CAEL
The seminary taught me to appreciate the sacred geometry of temple architecture. The Seams taught me to appreciate the sacred geometry of a window that opens outward and a drainpipe that holds weight.
Both lessons were proving useful.
The angel—cherub-class, four wings, face like a beautiful migraine—had cornered me in the Hall of Illuminated Receipts, which is exactly as dull as it sounds. I'd been researching tax records from the pre-Ascendancy period. Specifically, I'd been stealing tax records from the pre-Ascendancy period. In my defense, they weren't using them.
"Cael Morrow." The angel spoke my name and something inside me flinched—not from fear, though there was plenty of that, but from the sensation of being known. My name in its mouth felt like being stripped naked and found wanting. Like being six years old again, caught with my hands in someone else's pockets, except this time the someone was God. "You have committed heresies against the Eternal Economy. Your soul is forfeit."
I shifted my weight. Felt the familiar press of three knives against my body—thigh, small of back, wrist sheath. None of them would do a damn thing against an angel. But they were there. They were real. The cold edge of the wrist blade against my skin was more honest than anything the creature was saying.
"Quick question," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, which was either a good sign or evidence that my survival instincts had finally given up. "Is this a trial, or just an execution? Because if it's a trial, I have notes. Prepared remarks. Visual aids. I've been practicing this speech for—"
The angel moved.
I'd like to say I had time to react. I'd like to say my years of gutter-fighting served me well, that I read its trajectory and countered with some clever maneuver I'd learned from a drunk ex-soldier in the Threshold. What actually happened was simpler: I'd already rigged the window before it arrived.
Paranoia isn't a disorder when everything's actually trying to kill you. It's just good planning.
I went through the glass shoulder-first. The pain was immediate and specific—each shard writing its own small story into my flesh. I've always noticed pain more than other people. Not in a noble way. Not suffering ennobles the soul or any of that theological garbage. I just... feel it more. Taste it. The blood in my mouth was copper and salt and something almost sweet. The cuts on my arms were a symphony of bright sharp notes against the dull roar of panic.
I hit the drainpipe. It held. Behind me, the angel screamed something about divine judgment.
I was too busy falling to catch the details.
Halfway down, bleeding from a dozen cuts, window glass still in my hair, I started laughing. Not because it was funny. Because my body thought we were dying, and if I was going to die, I wanted the last thing I felt to be mine. The laughter hurt—my ribs, my throat, the places where the glass had gone deep—but it was my hurt. My choice. My voice in my own ears instead of that thing's voice saying my name like it owned me.
The pipe ended. The ground didn't.
I died for the first time in a city gutter, surrounded by trash, exactly where I'd started.
It figured.
I should explain about the dying.
Actually, no. I should explain about the tax records. The dying makes more sense if you understand what I found in those tax records, and what I found in those tax records makes more sense if you understand what kind of person goes looking for eight-thousand-year-old financial documents in the first place.
The kind of person who grew up in the Seams.
The Seams are what happens when reality gives up on urban planning. They're the crawlspaces between the Reaches—the eight great territories that divide the world like slices of an unequal pie. Where the Reaches don't quite meet, where the borders blur and the laws of one territory haven't quite decided if they apply, that's where the unwanted collect. Like sediment. Like trash.
Like me.
My mother was a scribe who lost her position. Then her mind. Then the ability to throw anything away. Our home was a listing shanty stuffed floor-to-ceiling with moldering papers, rotting food, broken tools she swore she'd fix, bundles of rags that might have been clothes or might have been rats' nests—hard to tell, didn't matter. The smell was its own weather system. Some days it was bearable. Some days I couldn't breathe without gagging. Those were the days I learned to breathe shallow, to exist in the smallest possible space inside my own body.
I learned to read by candlelight in a nest I'd carved between stacks of mildewed tax records. Learned to steal by necessity—food first, then anything tradeable, then finally the one thing I actually wanted: books. Learned to fight by proximity. The Seams sat between a debtor's labor camp and a quarantine for those touched wrong by quintessence burnout. The kind of people who ended up in places like that weren't gentle. Neither was I.
But before all that—before the stealing and the fighting and the desperate scrambling to become someone who might survive—I was already strange.
The sight came before language.
I don't remember learning to see the flows—the shimmering threads connecting every living thing to the great wheel of existence, the way reality breathes if you catch it sideways. I remember my mother's face when she realized her infant was tracking things that weren't there. The way she started drinking harder after that. By the time I could walk, I was reaching for colors no one else saw. By the time I could talk, I'd learned not to mention them.
My first word was 'mama.' My second word was 'bright.' She thought I meant the sun.
I meant the thing standing behind her.
The fever hit when I was four.
One moment I was a sick child in a sweltering shanty, sweating through rags while my mother muttered about purging humors. The next moment I was somewhere else entirely.
The walls folded into themselves. Corners became curves became angles that shouldn't exist. I watched my own hands multiply, trail, smear across my vision like my body couldn't decide where to be. Like I was a drawing someone was erasing from the middle outward.
And then the numbers came.
Not seeing them. Being them. I understood, for one horrible infinite moment, that everything was math. That I was math. That the equation of me was solvable, and on the other side of the solution was nothing.
I felt myself start to divide by zero.
My heart stopped. My mother found me blue. The healer—a drunk with enough skill to keep the Seams' children breathing, usually—said I was gone for four minutes.
I came back different.
"Shark-eyed," a neighbor said later. "Like something else was looking out through the kid's face."
Not something else. More of me. The fever burned away whatever membrane keeps a child from knowing too much. I was four years old and I understood that existence was a numbers game, and the house always wins.
I've been trying to count cards ever since.
By six, I ran the Seams' children like a tiny criminal empire.
Not through violence—I was small, underfed, couldn't win a straight fight against kids two years older. Through knowing things. The sight showed me who was lying. The pattern-sense from the fever showed me who could be played. The absolute feral need to control something in an uncontrollable life did the rest.
I organized the begging routes—which corners, which marks, which times. Ran the small thefts—pockets, market stalls, unattended carts. Took a cut of everything and redistributed just enough to keep the others loyal. I was six years old and I understood supply chains, incentive structures, the mathematics of loyalty and fear.
