Awesome — here's Chapter Five, the first step
The city's underbelly had its own clock. While the towers above counted glory and gold, the alleys below marked time in whispers — barter, rumor, fear. Lanterns swung like low moons; steam rose from grates; men traded favors the way others traded coin. It was a place Helios had ruled with a fingertip from the top of her tower, but never walked in with her own boots. Until now.
She moved through it like a storm in a dress of shadow. Even in the pressed anonymity of a hood and a low veil, people bent their heads. Power has a smell; when it walks close, the rats and the saints both know to take cover.
Kael rode two paces behind her, an anchor of quiet competence. He carried the knowledge she needed—names, maps, the price of every rumor. Tonight his face was drawn, the lines at his mouth sharpened by worry, but his eyes were steady. He would follow her into fire if she asked, and she had asked.
They passed the market of lost things: stalls of bone-laced trinkets, rusted gears that still hummed faintly, a woman selling song-scraps stitched into ribbon. A child ran by, clutching a stolen watch. Helios watched it all with a gaze that cataloged, not pitied. The world she ruled here was familiar, and she had no illusions about its mercy.
"Where they say the keepers meet," she murmured, reading the map Kael pressed into her hand. The inked symbol pulsed like a bruise: the old catacombs beneath the abandoned cathedral, a place the city had forgotten and the darkness had not.
They descended by a service stair so narrow two bodies could not pass comfortably. Walls soaked with damp and old prayers closed in. The air thinned, then changed — a sweetness like incense, and beneath it the colder tang of iron. Torches guttered as they passed; voices drifted up from the deeper veins of the city like distant seals breaking.
At the bottom, the catacomb opened into a cavern that smelled of old paper and salt. Figures moved in the dim: cloaked, deliberate. A low fire burned in the center, and around it sat a circle of those who wore memory like currency. The Veiled Order—if the rumors had names, these men gave them none. Their faces were folded in shadow, their eyes two slits of unreadable light.
A woman rose at their approach. She was older than the stories had made her sound, with hair like spun ash and a voice that did not waste breath. When she stepped into the torchlight, every small thing around her seemed to quiet as if the cavern itself were listening.
"You called," she said. No courtesy. No title. A test.
Helios stepped forward, lifting her veil just enough for the woman to see the line of her jaw. "I did. I need something you keep: a rite. The transfer." She spoke with the bluntness of command; still, there was a tremor at the edges of the word. Saying it aloud made it more real.
The keeper—Lys, the name Kael had whispered in fear—smiled once, brief and knowing. "You are the Empress who burns the city for answers," she said. "You should know what you ask. We trade in more than breath. The memory is not a coin you can unspend."
Helios's laugh was small. "I am aware of what I buy."
Lys moved closer, studying the woman who could bend men into silence. "You will pay with what binds you," she said quietly. "Not flesh, not blood. You pledge memories. Give them willingly and we will place them where the dead can reach them. He will breathe. He will not remember."
For a long heartbeat the keepers' circle waited. The air pressed in. Helios felt the pull of her throne — the calculus of empire — and the sharper pull of the man on a white bed, his breath like a thread she could not let go of.
"Is there no other price?" Kael asked, voice rough.
Lys regarded him with something like pity. "There is always cost. There is never a free wake."
Helios stepped nearer, the light cutting angles into her face. She did not touch Lys, did not kneel. She simply said, as if rehearsing it for herself, "Bring me the terms."
They did not haggle like merchants over silk. The Order's bargains were precise, legal in their cruelty: the donor must name the memories they surrender; the ritual consumes them and burns their traces into a vessel. The vessel is given to the reborn as a map that cannot be read by the saved. The one who returns keeps life and the body's habits, but the tether that anchored them to a specific soul — names, shared stories, the small seam of intimate things — is gone. Sometimes a strand returns, a scent, a flash. Sometimes nothing.
Helios's pulse thudded behind her jaw. "Can it fail?" she asked.
"It can fail only in the ways the living always fail," Lys said. "By choice. By interference. By a heart that will not let the task finish."
"And time?" Helios asked. "How long before the rite can be done?"
"Dawn," Lys answered. "We must gather a hundred small weights of memory, sealed and clean. They must be true — not borrowed, not fancied. You understand what this means."
Helios's fingers tightened on the map until the paper creased. "You will have what I ask."
Kael interjected, practical and cruel in his worry. "If she gives what is asked, if the Empress's memories are used—will she be… diminished?"
Lys's eyes softened, almost sadly. "Every sacrifice dims the hand that gives. But the light of intent can carry through. It is not for me to tell which you will mourn more: the life you save, or the life of memory you unmake."
A silence fell that felt like a verdict.
Helios turned away from the circle, toward the ladder that led back up. The city waited. The empress who could order deaths with a flick of her wrist had chosen a path none in that cavern would envy.
"Gather what I need," she said at last. "Not with force. With precision. No loose souls. No stolen memories. I want the price mine to pay."
Lys inclined her head. "She will not be the same. No one comes back from that bargain unchanged."
Helios's reply was quieter than a gunshot. "Then I will spend my memory like coin until the last debt is paid."
They left the catacombs, the torchlight swallowing their silhouettes. Above, the city remained unaware that its sovereign planned to pluck pieces of herself away like candles.
Later, when they returned to the tower, Kael watched her hold an object no one else had seen: the small locket she had kept since before crowns and empires. She placed it on the table and, for the first time in years, let herself look at it without turning away.
"Name them," Kael said softly. "What will you give?"
Her answer came at last, shaped and inevitable. "The nights I spent hoping. The map of the laughter he taught me. The memory of the first time his hand found mine beneath the rain." She paused, as if feeling each memory like a piece of bone being pulled free. "And the name I call him when I think no one listens."
Kael's face folded with the weight of it. "And when they are gone?"
"Then I will learn the cost," she said, voice steady as ice. "But he will live."
Outside, the wind took up the words and carried them into the sleeping city. Somewhere in the high rooms Eform rose and fell with a faint, fragile breath no one else could measure but her.
Beneath the palace, in a cavern of whispered bargains, the Veiled Order prepared the sigils and boiled ink from memory. The candles were lined, the space made sacred in a way that made even the hardest men look away. The rite would be cruel. It would be precise. It would change everything.
Helios sat alone then, the locket warm under her palm, counting out the moments like ledger marks. For the first time since she took the throne, she felt fear that had nothing to do with losing power.
She felt only one thing: the truth that some darkness is made lovely by what it protects.
And she had decided to pay for it.