A flickering silhouette lingered just beyond reach—neither shadow nor form. Few would have noticed it in the temple's corridor, where the candles guttered and the scent of myrrh hung heavy. But it watched. Observed. Calculated.
The Watcher had seen enough. He turned silently from the fading echoes of Cassian's conversation with the Emperor. Each move was noted, not simply for the Ember Doctrine but for a far older truth—one he was bound to.
His message was already on its way.
Elsewhere, in the twilight hush of a neglected hall, Luceris Thorne stood alone. The dream had shaken him again. No, not dream—vision. Each time it struck, he woke to silence and a strange pressure behind his eyes. A warning, though he didn't yet understand its source.
He touched the sigil hidden beneath his sleeve. It pulsed faintly. The spiritual bloodline of his mother—the inheritance no one in the palace honored—whispered to him in tongues not spoken aloud.
The shadows shifted. He would not remain silent much longer.
Cassian returned to his quarters with a weary body and sharper mind. The heat had passed, leaving a faint ache where Hadrian's scent lingered on his wrist and neck. Marked—not permanently, not truly—but just enough to calm the fever.
He should have been comforted. Instead, he stood by the window, the velvet curtains drawn back, the Empire sprawling beneath a rose-gold sky. The mark was not distressing. It was grounding.
Yet something inside him refused to settle. Not just the Watcher's presence earlier. Not just the Emperor's smile. It was everything: the calm, the pause in the current, the hush before the storm.
"I should rest," he whispered, but he didn't.
In another wing of the palace, Hadrian watched the city lights flicker like dying stars. He hadn't meant to leave Cassian alone long—but he had felt something. Something wrong. A hum beneath his ribs. The Veil stirred.
He closed his eyes.
"Rhaziel," he murmured.
The name brushed against memory, like wind against pages sealed shut.
He did not yet know who or what the Watcher truly was. But he would soon.
And he feared the cost.
Far from the palace, within the sanctum of the Ember Doctrine, Lord Thesan stood at the altar, reading the message written in cipher. The Watcher had succeeded. Cassian had returned. So had the mark on his neck.
And with him, the beginning of the end.