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She closed her eyes, dropping down into what she’d heard Gabe call channeling-space before opening them again.

This wasn’t a necessity every time she used her magic— Lereal’s magic , she reminded herself, not yours —and the one time she’d done something like this, stopping that statue from flattening her in the storage room, it had been instinct, not something she did on purpose.

But for clearing the whole tunnel, she probably needed a bit more concentration.

The black-and-white world separated itself slowly, the weave of it widening as she focused. Tendrils of iridescence curled through the empty spaces around the rocks, even those that appeared to have no gaps between them. “I’m still not entirely sure what I’m supposed to do here.”

“Have you ever seen a cannon fire without a ball?” Lilia asked. “At close range, it can still do quite a bit of damage, just from the force of the air.”

Trying to mimic a cannon deep in the catacombs, whether loaded with a missile or not, didn’t seem like a great idea. But Alie got the gist. If she harnessed enough air, made it go in the same direction, she could break the rocks apart enough for them to climb through.

With a twitch of her fingers, Alie coaxed the threads toward her, through her. It was never an unpleasant sensation, and that, too, was concerning. Channeling air and imbuing it with her will felt like stepping into cool water on a hot day, like a sky with the perfect balance of sun and breeze.

Her will was simple. Forward and force and through .

Alie pushed all those threads back out.

The sound made her want to slam her hands over her ears. The rocks broke with a grinding and squeal, like the teeth of an anxious giant, crumbling to the ground as a pattering of heavy raindrops. Instinctively, Alie covered her head.

But the tunnel itself remained intact. And when Alie shook herself out of channeling-space, a path through the tunnel was clear. Treacherous, maybe, and requiring more climbing than she’d prefer, but clear.

Next to her, Lilia took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. Then, without a word, she started forward.

Neither of them spoke as they made their way down into the catacombs, toward the home of the Buried Watch.

Mostly because all their attention was spent on picking over the jagged pieces of rock on the ground, but Lilia’s silence seemed heavier than simple concentration could explain.

Alie supposed that was fair when you were venturing into the lair of the cult where you’d spent most of your life.

The resting place of those who’d convinced her that the world needed her daughter dead.

But it was Lilia’s home, too. And those people had been her family.

“What was it like?” Alie asked softly.

“Being part of the Buried Watch?” Lilia stopped on a patch of stone floor that wasn’t littered with rock shards, staring into the dark.

The flickering of her torch carved out the hollows of her face, made her look older.

“When I first joined—when I had nowhere else to go—it was comforting. When I learned just how important our job was, just how badly things could go if we failed, it was awe inspiring.” She swallowed.

“And when I had Lore… when they told me what would become of her… it was terrifying.”

She started forward again. Alie followed, not speaking.

“You have to understand that I thought I was saving her when I asked her to die,” Lilia said, so quiet it was hard to hear even in the silence.

“I know that’s hard to understand, but I thought I was saving her from becoming something awful.

I thought the world would end, were she allowed to go on, and she would be nothing but a puppet for the goddess.

I had no way of knowing it wasn’t true. At least, not the way I’d been told. ”

“I believe you,” Alie said, because she sensed that was what Lilia wanted to hear. She didn’t know if she meant it or not.

But it seemed Lore’s mother was too deep in memory to hear, regardless of if she wanted to.

“I couldn’t do it, at first,” Lilia continued.

“When they marked her with the moon. I felt so selfish when I told her to run, but I couldn’t bear to see her enter the tomb and be stripped out of herself, even though we all knew she was more dangerous than the Night Witch.

It was wrong, and I regretted it; by letting her escape I’d consigned her to a worse fate.

But then we worked with the Church, found a way to fix my mistakes.

To make Lore the end of the cycle, but not the world.

” She shrugged, limp and defeated. “I thought it was a good thing when the old Priest Exalted made plans to bring her in, right before her Consecration. To sharpen the powers of the chosen Arceneaux, to make Apollius return. It felt like righting a wrong.” She paused, torch flickering.

“I don’t think any of us could fathom that it was Apollius who was wrong. ”

It was obvious when they reached the part of the catacombs that had housed the Buried Watch.

