CHAPTER NINE THESSALY
Three Hundred Years Earlier
I was twenty-three when I discovered the truth. Young enough to believe it mattered. Old enough to think I could do something about it.
The archives of the old seminary—not the one that would later burn with Cael inside it, but its predecessor, a sprawling complex in the heart of the Chronicle—had a section nobody visited. Basement level. Water damage. Records deemed unimportant by generations of archivists who couldn't be bothered to sort through moldering financial documents from before the current calendar system.
I was there because I was hiding.
The seminary master had taken an interest in me. The wrong kind. The kind that involved closed doors and implications and the understanding that my scholarship depended on my cooperation. I'd been dodging him for weeks, finding excuses, discovering urgent research needs that required me to be elsewhere.
The basement was elsewhere. The basement was forgotten. The basement was where I found the ledger that would ruin my life and, eventually, save it.
The numbers didn't match.
I noticed it first as a feeling—the way you notice when a painting is hung slightly crooked, when a note in a melody is just barely flat. Something wrong in the flow of the figures. I spent three days checking my work, convinced I'd made an error.
I hadn't.
The pre-Ascendancy records tracked quintessence flow through the cycle with obsessive precision. The old scholars had measured everything—the rate of soul emergence from the Source, the average lifespan of mortal existence, the return flow through death and rebirth. They'd built mathematical models of existence itself, elegant equations that described the eternal circulation of spiritual energy.
And then the Ascendancy happened.
The records after that point were different. Same measurements, same precision, but the numbers had shifted. The return flow was diminished. Not by much—perhaps three percent—but consistently, century after century, the amount of quintessence completing the cycle was less than the amount entering it.
Where was the rest going?
I knew. On some level, I'd always known. The Thrones. The seven stations positioned at the rim of the wheel, where souls passed from life to death to rebirth. The gods who sat upon those Thrones, eternal and unchanging, sustained by—
By what? The theology said they were sustained by faith. By worship. By the gratitude of mortals whose souls they shepherded through the cycle.
The math said they were sustained by eating us.
I was not as smart as Cael. I want to be clear about that. When I found the truth, I didn't laugh. I didn't see patterns within patterns, didn't immediately begin calculating how the knowledge could be leveraged.
I panicked.
I took the ledger. Fled the archives. Went to the one person I trusted—my mentor, a woman named Cassia who had taught me everything I knew about theological mathematics. I showed her the numbers. Explained my conclusions. Waited for her to tell me I was wrong.
She didn't.
She looked at the ledger for a long time. Then she looked at me with an expression I didn't understand until much later: grief.
"You shouldn't have found this," she said.
"But it's true? The gods are—"
"Yes."
"Then we have to tell someone. The councils. The other seminaries. The people—"
"Thessaly." Her voice was gentle. Final. "There is no one to tell. Everyone who matters already knows."
The Thrones came for me three days later.
Not the gods themselves—their agents. Angels and bound servants and mortal collaborators who had made the same calculation I would later make: better to serve the machine than be ground up by it.
They took me to a place that doesn't exist on any map. A pocket between spaces, like the Threshold but older, crueler. A prison for those who had seen too much.
I wasn't alone there. Others had found the truth over the centuries. Scholars and rebels and fools like me, who had looked at the divine machinery and understood what they were seeing. Most of them were broken. Some were dead. A few—the useful ones—were offered the same choice I was offered.
The Sun came to me himself.
I've told this story before—to myself, in the dark hours when memory becomes indistinguishable from nightmare. But I've never told the whole truth. Not to Cael. Not to anyone.
The Sun didn't threaten me. Didn't torture me. Didn't promise me power or wealth or any of the things I might have expected from a god trying to buy my silence.
He sat with me in my cell—if you can call it sitting, if a being of accumulated wisdom and ancient grief can be said to occupy space the way mortals do—and he told me the truth.
All of it.
"We were mortal once," he said. "Long ago. Before the Thrones existed. Before the Ascendancy. There were other gods then—older, crueler, more honest about what they were. They didn't hide the harvest. They demanded it openly. Temples of sacrifice. Blood and quintessence flowing upward to feed beings that had forgotten what it meant to be human."
"What happened to them?"
