The citadel rose like a ribcage from the sundered hill, each arch a vertebra, each window a socket that wept cold light. Choirs of unvoices drifted through its nave, not singing but remembering the shape of song. The Guardian entered first, and the air learned fear.
Inside, the cathedral inverted every law of sanctity Lyra had ever studied. Altars faced inward toward a hollow that was somehow deeper than the foundation. Pews were arranged for congregants who had no bodies. In the apse, a throne of stitched banners waited—emblems of kingdoms long devoured. Gareth tightened his grip. Seraphine's blade glowed.
"This is not a place," she whispered. "It's a verdict."
A figure materialized behind the throne, neither man nor woman, robed in parchment that fluttered with faint script. Every strip bore a signature, a promise, a plea. Contracts. Vows. Bargains. It lifted a scribe's quill.
"Welcome, Oathbearer," it said to the Guardian. "Welcome, Promisebreaker," it said to Lyra. "Welcome, Last Knight," to Gareth. "Welcome, Heretic-Saint," to Seraphine. "All debts are due."
"Name yourself," the Guardian commanded.
"We are the Curia of Ashes," it replied. "We keep the accounts of grief. You have spent beyond your means." The quill turned. "Payment: memory." It gestured to Lyra. "Begin with the brightest."
Lyra felt pressure behind her eyes, a hand reaching for her first spell, her mother's face, the laugh she had shared with Seraphine in a summer rain. She staggered. Gareth moved to block, but the Curia wrote his resistance into irrelevance; the ink unmade intent.
"Stop," Seraphine said, stepping into the hollow. "Take mine. I have spent faith like coin. I have preached judgment like truth. I will pay for it."
The Curia paused. "A deposit is acceptable."
Lyra screamed, "No—" But the Guardian lifted his hand, and the cathedral listened.
"Balance sheets are for those who believe in balance," he said, voice ringing like a bell that cracked the quill's nib. "I do not settle debts. I end them."
The parchment-robes writhed. "Then you will be unmade."
"Perhaps," said the Guardian. "But first, I will make a world where no child is born owing their future to a ledger written by ghosts."
He stepped into the hollow and tore it open.
Light and dark folded like paper. The cathedral screamed, not with pain but with surprise, as if no one had ever refused its terms. Seraphine caught Lyra as gravity lost interest. Gareth anchored them with a knight's stubbornness and a prayer to a dead king.
When the world remembered itself, the throne was empty, the contracts burned to ash, and the Curia had become what all unpayable debts become—dust on a wind no one would remember.
In the silence after, Lyra took Seraphine's hand. "Mercy is costly," she said. "So is love." Seraphine squeezed back once, fierce and brief, a promise without words.
The Guardian faced the shattered apse. Beyond it, the Shadowlands shifted like a beast disturbed. "We have their attention now," he said. "They will come to collect in person."