Rocher grimaced.

  The gate had opened, and with it, the press of men carrying him forward. Shields locked. The formation narrowed. Those behind yielded space without looking.

  By the time the surge had settled, he found himself at the point of it—the mouth of the breach before him, the weight of the line at his back, his boots braced on uneven stone.

  He turned, holding his breath.

  Cire and Seraphine were already moving away.

  He watched them for longer than he should have.

  Cire didn't look back. He hoped she would. As usual, she was too focused on the next step, the next corner, the next constraint. Seraphine trailed slightly behind her, Pulseweaver bobbing with their brisk pace.

  The padins closest to him gnced his way, then away. Their throats worked when they swallowed. He recognized the look, even if he didn't know all their names.

  When the gates were being assigned, they had stepped forward for this one. The insignias adorning their armor told him they were padins of the Second Choir—the same men who had first followed Cire and Seraphine into the fortress's depths.

  Men who had seen her pull miracles from thin air. Who had watched her bleed and soldier through it anyway.

  If they were counting on him for the same, he didn't know how to give it to them.

  He peered over them and found Tomás two rows back, shield held high, jaw clenched hard enough to show the muscles working at his cheek. Tomás held Rocher's gaze for a heartbeat, then nodded once, grim and final.

  Rocher forced his attention forward.

  The courtyard waited.

  It was not truly a courtyard anymore. It was a spread of broken fgstones and colpsed masonry held in arrested motion, as if the destruction had been stopped mid-act. Shattered chunks were suspended in the pattern of a bst, fragments of wall and cornice frozen along the invisible arc of force that had thrown them. Dust that should have settled hung in thin strands, catching the light without drifting.

  At the center, Danzig and the Demon Lord remained locked in their stillness. Danzig was a statue of violence, a bde held mid-swing despite the cw in his gut.

  The former Demon Lord loomed above him, a ttice of muscle and bone forced into unnatural alignment. Its frame was warped and overgrown—shoulders split by ridged protrusions, ribs fred open like broken gates. Its body remained tensed, as though something inside were still trying to complete the motion, straining against the instant that held it.

  Rocher felt the eyes of the men around him shift. Not toward the monster before them, but to him and the myth he represented. To the Hero. To the person the stories said should stand in front and make big problems seem small.

  Heat crawled up his neck. He adjusted his grip on nothing.

  He was suddenly aware of how he must look—how his silence could be read as dread, his stillness as uncertainty. He was aware, too, of how many of these men had lost friends, how thin their patience for hesitation would be.

  A gloved hand spped him between the shoulder bdes with enough force to jolt him forward half a step.

  "Rex, Hero," Evelyn said. "It's not like you to get so worked up."

  He gnced sideways. She stood there with her hand on her hip, eyes sharp, as if she were about to walk into a tavern brawl instead of an ancient battlefield.

  Rocher dragged in a breath and forced his shoulders down. He did it slowly, deliberately, until he could feel the tension ease in the muscles that had been tightening without his permission.

  "It's not that," he said slowly.

  Evelyn's expression didn't change, but her ears twitched forward.

  Rocher exhaled through his nose. "It's just... I was trying to think of something cool to say."

  Evelyn blinked. "You were?"

  "To Cire," he quickly crified. "To make her feel better about where she was heading. I... I think I might have done the opposite."

  Evelyn let out a short ugh. It carried just enough to turn a few heads nearby.

  "She'll live," Evelyn said. "And you'll live, too."

  The corners of his mouth lifted in spite of himself.

  Evelyn stepped closer, purposefully raising her voice. "Can't say the same for that thing in the middle. It's about to have a very bad day."

  A few of the padins straightened.

  "According to Cire, perception is slowest at the center," she said, jutting her thumb toward the courtyard. "Before the old Demon Lord can blink, we'll be there."

  Her gaze moved across the line, calm and measuring. "More than a hundred strong, closing from every side."

  One of the padins near the front muttered, "As if the Goddess herself had descended upon it."

  Evelyn grinned. "With this pn, Cire has given us the initiative. All we have to do is carry it through."

  Rocher felt the men around him settle. Not into calm, but into something usable. Into a shared idea they could hold in their hands.

  Evelyn leaned in again, voice only for him. "She and Sera will do their part. We'll do ours. And when they come back up, we make sure they have something to come back up into."

  Rocher nodded once. The movement felt too small to match what he was agreeing to, but it was all he had.

  The horn sounded.

  Not a single note, but a sustained call. Demanding a response.

  From the other gates, other horns answered. Each one overpped the next, slightly out of sync, until the sound closed around the courtyard like a tightening ring.

  A battle cry rose from the eastern gate. Another from the northern. Another from the south. They were not perfectly matched, but they did not need to be.

  Rocher realized betedly that his own voice was part of it.

  He didn't remember when it happened. The sound had come out of him anyway, a rough yell that scraped his throat and matched the volume of the men beside him.

  Evelyn's hand found his arm for a second, a quick squeeze through leather and cloth.

  Then the line surged.

  Rocher ran with it.

  I heard the horns more as a vibration through stone than sound.

  For an instinctive moment I turned my head toward it anyway, as if a simple look could bridge distance and yers of ruin. The noise was muffled, distorted by the field and the architecture, but the shape of it was unmistakable: the surge of men committing to a charge.

