The cold remembered them.
It settled against their skin the moment they stepped through the portal, familiar and unwelcoming. The gloom pressed close, smothering the edges of their lantern light and daring them to complain about it.
Isabella had come through first. By the time Lambert blinked the transit from his eyes, she was already stationed beside the only other exit, bow drawn. The chamber was larger than memory had allowed. Roots threaded through the vaulted ceiling, pale and fibrous, gripping the stonework like fingers sunk into a wound. The architecture was grown rather than built, columns rising from the floor in shapes that suggested intention without quite committing to design.
The ankh stood where they had left it, patient as a headstone. Its cold light spilled across the chamber floor in pale ribbons that pooled and thinned, illuminating nothing useful. Lambert’s gaze found it and held, then deliberately moved away. He kept to the far wall.
Wylan was last through. He didn’t move from the portal’s threshold, one foot still close enough to step back. Behind him, the portal’s surface rippled, then began to contract at the edges.
“What are you doing?” Lambert asked.
Wylan held up a finger. Wait. The portal shrank further, its edges curling inward like burning paper. When it had narrowed to half its original size, Wylan crouched beside the plinth on this side, pressed the ducal ring into the indentation, and watched the surface shiver and expand again.
He exhaled and withdrew the ring.
“Just making sure we have a way out that’s not reliant on someone outside having this very ring in my hand.”
Lambert frowned. “And you were going to leap through and leave us here?”
“If I had to abort, would you rather me with the ring be outside, or you outside with me in here with the ring?”
Lambert conceded the point with a tight nod. Behind them, the portal exhaled once and went dark.
Dust lay undisturbed except where their own footprints marked a previous visit, preserved in the stillness like evidence.
The portal’s light had been the last warmth in the chamber. Without it, the ankh’s glow was all that remained, cold and pale, illuminating nothing so much as its own indifference.
That was when the inscriptions appeared.
They surfaced slowly, as if rising through deep water. Faint lines resolved into script, covering the walls in dense columns that stretched from floor to vaulted ceiling. Not carved. Luminous, visible only in the ankh’s particular light. The stone had been keeping secrets, and the ankh knew how to ask.
Lambert stopped breathing.
“Nobody move,” he said.
Isabella struck a torch. The inscriptions vanished. The walls were bare stone, root-threaded and ancient, unremarkable.
“Put it out,” Lambert said.
“I’m not standing in the dark because you—”
“Put it out. Please.”
Something in his voice. Isabella smothered the flame. The ankh’s glow reclaimed the chamber, and the inscriptions returned, patient and unhurried, like scripture that knew it would be read eventually.
Lambert was already reading. He’d been keeping to the far wall, and now the text surrounded him, sharpening as his eyes adjusted to the ankh’s cold glow. The script was dense, formal, arranged in columns that ran floor to ceiling. The letters sat within the stone as if the rock had always contained them and only needed the right light to confess.
“Ancien Gallian,” he said. “Renaissance era, from the letterforms.” He moved along the wall, fingers tracing the air above the script. “The grammar structure is liturgical.”
“Meaning what?” Laila asked.
“Meaning this is how you address something you worship.”
Silence. He continued, more to himself than to them, until he stopped at a sequence of characters more intricate than the rest, nested inside what he recognised as honorifics. Titles of reverence, layered and recursive, each one building on the last.
“These are titles. Dozens of them. Each elaborating on the one before.” His brow creased, working through the syntax. “Some of these I can’t parse. The structures are older than the letterforms suggest. As if someone translated something ancient into a Renaissance hand.”
“Lambert.” Laila’s voice carried an edge that meant get to the point.
“They’re addressed to R?zvan.”
The name settled into the chamber like sediment.
“Remind me,” Isabella said from the doorway.
“The Church’s great cautionary tale.” Lambert’s finger continued tracing the honorifics as he spoke. “When Valère built his church on Reason and Enlightenment, R?zvan stood against him. The old ways. Superstition. The histories say he found his own path past mortality through means the Founder condemned. Death magic twisted to defy Death itself.”
“Death magic,” Isabella repeated, looking around the chamber. “This doesn’t look like death magic to me. It looks like a church.”
“It’s a cult’s shrine.”
“It’s devotion, Lambert. You just said so yourself.” She gestured at the walls, the careful columns of script glowing in the ankh’s pale light. “Someone spent years on this. The lettering alone, this isn’t fanaticism scratched into stone. This is craftsmanship. Reverence.”
