the Palace That Ate City

In Ilrath, every well-kept building grows a Keeper, every invitation carries legal force, and whoever holds a home's closing-name decides who may cross its last door. Threshold mason Nera Saye has spent twenty years repairing other people's shelter while dreaming of one room no ruler can take from her. Nine days before the Long Open-when the sky loses its boundary and the shelterless Open Ones walk-Nera finds a black swallowstone beneath a tenement jamb. Across Siltward, bedrooms, workshops, and nurseries are becoming rooms of the royal Palace. Their residents remain where they slept, but the Crown now shelters them as guests-and a guest can always be told where to stand, when to leave, and which doors no longer belong to them. Regent Halda Vorr calls it the Grand Enclosure. Haunted by the daughter who died outside a barred ward-house, she intends to make private refusal impossible by turning all Ilrath into one Palace. But the Palace has learned to eat more than stone: it devours the right to decide who is at home. As entire streets fold into royal corridors and the Palace begins swallowing rooms beyond Halda's orders, Nera must open the greatest last door ever made. The cost will be carried in her bones, and the city may survive only by sheltering what it has spent generations refusing to name.