The earth itself had tried to swallow the Temple of the First Descent.
Only the crown of its broken dome still jutted from a cliff face like a cracked skull, half-buried in centuries of scree and thorn. Wind screamed through the fissures, carrying the faint, endless sound of wings beating against chains.
They descended at twilight.
Kaelen went first, Azazel's circlet a cold ring of judgment on his brow. The brand answered every step with a pulse of eager fire, as though the ruins were an old lover calling him home.
The entrance had once been a gate of pearl and gold. Now the pearl was blackened, the gold melted into frozen tears. Across the lintel, a single line of celestial script still glowed faintly:
Here pride learned its name.
Iria traced the letters with ash-stained fingers. Her chains dragged behind her like a wedding train of iron ghosts.
"This is the threshold where the Watchers crossed," she said. "Two hundred stood here. Two hundred swore the oath that broke the heavens. The gods sealed it with a pact written in their own blood, then broke the pact the moment it became inconvenient."
A pressure plate hissed beneath Tomas's boot. Spears of frozen starlight erupted from the walls old angelic justice, still lethal. Tomas twisted aside; one spear grazed his cheek, drawing a line of silver blood.
"Still cranky after all these years," he muttered.
Iria knelt, pressing her palm to the floor. The chains flared, reading the glyphs like braille. She spoke the counter-oath the one the gods had forbidden any mortal throat to utter. The spears dissolved into harmless dust.
Deeper in, the walls awoke.
Carvings writhed under torchlight: beautiful giants descending on wings of dawn, teaching mortals the secrets of root-cutting and star-naming, cosmetics and sword-forging. Then the turn: the same giants bound in chains of fire, dragged screaming into the abyss while the gods looked on from thrones already beginning to crack.
Kaelen's brand burned hotter with every image. Pride, the carvings whispered. Beautiful, necessary pride.
He forced himself onward.
At the heart of the ruin waited a door of black glass, etched with the final moment of the pact: a god and a Watcher clasping forearms while, unseen behind them, the god's other hand already held the dagger.
Iria's voice was barely audible. "They never intended to keep it. The moment the Watchers taught mankind to stand upright, the gods decided some knowledge was too dangerous to share."
She pressed her chains to the door. The iron links shattered one by one, paying the blood-price of entry.
The door sighed open.
The air inside tasted of endings.
The chamber beyond was a perfect sphere once the heart of heaven's observatory, now a tomb.
In its center floated a single shard of the original firmament: a mirror of living starlight, cracked down the middle. Around it, the walls were painted with the gods in their glory tall, radiant, terrible. But the paint had blistered. Faces had melted. Crowns dripped like candle wax.
Selene walked to the mirror as though pulled by invisible strings. She placed both palms against the cold surface. The mirror drank her. Light poured out not golden, but corpse-pale. Selene's body arched, mouth open in a silent scream as the shard forced its memories into her.
She saw: A throne room vast as galaxies. Nine circles of seats, each more exalted than the last. Upon the highest, a being of unbearable beauty once sat Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, before the name became a curse. Now the seat was empty, the cushion rotted through. Dust motes drifted where wings of morning had once spread.
Lower thrones were worse. Some held only shadows wearing crowns too heavy for nothing. Others cradled husks gods who had tried to flee their own decay and failed, bodies twisted into mockery: wings fused to backs, mouths sewn shut with threads of their own forgotten prayers.
One throne third circle, left of the center still moved. A thing that had once been the goddess of mercy rocked back and forth, skin sloughing in sheets, whispering the same phrase over and over:
"They left us to keep the lie alive." Selene convulsed. Veillight exploded from her eyes, her mouth, her pores pure, agonized revelation.
Kaelen caught her as she fell. The mirror cracked further, bleeding slow starlight across the floor.
"They're not dead," she gasped, voice shredded. "They're hollow. Echoes wearing the skins of gods. The real ones ascended… or fled… or burned out trying to stop what the Watchers began. Everything since has been theatre. Puppets pulling puppet strings."
Tomas stared at the blistered murals. "So we've been hunting heretics for costumes?"
Iria's chains clattered to the stone, lifeless. "We were never guardians. We were jailers keeping mortals afraid of the dark so the dark would never notice the stage was empty."
Kaelen looked at the cracked mirror. In its fractured surface he saw himself circlet blazing, brand blazing, wings of golden fire unfurling from his shoulder blades that had never been there before.
The Flame whispered, soft as seduction: Take the thrones. Fill them. Finish what pride began.
He felt the old intoxication rise Lucifer's intoxication, the moment before the plummet when falling still felt like flying. Selene clutched his arm, nails drawing blood. "Don't listen," she begged. "That's how it starts. That's how they all became monsters wearing beauty."
Kaelen closed his eyes. When he opened them, the phantom wings were gone.