The tunnels widened out. A soft glow emanated from plant life clinging to the walls, vines and mushrooms that Alie didn’t recognize.

She wanted to ask about them, but down here, near to where so much magic had been housed for so long, such things should be expected.

The bones, however, were a surprise.

Human, all of them, scattered around the tunnel, some broken from the collapsed rock, others whole. A shattered femur speared up from the center of the floor, sharp end ready to catch an unwary foot. A full rib cage lay on its side near where the tunnel began to widen.

She’d known that there were bones down here, left over from revenants crawling in to die, from those who couldn’t afford a vault and didn’t have anyone who cared enough to see them burned.

But these bones didn’t seem old, didn’t seem like afterthoughts.

They looked… new. Yellowed, still, not outside of a body long enough to bleach.

The scent of rot married the mineral scent of the stone tunnels, the crisp and ozonic notes from channeled air, and she grimaced.

“Come on,” Lilia said grimly.

She pushed forward. Alie didn’t want to follow. But she wanted to be alone in the dark even less.

The tunnel widened into a cavern. Alie couldn’t tell how large; the luminous plants only grew near the ground, and the dark seemed to eat the light from Lilia’s torch, only letting it travel so far.

The former Night Priestess stepped carefully. There were more bones here, a maze of them across the floor. These had to be her friends, the other members of the Buried Watch, but Lilia showed no emotion other than a clenched jaw.

She didn’t show any emotion even when she looked at the obsidian rubble of the tomb.

There had been many moments in the past few months when Alie had come face-to-face with something from a myth.

She housed something mythical in her own mind, spun it with her hands.

But still, the ruins of the tomb that had held Nyxara’s dead body made her pause, made her breath leave in a gasp that might’ve been awed or terrified, and Alie couldn’t tell which it was.

She also couldn’t account for the empty feeling that sank her stomach, seeing that tomb blown apart.

“What in every hell happened here?” she asked, clutching her skirt in her hands so it didn’t brush against bones.

“Lore happened,” Lilia answered.

Even now, Lilia lingered at the side of the ruins, hesitant to step over the first lines of obsidian. Alie wasn’t eager to, herself. In fact, she felt like crying.

“Shit.” All her muscles hung slack around her bones; it was all she could do not to crumple. “If the tomb is gone, how are we supposed to find the shard?”

“The tomb isn’t gone, it’s just broken.” Sucking in a sharp breath, Lilia stepped into the rubble. As she did, her spine softened, and she turned to arch a brow at Alie. “So we start looking through the broken pieces.”

“Finding a broken piece in a million broken pieces.” Alie sighed as she followed Lilia into the piles of jagged obsidian. “Brilliant.”

And that was what they did. For hours, it felt like, though there was no real way to tell time down here, nothing to mark its passing except the steadily worsening ache in her back.

Alie thought her hell might be like this.

Fruitlessly picking up shining chunks of black stone only to put them down again.

Some of the pieces of the tomb were larger than others. One of them was nearly as large as a mirror, and just as reflective. Alie stopped her searching and stared at herself, just for a moment. This body, the same one that had carried her through twenty-four years, now housing the power of a god.

But she liked how she looked with it. Her spine straighter, her eyes clearer. There was a faintness around her hands, making them look ghostly. As if they’d disappear when held to a light.

A light…

The bioluminescent plants didn’t illuminate much, about the same as a full moon on a clear night. But over in the corner, a large group of them glowed brighter than the others.

Not quite a sunrise, but worth a try.

Alie fished the ring from her pocket. It buzzed against her skin. She picked over chunks of obsidian to the glowing plants and lifted the ring, expecting nothing.

A thin beam of light, like the tail of a shooting star, pointing to the middle of the rubble.

She glanced over her shoulder. Lilia had stopped her search, eyes narrowed at the ring. Alie jerked her chin to the beam of light. “I’d look there.”

Lilia did. And it only took a moment to find the shard. She reached out to touch it and hissed, snatching her hand back. “Damn. That hurts like every hell.”

