The Kindled came for him the way bells come for morning—quiet and inevitable.
Three children in clean robes and bone-dust masks waited outside his door when he opened it, lanterns cupped like small hearts. Their bare feet didn't make a sound on the bone planks. The oldest—maybe twelve—inclined his head with a kind of solemn grace that would've looked noble if you ignored the knives.
"Guest Noah," he said. "We'll take you to the palace."
"To… why?" Noah asked, blinking as if he'd slept badly. He curled his mouth into an apologetic expression—the polite, useless expression of a man who needed instructions to breathe, who didn't remember and knew what was coming. "Is it an emergency?"
"Audience," the boy replied, unbothered. "Please follow."
Right. Audience now, not tonight. That was new. That was what Linnea said, and what Noah prepared for, well, at least tried to prepare himself for.
Noah slid his hands into his sleeves so they wouldn't shake and fell into step. The hallways funnelled them through honeyed light and the low music of a place rearranging itself for spectacle. He tried to keep count of turns and doors and failed—the children took side passages grown from ribs and cartilage like shortcuts handed down in blood. A few adults paused to watch them go, then lowered their eyes as the Kindled passed, like you did with someone you feared and didn't want to provoke.
"Do I get a hint?" Noah tried again, aiming for airy. "Am I in trouble? Because I'd like to dress for the occasion."
"You look fine," the youngest said without looking back.
"First time anyone's said that to me with a blade," Noah muttered.
The palace loomed up out of the settlement like a tooth no one could ignore—ribs arched, plates fitted and polished, scent-lanterns hung high to make everything gleam. The Kindled slid through the main gate and into cool corridors where the floor didn't pulse and the air didn't smell like old meat. Noah let himself breathe once, slow, and kept moving.
The Saint received him in a smaller chamber than the stagey hall from before—no crowd, just a table laid for tea, two chairs, like it were a normal audience. The veil was in place. The posture was perfect. The feeling of walking into a furnace that hadn't been lit yet was the same as always.
"Noah," the Saint said, warm. "Come sit."
Noah sat. He didn't let his eyes dart to the corners. He didn't glance at the door to measure how fast it could close on him. He folded his hands and did his best impression of a mild headache with good manners.
"Tea?" the Saint offered.
"Please," Noah said, because refusing was theatre he didn't need.
They poured. The Saint watched the steam like it told him something. It might have.
"Tell me," the Saint said lightly, "have you found any new cards, since your arrival here?"
Noah's mind stuttered. The room rearranged itself mid-breath. He kept his face where it was supposed to be and felt the anchor-lines in his head tighten on their own—Abel, Linnea, hold. Cards? We haven't talked about cards. I haven't said 'Deck' in this room. The prickle on the back of his neck turned sharp.
"Cards," he echoed, buying one heartbeat. "Like… playing?"
"Fate," the Saint said, amused. "Your deck."
Noah smiled without showing teeth. "Ah. That. Funny, you bring it up."
"Is it?" The Saint tilted his head. "You bring it up in your sleep."
Noah's skin went cold. He hears me? In sleep? Or he took a memory and left the taste of it in his mouth? He swallowed, slowly. Kept the shape of the idiot guest on his shoulders. "I talk in my sleep a lot," he said. "Mostly about my hot men Abel."
"Abel," the Saint repeated, a little disturbed. "And cards. So—new ones?"
"No," Noah said, steady. "Nothing new since I arrived. It's been… quiet." He let his brow crease, as if thinking about it for the first time. "They usually show up when I'm moving. Traveling. Getting into trouble. Maybe I bored them. Maybe the Deck hates routine as much as I do."
"You've always struck me as a creature of momentum," the Saint said. "Stillness doesn't suit you."
"Stillness suits nobody," Noah said lightly. "Except rocks."
"And gods."
"Windy rocks," Noah said.
The Saint laughed, soft and very pleased with himself. Noah didn't look at the laugh. He looked at his tea, at his hands, at the place where the light from the not-window fell across the table in a neat oval like a target. He knows too much. He's reaching. He could be in my head. He could be in the space around my head where thoughts turn into words. He could be fishing. He could be bored. He could be all three.