Lambert said nothing. His finger had stopped moving.
“What if the Church’s cautionary tale,” Isabella said, “is just the version that won?”
Lambert turned from the wall. He could feel the pull of it, what he’d been taught against what he was reading. “The inscriptions call him ‘vessel for Fate,’” he said finally. “A conduit for forces beyond mortal comprehension. The phrasing is messianic.”
“And that frightens you.”
“It should frighten all of us.” The words came out thinner than he intended.
Lambert reached into his satchel. The journal was a familiar weight by now, its leather cover softened by decades of handling. If anything held answers about this place, it would be the notes of the man who built it.
He opened it near the wall, angling the pages toward the ankh’s light to read by.
Text bled through the pages. Not the cipher Isabella had spent weeks decoding, not the route maps or warehouse schematics they’d already catalogued. New script, surfacing between the lines they knew, filling margins they’d assumed were blank. Alexios’ handwriting, unmistakable, in an ink that had been invisible under every light they’d ever read it by.
Lambert stopped turning pages. The journal was full. Every page they’d thought half-empty was dense with annotation, commentary, liturgical cross-references, a second journal hidden inside the first, visible only here, only in this light.
“Lambert?” Wylan’s voice, cautious. “What is it?”
Lambert didn’t answer immediately. He was reading.
Laila watched Lambert turn the journal’s pages.
A second journal she’d never known, hidden in ink only visible in the light of the ankh. Another secret. Another layer to peel back.
Your husband was unfaithful. In more ways than one.
Elizabeth’s voice, coiling through her garden like frost. She’d thrown the warlock out for it. Stamped out the creeping ice and told herself it was a taunt.
Everything had been moving so fast. The fire, the bomb, the attempted kidnapping, and now here they were in the dungeon. She’d shoved it aside because there was always the next crisis, the next decision. Now, standing still for the first time, it caught up with her.
Are you not a mistress of the heart and mind?
Mirembe’s voice, cutting clean through the frost.
Laila turned the words over. Well, the first heart I must command is my own. Come now. You’ve faced bigger monsters than your own feelings.
She let it filter through her. Grief sharpened on the whetstone of revelation, but underneath it, stubborn and warm, there was affection. Like there always had been.
Elizabeth’s words were not a jab. They were a precise incision, timed for maximum damage.
Laila knew what it looked like to pull the strings of others. Now she knew what her own strings looked like.
In the cold glow of the ankh, she found her footing.
How fitting, that I should find certainty in the company of Death. She was sure Lambert would have something to say about that.
“Children,” Laila said. “Before we go further. Gather round.”
“This dungeon was your father’s. Every room, every passage, every inscription. We’ve barely crossed the threshold and already...” She glanced at the journal in Lambert’s hands. “I suspect every step forward will show us another side of him we didn’t know. And I would rather we face that prepared than be caught off guard each time.”
Wylan was the first to speak. “Prepared how? He shipped me off to Soraya’s workshop when I was twelve. I always assumed alchemy bored him. Too busy being the Hero of Pharelle to sit through distillation theory.” He turned the vial in his fingers. “Now I’m standing in his secret dungeon full of hidden liturgy and invisible ink, and I’m starting to think he understood more than he let on. He just didn’t think I was worth telling.”
“He gave you to the best alchemist he knew,” Laila said.
“He gave me to someone else.”
Lambert was looking at the inscriptions. “At least he invested in you. I was given a role. Groomed by his peers to take over as house chaplain, only to be ordained in time for his funeral. I was given over to sunny duty, not given grace as a dutiful son.” He said it without bitterness, which made it worse. “I’ve been trying to grieve a father, and I’m not sure I ever had one. I had a commanding officer.”
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Isabella shifted at the doorway. “I was part of a treaty. A political exchange. Whatever family I have here, I know how I arrived.” She shrugged. “You don’t need to prepare me for finding out he had secrets. I’ve always been on the outside of them.”
Laila let the silence hold. Then:
“There are two stories of Alexios. One is the Hero of Pharelle. The shining Duke. Champion of Invictus. The man who raised you, in whatever way he managed.” She gestured at the walls. “The other is whoever built this place. I don’t know that man. I never met him.”
“You’re asking us to just accept that?” Lambert said. “After everything we’ve found, you can’t think it’s all just a lie.”
“Not a lie, Lambert. A fiction.”
“A fiction.”
