The Inquisitorial Archives occupied a basement that had been designed, with characteristic ecclesiastical optimism, to house approximately one-third of the documents it now contained. Shelves rose to the ceiling in defiance of both structural engineering and the cataloguing system, which had evolved over two centuries into something that resembled taxonomy only if one squinted and had been drinking.
Lambert found the clerk exactly where he expected: behind a fortress of pending requests, nursing a cup of tea that had gone cold sometime during the previous administration.
“Beaumont,” Lambert said. “Julius. Convicted 1779. Dragon egg conspiracy.”
The clerk’s eyebrows performed a complicated manoeuvre that suggested he remembered the case, remembered Lambert, and had opinions about both that professional discretion forbade him from voicing.
“That’s Restricted Ecclesiastical. You’ll need a Form 27-C, countersigned by—”
Lambert produced his Inquisitorial seal.
The eyebrows retreated. “Third stack from the left, fourth shelf down, behind the heresy overflow.”
? The Inquisition would shortly discover that the problem with a heresy overflow is that it has a finite capacity, but heresy does not.
The file was thinner than Lambert remembered. Thinner than it should have been, for a case that had sent a nineteen-year-old to monastic confinement for conspiracy against the Church.
He spread the documents across a reading desk and began.
Witness statements: three, all anonymous, all suspiciously consistent in their phrasing. The same sentence structures. The same damning details delivered in the same order. Lambert had taken hundreds of witness statements in his career. Real witnesses contradicted each other. Real witnesses remembered the colour of a man’s coat but forgot what day it was. Real witnesses were messy.
These read like they’d been copied from a template.
The ideological evidence was more substantial. Pamphlets, transcribed speeches, testimony regarding ‘seditious rhetoric’ and ‘expressions of sympathy for the Sun Queen’s grievance’: a picture of a young man seduced by dangerous ideas, who had questioned the Church’s right to hold what it held.
Lambert read through it, turning each page with care.
Something nagged at him. A turn of phrase here. A particular construction of argument there. The rhetoric felt familiar: worn into shapes that fit a specific body, the language of someone he had been.
Then he remembered with dreadful clarity.
These were his words.
His deposition before the ecclesiastical review board. His argument that the Church’s seizure of Aeloria’s egg constituted theft regardless of what power its possession might confer. His rhetoric, stripped of attribution and presented as evidence of seditious sympathy. His principles, repurposed as a noose.
Lambert sat very still.
Whoever had constructed this frame understood both ecclesiastical procedure and irony. They had used Lambert’s own words to secure his signature on the warrant. They had made him the instrument of his cousin’s destruction with tools he himself had forged.
It was, he had to admit, extremely well done.
He turned to the sentencing recommendation. Monastic confinement, indefinite term, at a monastery sufficiently remote that Julius Beaumont might as well have been sent to the moon. Approved in two days.
He remembered those two days. He remembered thinking how efficient the process had been.
Two days was not efficiency. Two days was someone clearing the path.
Someone wanted Julius Beaumont gone before anyone asked too many questions.
He checked the signatures. The investigating officer: himself, age seventeen, barely out of training, eager to prove his worth despite, or perhaps because of, his controversial opinions. The reviewing magistrate: Monsignor Cornelius, since deceased. The final approval: a seal he didn’t recognise, from an office that, according to the organisational chart pinned to the wall, no longer existed.
Lambert sat back.
He had been so certain, nine years ago. He had signed the warrant and told himself he was serving truth.
The file sat open before him, and truth looked rather different from this angle.
Soraya’s laboratory had not aged gracefully.
The building hunched at the end of a narrow alley, its windows boarded with thoroughness intended to keep things in rather than out. Six years of neglect had done the rest: damp had colonised the walls. The sign above the door, S. Vasquez, Transmutation & Consultation, hung by a single rusting nail.
The door opened smoothly.
Wylan paused, hand still on the handle. Six years of apparent abandonment, and the hinges were oiled.
Isabella glanced at him. “Problem?”
“Not sure yet.”
The interior was dark, dust-sheeted. Shapes huddled beneath canvas covers. Wylan reached into his satchel and withdrew a small vial, unstoppered it, and drank. The effect was immediate: colours sharpened, smells layered themselves into distinct threads, and the world acquired edges it hadn’t possessed a moment before.
