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A year after the war (though Vi never called it that aloud, the word stuck to her teeth like old blood), Caitlyn sat in a high-backed velvet chair. She wore her House colors: deep blue and gold and silver so pale it looked like moonlight on her shoulders. A subtle circlet rested against her temple, nothing ostentatious. Caitlyn hated ostentatious. But there was no mistaking the steel in her spine, the unyielding lift of her chin. Matriarch Kiramman, because her mother had not come back from the rubble, and someone had to build something clean from the ruin.
Vi lounged beside her in a chair dragged in from the hallway, obviously not meant for ceremony. It was plain wood, squeaking when she shifted. She wore black trousers tucked into her battered boots, her only nod to formality a collared white shirt that didn’t quite hide the smudges of oil at her cuffs. She looked like a storm cloud next to Caitlyn’s clear sky, red-pink hair tied back but stubborn strands springing free. Her boots tapped against the marble floor restlessly like a guard dog on too tight a leash.
The painter was a soft man with trembling hands that smelled faintly of turpentine and stale wine. His eyes darted from Caitlyn to Vi and back again, almost uncertainly. He had expected a Kiramman alone, all regal and poised, easily smoothed into oil and canvas, not this bruised-looking brawler pressed in close at her side, knuckles scarred, chin lifted like she would punch him if he asked her to move an inch away. Behind him, apprentices shifted nervously, the scent of pigment sharp enough to sting the nose.
The painter hesitated. His brush hovered above a blank canvas as big as a door.“This is most…” he murmured. “Unconventional.”
“Unconventional is the new standard,” Caitlyn said simply. “Paint us both.”
The artist swallowed. His eyes flicked again to Vi, who bared her teeth in something that might have been a smile. Caitlyn reached over, lacing her fingers through Vi’s hand. Vi’s shoulders dropped half an inch, though her jaw stayed tight.
“Ma’am, traditionally—” the painter tried, but Caitlyn’s thumb traced over Vi’s knuckles like punctuation, and that was that.
“Tradition killed enough of us,” Vi snapped. “Start painting.”
So the first stroke fell, a whisper of charcoal to map the line of Caitlyn’s shoulder, the bright halo of Vi’s hair. Hours bled out through tall windows, sunlight shifting on the marble. House staff drifted through with tea that Caitlyn barely sipped and biscuits that Vi ignored. Now and then, Caitlyn turned, brushing her lips to Vi’s temple, like a silent benediction, a promise she hadn’t broken yet.
Once, Vi muttered, “Do I really gotta sit still?” and Caitlyn murmured, “You promised,” so gently that Vi only huffed and sank deeper into her chair, her thigh pressed to Caitlyn’s skirts. Their joined hands stayed in the frame, inked and immortal, trembling only slightly when Vi’s thumb traced the inside of Caitlyn’s wrist, where the pulse flickered frantic and alive.
When the sun dipped behind the spires and the last brushstroke dried in a hush of turpentine and oil, the painter stepped back. His breath caught in his throat.
On the canvas, Caitlyn’s eyes stared out calm as a winter lake, cold cerulean and white, the vertical scar cutting through the damaged iris. And, beside her, Vi’s eyes burned with something fierce enough to gut the whole shining city—like love, defiance, exhaustion, hope—all tangled up and painted into the spaces between bruises that hadn’t quite faded.
The apprentices packed up the paints, whispering about scandal, about how the next Kiramman matriarch’s portrait would hang in the family’s grand hall forever, a lover etched into the legacy like a loaded bullet. The wind outside rattled the windowpanes almost ominously.
When the hall emptied, Caitlyn squeezed Vi’s hand, forehead pressed to her temple. Vi’s laugh cracked through the silence, half-shattered. “I guess you’re stuck with me on a wall for good now.”
Caitlyn only smiled, soft as snowfall, and said, “Good.”
Five years later, the second portrait was painted in a sunroom.
It had once been a greenhouse, a quiet Kiramman indulgence for rare orchids and warm air in the dead of winter. Now the glass walls were patched with mismatched panels, some clear, some warped, catching the sunrise and breaking it into strings that danced across Vi’s back as she sat half-turned in a cane-backed chair.