"Not yet," he said to the Flame, to the mirror, to the empty heavens themselves.
He smashed the shard with the pommel of his sword.
Starlight bled out like dying angels. Behind them, something in the ruins shifted stone grinding on stone, chains long rusted finally snapping. The gods' lie had just lost one of its mirrors.
And the Watchers' truth was one step closer to morning.
The others slept, or pretended to, in the outer ring of the ruined temple. Kaelen walked alone to the deepest crypt, where even torchlight feared to follow.
A single shaft of moonlight speared down from a crack in the dome, striking a pedestal of black marble. Upon it rested nothing; only the outline of where something vast had once been chained. The stone still wept slow tears of molten gold.
He knelt.
The circlet burned. The brand roared.
He had come here to silence them both.
Instead, he let go.
The Ascendant Flame answered like a dam finally breaking.
Gold fire exploded from his chest, flooding the crypt in blinding dawn. The air ignited. Marble cracked. The very shadows screamed and bowed.
Kaelen rose inside the inferno, arms spread, and the Flame clothed him in living majesty: armor of molten light, wings of white-gold fire unfurling twenty feet wide, a crown of seven living suns blazing above the circlet. His reflection in the weeping gold showed eyes that were no longer human pits of burning scripture, ancient and merciless.
A voice that was not his rolled out across the ruins, shaking dust from the bones of dead angels:
I am the Morning made flesh again. I am what Belial dreamed of becoming before the Pit swallowed his name. Bow or burn.
He saw himself on the Highest Throne not empty now but occupied. Below him, realms knelt. Above him, nothing. No gods, no equals, only the endless hunger of perfected pride.
The vision tasted like honey and blood.
He reached for it.
Belial's laughter echoed in his bones old, ruined, delighted. Yes. Take it. You were forged for this. The first rebellion failed because they still wanted love. You want justice. That is purer. That is eternal.
Kaelen's wings flexed. The crypt began to melt.
Somewhere far above, Seraphim horns answered distant, but closing.
He was one heartbeat away from accepting the crown when Selene's broken whisper from the mirror chamber drifted down the stair like cold water:
"That's how they all became monsters wearing beauty."
Kaelen clenched his fists.
The wings shuddered, tore, bled light.
"No," he snarled to Belial, to the Flame, to himself. "Not like this."
He drove both hands into the molten pedestal and forced the power downward, inward, caging it again. The wings collapsed into sparks. The crown shattered into seven dying suns that fell around him like tears.
The brand dimmed to sullen embers.
But the crypt was ruined, walls glowing cherry-red, and the sky now crawled with hunting light.
He had just rung the bell the heavens could not ignore.
They ran.
Alarms of pure celestial note split the night as the temple's ancient wards woke in fury. Stone seraphs atop the columns opened blind eyes and screamed. Chains that had held Watchers for millennia snapped like dry twigs, lashing at the air.
Tomas carried Selene fireman-style; her visions had left her half-blind. Iria's chains whipped behind her, shattering pursuing glyphs into sparks. Lirael sprinted with the satchel clutched to her chest, Nym and Brother Cael close behind.
Kaelen brought up the rear, sword drawn, the brand leaking gold with every heartbeat.
They burst into the central nave where the great fresco of the Fall still blistered on the ceiling. At its heart hovered the last relic: a single black apple formed of crystallized sin, the very fruit Azazel had once offered Eve to teach her the difference between naked and ashamed. It pulsed like a second Nexus, hungry for a hand brave enough to claim it.
Kaelen did not hesitate.
He leapt, seized the apple mid-air. The moment his skin touched it, every ward in the temple detonated at once.
The ceiling fell. Pillars toppled. The fresco of the Watchers screamed as it burned a second time.
Kaelen landed amid the collapse, apple clenched in his fist. Power dark, sweet, electric poured into the brand, marrying forbidden knowledge to forbidden flame.
Selene's voice cut through the chaos: "The east wall there's a Watcher's escape tunnel! Move!"
Iria's chains tore a path through crumbling stone. They plunged into darkness just as the temple imploded behind them, burying ten thousand years of lies beneath a mountain of dust and fire.
They spilled out onto a moonlit ridge half a mile away, coughing ash, bleeding light.
Kaelen opened his hand. The black apple had become a seed of living shadow, already rooting into his palm. Gold veins spread from it, marrying with the brand in a pattern older than mercy.
Tomas stared, half in awe, half in horror. "What did you just steal, Kael?"
Kaelen closed his fist around the seed. It pulsed like a second heart.
"The reason they fell," he said. "And the reason we won't."
Far behind them, the ruined temple glowed like a funeral pyre.
Above, the Seraphim circled the blaze, confused, furious, afraid.
The Ashbinders were no longer fugitives hiding from heaven.
They were the spark heaven had tried to bury, and the grave had just spit them back out.