He breathed in.
The mustiness came first. Old wood, damp stone, the staleness of air that hadn’t moved in years. Then, beneath it, something else. Reagent traces. Faint, but present. He crossed to the workbench, running his fingers along the surface without quite touching it. And there, a faint discolouration where something acidic had been spilled and wiped away. The stain should have oxidised fully by now. It hadn’t.
He catalogued a surprisingly careful disorder for a space left to rot. The stockpiles of metallic reagents had been depleted but not emptied. The arrangement of tools on the secondary bench, positioned exactly as Soraya had always kept them. The alembic residue, fresh within the month.
She hadn’t just been here. She’d been working.
“Wylan.” Isabella’s voice, from near the far wall. She ran a finger along the window frame. “The rot is painted on. Someone’s been maintaining this place.”
He crossed an invisible threshold.
The trap triggered without warning. Mechanism, not tripwire, sensing movement rather than contact. A greenish cloud bloomed from vents he hadn’t seen, the gas taking its work very seriously.
Wylan’s hand was already in the satchel, fingers closing on the correct vial by shape alone. He downed the contents in one gulp. A faint shimmer spread across his skin. He stepped into the gas, inhaled deeply, and exhaled clear air.
The cloud dissipated. Wylan brushed off his sleeves.
Isabella’s hand had gone to her blade and stayed there. Her eyes swept the room, taking the missed trap personally. “Mechanism-triggered. I should have—”
“It’s alchemical. Not your fault.” Wylan stoppered the empty vial and returned it to his satchel. “She didn’t want visitors.”
“You look pissed,” Isabella said. “Or sad. I can’t tell which.”
“How would you feel about having to bring in your former mentor?” He kept his eyes on the workbench. “I don’t even know if she’s alive. No one’s seen her in six years.”
“Do you think she did it?”
Did Soraya kill Father?
“I don’t have enough evidence either way.” He didn’t look up. “And she would have taken me to task for forming such an opinion baselessly.”
Isabella watched him for a moment. Then: “There’s airflow where there shouldn’t be. Behind the shelf unit.”
He crossed to her. A draft, faint but present, where solid stone should have blocked it entirely.
“Of course she had a bolthole,” he muttered. “She’s Soraya.”
The mechanism was elegant. A sequence of pressure on three separate points: ordinary shelf brackets to anyone who didn’t know. The wall section swung inward, revealing a passage descending into darkness.
Wylan retrieved the immolator lantern from his pack. The light carved a sphere of amber from the black.
They both stared at the darkness.
“She was my mentor. I should go first.”
“She’s also potentially a murderer who just tried to gas us.”
“Fair point.” Wylan stepped back with a wide gesture. “After you then.”
The Catacombs opened around them gradually: the air growing colder, damper, thick with the scent of mouldering stone and old bones. Walls shifted from rough-hewn passage to the ossuary proper. Skulls arranged in patterns, femurs stacked like cordwood, the architectural remnants of centuries of Pharellian dead.
? The Confrérie des Ossements regarded the Catacombs as a civic project still very much in progress. Given that Pharelle had been generating residents for four centuries, this assessment was correct, if not especially comforting.
They walked in silence, the dead watching from their alcoves, until the passage opened into a cavern and they saw the light.
A hut, nestled against the far wall. A garden surrounding it, though ‘garden’ implied something cultivated rather than conspired. Vines twisted like sentient ropes. Flowers glowed faintly, hoarding their secrets. Some of the plants appeared to be watching them. One particularly aggressive specimen had ambitions.
“Half of these shouldn’t be growing together.”
“Alchemical solutions.” Wylan eyed a vine that seemed to be eyeing him back. “Don’t touch anything.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
They approached the hut. Wylan raised his hand to knock.
The door swung open before his knuckles touched wood.
Well-oiled. Of course it was. Soraya had always appreciated the value of subverted expectations.
Lambert had known about the vault for years, in the same way every Inquisitor of sufficient rank knew about certain discretionary funds and certain doors that officially led nowhere. He had never had cause to visit. Whatever was stored beneath Notre Reine stayed stored, and questions about inventory were discouraged with the gentle firmness the Church reserved for matters it considered settled.