This time, there was no official decree, no polite invitation from the Council or the family’s estate manager. Just Caitlyn and Vi and a local portraitist Vi liked, someone from the Lanes, whose hands smelled of ink and linseed, whose eyes didn’t widen at the scars on Vi’s arms or the shadows under Caitlyn’s eyes. There were no apprentices now, nor were there Kiramman banners. Just the bristle of leaves brushing the ceiling and the soft click of Caitlyn’s ring against her teacup when she fidgeted.
Vi wore a shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled to her elbows. There was a tiny smudge of black under her left eye where she had failed to wash off engine grease. She had come straight from the Undercity, boots still tracking in the dust of the streets she hadn’t stopped patrolling. She slouched sideways in the chair, forearm draped over Caitlyn’s knee, like it was the only anchor keeping her here.
Caitlyn sat perched on the armrest, regal by habit, yes, but her spine softened now and then as Vi leaned into her hip, pulling her off-balance. She was older, and her eyes knew it, deep-cut with the lines of too many Council meetings that tasted like acid behind her teeth.
The fine Kiramman blue was replaced with a simple silk blouse the color of stormclouds. A single gold pin at her throat, her mother’s sigil reworked into something cleaner: the Kiramman crest flanked by two crossed wrenches. It was Vi’s mark, stubbornly soldered into noble silver.
“Hold still,” the painter murmured, sketching quick lines that scratched like whispers against the paper.
A little jar of turpentine sat open by their feet, the tang sharp under the sweetness of overripe flowers. Vi tried to obey, she really did, but her thumb kept drifting to the inside of Caitlyn’s wrist, feeling the soft pulse there, counting it like it was something she could hoard.
“Vi,” Caitlyn breathed, a half-laugh in her throat. “You’re fidgeting.”
“Blame the tea,” Vi shot back. “It’s vile.”
Caitlyn’s mouth twitched, corners tilting up. She didn’t say it, but Vi saw the words anyway. You drink it anyway. You drink anything if I hand it to you.
Outside, the wind rattled the glass. They both flinched. Vi’s head snapped toward the door, and Caitlyn’s fingers tightened in the folds of her trousers. A leftover echo from that night when the sky fell, when towers cracked and the word progress was painted in blood and ruin.
The painter didn’t look up. He had heard the stories. He knew enough to keep the silence thick and merciful.
Vi forced herself back against Caitlyn’s knee, knuckles brushing the hem of her blouse. Caitlyn tilted her head just enough that her hair, grown longer, darker at the roots now, fell across Vi’s temple. In the sketch, that strand was caught mid-fall, a red-pink ribbon against Vi’s flushed cheek, pink against pink.
“You’ll hate this one,” Vi muttered after a while.
Caitlyn didn’t answer at first. She just carded her fingers through Vi’s hair, thumb brushing that smear of engine grease like it was gold leaf.
“No,” she said, so soft Vi almost missed it. “No, I’ll love this one more.”
Why?
But Vi didn’t ask. She didn’t have to.
Because this one wouldn’t hang in the Kiramman hall. It would stay here, in the greenhouse of cracked glass and stubborn flowers, where the air smelled like damp earth and forgiveness. It would watch over the cold nights when Vi came home bleeding, when Caitlyn took her hand and threaded their fingers together and counted them in her palm like a prayer. Still here, still whole, still mine.
The painter didn’t pose them like noblewomen or soldiers. He caught them exactly as they were, with Caitlyn’s palm resting heavy on Vi’s hair, Vi’s eyes half-closed like the weight of it was the only thing that could pin her restless bones to this sunlit floor. In the corner of the frame, the glass ceiling fractured the light into ragged stars.
When he finished, he signed it in the bottom right with ink that bled like a vein. He didn’t ask what they wanted it called. He just packed his brushes, dipped his head, and left them alone with it.
Vi leaned her forehead to Caitlyn’s thigh, the shape of a bow made flesh. Caitlyn’s fingers traced idle circles on Vi’s scalp. Outside, the city rattled and mended and rattled again.
It was the tenth winter after the sky cracked open.
Snow drifted against the high windows of the Council Hall, painting Piltover in a hush of white so clean it might almost fool a stranger. But inside, where the air hummed warm and restless, the new Kiramman wing smelled of varnished wood and rain-heavy coats draped over marble balustrades.
