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M y limbs felt numb as I stumbled back to my room, Dante’s voice echoing in my mind. I curled into the sheets, blood seeping through the bandages. I probably needed a nurse. I was too weak and tired to care.

I dreamt of falling. Not the kind with wind in your ears or weightlessness in your gut. This was worse, tendrils looped around my wrists and throat, dragging me down.

I woke freezing. The dormitory was thick with silence, the rain tapping against the windowpanes like restless fingers.

The first rays of cherry-red light were beginning to seep through the bottom of the curtains, warping through the stained glass and casting patterns on the floor.

My sheets were damp with sweat, my body trembling, but I barely noticed.

Because in the quiet, in the stillness, something had changed. My fingers brushed against my collarbone. The Lumen.

I bolted upright, hands flying to my throat, as if expecting the chain to dissolve like smoke between my fingers. But it was there, solid and impossibly real. The pendant gleamed in the pale slant of morning light, the chain unbroken as if it had never left me at all.

For a second, I was sure I was hallucinating, that the fever breaking across my forehead had twisted reality. I squeezed my eyes shut and reopened them. Still there. It was definitely still there. I pressed the cool of the pendant into my palm, hard.

I clutched it, head spinning. Dante? No. He wasn’t finished with me. He’d have made me beg first, dragged it out like every cruel game he played. But who?

I turned toward the door, my gaze trailing to the sliver of shadow pooling beneath the frame. Someone had been here. Someone had slipped into my room unseen, to leave it for me. The thought curled in my chest. I had prayed to her only the night before asking for help. Her. My mother.

If Hugo could return in death, lingering like an echo, then why not her? The thought sent a shiver curling down my spine.

I tightened my grip around the Lumen, feeling the metal warm beneath my fingers, grounding me. I was safe. My wounds already felt less sore. Impossible things happened at Evermore every day. This wasn’t so implausible.

I had the Lumen. Now I had to focus on the cards. I fumbled beneath the corner of the mattress, pulling free the weathered, crumpled card I had been trying to forget.

The Fool. I ran my thumb over the blinking eyes, the delicate etchings in the ink.

It was the first hope I’d allowed myself to feel in days.

If the Lumen had been returned to me. If someone—my mother, fate, the saints themselves —had decided I deserved to have it back, then maybe I was worth saving. Maybe I could fix this.

I wanted to fix it for Hugo. For Ruby. For my mother. For the girl I used to be, the one who thought she could survive this place .

For the first time since I’d arrived at Evermore, I felt compelled to pray.

My footsteps echoed off the stone floor as I approached the chapel pulpit, clenching and unclenching my fists.

I pictured my mother kneeling where I now did, hands upturned, reaching for answers that never came.

A tremor passed through me. She’d been just as alone as I was now, her prayers swallowed by the same silence.

I reached into my pocket. The Fool pulsed against my fingertips, warm as a heartbeat. I exhaled, pressing my palm flat to the marble floor in offering.

The Crucible flickered overhead, light spilling across the stone floor and refracting against the windows that bore the painted faces of long forgotten saints. Their eyes were hollow, their expressions stark.

The stillness felt heavy. Expectant. I swallowed, closing my fingers tighter around the card, hands clasped in prayer.

“Please help me. Show me the truth of all of this.”

The words barely left my lips before something shifted. A brush of movement, a disturbance like a ripple through still water. Then, it stilled, the silence closing in.

The words slipped from my lips again, stronger this time. “Show me the truth.”

The torchlight guttered, and a pulse of heat tore through my veins. I gasped, jerking back. The surface of the card gleamed, the golden ink lifting, peeling from the parchment in delicate veins of light.

A sound echoed through the chapel, low and resonant, a crack that vibrated through my bones. A jagged seam split the air above the pulpit, golden light bleeding through reality .

He entered through it. Not a man, nor a god, but something in-between. His form pulsed, his edges blurring as if his presence was too divine for this world to contain it, or straining against something.

His face flickered, so nearly human. But with every blink, the features warped, never the same. Never staying still. Then, he spoke. “ You should not exist.”