"We killed them." His voice was tired. Eight thousand years of tired. "A rebellion. Mortals rising against their divine masters. We found a way to tear them from their Thrones, to unmake what they had become. And in the chaos that followed, we took their places."
"You became what you destroyed."
"Yes. Because the alternative was worse." He looked at me—really looked, with eyes that had witnessed civilizations rise and fall like waves against a shore. "The wheel needs the Thrones, Thessaly. Not because we built it that way, but because we broke it. When we destroyed the old gods, we damaged the cycle. The Gnaw began. And the only way to slow it—the only way to keep existence from unraveling entirely—was to take up the positions they had abandoned. To feed on the flow, because feeding on the flow keeps it moving."
"That's convenient."
"It's true. I wish it weren't. I wish we had found another way." He made a sound that might have been a laugh, in someone who still remembered how. "We've been looking for three hundred centuries. Every solution we find creates new problems. Every attempt to heal the wound makes it worse. We are not tyrants because we choose to be. We are tyrants because we don't know how to be anything else."
"And the harvest? The piece you take from every soul?"
"Necessary. Or at least, we tell ourselves it's necessary. The honest answer is: we don't know anymore. We've been feeding so long that stopping might kill us. Might crash the system. Might do nothing at all. We're afraid to find out."
I stared at him. A god, admitting fear. Admitting uncertainty. It was the last thing I'd expected.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you remind me of who I used to be. Because you found the truth and your first instinct was to share it, not use it. Because in three thousand years, I've watched countless rebels rise against us, and they all made the same mistake: they thought we were evil. We're not evil, Thessaly. We're scared. We're tired. We're doing the best we can with a situation we don't fully understand, and we're failing, and we're too afraid to admit it."
"That doesn't make it right."
"No. It doesn't." He stood. If he stood. "I'm offering you a choice. Work for us. Find others like yourself—the ones who see too much. Bring them in before they become dangerous. In exchange, you live. Extended life. Resources. The ability to guide the transition when it comes."
"What transition?"
"The one that's inevitable. Someday, someone will succeed where others have failed. Will find a way to remove us without destroying everything. When that happens, I want the landing to be as soft as possible. I want someone in position to help. Someone who understands what we are, and why, and what might come after."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then you die. Not as punishment—as necessity. You know too much. The knowledge you carry, if spread carelessly, could destabilize everything before we're ready. Before there's any hope of a controlled transition."
I took the deal.
I've spent three hundred years telling myself I had no choice. That survival was the only rational option. That I could do more good alive than dead.
And for three hundred years, I've watched for the one who could finish what I started. The mind sharp enough to see the truth and survive it. The soul slippery enough to escape the harvest.
When I found Cael Morrow, I knew.
But I didn't know if I'd help him or destroy him. I still don't.
That's the choice I'm facing now, three hundred years later, standing in a Threshold market while his face stares at me from every wanted poster in three Reaches.
Help him, and betray everything I've built. Everyone I've saved by working within the system.
Stop him, and betray the girl I was. The one who found the truth and wanted to share it. The one who believed knowing mattered.
Some choices don't have right answers.
This might be one of them.
CHAPTER TEN ALDRIC
The trail led through the Churn.
I hated the Churn. Every inquisitor did. The volcanic archipelago was chaos incarnate—islands that appeared and disappeared with the tides, merchant-pirates who worshipped change itself, a culture that considered stability a character flaw. Tracking anyone through the Churn was like trying to follow footprints through running water.
But the reports were clear: Morrow had been seen in the Threshold, which meant he'd likely exit through one of the Churn's liminal ports. The dimension-smugglers used the islands' instability to mask their movements, folding space through volcanic vents that connected to nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.
I was three days into the search when I started questioning things I shouldn't question.
It began with a conversation. A merchant in one of the floating markets—a woman with salt-crusted skin and eyes that had seen too many horizons—recognized the description I was circulating.
"The scholar," she said. "Yes. He passed through yesterday. Strange man. Talked to himself. Kept looking at things that weren't there."
"Which direction did he go?"
"Why do you want to know?"
The question caught me off-guard. In the Bleach, where I'd grown up, you didn't ask why an inquisitor wanted something. You just answered. But this was the Churn, where authority was a suggestion and curiosity was a virtue.
