Seraphina’s hand was around Isabella’s throat before anyone had finished processing the word ‘grandmother.’
Lambert’s blood was still wet on the chalice. The cut on his palm throbbed in time with the dungeon heart, a rhythm he could feel in his teeth. He had bled for a weapon. He had got a family member, and she was currently strangling his sister.
Wylan moved first. He downed his elasticity potion with the speed of bad decisions and snapped his rubberised arm across the chamber at Seraphina. She caught it without looking. Her grip tightened until Wylan discovered several new entries on his personal pain scale, and his bravado deflated faster than a punctured balloon. She held his arm in place the way one holds a dog’s lead: firmly, and with the clear expectation that the dog would learn.
“You will explain,” Seraphina said, her voice stripped of everything but intent. Her eyes hadn’t left Isabella. “Where is Alexios?”
Laila hesitated, her expression flickering. “I regret to inform you, belle-mère, that Alexios—”
“He’s dead.” Isabella delivered the news with the delicacy of someone using a mallet to crack an egg. Being pinned to a wall by the throat had not improved her diplomacy.
Grief visited Seraphina’s face briefly, found the accommodations lacking, and left. What replaced it was colder.
“And what,” she said, “did you do to him?”
Lambert stepped forward with the careful poise of a man who had calculated exactly how close he could stand without being grabbed. “Madame de Vaillant, we’re not sure. When did you last see Alexios?”
“When I was last awake.”
“And how were things between you?”
Seraphina’s grip on Isabella hadn’t shifted. “Unfinished.”
Lambert held her gaze. “You just missed the sixth anniversary of his death. Assassinated. We believe poison.”
Laila’s voice was steady. “And given that you do not recognise Isabella, or indeed any of your supposed grandchildren, your absence has been rather longer than six years. Two decades, perhaps?”
“What year is it?”
“1788.”
“Twelve years.” She said it the way someone might note a delayed train. “Could have been worse.”
Lambert’s breath caught. 1776. The year Alexios had brought him into the family. “Unfinished business, you say. In 1776?”
Seraphina’s gaze settled on him with new interest. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t look away either, and Lambert had the uncomfortable sense of being reassessed from decorative to functional.
“For goodness’ sake,” Wylan managed, still tethered by his elastic arm, “can you let my sister go?”
Lambert noticed Laila moving. She had been drifting closer while he talked. Laila never rushed. She simply arrived where she needed to be, and by the time you noticed, the flanking was already complete. He felt the shimmer of enchantment before he saw it, a subtle blurring at the edges of his senses.
“Seraphina,” Laila began softly. “I don’t know what you’ve been through. But I am your daughter-in-law, and these are your grandchildren. Is this really how you want this reunion to go?”
Seraphina’s lip curled. “You drew a sword on me fir—”
A blade pressed against her throat. From behind.
“Now,” said Laila’s voice, the real one, without a trace of warmth, “put down my daughter.”
The Laila standing in front of Seraphina flickered and faded like smoke.
Seraphina went very still. Then, slowly, something that might have been admiration crossed her face. “We seem to be at an impasse. Only the de Vaillants would treat a reunion as an opportunity to brandish knives at each other’s throats.”
“Yes, and you married into it so well,” Laila replied, the blade steady. “Now, we could continue this hostile standoff, or we could put away our claws and talk like civilised people.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Seraphina said, in a tone that suggested civilised was something that happened to other families.
Seraphina’s grip loosened. Isabella seized the moment, gasping raggedly. Wylan wriggled his elastic arm free; it snapped back with an embarrassingly twangy sound.
? This wasn’t his first encounter with the treacherous snapback. Maximilian had honed the flinch response through relentless drills, surprise-stretching Wylan’s arm at every opportunity with his cheerful refrain of, “Stop hitting yourself!”
Seraphina stepped back and regarded them each in turn. She was taking inventory. “So this is Wylan.” Her gaze moved past him. “I notice Maximilian is not among you.” It was not a question. She turned to Lambert. “And I suppose you must be Lambert.”
“You know me?”
“No. But I knew your mother.” Her gaze traced his features. “I see her in you.”
Lambert’s composure cracked. Just for a moment. “Then will you tell me who she is?”
Seraphina’s smile returned, slow and deliberate. “That all depends on whether this is a family reunion or not.”
Seraphina turned to Laila. “And you’re saying Isabella is your daughter?”
