Nightfall in autumn quieted the vibrant campus. Most students were trapped indoor, unwillingly, by St. Kevin’s strict curfew after 8 p.m.

  Eydis stood before the locked double doors of the dining hall, a two-storey red-brick building separate from the boarding houses, its windows dark.

  She checked the courtyard for any bystanders, fed a stolen keycard through the reader and let herself in.

  Such nimble fingers. Who would have thought Your Majesty was proficient in stealing. a familiar voice coiled through her mind. It was Envy who was as welcome as a snake in a nest of eggs.

  Solitary confinement were surprisingly educational, she replied. Spend a month in a box and see what you pick up.

  Princess Eydis, creeping through the dark. Was exile delightful? After all, you weren’t much for social interaction.

  Of course Envy didn’t remember this. It had happened long before she bound the Sin. She sent a light zap at the nosy pest.

  Marvellous companionship, Envy. I had ample time for insightful conversations with… myself. I do miss it now that my ears are being hammered by a certain fork-tongued parasite.

  The sulky quiet that followed was expected. She ignored Envy’s dramatic pout and surveyed the dining hall.

  The hall had been scrubbed clean, replacing the earlier heavy aroma of food with the chemical bite of bleach and detergent. Her senses swept the room and returned with nothing, which was itself the problem.

  No trace of Gluttony.

  “Curious.” She drew one finger along a steel prep table. “I had assumed that revolting lunch scene had Gluttony’s ugly stamps all over it. Or has Birgit just developed an alarming fondness for… orange juice now?”

  She pushed open the timber door to the kitchen and inspected the place. Spotless. Sadly, sanctity did not extend to seasoning. She checked the cabinets and, with mounting suspicion, the freezer.

  Hauling open the heavy stainless steel door, Eydis was instantly blasted by a frost-bitten chill. Inside, shelves cradled heavy stacks of frozen meat and pastry, all covered in frost.

  Envy thickened into view beside her. “No sign of our bottomless pit.”

  Closing her eyes, she used her senses again. The presence of shadows was there, tenuous and wispy, before vanishing altogether.

  That was not how Gluttony behaved. The Sin was an insatiable abyss that always wanted more. It couldn’t hide its hunger as well as the more elegant, stronger Sins, like Pride or… Envy.

  She could feel Envy’s smug grin and rolled her eyes before attempting to sense Gluttony again. Once again it ended in failure.

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  Had she read the signs incorrectly? Had she been imagining it? Maybe she was running on too little sleep. Perhaps, her magic simply wasn't strong enough to sense it.

  Irritated, she exited the hall and walked to the cricket field. Envy turned invisible and left her side to scout for disturbances.

  Eydis sat cross-legged on the damp, trimmed grass, where she had been cultivating in secret as of late. She traced over the dull lines of the old sigil that circled her, making small, cautious refinements to it.

  Her sigil no longer flared its usual vivid violet. Now it was a muted, dark siphon, designed to hide the visible shimmer of her cultivation. Its glow lay underneath the layer of well-kept grass. Elegant, discreet, almost perfect.

  The problem was that even this method was hardly indoor-friendly. She could hide the shadows visually, but their energy could still be sensed by those with… specific talents. To a passer-by she might look like a student contemplating lint in a mosquito-ridden field, but she knew Astra could see what others could not.

  Predictably, her new adjustment didn’t work. The circle pulsed with shadow energy. Back to the drawing board.

  Eydis closed her eyes and felt the dark current flow from the sigil into her body. As always, her body fought it, a violent push and pull racing through her veins.

  Why? Every being held the capacity for darkness. Light and shadow, two halves of one whole. Basic cosmic harmony.

  Unless this body was not meant for it.

  What exactly was hidden here? Light? Unless this body had belonged to one of the Celestial Empire’s chosen champions, which she very much doubted, even an ordinary vessel of the Light could be corrupted…

  A long-buried memory flashed to remind her of that. Princess Eydis once had a childhood friend, her name lost and her face dissolved into an outline. A casualty of the former Queen’s attentiveness.

  “That child is not your friend,” the Queen had said, her voice colder than the gold-veined marble underfoot, which was saying something.

  “Forgive me, Your Majesty. I wasn’t aware I needed a license to have one.”

  The Queen narrowed her obsidian eyes.

  “Besides, I was under the impression that my well-being was none of your concern. Was it the laugh?” Eydis taunted. A rebellious child she had always been.

  “You do not know the forces you toy with, Princess Eydis. You will not see her again.”

  And Eydis hadn’t.

  A month in the dark, alone with nothing but her own thoughts. She’d never let herself ask what became of her friend.

  Because deep down, she already knew. Because not knowing was easier than staring into the void and finding it staring back.

  A lie of a life, an illusion of safety, was… safer.

  She shoved the memory aside and pulled her focus back to this task. Perhaps the key to capturing Gluttony wasn’t in sharpening her senses, since apparently she could detect Envy just fine. Perhaps…

  She needed a lure, an outrageous one, and she knew where to start.

  Envy shivered when said outrageous plan leaked into its mind. Before it could complain, two figures cut across its vision, heading straight for the empty pitch.

  Eydis’s golden eyes flew open at Envy’s warning. The dark aura around her withdrew, folding into the shadows as she did the same.

  One look through Envy’s eyes was all she needed to place them.

  Theo and Astra, silver-haired and graceful, crossed the field in silence, moving with the quiet alert that had nothing to do with a leisure stroll.

  A patrol, then. Interesting. Why them and not any of the staff members? Moreover, with the academy’s protective fields, patrols were redundant.

  Which meant they knew something. And if they knew something, it was worth prying into.

  She watched them a moment longer, then let the shadows take her. The pieces were scattered, but she would arrange them, one way or another.

  First, a stop at her dorm.

  When Eydis slipped away, Astra came to a stop.

  Theo noticed immediately and scanned the surrounding with his eyes. “What is it? Do you see something?”

  “No,” Astra murmured. “Just a feeling.”

  “A feeling?”

  “That someone was here.” Astra lifted her chin and closed her eyes. There was nothing unusual. Yet the silence felt different. She just couldn’t put her finger on what.