So I stop hunting for light and listen for rope. The bond is a seam beneath my sternum, a barely-there wire that trembles when I breathe. I lay my hand over it and pull, not outward but toward myself. A gentle invite, like cupping something alive. The first answer is a nudge: a white pinprick of heat that now lives under my other hungers. It’s small, intimate, like a compass-point more than a torch. And when it wakes it does not burn so much as clear.
“Good,” Cassiel says. “Hold it.”
Holding is the work. I fold my attention around that inner pulse and let Cassiel’s presence steady it; his thread keeps it from flaring into anything reckless. Encouraged, I widen the seam, asking for more than a thread. For a second the spark obliges and a blade of light unfurls inside my chest, a clean, righteous edge that paints the air with meaning.
Then the truth answers back: this light is older than my body is built to keep. It claws at my lungs; my vision spangles at the edges and pain runs along the bond like a live wire. The blade overreaches, and the room sharpens into white.
Cassiel is there before I can think, his palm down over mine, heavy and grounding. The recoil folds into him with a shudder that takes his breath away as if he’d swallowed it. He doesn’t scold, just holds.
“You can carry a ribbon,” he says, voice low and even. “Not the whole river.”
My knees wobble beneath me. The light curls back into a wary thread when he eases the seam closed. I taste iron and something impossibly sweet. The cost of touching something vast. He keeps his hand where it is a beat longer, warmth seeping into me like a promise. “You’ll learn,” he murmurs. “But you don’t get to steal the sun today.”
Bastion’s training space smells of iron and old blood. He moves like a hinge—slow and lethal—and his lesson is the body as weapon.
“Think of the count,” he tells me. “Count your breaths into a rhythm that wants to break things. Let that anger become structure.”
I plant my feet. We do a drill: inhale, fill, anchor. On the exhale I reach through the bond again and ask for weight, not light. My skin prickles as the basalt plates crawl up beneath my clavicle, cold and black as splintered obsidian. They fit like armor—blunt, unavoidable—and my shoulders broaden as if I’ve borrowed a warhorse’s ribs.
The first time I ask it for speed, the plating locks and something feral uncoils. The world sharpens into angles and targets I want to cleave. Bastion’s eyes flare; he grabs my wrists, fingers like steel.
“Not hunger,” he snaps. “Control.”
He teaches me to breathe into the plates instead of the claws that lurk behind them. Let the armor be a shell I can step into and out of, not a cage that steals my mind. On the second try I call the plating and release it twice without the taste of want rising in my throat. Bastion grins, an almost tender thing at the corner of his mouth.
“You took to it quick,” he says. “That’s dangerous. Strength without restraint breaks things you cannot fix.”
I tuck that warning like a blade into my ribs.
We build the lessons up, day into day. Cassiel’s flame, then the torch he sets higher. The fire holds a moment longer each practice. Five seconds, then eight. Until I can write a single sigil on the stone that doesn’t collapse with a hiccup of light. Bastion’s plates form, then shed in clean motion and the feral tug eases.
On the third day they design a drill that forces me to braid what I’ve learned: precision of light with the bluntness of armor. The goal is a warded glyph embedded in basalt. I must steady Cassiel’s ribbon enough to make the sigil visible, then strike through it with the weight Bastion lends. The first attempt shatters the stone but burns the sigil’s edges into ashes. The second time, the blade of white arcs through the ward cleanly; the basalt cracks along the rune and falls like a curtain. They both exhale with me—one breath, the laugh of relief hanging between us.
We don’t celebrate. There’s no fanfare in our victories, only the focused silence of people who know what’s coming.
FIFTY-SIX
One heartbeat I’m lying on the bed in the fortress, the sheets cool under me; the next I’m standing in the place that always tastes like ash and roses. Zepharion’s garden folds itself around me: obsidian petals gleam like knives, roots coil and pulse underfoot. It should be silent, but there is noise—the far-off scrape of metal, a chorus of broken breathing. My stomach drops.
The same dream that has been plaguing me since I entered Hell.
Deimos is nailed to a gate of bone, wings torn out and hanging ragged, a red river slick beneath him. He’s alive enough to spit, to curse, to try to twist free, but something invisible holds him. His eyes find mine and for a breath—a single howling breath—he looks like a man I could have had a life with: ruined, brilliant, unbowed. He mouths my name. It comes out like a prayer and a demand.
Bastion is next. He is on a pyre of dried leaves and hot iron, his chest caving under a blade someone thrusts through him slow and sure. He doesn’t scream. He makes this small, animal sound, half disbelief, half plea. His fingers twitch as if to reachfor me; I want to catch them, to pull him through the dream, but my arms are lead. They don’t move.
Cassiel burns from the inside out. Holy light becomes rot in his mouth; he chokes on the brightness until his lips blister and split. His wings catch like tinder, and the sound of him is haunting. It is a tearing, a hymn gone wrong. He looks at me one last time and his eyes contain something soft and terrible: forgiveness I didn’t deserve.
And Zepharion stands behind them all, patient as a king watching a play he wrote. His smile never leaves his face. He leans forward and touches the air where my throat is. His voice is velvet and knives.
“Do you see how beautiful they die for you?” he asks. “How pure the sacrifice looks from this angle?”
I try to move. I try to scream. The dream folds my lips into a neat silence and hands them back to me. He takes pleasure in the restraint as if he were shaping clay.
“Why not stop me?” he continues, as if naming the things I promised myself. “Go on. Stop me, Lillien. Walk through the door. Make the choice that will keep them breathing.”
He turns and a door is there—blood-red and sweating black steam, the handle steaming as if it had just been pulled from some furnace. It hums with a promise I know too well. I know I have seen it before. I can feel my feet answering it’s call.
Somewhere in the shape of the dream Deimos is not a corpse. He is a storm on the edge of the glass. I feel him as a pressure at my chest, a tug at the seam of the bond, like a hand trying to find mine through water. He is there, watching and pulling, but he cannot cross. His reach is a thin thread that frays against whatever Zepharion has wrapped this place in.