“Yes,” Laila said, “as you very well know. I will not have you ignore or pretend otherwise.” She sheathed the blade, but her voice carried the same edge. “This is no longer your household, Madame.”
Wylan, cradling his arm, looked between them all. “Sorry, is nobody else alarmed that someone just stepped out of a sarcophagus and claimed to be our grandmother?”
“Is that really so hard to believe?” Seraphina said.
“It’s just — you look younger than our mother.”
“I stay out of the light of Agony,” Seraphina said, and left it at that.
She turned to Lambert, still holding the chalice. Blood from his cut palm had dried against the silver. “So.” The pause was practically scandalous. “I suppose I should thank you for bringing me back.”
Lambert said nothing, still several revelations behind the conversation.
Her gaze landed on the chalice. “That belongs to me. You will return it now.”
Lambert looked at the chalice, then at his cut hand. “I bled for this.”
“And I slept in it for twelve years. I think my claim is older.”
“That all depends,” Lambert said, “on whether this is a family reunion or not.”
Seraphina settled into the silence. She owned it immediately. “So. You managed to find your way to the heart of the de Vaillant Dungeon.” Her gaze swept the group. “But from your expressions, I wasn’t what you were expecting. What, pray tell, did you hope to find?”
Isabella rubbed at her neck where the bruises were already forming. If the throttling had rattled her, she’d decided to be angry about it instead. “A weapon. And answers.” She held up the scroll. “Who is R?zvan? What does he have to do with the Eclipse? And since when,” she jabbed a finger at the parchment, “has Valère had a last name? Prospère?”
Seraphina’s expression shifted, the question finally earning her full attention. “Prospère?” She savoured the word like a private joke. “There are probably few in the Church today who even remember that bon mot. The Church saw fit to shed his surname over the decades.”
Lambert watched her carefully. She spoke of Valère as though she’d met him. That was either invaluable or deeply suspect.
“Perhaps to answer your earlier question,” Lambert said carefully, “the Eclipse Society is no longer. Certainly not since Alexios’ death, but a great deal before then. Scattered. Either missing or in hiding.”
Seraphina noted this, filed it, and moved on. Lambert had seen more emotion from customs officials.
“You don’t seem particularly upset about that,” Isabella said.
“Should I be?”
“Your son’s entire network is gone. I’d have expected something.”
Isabella pressed. “We came down here after the weapon the Society was chasing, and what do we find? You. So tell me straight: are you the weapon, or is it one of these relics?”
“No, I am not the weapon,” Seraphina said. “But I know where he is buried.”
“The only person you could mean is R?zvan.” Lambert exhaled. “That answers a great many questions.”
“Oh great,” Wylan said. “Vampires. We’re talking about vampires, and we’ve just woken one and are already floating the idea of waking another. Do you even hear yourselves?”
“Wylan is right,” Lambert said, and the surprise of those two words briefly united the room. “Alexios said the weapon was in this Dungeon. Not buried in some other crypt with,” he pinched the bridge of his nose, “the undead body of R?zvan.”
Seraphina’s gaze drifted to the chalice in Lambert’s hands. “Well, it’s partly true. You’re holding the weapon. It is the key to destroying the dragon cult. But it can only be used properly in his hands.”
The chamber’s Dungeon heart pulsed once, offering a second opinion.
Laila’s eyes narrowed. “So you want to destroy the dragon cult. Not that I hold any love for Aeloria, but what’s your stake in this?”
“Let’s just say Valère and his lot are historical enemies of mine and R?zvan. If you would rid the world of Valère’s influence, you will need R?zvan.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Sorry,” Wylan said, “are we talking about Valère? I thought we were talking about the dragon cult.”
“Oh, my dear Wylan.” Seraphina was clearly relishing the moment. “The Church and the cult are merely two sides of the same coin.” She turned to Lambert. “Tell me, as a priest of Invictus, what do you know about Valère?”
Lambert answered from reflex, the catechism as familiar as breathing. “Valère. Prophet and founder of the Church. Conduit of Invictus’ divine light. He exposed Aeloria’s Iron Mask conspiracy, saved the king, and established the Church as the state religion. He is considered the first and greatest servant of Reason.”