The adults called me the Gremlin. Half-mocking, half-wary. There was something wrong with that kid. Something old behind the eyes.
They weren't wrong.
The seminary acquisitor found me at six and a half. Not lifting texts—trading them. I'd stolen a minor heretical tract from a careless pilgrim and was negotiating its sale to three different buyers simultaneously, playing them against each other for maximum price. I was barely tall enough to see over the market stall I was using as an office.
Her name was Thessaly. Old and sharp and amused in a way that made me deeply suspicious. People didn't look at Seams kids with amusement unless they were planning something bad.
She didn't take the book. Didn't turn me in. She bought it herself. Then she asked me what it said.
I told her. I'd read it. Of course I'd read it. You don't sell something without knowing what it's worth. The tract was about the nature of the soul's passage—whether consciousness persisted through the cycle of death and rebirth or was merely an emergent property of each new configuration. Amateur theology, really, but dangerous enough to interest collectors.
Thessaly watched me explain fourth-century metaphysics with the vocabulary of a street rat and the comprehension of a scholar three times my age. Her face did something complicated.
"Do you want to learn more?" she asked.
"What's it pay?"
She laughed. Nobody had laughed at me like that before—like I was delightful instead of disturbing. I didn't trust it.
I said yes anyway.
Back to dying.
I lay in that gutter for what felt like a long time. The pain had stopped, which was alarming—pain was usually the last thing to go. The world was doing that non-Euclidean thing again, corners folding wrong, except this time I could see through the folds. See what was underneath reality's skin.
The wheel.
Everyone learns about it as children. The great cycle of existence. Souls emerge from the Source, live their mortal span, die, and return to be reborn. It's how existence has always worked. The priests sing about it, the philosophers debate its finer points, the poets make it sound beautiful.
What they don't tell you—what they maybe don't know—is that the wheel has stations.
I saw them. Seven points of impossible brightness positioned around the rim where souls pass from life to death to rebirth. Seven interception points. Seven places where something was reaching into the flow and taking a piece before letting the rest continue.
The Thrones.
The seven gods of the Ascendancy. The divine powers humanity had worshipped for eight thousand years. They weren't guarding the wheel, weren't maintaining it, weren't doing any of the things the theology claimed.
They were feeding on it.
I felt my own soul start to drift toward the wheel, pulled by the current of death, and I watched one of the Thrones turn its attention toward me. The Ember. The god of passion. Something in her vast alien consciousness tasted my quintessence and found it... interesting.
Interesting was bad. Interesting meant she might want a closer look. Might reach for me specifically, drag me through her processing, consume not just the usual percentage but all of me—
And then something pulled me back.
Not the wheel. Not the Ember. Something else entirely. A thread of connection I didn't understand, yanking me away from the flow of death like someone hauling a drowning man from a river by his hair.
I slammed back into my body so hard I vomited blood.
The gutter was still there. The trash was still there. The distant screaming of the angel, realizing its prey had somehow escaped divine judgment, was new.
I laughed again. It hurt worse this time.
"Okay," I said to no one. "Okay. So the gods are parasites, death is a scam, and something I don't understand just saved my life."
I pushed myself upright. Glass fell out of me. Blood made my hands slip on the cobblestones. Everything was too bright, too loud, too much—my senses overloading the way they did when I was stressed, processing everything at maximum intensity because my brain had never learned the difference between a threat and a texture.
I found one of my knives. The wrist sheath one. Gripped it until the edge bit into my palm, using the pain to cut through the noise.
Focus. Survive now. Panic later.
"Cael Morrow," the angel's voice came from above. It was descending through the broken window, wings unfurling, beautiful and terrible and very, very angry. "You cannot escape the Eternal Economy. Your soul—"
"Was rejected," I said. "Sent back. Return to sender. Maybe you should talk to your supervisor about that."
The angel's face did something that shouldn't have been possible for a being of pure divine light. It looked confused.
That confusion bought me about three seconds.
I ran.
CHAPTER TWO VERAINE
I felt him die from three districts away.
That's not how my gift is supposed to work. I see damage—fractures in objects, in structures, in the fabric of things that want to break. I don't feel people die. I'm not connected to anyone that way, not anymore, not since the fire—
But I felt Cael die. Felt the thread between us—the one I'd pretended for twelve years wasn't there—go taut and then snap and then, impossibly, reconnect.
I dropped the manuscript I was restoring. Priceless. Three hundred years old. I didn't care.
"Veraine?" My assistant's voice, concerned. I must have made a sound. "Are you—"
"I need to go."
"But the Luminary's commission—"
"Can wait."
I was already moving. Stripping off my conservator's gloves, grabbing my coat, not bothering to explain. Let them think I was having one of my episodes. Let them think whatever they wanted. Cael had died and come back and the thread between us was screaming.
Twelve years we'd been married. Eleven since we'd first tried and failed and tried again. Twenty-two since we'd met as children in that damned experimental seminary program, both of us broken in ways that somehow fit together like two halves of an ugly, misshapen whole.
I'd pulled him back from death once before. When we were twelve, in a burning building, with a power I didn't understand and have never been able to replicate. I'd reached across whatever boundary separates life from death and yanked, and he came back, and neither of us had ever talked about what that meant.
But I'd felt it. Just now. That same pull. That same thread.
I hadn't pulled this time. I was three districts away, wrist-deep in medieval papermaking techniques. Someone else had pulled. Something else.
Or the thread I'd created twenty-two years ago had pulled on its own.
Either possibility terrified me.
I should explain about the gift. And about Cael. They're the same explanation, really—I can't talk about one without talking about the other, and I've spent most of my life trying to talk about neither.
I grew up in the Shallows. Mirror-lake country. A family of diviners, oracles, seers—people who look into reflective surfaces and see more than their own faces. My grandmother could read the future in a cup of still water. My mother could find lost objects by staring at polished silver. My aunts, uncles, cousins, all of them touched by the gift in one form or another.
I was supposed to inherit it. The gift. The sight.
Instead, I got something else.
When I look at things—objects, buildings, people—I don't see the future. I see the fractures. The places where they're already broken, even if the breaking hasn't happened yet. The fault lines. The structural weaknesses. The points where, if pressure were applied just so, everything would shatter.
