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Chapter 601: The Stargazer

Observatory, City of Dawn, Graycastle.

The name king’s city had died with Timothy’s regime, blown off like ash in a wind. Dispersion Star had expected chaos in its wake — looting, fires, the long scream of order unraveling — but the city had surprised him. Farmers still tilled the suburbs at dawn. Stonemasons still hammered at the cracked city wall. Blacksmiths still rang iron in their shops, and the patrol teams still chased refugees through Black Street, that same old cat-and-mouse that had never resolved in his lifetime and showed no sign of resolving now. From the observatory’s high hathpace, the city below looked like a prosperous place.

Almost unchanged. Almost.

Every day, a handful of families loaded wagons and pointed them west, toward the new opportunities everyone said waited in the Western Region. The Alchemist Workshop — the Astrology Association’s old rival, perpetual thorn — had pulled up entirely and relocated, their carts grinding out through the gates one grey morning while Dispersion Star watched from above. Nobles he had never heard of now moved through the palace, picking over the bones of vanished families. New names, new faces, new scrambles for land and title.

And no one came to ask the stars anything anymore. No anxious nobles wanting futures read. No merchants seeking omens before a voyage. The sages — the word came with a faint curl of contempt now, he had noticed — utterly forgotten.

If not for the food and gold royals sent regularly by the officials His Majesty Roland had left behind, the apprentices would have scattered long since.

They had not scattered. They were here. And as long as the Astrological Station stood, its mission endured.

The Forever Stargazer.

The sun dissolved into the western mountains, staining the sky gamboge, then dull red, then the deep purple of a bruise. As true dark fell, the astrologers began their work.

Wind-proof oil lamps blazed on the hathpace. Apprentices carried the stargazing instruments from the warehouse one at a time, with the reverence of men transporting sacred relics — any damage meant lashes and docked wages. His Majesty Roland’s instruments received the most exquisite care of all.

Dispersion Star had not taken those instruments seriously when the wooden box first arrived. Roland had promised advanced stargazing gear; but instrument-making was a year-long affair, requiring rare materials and a hundred gold royals per piece, and Border Town had been a shabby backwater two years ago. He had assumed even a victorious Roland would not spend that on astronomers so far from his new center of power.

He had been wrong.

The moment he opened the box, the breath went out of him.

Nothing like it existed anywhere he had seen. Where the Association’s instruments were bamboo-thin and finicky, this metal cylinder was the diameter of a bucket. The embedded glass mirror was so clear it threw back his own face without distortion — no scratch, no bubble, no seam. A thumb-sized rotary knob at the tail end adjusted the focal distance with a gentle pinch and turn, no locking required, no trembling readjustment after each breath. A flat inclined mirror inside redirected light into his eye without forcing him to crane over the barrel. He had known that principle for decades and never thought to apply it.

His Majesty called them astronomical telescopes. Six in total, three batches.

Dispersion Star had not looked at his old astrolabe since.

Five of the six he distributed to the station’s most experienced astrologers. The constellation map would have to be redrawn entirely — the telescopes had already revealed tens of dark stars invisible to the naked eye, lurking below the old threshold of sight.

“Master.” Yun, his chief disciple, approached with the log book. “All instruments are in place.”

“Division of constellations completed?”

“Yes. Brightsky Star is ill — Void Star will cover the North One area tonight.”

“Light the flame. We begin.”

Fire roared up from the central brazier — Phospherus, the night’s brightest star, rendered in burning pitch. The astrologers arranged themselves around it by strict convention, each occupying the position of a companion star, so that they became part of the sky they studied.

Dispersion Star was fifty years old. Most men his age read by candlelight and paid for it with blurring vision. He had not made that mistake. Since the day he was selected as an apprentice, the rules had governed his eyes more severely than a knight governed his blade: no lamp-reading after dark; no strong noon sun — no going outside unhatted at noon; meals built around vision, animal organs and eyes, bloody meat. Fish forbidden — water-nature, dulling the fire in the blood. Spice forbidden — earth-nature, a slow path to blindness. Forty years of adherence. His eyes repaid him. In low light, in thin starshine, they were still sharper than most young men’s in this city.

The span of an eye’s life was limited. He spent his accordingly.

He pressed his eye to the sight and swept his assigned area with the patience of a man who had done this ten thousand times and expected to do it ten thousand more. The constellations burned in the lens — familiar as the lines of his own palm, each star a known face.

He was moving toward the second constellation when a faint light snagged the corner of his vision.

He stopped.

His blood went cold.

Breath suspended, he swung the barrel back, fingers iron-steady. The slightest tremor could lose it entirely.

It was there — between Hexagram and Blazing Star, a dim glimmer red and uncertain, as though it might blink out at any moment. Every star in the sky was white or pale gold or the cold blue-white of ancient suns.

This one was red.

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