“Very good,” Seraphina said. She could not have sounded more like a tutor marking an exam if she’d produced a red pen. “But it seems the Church has left some gaps in your education, just as they seemed to have forgotten his original name.” She let that settle. “Valère was Aeloria’s first, and as far as I know, her only dragonborn.”
“That is sacrilege.”
“Oh, quite certainly,” Seraphina agreed. “But it’s also true. That knowledge is likely one of the reasons I’ve been buried for twelve years. But some secrets can’t stay hidden. Not when there’s an inquisitive priest looking for answers.”
“You are mocking me and my faith.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Lambert. Aeloria found Prospère, stole him from a rival, raised him up to a dragonborn, and in return he built her a new throne and called it Reason.”
“This is entirely ridiculous!”
“I’m sure you’ve believed bigger stories before. Your whole cathedral is built on dragon bones.”
Lambert said nothing. His hands had stopped moving.
“Lambert,” Isabella said. “Breathe.”
“She’s telling us the Church is a lie,” he said.
“She’s telling us her version of it,” Laila said. “There’s a difference.”
Wylan, who had the good fortune of no theological investment in the matter, recovered first. “If the Church was Aeloria’s creation, why is she at war with it now?”
“As far as I know,” Seraphina said, “she isn’t.”
Lambert found his voice, though it came from somewhere distant. “The egg. There was a balance between them, however uneasy. It held until someone stole her egg.”
“Lambert,” Laila said. A warning.
Seraphina’s stillness changed quality. “Someone stole her egg?”
Lambert caught the look Wylan gave him. Don’t. “That is a longer conversation than we should be having right now.”
Wylan seized the opening. “Alright. Family meeting. Private. Not here.”
“A family meeting?” Seraphina’s smile widened. “I’ll come along.”
“Would you give us a moment to chat amongst ourselves?”
“I’ve rested for twelve years,” she said. “I’m sure I have an additional minute.”
They huddled. Seraphina retreated to examine the sarcophagi with performative disinterest. She watched them the way cats watch mice: patiently, and with no intention of leaving.
Wylan kept one eye on her. Everyone else was busy having opinions. He was busy watching the vampire who could apparently hear their heartbeats from across a stone chamber.
Lambert kept his voice low, though there was little point. “She knows Aeloria. Valère, apparently. She claims to know a history behind the Church and has more knowledge about the cult than we do. We have been fighting blind, and she’s the first person who can actually tell us what we’re looking at.”
“We’ve known her for five minutes,” Wylan hissed. “And she spent the first two with her hand around Isabella’s throat.”
“She woke up to the news that her son was dead,” Isabella said, one hand rising to her throat where the bruises were forming. “I’d have done worse.”
“Keep your voice down,” Laila said sharply.
From across the chamber, Seraphina’s voice carried with effortless clarity. “Oh, don’t mind me. I can hear everything regardless. I just wanted to give you some space to huddle. Your heartbeats are fascinating, by the way. They keep speeding up even when you’re saying nothing of consequence.”
Wylan resisted the urge to check his own pulse.
Seraphina called over to them. “Perhaps in the interest of time we can dispense with the pretence of privacy. I have been here such an awfully long time and I would like to get out into the night air. How about this: I will give you three questions, and I will answer them to the best of my ability. After that, I will take my leave and we can figure out if we are family another time.” She held up three fingers, as though the number might otherwise prove challenging.
Isabella stepped forward first. Of course she did. She held up Alexios’ weathered journal like a barrister presenting evidence. “This is Alexios’ journal. It contains his notes on every associate, every connection, every thread of the Eclipse Society’s network. What can you tell me about them?”
Seraphina’s expression didn’t so much as flicker. “You have wasted your question. I have been underground for twelve years. I did not even know he was dead. My knowledge of his associates is considerably less current than yours.”
Wylan watched Isabella’s jaw tighten. He could have told her. Seraphina had been in a box since before Isabella joined the family. But Isabella always led with what she had, even when what she had was the wrong weapon for the fight.
Lambert stepped forward. Wylan could see him recalibrating. Whatever he asked, it would need to be something Seraphina couldn’t deflect.
“Alexios knew about R?zvan,” he said. “He had the chalice. He had the notes. He spent years down here. But he never woke him.” Lambert met Seraphina’s eyes. “Why not?”
Seraphina’s expression changed. Lambert had asked something she hadn’t expected, and that, apparently, warranted respect. “Because your father had limits,” she said. “He believed he could find another way. A lesser weapon, built from fragments, something he could control.” She paused. “There is no other way. There never was. But Alexios would rather fail on his own terms than succeed on R?zvan’s.”