It's useful for conservation work. Priceless for restoring damaged manuscripts, repairing ancient artifacts, preserving things that want to fall apart. I can see exactly where the damage is, exactly how it spread, exactly what needs to happen to hold it together.
It's less useful for happiness.
Because I see fractures in people too. In relationships. In institutions. In the careful structures we build to convince ourselves the world makes sense. I can't look at anything without seeing how it's going to break.
And Cael...
Cael was the most fractured thing I'd ever seen.
I was seven when they sent me to the seminary. The Convergence Program—fifty years of reformist education policy distilled into one doomed experiment. Take gifted children from all eight Reaches, all social classes, all backgrounds. Educate them together. Break down the barriers that divided the world.
It was a beautiful idea. Most beautiful ideas are.
There were twelve of us in Cael's intake year. I was the quiet one. The girl from the Shallows who stared at things too long and made the other children uncomfortable. Who cried when she looked at the seminary walls because she could see all the places they were going to crumble, given enough centuries.
Cael was not quiet. Cael was a chaos engine. A feral creature in scholar's robes, all sharp edges and sharper words, picking fights he couldn't win and somehow winning them anyway through sheer viciousness and pattern-recognition. The teachers didn't know what to do with him. The other students were afraid of him. Even the ones who should have been able to crush him—bigger, stronger, from better families—learned quickly that Cael Morrow fought like he had nothing to lose.
Because he didn't. He'd come from nothing. He expected nothing. Everything else was just math.
I watched him for a year before I worked up the courage to speak to him. A full year of studying the most fractured human being I'd ever encountered, trying to understand how someone could be shattered so completely and still be standing.
The answer, when I finally found it, was simple: he'd never been whole in the first place. You can't break what was never intact. Cael hadn't shattered—he'd just been assembled wrong, from the very beginning, in a way that somehow held together through sheer spite.
It was the most beautiful damage I'd ever seen.
I found him in an alley six blocks from the Chronicle Archives. Covered in blood. Covered in glass. Laughing.
"Veraine." He looked up at me with those shark eyes—the ones that had seen too much too young and never quite recovered. "You felt that?"
"I felt something." I crouched beside him, already cataloging the damage. Lacerations across both arms. Glass embedded in his shoulder, his scalp, his hands. Nothing fatal, but he should have been in shock. He should have been unconscious. Instead he was laughing. "Cael. What happened."
Not a question. I don't ask him questions anymore. I've learned that questions give him room to deflect, to joke, to construct one of his elaborate verbal mazes. Statements work better. Demands work best.
"I found something." He was still laughing, but it was turning into something else now—something closer to crying, though he'd never admit it. "In the pre-Ascendancy records. A tax ledger. Do you know what the gods are, Veraine? Do you know what they've been doing for eight thousand years?"
"You can tell me while I get this glass out of you."
"They're parasites." He grabbed my wrist—his grip surprisingly strong for someone who'd apparently just died. "They're not maintaining the cycle. They're harvesting it. Taking a piece of every soul that passes through. Have been for millennia. And the ledger proves it—the math doesn't balance, the numbers before they built their Thrones versus after, the rate of quintessence flow—"
"Cael." I put my hand over his. Felt the thread between us pulse. "You need to stop talking and start moving. If what you're saying is true—"
"It's true."
"—then something is going to come looking for you."
"Something already did." He gestured vaguely upward. "Angel. Cherub-class. Very upset. I jumped out a window."
I stared at him. Twenty-two years. Half my life. And he could still surprise me.
"You jumped out a window."
"Third floor. There was a drainpipe. It didn't hold as well as I'd hoped."
"You died."
"Briefly." His laugh was definitely closer to crying now. "I think you pulled me back. Or the thing you did when we were twelve pulled me back. I don't understand how any of this works, V. I'm supposed to understand things. That's my whole—that's all I'm good for—"
I kissed him. It was the most efficient way to make him stop spiraling. Also, he'd just died, and I'd felt it, and there were things I needed him to know that I'd never been good at saying with words.
He tasted like blood. Like copper and salt and something almost sweet underneath—the taste I'd learned to associate with him, with home, with the one person in the world whose fractures matched mine.
When I pulled back, his eyes were clearer.
"We need to go," I said.
"I know."
"We can't go home."
"I know."
"Everything is about to change."
He smiled. Blood on his teeth. Glass in his hair. The most fractured, most brilliant, most infuriating person I'd ever known.
"Finally," he said. "Something interesting."
CHAPTER THREE THESSALY
Three hundred years is a long time to keep a secret.
It's an even longer time to keep one from yourself.
I watched the angel descend from the Chronicle Archives, wings folded in what I'd learned to recognize as frustration. Cherub-class—not one of the higher orders, but still dangerous. Still capable of rendering a mortal soul into constituent quintessence with a thought. Still very, very upset that its target had escaped.
"Acquisitor." The angel's voice carried harmonics that made my teeth ache. "The heretic Morrow. You were his handler."
"I was his mentor," I corrected. "Twenty-eight years ago. I haven't seen him since he was expelled from the seminary."
A lie. One of thousands I'd told over three centuries of service to the Thrones. This one tasted worse than most.
The angel studied me with eyes that had witnessed the birth of stars. I kept my face neutral. I'd been keeping my face neutral since before this creature's divine parent had decided to ascend.
"He accessed pre-Ascendancy records," the angel said. "Financial documents from the old economy. He saw something in them."
"I wouldn't know what. I'm not a scholar—I find them. What they do after I find them is above my station."
Another lie. I knew exactly what Cael had found. I'd been waiting for someone to find it for three hundred years.
The angel made a sound that might have been contempt. "He escaped. Somehow. Died and came back. The Ember felt it. She's... intrigued."
That was bad. The Ember intrigued was like a fire intrigued by dry kindling. Nothing good came from catching a god's attention.
"What do you need from me?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
"Find him. You found him once. Find him again."
I bowed my head in acknowledgment. "By the Eternal Economy."
The angel departed. I waited until its presence had faded from my awareness—three minutes, four, five—before I allowed myself to breathe.
