The air was a lungful of damp earth and waiting. It was not a silence that listened, but a silence that was already full—a cup brimming with dark water. The great door's final shudder had been the sound of a world sealing shut. They were in the belly of the stone now, and the stone was digesting the echoes of their last breaths.
Ezra's skin remembered the cold of the garden above. But this was a different chill. The garden had been a held breath; this was an exhalation. A patient, final letting-go.
Rowan looked back, once. His eyes were chips of amber in the gloom. Then forward. His shoulders were taut, the cords of his neck like drawn bowstrings. He had made a choice, and it tasted of ash. "Which way?"
Mara did not speak. She went to her knees, as one does before an altar, and laid her palms flat upon the floor. She closed her eyes. She did not see with them here.
Ezra watched her throat move as she swallowed. She looked smaller in this vast dark, not weak, but essential. As if all that was not necessary had been stripped from her, leaving only the core that listened.
"The vibration…" Her voice was the whisper of a reed in a deep place. "Left. Stronger. It is not a sound. It is a…" Her brow furrowed. "…a pull."
Rowan nodded. Once. A wolf who has caught a scent on a fouled wind. "Left."
They moved.
The tunnel sloped down, turning in long, slow spirals like a nautilus shell. The air warmed. It tasted of rock that had baked in a deep fire, and underneath, the ghost of incense. Not the clean smoke of altars, but something older, sweeter—cloying as honey left to spoil in a tomb.
Nora walked close behind Ezra. He could hear her breath, a steady, fought-for rhythm beside the frantic drum of his own heart.
Cassian's steps were too even. The measured tread of a man walking a ledge, afraid that a tremor in his hands might be his undoing.
Ezra pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth. The small, sharp pain was an anchor. He tried not to think of Atlas's words, but they came anyway, slipping between his thoughts like a thin blade. You'll die.
Then, the tunnel opened.
The walls fell away into a cavern so immense Nora's little fire was a firefly in a starless sky. The ceiling was lost to blackness. The walls themselves were alight, but not with any wholesome flame. A sour, greenish glow wept from veins in the stone, the light of things that remember they were once alive and resent the memory.
In the center of the vast floor lay a pool.
It was not water. Water reflects the sky. This reflected nothing. It was a disk of absolute black, flat and depthless as a blind eye.
Ezra looked at it and felt his soul shrink back.
Rowan lifted a hand. Stop.
They stopped.
And Ezra saw then why the chamber felt not empty, but wrong.
It was the wall.
A story was carved there, gigantic, its lines too sharp, too clear for a place so ancient. The figures seemed to stir in the corpse-light, trapped in a single, terrible moment.
Three panels.
A story told without kindness.
In the first: a woman knelt in a garden of crystal. She was beautiful as a spear-point is beautiful. In her hands, she held three forms shaped from glowing clay. One wept silver. One laughed, its mouth a gash of joy. One smiled, serene and hollow as a dry cup.
In the second: the figures stood beside her, grown tall. Fine cracks laced their skin, delicate as the glaze on old pottery. The weeping one watched the laughing one with a hunger that carved hollows in its cheeks. The laughing one leaned too near. The serene one turned away, its cup tilted, unwilling to share.
In the third: ruin.
They were not women anymore. They were forces. One was a whirlwind of tears that flayed stone from bone. One was a thrashing of limbs and broken light. One was a sweet, smothering haze—a perfume that made you forget your own name.
And above them, the maker's face was carved into something that was not one thing, but the mother of two: rage, and grief.
A spear of pure light split the scene, shattering the three into a thousand glittering shards—
—and the shards burst outward, became a swirling, mindless cloud.
Flies.
Ezra's breath caught in his chest.
Beneath the mural, names were cut in a script too clean, too new.
Pothos
Mania
Euophrosyne
And beneath that, a single line:
The Shattering
Milo's voice was rough, as if scraped over stone. "The flies… They were… people."
Kiva made a soft, wounded sound. "She—" she whispered, her empathy catching on the carved agony like a hook, "—she loved them. And she unmade them."
The chamber seemed to lean in, the air growing heavier, as if approving of the telling.
"To create is to invite corruption."
The voice was dry, familiar. Varik stepped from the shadow of the mural as if he had been part of its stone. The madness of the garden was gone from him. He was pared down now, to something lean and knowing. A man with milk-pale eyes and a smile like a crack in old leather.
He tilted his head toward the story on the wall. "Not a fable. A mechanism."
Rowan did not turn fully, but his posture changed—the coiling stillness of a wolf when a new scent enters the wood. "Speak plainly."
Varik's lips twitched. "Plainly? That was the Primordial of Lust. Not a god of songs. A rule of the world. A hunger that built things because the act of building was the only shape its wanting could wear."
He lifted a thin finger, tracing the names in the air. "The Cthonides. Her echoes. Her daughters. Her fatal flaws."
Cassian's voice was a chip of winter ice. "And what sleeps here?"
Varik's gaze slid to the black pool.
"A remainder," he said, soft as dust settling. "A ghost wearing a god's skin. The Celestial is not the mother. It is what crawled from the wreckage of the Shattering and decided the only way to never be left alone again… was to own everything that could ever think to walk away."
