She rose from her crouch. The right-hand door stood half-ajar, its face blistered and bowed. She set her shoulder against the left and pushed. Wood screamed. The leaf swung wide and slammed stone. Echoes crashed along the nave.

  The room lay revealed.

  A long central aisle ran straight to a dais of four shallow steps. Three ranks of pews flanked it many cracked, some toppled. Six pillars held the ribs of the roof, three to a side, their capitals carved in old sun-signs now peeled and blackened. Beyond the altar: a slab split down the middle, light bleeding from the wound. The fissure moved as if something breathed under glass.

  Five robed figures knelt around it in a star pattern. A sixth lay sprawled near the doors, already cooling, killed by whatever had broken through before she arrived, or by his own brothers in their desperation. Hoods up. Hands splayed on the floor. Their voices had been the murmur she’d heard on the stairs; now they stalled and died as the doors hit.

  They turned. Five faces, all shadow and green rim.

  “Stop,” Yara said, stepping over the threshold.

  The hum swallowed her word.

  The closest cultist stood near the front pews, ten strides ahead on the centerline. His right palm lifted. Runes crawled up his wrist like thawing ice. A sheet of green leapt from his hand, slick, fast, too bright.

  Her shield took it. It hit like a thrown door. Heat rolled across her cheeks. Boots skidded on scorched marble. Copper flooded her tongue.

  He blinked, startled that she was still standing.

  Her palm snapped level. Cold surged up her arm. She let it go.

  The bolt struck him square in the sternum. He flew backward over a pew, ribs knocking wood, smoke unwinding from his robes as he sagged out of sight.

  Two moved at once to flank her.

  Left: a figure slid between pews along the shadow of the pillars, staff low, runes blinking out of rhythm.

  Right: another loped down the side aisle, faster, using toppled benches as cover.

  The air between them warped. Heat-haze with edges. Crossfire.

  Yara dropped.

  Green lanced over her shoulder and cored a saint from a mural, paint turning to steam, stone hissing.

  She rolled behind a fallen pew, came to one knee, and sighted left.

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  The left-hand cultist dragged a shield up—too late. Her blast caught him center mass. He slammed into the second pillar shoulder-first. The pillar cracked.

  Weight hit her from behind.

  A third cultist had come through the center aisle while she'd been shooting. His staff swung down. She got the spear shaft up in time. Wood cracked against iron. The impact jolted through her arms, made her elbows scream.

  He started chanting, voice low and sharp.

  End him.

  She drove the spearpoint into his chest. Power pulsed through the iron and erupted from the tip. He jerked once. Green light poured from his mouth. He dropped.

  Two remained at the dais.

  They stood shoulder to shoulder on the top step, one palm pressed to the split stone, the other raised toward her. Light crawled up their forearms, veins glowing beneath skin. The spell wasn't separate—they were weaving it together.

  The fissure widened. The floor shook. Dust fell from the ceiling beams.

  "Stop," she said, and ran.

  They struck together.

  Twin bolts shot from their palms and merged midair, green light spiraling tighter until it burned white-hot. The blast came straight down the aisle, wide as a body, faster than she could dodge.

  Yara dropped and fired first.

  Her shot skimmed the marble, hers a green blade at ankle height. It scythed through the nearer cultist’s knees. His legs snapped backward. He fell, wrenching his hand off the fissure.

  The braid unraveled.

  The surviving strand spasmed and whipped wide. It flared hard and white, smashing into her shield. Pressure like a slab. Stone rang as she hit the altar’s corner.

  The surge had nowhere clean to go.

  With his other palm still planted to the crack, the circuit closed on the only body left in it. The spell backlashed up his arm clean, merciless. Runes burst like seeds. He arched. Light vented from his eyes and mouth. Then he dropped, smoking on the steps.

  Silence rebuilt itself in thin layers: the hiss of the fissure, the soft pat of ash, her breath finding its way back.

  She pushed up. The dais swam, steadied. Two bodies smoked on the steps. The green inside the split eased to a slow, stubborn pulse, the tired heart that would not sleep.

  Nothing moved.

  —

  The shortness left her limbs first. The room widened again. Sound returned in full crackle, drip, the small, bright noises of a place deciding how to settle.

  “It’s done,” she said, and the high ceiling made her voice seem smaller than she felt.

  Practical first.

  She walked the circle slowly, a hand to the floor each time she knelt: wrist, throat, eyes. Dead. Dead. Dying, then dead. Her fingers shook with exhaustion more than fear. She took what the living might need later: a pouch of coins because coin solves quiet problems, three vials of dark resin that smelled like tar and storm, and two shards of carved crystal warm in the palm.

  The last body, the one who had thrown white, wore a heavier robe with a stitched collar. She searched it second-to-last and almost missed the weight: a key in a belt-slit pocket.

  Black iron. The bow set with a red stone, cracked the way lightning cracks sand. When she turned it, light caught inside the fracture and pulsed once. Not bright. Enough to say alive.

  The glow in the fissure wrinkled, just slightly, as if scenting rain.

  She did not hold the key over the split. She closed her fist around it until the edges bit and slid it deep into her pouch.

  Only then did she face the altar again.

  Up close, the break looked torn rather than cut. Marble had melted to glass along the inner lip, cooled in drips and tongues. Light swam below that edge in layers thin as silk in one pulse, thick as fog in the next. It made its own weather: a smell like hot stone after rain, a breath of cold against her cheeks.

  Something moved within it. Turning. Watching. The certainty of being seen without a gaze. It sat in her skin like a weight.

  “Stop,” she told it. Her voice sounded steady and grown. “Stay down.”

  The hum deepened. The glow breathed and did not obey.

  something in that fissure is watching her.

  for that—and just in time for something worse.

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