Kael didn't explain anything for two days.That was, Mira had learned, exactly how you knew something was serious with him.When it was small, he talked constantly, filled silences with old jokes and older complaints about his knees. When it mattered, he went quiet and let his feet do the deciding, and the squad had learned to read that silence the way sailors read weather.They walked north, away from the valley, away from the war front, away from anythingthat looked like a road maintained by anyone official. Kael set the pace himself, whichtold Mira something too, he wasn't pacing himself for an old man's stamina. He waspacing himself for nerve."You could tell us where we're going.” Roderick said, on the second morning, not for the first time."I could." Kael kept walking. "I'm choosing not to, because the moment I say the name out loud, half of you are going to start forming opinions before you've even met the man, and I need you walking in there with clear heads, not borrow

"Vex." The Forge Master said. "General Vex."The name landed wrong in the room, the way a familiar word sounds wrong when it's placed somewhere it doesn't belong. Mira felt Roderick go still beside her, the specific stillness of a soldier hearing a superior's name attached to something it shouldn't beattached to."That's not possible." Roderick said. "Vex has been on the war front for three years. I've served under him. He doesn't have time to run a vault, let alone empty one.""He didn't need time to empty it." The Forge Master said. "He needed one afternoon,twenty years ago, and a signature nobody thought to question, because nobody questions the man the crown appointed to make sure something dangerous gets destroyed properly.""You're saying he stole it himself." Yuki said. "Or someone stole it and blamed him because his name was already on the paperwork."The Forge Master looked at her with something like respect."I'm saying I don't know which." He admitted. "I only kn

The track swallowed the light the moment they turned onto it.Not literally, the sun was still climbing, morning still doing what morning did, but thecanopy overhead grew thick enough, fast enough, that Mira found herself squintingagainst a gloom that had no business existing this early in the day. The horses felt it too.Hers kept breaking stride, ears pinned flat, needing more encouragement with everyhundred feet than the last."This isn't natural growth." Yuki said, eyes on the branches knitting overhead like fingers lacing together. "Trees don't coordinate. This canopy's been shaped. On purpose. Probably decades ago.""Shaped to do what?" Roderick asked."Hide something." Yuki said. "Or slow something down long enough to see it coming."Cassian hadn't spoken since the crossroads. He rode at the front now, not becauseanyone had asked him to, but because his horse kept drifting that direction no matterhow many times he corrected it, and eventually he'd stopped correcting.

Nobody answered the voice.That was the wrong response. Mira understood that instantly, the way you understand you've made a mistake half a second after your body's already made it, because silence, to whatever was down there, sounded exactly like an invitation.The exhale came again, longer this time, and the darkness in the cellar doorway didn't just sit there anymore. It 'thickened', folding in on itself the way smoke folds when it's deciding what shape to take."Kael." Asta's voice had dropped to something flat and urgent. "Tell me what to do.""Don't answer it." .Kael said. "Don't say the name back. Not his, not yours, not anyone's. It's listening for confirmation. Give it nothing to confirm.""That's not going to work forever." Roderick said, blade fully drawn now, angling himself between the doorway and the rest of the courtyard. "It's not asking permission to come out. It already opened the door itself."Seris had gone rigid near the threshold, one hand pressed flat agai

'"How touching."' The voice said again, closer to the doorway now, testing the frame the way a tongue tests a loose tooth. '"Please. Go on. I haven't heard a confession this good since the last one Seris gave me."'Seris went rigid."You don't get to use that." She said, and for the first time her composure didn't just crack,it split clean through. "Whatever you are, whatever's left of him down there, that conversation was never yours to repeat."'"Wasn't it?"' The voice curled around the words like it was savoring them. '"I remember everything he remembers. That's the whole design, girl. You didn't confess to a man. You confessed to a house with two rooms, and I've been living in the one you thought was empty."'Doss flinched backward from the doorway so hard he nearly went down."That's why it knew things were in ruins." He said, half to himself, working through it out loud the way Yuki did when fear needed somewhere useful to go. "I'm not guessing. It's not spying. It just,