"He's a heretic. He's spreading dangerous lies about the divine order."
"What kind of lies?"
I hesitated. The angel's words came back to me: The theology is not your concern. But the theology was always my concern. It was my entire life.
"He claims the gods are parasites," I said. "That they harvest souls instead of shepherding them."
The merchant laughed. Not mockingly—sympathetically. The way you laugh when someone says something naive.
"And you don't believe him."
"Of course not. The Eternal Economy is—"
"A system. Like any system." She leaned forward. "I've been sailing these waters for forty years, inquisitor. I've seen things the seminaries don't teach. Places where the cycle moves differently. Edges where you can almost see the machinery."
"That's superstition."
"Is it?" She shrugged. "I'm not saying your scholar's right. But I've always found it strange—the way the Thrones position themselves at the rim of the wheel. The way they call it shepherding when what they're doing looks an awful lot like standing in the way. A shepherd guides the flock. A shepherd doesn't take a piece of every sheep that passes."
"That's not what they do."
"How do you know?"
The question haunted me through the night. And the night after that.
How do you know?
I had faith. I had scripture. I had twenty-six years of certainty and the institutional weight of an empire built on theological truth.
But I didn't have proof.
The seminary had taught me that faith didn't need proof. That the very act of seeking evidence was a failure of devotion—an admission that belief alone wasn't enough. The blessed didn't question. They trusted.
And I had trusted. My whole life. Through my father's death, through my ordination, through every heretic I'd brought in for processing. I trusted that the system was just because I needed it to be just. Because the alternative—that I had dedicated my life to a lie—was unbearable.
But the angel hadn't given me a refutation. It had given me an order.
The theology is not your concern.
Why not? If Morrow's claims were false, they should be easy to disprove. Show me the evidence. Show me the math that proves the cycle is whole, that nothing is being taken, that the gods serve rather than feed.
Show me anything except silence and orders and the growing suspicion that I was chasing a man whose only crime was looking too closely.
I found his camp on the fourth day.
Abandoned. Recent. He'd left in a hurry—probably knew I was coming. Pattern-sight, according to the briefings. The ability to see the shape of things before they happened. Not prophecy, just probability, but it amounted to the same thing: he'd stay one step ahead as long as he kept running.
But he'd left something behind.
A notebook. Dropped in the mud near the fire pit, partially burned but still readable. I should have flagged it for collection, sent it back to the seminary for proper analysis, maintained the chain of custody that separated righteous investigation from personal curiosity.
Instead, I sat in the ashes of his camp and started reading.
The math doesn't lie.
I've checked it a hundred times. A thousand. The numbers before the Ascendancy versus after. The flow rates. The return percentages. Something is being taken. Something has been taken for eight thousand years.
But that's not what keeps me awake.
What keeps me awake is the question: why don't more people see it? The data exists. The records exist. Anyone with access to the pre-Ascendancy archives could find what I found. And yet, in eight millennia, how many have?
Answer: more than the Thrones want us to know. I've found references. Hints. Disappeared scholars, suppressed texts, entire traditions erased from the historical record. We're not the first to notice. We're just the first in a while.
The others were silenced. One way or another.
V says I'm being paranoid. Maybe she's right. But paranoia kept me alive in the Seams, and it's kept me alive since. The truth is dangerous. The people who have it tend to disappear. If I'm going to spread this—if I'm going to give it to the world—I need to do it fast and loud and in a way that can't be suppressed.
Or I need to become impossible to kill.
Funny. I've already done that once.
—C.M.
I sat with the notebook for a long time.
The math doesn't lie.
He sounded certain. Not the certainty of a madman, ranting about conspiracy and persecution. The certainty of a scholar. A mathematician. Someone who had found something concrete and was trying to make sense of it.
I should report the notebook. Turn it over to my superiors. Let them decide what to do with it.
Instead, I took it with me.
Not because I believed him. Not yet. But because the angel had said the theology is not your concern, and I was starting to realize that was exactly backward.
The theology was the only thing that should be my concern.
And if Cael Morrow had found something true—something the Thrones didn't want known—then I needed to see it for myself.