Caitlyn stood near the hearth, the flames painting her skin in soft, pulsing orange. Her hair was pinned back with a jewelled comb she never would have chosen for herself, some gift from a Zaunite artisan, shaped like the first bloom that pushed through the debris of the old bridge. It gleamed darkly against the neat knot of her hair, catching sparks of lamplight as she turned her head to find Vi’s shape in the shadows.
Vi’s boots squeaked on the polished floor. She had always hated this place. But she always came. She came when Caitlyn asked. She came when Caitlyn didn’t ask, but needed her there anyway, the same way a door needed its lock.
They didn’t wear House colors tonight. They didn’t need to. Vi’s jacket was plain black, scuffed at the elbows, the shoulders frayed a bit. Caitlyn’s own jacket was a dark navy that might as well have been black too, its sleeves simple and tight at the wrists.
Except, on both of their fingers, bright as a struck bell, were matching rings. Thin bands of steel, etched with the faintest weave of lettering—For Eternity, in neat Ionian script. Vi’s ring was scuffed. Caitlyn’s was not. Neither of them had taken theirs off in three winters.
The painter for this portrait was an old woman with a spine like an iron hinge. She did not fuss. She did not bow. She set up her canvas on the far end of the hall, dragging a battered stool across the parquet floor, and gestured sharply for them to come over.
Vi snorted but obeyed, one thumb hooked in her belt, the other tracing the band on her finger. The ring catches the glow of the fire, throwing stray light across the old oil paintings on the walls of Kiramman matriarchs draped in silk and loneliness, their husbands banished to smaller frames in the side corridors.
Caitlyn leaned against Vi’s side as they stood before the canvas. The painter snapped at them to be still, but Caitlyn’s fingers were already finding Vi’s, slotting knuckle against knuckle, the metal of their rings cold for only a heartbeat before the heat of skin softened the chill.
“Hands up,” the painter grumbled, squinting through a monocle so smudged that Vi’s was tempted to offer her a rag. “And together. That’s the part people will remember.”
Vi grinned, teeth bared wolfishly, pressing her shoulder into Caitlyn’s. “The whole city’s gonna see it anyway. We might as well give them something to talk about.”
Caitlyn hummed. Her thumb stroked the underside of Vi’s ring finger, a habit she had never broken. It was a tic she indulged when she was speaking in the Council chambers, when she was watching Vi haul herself in at three in the morning, bruised but breathing.
It was silent but for the painter’s brush, the scratch of bristles on canvas, and the muted heartbeat of the city beyond the stained glass. Snow slid down the windows, melting into rivulets that catch the light and scatter it like diamonds.
Vi shifted once, then twice. She was always restless, the ghost of fight or flight stitched into her bones, but Caitlyn’s hand never wavered. The ring glinted each time she moved, a beacon to the painter’s old, sharp eye.
“Why another one?” Vi murmured, low enough that the painter wouldn’t catch it under her breath. “We already got two. Isn’t that enough to haunt the halls when we’re old and dead?”
Caitlyn’s smile was all the warmth in the room. “It’s not for them,” she said. “It’s for me. For us.”
Vi’s answering breath was a laugh caught on a sigh, a tiny huff that ghosted against Caitlyn’s ear. She leaned in close enough that her nose brushed Caitlyn’s jaw, paint-fume and winter wind tangling in the space between them.
“Then make sure she gets the scars right,” Vi muttered, nodding at the painter. “I earned every one of them.”
“And the ring?” Caitlyn asked, like she didn’t already know.
Vi lifted their joined hands, knuckles to her mouth, pressing her grin into Caitlyn’s fingers until they bend around her teeth. “This one I didn’t earn.” She paused, still smiling. “This one you gave me.”
The old painter cleared her throat, pointed as a slap, and the moment froze like oil left too long in the cold. Vi straightened up, rolling her shoulders back, but the rings stayed pressed together, caught forever under the brush’s patient sweep.
Hours bled out like ink in water. Outside, snow stacked thick on the stone terraces. The Council staff tiptoed around them, bearing trays of fresh tea, careful not to breathe too loud. But the two of them stood locked in place, like two pillars holding up a battered ceiling, two knotted threads stitched stubbornly through every wound this city ever opened.
When it was done, the old woman rubbed her brush clean and squinted one last time at the rings, the scars, and the space between Caitlyn’s mouth and Vi’s temple. She said nothing. She just packed up her brushes and left them there, alone with the drying oil.