He forced a sip down and set the cup back exactly where it had been.
"Usually," Noah said, keeping his voice light, "if you want to hear me complain, you invite me after dark. Why the early call?"
The Saint's veil angled as if he were smiling at a child who'd said something cute. "Because tomorrow will be a celebration."
"Oh, good," Noah said. "I love confetti."
"A showing," the Saint continued as if Noah hadn't spoken. "A festival of light. We will remind the settlement of what keeps them safe. You will stand with me."
"Stand," Noah repeated. "As in… stand."
"As is seen," the Saint said. "You are a rare thing in a world hungry for proof. A new candidate. A new promise. I want them to look at your face and feel grateful."
"Grateful," Noah said, gently. "For… me."
"For the sun," the Saint said, and the temperature in the room seemed to notch up a fraction. "For what it takes. For what it gives."
Noah nodded as if any of that were a reasonable sentence. The tea tasted like ash now; he put it down before his hand betrayed him.
"I'll have a room prepared for you here," the Saint went on, conversational. "It will be better if you stay in the palace tonight. Easier to get you where you need to be, early."
"'Better' and 'easier,'" Noah said with a smile that hurt his face. "Two of my favourite words."
The Saint chuckled. "You'll have everything you need. Robes, water, rest."
"And a lock," Noah mumbled.
"Security," the Saint corrected, and the word didn't even bother trying to be something else. "You'll be comfortable."
"Comfort is a strong word." Noah inclined his head. "But thank you. I'll try not to break anything."
"I prefer when you do," the Saint said softly. "It makes you honest."
There it was again—that thin, cold line under silk. Noah let his breath flow around it. "When should I—"
"Acolytes will show you now," the Saint said. "We'll speak again in the morning, just before we begin."
"Of course," Noah said, and stood when the Saint did, because theatrics had steps and he could dance on command if he had to.
The Kindled came as if they'd been waiting outside the door all along. They led him down a short hall with a high slit of a window and into a room that tried very hard to be kind: a low bed, a basin, a folded robe the colour of honey. The floor didn't pulse here. The air smelled like the inside of a clean cup.
"Thank you," Noah told the children, and meant it despite everything.
They stepped back without smiling. The door closed. The lock turned with a sound that was smaller than it felt.
Noah stood very still until the echo stopped happening in his bones. Then he moved—three steps to the window, two to the door, a hand under the bed to check for whatever people hid under beds in polite palaces. Nothing except a well-swept floor and the knowledge that a lock was a kindness only when you owned the key.
He knows about the cards. The thought crawled up his spine and sat behind his teeth. He could read me. Or he watched me. Or he's smarter than I want him to be and he's guessing well. If he can hear me when I sleep—if he's been listening—then he knows enough to ruin us.
His mind did the math badly and fast. Abel in the halls. Linnea in the square. Blue smoke. White smoke. Kids on the stairs with knives they think are prayers.
He waited for fear to pick a single place in his body to sit. It didn't. It spread out, thin and total. He wanted to be noble and found himself petty instead: the first face in his head wasn't Linnea's—it was Abel's. He felt a flicker of shame that didn't stick. He didn't know Linnea the way he knew the shape of Abel's hand on a sword or the sound Abel made when he laughed once a day, like it cost something.
"I'm not a saint," he said into the empty room, voice soft and honest. "I don't save everyone."
He didn't like how easy it was to say. He liked that it was true.
He sat on the bed because standing up made him feel like a target. The mattress was firm. The sheets were cool. He set his palms on his knees and let his breath try to be a job he could do well.
In. Out. Count to four. Think of nothing. Fail. Try again.
He almost prayed. The habit tugged at him from a world that had churches with bad coffee and sharp women, from a world where you whispered at ceilings just in case. He glanced up and caught the ridiculousness of it—the ceiling here was polished bone.
There were no gods to listen. The old ones were dead. The new ones were candidates who bled and lied and made mistakes in rooms like this.
