With echoing footsteps, Seraphine walked the damp, dark corridor.

  Runelight washed the stone in dim flickering blue, but she barely gave it a thought.

  Her mind was elsewhere—on Cire.

  There had been something there. A hesitation. A pressure behind the eyes, like a word waiting for air. When they pressed her, she'd said it was nothing.

  Which meant it was not nothing at all.

  Seraphine folded the map more tightly than necessary and tucked it into her sleeve. Cire did not hide things lightly. If she had chosen silence, it was either because the truth would wound them... or because it would change what they did next.

  Both possibilities sat poorly.

  "Hey. Stop getting distracted."

  Evelyn jerked her chin, her voice cutting cleanly through the damp air.

  Seraphine blinked. Then her eyes followed the direction Evelyn was pointing.

  Two shapes stood half-embedded in the cistern wall ahead of them, indistinguishable from the surrounding stone at first gnce. Their forms were humanoid but thicker through the shoulders, pted like overpping shale. Water had calcified along their joints, fusing them to the masonry as if they had grown there.

  Statues.

  Except statues did not hum.

  A faint vibration threaded the air, felt more in the bones than heard.

  Seraphine exhaled slowly. "More of Nyxara's constructs."

  "They appear to be asleep," Evelyn said. "For now at least."

  The cistern was vast, its ceiling lost in darkness, its floor broken into terraced stone channels that once guided water into the castle. The air smelled mineral and stale. Their footsteps echoed in hollow yers.

  Seraphine pulled the map free and smoothed it against her thigh.

  The first team of padins had mapped the lower vaults in careful increments. Cire had studied the parchment earlier, her brow furrowed with calcution. She had traced the marked anchor points with one finger, then drawn a faint arc between them.

  'They're equidistant,' Cire had murmured. 'Almost perfectly so.'

  Seraphine had frowned. 'Meaning?'

  'Meaning we're likely to find the remaining anchors along the same radius.' Cire tapped the parchment twice. 'If we focus on these points, it should narrow the search area.'

  She had looked almost apologetic, as if this was consotion for the things she left unsaid.

  Seraphine now overid Cire's faint arc with the padin markings. The geometry held.

  "Looks like Cire was right," Evelyn murmured.

  Seraphine folded the map again. "Yeah."

  Evelyn smiled wryly.

  Then she lifted the Sacred Mask of Xolotl.

  The air shimmered faintly as she fitted the artifact over her face. The runic fiments along its edges glowed once, then dimmed. Her outline thinned, blurred, and vanished.

  The cistern seemed to hold its breath.

  Then stone tore.

  Both golems ripped themselves free of the wall in the same instant, dust exploding outward as calcified mortar shattered. Their movements were abrupt and violent, as if the world had resumed mid-motion after a long pause.

  Seraphine raised Pulseweaver high above her head.

  Lightning struck the nearer construct in a burst of white-blue light, the impact cracking stone and scattering chips across the floor. The golems' heads snapped toward her.

  Thunkthunkthunk.

  Both began to charge, the ground trembling under their weight.

  A shape dropped from the darkness above.

  Rocher crashed into one golem as it barreled forward. Stone and metal collided with a crack that reverberated through the cistern.

  Gold runes ignited across his skin in tight spirals that hardened into a luminous shell. The sigils rotated slowly, locking into pce like articuted armor.

  He pnted his feet and twisted, muscles coiling, steering the golem as if its foot were a pivot.

  The momentum drove them sideways into one of the supporting pilrs. It fractured with a sharp report, shedding stone in a cascading colpse.

  "Careful!" Seraphine shouted. "You'll bring the whole pce down—"

  She lunged. The second golem hit the wall beside her.

  Stone exploded outward. Dust filled the air in a choking cloud. The impact drove a shock through the floor that rattled her teeth.

  "Oh, screw it."

  She pivoted and unleashed a nce of concentrated heat.

  The beam struck it square in the torso. Its metal pting glowed dull orange, then brightened toward white. Molten droplets slid from its surface and hissed where they struck the damp floor.

  The golem did not slow.

  It tore itself free of the fractured wall and stepped toward her, glowing like banked coals.