In the portrait, their hands were the center, steel bands bright as a sunrise. Their fingers were linked so tight it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
The grand staircase had survived a lot.
It rose in a sweep of stone and oak, broad enough for processions, wide enough for ghosts to linger on each step. Above it, the wall that had once borne portraits of matriarchs and their families with glassy eyes and stiff collars now waited, blank and freshly washed.
This one would not be just Caitlyn. Not anymore.
They cleared the hearth for it and stoked a fire so the cold couldn’t creep into the baby’s bones. Vi stood on the edge of the rug, arms crossed tight to keep her hands from trembling, boots planted as if the floor might lurch from under her at any second.
Caitlyn sat in a deep armchair, old Kiramman walnut polished to a soft gleam. She had one elbow braced on the padded arm, her other arm curved like a shield around the tiny shape of Calliope Kiramman. Callie, who slept in a nest of soft blankets, thumb curled tight against her own downy cheek. A downy sprig of violet hair, stubborn as Vi’s, curled over her temple. Her mouth moved now and then, dream-words that would one day burn Piltover to the ground or build it all over again.
Caitlyn’s face had changed in quiet ways, hollows under her eyes, softness in the lines around her mouth, in the furrowed dimple between her dark eyebrows. The hearth behind her snapped and spat, firelight catching the gold in her hair and the silver strands threading near her temples. Vi thought she looked like a legend sitting there, like the old oil portraits brought to life, but made gentler, made real.
At Vi’s feet, the dogs sprawled. They were two mongrels from the Lanes, rough-coated and big-boned, one grey and one black. They were nothing like the purebred hunting dogs the Kirammans of the past owned. They smelled faintly of wet fur and hearth ash, and every now and then their tails thumped against Vi’s boots when she shifted her weight.
The painter, young this time, some prodigy from the Academy who spoke with too many vowels and blinked when Vi swore, hovered with her charcoal sticks and brushes, eyes wide and hungry. She had never painted dogs into a Kiramman family portrait. She never painted a matriarch and her Zaunite of a wife and their daughter whose name bent the tongue in old Piltovian halls.
She tried to fuss. She suggested Caitlyn stand, or that Vi sit, or that the dogs be moved out of the frame. Vi’s lip curled, a flash of the old grin, sharp as a blade pulled slow from a sheath. She said nothing. She just spread her boots wider, one hand dropping to rest on the grey dog’s big head. The dog huffed, tongue lolling, eyes half-closed in the fire’s warmth.
Caitlyn didn’t speak either. She just shifted Callie higher against her chest, pressing a kiss to the fuzz of her hair. Her ring caught the firelight. The baby’s tiny hand flopped over her mother’s heart, a soft claim staked without understanding. Maybe one day she would know.
“Begin,” Caitlyn said, and that was that.
The girl with the charcoal stopped blinking so much. She sketched, and the silence settled in. Outside the windows, snow hissed against the leaded glass. Somewhere deeper in the house, staff whispered around corners, not daring to step into this little circle of warmth where the old bloodline burned and remade itself in the cradle of a child’s soft sigh.
Vi’s boots squeaked on the rug once, then twice. She forced herself still, but her fingers brushed the ridge of a new scar beneath her collar. Six stitches from the alley fight last month, a fight that never made the papers, because Caitlyn had enough quiet pull these days to keep certain stories buried deep.
She let her eyes drift down to Caitlyn’s shoulders, hunched to hold the baby closer, her hair spilling loose where Callie had tugged it in her sleep. The dogs breathing slow at her ankles, their fur smelling of hearth smoke and old leather.
The painter’s brush whispered against the canvas. The hours softened at the edges. The fire cracked low and hissed a secret Vi didn’t bother to catch. She leaned her hip against the back of the chair when her knees threatened to buckle with too many nights awake and too many fights she refused to stop picking.
Caitlyn tilted her head just enough that her temple brushed Vi’s wrist. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to.
In the unfinished lines on the canvas, the ghost of what they would become flickered: Caitlyn’s calm, Callie’s tiny hand like a seal pressed against her mother’s breastbone, Vi’s rough outline behind them like the city’s last promise. And the dogs, a blur of shaggy loyalty, tails thumping in slow, steady time.