The guards at the lower entrance had the look of men selected for discretion. The kind who didn’t ask questions. The kind who didn’t remember faces.
“Restricted access,” the senior guard began, his conviction already waning. He knew how this would end.
“Yes,” Lambert agreed, and walked past him, brandishing an official-looking paper barely a centimetre from their faces as he did so.
? Lambert had long ago learned that looking like you belonged somewhere was half the battle. That was one of the few things he had learned from Laila. How it worked in practice was one of the few things he had learned from Father.
The stairs descended further than Lambert had expected. The vault, when he reached it, was not the grand repository he had half-imagined but an ecclesiastical basement: shelves of varying vintage, crates stacked without obvious system, the accumulated possessions of an institution that had been acquiring objects of significance for centuries and disposing of them never.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He unhooked a lamp from the bracket beside the stairs.
Nothing announced what had been stored here, and nothing commemorated what had been taken. The Church’s official position was that nothing of particular interest had ever occupied this space, and the architecture had been carefully arranged to support that fiction.
Lambert withdrew the paper from his coat.
Dock routes. Berth assignments. The ship-and-anchor of Freight Expectations in the corner, and a torn edge where the document had once continued.
He let his focus soften.
Show me.
Lambert waited. Divine sight did not always answer, and when it did, it rarely answered clearly. He had learned to be patient with it, the way one learned to be patient with elderly relatives who knew important things but could not be rushed into sharing them. The sight offered him nothing.
He began to search anyway.
The fourth crate held paper. Lambert knelt and began to sort, working by lamplight, turning each scrap with mechanical patience.
Torn prayer cards. Inventory fragments. A requisition form for communion wine in quantities that suggested either a very large congregation or a very small one with ambitious thirsts.
Then, faintly, a glow.
It was not visible to the eye, precisely. It was the suggestion of visibility, the divine equivalent of a clerk coughing politely to indicate that one had overlooked something obvious. Lambert’s fingers moved towards it without conscious direction and closed on a scrap of paper no larger than his palm.
He held it to the lamp. The paper stock was right. The weight. The faint watermark of Freight Expectations.
He placed it beside the paper from Alexisoix’ pocket.
The torn edges matched.
Captain Al—
And on his piece, completing it: —rico.
Lambert sat back on his heels.
Captain Alarico. The name should have meant nothing, but Lambert knew better.
So you worked for Freight Expectations. Suddenly a clandestine meeting at the Bassin-de-Marne in the weeks after the dragon’s attack held new meaning.
And now I know why you never returned to Gallian waters.
Lambert pocketed both pieces and climbed back towards the light.
They stepped inside.
Shelves. Bottles. Jars. That one’s glowing. That one’s watching. Tinctures—moss—stone—sulphur?—phosphorus—old paper—
A workbench in the corner: mortars, pestles, distillation equipment; reagent racks organised by colour rather than function; scales with mismatched weights; three alembics in descending size; a jar of what might have been eyes. Residue patterns on the secondary bench, bottles arranged by viscosity, handwriting on the labels cramped and impatient.
He knew that handwriting.
The hearth. The fire. A figure seated with her back to them, stirring a cauldron.
Six years, and she looks exactly as I remember.
They moved towards the fire. Just as Wylan opened his mouth to speak, Soraya held up a single finger without turning around.
They sat. They waited.
The cauldron bubbled. The fire crackled, and Soraya stirred, the spoon making three slow rotations. She had clearly been having this argument with the universe for some time, and was losing.
“It’s ruined,” she said flatly.
Wylan seized the opening. “What were you working on?”
She turned to face them. Her expression mixed irritation and weariness earned from years wrangling both stubborn ingredients and stubborn people.
“Dinner.”
Without so much as a ‘hello’ or ‘why are you intruding in my lair?’ Soraya placed two bottles on the table between them. One within their reach, innocuous. The other she held with reverence usually reserved for relics or bombs.
“There is a choice you must make,” she said. “If I unstop this bottle, a large explosion will engulf this house, taking me and the two of you with it. The alternative is for you both to take a sip of that potion.”
Isabella didn’t flinch. She reached across, picked up the bottle, and drank.