“The Alexios we knew was incomplete. But that doesn’t make him false.” She saw Lambert’s hands still on the journal and pressed on. “You of all people should understand this. The story of Valère matters more than who he was as a man. The idea outlives the person.”
“That’s theology, not comfort.”
“It’s both.” She looked at him steadily. “Lambert, I know you don’t like it when I call you son. And I know you still think of me as Madame. We have both silently agreed to the fiction that you were conceived before I married Alexios. Neither of us truly knows. It’s a convenience we allow ourselves, because it makes it easier to be family.”
The chamber was very quiet.
“And you, Isabella.” Laila turned to the doorway. “Everyone wonders how a spriggan could have a siren for a daughter. It’s nonsense, biologically. But no one is going to tell me you are not my daughter. No one.”
“And I suppose you don’t need a fiction for me,” Wylan said.
Laila laughed.
“Wylan, you are a madman and possibly the most dangerous person in the household. I exist under the pretence that you’ve got everything under control, and so far you haven’t let me down.”
Wylan opened his mouth, closed it. For once not having much to say.
“The point is, what is our family if not the little stories we tell ourselves,” Laila said. “Son. Daughter. Family. Some of them are true. Most of them are convenient. But all of them are real, because we chose them.”
She looked back at the inscriptions glowing on the walls. “Alexios is dead. Whatever the truth of who he was doesn’t matter. I can still love the man I remember. The memory is mine. No dungeon is going to take that from me.”
She straightened and started walking towards the exit.
“Now. Shall we see what else my late husband has been keeping from us?”
The stairs descended in a tight spiral, worn smooth at the centre where centuries of footsteps had polished the stone to a dull shine. Wylan counted them. He stopped at three hundred and lost interest, which meant they’d descended further than the foundations of the estate. Whatever this place was, it wasn’t under the house anymore. It was under everything.
No one spoke. The conversation in the altar room sat between them, cooling. Wylan turned the vial in his fingers and thought about what his mother had said. The most dangerous person in the household. She’d meant it kindly. That was the worst part.
Isabella led. Lambert followed, the journal pressed against his chest. Laila walked between them. Wylan brought up the rear and watched them all.
The spiral opened without warning. One moment walls pressed close, the next they were gone, and the chamber yawned around them like the nave of a drowned cathedral.
The lake filled the floor, a single unbroken surface stretching wall to distant wall, black and still as poured glass. The stone pillars that lined the chamber rose from the water itself, their bases submerged, their reflections plunging down into perfect darkness. There was no path around it. No bridge. On the far side, a faint suggestion of an archway at the limit of their light.
Steam rose from the surface in thin threads that curled and vanished. The air was warm and close after the cold of the stairs, with a thick mineral smell that coated the back of the throat and had no business being this far underground. Where the altar’s silence had been that of a library, this was a breath waiting to exhale.
“Forward, then,” Laila said.
Isabella tested the surface with her boot. It held. She shifted her full weight onto it and the lake accepted her, grudgingly, solid as stone beneath a skin of water barely deep enough to wet her soles. Ripples spread from her step in slow concentric rings.
They walked. Their footsteps sent ripples out across the black surface, each ring intersecting with the others in patterns that held too long before fading. Wylan watched the ripples. The decay rate was wrong. In water this shallow, surface tension should dissipate concentric waves within seconds. These lingered, as if the lake were taking notes.
The pillars passed them one by one. The archway grew no closer, which suggested either poor architecture or excellent malice. They were halfway across, or what felt like halfway, the entrance now as distant as the exit, when Wylan looked down.
His own reflection stared back from beneath his feet. He glanced past it, checking the others out of habit.
Laila had no reflection.
The water beneath her was empty. Dark glass, reflecting the ceiling, the pillars, the faint light. But no Laila. As if the lake couldn’t see her at all.
“Stop,” Wylan said.
Wylan’s voice, behind her. “Stop.”
Isabella was already looking down.
The thing beneath her feet wasn’t her reflection. It was low-slung and four-legged, antlers branching from a skull that was wrong in ways she couldn’t immediately catalogue. It moved when she moved, but faster, and hungrier.
She knew the feeling. The Bramblewoods. The hunt that made her a ranger.
Wylan was saying something about their mother. Isabella glanced sideways. The water beneath Laila was blank. No reflection at all.
“Keep moving,” Laila said. “Standing still in the middle of a lake is worse than anything at the other end of it.”
Isabella agreed. She took a step. Her reflection took two.
They managed three more steps before Isabella’s hand found her bow.