“Yes,” Laila said. “He would.”
All eyes turned to Wylan.
He’d been dreading this. Not the question. The expectation that he’d play along. “I don’t have a question,” he said. “What I have is an observation. We have known this woman for less time than it takes to boil an egg. In that time, she has assaulted my sister, claimed ownership of a relic my brother bled for, and informed us that our entire Church is a front for a dragon cult.” He folded his arms. “And here we are, playing her game, on her terms, in her Dungeon. I’m not asking her anything. If Laila wants my turn, she can have it.”
Laila shook her head. “I have no questions I want answered right now. But I’d trust Lambert to make better use of it than me.”
Lambert’s fingers drummed against his thigh. “I have a question you might not want to answer.”
“How refreshing,” Seraphina said. “The first interesting thing anyone has said all evening.”
“We believe Alexios was faithful to Death. Was that constant for him and the Eclipse Society?”
Seraphina went still. Her mouth had outrun her intentions. She turned towards the sarcophagus, one pale hand tracing its edge.
“Your father was a reluctant follower.” The words came slowly. “Necessity, not faith.”
“Why do you say that?”
“If he were a true believer,” she said, “he would have embraced everything we offered.”
She caught herself. The openness vanished.
Everything we offered. Wylan tucked that away.
Then untucked it. “Actually,” he said, “I do have a question.”
Seraphina turned to him with renewed interest.
“You didn’t answer Isabella’s, so I’ll answer it for you. Alexios’ associates are dead, scattered, or in hiding. The Eclipse Society is finished. You’ve been sealed away for twelve years and you have no idea what’s happening on the surface.” He held her gaze. “That’s why you’re entertaining us instead of leaving. So here’s my question: what do you actually want?”
Seraphina looked at him properly for the first time. Then she smiled, and it was the first smile that looked genuine. “Alright,” she said. “I’ll indulge you.”
She began to pace, slow and deliberate. “Right now, there is an enormous amount of faith built around the Church. It was meant to be in Aeloria’s image, but Valère made it in his own, projected onto an idea of Invictus.”
“And what would R?zvan replace it with?” Laila said. “Darkness has its own kind of worship.”
“Now you’re asking the right questions,” Seraphina said. “The Church might not be the largest congregation in the world, but it is still a nation of faith, and in that faith is power.” She glanced at the chalice in Lambert’s hands. “As long as that remains out of their hands, neither Valère nor Aeloria can command that faith or its power.”
She paused. “But it is subdued down here. And there is only one way to stop that power entirely.”
“How?” Wylan said, though some part of him already knew.
“By bringing eternal night.”
Nobody spoke.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve tried this,” Lambert said quietly. “Is it?”
“No,” Seraphina said. “It isn’t. But the blood wasn’t strong enough. Next time, it will be.”
Wylan looked between them. “What are you talking about?”
“The Great Frost,” Lambert said. “A period of almost no sunlight. The Pendulum shrouded in a strange gloom for over a week.” He looked at Seraphina. “That was you.”
“That was R?zvan,” she corrected. “I merely watched.”
Wylan turned back to Seraphina. “You want to blot out Agony,” he said slowly. “Permanently. No sunlight. Ever. And you’re standing here telling us this like it’s a selling point?”
“That is the general idea, yes.”
“Forget theology,” Wylan said. “I’m thinking about turnips. They’re surprisingly fond of sunlight.”
“A day thing,” Isabella offered, “or just a general life thing?”
“Both,” Wylan said. “Certain crops we depend on might not last. And multiple species. Not just humans.”
“Your concerns about vegetables bore me,” Seraphina said, with the finality of someone who hadn’t eaten solid food in decades.
She turned to Lambert. The performance was over. “You,” she said, her voice low but certain. “You speak with the conviction of one who might actually understand what is at stake.”
“And the rest of us?” Isabella said.
“Are welcome to come. But it’s Lambert I’ll be speaking to.”
“My family once held an old manor that overlooks the Catacombs. Laila will know how to find it. Come find me on the nights when the light of Ecstasy fills the Pendulum to its fullest.”
Lambert nodded. “I’ll be there.”
“Good.” Seraphina’s gaze swept the group one final time. “Now. The chalice, if you please.”
