Dawn came quiet and grey.
No screaming bells.
No crackled hymns.
Just the low mutter of the city and the steady pulse of the tower, as if the stone itself had decided to hold its breath.
Doris woke with the certainty that today was the day.
No voice told her.
No ward flared.
She just knew.
So did everyone else.
The suite felt wrong in its stillness.
Mara was already dressed, hair braided back, hands busy with a pot she'd started before dawn. Edrin sat by the window slit, watching the light creep across the palace roofs toward the chapel dome. Dorothy had not even bothered to pretend she slept; she sat in her chair, staff upright, eyes open.
Flint paced.
Brian chewed on a wooden ring, content for once to sit in his cradle and watch the adults vibrate around him.
John stood at the wall, fingers pressed flat, listening.
"Well?" Doris asked hoarsely.
"The chapel's awake," he said. "Not wrong. Just… waiting."
"So are we," Mara said sharply. "Eat."
She thrust bowls at them filled with thick porridge fortified beyond reason, studded with bits of dried fruit and nuts she'd bullied or stolen from the kitchens.
Doris took a spoonful, swallowed against the tightness in her throat.
"This feels like the part of a story," Flint said, "where everyone shares meaningful words before doing something stupid."
"You can skip your part," Dorothy said.
"No, no," Flint protested. "I've been rehearsing."
He stopped pacing and planted himself in front of Doris and John, face uncharacteristically serious.
"You two are going into a hole under a chapel," he said. "If you see any cultists, stab them. If you see any priests, let Serais stab them. If the walls start talking, let Doris talk first. If the walls start singing, let no one sing along, we've established that ends badly. If everything collapses, run upward. Gravity is not your friend. If you die, I will be offended."
Mara smacked the back of his head.
"Terrible speech," she said. "Too many stabbings, not enough promises."
Flint rubbed his skull. "It's a realistic speech," he said.
Doris swallowed another bite of porridge.
She knelt by Brian's cradle.
He looked up at her, eyes clear, drool on his chin.
"Hey, little storm," she whispered. "We're going downstairs today. You're staying here."
He made an indignant noise.
She smiled faintly.
"I know," she said. "It's unfair. You're the one they want and we're the ones going. That's the point."
She stroked his hair back.
"If anything feels wrong," she said softly, more to the walls than to him, "you scream. Or laugh. Or kick. Dorothy will hear it. The tower will hear it. We'll hear it if we can."
Brian grabbed her finger and held on tight.
The hum sharpened around the cradle, the baseline tightening, house symbol and crooked star pulsing in sync.
It felt like a promise.
Or a demand.
John came to stand beside her.
He kissed his son's forehead, then Doris's.
"Ledger?" he murmured.
She forced a breath.
"Ledger," she agreed.
At the table, she wrote with quick, small strokes:
— Descent day. Sanctum under Third Chapel. Leaving Brian in suite under Mara, Edrin, Dorothy, Flint, Kael, Elian. House symbol bright. Herenvale shard warm. I am afraid. Going anyway.
John added, beneath:
— If this is the last entry in our hand, whoever reads it: the answer was no. We went below to keep that answer true.
Mara watched them blot the ink, jaw tight.
"Go," she said roughly. "Before I change my mind and chain you to the bed."
"You could try," Doris said.
"And fail," Edrin added quietly. "This is your fault line, girl. We taught you to feel it. We don't get to keep you from standing on it."
He crossed the room in three strides and pulled her into a fierce hug.
"Come back," he whispered.
"I intend to," she said.
He turned and gripped John's shoulder.
"You too," he said. "I don't want to have to like someone else."
John managed a strained smile.
"I'll do my best to spare you the trouble," he said.
Dorothy lifted her staff.
"Enough," she said. "You'll miss your own descent if you keep crying over it."
"We're not crying," Flint protested.
"Your eyes are," she said. "Go."
The tower corridors felt narrower than usual.
Every sound was too loud: the slap of boots, the whisper of cloth, the low murmur of wardens passing orders.
Maevra met them at the stair leading down to the chapel quarter.