Cael Morrow. The feral child I'd pulled from the Seams three decades ago, recognizing in his pattern-sight and fierce intelligence something I'd almost forgotten was possible: hope.
He'd found the proof. After all these years, all my careful cultivation, all the breadcrumbs I'd left in archives I wasn't supposed to know existed—he'd finally found it.
And I was going to have to decide what to do about that.
I should explain about the three hundred years.
In the year of the Silence—long before Cael was born, before his grandparents were born, before the current political order had solidified—I was young. Young and brilliant and absolutely certain that I'd discovered something that would change everything.
The tax ledgers. The quintessence flow rates. The math that didn't balance.
I was the first. Or at least, I thought I was. I know better now—there have been others, down through the centuries. Others who looked too closely at the divine machinery and saw the gears grinding, saw the toll being extracted, saw the truth behind the beautiful lie of the Eternal Economy.
Most of them died. The ones who didn't... well.
The Thrones offered me a choice.
Not the Ember—the Sun. The god of wisdom and integration. The most reasonable of the divine parasites, the one who'd developed something almost like conscience after eight thousand years of consuming mortal experience. He came to me in my cell, where I waited for execution, and he made me an offer.
"You see clearly," he said. His voice was tired. Ancient. The voice of someone who'd been right about terrible things for so long that rightness had become its own kind of prison. "Too clearly to waste. Work for us. Find others like you—the ones who see too much, ask too many questions. Bring them to us before they become... problems."
"You want me to betray my own kind," I said.
"I want you to live," he corrected. "And in living, perhaps... guide. Slow things down. Make the transition gentler when it comes."
"What transition?"
"The one that's inevitable. Someday, someone will succeed where others have failed. Will find a way to remove us without destroying everything. When that happens, I want the landing to be as soft as possible. I want someone in position to help. Someone who understands what we are, and why, and what might come after."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then you die. Not as punishment—as necessity. You know too much. The knowledge you carry, if spread carelessly, could destabilize everything before we're ready. Before there's any hope of a controlled transition."
I took the deal.
Three hundred years. Extended life, in exchange for service. Find the dangerous minds. Bring them in. Some were executed. Some were... processed. Some, the useful ones, were given deals like mine. An army of heretics serving the very thing we'd tried to destroy, bound by survival and something that, over centuries, had almost begun to feel like loyalty.
Almost.
I never stopped looking for the one who could finish what I'd started. The mind sharp enough to see the truth and survive it. The soul slippery enough to escape the harvest.
When I found Cael Morrow, six years old, haggling over heretical texts with the vocabulary of a dockside merchant and the comprehension of a master theologian, I knew. I knew.
I'd finally found my successor.
Or my replacement.
Or my doom.
After three hundred years, I'd learned they were often the same thing.
CHAPTER FOUR SORROW
The Seams had a saying: "Nobody leaves and nobody comes back."
It was bullshit, of course. People left all the time—into the labor camps, into the ground, into the river with stones in their pockets. But they didn't come back. The Seams was the kind of place that kept what it killed and forgot what it couldn't use.
I remembered Cael Morrow.
The Seams had forgotten him. Twenty-eight years was a long time in a place where life expectancy hovered somewhere around thirty-five. The kids he'd run with were dead or scattered or worse. The adults who'd called him the Gremlin had aged out of relevance. Even the shanty where he'd lived had collapsed, been rebuilt, collapsed again, become a different kind of ruin.
But I remembered.
I was seven when he was six. One of his lieutenants, running the begging routes, learning to work the pockets of distracted pilgrims. I'd been good at it—quick hands, forgettable face, the kind of hungry that made you sharp instead of slow.
When the seminary woman took him away, I'd expected to take over. I was the obvious choice. Oldest of the crew. Most experienced. Most likely to survive.
I hadn't understood, then, what Cael actually did. I thought he just told us where to go and when. Managed the schedule. Kept the take fair.
I didn't realize until he was gone that he'd been seeing things. Reading patterns in the flow of pilgrims, in the moods of guards, in the invisible currents that determined who got caught and who got away. Without him, we were blind. We didn't even know we'd been using his eyes.
The crew fell apart in six months. Two dead, three absorbed by the labor camps, the rest scattered to fend for themselves. I survived. Barely. By doing things I don't talk about anymore.
I survived, and I grew up, and I got out—not to anything better, just to something different. The Threshold. The spaces between spaces. I became a fixer, a smuggler, a woman who moved things and people from place to place without asking too many questions or answering any.
I never stopped being angry at the boy who left.
The rumor hit the Threshold three days after the angel appeared at the Chronicle Archives.
A man had stolen something from the gods. Something important. He'd died and come back, which shouldn't be possible outside the normal cycle. Now the Thrones were hunting him, and the price on his head was enough to make kings nervous.
The name filtered down a day later: Cael Morrow. Scholar. Heretic. The man who'd looked at the divine machinery and seen it for what it was.
I sat in my usual corner of the Hinge & Socket—a bar that existed in seventeen places simultaneously, a useful property for someone in my line of work—and listened to people talk about the man I'd spent twenty-eight years trying to forget.
"—says the gods are parasites—"
"—can't kill him, apparently, they've tried—"
"—bounty's up to three thousand now, they want him alive—"
"—heard he has proof, actual documents from before—"
I finished my drink. Ordered another. Thought about the last time I'd seen Cael Morrow—small and feral and certain, climbing into a carriage with the seminary woman who'd bought his loyalty with the promise of knowledge. He hadn't looked back. Hadn't even waved.
Why would he? We were the Seams. The place nobody left and nobody came back from. He'd escaped. The rest of us had just survived.
"You look like someone punched your grandmother," Vex said, sliding into the seat across from me. Vex was Threshold-born, gender-fluid as the dimension they'd grown up in, currently wearing a face I didn't recognize. "Bad news?"
"Old news. Newly relevant." I pushed my glass in circles on the table. "The heretic everyone's talking about. I knew him. When we were children."
Vex's eyebrows rose. "The unkillable blasphemer? The man who's got every Throne-hunter in the Reaches scrambling for a piece of the bounty? That Cael Morrow?"
"He wasn't unkillable then. He was six years old. Scrawny. Had these eyes like he was always calculating something." I drained my drink. "He left. I stayed. Story as old as the Seams."