  "No?" She shifted her stance and reversed the flow. "Then try this."

  Cold surged from her palm in a visible wave. Frost fshed across the construct's surface, racing along seams and joints. The molten glow dimmed as heat bled away, repced by a brittle rime.

  The golem took another step.

  Metal shrieked.

  Its joints resisted. Frost thickened. It forced its knee forward, grinding through its own immobilizing shell.

  Cracks spidered across the frozen pting.

  It raised one arm.

  The limb fractured at the elbow.

  The weight of its own movement tore the joint apart. The golem colpsed forward, its leg snapping with a brittle report as the structure failed. It struck the stone floor and shattered into inert fragments.

  "Let's see you get up from that," she said, breathless.

  Behind her, stone thundered.

  Seraphine turned in time to see Rocher drive his opponent backward, forcing it to the ground. The runes along his arms burned brighter as he pinned its shoulders and twisted, leveraging weight and momentum.

  The golem bucked once. Twice.

  Then suddenly went very still.

  Rocher let out a breath. The golden sigils dimmed.

  He remained crouched for a moment longer before he released the construct and rose. He brushed dust off his coat with a quick motion, then rolled one shoulder as if testing for strain.

  He nodded once at Seraphine. "Guess she found it."

  "Sure did." Evelyn reappeared beside him, Mask lifting away from her face.

  In her hand, a mana crystal pulsed faintly, its light drained to a dull ember.

  She jerked her thumb toward the far end of the cistern.

  "Over there by the drainage channel," she said zily.

  Seraphine crossed the chamber, boots crunching over fractured stone, and knelt beside the shallow groove carved into the floor. The sigil circle y half-buried beneath mineral deposits, its geometry intact.

  She marked the eighth and final position on the map.

  A near-perfect circle, like Cire had predicted.

  "Okay." Seraphine straightened. "Then let's head back."

  Sleep would not come to me.

  The camp had settled into the exhausted quiet that followed a day of hard fighting. Voices had dwindled to murmurs, then to nothing. Even the padins on watch spoke in low tones, their silhouettes passing through nternlight like slow-moving ghosts.

  I y awake and counted breaths until the counting became another form of thinking.

  Every time I closed my eyes, the same thoughts returned.

  Halbrecht.

  Phymera.

  And Rocher.

  The air inside the tent felt close, heavy with the warmth of too many bodies and the faint medicinal bite of my own supplies. After a while I could no longer pretend I was resting.

  "Cire..."

  I gnced over. Lumiere was still asleep. She murmured something, brow knitting briefly before she turned away.

  I eased upright and slipped on my boots, careful not to wake her.

  Outside, the air met my face like cool water.

  By Halbrecht's order, the camp had been quieted and darkened in imitation of night. Lanterns burned low behind canvas walls. Watchfires guttered in shallow pits, their light fttened by the damp air. Beyond them, Marrud-Vael rose in bck tiers against a sky the color of ash.

  Even the fungus seemed subdued, its pale shelves dull under the faint runelight strung along cleared paths.

  I had not intended to climb the battlements.

  Only to walk. To breathe. To let the pressure in my chest dissipate into the open air.

  But my feet carried me toward the fortress gate, past the silent shapes of stacked shields and resting spears, past a pair of sentries who nodded without question.

  My steps echoed softly as I climbed.

  Higher up, the sounds of the camp fell away entirely. The fortress seemed to absorb noise, holding it in the same unnatural stillness that preserved everything else here.

  When I reached the battlement walk, the night opened around me.

  The vault overhead vanished into starless gray darkness. Far below, watchfires glowed like fallen embers.

  I walked along the wall, boots whispering over ancient stone.

  I could still feel Lumiere's restraint from earlier—the question she had chosen not to ask. Respect, not silence, had held her back.

  I was grateful for that.

  And ashamed.

  The wall bore the scars of her fight here only hours before.

  Broken bolt shafts y snapped in the mortar seams. The creneltions were chipped and fractured, edges crushed as if something immense had hurled itself against the parapet and been driven back again and again. Fine powder still clung in the cracks where impacts had shattered the outer face.

  But the damage on the wall was nothing compared to the ground below.

