To return home, changed

You wake from a dream of forests and fires, black and orange and fierce. It clings to you, like the smell of smoke – a feeling like forgetting the object of a long-held desire. There is something in your mouth, nestled beneath your tongue. A scale.

You turn it over in your hand, and it reflects golden light upon your walls in strange patterns, as if dappled by undergrowth. Your thoughts linger on the Seventh Coil, product of an old anathema, and the tiger who betrayed his fellows in the name of a dream of love. Nested intrigues, lies and deceptions. A shame so deeply buried that whole nations depend upon its secrecy. The proscribed desires upon which the Games were built.

Outside, the lights and sounds of London play out their typical dramas. A few more ships set zail from Wolfstack. More visitors and rescued Tributes leave, or melt into the shadows of the Fifth City until they're no longer visitors at all. After the light and clamour of the Coilheart Games, it looks almost as if nothing has changed.

It is not true. Thousands flooded London for these short weeks, and none have left unaltered. Through competition, through love, through strife and rescue and the friction of other people, all changed. Even deep in the sixth coil, something unexpected burgeons where nothing new was ever meant to tread.

You place the scale on the sill, and it glitters in the dim light of the Bazaar's spires. A reminder, of hidden and secret depths.

[This concludes the Coilheart Games, and the opening of the Sixth Coil.]