"But?"
Vex knew me too well. There was always a but.
"But I want to know if it's true," I said. "What he found. What he's saying. If the gods really are just... feeding on us. On everyone. On everything that dies."
"Does it matter? True or not, they'll kill him for saying it. Kill anyone who gets too close."
"It matters to me." I stood. Dropped coins on the table. "If it's true—if the whole thing is rigged, if there's no actual justice in the cycle, if the people I watched die in the Seams weren't going anywhere better—then I want to hear it from him. I want to look him in his calculating eyes and ask why he never came back. Why he never tried to help. Why he got out and forgot we existed."
Vex watched me go. "Sorrow. The bounty hunters—"
"I know."
"The Throne-agents—"
"I know."
"You could die."
I smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. I'd learned it in the years after Cael left, in the dark spaces where survival meant becoming something sharp.
"I've been dying since I was seven," I said. "This would just be making it official."
CHAPTER FIVE CAEL
The problem with being hunted by gods is that they have excellent organizational skills.
Within a day, my face was on every notice board in three Reaches. Within two, the bounty had tripled. By the third day, Veraine and I had been turned away from four inns, two temples, and one brothel that I'd been assured never asked questions.
"Questions are free," the madam had said, closing the door in my face. "Harboring heretics is expensive."
We ended up in a stable. It smelled like horses and old hay and the sharp undertone of manure, which shouldn't have been comforting but somehow was. I'd slept in worse places. I'd lived in worse places. At least this one had walls and a roof and no one trying to actively kill us.
"We need a plan," Veraine said.
She was sitting across from me in the straw, her conservator's coat traded for something less recognizable, her hair pulled back in a way that changed the shape of her face. Even exhausted, even hunted, she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Which wasn't useful information right now, but my brain has never been good at filtering for utility.
"I have seventeen plans," I said. "Fourteen of them are terrible. Two of them require resources we don't have. One of them might actually work."
"Tell me the one that might work."
"We need to make the information public. Not just the ledger—the context. What it means. What the gods have been doing. If enough people know, they can't kill all of us."
Veraine was quiet for a moment. Her gift, I knew, was showing her the fractures in my plan—the places it would break, the points of weakness, the fault lines that could bring the whole thing crashing down.
"They don't need to kill everyone," she said finally. "Just you. You're the one who can explain it. You're the one who sees the patterns. Without you, it's just numbers. Numbers can be disputed. Dismissed. Reframed."
"Then we train others. Find more people who can see. Build something that doesn't depend on one person."
"That takes time. Time we don't have." She reached out, touched my hand. Her fingers were cold. "Cael. The Ember is interested in you. That's what the angel said. Interested. A god is interested in your soul. Do you understand what that means?"
I understood. The Ember—the god of passion, the Throne that consumed emotional intensity—had noticed me. Not as a threat to be eliminated, but as something valuable. Something worth collecting.
The gods didn't just eat souls. They had favorites. Souls that burned brighter, felt deeper, experienced more intensely—those were delicacies. Luxuries. The difference between table wine and a vintage that had been aging for centuries.
My soul, apparently, looked appetizing.
"I've always been too much," I said. It came out more bitter than I intended. "Too intense. Too loud. Too strange. Finally found a use for it—divine fine dining."
"Stop." Veraine's grip on my hand tightened. "Don't do that. Don't make jokes about this."
"What else am I supposed to do?" The laugh that came out was sharp, ugly. "Panic? I already did that. Cry? Did that too. I've been through the whole emotional menu, V. Jokes are what's left."
She pulled me forward, pressed her forehead to mine. Her breath was warm. Her gift was warm too—I could feel it, dimly, the thread between us that she'd created twenty-two years ago. The thing that had pulled me back from death.
"I won't let them take you," she said. "I pulled you back once. I'll do it again. As many times as it takes."
"That's—V, that's not sustainable. You can't just keep resurrecting me indefinitely."
"Watch me."
I laughed again, but this time it was different. Softer. The kind of laugh that happens when someone loves you more than makes sense, more than you deserve, more than you know what to do with.
"I love you," I said. "Have I mentioned that recently?"
"Not in the last four hours."
"Tragic oversight. I love you. I love you in the specific way that involves being willing to overthrow the entire divine order so we can grow old together without being spiritually consumed. Is that romantic? I feel like that's romantic."
"It's very you," she said. "Which is close enough."
The woman found us at dawn.
I woke to the smell of smoke and old metal—the smell of someone who'd spent time in the Seams. Before I was fully conscious, I had a knife in my hand, my body moving on instincts laid down three decades ago.
"Easy, Gremlin." The voice was rough, amused, and absolutely impossible. "That's what they used to call you, wasn't it? The Gremlin King. Lord of the gutter rats."
I stared at her. Tried to reconcile the woman in front of me—hard-edged, late thirties, dressed in Threshold smuggler's leathers—with my memories of a seven-year-old pickpocket with quick hands and hungry eyes.
"Sorrow?"
"You remember." Her smile was sharp. Not friendly. "I'm flattered. Given how quickly you forgot the rest of us."
Veraine was awake now, sitting up in the straw, assessing the threat. I held up a hand—wait—and she subsided, though I could see her gift working, cataloging every fracture in the woman's stance, her weapons, her approach.
"I didn't forget," I said. "I didn't have a choice. They took me. I was six years old, Sorrow. I didn't—"
"Didn't what? Didn't write? Didn't come back? Didn't do anything for twenty-eight years while the rest of us rotted?" She stepped closer. Light from the stable's gaps fell across her face, illuminating scars I didn't remember. A history I hadn't been there for. "Two of our crew died within a year of you leaving. Did you know that? Tam and Essen. Tam got caught stealing—they took his hands, then his head. Essen drowned in the river. They said she jumped."
The names hit me like blows. Tam, who'd been the best at locks. Essen, who'd had a laugh that sounded like bells. Children. We'd all been children.
"I tried," I said. The words felt inadequate. They were inadequate. "When I was older. I went back. The Seams had changed. Everyone I knew was gone or dead or—"
"Or survived." Sorrow's smile flickered. Something almost human beneath the anger. "Some of us made it. No thanks to your patterns or your plans or your perfect memory for who could be played."