Nora stirred beside Ezra, her anger a heat against his arm.
Rowan's voice grew colder. "How do you know this?"
Varik considered him, a long, silent moment.
Then he smiled. Small. Ugly. Not with mirth.
With leverage.
"I wrote the hymns," Varik said. "I taught mortal men how to carve longing into law." His pale eyes went back to the mural. "I know the scent of her work."
He paused.
Letting the words find their home.
Then his gaze drifted, slow and sure as a serpent's turn, to the empty space among them—to the hollow place where Silas should have stood.
"And I know the scent of what you are missing."
The air in the chamber changed.
Not a shift in magic.
A shift in the heart.
Every eye went to the gap where Silas was not.
Nora's voice was a lash, too quick. "Don't."
Ezra said nothing.
The words had frozen in his throat.
For Varik was not speaking of Silas as a friend, a healer, a man.
He was speaking of him as a fact. A key. A wound that had never closed.
Rowan's jaw was a knot of granite. "Say what you mean."
Varik, of course, did not.
That was his art.
He took a step toward the mural, the green light painting his skin the color of moss on a grave.
"Some blood sings," he mused. "It reaches for power like a vine for the sun. Some blood… does not sing."
He looked over his shoulder, his milk-blind eyes holding Rowan's.
"Some blood echoes."
Rowan went perfectly still.
Not the stillness of a man in control.
The stillness of a man who has just seen the hunter's pit he is standing in.
Ezra felt it—a cold draft from a door in Rowan's spirit swinging wide.
Cassian felt it too. His voice was low. "Rowan."
Rowan did not answer.
Varik's smile deepened. "You have known from the start," he murmured, almost gently. "Your nose told you. The first time the quiet healer let his blood water the ground."
Nora's hands were fists at her sides. "He is just Silas."
Varik looked at her as one looks at a child who insists the storm is not coming.
"Is he?" Varik asked, soft as a blade drawn from a silk sheath. "Or is he a piece that was lost when the world was broken?"
Ezra's guts turned to ice.
He saw Silas's hands—capable, always mending. Heard his voice, soft, always stepping lightly. Saw him flinch at certain sounds, cover his ears when the flies droned.
Varik did not say it. He did not say bloodline. He gave them no clean thing to grasp, to deny.
He only planted the seed of dread in the fertile dark.
"Ask your leader," Varik said, his voice the whisper of a tomb. "He knows what he found in the ashes."
Rowan moved.
A blur of worn leather and fury. Varik slammed into the wall, Rowan's forearm an iron bar across his throat. The sound was the crunch of a dry branch snapping.
Rowan's voice was guttural, animal. "You take pleasure in this."
Varik choked—and laughed, a wet, broken sound. "Pleasure? No." His cracked smile widened. "I am surviving. As are you."
Rowan pressed harder.
Ezra saw Nora tense, caught between pulling him back and letting the pressure build.
Cassian's knife was a star of cold silver in his grip.
Mara's head snapped up.
"Movement," she hissed.
Rowan did not let go, but his hunter's focus split, his ears pricking toward the far shadows.
Ezra heard it then.
A dragging.
Many things, pulled across stone. A wet, rhythmic scraping.
Shapes detached themselves from the gloom.
Not monsters. Not beasts.
These were people who had forgotten they were people.
Corpse-tenders. Figures in heavy, stained aprons, faces wrapped in cloth. They moved in a weary line, dragging sacks that left dark smears on the floor. Behind them, robed acolytes walked with bowed heads, scratching marks onto clay tablets, clerks in a charnel house.
One tender reached the black pool.
A sack was opened.
Something slumped and heavy slid into the void.
No splash.
No ripple.
It was simply… gone. As if the pool were not water, but a hole in the world, an error being quietly erased.
A cold that had nothing to do with the air traced its fingers down Ezra's spine.
Milo's light trembled. "They are… disposing of them."
"Studying it," Kiva breathed, her voice thinned by a horror that was not her own. "Recording the ruin."
Rowan shoved Varik away. The old man sprawled on the stone, coughing.
When Rowan turned back to them, his mask was gone. Stripped away. What was left was flint and a fatal acceptance.
"Whatever he is," Rowan growled, his eyes chips of hard amber in the greenish dark, "Silas is ours."
Varik pushed himself up, his smile untouched. "You will have to catch him, to keep him."
The corpse-tenders began to turn.
Slowly.
As one.
Their blank, wrapped faces tilting toward the living heat of the intruders.
Mara's voice was urgent. "They have sensed us."
Cassian's knife stopped its spinning, became a single point of purpose.
Nora's fist clenched, a spark of violent orange blooming at her knuckles.
Ezra felt his own light stir—weary, battered, but waking once more in the deep dark.
And from the tunnel behind, through fathomless stone, the Weeping Door bestowed a single, soft gift.
Plink.
A tear falling. A laugh carved in rock.
Rowan's gaze swept over them—over their fear, their fury, the fault line Varik had opened in their midst. Something in his eyes hardened, not into a plan, but into a creed.
A refusal.
"We move," he said, and the words were final. "Now."
It was not a strategy.
It was the only answer left to the damned.
And in a temple that fed on despair, sometimes a refusal was the only prayer left.