Syllis pushed through the tall, leaded timber doors of the Grand Exhibition Hall. The artificial calm Galdien’s chime had woven still clung to her, a suffocating film over her fury. Revion’s hand, warm and firm, found her elbow, a silent anchor in the swirling dissonance. The hall rose into a cavernous dome of green bottle-glass, its ribbed ceiling strung with iron bells that vibrated with trapped pasts. Below, rows of senior tuners turned in unison, their whispers cutting out as boots scuffed the stone floor. On the central dais, Mirellys, draped in spun grey silk, stood beside the gleaming Echo-Core. It hummed with the raw, unstable light of an uncalibrated instrument, yet the geometry belonged entirely to Syllis. Mirellys’s eyes, wide and luminous, tracked Syllis’s approach. Her lips curved into a fragile smile, but the triumph in their depths was a venomous barb. Mirellys stepped forward, a vision of delicate distress. Her voice, pitched just high enough to carry across the hushed hall, trembled like a struck nerve. “Syllis! Oh, thank the Harmonious Fates you’re here! I was so worried. Your… condition.” She dabbed at the corner of her eye with a silken cloth, her gaze sweeping over the assembled tuners, garnering sympathy. “I know this must be difficult for you, seeing the Echo-Core unveiled. After all your… efforts.” Her words were a soft knife twisting in an open wound. Revion pressed his thumb into Syllis’s sleeve. The instinct to duck her chin and mutter excuses flared up, but the bone-mallet strike from Galdien’s bench still rang against her teeth. It grated against the stiffness petrifying her fingers, and against the stolen months torn from Revion’s mind. “Mirellys,” Revion’s voice was a low growl, cutting through the saccharine performance. “We need to speak. Privately.” Mirellys flinched, pulling back as if struck. Her eyes, brimming with unshed tears, fixed on Revion. “Revion, don't! Not now. Not before the council.” Her voice cracked on cue, sharp and thin. She took a hesitant step towards him, her hand reaching out as if for solace. “You know how much this means to me. All my life, I’ve been… overlooked. Remember when we were novices, and the Solstice Chime shattered during the Vernal Weave? Everyone blamed me, but you… you fixed it, and said I helped. You let me take the credit. Grant me this one tribute, Revion. Just this once. For old times’ sake.” The air thickened with Mirellys’s manufactured sorrow. Syllis’s mind reeled. The Solstice Chime. She remembered that day. Revion had spent hours meticulously re-attuning the shattered fragments, his small hands bleeding from the sharp edges, while Mirellys had sat on a nearby bench, weeping theatrically until the Arch-Tuner on duty had intervened, praising her 'resilience' and Revion's 'kindness'. It had been an open secret that Mirellys used her fragility as a shield, but to weaponize it now, against Revion, against *her*— “The Solstice Chime, Mirellys?” Syllis’s voice was hoarse, but it held a new, dangerous edge. The artificial calm was cracking. “You watched him cut his fingers on the glass. You watched him take the blame for your carelessness. You asked him to lie.” Mirellys’s delicate facade wavered for a microsecond. Her eyes darted to the judges seated at the front, then back to Syllis, a calculated flicker of indignation. “Syllis, how can you? After everything? I’ve been so worried about you, your… mental state. You’re clearly not well. And now, to try and sabotage my moment, my triumph… it’s cruel.” She turned her tear-filled gaze to Revion. “Revion, look at me. You know my heart. The Echo-Core belongs to the city, to protect our dying records. It must be dedicated properly, not abandoned to someone so unstable.” Her fingers, trembling with theatrical helplessness, reached toward the vessel on the dais. Her fingers brushed the activation key, a spiral of polished auris-stone, intending to grasp it. Sickness coiled tight in Syllis’s throat. She saw the flash of triumph in Mirellys’s eyes, the conviction that Syllis would crumble, that Revion would acquiesce, that the Echo-Core would be stolen, claimed, *hers* forever. But the girl who had cowered in the shadows of the Conservatory, the orphan who craved Galdien’s approval, was being burned away, replaced by the fire of betrayal and injustice. The core held two years of sleepless vigils, etched into the lattice alongside the pieces Revion had lost to shield her work. Before Mirellys’s fingers could close around the auris-key, Syllis moved. A sharp crack echoed through the sudden silence of the hall as her own hand, still bandaged but steady, slapped Mirellys’s reaching wrist away. Mirellys gasped, her carefully constructed tears freezing in place, her face a mask of shock and sudden, naked fury. Syllis stepped past her, snatching the brass speaking-horn from its stand. Its cold, smooth surface vibrated with the collective attention of the room. She held it aloft, her gaze sweeping over the stunned faces of the tuners, the judges, and finally, Mirellys, whose eyes now blazed with a raw, unadulterated hatred. “This is mine!” Syllis’s voice, amplified by the chime, resonated with a new, fierce clarity, cutting through the hall like a shard of pure sound. The artificial calm had shattered completely, replaced by a searing, crystalline rage. “The Echo-Core is *my* build. Every frequency, every temper, every sliver of blue glass inside that housing belongs to my bench. This thief forged my seal. She arranged to lock me in the catacombs and bleed my faculties dry, the way she bled Revion’s past. She has no claim here!” The hall erupted in a cacophony of whispers. Faces, previously impassive, contorted with shock and confusion. Mirellys, regaining her composure with terrifying speed, crumpled to the floor, clutching her wrist. Her voice, now truly a sob, tore through the murmurs. “She’s hysterical! Look at her! Her hand, it’s… it’s crystallizing! She’s fracturing! The pressure has driven her mad!” Mirellys wailed, lifting her tear-streaked face to the judges, her plea a desperate, theatrical performance. “She will destroy it all! Arch-Tuner Galdien, stop her! She is a hazard to the Conservatory and to our archives!” Arch-Tuner Galdien, who had been observing from the front row with an inscrutable expression, rose slowly. His presence filled the space, commanding a sudden, absolute silence. He climbed the dais stairs, robes whispering over flagstones. Reaching out, he pried the horn from Syllis’s rigid grasp, his gaze flat and unblinking. He looked at Mirellys on the floor, then at Syllis, then out at the bewildered crowd. The silence was absolute, suffocating. “Syllis,” Galdien said through the brass, his tone smooth and dead. “Hand the spindle to Mirellys. Now. Or leave the gates stripped of every craft you were ever taught.”

Tears and Glass