through the grass. "That is high treason! That is necromancy, you snivelling clerk! Have you lost your mind?" "Look at the patterns!" Ibai shoved his blue-stained palm forward, pouring his own life-force through the counter-seal to meet Eneko’s searing white strike. The clash sounded like two iron cauldrons colliding in mid-air. "Look past your textbook for once!" The opposing forces locked at the threshold, neither yielding. The air vibrated so violently that the dew on the eaves turned into mist. In the blinding glare where the white fire of the Severance ground against the deep indigo of Lide's soul, the barrier thinned into glass. The energy rebounded. A sudden snap echoed across the misty clearing as the feedback rushed backward along Eneko's circle, throwing the zealous ritualist onto his back. As the wards collided and broke, Lide’s memory tore loose across the current. It did not project as a gentle shadow this time. It exploded between the two young men in vivid, painful clarity. The smell of copper. The chill of an autumn midnight. The image of Amaia kneeling on these very floorboards, crying so hard she choked on her own phlegm, her hands trembling as she held the silver-hilted knife over Lide's sleeping breast. *Forgive me, sister. The blight is at the well. The roots are black. Only a heart anchored to the loom can weave the ward across the valley.* Eneko lay in the dirt, the athame trembling in his slack grip. The memory vanished like smoke, but the phantom stench of blood and terror lingered between them. His zealous certainty collapsed in an instant, mouth hanging open as he stared at the pale form weeping by the loom. "She wasn't a lingering blight," Eneko stammered, his knuckles slackening around the bronze bell. "She was..." "She was sacrificed!"

The Siege of Aizkorri