When it was done, when the final line dried and the brush clattered back into its tin, Caitlyn let her eyes drift up the staircase. She was already seeing it there, high above the steps where the old matriarchs would watch from their heavy gilt frames.
This one would watch too. But it would see more.
Vi bent low when the painter fled, pressing her lips to Caitlyn’s temple, then the baby’s crown. Callie stirred and blinked once, wide blue-gray eyes catching Vi’s gaze like she had been awake this whole time.
Vi smiled her crooked smile down at their daughter.
They did this one in the garden.
It was Callie’s idea. Calliope Kiramman, now six years old, solemn as a little judge when she announced it. “Not inside,” she had said, sticky with apricot jam and the conviction of a child who had never heard the word impossible without laughing in its face. “Outside. With the trees. And Grandpa.”
So they cleared the old Kiramman lawn of its formal rose beds, unrolled blankets across the grass, and swept the stone path free of drifting petals that stuck to Vi’s boots. The painter, a wiry man with arms inked to the wrist in whorls of birds and constellations, set up beneath the big willow that arched over the southern wall. Its branches draped a curtain of green so alive it made the old marble balustrade behind them look like bone turned to moss.
Caitlyn sat in the center on a low garden bench, her skirts hitched slightly where Callie’s knees pressed into her lap. Her father, grey-bearded and long since soft around the middle from retirement’s endless cups of spiced tea, sat beside her. He wore a waistcoat that smelled faintly of mothballs, the old Kiramman signet ring snug on his knuckle like it had been waiting for a reason to shine again. He kept glancing at Callie with a wonder that cracked his face into soft lines, as though every moment he still couldn’t believe the world had given him this second, sweeter chance.
Callie, barefoot in the grass, perched on Caitlyn’s lap with one arm thrown carelessly around her grandfather’s shoulder. Her hair was a riot of purple by now, sun-kissed and wild as the garden’s first bloom. She wore a simple linen dress, green to match the willow’s sway. She held one of the dogs’ ears in her other fist, absently scratching at it while she told the painter, firmly, how big and grown up she wanted to look in the picture.
Vi leaned behind them all, one hip braced against the willow’s rough trunk, arms folded. Her boots were kicked off somewhere in the flowerbeds. A smear of dirt marked her knee where she had let Callie tackle her into the grass before they started. The second dog sprawled at her feet, belly turned shamelessly to the spring sun. Vi’s hair, shorter now, and bright under the shifting light, stirred when the breeze moved through the willow branches.
The painter worked quickly, smudging charcoal into broad lines that caught the spill of Caitlyn’s hair over Callie’s shoulder and the neat angle of Tobias’ worn cuff brushing against his granddaughter’s small wrist. Callie kept giggling when the willow leaves dipped low enough to tickle her ears, shrieking when one brushed her nose. Caitlyn’s laugh joined hers, carrying over the clipped hedges to where the city’s high spires pierced the sky.
When the laughter died down, Vi stepped forward once, then twice, until her knuckles brushed the nape of Caitlyn’s neck. Just a flicker, calloused skin against silky hair, a tether hidden in plain sight. Caitlyn didn’t turn, but her free hand lifted anyway, palm curling over Vi’s wrist. Their rings glinted there, matching as ever.
Tobias cleared his throat, low and half-embarrassed, but his mouth tugged into a smile he tried to swallow. Callie seized the moment, small tyrant that she was, reaching out to tug Vi’s hand forward until Vi bent low behind the bench, her chin hooked over Caitlyn’s shoulder, nose brushing the crown of Callie’s wild curls.
“There,” Callie ordered the painter, using her mother’s Sheriff voice. “Like that.”
Vi huffed a laugh into Caitlyn’s hair, voice muffled by her wife’s temple. “Bossy like her mother.”
Caitlyn turned just enough to catch the edge of her grin. “Both of them.”
Tobias chuckled under his breath at that, eyes bright behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. He shifted closer, settling one warm, dry palm on Caitlyn’s shoulder, an anchor that hadn’t always been there, but was here now, stubborn and gentle as the willow’s roots.
The dogs fidgeted, one rolling over to nose at Callie’s dangling foot. She squealed, almost tumbled from Caitlyn’s lap, then caught herself by throwing her arms wide around her grandfather’s neck, planting a sloppy kiss on his temple that left him blinking and speechless, happier than any cold marble corridor or grand staircase ever deserved to hold.
