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There’d be no way forward until I filled that hole. So that’s what I’d been doing these past months since the battle. That’s how I found myself swinging open the door to my father’s office as I had most nights.

Only one person understood why.

“You disappeared early.” Barrett turned from the shelves, balancing journals in each hand, weighing which to start with. “Thought you’d beat me here.”

“Had somewhere to stop first,” I grunted. I strode to the desk and dumped a generous pinch of herbs in a glass of water for later, then poured a measure of whiskey to have on hand in case the shadows rose too high or the flickering light of the fire reflected off a piece of metal or glass at the right angle. Like moonlight on an ax.

I poured one for Barrett, too.

Lucidius’s office was a long gallery space with shelves stretching to the ceiling, artifacts and books weighing down the wood. When mystlight fell through the open door and my footsteps echoed on the marble, I was struck again by how vast the research was. How much more we had to sort through.

We’d cleared three shelves near the desk, beside the door to the balcony covering the back wall. The top for priority research, the middle for current, and the bottom for what came next. The rest...towering above us, it overwhelmed me.

But while I may be battling my demons internally, in this fight I wasn’t alone for once.

“Right where we left off, then?” Barrett extended one notebook to me. I handed him a whiskey glass in exchange, and we fell to our usual seats to begin reading.

The disarray had been cleared, books reorganized into a method that only made sense to us as we picked apart Lucidius’s secrets. Journals of untidy, half-mad scrawl and drawers packed with jumbled theories.

The pieces of his life I studied were stones across the chasm within me. Answers building a bridge of understanding and acceptance, forgiveness of my sins the dirt packing below it.

I didn’t know if it was healthy. Cypherion had seemed skeptical when he found me pouring over notes about Angels and curses and prisons, Alabaths and Mystiques and mountains. But there were so many answers to find and if I’d learned one thing from this work, it was that knowing satisfied something within me.

I wasn’t doing this to justify Lucidius’s actions. It was for closure and to help in any way I could. Fighting was a challenge—I hadn’t completed the Undertaking—and one ill-timed attack would send me spiraling back to my cell. Meetings were easier but still dragged up harsh memories of Lucidius standing in the Revered’s spot, secrets beneath his smile. Maybe if I could figure out what those secrets were, I could move forward.

The night was quiet, a breeze drifting in through the balcony door, and for a while we worked. Two scorned sons, pawns in a game we never asked for, finding a bit of solidarity between us.

“Are you ready for the journey to camp?” Barrett asked.

“Are you?” I redirected, because, no—I wasn’t. Though there were reasons I was interested in traveling to the battlefront in a few days, there were a thousand reasons not to be.

“Yes,” Barrett said, though his eyes dipped. “If the Engrossians are fighting—if they’re dying—I deserve to be there.” Remorse twisted his words, rattled my heart.

I cleared my throat. “We should get back to work. Who knows how much spare time we’ll have once we’re there.”

Barrett nodded. A twinge of guilt flooded my system at shutting him down, but I shoved it aside. I wasn’t ready to talk about any of it.

Though Barrett would be fighting against his people, they weren’t truly his people. They fell to a dark magic his mother forced upon her troops, and the grief he suffered over that was palpable.

But if he was there, I should follow his example. Set aside my personal reluctance and do what was needed of me.

I didn’t tell him that, though. The bastard didn’t need me to inflate his ego.

Besides, this had become our routine, barely speaking unless necessary, the father we shared forging a twisted fucking union with the man I once—sometimes still—thought the symbol of everything I wasn’t. He was wanted while I was a burden, an accident?—

No. I reminded myself, crinkling the edge of the paper in my hand. Barrett had been used, too. Kakias tried to dictate his life and manipulate his people as she had mine.

Pushing aside that mess of thoughts, I forced myself to focus on the words before me. My father’s personal diary from forty years prior. The handwriting was nearly-illegible, but it was becoming easier to decipher. The way his letters gathered when he was writing quickly, but the bottoms of his j’s and g’s and y’s always looped big and exaggerated, crossing through half the word below.

This was the journal I’d been picking through for the past week. My skin prickled as I read an entry from the middle of summer, the tattoo on my chest weirdly warming when I saw?—

“He was trying to call on the Angel,” I gasped, slapping the journal down in front of Barrett. Papers lifted across the desk with the force. “Lucidius—he was contacting Damien.”

“That’s unheard of…” Barrett leaned forward, extending a hand to trace the words I’d just read, his sigil ring catching the light, the Engrossian Angel emblem glinting. When he saw the words in Lucidius’s own hand, Barrett’s eyes widened.

Tonight, I’ll call him from the highest mountain, the site I read about. Elthem flower of the cypher trees burned in lava of the volcano. The confrontation will be enthralling.

There was a manic overtone to his glee, but the entry faded into a tangential monologue of Lucidius’s greatest thrills, the script wavering as he rattled on. But that second sentence, those two ingredients, it was certain. The flower pulled from branches of the trees that were magical conduits across Gallantia incinerated in fire from our most reverent site. Every clan had a rumored ritual to summon their Angel, but they were considered sacrilegious.