The words were not an accusation, but I could tell by the way he spoke them that they were a fact. I had heard them before. I had also felt them in the way Evermore refused to let me go, in the way the Thread twisted through my bones. In that same way, I knew exactly who this apparition was.

“Who are you?” I stammered. “Are you an Archangel?”

He nodded. Yes. “You must listen.” The voice did not come from his lips, it was omnipresent. “We do not have much time.”

A pulse of energy coiled through the space between us. The Fool trembled in my hands, the golden ink peeling from its surface, curling like something alive.

“You have to help us. I am not free. We are not free.”

“How? Who did this to you?” I tried to put the pieces together, to process all that was happening in front of me. An Archangel had come from the cards. This was what Dante was trying to contain, what he was trying to steal.

They were trapped. The Archangels were trapped inside the Arcana. I looked down at The Fool , the gold shifting, the painted jester on its surface staring back at me like it knew, like it had always known.

“The darkness.” I already knew the answer. Dante had done this. “ We are fighting from within. This is the only reason I am able to speak with you now. Soon, the binding will grow too strong to fracture again.”

“Tell me what to do. Tell me how to break the binding.” The chapel lurched, dust sifting like ash from the rafters .

“ We were bound with arcane magic, blood magic that was long since banished. Learn what magic forged this prison. Only then will you know how to break it.”

“I will. I’ll free you. But first—my mother.

” My throat closed around the words. “Is she in the After? Evangeline Davenant?” I thought of my father too, but mortals didn’t seem to pass into the afterlives in the same way.

The moment the words left my lips, the chapel shuddered as if recoiling from the very idea.

“ No.” His many faces spun before settling on another. “And it would be unwise to search for her.”

“What?” My blood ran cold. “She attended Evermore. She was a Luminari. Where is she? Why?”

“Do not seek Evangeline Davenant. That path leads to ruin. Your soul is forged from deepest darkness, but you must choose the light.”

“Why?” I pressed. A cold weight curled in my chest. I didn’t understand.

The chapel groaned like something alive, the blood in my veins turning to ice. The Fool Card burned, its image peeling off in strands. Words came in whispers, in many voices — then just one.

“I cannot fight the binding any longer, I cannot stay. Marry this card with the Arcana deck and free us all.”

Another crack resounded and the walls trembled, the torchlight dimming. The Archangel’s form fragmented, dissolving like embers in the wind.

“The After is crumbling.”

The words rang like the tolling of a funeral bell.

“And if you do not find the deck ? —”

A violent wind ripped through the chapel, like a scream of warning. The Fool flared, one last frantic pulse. Then the world flashed white, and the Archangel was gone. The Arcana wasn’t just magic. It was a cage, a prison holding the Archangels inside .

The card lay silent in my hands, its glow completely extinguished. My mind screamed, trying to understand, clinging to what I’d just been told. But the information fit like pieces of disparate puzzles, none of the edges lining up.

There was a bang as the chapel doors flew open. Godwin puffed out his chest. “Quickly now. The guards are already on their way. Whatever you just did alerted the Archdaemons.”

The words looped again in my mind. The After is crumbling. The After. I’d never even seen it, but the thought of it falling to ruins cleaved through me. That would mean Elsewhere was the only afterlife Luminari could strive for.

I could feel it unraveling under my skin, like threads pulled loose from the tapestry of the world. This wasn’t just about cards, or graduation, or survival. This was far bigger. This would affect everyone, even those beyond Evermore.

I sprinted out of the chapel, pausing on the steps as I braced my hands on my knees, desperate to catch my breath. “The Archangels…” The words cracked through me. I felt them in my bones, in my blood, in the hollow place between my shoulder blades that ached with every movement.

“Not here.” Godwin guided me forward. Every step felt like my shoes were made of lead. “If they find you, it’s all over.”

I couldn’t breathe. The Fool was still warm in my hand, though its light was gone.

I thought I’d wanted the truth, but not like this.

Truths at Evermore seemed only to invite more questions and unearth more doubt.

My chest heaved. My prayer had been answered, but I didn’t feel relief. Without the Archangels, we were doomed.