She didn’t decide to draw. The antlered thing shifted beneath her, coiling, and her hand moved before Isabella could stop it.
The surface cracked like glass splitting upward, shards of black water rising and holding shape. The reflections peeled from the lake and stood, dripping, solid, real. Lambert’s golden hero towered over him, broad-shouldered and brilliant. Isabella’s antlered thing crouched on the water’s surface, steam curling from its hide.
Laila was gone. Mid-step, mid-breath. Just gone.
The antlered creature stood in front of Isabella. Close enough to touch. Its flanks heaved. Its breath came in clouds. For one moment it was still, and she saw its eyes.
Father’s eyes!
Her bow hand dropped an inch.
It bolted.
Between the pillars, hooves striking the water’s surface in sprays of black glass. Isabella heard herself say “Wait—” and hated the sound of it. A child’s voice. A daughter asking a retreating back to turn around.
Then it was running, and something older than grief kicked in. The thing was prey and she was the hunter. She was moving. Nocking. Reading the angles between the pillars the way she’d read tree lines in the Bramblewoods.
The gap closed. Ten paces. Eight. The antlers caught the light.
It glanced back. Her father’s eyes.
Her draw faltered. The arrow stayed nocked. The thing opened the distance again and Isabella swore through her teeth.
Again. Chase, close the gap, see the eyes, hesitate. The ranger lined up the shot and the daughter pulled it. Every time. The antlered thing didn’t need to be faster than her. It just needed her to keep flinching.
The anger built. Not at the thing. At herself. She was a ranger. She was a daughter. The lake had made them the same action, and she couldn’t do both.
The steam thickened. The pillars blurred. Her lungs burned.
Why won’t you stop? Why won’t you just stop and look at me?
It’s not him. It’s the feeling of him, and that feeling is always leaving.
Isabella stopped running.
The antlered thing slowed. Turned, twenty paces out, between two pillars. Her father’s eyes, one last time. Patient. Waiting to see what she’d do.
She drew. Full draw. Clean line. The string settled against her cheek and the world narrowed to the arrowhead and the target and the space between them.
I’m both. I’m done pretending otherwise.
She loosed.
The arrow crossed the distance without hurry. The antlered thing didn’t run. It took the shaft through the chest and staggered, folded at the knees, and sank back into the water like a stone returning to a riverbed.
Isabella stood among the pillars. Breathing hard. Bow still in hand. She didn’t look at the water beneath her feet.
Somewhere in the steam, golden light flashed. Lambert.
The golden thing fought the way Lambert had always imagined heroes fought.
It didn’t think. It didn’t hesitate. Every blow landed certain, unburdened, never once needing to ask whether it belonged in a fight.
Lambert prayed. Light gathered at his knuckles, barriers of radiance thrown up against each blow, the familiar warmth of Invictus answering his call. The golden figure shrugged them off the way a man shrugs off rain. Not immune. Indifferent.
It looked like him. Not exactly. Not the man Lambert saw in mirrors, gaunt and careful and always questioning. This was the version he might have been. The golden son. Broad and shining and certain, the man who never needed to examine anything.
Twenty years stepping out of a dead man’s silhouette, and the lake made it solid and handed it a sword.
He fought methodically, every strike preceded by calculation, every prayer shaped by doctrine. The golden thing just swung, and its swings landed, and Lambert gave ground one step at a time.
Why do you have to work so hard at this?
Why does everything have to be earned? Examined? Justified? Why can’t you just—
The golden figure caught him across the ribs. Lambert staggered, caught himself, tasted copper. The water rippled beneath his feet and held.
I could stop. Lay down the collar, the doubt, the endless examination. Be the unquestioning son, the golden heir. The reflection offered it without words. Just its existence. This is what I could be, if I just let go.
Lambert spat blood onto the black water.
“No,” he said.
He planted his feet. The golden thing swung again. Lambert stepped inside the blow, close enough to see the thing’s face. His own jaw, squared. His own shoulders, broadened. But the eyes were empty. Golden and hollow.
If it has a heart, it can be broken.
He reached for prayer. Not the small invocations, the light at his knuckles, the cantrips of a Sunday chaplain. He reached past doctrine, past duty, past the careful theological architecture he’d built his life inside.
? There is a difference between rote prayers and earnest prayers. Most clergy spend their careers content within the former. The latter tended to cause heresy and scorch marks.
He didn’t ask for salvation. He asked for a weapon.