She wore no ceremonial robes today, just a simple dark coat, hair tied in a knot, the Head's chain half-covered by a plain scarf. A chalk stick was tucked behind one ear.
"Good," she said, eyes flicking over each of them. "You're late."
"We're on time," Halvar said, coming up behind her with Lyr and Serais.
"Emotionally, you're late," she replied. "You should have been ready yesterday."
Orane appeared with Tessa and Merrit in her wake, both in full field harness—
light armor, short blades and rope coiled at their belts.
Ren lingered behind, already ink-stained, a stack of slates under one arm, a roll of maps under the other.
He looked like he'd slept in a ledger.
"Everyone accounted for?" Maevra asked.
"Everyone who is supposed to be here," Orane said, giving Tessa and Merrit a warning look. "No extra heroes."
"Good," Maevra said. "Let's walk."
They went down together.
Doris hadn't realised how much she hated those stairs until this moment.
The stone under her feet felt too aware.
It tracked each step of hers, John's, Maevra's, and Halvar's as if marking contestants in a race no one wanted to win.
No one spoke much.
The hush of their descent was broken only by Ren muttering numbers under his breath—headcount, equipment check, route timings.
"Stop counting us," Lyr hissed once.
"If I don't," he hissed back, "I'll start thinking about Herenvale. Let me have my coping mechanisms."
They reached the corridor that opened into Third Chapel's small side vestibule.
Wardens held the entrance.
The main doors were barred.
No acolytes.
No worshippers.
Third Chapel had been quietly "closed for cleaning."
"You all look very clean," one warden muttered as they passed.
Serais snorted.
"Pray we don't come back dirtier," he said.
Inside, the chapel was almost unrecognisable.
Candles gone.
Benches pushed back.
Altarpiece shrouded.
The nave felt bigger without the clutter of devotion, just stone and echo and a faint, stubborn hum.
Under the warp of incense and old prayer, the sanctum shell pawed like a restless animal.
Doris felt it in her teeth.
Maevra paused three paces inside the door.
"This is as far as the envoys go," she said.
In the shadows of a side alcove, Doris saw movement—Lady Arisel's severe profile, the imperial nephew's curious gaze.
They'd come to watch the descent begin.
Of course they had.
Maevra did not look at them.
She addressed the altar.
"Third Chapel," she said. "We're going below. We do it to keep you standing. Try not to fall on our heads."
Serais made a soft sound that might have been a laugh and might have been a prayer.
Halvar moved to the stone lip around the altar base, found the small, almost invisible seam Doris had seen once before in Lyr's diagrams.
"Ready?" he asked.
"No," Lyr said. "Do it anyway."
He pressed his palm to the seam and spoke a word in a language that belonged to ward-crews and old Anchor engineers.
The seam glowed.
Stone shifted with a slow grind.
The altar didn't move.
The floor around it did.
A circle of flagstones sank, revealing a narrow, steep stair spiraling down into darkness.
Cold air rushed up, smelling of dust and old wet rock and something metallic that wasn't blood and wasn't rust.
Doris's skin crawled.
"Lovely," Ren whispered behind them.
"Stay topside," Maevra said. "You're in charge of pulling."
He nodded, swallowing.
"Mirrors are live," Halvar said. "Lines run from here to the corridor. If anything goes wrong, shout. If shouting doesn't work, bleed on the
floor. The stone will tell us."
"Comforting," Tessa muttered.
Orane clapped her on the shoulder.
"Think of it as practice," she said. "You've always wanted to leave a mark."
Maevra turned to Doris.
"The shard," she said.
Doris took the Herenvale chip from the pouch at her belt.
Its weight felt different here—heavier, as if the sanctum shell already recognised an old cousin.
"You're sure about this?" John asked under his breath.
"No," she said. "But less sure about leaving it behind."
She knelt, touched the shard briefly to the top step, just enough for the stone to taste it.
The hum twitched.
Below, the sanctum shell stirred.
No scream.
No lunge.
Just a ripple of recognition.
"Good," Lyr said softly. "Let it chew on that while we come down."