"So," he said to the air, wry. "Hi, me. Try not to screw it up."
He closed his eyes and reached for the place where his domain lived—whatever "faith" meant when it was yours and not somebody else's. He didn't ask for a miracle. He asked it to remember him. He asked it to hold the shape of Abel's name like a seed between two fingers and not drop it. He asked it to be there if everything else went sideways and the floor gave out.
When he opened his eyes, the room hadn't changed. The door was still closed. The lock was still locked. The bed was still exactly the size of one man trying to pretend he wasn't waiting.
He lay down anyway.
If he slept, he'd need to hold his thoughts tight as fists. If he didn't, he'd arrive at the stage shaking. He tucked his hands under the thin pillow and watched the not-light make a neat shape on the opposite wall.
"Blue smoke," he whispered to no one. "Please let it only be blue smoke."
They woke him like they were unwrapping a gift that didn't belong to them.
A soft knock. The lock turned. Three acolytes—older than the Kindled but still too young for their practised hands—filed in with folded fabric and a basin that steamed. They didn't speak much. One set the basin down and wrung a cloth over his wrists. Another held up a robe the color of warm honey, light catching on thin embroidery that drew sunbursts along the hem. The third straightened his hair with quick, careful fingers as if this would change what his face said.
"Is this… dress-up?" Noah asked, letting sleep cling to his voice. "Do I get a crown or just good behaviour points?"
"Robes," the eldest said, not unkindly. "For the showing."
"Right," Noah murmured. "The showing."
They lifted the robe over his head. The fabric slid like a quiet decision. When they were done, he looked like a miracle anyone could clap for. He tried not to think about how easy he made that job.
The Kindled Choir met him in the corridor—six children with lanterns and bare feet and blades tied neatly at the hip. They folded around him like a moving frame and started toward the main hall. No one grabbed his arm. No one had to.
"Where are we going?" he asked, blinking, playing a man who was never told the schedule. "Do I smile or bow or both? I don't have a pamphlet."
"Palace hall," the smallest said. "Audience with the Saint."
"Of course." He smiled, empty and bright. "My favourite hobby."
The palace had changed its sound. Somewhere, a drum kept a slow, steady beat. Somewhere, incense burned too sweet. Servants moved in clean lines, heads down. Adults stepped aside as the Kindled passed, faces polite, mouths tight. Noah looked where a man would look—the banners, the polished plates, the way light made patterns like water on the floor—and not where he wanted to look: toward the door that led down.
The Saint waited beneath a high aperture where false sun fell in a smooth circle, turning dust to gold. He looked Noah over the way a sculptor looked at a block: considering the angles he'd cut to make an image people would worship.
"You'll make a marvellous spectacle," he said, warm, admiring, like Noah had done him a favour by existing.
Noah arranged his mouth into a grateful. "I do try."
They stood close enough that Noah could smell the faint iron under the Saint's clean scent. The veil hid everything and nothing.
"You took my comment about stillness too hard," the Saint went on, tone almost indulgent. "If it hinders you, I'll remedy that. I intend to give you freedom. Incentive. Enough… movement to help your divinity along, as you want it."
The smile didn't move on Noah's face. Inside, the floor dropped out. Freedom? Incentive? A generous god promising a leash long enough to hang yourself with. He knows I need motion. He knows I'm waiting for it. How?
Before Noah could fumble for something safely stupid to say, the Saint's attention flicked toward the doors. "We'll begin."
They parted, each taking their appointed place in the little play.
The great doors opened onto the square and the sound came in—not loud, just concentrated. People stood packed in clean lines. Banners moved like slow flames. Linnea stood at the front of the temple steps, white-robed, hands lifted, her voice carrying with the clarity of someone who'd learned to thread a knife through a crowd without drawing blood.
Golden smoke climbed from brass censers on the gate—thin ribbons that unfurled and held, a signal and a promise. The Choir lined the path, neat and bright. Noah walked between them toward the raised dais where the Saint would speak and where—if you believed the lie that held this place together—light lived.
