A Shield With Four Edges

Sir Fenric found the first crack in the gate while making his morning rounds. Raion Ironmane found the second while inspecting the shield mechanism. Captain Catton found the third because he had been trying to use the mechanism as a shortcut to breakfast.

King Caelum announced that the gate would hold. Then he looked up at the three enormous cracks and asked, in a much smaller voice, what the others needed him to carry.

The white-armored champion known as Sir Caedric arrived with tools instead of a banner. He had once served a court that believed polishing a problem was almost as good as fixing it. He no longer worked there. By noon he and Raion Ironmane had taken apart enough of the wall to discover that its foundations were hollow.

A voice beyond the wall

Noxus appeared on the far side at sunset. The guards raised their weapons. The cosmic stranger raised both empty hands, then studied them as though considering whether humans always counted hands before conversations.

“I am looking for the sound inside your wall,” Noxus said.

Sir Fenric listened. Beneath the alarm, beneath Captain Catton’s increasingly inventive complaints, the gate was singing. Its builders had trapped a fragment of a living star in the foundations. The star had powered the city’s defences for generations. Nobody had asked whether it wished to stay.

Raion Ironmane wanted to secure the streets before releasing anything. Captain Catton found a way to evacuate the market using a story about a surprise royal inspection. Sir Caedric marked the supports that would need replacing. King Caelum walked from house to house, knocking on doors. His crown slipped again. This time a child straightened it for him.

The work of holding

When the foundations opened, Noxus reached into the light. The gate began to fall. There was no time for a glorious formation: Sir Fenric took one side, Raion Ironmane took the other, Sir Caedric braced the centre and Captain Catton put his shoulder beneath a beam that would leave him complaining for a week.

King Caelum could not hold a wall. He could hold a ladder. He held it while the last worker climbed down, then stood beside it until everybody had been counted.

The star rose through the open gate without burning a single roof. Noxus followed it as far as the square and stopped. “Is this what you mean by a team?” the stranger asked.

“Usually with fewer injuries,” Sir Fenric said.

They rebuilt the gate over six days. It opened by ordinary hinges and a mechanism anyone in the city could inspect. King Caelum insisted on paying the workers before commissioning a new crest. Captain Catton proposed putting his portrait on it. The vote was unanimous against, which he later described as proof of an unfair coalition.

Noxus stayed for the seventh day. At midnight he found a seventh place set at the empty table. Whose name had been scratched into the bowl?