Maevra straightened.
"All right," she said. "Order: Orane first. Tessa and Merrit next. Halvar. Lyr. Serais. Me. Doriane. John. If anyone trades places without telling me, I'll feed you to the sanctum myself."
Flint would have had a quip for that.
Flint wasn't here.
Doris's stomach knotted.
She took John's hand for a heartbeat.
He squeezed back.
Then Orane drew her sword, took a breath, and stepped onto the first stair.
Tessa and Merrit followed.
Halvar after them, muttering under his breath.
Lyr went down with her hand on the wall, fingers tracing wardlines only she could see.
Serais made a sign at the covered altar and followed.
Maevra paused at the brink.
She glanced back once.
Her gaze brushed Ren, Arisel, the nephew, the empty nave.
It paused, just for a heartbeat, on the place where she knew the house symbol lay far above in the tower suite.
"Hold," she said to nobody and everybody.
Then she went down.
Doris stepped onto the stair.
The hum shifted around her with the chapel above, sanctum below, quiet room patterns threaded faintly between.
John came close behind.
The stair was narrow.
The walls were close.
Stone pressed on every side.
They descended.
It wasn't a long stair.
It just felt like one.
Twenty steps.
Thirty.
Doris counted without meaning to.
At fifteen, the chapel hum thinned.
At twenty, the sanctum shell's pulse grew stronger.
At twenty-five, she felt the shift, the point where the overlap they'd practiced in the simul met reality.
Chapel above, anxious.
Sanctum below, curious.
In between, stone that didn't yet know which it would follow.
"Here," she whispered.
Halvar's voice floated up from ahead.
"Doriane?"
"Overlap," she said. "We're in it."
"Good," he said. "Keep talking."
Her voice sounded strange in the tight spiral.
She did it anyway.
"This is the band," she murmured. "Tower plus chapel plus sanctum. They don't know which song wins. We teach them."
Brian's laugh flickered in her memory; the Herenvale shard warmed against her palm.
She let both sit in her mind as she walked.
John's hand brushed her back once, steadying.
"I am not your enemy," she told the stone quietly. "I am here because we forgot you once and you broke. We're not going to forget this time."
The hum quivered.
Below, something answered.
Not in words.
In a deep, slow intake of breath.
The stair ended in a small, circular chamber, barely high enough for Halvar to stand upright, just wide enough for eight people to crowd inside.
Orane and the wardens fanned out automatically, taking the edges.
The walls were smoother here, cut with an intention that had nothing to do with chapels.
Sigils lay half-hidden under grime and lichen patterns like the ones in Lyr's diagrams, only older, deeper, written when people believed the world was infinitely malleable.
The air was cold.
Breath steamed.
In the far side of the chamber, a low arch opened into darkness.
Beyond it, the sanctum proper.
The shell.
The thing under the chapel.
"We stop here," Maevra said, voice soft but carrying. "No one crosses that arch until we're sure the field won't bite."
Halvar was already at the wall, hand pressed flat, eyes closed.
Lyr traced sigils in the air, mapping the tether lines.
Serais stood near the arch, not crossing it, humming under his breath, half-prayer, half probe.
Doris stepped toward the center and set the Herenvale shard on a natural hollow in the floor.
The hum sharpened.
Stone remembered.
She could feel it.
Herenvale's bruise.
Third Chapel's tension.
The quiet room's baseline.
Brian's laugh.
The house symbol's insistence.
All layered.
All present.
John took his place beside her.
He didn't touch the shard.
He touched the floor near it.
"No," he said softly, to the wrongness just beginning to seep through the arch.
Orane drew closer to the arch, sword low, as if she expected something with teeth to emerge.
Tessa and Merrit flanked her, faces pale, eyes wide, every muscle held just shy of tremble.
Maevra stood with her back to the stair, between them and the way out.
Not blocking.
Anchoring.
"We're going to ask it questions," Halvar said quietly. "We're going to show it shapes. We're going to listen. We are not going to give it our fear to chew on if we can help it."
