CHAPTER 416: THEN I’LL STEADY IT MY WAY

Mariel reached out, her fingers brushing against one of the lantern nodes built into the table’s edge, tilting it slightly as if it were real and not just light.

"You know what you are doing," she said. Her voice was kind, but not the kind that softens or excuses.

It was the kind of kindness that cut deeper than any lecture, the sort that only lands when someone has already been watching long enough to know what is true.

"Do not let vengeance dress itself as prudence."

He didn’t argue. He didn’t even let the words sting. He had earned some of the spite that lived in him, and he knew it, but spite was not a driver, not a tool for steering, not something he would let hold the wheel.

It was ballast, something you carried and balanced. "Noted," he said, simple as that. "I want him gone. I want the ones beneath him scattered or silent.

I want the people in this city to wake up thinking about coffee and train lines and whether their shoes will hold, not about gods or bones or storms.

I won’t waste surprise on speeches. I’ll spend it on results."

Taaros straightened then, and when he did, the air seemed to adjust around him, as though it had always known how much space belonged to him and was finally reminded.

His voice was low and weighty, not polished and not dressed for a throne—it was the kind of voice that came from work boots and weathered beams.

"Then show us," he said. "When the ancient makes his move, show us your people are not only survivors clinging to borrowed light.

Show us the light is yours. Show us you mean to keep it without asking anyone’s leave."

He didn’t thunder. He didn’t need to. The words landed heavy anyway, heavier than a shout ever could.

Mariel lingered a moment longer. Her gaze softened, but the line under it stayed sharp. "We have watched you carry loads when no one saw," she said.

Her voice carried no pity, no judgment, only recognition of weight already borne. Then, almost gently, she added, "Do not forget to set them down at the right hour.

Balance favors a steady hand more than a tight fist."

When they left, they flowed out the way they had come, the seam in the air closing so neatly it felt as though the room itself had smiled at being restored to shape.

He was alone again, surrounded by the steady hum of systems and the glow of maps that waited for his hand to touch them.

He let out one slow breath through his nose and spoke to the empty room, not loud, not soft, just steady. "Then I’ll steady it my way."

He didn’t sit again. Instead, he walked to the far wall and laid his hand against the glass. The display shifted at his touch, sliding into a new layer.

This one wasn’t about streets or armies. It was the Association itself, opened like a body under a scan, lines and veins glowing faintly as they ran to every corner.

He didn’t stare at the great arteries—the obvious power always looked obvious. He traced the capillaries, the small flows no one noticed but which kept the whole alive.

He adjusted one here, dimming it to a dull glow, shifted another into a rhythm that would feel like sleep to anyone watching, and turned a third into a pulse meant to itch at the edge of a cultist’s mind.

Three small threads pulled, while the rest of the rug looked untouched to anyone who glanced.

He believed in patience, in letting the smallest details carry their own weight until the time came.

The clock in the corner crept toward that hour between night and morning that belonged to bakers, nurses, and men who still believed in trains running on time.

He drank his tea while it was still hot. He ate a bite of bread he hadn’t made but had promised to eat.

It was heavy in his mouth, lighter in his stomach, and it sat there like fuel instead of comfort. He looked back at the map and followed the route he had labeled Dawn.

The coil that lived under his ribs, wound tight for so long, loosened by just a finger’s width.

He opened a side window and let the exam schedule unfold across the glass. He didn’t read it word for word. He listened to it.

Schedules had their own music. You could always tell when someone who didn’t know the song had tried to move a note.

He found three places where the beat stuttered, where a bar had shifted by a half-count. He circled them quietly in red and left a single word beside the mark. Watch.

Only two people would ever notice it, and that was enough.

A tug came behind him. Not a ripple, not a seam, just the faint pull a silent message makes when it finds the room it was meant for.

He lifted his hand without turning, and the desk responded, raising a thin strip of light into his palm. He closed his fingers around it and let it dissolve before it could cool.

Three new nodes flickered to life on the city’s ringed map, dim as embers. He knew who had sent them. He knew better than to say it aloud.

He set them in their places and left no mark of his own.

He didn’t think about sleep.

Instead, He thought about breakfast carts rattling along their routes and trams pulling up on schedule because men with oil on their hands had checked bolts out of habit and pride.

He thought about his sister’s face when she pretended she wasn’t worried and failed.

He thought about three young people sitting on a couch, reading the words he had written in a calm hand, the kind of words that looked plain on the surface but carried a single note inside them that said he hadn’t slept and didn’t expect to.

The building’s hum shifted by a hair. Machinery that had been still woke and turned over. Cleaning crews moved to the far side of the floor.