He mounted the dais and took the square of space that belonged to him. He didn't look at the palace. He didn't look at the ribbed arches framing the square like a cage you could mistake for a blessing. He fixed on the smoke, the color of coin. Blue, he thought. Please.
Linnea's prayer spiralled out, elegant and empty, every phrase the right shape. She moved like a dancer even in stillness. When she gestured, the acolytes at the temple mouth tipped a new measure into the censers.
A thin vein of blue curled into the gold.
Noah's heart bit his ribs. Go, Abel. Go.
Time stopped trying to be time and turned into water. He stood and stood while Linnea spoke, and the Saint smiled, and the Choir held their line. Seconds stretched into something you could drown in. The blue deepened, not much, just enough that he knew Linnea was buying him minutes and that minutes were more expensive than anyone could afford.
How will I know? his mind whispered, slipping around the anchor's hum. If the core breaks, will the light flicker? Will the ground breathe differently? Will anything happen? Or is this just a story I told myself because stories like mine always give you a sign? What if it just… stops him from taking more and nothing comes back? What if no one feels it?
He looked at the faces—adults ready to clap on cue, kids standing straight as new swords—and felt the cold of it: years of habit, years of being fed on fear and small favours. Even if it breaks, do they move? The children won't. The children can't. They'll hold the line and call it holy.
Something shifted in the crowd. Heads turned, a ripple travelling faster than sound. Noah followed it like a man chasing a threat he can't admit might be hope.
Cassian.
They were bringing him down the side path toward the dais. He walked on his own feet, chin up, mouth set in that boyish nonchalance that made people think he didn't bruise. But the Kindled flanked him in close formation, their blades out, points down, a quiet warning. On Cassian's face—no comprehension of what the formation was. On Linnea's—shock, tight and quickly smoothed under the mask of a priestess.
Not planned, Noah thought, gut twisting. Not ours.
Linnea stumbled on a word and made it a lyric anyway. Noah's mouth went dry.
Then the Saint lifted a hand.
"Thank you, Priestess," he said, voice carrying without effort. "Your words warm us. But words must give way to work."
He stepped forward and spread his arms with the grace of a man born to stages. "All of you—my children—look." The veil tipped toward Noah. "You know him. A new candidate among us, a rare star fallen into our Womb. He is like me. He carries a power that can be sharpened. And you know me—your father in light." A small swell from the crowd at the reinforced myth. "I have never kept my love from you. I have never hidden the cost. We ascend through endurance. We become through pain. Progress," he said gently, "is bought. Always."
Noah's spine went ice. He didn't look at the Saint. He looked at Cassian.
The Kindled guided Cassian up the steps. He wasn't bound, and yet he was. He shot Noah a quick flicker of a look—friendly, puzzled, a private joke with no place to land. Noah wanted to grab him by the collar and shake some sense into him with both hands. He didn't move.
Another shift, larger, heavier. The crowd made space because the crowd knew when to make space.
Abel.
They dragged him between two adults and four Kindled, not careful at all. Blood had dried down one thigh in a brown-black stripe. A tear split his sleeve where a blade had tried and failed to make a longer story. He was breathing hard but not broken. When his eyes found Noah's, they were steady. He gave the smallest nod.
There was no sound in Noah's head for a second. Just the anchor's line tugging like a wire under skin.
He got there.
Noah's throat tried to close. He got there and they got him.
No one in the square gasped when Abel appeared. No one cried out at the blood on his leg. Heads angled with polite interest, the way you did when the Saint added a gallows to a sermon. If the core had broken, the world didn't show it. The sun didn't blink. The ground kept its patient pulse. Noah tasted the metal edge of panic. What if breaking the box doesn't spill anything? What if all we did was turn off the tap and leave the river where it lay?
They forced Abel to his knees at the front of the dais. A Kindled girl put a hand on his shoulder and pressed without looking at his face. Cassian reached the top step and went down on one knee because the formation told him to, not because someone pushed. The edge of a confused smile sat at his mouth like a bad idea he hadn't had time to change.
Noah stood behind them, white and gold and very still, and felt the shape of his fear change from knife to flood.