"That's asking a lot," Lyr muttered.
"From us or from it?" Serais asked.
"Both," Halvar said.
He opened his eyes.
"They tuned the shell shallow," he said, more to Doris than to anyone else. "Shallow, but wide. They didn't want a deep collapse. They
wanted a broad stabiliser. They did good work. For their purposes."
"And then left it alone," Doris said.
"Yes," he said. "And now it's lonely and full of rumors."
She took a breath.
"Let's give it better ones," she said.
Maevra nodded once.
"Doriane," she said. "You first."
Of course.
Doris stepped toward the arch.
Not through.
Not yet.
She let her fingers hover just inside its curve.
The air beyond felt thicker.
Not like water.
Like memory.
She closed her eyes.
"Third Chapel Sanctum," she said, voice low, careful. "You were built to hold. You were built to keep the hill from sliding, the stones from shifting, the cracks from opening. I am not here to dismantle you. I am here because someone is trying to teach you new words for break."
The field stirred.
A tremor shivered through the floor.
Herenvale's shard vibrated in sympathy, but didn't flare.
"We're not going to let them," she said. "We're going to give you another pattern. One that remembers Herenvale and says no when the wrong hymn is sung."
She opened her eyes.
The air beyond the arch shimmered faintly.
Not light.
Not heat.
A faint outline, like the echo of a shape not yet formed.
Lyr hissed softly.
"It's listening," she whispered. "It's… leaning."
John felt it too.
The wrongness in the overlap thinned.
Not gone.
But resisting the lure of the crack verse that still lingered somewhere in its memory.
Serais shifted his humming to the "Turning of the Year" motif.
Soft.
Circular.
The sanctum field twitched at the familiar pattern.
"Remember this?" he murmured. "The bells do."
For an instant, Doris almost heard it:
A bell tone, as it had been last week.
Cracked.
Then corrected.
Brian's laugh braided through it, bright as a flint spark.
The sanctum tasted that moment again.
A choice point.
This time, there were more voices offering alternatives.
Doris.
John.
Serais.
Halvar's steady, stubborn baseline.
Maevra's quiet, intense focus.
Lyr's precise lines.
Orane's readiness to cut anything that moved wrong.
Tessa and Merrit's raw, terrified determination.
All of it sat in the field.
All of it available.
The sanctum could choose.
Doris felt it.
The way it hovered on the edge between echoing the Paragon pulse lodged in its memory and settling into the new pattern they'd been feeding it for weeks.
She held her breath.
So did everyone else.
Then, slowly, the hum shifted.
Not dramatic.
Not cinematic.
Just… a reweighting.
A re-alignment.
The crack-verse flavor receded, like a word remembered and set aside.
Baseline climbed.
Chapel hum rose to meet it.
Sanctum shell settled into a shape that tasted faintly of the quiet room.
Lyr let out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a sob.
"It chose," she whispered. "It chose ours."
"Don't get cocky," Halvar said hoarsely. "This is the shell. Not the core. It can still change its mind."
"But it didn't immediately try to kill us," Orane said. "That's a promising start."
Maevra's shoulders dropped a fraction.
"First step," she said. "We're in its field. We're not enemies. Yet."
Doris's knees felt weak.
John slipped an arm around her waist, steadying without making a fuss of it.
"You did it," he murmured.
"We did it," she corrected automatically.
Herenvale's shard was warm against her foot.
A warning.
An encouragement.
A memory of what happened when anchors were given only one terrible option.
"Now what?" Tessa whispered.
"Now," Maevra said, "we test how far we can walk before it changes its mind. One pace at a time."
She looked at Doris and John.
"At your pace," she said. "We follow you."
Doris swallowed.
Her mouth was dry.
Her heart hammered.
Her son was far above, under chalk and stew and stubborn grandparents.
Below lay the heart of a neglected sanctum, Paragon whispers, old Voidborn sins, new patterns.
She stepped toward the arch.
John went with her.
Together, they crossed the threshold.
The Sanctum under Third Chapel shuddered.
Not in anger.
In recognition.
The line, at last, moved.