The painter’s brush swept fast. Charcoal was replaced with oil, pale green and gold and the soft blue of Caitlyn’s dress, and the warm smudge of Vi’s cheek against her shoulder. The willow branches bent low overhead like the city itself was bowing, just for now. Just for them.
The new Academy hall was all sharp glass, sunlight cut through the high windows in slanted pillars. It had been rebuilt twice, once after the oldest riots, once more after the war that no one called a war, but everyone still carried on in certain conversations. The walls were pale limestone now, streaked with copper veins that caught the light and bent it into warm pools at the students’ feet.
On the West Wing, past the physics labs and the library where the new minds rewrote old mistakes daily, hung a painting that never quite blended in with the cold, gleaming walls around it.
It was of two women, grey at the temples, lined at the corners of their eyes in ways the artist had refused to soften. One, with ruffled red-pink hats and dark tattoos swirling up toned biceps, leaned her elbow on the back of the other’s chair, her boots scuffed, knuckles scarred even after all those years. The other, with long midnight blue hair and a dark eyepatch covering one eye, sat forward, caught mid-turn, a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth as if she had just spotted something worth fighting for.
Their rings gleamed, those same bands, same stubborn steel, polished by decades of bare fingers twisting them when the nights were too long. Behind them in the painting, a window opened onto a garden, green smudged with gold brushstrokes, a nod to a spring long past when they had once sat in the grass with a child between them and no walls high enough to cage them in.
There was a plaque beneath the frame that read The Kiramman Endowment for Unified Studies. And, beneath that, for those who keep the bridge open.
They came in clusters, Zaunites with green-tipped hair and secondhand boots trailing chemical smells, and Pilties in neat uniforms with edges scuffed from too many hours tinkering in the lower labs. They gathered in a loose knot before the painting, some of them rolling their eyes, some pretending not to care, but all of them looked.
Always, they looked.
One girl, dark under her eyes from sleepless nights studying nanocircuit maps, pointed at the rings first. “My mom told me they made the Council rewrite inheritance laws. And she said Vi punched a minister once for calling her daughter a scandal.” She grinned, teeth crooked. “I bet she did more than punch him.”
A boy in an Academy uniform too tight at the shoulders traced the line of Caitlyn’s jaw with his eyes. “My dad says she taught him to shoot. Not like, shoot shoot. Metaphorically.” He laughed, embarrassed at the words, scuffing his shoe on the polished floor. “Like, to aim at the right thing.”
A Zaunite boy, jaw sharp and the sleeve of his jumper held together with three mismatched buttons, shifted his books under his arm and spoke quietly, almost an apology. “My sister works here now. She was the first from our street to get in. They paid her tuition. The fund came from them.” He nodded around them. “From this.”
He didn’t touch the plaque. He didn’t have to. The way his voice folded around this told the whole story. Wealth that used to gild marble staircases and cover up bad news now slipping under doors in the Lanes, paying for welders’ tools and lab glass and the restless, sharp minds that would have once been choked on factory floors.
The youngest girl among them, small and sharp as a new blade, tilted her head. “They look so… alive.”
She wasn’t wrong. In the painting, Vi’s grin cut wide through her years like a promise that never got buried. Caitlyn’s eye still held that steel-spring tension coiled and aimed at some horizon no one else could see. The painter had caught the subtle lean of their shoulders as Vi turned slightly in, Caitlyn’s arm brushing hers, rings glinting between them like a private language that never needed to be spoken aloud.
A soft bell rang somewhere down the corridor, an old iron ship’s bell, a relic from the harbor markets. The students shifted, restless with the tug of new deadlines. But none of them turned away at once. They lingered for a beat, then two beats, enough to catch a piece left in the brushstrokes.
Outside the high glass windows, the city crawled and rose and mended itself again, spires reaching for the sea wind and lungs breathing warm air into fresh-forged dreams. Pilties and Zaunites swapped coats in the spring rain, argued over cogs and credits and patents that might just bind the world tighter or blow it open for good.
The last student to leave the hall, with a freckled nose and ink on her fingertips, looked back at the portrait, a grin ghosting over her lips like she had heard some secret the city kept close. She lifted her hand, two fingers brushing against the plaque, a touch so light it left no mark at all.
And the rings gleamed in the oil, catching the dusk light through the windows.