That wasn’t calculation. That was his sister deciding the fastest way through a problem was straight through it.
Wylan followed suit, acutely aware that Soraya’s thumb remained on the stopper of the other bottle.
The potion’s effect was immediate, spreading warmth through his system and loosening his tongue with unsettling efficiency. It felt like someone had turned his thoughts into liquid sunlight: warm, bright, and impossible to swallow silently.
Soraya leaned forward. “Let’s establish the parameters. What is your name?”
“Wylan de Vaillant.” The words came out without resistance. He’d expected compulsion; instead it came as relief, like setting down something heavy.
“And hers?”
“Isabella de Vaillant. My sister.”
Soraya nodded. Calibration complete. “Now. Why are you here?”
“You were the last person to see our father alive.” The words came with uncomfortable clarity. “You disappeared the same night. We need to know what happened.” A pause. The potion wouldn’t let him stop there. “And we need to know if you killed him.”
They hung in the air. He hadn’t meant to be quite that direct.
Soraya’s expression didn’t change. “What do you intend to do with what I tell you?”
“Protect our family,” Isabella said. “His secrets are putting them at risk.”
“We need to know if he was right,” Wylan added, “or if he just got people killed for nothing.”
“Have you ever been allies of Aeloria, the dragon queen?”
“No—” they said together, then stopped.
Wylan recovered first. “We have never been allies of Aeloria. We have no ties to her or her followers.”
Soraya held his gaze. Then she reached for the second bottle.
Something in Wylan’s chest went very still.
She unstoppered it and poured its contents into three small glasses. The scent of strong homebrewed alcohol filled the room.
“A drink,” she said, almost smiling, “to seal our understanding.”
Wylan stared at the glass. “That’s not—”
“An explosive?” Soraya raised an eyebrow. “No. It’s a rather potent homebrew. I find the threat of mutual annihilation encourages honesty, but the actual annihilation tends to limit the conversation.”
They drank. The homebrew burned going down. Wylan suspected his eyebrows might be singed.
? Wylan recognised a familiar note in the bouquet, a faint echo of his own notorious Wicked Brew. He had to concede, if only to himself, that this vintage was superior. The fact that it hadn’t dissolved the glass was also a point in its favour.
For a moment, they were just three people sharing a drink. Soraya refilled the glasses without asking.
“You’ve improved,” she said. “The sensory enhancement draught. I noticed its metallic odour on you when you walked in.”
Wylan blinked. “You could tell?”
“I taught you the base formula. I know what my own work looks like when someone else has been tinkering with it.” She tilted her head, studying him. “The binding agent. You changed it.”
“Refined it. The original destabilised too quickly.”
“Show me your hands.”
He held them out, palms up. She examined them with clinical detachment, turning them over, noting the calluses, the faint chemical staining around the fingernails.
“You’ve been working,” she said. It wasn’t quite approval. It wasn’t quite not.
“Six years.”
“So I see.”
A single sentence of professional acknowledgement from the woman who’d taught him to measure reagents by weight rather than volume.
And then the thing he hadn’t let himself feel surfaced anyway.
She worked with Father. All those years. The Society, the expeditions, the discoveries—she was there, and I wasn’t.
“You were part of it,” he said. “The Eclipse Society and the work Father.”
A mote of sadness grew in Soraya’s face. “Yes.”
“He never told me.”
“You were a child.”
“I was twelve when he died. Old enough to hold a flask. Old enough to understand.”
“Old enough to be a target.” Soraya set down her glass. “Knowledge is currency, and currency attracts thieves. The less you knew, the safer you were.”
“That wasn’t his choice to make.”
“No. But he made it anyway.” She met his eyes. “He was trying to protect you. In his way. Which was frequently infuriating and occasionally counterproductive, but—he talked about you. Your aptitude. Your instincts. He was proud.”
Wylan looked down at the table.
You could have told me yourself. You could have taught me.
“What were you working on?” Isabella asked, cutting through the silence. “With the Society. What was so dangerous it got him killed?”
Soraya said nothing. She poured herself another drink.
“You know about the Dungeon. The Umbra portal in your home.”
“We’ve found it,” Wylan said. “We haven’t been through.”
“Of course not. You’d need the key.”