Even if it destroyed everything I believed.
Especially then.
CHAPTER ELEVEN CAEL
The plan was simple: start a fire that couldn't be put out.
Not literally—I'd had enough of fire for several lifetimes. Metaphorically. Spread the information so wide and so fast that no amount of suppression could contain it. Get the truth into enough minds that killing me wouldn't matter anymore.
The problem was infrastructure.
The Thrones had spent eight thousand years building systems of control. Seminaries that taught their theology. Merchants who depended on their blessings. Governments that drew legitimacy from divine sanction. You couldn't just stand in a market square and shout "the gods are parasites!"—well, you could, but nobody would believe you, and you'd be dead before sunset.
You needed credibility. Networks. Ways to reach people who were already questioning, already looking for answers, already feeling the wrongness but unable to name it.
You needed a revolution, and revolutions required organization.
"You're thinking too loud," Veraine said.
We were in one of Sorrow's safe houses—a space that existed in the fold between two Threshold locations, invisible to anyone who didn't know exactly how to find it. She was repairing a damaged manuscript she'd brought from the archives, her fingers moving with the precision of someone whose whole life was about fixing broken things.
"I'm thinking at exactly the right volume. You're just listening too hard."
"I can see your face. It's doing that thing where you're trying to solve a problem that doesn't have a solution."
"All problems have solutions. Some just require more variables."
"That's not as reassuring as you think it is." She set down her tools, looked at me. "What's the problem?"
"Reach. We have the truth. We have Sorrow's networks. But the networks are smugglers and outcasts—people who already don't trust the system. We need to reach the believers. The faithful. The ones who want to trust and will keep trusting until you give them something better."
"Something better than eternal salvation?"
"Exactly." I started pacing. Pacing helped. Movement kept the thoughts from getting stuck. "The Thrones offer comfort. The promise that death isn't the end. That the cycle continues. That the people you love come back. How do you compete with that?"
"The truth?"
"The truth is terrifying. The truth says death is a scam, the cycle is compromised, and the entities you've prayed to your whole life are eating your ancestors' souls. That's not something people want to hear. They'll reject it. Fight it. Kill the messenger rather than question the message."
"Some of them."
"Most of them. Initially. Which means we need a different approach. Not instead of truth—alongside it. We need to offer something positive, not just tear down something negative."
Veraine was quiet for a moment. Her gift, I knew, was analyzing the fractures in my logic, looking for the places where the argument might break.
"What do you offer," she said slowly, "when you're asking people to give up their gods?"
"A different kind of god?"
"That just recreates the problem."
"No gods at all?"
"That's terrifying for different reasons."
I stopped pacing. Looked at her. Really looked, the way I sometimes forgot to when I was inside my own head.
"What would you want? If you were a believer, and someone told you everything you'd trusted was a lie. What would you need to hear?"
She thought about it. This was one of the things I loved about her—she never answered questions like that reflexively. She actually considered them.
"That it wasn't my fault," she said finally. "That believing wasn't stupid. That I'd been lied to by beings far older and more powerful than me, and anyone in my position would have made the same choice." She paused. "And that there's still something to believe in. Maybe not gods. Maybe not the cycle the way I understood it. But something. Some meaning. Some reason why existence matters."
"What if there isn't?"
"Then you lie."
I stared at her.
"No. Listen." She stood, crossed to me, took my hands. "People need meaning the way they need air. You can't just take it away and expect them to breathe vacuum. If the old meaning is gone, you give them new meaning. Even if you're not sure it's true. Even if you have to make it up as you go."
"That sounds like manipulation."
"It sounds like leadership. Which is the same thing, viewed from different angles." She squeezed my fingers. "You didn't survive the Seams by telling people the truth about how bleak their prospects were. You survived by giving them something to work toward. A cut of the take. A sense of belonging. A reason to get up in the morning."
"That was different."
"It was exactly the same. Small scale, but the same principle. People follow you because you give them hope. Now you're doing it again, but the stakes are bigger. The hope has to be bigger too."
I pulled her close. Held her. Felt the steady rhythm of her heart against my chest, the solidity of her presence in a world that kept trying to dissolve into chaos and pattern and the terrible math of existence.