  I paused at a break in the battlement and looked down.

  The courtyard interior had been carved into ruin. Craters pocked the stone like impact wounds. Long gashes radiated outward in torn paths, as though something enormous had dragged a bde through the earth. Melted rock y frozen in warped sheets that caught the dim light and threw it back in dull, distorted reflections.

  Time should have worn these scars smooth. Instead they remained brutally fresh, the fractures sharp, the violence preserved with impossible crity.

  The field below held the moment suspended.

  At the center of the devastation, two silhouettes remained locked in a posture of perpetual conflict, frozen mid-strike.

  Danzig.

  The former Demon Lord.

  A dark cloud of miasma hung around the figures, shifting slowly like smoke that had forgotten how to disperse.

  I let out a slow breath.

  Something in the stillness made the hairs along my arms rise.

  Then I heard it.

  A soft, breathless giggle, drifting along the battlement from somewhere ahead.

  Too light. Too out of pce.

  I turned.

  Halbrecht and Phymera emerged from the shadow of a spire, walking at an unhurried pace as though they had nowhere more urgent to be. Her arm rested lightly in the crook of his, her posture rexed with an ease that suggested familiarity.

  They looked like they might have been strolling through a garden. Phymera was smiling up at him, wearing Lumiere's face.

  My stomach tightened.

  When she noticed me, Phymera straightened, her grip loosening as if she had suddenly remembered herself. She stepped half a pace away.

  Halbrecht did not appear to notice.

  "Miss Cire," he said warmly. "I did not expect to find you awake."

  I did not move from where I stood.

  "Neither did I," I said.

  "I don't bme you," he said, chuckling.

  Halbrecht joined me at the break in the battlement and leaned over the stone, studying the devastation below.

  I watched him in profile. He made no effort to hide his giddiness.

  "It's remarkable, isn't it?" he murmured.

  Phymera drifted nearer again, though she did not touch him this time. Her borrowed face remained composed, but her eyes flicked between us with quiet attention.

  "Tell me," he said, turning slightly. "Can you feel it, too?"

  "Feel what?" I asked ftly.

  "The anticipation," he said. "The air itself seems to tremble with it. To stand on the eve of battle... on the precipice of something extraordinary."

  I looked down at the shattered courtyard. "We've spent the whole day fighting just to survive."

  "Indeed." He smiled faintly. "But that was merely the prologue. Our true quarry lies just below."

  "And Danzig," Phymera added softly. "Don't forget about him."

  Halbrecht inclined his head. "Of course, dear."

  He turned and pressed a brief kiss to her forehead.

  I flinched.

  The gesture was casual. Possessive. Unremarkable in its ease.

  Halbrecht straightened and regarded the silent courtyard once more, as though admiring a work of art.

  "I find it impossible to sleep on nights such as this," he said. "Not when history itself gathers beneath our feet."

  He pushed away from the battlement.

  "I'm looking forward to tomorrow."

  He did not wait for a reply.

  Phymera lingered a heartbeat longer. Her eyes met mine—then she turned and followed him into the dark.

  Their footsteps faded.

  Silence returned, deeper than before.

  The battlement felt rger in their absence.

  Colder.

  I stared down at the preserved battlefield until the shapes blurred.

  On some level, I knew what I had just seen.

  A man like Halbrecht did not simply oppose. He coveted. He spoke of conquest as duty, of dominion as righteousness. Lumiere embodied everything he wished to cim—legitimacy, sanctity, brilliance... and beauty.

  The thought made my stomach turn.

  This was my punishment.

  In the game, the Hero would have filled the role Halbrecht now occupied—maintaining Phymera's alignment through proximity, through intimacy rendered strategic. Her shapeshifting had been meant as titiltion, but here, stripped of all ornament, only its horrifying purpose remained.

  I had known.

  I had known what it would require.

  And out of jealousy—out of the stubborn refusal to share what I had with him—I had kept that knowledge to myself.

  The night air felt colder now.

  I wrapped my arms around myself, unsure whether I was bracing against the chill... or against the consequences of my own silence.

  Far below, the battle raged, arrested in frozen stillness.

  Waiting to begin again.