Wylan and Isabella exchanged a glance.
“So wait,” Wylan said slowly. “You know about the signet ring?”
“I was one of the few people your father trusted to go with him into the Dungeon.” Soraya’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I saw how it worked.”
“Then how do you know it was missing?”
“Because it was missing from your father’s finger when I last saw him.”
Every answer opened three new questions. It was exhausting.
Soraya swirled her glass, watching the liquid catch the firelight. “The Umbra is not somewhere you visit lightly. It’s the abyss that waits beneath everything. Chthonic. Darkness that existed before anyone thought to invent light.” She set down the glass. Picked it up again. Set it down. “Your father spent years exploring its depths, trying to understand what lay buried there. What could be used.”
“What I’m about to tell you, we never wrote down. Never spoke of outside the inner circle. Your father was insistent on that.” She looked at Wylan, then at Isabella. “The Umbra is antithetical to Aeloria.”
The fire crackled. Neither sibling moved.
“Not to dragons in general,” Soraya continued. “We tested that. Dragon scales, dragon blood, samples from half a dozen different species acquired through means I will not be discussing with you. All of them tolerated Umbral exposure without issue.” She paused. “But Aeloria’s scales—old ones, shed decades ago, bought through intermediaries who didn’t ask questions—when we exposed them to concentrated Umbral energy, they degraded. Rapidly. As though the Umbra was unmaking whatever she’d put into them.”
Wylan was already recalculating. “The dragonborn. If they carry her essence—”
“We don’t know.” Soraya’s voice was sharp. “We never had access to a dragonborn to test. But your father believed the same principle would apply. That whatever the Umbra does to her scales, it might do to her children. To her influence. Perhaps even to her directly.”
“A weapon,” Isabella said quietly.
“A possibility.” Soraya reached for her glass again, found it empty, and didn’t refill it. “He was coming to tell us the night he died. We were in the midst of a meeting—the inner circle, those of us who’d been with him longest—and he arrived late, agitated, saying he’d made a breakthrough. That he’d found something in the depths of the Dungeon that changed everything.”
She stopped stirring.
“He never got to explain. In the middle of his argument, he just… collapsed.”
She snapped her fingers. The crack made both siblings flinch.
“Poison,” she said flatly. “I recognised it immediately. Tasted his goblet to confirm—I’m immune to nearly every alchemical compound, occupational necessity—and yes. Someone had decided Alexios de Vaillant’s voice was too dangerous to let live.”
The fire popped and settled. Wylan found he couldn’t speak.
“But here’s the thing that’s haunted me for six years.” Soraya’s eyes met his. “It wasn’t alchemical. The poison. It wasn’t a compound I recognised, and I recognise most of them. Not theurgy, not arcane residue.” She paused. “Chemistry. Not alchemy. A distinction most people think is academic until they’re trying to identify what killed someone. If I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t tasted the goblet within minutes of his death, I’d never have detected it. The compound was designed to metabolise fast. Leave no trace. Whoever made it knew exactly what they were doing.”
“So it wasn’t you,” Isabella said.
Soraya’s glare cooled over. “No. It wasn’t me.”
“Prove it.”
The two women stared at each other. The silence held. Wylan’s hand was already at his satchel, the movement unconsidered, fingers brushing the vials within.
Soraya smiled. It wasn’t a warm expression.
“You want me to drink the truth potion.”
“Fair’s fair,” Isabella said. “We bared ourselves. Your turn.”
Soraya held her gaze. Then she reached for the bottle of truth potion, still sitting on the table where they’d left it.
“One question,” she said. “That’s all you get.”
“Did you kill our father?”
“No.”
The word came out flat, unadorned, with the same compulsive immediacy Wylan remembered from his own answers. No hedging. No qualification. Just the truth, dragged out by alchemical force.
Isabella nodded slowly. “All right.”
“All right?” Wylan looked at his sister. “That’s it? One question?”
“That was the question that mattered.” Isabella’s eyes hadn’t left Soraya. “The rest we can figure out.”
Soraya set down the bottle. Her expression settled into relief.
