The primary lens of the Mirrorglass Tower drinks the light of a dead sky. At three in the morning, the air at the apex is a whetted blade, smelling of mountain snow and the bitter residue of pitch-pine ink. Liriel Aster stands alone, her midnight-blue coat buttoned against the draft, her pale-grey eyes fixed to the eyepiece as the comet drags its jagged tail across the meridian.
She adjusts the brass gears with a steady, ink-smudged hand. The mathematics of the heavens rarely lie, yet the trajectory she maps across the vellum is an impossibility of fire and ash. For sixteen years, she has taught Prince Caer Vael that stars are silent witnesses, but this celestial guest screams of a singular end: the tower she serves will burn by the hand of the king she tutored.
Liriel reaches for her ephemeris, her fingers tracing the soft, worn spine of the book in her pocket. The prophecy is etched in the curve of the comet's path, a geometric certainty that demands a radical response before the sun dares to rise. The ink on her final calculation begins to bleed, mirroring a sudden red shift in the observatory's primary lens.