Move, his body begged. Do something.
The Saint's voice smoothed back over the square. "You've always known I give gifts you do not understand," he said, tender. "Today I will give one to our guest. Today, he will be offered the chance to become."
Linnea opened her mouth to speak—to stall, to bless, to drown this in words— and two Kindled stepped to her sides and took her by the elbows, gentle and implacable. They turned her just a fraction. She let them. Noah saw the shock flash and vanish again, a wave breaking under the surface.
The smoke at the gates deepened. Golden ropes curled on themselves like patient handwriting. And then—finally—blue thickened from vein to ribbon. From ribbon to band. It slid into every gold flare like shade into light.
Noah's breath caught. Go, go, go.
The Saint didn't glance at it. He laid a hand on Abel's bowed head like a blessing, then lifted it to hover above Cassian's shoulder. "How do we help a man ascend?" he asked the crowd, voice soft as a secret you want everyone to hear. "How do we help him learn?"
"Through the fire," someone called, right on cue.
"Through the knife," another answered.
"Through the gift," the Saint finished, and his veil tipped toward the square as if to thank them for reading their lines.
Noah stared past him, past everyone, to the far gate. Up from the grates there, from the temple vents, from the hidden jars on the palace lintels, a pale white began to bleed through the blue. Not much. A thread at first. Then two. Then more.
Linnea's hands flexed once against the Kindled grip. She didn't look at Noah. She looked at the smoke and let one corner of her mouth turn down: That's all I have.
White climbed the air like a surrender flag.
"And my children," the Saint said gently, and Noah hated the way the words could almost sound like love, "how do we make pain into a gift?"
The crowd answered him like a prayer, like a habit. "We give it."
The Kindled stepped forward as one and filled Noah's view. He saw bone-dust lines neat on their cheeks, the tidy polish on blade spines, the way their shoulders were square in the way of students who'd learned to be doors.
They faced the square, not him. They stood between him and the Saint like a wall. Steel hissed soft as breath as blades slid free.
Noah's hands were empty. His mind was not.
White, he thought, and lifted his chin like a man who'd chosen the robe he wore. Alright. We do this now.
The first blade-point dipped toward Abel's throat. The second angled toward Cassian's shoulder. The Saint's palm rose, patient, about to drop.
Noah took a breath that tasted like ash and sugar and old fear and readied the thing in him that had learned to answer when asked.
The square waited—bright, clean, expectant.
And the children's knives came up.
The knives lifted.
Noah's breath went thin and sharp. The world pinched to a single bright point: steel glinting by Abel's throat, another edging toward Cassian's shoulder, the Saint's palm hovering—so gentle, so patient—about to drop.
Move, his body screamed. Do anything.
He didn't. Not yet. He looked at the square—at rows of adults who would clap on cue, at children taught to be doors—and understood the thing he'd been refusing to say.
I can't save you all. Not today. Maybe not ever. The priestess's hope of a perfect hero? Not him. He had come to break a machine, not to turn its gears with a prettier smile. The core was dead and nothing in their faces had changed. They would not run because a stranger told them to. They would not run because a stranger begged.
The lie had been too big. It wore a veil. It had a name.
Noah lifted his chin and let the fear harden into something with teeth.
"Look at me," he said, and his voice carried cleanly over prayer-breath and lantern hiss. A few heads turned. Not enough. "Look at me."
The Kindled didn't move—they faced the crowd, not him—but some adults glanced up, curious as birds.
Noah didn't wait to be granted permission. He cut across the Saint's script with a stranger's rudeness and a prophet's calm.
"He is not a god," Noah said.
Silence rolled like a dropped bowl.
"He eats you and calls it light," Noah went on, sharp and flat. "He calls knives blessings. He calls your children saints so you won't hear the word weapon. He is a man with a trick and a taste for blood. And you—" his voice broke, then steadied on acid— "you've let him be your cage because the cage is warm."
The Saint didn't speak. The veil didn't move. But the air around him tightened as if pulled on a string.