  Rocher was up there. He was—

  Stop.

  I pulled my attention back down into my own body, into my own breath, into the task in front of me.

  If I let my mind climb the staircase, I would follow it right back into the courtyard. And I could not afford to be there. Not now.

  The stairwell tightened around us as we descended, spiraling down in a narrow corkscrew of bck stone. It reminded me of the old clock tower in the City: built for access, not comfort, designed to funnel the bodies moving through it. The walls pressed close enough that my shoulder brushed stone every few steps.

  Seraphine went first, one hand skimming the inner wall as she moved, not for bance but for information. Her posture was composed, but the set of her shoulders gave her away. Phymera followed her, still in Lumiere's form, seemingly unbothered by the confined space. Her steps were too quiet, her gait too smooth.

  I came closely behind them, counting the turns without meaning to. The air cooled. The damp smell of stone sharpened, threaded with something metallic.

  At the first nding, I gnced back.

  A fourth pair of footsteps answered me.

  Sir Veyne.

  He kept his usual distance, neither close enough to be mistaken for part of us nor far enough to lose sight. His armor made less sound than it had any right to. Even in a stairwell that magnified every breath and scrape, he moved like he knew how to keep his weight from speaking.

  I met his eyes.

  He didn't offer a reason. Or an apology. He didn't even look irritated at being caught.

  He simply looked back, expression neutral and unyielding, then let his gaze slide past me as if I were just another obstacle to see around.

  I sighed.

  Halbrecht's watcher. Here to ensure we did what we promised.

  I turned forward again before the irritation could cost me focus.

  We descended another turn. Then another.

  Seraphine stopped so abruptly I nearly slipped.

  "There," she said.

  I leaned around her shoulder and followed her line of sight.

  At first I saw only stone. Then my eyes caught what hers had already mapped: a narrow crack under the stairwell, a gap where a sb had shifted out of alignment with the column that supported the spiral.

  Not a fw. A doorway, deliberately pced.

  Behind it, faint lines glimmered.

  A magic circle.

  Harsh angles nested into imperfect curves. Segments that looked like they had been cut with a bde rather than drawn. Layering that implied a second circle beneath the first, and a third beneath that.

  "This was the sixth one we'd found," Seraphine murmured, mostly to herself.

  "The first on our itinerary," I corrected.

  She nodded, then crouched and angled herself toward the crack. "Careful," she said. "It's a tight fit."

  She pushed herself through.

  Phymera didn't hesitate. She turned sideways and slid through with ease that shouldn't have been possible in Lumiere's body. For an instant the proportions went wrong—shoulder narrowing, ribs compressing, her outline thinning like soft metal pressed through a mold—before settling back into Lumiere's familiar lines.

  I followed, pressing my shoulder against cold stone and feeling fabric scrape. The gap bit at my sleeve. For a second I thought my satchel would catch, but with a gentle tug, it slipped through after me.

  Inside was a space just rge enough for three crouched bodies. The air was stale, faintly sweet, like resin trapped in a sealed box.

  I gnced back toward the crack.

  Sir Veyne stood beyond it, arms folded across his chest, blocking the stairwell with his presence alone. His gaze swept the gap once more, measuring stone and shadow, then settled into stillness. Satisfied it was a pocket and not a passage, he made no move to follow.

  Seraphine settled in front of the circle, knees wide, posture grounded. She held out one hand.

  A stylus formed between her fingers: condensed magic shaped into a narrow rod, sharp-tipped, with a faint internal glow.

  I watched her adjust her grip. Thumb shifting a fraction. Wrist aligning. Breath calibrating.

  "Ready, Phymera," Seraphine said.

  Phymera tilted her head once. For a moment, she smiled Lumiere's serene smile.

  Then she shifted.

  Her face did not change so much as retool itself—pnes sliding, seams vanishing, edges rounding as if a sculptor's hands had passed over softened alloy.

  Her cheeks colpsed inward. Her surface lost its shine and took on a thinner, duller finish, like tarnished leaf over a harder frame. Her posture canted, shoulders drawing forward into a practiced stoop. Strands of pale hair unraveled into uneven gray wire that clung in limp wisps. The eyes sank deeper in their sockets, shadowed by newly raised ridges, and the mouth tightened into a line that looked like it had forgotten how to work decades ago.

  Nyxara as the history books knew her.

  The Crone.

  She was the image of rot and harsh wisdom, a far cry from the child she'd been in the Forest. Two masks for the same name. Neither felt entirely honest.

  Phymera's voice changed with her form. It had roughened into a low rasp that sounded like smoke lived in her throat.

  "Release," she said.

  The circle responded. A low harmonic note pressed on the bones in my jaw, somewhere below hearing.

  The first yer of it lifted, peeling up from stone. It rotated in measured increments, segments shifting and settling one by one, like hidden tumblers aligning inside an unseen lock.

  Beneath the circle was a simpler one, barebones and functional, a foundation stripped down to its load-bearing lines.

  Seraphine's breath caught. Then she exhaled slowly, as if forcing her body to match the precision of the mechanism.

  She brought the stylus down.

  The tip hovered over the exposed lines for a heartbeat. I could see calcution behind her eyes, the way she stripped away every impulse that didn't serve the work.

  She looked up at me, jaw tight. I nodded back.

  Her fingers tightened once.

  Then she went to work.