Invictus’s light gathered in his palm, scorching radiance that far exceeded any morning prayer. The water beneath him began to steam.
Lambert pressed his hand against the golden thing’s chest and let the light go.
The golden figure cracked from the inside, light pouring through the fissures like dawn through a shattered window. It didn’t scream. It just came apart, bright and hollow, and collapsed back into the water in a cascade of steam and silence.
Lambert stood on the lake, hand raised, light fading from his fingers. The steam began to clear, and the lake, which had been so eager to offer opinions, had nothing to say.
He looked down. His reflection looked back. Still golden, but now bloodied.
Wylan’s reflection stood in front of him, wearing his face with a composure he didn’t feel. It hadn’t attacked. The others’ reflections had risen distorted, monstrous. His had put its hands in its pockets and waited, which was, if anything, worse.
“You’re not a monster,” Wylan said aloud. “What are you going to do, ridicule me to death?”
The reflection’s mouth didn’t move. The words arrived anyway, settling into his thoughts like they’d always been there.
We don’t need to do anything like that.
“Oh, you can talk. Then go on. What do you have to say?”
Nothing that isn’t already on our mind, Wylie.
“What is this, some kind of test? I’m really good at tests.”
Not all of them. We made our own alchemical alcohol because we can’t stand the trials of courtship.
“That’s not a test, that’s a social hazard.”
Is it though? None of the others have to work as hard to navigate romance. A pause. Well, except maybe Lambert. That’s a trial.
“I don’t need romance anyway. It’s tedious.”
Don’t need, or are we just avoiding it?
“What’s the difference. It’s easier to ignore either way.”
Exactly, Wylie. We’re ignoring it. Avoiding it. But you can’t pretend with me that it doesn’t bother you. The reflection tilted its head, his head, with an expression Wylan recognised as the one he wore when he’d solved something and was waiting for everyone else to catch up. Look around, Wylie. We’re the only ones not pretending. We don’t pretend. It’s pretentious.
“Yes, yes, clever wordplay, but what’s your point? That I’m the monster? I think Laila made that point already. It’s a bit heavy-handed if you ask me.”
Isn’t it, though?
“You’re trying to goad me? Trust me, I’ve seen Lambert and Laila do it often enough to know what it looks like.”
Still using clever words to hide your feelings, Wylie.
“Hide from what? Yes, I’m an unstable luminary, with a father that has at best been absent, at worst been leading a double life, and a mother that recently drew a knife on me in a moment of instability. Boo hoo, but none of that stops me from being one of the best alchemists in the city.”
Deflect. Ignore. Avoid.
“So what? I’m in a household full of lunatics, and I’m just one of them. I’m not different, I’m just another part of my family.”
Still—
“I dunno, from where I’m standing, I think I’m looking dead in the eyes of what you’re trying to get me angry about. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Trying to get me angry. That’s what you need. It’s not what I need.”
The reflection flinched.
Wylan looked the image square in the eye. “I might be mad, but I’m not angry.”
For a moment the reflection held his gaze. Then it softened, lost its edges, and sank back into the water until it was just Wylan again, pale and slight, staring up from beneath the surface.
Around him, the steam was clearing. Isabella stood among the pillars, breathing hard, bow in hand. Lambert was on his knees, golden light still fading from his palms. The water around them was still. Whatever they’d fought, they’d each finished it alone, which was the polite version of saying nobody wanted to go first.
“Would any of you care to know,” Laila said, from exactly where she’d been standing the entire time, “that I have been shouting at you for the last five minutes?”
Wylan turned. She was there, perfectly visible, arms folded, radiating the fury of someone who had been thoroughly and completely ignored.
“The lake was feeding off your anger,” she said. “All of you. Every blow, every reaction, it was taking it and giving it back larger. I could see it happening and none of you could hear me.”
Wylan filed that away. The lake couldn’t see her, and she couldn’t be seen while it was feeding. What did it mean that his mother had no reflection in a room that weaponised emotion? He looked at her and decided this was not the moment to ask.
They stood in silence for a breath. Then Isabella looked down.
“I thought we defeated them.”
Their reflections stared back from beneath the water’s surface. Lambert’s golden hero. Isabella’s antlered hunter. Wylan’s own unchanged face. All still. All watching. Defeated, apparently, was a matter of opinion.
“I don’t think you can defeat these monsters,” Wylan said. “They’re the kind that follow after you.” He started walking towards the archway. “Come on. We don’t have to stay here.”