Noah's pulse hammered. Something in his chest shook itself awake and looked at the square with old, unkind honesty. He felt the words before he heard them leave his mouth.
"Fools," he said, soft and vicious. "Cowards. You'd rather kneel to a liar than stand and be afraid. You want safety more than truth? Fine. Then choke on it."
It wasn't just bitterness. It wasn't just rage. The sentence hit the air and stuck—like breath on glass, like tar on feathers. His domain heard him.
The air in front of Noah trembled, as if the square itself had flinched. A card slid out of nothing and hung there, huge—big as a banner, black-bordered, edges eating the light. For one terrified, undeniable heartbeat, everyone saw it.
XVI — THE TOWER.
Lightning split a crowned tower. Bodies fell. The crown tumbled. The image flickered, not the way paper flickers but the way a nerve misfires.
Someone whispered, "Omen," like a superstition breaking its own teeth.
The card burned. It didn't catch; it decided. Fire unscrolled across it from the top down, silent, absolute. Ash drifted in slow spirals.
And then the world broke.
Sound ripped itself in half. The shock hit like a thrown wall—a white force that punched the chest first, then the ears, then everything. Bone-lattices groaned and snapped. Ribs that had framed the square for generations sheared through with a noise like the end of one kind of music. Scent-lanterns burst in bright, frightened flares. Banners turned to strips of fire and fell like red rain.
The impact flung Noah backward. The dais bucked; ribs underfoot flexed and held like the back of some great animal deciding not to roll over. He hit hard, rolled, came up on one elbow with his mouth full of grit and heat. His ears rang high and mean.
Half the square was gone.
Not scorched. Gone. A sweep carved through the settlement like a god had dragged a sleeve across a table—stalls erased, homes torn open. People who had stood a heartbeat ago were ash and shadow on the ground. A child's blade clanged and spun into the dust, owner nowhere to be seen. The false sun stuttered—one dim flicker, two—and then burned on, steady and obscene.
Noah didn't move.
Sound had turned into pressure, a screaming inside his skull that ate its own tail. Heat crawled across his skin in waves, each one leaving him a little emptier. He kept his face down, forehead pressed to scorched bone, because he knew—knew—that if he looked up he'd see exactly what he'd done.
The world stank of resin and cooked meat. His palms burned. Breathing hurt.
A hand closed on his shoulder and shook, not hard—just enough to make his vision jump. Abel's hand. Abel's voice—faraway and shredded by the ringing—dragged itself across the distance.
"Noah. Look at me."
He didn't, not at first. His throat tried to shape an apology and failed. The square was a smear in his peripheral vision: a gouge torn through homes and bodies; banners burning; the dais listing like a ship that had decided very suddenly it didn't like the sea. The Kindled who had stood in front of him—small, perfect, terrifying—were simply gone. Ash where faces had been.
I did that, something in him said. Another part—the part that survived things by laughing—was mercifully absent.
Abel got him onto an elbow. Dust streaked Abel's hair. Blood had opened again down his thigh; it ran fresh now, bright and unforgiving. Horror sat on Abel's face in a shape Noah had never seen there, and it wasn't aimed at him so much as through him—at what he had become, at what the world had made him choose.
"I—" Noah started, and his voice was a broken thing. "I had to—"
Abel's fingers clamped around his wrist, steady. Alive, the grip said. Stay here.
Cassian didn't come. He stood where the blast had thrown him, shoulders locked, eyes tearing themselves over the wreckage with the helpless focus of someone counting names he could never finish. A line of blood cut his cheekbone; he didn't wipe it. The boyish mouth that always found a grin was flat now, a blade with the sheath lost.
Across the dais, the Saint stirred.
He pushed up with a terrible composure, veil torn and char streaking the linen. For a beat, the ruined face beneath flashed—melted flesh, a too-bright eye, white teeth in raw pink. He covered it again carefully, as if tucking away a secret, and turned—slow, furious—toward Noah.
"What have you done," he said, voice hoarse, not asking. Accusing. "You butcher. You call this truth?" He gestured, and the gesture took in everything—ash where people had been, a city with a bite taken out of it. "Look. Look at them. Innocents. Children. You brought ruin into my house."