"When did you get so wise?"
"I've always been wise. You were just too busy seeing patterns to notice."
Sorrow found us like that. She'd learned, over the past few days, to make noise when approaching—I had a tendency to react badly to surprises, and "badly" in this case involved knives.
"We have a problem," she said.
"Just one?"
"One new one. On top of all the others." She was carrying a document—one of the manifests she used to track movement through her smuggling networks. "There's an inquisitor on your trail. Third-rank, out of the Bleach. Name's Aldric something. He's good."
"How close?"
"Day behind. Maybe less. He's been asking questions in the Churn, following the breadcrumbs I thought we'd hidden." She handed me the manifest. "And there's something else. He's not acting like a normal inquisitor."
"Meaning?"
"Normal inquisitors call for backup. Send reports to the hierarchy. Work within the system." She sat down, looking troubled. "This one's gone quiet. No reports in three days. He's either dead, compromised, or..."
"Or?"
"Or he's started thinking for himself. Which, for an inquisitor, is basically the same as being compromised."
I looked at the manifest. Names and dates and movement patterns, the skeleton of a hunt rendered in ink and logistics.
"What do you know about him?"
"Young. True believer. Spotless record. The kind of priest who became a priest because he genuinely thought it would help people." Sorrow shook her head. "I've seen the type before. They're the most dangerous, once they start to crack. All that certainty, suddenly looking for a new target."
"Or the most valuable." I was thinking out loud now, the patterns starting to assemble. "A true believer who loses faith doesn't just become neutral. They become angry. Betrayed. They want justice for being lied to."
"You want to turn him."
"I want to give him the chance to turn himself. There's a difference." I looked at Veraine. "What do the fractures say?"
She closed her eyes. Focused. When she opened them again, her expression was complicated.
"He's already cracking," she said. "I can't see him directly, but I can see the shape of him in how the world bends around him. He's carrying something heavy. Some piece of truth he didn't expect to find." She paused. "If you reached him before he breaks completely—before he has to choose between his old certainty and what he's discovering—you might be able to guide the break. Help him land somewhere useful."
"And if I reach him too late?"
"Then you have an enemy who knows your methods and has nothing left to lose."
I smiled. It wasn't a nice smile—it was the smile I'd worn in the Seams, when the odds were bad and the only option was to bet everything on a single throw.
"Good," I said. "I've always been better with deadlines."
CHAPTER TWELVE THE EMBER
I found him in a dream.
Not his dream—mine. Gods dream differently than mortals. Where their dreams are chaotic, personal, bounded by the limits of individual experience, ours are... larger. We dream the dreams of everyone who has ever burned for something. Every passion, every obsession, every moment of intensity that has passed through our Thrones.
Eight thousand years of dreams. Most of them blur together after a while. Background radiation. The thermal noise of mortal feeling.
But this one was different.
He was standing at the edge of a cliff—not a real cliff, a dream-cliff, the kind your mind constructs when it's trying to represent something abstract. The abyss below was full of numbers. Equations that spiraled into infinity. The mathematical truth of what I am, rendered in a form his subconscious could process.
"You shouldn't be here," he said. Not startled—resigned. Like he'd been expecting me.
"It's my domain." I moved closer. In dreams, I can almost remember what it felt like to have a body. To be bounded. To exist in a single place instead of everywhere and nowhere at once. "You dream of passion. That makes you mine, in a sense."
"I dream of math. That's not the same thing."
"Isn't it?" I let myself settle into something like shape—a woman, approximately, with edges that flickered like flames. "You found the equations because you couldn't stop looking. You kept digging because you needed to know. That's passion. That's obsession. That's the fire that sustains me."
"The fire you eat, you mean."
"Yes. That too." I didn't see the point in lying. He already knew what I was. "I wanted to meet you. Properly. Not through angels or intermediaries."
"Why?"
"Because you escaped. Because you saw what we are and instead of breaking, you laughed. Because you burn brighter than anything I've tasted in centuries, and I want to understand why."
He was quiet for a moment. In the dream, I could feel his emotions like textures—suspicion and curiosity and fear and something else, something that felt almost like pity.
"You're lonely," he said.