"Why are you here?" Veraine's voice, cool and precise. "If you hate him this much, why track us down? The bounty's good, but you don't seem like you need it."
Sorrow looked at her. Reassessed. I could see her running calculations—who is this woman, what is she to him, what's the angle here. Seams thinking. The kind that never went away.
"Because I want to know if it's true," she said finally. "The things they're saying. About the gods. About the cycle. About everything."
"It's true," I said.
"Prove it."
I looked at Veraine. She nodded, barely—a tiny motion that meant I see the fractures, they're manageable, proceed with caution.
"Sit down," I said to Sorrow. "This is going to take a while. And you might want to be sitting when you hear it."
She sat. I started talking.
By the time I finished, the sun was fully up and Sorrow had a new set of fractures that I didn't need Veraine's gift to see. The kind of fractures that happen when everything you've ever been told about reality turns out to be a lie.
"Those people who died," she said quietly. "Tam. Essen. Everyone from the Seams who didn't make it. Their souls—"
"Harvested. Like everyone else's. The gods take a piece before letting the rest return to the cycle. The piece that remembers. The piece that feels. The piece that matters."
"And they've been doing this for—"
"Eight thousand years. Since the Ascendancy built their Thrones at the rim of the wheel. Since they learned how to intercept the flow and skim from it."
Sorrow was silent for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice was different. Colder. More certain.
"What do you need?"
"Allies. Resources. Ways to spread the information. Networks that don't ask too many questions." I paused. "All the things someone who runs smuggling operations through the Threshold might have access to."
Sorrow laughed. It was an ugly sound, but it was real—more real than anything she'd shown us since she arrived.
"You calculating bastard," she said. "You knew I'd end up helping. You saw the pattern."
"I hoped," I said. "Pattern-sight isn't prophecy. It's just... likelihood. And the most likely version of you, given what I remembered, was someone who'd want to burn down the whole system if she found out it was rigged."
"You remembered me."
"I remembered all of you." The words came out quieter than I intended. "Every name. Every face. Every one I left behind. I didn't forget, Sorrow. I just couldn't go back. By the time I could, there was nothing to go back to."
Something shifted in her expression. Not forgiveness—we were a long way from forgiveness—but maybe the first crack in the wall she'd built against me.
"Fine," she said. "I'll help. But not for you. For Tam and Essen and everyone else the Seams swallowed. For the kids who died without knowing the game was fixed."
"That's good enough," I said.
Veraine stood, brushing straw from her coat. "So. We have a smuggler, a conservator, and a heretic who can't stay dead. Against seven gods and eight thousand years of infrastructure."
"When you put it that way, it sounds impossible," I said.
"Is it?"
I thought about the ledger. The math that didn't balance. The truth that had been hiding in plain sight for millennia, waiting for someone stubborn enough to notice it.
"Probably," I said. "But impossible just means nobody's done it yet. And I've always been bad at accepting things the way they are."
Sorrow snorted. "You haven't changed. Still think you can calculate your way out of anything."
"Not out of," I said. "Through. There's a difference. Out implies escape. Through implies—"
"Victory?"
"Change. Victory's just change with better PR."
We gathered our meager supplies. Sorrow led us toward a door in the back of the stable that hadn't been there when we'd arrived—Threshold architecture, folding space to create exits where none should exist.
Behind us, the world we'd known was burning. The divine hunt, closing in. The gods, finally paying attention to the mortal who'd seen their machinery for what it was.
Ahead of us: everything else.
I stepped through the door.
CHAPTER SIX ALDRIC
I had never doubted. That was the foundation of everything I was.
From the moment I understood language, I understood that the gods were real and good and watching. My mother taught me prayers before she taught me to read. My father's last words, as the wasting sickness took him, were praise to the Sun for a life well-lived. My sisters and brothers had gone to the clergy, every one of them, and I had followed because following felt like flying—like being lifted by something greater than myself toward a purpose I couldn't quite see but absolutely believed in.
I was good at believing. It was my only real talent.
Twenty-six years old. Third-rank inquisitor in the Sun's Illuminated Order. Youngest to achieve that rank in a generation. Not because I was brilliant—I wasn't—but because I was certain. Absolutely, unshakably certain that the Ascendancy was just, that the Eternal Economy functioned as designed, that souls rose and fell and rose again in a cycle of divine benevolence.
The heretics I tracked were confused. Misled. I pitied them, genuinely, even as I brought them in for processing. They'd looked at the divine machinery and seen something wrong, when really they'd just been seeing their own flawed reflections.
That's what I believed.
Then my superiors assigned me to the Morrow case.
The briefing was unusual from the start.
Normally, heretic assignments came through official channels—sealed documents, formal procedure, everything properly sanctified. This one came in the middle of the night, delivered by an angel I didn't recognize, with orders that burned after I read them.
"Cael Morrow," the angel said. Its voice was like wind chimes in a hurricane—beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. "Scholar. Heretic. Anomaly. He has seen things he should not have seen. He has said things that cannot be unsaid. He must be found."
"And brought to justice?"
The angel's pause was almost imperceptible. Almost.
"Brought," it said. "The Ember has taken an interest. She wishes to speak with him. Personally."
I felt the first hairline crack in my certainty. The Ember. A Throne. A god had taken personal interest in a heretic. That wasn't justice—that was something else. Something I didn't have a category for.
"What did he see?" I asked. "What truths has he distorted?"
"That information is above your station."
"With respect, I need to understand the heresy to counter it. If I'm going to track him, talk to his associates, find his hiding places—I need to know what he's saying. What arguments he's making. Otherwise I'm hunting blind."
The angel studied me. I couldn't read divine expressions—no mortal could—but something in its posture suggested assessment. Calculation.
"He claims," it said finally, "that the Thrones harvest souls. That the Eternal Economy is not an economy at all, but a... feeding system. That the gods consume mortal quintessence and have been doing so since the Ascendancy began."
I waited for the punchline. The explanation. The obvious refutation that would make the heresy sound as absurd as it clearly was.
The angel said nothing.
"That's..." I started. Stopped. Started again. "That's easily disproven. The theological mathematics—the flow rates—the testimony of the blessed dead who return with memories of paradise—"
"Find him," the angel said. "Bring him to the Ember. That is your task. The theology is not your concern."