Alie made her way over, cautiously bending down to the shard. Her hands buzzed, so much worse than touching the ring, but she gritted her teeth and closed her fingers on its edges.

Pain, scouring, like she’d been lit on fire. Alie’s mouth opened, but all that came out was a harsh breath.

Then the pain was over, a half heartbeat of agony. It still made her hands numb, but Alie could lift it now. She hauled the piece up from the ground.

It was pale, seamed in gold. On the edge, a carved sun, a perfect match to the Arceneaux crown.

“How did it do that?” Lilia breathed.

“Something about magic, I’m sure.” Alie tucked the ring back into her pocket. “The stone is Mount-mined. I guess things from the Golden Mount call to each other.”

“And it doesn’t hurt you to touch.” Lilia shook her head. “A fail-safe, I supposed. So only gods can handle the pieces.”

Something about that itched in the back of Alie’s mind.

Above their heads, the cavern shuddered.

Lilia glanced up. “Did you hear that?”

Another shudder, dust clouding the air in the light from their torch.

Apollius had built the tomb, had put the Fount piece here. Had never wanted the Fount put back together again.

It made sense for Him to build in a defense mechanism.

Rocks pattered to the floor like rain, small enough not to cause undue injury, but large and sharp enough to hurt. One landed on Alie’s arm, blooming a bruise. In the dark where their light didn’t reach, the echoing sounds of grinding, falling, imminent collapse.

“Shit,” Lilia hissed.

Alie’s hand shot up, her fingers gathering in air. The iridescent lines flowed into her and then back out, weaving themselves into a shield over her and Lilia’s heads. A rock, larger than the others so far, fell from the ceiling and bounced off. Alie winced. “We should run, probably.”

As if her words tipped the scale, the ceiling of the cathedral crashed down.

This was no gentle warning, giving them time to escape—this was a full-measure assault, the magic woven into this place going after them like hunting dogs with the taste of blood.

Stones twice as big as Alie crashed to the ground, bouncing from her shield—she kept from screaming, but only just, the impact reverberating through her outstretched arm.

She and Lilia sprinted toward the mouth of the tunnel she had already cleared, tripping over bones.

And the collapsing didn’t stop once they got free of the cathedral, of that first tunnel.

The phosphorescence of the plant life slowly faded as Alie’s fingers shook with the pressure of her air-woven shield.

The Fount piece burned in her other hand, her fingers numb, the half of her concentration not spent on the shield focused completely on not dropping the stupid stone that was currently bringing the earth down on their heads.

“It’ll collapse the whole damn catacombs!” Lilia shouted next to her, still barely audible over the screech of rock.

A light up ahead, after a churn of time that seemed both longer and shorter than the hours it had taken to hike down here. The hole in the derelict house, the place they’d entered. Alie had never run so fast in her life.

She pelted through the hole, Lilia at her back. They didn’t stop, running through the house and out the door, into the street.

Shuddering, the groaning of old wood and old stone.

The house’s collapse was slow, not like the immediate destruction of the caverns below.

And it was quiet, almost, as if the house’s ghost was half given up already.

The row houses were all crooked now, the foundations slipped from their moorings as the tunnel beneath them collapsed.

They’d surely been unstable before, when the first tunnel Alie cleared had gone down.

Now that the entire path up from Nyxara’s tomb was rubble, the consequences were finally visible.

A few people came out of the houses, frowning, trying to figure out what had happened.

Alie pulled her hood over her head and turned away.

“So much for secrecy,” Lilia said.

Alie hid the stone shard in the pocket of her cloak.

It was too big to fit without bulging. As soon as her hand let it go, feeling started coming back to her fingers in painful waves.

“No one pays attention to the houses out here,” she said, hating that it was true, hating that she was using that to her advantage.

“And most of them have been unstable for years. No one should immediately put together that it has anything to do with the tunnels.”

“But they will eventually.”

“Hopefully, by then we’ll be long gone.” The piece in her pocket seemed to… tug , almost, toward the shining line of the ocean beyond the row houses. A stream being drawn back to a river, a lodestone finding home.

Alie closed her hand around it, mindless of the pain.