The chamber went quiet. Lambert looked down at the chalice, then at his family.
“No,” Isabella said.
“Lambert, don’t,” Wylan said.
“She didn’t curse Aurora,” Lambert said quietly. “She’s not our enemy. And if what she’s told us is even half true, we need her more than we need a relic we don’t know how to use.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” Lambert said. “I don’t.” He held out the chalice.
Seraphina’s fingers curled around it. “Thank you,” she murmured, though the word was less gratitude than receipt.
She paused at the threshold, glancing back at Lambert. “You are very like her, you know,” she said. Then, to Laila: “Is he one of yours? Oh” — she waved a hand — “forget I said anything.”
She turned on her heel. “I believe that is my time to depart.”
“Thank you for your time, Madame de Vaillant,” Laila replied, her tone carefully polite.
“To another night, Madame de Vaillant,” Seraphina returned, inclining her head. “May you uphold the name with the dignity it deserves.”
She gestured towards the sarcophagi. The lids ground open, slow and heavy, and from within emerged three figures wrapped in shadow so thick it swallowed what little light the chamber still held.
Two of them were strangers. Tall, silent, unremarkable in the way that deliberately forgettable things are unremarkable.
The third made Wylan’s skin crawl. He knew the face. Not from life, but from the portrait above the east staircase. Artan de Vaillant. Alexios’ father. A man who had been dead for longer than any of them had been alive. What stood before them now wore those features badly, like a mask that didn’t quite fit. The jaw was right. The brow was right. Everything else was wrong.
Seraphina placed a hand on Artan’s arm with absent familiarity. Then she turned and walked towards the far wall of the chamber. Not towards a door or a passage. Towards the darkness itself. The shadows gathered around her like a garment being drawn on, thickening until her outline blurred. Then she was gone. The three figures followed, Artan last, his stiff gait carrying him into the same darkness until it closed behind them like water over a stone.
Wylan glanced at Laila. She hadn’t moved. Her face had gone very carefully blank in the way it did when something had hit her harder than she wanted anyone to see.
“Laila?” Lambert’s voice. Gentle. “Are you alright?”
“No,” Laila said. “But we have work to do.”
The silence that followed Seraphina’s departure had a different quality, emptier, and the chamber felt larger without her in it, as though she had been taking up more space than her body accounted for.
Wylan was the first to move. He crossed the chamber towards the altar where Caliburn still sat embedded, its bronze blade bound by black ichor that pulsed faintly in the dim light.
“What are you doing?” Laila said.
“We’ve come all the way down here, and now, thanks to Lambert, we’re leaving empty-handed.” Wylan crouched beside the altar, examining the ichor with professional interest.
“I think we made an ally,” Lambert said.
“An ally who is questionable at best and homicidal at worst. You handed her the chalice, Lambert. You let her walk out of here with the one thing we bled for.” Wylan pulled a vial from his satchel. “I’m not leaving without this.”
“Didn’t Seraphina say to leave it?” Laila asked.
“Seraphina said a lot of things. And worse, there was a great deal she left unsaid.” He uncorked the vial. “I don’t trust her, and I’m not walking out of this Dungeon without a weapon.”
“You’ll have to get it out first,” Isabella said, nodding at the ichor.
Wylan grinned. It was the grin of a man who had been surrounded by theology, vampires, and family politics all evening and was finally being asked to do something he was good at. “It’s just some strange unknowable ichor. Let’s see how it stands up to the brilliance of science.”
He poured the acid carefully along the blade’s edge. The ichor hissed, bubbled, and dissolved, retreating from the bronze like something that had just discovered an allergy.
“Careful,” Isabella said. “Don’t hurt the sword.”
“It’s bronze. The acid has no reaction to it. And if decades of that ichor hasn’t pitted or stained it, nothing I can make will.” He stoppered the vial and reached for another. “Stand back.”
He downed a potion with the confidence of long practice, and his muscles swelled visibly beneath his sleeves. He wrapped both hands around Caliburn’s hilt, braced, and pulled.
The sword came free with a sound like a long-held breath finally released.
Wylan held it up, bronze catching the faint light. “What do you reckon?” he said. “Not a bad inheritance.”
? In most families, the youngest scion inheriting a sword would have been the sign of a good story. In the case of Wylan, it was probably considered a great lapse in judgement.