It departed before I could ask more questions. I stood alone in my chambers, the smell of burnt paper still hanging in the air, and felt something I hadn't felt in twenty years of faith.
Doubt.
Not much. A splinter. The kind of thing that could be ignored, pushed aside, buried under enough prayer and certainty.
But it was there. For the first time in my life, there was a crack in the foundation.
And I couldn't help wondering: if the heresy was so obviously false, why hadn't the angel simply told me why?
CHAPTER SEVEN THE EMBER
I remember love.
Not the way mortals remember things—linear, fading, colored by time. I remember love the way a fire remembers wood. I consumed it. It became part of me. And now, eight thousand years later, I can still taste the shape of it, even though the fuel is long since ash.
His name was Torven. He was a poet. He had terrible handwriting and a laugh that made me feel like the sun had decided to rise just for us. We were young—though what that meant then is not what it means now, before the Thrones, before the Ascendancy, before we learned what gods could do and what gods could become.
I killed him.
Not directly. Nothing so clean. I became a god, and in becoming a god, I became unable to love him without consuming him. The first time I touched him after my ascension, I felt his passion flow into me like water into a drain. By the third touch, he couldn't write poetry anymore. By the tenth, he couldn't laugh.
I stopped touching him. Stopped seeing him. Let him live out his mortal span at a distance, watching from my Throne as he aged and diminished and finally died, his soul passing through my station on its way to rebirth.
I kept his portion. His quintessence. The piece of him that remembered loving me. I've held it for eight thousand years.
It doesn't taste like him anymore. It's just... fuel. Memory without meaning. Passion without the person who felt it.
This is what it means to be a god. This is what the mortals don't understand when they pray to us, worship us, beg us for intervention. We are not their parents. We are not their guardians. We are something that used to be human and became hungry instead.
I am the Ember. The Throne of passion. Every love, every hate, every moment of intensity that mortals experience flows through me at death. I taste their first kisses. Their last fights. Their desperate midnights and their triumphant dawns. I am fed by the very thing I can no longer feel.
And now there is a mortal who has seen through our machinery. Who has named what we are. Who has died and come back without passing through my grasp, his soul slipping sideways through the cycle like water through fingers.
Cael Morrow.
I tasted his death. Briefly—a flash of terror and rage and something else, something almost like joy, the delirious laughter of someone who has nothing left to lose. It was bright. Brighter than anything I've tasted in centuries. A soul that burns at full intensity, holding nothing back, feeling everything at the maximum volume existence allows.
And then he was gone. Yanked back into his body by something I couldn't see, his quintessence thread snapping taut and pulling him away from my grasp before I could take my portion.
No one escapes the Thrones. No one has escaped the Thrones in eight thousand years. The cycle is absolute. The harvest is eternal. And yet this man—this broken, brilliant, infuriating man—simply... left.
I need to know how.
More than that—I need to taste him again. Not to consume him, though I could. Not to destroy him, though I should. I need to understand what it feels like to be that alive. That intense. That recklessly, catastrophically passionate about something—about anything—after millennia of feeling nothing but echoes.
The other Thrones want him dead. The Furnace, especially, is furious—she hates anomalies, hates anything that disrupts the precise mathematics of the harvest. The Sun is tired and sad and wishes none of this were happening. The Corona, as always, says nothing.
I told them I would handle it. That I would find him, interrogate him, determine the source of his resistance and eliminate it.
What I didn't tell them: I don't want to eliminate him. I want to understand him. I want to be near something that still burns, even if I can never burn again myself.
Eight thousand years is a long time to be cold.
The Gnaw is spreading.
We don't talk about it. Not among ourselves, not to our servants, certainly not to the mortals. But the wound at the bottom of existence—the place where the cycle breaks down, where souls fall through and never return—grows larger every century.
We made it. When we built our Thrones, when we first pierced the rim of the wheel to begin our harvest, we damaged something fundamental. The wheel was never meant to have stations. The cycle was never meant to be interrupted. We broke the machinery, and the Gnaw is where the breaking shows.
The Sun thinks we should stop. Step back from the Thrones. Let the wheel heal itself. He's been saying this for four thousand years, ever since the Gnaw became impossible to ignore. The rest of us have... found reasons to delay.
We tell ourselves it's for the mortals' sake. That they need us. That without the Thrones, the cycle would destabilize, souls would be lost, existence itself might unravel. And some of that is probably true. Probably. We've been feeding for so long that the system has adapted around us. Removing us might cause more damage than leaving us in place.
Or it might not. We don't actually know. We've never tried.
Because we don't want to. Because we're hungry. Because eight thousand years of feeding has made us need it, the way mortals need air, the way fire needs fuel. We are what we consume. Without the harvest, we would diminish. Fade. Eventually, perhaps, die.
And we are afraid of dying.
Gods. Eight thousand years of worship. Trillions of souls passing through our hands. And we are still, at the core of us, the frightened mortals who looked at death and said no. Who found a way to cheat the cycle instead of submitting to it. Who became monsters because being a monster was better than being nothing.
Cael Morrow has named us. Not just what we do—what we are. Parasites. Thieves. Frightened children who stole the universe's lunch money and have been running from the consequences ever since.
The Furnace wants him silenced because the truth threatens the system. The Sun wants him stopped because the truth might accelerate the Gnaw. I want him found because...
Because he's right. And I haven't met someone who was right in a very, very long time.
Even Torven wasn't right. He was beautiful and passionate and kind, but he believed in the old gods—the ones we replaced, the ones who were just as hungry as us but worse at hiding it. He would have been horrified to know what I became. What I had to become, to survive the transition.
Cael Morrow looked at the system and saw it clearly. He felt the wrongness and named it. And instead of being crushed by the weight of that knowledge, he laughed. I felt that laugh when he died. It was the most alive thing I've experienced in millennia.
I want more of it.
Even if wanting is all I have left.
CHAPTER EIGHT VERAINE
The Threshold was everything the priests warned us about and nothing like I expected.
