Sorin’s boots kicked up dust as he climbed the rickety stairs to Pip’s workshop, the scent of burnt sugar still clinging to his sleeves. The others had scattered—Aeris to sharpen her knives, Kael to brood over his lute, Riven and Virellia to bicker about the ghost fish—but Sorin needed to move. To fix something that stayed fixed.

  Pip’s door was, as always, slightly ajar, as if inviting thieves to test their luck. Sorin nudged it open with his elbow. “You alive in here?”

  A wrench sailed past his head and clattered against the wall.

  “Debatable,” came Pip’s voice, muffled beneath a pile of gears. The clockmaker was a silhouette of sharp angles and oil-strained sleeves, hunched over a worktable cluttered with disemboweled clockwork birds. One of the mechanical starlings twitched in their grip, its wings spasming like a dying insect.

  Sorin picked his way through the chaos, sidestepping a teetering tower of spare cogs. “Need help?”

  Pip didn’t look up. “Need silence.”

  Sorin grinned and snatched a screwdriver from the table. “Too bad.”

  For a while, they worked in companionable quiet, Pip’s deft fingers reassembling the starling’s brass innards while Sorin untangled a nest of copper wire. The workshop was a symphony of ticking and whirring, the air thick with the tang of molten solder and the vanilla-sweetness of Pip’s inexplicable candle collection.

  Then Pip slid a small object across the table.

  A music box.

  Not one of Pip’s usual creations—this was older, its rosewood casing scarred with hairline cracks, the metal keyhole tarnished green. Sorin’s fingers hovered over it. “Where’d you find this?”

  “Didn’t.” Pip’s voice was flat. “It found me. Left on my doorstep this morning with a note: ‘For the bard who forgets.’”

  Sorin’s stomach lurched. He knew that handwriting—the same looping script as the letter in Kael’s bottle.

  Pip wound the key with a surgeon’s precision. “It’s broken. Plays half a song, then chokes.”

  The first notes were familiar—a lullaby Kael had hummed for years, the one that slipped into tavern songs and campfire dirges. But then the melody twisted, the pitch warping into something jagged and wrong. Sorin’s scars prickled.

  Pip tilted their head. “You know it.”

  “Kael’s song. But not… not like this.”

  The box shuddered. A flicker of light burst from its lid—a tiny hologram, no larger than a coin. A woman’s face, silver-haired and sorrowful, mouth moving soundlessly.

  Liraeth.

  Sorin’s breath caught. He’d seen her before—in shards of memory, in the echoes of Blackspire. The woman who’d given him the dagger. Who’d whispered—

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  The music box screamed.

  Not a mechanical grind, not a broken gear—a human sound, raw and terrified. The hologram shattered into light. The box’s lid snapped shut with a sound like teeth.

  Pip blinked. “Well. That’s new.”

  Sorin’s hands were shaking. “Wind it again.”

  Pip raised a brow. “Why? So it can bite my fingers off?”

  “I need to see her.”

  “She,” Pip corrected, tapping the box, “is a memory. And memories are knives with the handles filed off.” But they wound the key anyway.

  This time, the hologram showed Liraeth holding a child’s hand—a boy with Sorin’s eyes. Her lips formed words: “When the time comes—”

  The box gasped. A whisper slithered out, too clear, too close:

  “You’re running out of time.”

  The workshop’s candles snuffed out all at once.

  Pip struck a match. The sudden flare of light carved sharp shadows across their face, turning their usual smirk into something gaunt and grim. The music box sat between them, silent now, its once-polished wood gone dull in the dimness.

  Sorin's pulse hammered in his throat. "You heard it too."

  "Obviously." Pip lit a candle, then another, their movements precise. "Though I'd rather not hear it again. That voice was... unpleasant."

  Sorin reached for the box, but Pip slapped his hand away.

  "Ah-ah. Not until we know why it's got your name written all over it." They flipped the box over, revealing tiny letters etched into the bottom—Sorin, Age 12.

  The words hit like a punch. Sorin remembered the coin from the Market of Might-Have-Beens, the way Lyria had rung it and made his scars burn. "This is about the crown," he said, more to himself than Pip.

  Pip snorted. "Everything's about the crown with you." They pried open the music box's underside with a thin screwdriver. "Let's see what makes you so special."

  Inside, nestled among the gears, was a single tooth.

  Human.

  Small.

  Sorin's vision swam. He knew that tooth. He'd lost it—years ago, in the Broken Sanctum, the night everything went wrong. The night he forgot.

  Pip plucked it out with tweezers, holding it up to the light. "Yours, I presume?"

  Sorin couldn't speak. His mouth tasted of blood and burnt sugar.

  The tooth gleamed, its surface etched with miniscule markings—not decay, but words. Pip squinted.

  "You were never meant to wake up."

  Then the tooth moved in Pip's grip, twisting like a live thing. Pip yelped and dropped it. It hit the floor with a sound like a bell, and the workshop's shadows twisted, stretching toward it like hands.

  Sorin stumbled back, his scars flaring gold. "Pip—"

  The shadows congealed into a shape—a woman’s silhouette, tall and silver-haired. Liraeth. Her voice was a whisper, layered with other whispers, a chorus of forgotten things:

  "He’s coming. He remembers. You’re running out of time."

  Then the vision snapped like a thread.

  The tooth was gone. The music box lay shattered, its gears spilled across the floor like entrails.

  Pip exhaled sharply. "Well. That was exceptionally creepy."

  Sorin pressed a hand to his chest, his heartbeat wild. "We need to find Kael."

  Pip arched a brow. "Why? So he can sing it to death?"

  "That song—the lullaby—it's a key." Sorin grabbed Pip's arm. "Kael wrote it, but he doesn’t remember. And if the Exiled One is really him from the future—"

  "—then the song is how the crown gets its claws in you," Pip finished. They shook off Sorin’s grip and knelt, gathering the broken pieces of the music box. "You realize how insane that sounds."

  Sorin laughed, jagged. "Since when has that stopped us?"

  Pip dropped the fragments into a tin. "Fair." They stood, brushing dust from their knees. "But if we’re chasing ghosts, we’re doing it smart. No charging into ruins, no dramatic soliloquies. And no waking up ancient curses before breakfast."

  Sorin opened his mouth to argue—then froze.

  A sound.

  Faint.

  Coming from the tin.

  The shattered music box was still playing.

  Its warped lullaby seeped through the metal, slower now, distorted. The melody curled around the workshop, slipping into the cracks between Pip’s tools, the gaps in the floorboards.

  And then, so quiet Sorin almost missed it:

  "Nothing lasts—not even kings, not even thieves, not even me."

  Pip went very still. "That’s new."

  Sorin’s reflection in a nearby gear looked back at him—but its eyes were hollow, its face crowned in molten gold.

  Then the vision vanished.

  The music box fell silent.

  And somewhere, deep in Blackspire, a bell began to toll.