She tapped her foot on the floor. A hidden panel slid aside, revealing a compartment that could have given a master illusionist performance anxiety. She retrieved a lacquered puzzle box, its surface a maze of carvings and concealed mechanisms, answerable only to the proper sequence, a very good lockpick, or several hours of spite-fuelled determination.
Wylan and Isabella watched as Soraya demonstrated the unlocking sequence. Her fingers moved through without hesitation: slide, twist, press, twist again. The sequence defied the very concept of logic. With a final, satisfying click, the box opened to reveal its treasure: the de Vaillant signet ring. It gleamed in the dim light.
“I took it from him before I fled,” Soraya said. “I couldn’t risk it falling into the wrong hands.”
She pushed the box towards them. “You know this is more than just a key.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most people who enter the Umbra feel wrong. Displaced. Like their soul is wearing clothes that don’t fit.” She looked at Wylan. “Your father moved through it like he belonged there. That’s how we came to work together. Him, myself, and Professor Eldermoore. Three people who could walk in the dark without losing themselves.”
“Is that hereditary?”
“I honestly don’t know.” Soraya refilled her glass, though she didn’t drink. “But your grandmother was obsessed with bloodlines. Convinced your father was something special. Maybe she was right.”
Lambert. Max. Me.
The thought surfaced unbidden. Lambert, who’d felt Invictus’s touch as long as he could remember. Max, setting things on fire before he could read. Himself, alone in his laboratory, waking one morning to find the world had acquired a chemical grammar.
Three brothers. No calls to adventure. No dramatic brentings. They’d just… become.
“Your father walked through the Umbra like it was his living room,” Soraya continued. “And his children—” She gestured vaguely. “The de Vaillants have always been unusual. I just thought it best to keep my own counsel on your father’s family affairs.”
Wylan accepted the ring gingerly. The metal was warm, warmer than the cool air of the Catacombs should have allowed. Heavier, too, than it had any right to be.
He tried it on his index finger first. Too large. His middle finger. Still loose. His thumb came closest, but even there the ring hung like a child wearing their parent’s wedding band.
He slipped the ring off, produced a length of leather cord from his satchel, and threaded it on. The cord went around his neck and the ring settled against his chest, hidden beneath his shirt. Not ready to be worn openly, but at least a burden he could carry without pretending it fit.
Isabella watched in silence.
Wylan’s gaze wandered to the cauldron simmering over the fire. Ruined, thanks to their arrival. He reached into his satchel and produced a battered canteen.
“I, uh, noticed we might’ve disrupted your dinner. It’s just some soup I made. Not fancy, but edible. Mostly.”
Soraya accepted the canteen without comment. She turned it over in her hands, sniffed once. Then, to Wylan’s horror, she uncorked it and poured the contents directly into the cauldron of ruined stew.
“Wait, I’m not sure that’s—”
Soraya’s raised hand silenced him. With a flick of her wrist, she added a pinch of something from a nearby container. The cauldron hissed, bubbled furiously, then settled into a rich, savoury broth. The transformation was so dramatic the soup now simmered with an air of refinement, having taken elocution lessons from a particularly strict dowager.
“There. Now it’s a proper meal.”
“That’s… impressive. Was that alchemy?”
“Alchemy? Hardly.” Soraya ladled the soup into wooden bowls. “Mere chemistry. Cooking is about understanding the ingredients. But more importantly, it’s about making the best of what you have, even if what you have is a disaster.”
They ate in silence.
As they finished, Soraya set down her bowl and the warmth left with it.
“There is one more thing you need to know. Someone close to your father was responsible for his poisoning. Someone he trusted. That’s why I disappeared. I didn’t know who to trust, so I trusted no one.”
Neither sibling moved.
Someone close to him.
“Be careful. The poisoner was skilled enough that if I hadn’t been there, it might have gone undiscovered entirely.” Her eyes held his.
They were taking their leave when the explosion hit.
The ground shook. Wylan and Isabella spun around.
Where Soraya’s hut had stood was now a smouldering ruin. Ash hung thick in the air. The alchemical garden, once alive with strange and dangerous beauty, was reduced to glowing embers. If the garden had possessed lungs, it would have died screaming.
On what remained of a wall, scrawled in Soraya’s unmistakable hand, the message glared back at them. Acid-burned letters, still smouldering.
Do not look for me.