THE SIDE GALLERIES above the plaza smelled of dust and old incense. Ophelia moved like she belonged there, book tucked under her arm, head bowed just enough that anyone glancing would assume she was another junior scribe running an errand.

She had spent half her childhood mapping the Sanctum in stolen afternoons—where voices carried, where they didn’t, which doors opened onto crowded halls and which onto empty chambers. The Council thought secrecy started and ended with locks and runes. They never accounted for the fact that sound traveled.

She slipped into a narrow alcove just off the main gallery, where a carved screen of latticework stone overlooked a lesser hall. From here, scribes sometimes listened to sermons to document them. Today, the benches were empty.

MADELEINE COULDN’T STOP shivering, and she hated how it made her look timid more than anything else. The chamber they brought her to was colder than the cell she had scrubbed two days before. Cold in a way that wasn’t from draft or stone or shadow, but from the iciness of the people who occupied it.

Two Seraphs stood on the raised platform at the far end, their gold catching the light in hard, clean angles that made the rest of the room feel smaller. A scribe waited beside them, quill poised, eyes fixed on Madeleine with polite disinterest.

She kept her hands folded tightly in front of her apron as the guards stepped aside. The door shut behind her with a finality she understood all too well.

“Madeleine Amser,” Seraph Moriah said, her voice as sharp as the lines of her robe. “You tended the lower cells two days ago.”

Madeleine bowed her head. “Yes, Seraph.”

Lysander shifted, studying her with an expression that felt as sharp as glass. “Then you understand why you’ve been summoned. You were the last to see the boy before the Council intervened.”

She nodded once. “I understand.”

They made her kneel—not forcefully, but with expectation heavy enough that refusing would have been its own execution. The stone floor chilled through her stockings as she lowered herself down, old joints protesting.

AIDEN LET ORION rest for more than an hour, until he was sure the color and steadiness had returned to his body.

“Come on,” Aiden said gently. “Think you can stand without using three dominions and a prayer?”

“I’ll try,” Orion said.

Time blurred into the rhythm of boots on stone, the steady clink of bits of gear, Bran’s occasional snort. The tunnel widened and narrowed, ceilings rising and falling. Once or twice they passed side passages, darker mouths leading who-knew-where. Aiden ignored them all, following a route only he seemed to recognize.

AIDEN WOKE TO warmth where there should have been cold. For a few disoriented breaths he thought the fire must have caught again—spread from the ring of stones and crawled into his bones. Then he realized the heat was more focused than that, pressed along his chest and arm, rising and falling with a rhythm that wasn’t his—Orion.

The memory of the night slotted back into place: the slow settling of Orion’s breathing, the way he’d shifted in his sleep toward the nearest source of heat, Aiden hesitating for all of three heartbeats before sliding an arm around his ribs to keep him from rolling onto his bandaged back.

He hadn’t meant to fall asleep like that; he’d only meant to keep watch.

Aiden tried to ease his arm back. The movement was careful, measured, the way a man might lift his hand away from a skittish animal, but Orion stiffened. Not from pain—Aiden knew what that sounded like now—but from awareness.

AIDEN had barely slept, but he was still awake before Orion.

The room was frigid, the fire long gone cold. He crouched at the hearth—dry kindling first, then a few small logs—and coaxed the coals back to life with Ember, the flame catching, slow and steady, until the light reached across the room and thinned the darkness. He moved quietly through the space, every step muffled and measured so as not to stir the man asleep in his bed.

WHEN Orion opened his eyes, the world was still dark.

He didn’t remember much after the fall, but he remembered plunging into the Rift during the day and coming out the other side of it swallowed by darkness that behaved like night without belonging to it. It wasn’t the gentle dim that comes before sleep, the honest quiet of a world exhaling. This darkness pressed close, deliberate, as if it had a will. It sat on his chest and cooled his breath. It covered the room like a veil drawn by a careful hand.

Shadowvale, he thought, with a shiver that felt older than today. A place stripped of its Hallow and replaced by Shadow. A place named in whispers. A place Hallowmere pretended wasn’t real and feared just the same.

THE dream always began with feathers.

White ones—drifting gently through a golden sky. They spiraled downward in slow, lazy circles until they turned black halfway through the fall, catching fire as they hit the ground.

Orion jerked upright in bed, breath tight in his chest. The sunrise spilled through the sheer curtains, soft and warm as honey. Hallowmere hardly ever saw clouds—at least not anymore. The sun had its constant throne in the sky, and every day its crowned radiance blessed its favored city.

He pressed a palm over his sternum, waiting for his heart to quiet. Today was meant to be perfect. Today was meant to be the day everything he’d trained for finally manifested in front of all of Hallowmere—Beatification. Recognition. Acceptance.

Wings.

He exhaled once more, deep and steady, and pushed up from bed.