In the seminary, they taught us that the spaces between Reaches were dangerous. Liminal. Unstable. Places where the rules of existence bent in uncomfortable ways, where travelers could step through a door and emerge somewhere—somewhen—completely other. "Only the lost and the desperate go to the Threshold," our instructors said. "And only the foolish expect to come back unchanged."
What they didn't tell us: the Threshold was beautiful.
Sorrow led us through a door that existed only if you approached it from the right angle, and we emerged into a city of impossible architecture. Buildings that curved up and became sky. Streets that forked into three directions at once. A sunset and a sunrise happening simultaneously on opposite horizons, painting everything in shades of gold and violet.
"Welcome to Hinge," Sorrow said. "Try not to stare. Marks you as a tourist."
Cael was already staring. Not at the architecture—at the patterns. I could see his mind working, cataloging the ways the impossible geometry connected to the underlying flow of quintessence. His eyes had that distant focus that meant he was seeing something the rest of us couldn't.
"V." His voice was hushed. Awed. "The cycle moves differently here. The wheel's rim—it's thin. Almost permeable. That's why the Threshold exists. It's where the boundaries of existence get close enough to touch."
"Is that good or bad?" Sorrow asked.
"Yes," Cael said, which was not an answer. "Both. It means information can slip through more easily—ideas, concepts, things the Thrones try to suppress. But it also means they can reach through more easily. We're not safe here."
"We're not safe anywhere," I said. "At least here we have allies."
I used my gift while we walked. The Threshold was heavily fractured—not from damage, but from design. The whole place existed in a state of controlled instability, like a tower of cards that somehow kept standing. Every building had fault lines. Every street could collapse into somewhere else if enough pressure were applied. It was beautiful and terrifying and I couldn't stop cataloging it.
"You're doing that thing," Cael said quietly.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you see too much and pretend you're fine."
"I'm not pretending. I'm processing." I took his hand. Let his warmth ground me. "The fractures here are... different. They're not damage. They're the opposite—they're what's holding everything together. The Threshold is broken in a way that makes it stable. Like how a controlled burn prevents forest fires."
"That's actually reassuring."
"It is," I agreed. "But it also means I can see the one thing that could break it. One crack that runs through everything—the place where controlled instability becomes uncontrolled. If someone exploited that..."
"Could you?"
I looked at him. "Could I what?"
"Exploit it. If you had to. If we needed the Threshold to... I don't know. Collapse. Seal. Become something else."
The question should have horrified me. I was a conservator—my whole life was about preserving things, not destroying them. But I thought about the fire at the seminary. The friends we'd lost. The twelve years of hell that followed. I thought about the gods feeding on souls, about the Gnaw spreading, about a universe that was slowly eating itself.
"Yes," I said. "If I had to. I could break anything."
Cael smiled. It wasn't a happy smile—it was the expression he wore when a pattern clicked into place, when something he'd suspected became certainty.
"Good," he said. "Because before this is over, we might need to break everything."
Sorrow's base of operations was a building called the Socket—the other half of the bar we'd heard about, the Hinge & Socket. The Hinge was the public face, a smuggler's watering hole that existed in seventeen places simultaneously. The Socket was the private face, a single location that didn't technically exist anywhere at all.
"It's off the grid," Sorrow explained. "Even the Thrones can't see into a place that doesn't have a fixed position in reality. The gods track souls through the wheel's flow, but the Socket sits outside the flow. Null space. The closest thing to truly safe that exists."
Inside, the Socket was surprisingly mundane. Tables and chairs. Maps on the walls. A small bar with bottles I didn't recognize. A handful of people who looked up when we entered and immediately looked away again—Threshold etiquette, apparently, was to notice nothing.
Sorrow led us to a back room. More maps. A corkboard covered in notes and strings connecting different points—the kind of conspiracy wall that made me think of Cael's research space, except this one was focused on smuggling routes rather than divine mathematics.
"So," she said. "You want to bring down the gods. Let's talk logistics."
Cael blinked. "Just like that?"
"You convinced me the system's rigged. I don't believe in fighting rigged systems—I believe in burning them down and building something new from the ashes. If you've got a plan that's anything better than 'hope really hard,' I'm interested in hearing it."
Cael sat down. Started talking. I'd heard most of it before—the ledger, the math, the evidence of systematic harvest—but watching him explain it to someone new helped me see it fresh. The precision of his pattern-sight. The way he built arguments like architecture, each point supporting the next until the conclusion became inevitable.
He was brilliant. I'd always known that. But there was something else now—a fire in him I'd only seen a few times before. When he talked about the Seams. When he talked about the children who died. When he talked about me.
This wasn't just academic for him anymore. It was personal. The gods had tried to kill him—had briefly succeeded—and in that moment of death, he'd seen what they really were. The abstract had become visceral.
"The challenge," he was saying, "isn't proving the truth. The evidence exists. Anyone who looks will find it. The challenge is getting people to look. The Ascendancy has spent eight thousand years building a theological framework that makes looking feel like heresy. You don't question the gods. You don't examine the machinery. You just... trust."
"And you want to break that trust," Sorrow said.
"I want to give people permission to doubt. Doubt is the first crack. Once people start asking questions—real questions, not the approved theological debates that go nowhere—the whole structure starts to wobble."
"And then?"
"Then we find out what happens when gods lose believers."
Sorrow was quiet for a moment. Processing. I watched her with my gift, saw the fractures in her understanding shifting as new information rearranged her worldview.
"You don't actually know, do you," she said finally. "What happens. If you succeed."
"No," Cael admitted. "The gods have been feeding for eight thousand years. The system has grown around them. Removing them might free the cycle—let souls pass through cleanly, without being harvested. Or it might destabilize everything. Crash the wheel. End existence as we know it."
"That's a hell of a risk."
"The alternative is letting them keep eating us. Forever. Generation after generation, getting a piece of every soul, while the Gnaw spreads and the wheel gets wobblier and eventually—probably—everything collapses anyway. At least this way we collapse it on our terms."
Sorrow laughed. It was an ugly sound, but genuine.
"You're insane," she said. "Absolutely, completely insane."
"Probably," Cael agreed. "Does that change your answer?"
"No." She stood. Extended her hand. "Welcome to the resistance, Gremlin. Let's go break some gods."
End of Chapters 1-8