Noah flinched. He didn't look.
Abel stood.
He moved like a man whose body had been built by knives and kept by promises. He put himself between Noah and the Saint and took one step. Then another. His blade came up.
The Saint didn't bother with fire. He didn't need divinity for this. He stepped in, quick as a snake, and drove his fist just under Abel's ribs—once, brutal, the kind of punch that took breath and stance both. Abel folded a fraction, guard opening, and the Saint's other hand snapped the short sword from his belt and slid it into Abel's stomach with practiced, intimate efficiency.
The sound Noah made wasn't a word.
Abel didn't fall at first. He looked down at the hilt blooming from him as if surprised by the color of his own blood, then looked up at Noah and apologized with his eyes for making him see it.
The world came back all at once.
Noah was already moving, mind gone to white noise that knew only take him from me. The Deck flared in his chest like a match catching oil. Fate Lines snapped into his palms—two bright, brutal cords—and he hurled them without thought, without craft, without mercy.
They hit the Saint's head like a verdict.
Not a wrap. Not a bind. A crossing blow—one line from left to right, the other from right to left—at a speed that turned touch into force and force into ruin. There was a crack that Noah felt in his teeth more than heard. The Saint's veil snapped back like a flag in a storm. The head that had smiled for centuries went slack and wrong, and the body followed, folding bonelessly to the scorched dais.
Silence opened in the square where awe should have been.
Noah stood panting, hands shaking, the Lines retracting in threads of light that burned out against his skin. For a beat, confusion cut through the rage: That's it? He had expected to die for this. He had expected a god. But the core was gone. The sacrifices were ash. The trick had run out of fuel—and he had been just a man in a borrowed crown.
Noah dropped to his knees beside Abel.
"Help!" His voice cracked raw. "Somebody—help!" He pressed both hands around the wound as if he could hold the blood in by will alone. "Abel, hey, stay with me, look at me—"
Abel's breath sawed. He said Noah's name and something like stubborn in a voice that was trying to be a joke and failing. The world tunneled; Noah's hands slipped; panic made his chest a cage too tight for lungs.
Cassian arrived without a word.
He crouched on the other side of Abel and slid his shoulder under Abel's, taking weight with the automatic grace of a man who had dragged a brother from a battlefield before. His face was emptied-out, every usual light banked to ash.
"Up," Cassian said, low and steady. Not to Noah. To Abel. "We're moving."
He hauled. Abel grunted and went with him because he always did the thing that hurt if it was necessary. Noah scrabbled, got under the other arm, heart beating like it wanted to split his ribs open and climb out.
They half-carried, half-dragged him off the dais, away from the Saint's soft, wrong heap, away from the edge where people had become shadow-stains. A handful of homes at the far side of the square still stood, singed but standing; they made for the closest.
Noah looked back once—just once—and saw Linnea crumpled near the temple steps, one arm bent wrong, mouth open in a sound he couldn't hear. Shame hit like a second blade. He took another step anyway, because Abel was bleeding and the world had narrowed down to the size of the man between them.
They reached a doorway that hadn't fallen and shouldered through. Inside: a table knocked askew, a cracked basin, a smell of dust and old oil. They eased Abel down against the wall. Noah's hands wouldn't stop shaking. Cassian ripped a hanging into strips with his teeth when his fingers wouldn't move fast enough.
"Press here," Cassian said, and Noah did, and the cloth darkened instantly.
No one spoke. Outside, the square made small noises of disaster: a sob with no air, a pot rolling, the cough of something catching fire late.
Noah braced his forehead against Abel's and tried to breathe for both of them.
I did this. I did this.
The Garden of Monsters — End of Act One
We dream of wolves and wraiths at night,
of fangs that tear, of wings in flight.
Yet none so cruel as man's own hand—
no beast can match what men have planned.
The child fears shadows, claw and flame;
but greater still is wrath with name.
A whispered lie, a kindled hate—
these birth the monsters we create.