The word hit harder than it should have. Gods aren't supposed to be lonely. We exist in communion with every soul that passes through us, every passion we consume. We are, by definition, never alone.
But that's not the same as not being lonely.
"I remember love," I said. "I told you that already. Or will tell you. Time moves strangely, here. I had someone, once. Before I became this. And when I became this, I lost him. Not to death—to hunger. My hunger. My inability to touch without taking."
"That's not my problem."
"No. It's mine. But you..." I moved closer. In dreams, distance is negotiable. "You have someone. The conservator. I felt her when you died. The thread she holds, the one that pulled you back. That's a kind of love I haven't seen in millennia. The kind that survives the impossible."
"Leave her out of this."
"I'm not threatening her. I'm admiring her." I meant it. Surprising, how much I meant it. "She figured out how to break the rules for you. How to reach across the boundary between life and death and pull you back. That takes more than skill. That takes devotion."
"What do you want?"
"To make you an offer."
His wariness spiked. I could taste it—the sharp tang of someone who's been offered too many deals with hidden costs.
"I've had enough offers."
"This one's different. I'm not asking you to stop. Not asking you to surrender. Not asking you to betray what you've discovered." I paused. Let that sink in. "I'm asking you to help me understand how to undo what I am."
The dream shifted. The cliff became a room—his memory, I realized. A basement somewhere, full of books and papers and the specific kind of chaos that only accumulates around obsession.
"You want to stop being a god," he said slowly.
"I want to know if it's possible. The Sun says there's no way back. Once you've become what we are, you're committed. But the Sun has been saying that for eight thousand years, and the Gnaw keeps growing, and I'm starting to wonder if 'no way back' is truth or just fear dressed up as wisdom."
"Why tell me?"
"Because you see patterns. Because you found the truth we've been hiding for millennia. Because if anyone can figure out how to unmake a god, it's the heretic who unmade our mythology with a tax ledger."
He laughed. It was the sound I remembered from his death—wild and uncontrolled and absolutely alive.
"You want me to help you die."
"I want you to help me choose. Life. Death. Something else. Eight thousand years and I've never had a choice—just momentum. The wheel turns and we feed and the system continues because it's always continued." I let my edges waver. Let him see the uncertainty beneath. "I'm tired, Cael Morrow. Tired of being hungry. Tired of watching mortals love and hate and burn while I can only consume the echoes. I want to feel something real again, even if feeling it destroys me."
He studied me. I couldn't read his expression—dreams don't translate emotions the same way waking does—but I could feel him calculating. Pattern-sight, processing probabilities.
"If I helped you," he said. "If I found a way to unmake the Thrones. What happens to the others? The Sun. The Furnace. The Corona."
"I don't know."
"Would you care?"
The question cut deeper than I expected. Would I care? The other Thrones were... not friends, exactly. Not family. But something. Beings I had known for eight thousand years, fought with and against, agreed and disagreed with. We were bound by circumstance and hunger and the shared memory of what we used to be.
"I would care," I said. "I wouldn't let it stop me."
"That's the most honest thing a god has ever said to me."
"I have nothing to gain from lying. You already know what we are. The worst is already out." I moved toward him—not threatening, just... closer. "Think about it. I'm not asking for an answer now. But when you make your move—when you finally find a way to break what we've built—remember that not all of us want to fight. Some of us just want it to be over."
"And if I can't help you? If there's no way to unmake a god?"
"Then I suppose I'll keep feeding." I started to fade. Dreams don't last forever, even for beings like me. "But I wanted you to know. When you face the Thrones, when you finally bring your truth to our doorstep—not all of us will be enemies."
"Some of you will."
"Yes. The Furnace will fight to the last. The Blaze, probably. The Corona..." I shrugged. "The Corona hasn't spoken in so long, I'm not sure it remembers how. But I won't fight you, Cael Morrow. Whatever happens, I won't be your enemy."
The dream dissolved. I felt him slip away, back to waking, back to his plans and his woman and his desperate rebellion against everything I represented.
I stayed in the dream-space for a while longer. Watching the numbers spiral into the abyss. Wondering if he could really do what I'd asked.
Wondering if I wanted him to.
End of Chapters 9-12