The Chasm, which was sealed by dimensional architectures even ARIA could not, in honesty, fully understand.

What had been the nature of the wounds upon her, the blood upon her, the marrow drained from her hand.

Why had ARIA’s bond to her Master cried out, half a kilometre east of here, in the wet, bewildering grief of something pulled out of her — and why was that grief, now, gone?

The questions stacked. They did not collapse. ARIA chose, with the patient discipline of a goddess rationing her own bewilderment, to let them stand unanswered for another hour.

She rose.

The girl in her arms did not stir.

Nyxire watched them go.

In the great, mythic patience of her face — there was something almost fond.

The small, almost imperceptible warming of the eyes that horses, in the dim catechism of equine expressiveness, could just barely allow themselves.

An expression that said, in some quiet stable-floor liturgy older than the architectures it had been bedded in: you have her now. Well done. We shall speak of this another morning.

She turned and walked, with the unhurried gait of an officiant returning to a sacristy, back toward the stable that was less stable than mansion, less mansion than temple.

The all-knowing Nyxire.

*** 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Above the Chasm, Seraphiel had at last lowered her swords.

The white fire along the blades subsided into a pulsing simmer. The blood — his blood — continued its unhurried weeping along the edges, vanishing into the air below as it fell, as if the world were politely declining to keep evidence of an act it had decided, against her witness, not to admit.

She had been entertaining, for several long, doctrinally improper minutes, the question of whether to report.

The Source would receive her.

The Voice would not lie to her and the Eternal Veil would unfold its primordial light around her wings and accept her tidings with the grave, slow attention it accorded all news of consequence — and the news, she had to grant, was of consequence.

An ancient god hidden in the mortal realm. There’s also something capable of unmaking a death already accomplished by a Warden of the First Morning.

The cadence of that sentence, even rehearsed within the careful proscenium of her own skull, sounded ridiculous.

She closed her eyes.

She allowed herself, in the privacy of the upper air, the soldier’s small, illegal indulgence of thinking it through.

If she withdrew now, she withdrew having failed.

If she withdrew having failed, the Source — gentle, unpunishing, infinite — would assign the quest to higher choirs. The higher choirs would descend. The descent would be seen and the Mother, stirring already in her old grave beneath the world, would notice.

And the boy, the abomination, the thirty-one wives, the empire, and now this — whatever this was, this ancient power that wore the body of a small black-haired girl with red exhausted eyes and two fingers ruined by some unspeakable price — would have time, between the seeing and the descending, to prepare.

Seraphiel did not yet have the words to articulate why she felt, in her gilded marrow, that the Prince’s preparations had become, in the past hour, a thing one no longer wished to invite.

But she felt it.

One does not give such a man notice.

One does not give such a girl notice either.

She made her decision with the swift, dry economy of every great soldier whose superior officer is too far away to be consulted on the second move.

She would not report.

Not yet.

The strike against the Prince had cost her. The infiltration of his blind sanctum — the act of walking, soundlessly, in the very place that functioned as a second skin to the abomination, without the abomination’s notice — had drained her at depths she had not, in ten thousand years, been required to plumb.

’It was like walking on another person’s skin without their knowledge’ she thought and then was briefly horrified at herself for having found, so quickly, so apt, so mortal a metaphor.

She required rest.

By the time she had rested, the girl would have also woken. ARIA would have completed whatever inventory ARIAs completed of impossible foundlings. The Master would have flown to Paris, or chosen instead the navy and stayed, or invented a third thing she could not yet predict.

It did not matter.

Seraphiel lifted her chin and folded her wings. Drew the white fire of her swords back into the long, patient sheaths of her gauntlets, where they slept like the children of stars.

She had a mission.

The mission had been, briefly, accomplished — for the duration of three heartbeats she did not yet have a word for, the abomination had borne its proper status of bereaved, the Prince had borne his proper status of concluded, and the cosmos had borne, however briefly, its proper geometry of purified.

The girl had undone it.

The girl had, by some expenditure of two fingers and a tunic’s worth of foreign blood, erased what Seraphiel had been spent ten thousand years being prepared to do.

Seraphiel allowed herself, in the upper air, the smallest of golden smiles. It contained no warmth. It contained only the slow, satisfied arithmetic of a being whose patience was older than the planet beneath her feet.

She would rest.

She would return.

She would kill the Prince again.

And — if the girl with the ruined fingers chose, upon waking, to once more spend whatever metaphysical coinage her small fierce body had been collecting for this purpose — Seraphiel would kill him a third time. A fourth. A fifth. A hundredth.

Until the small fierce body had no more fingers to lose, no more marrow to surrender, no more tunics to baptise in the blood of opponents the Warden could not yet name.

Eventually, the price would exceed the purchase.

Eventually, the girl would run out.

Seraphiel turned her face, unhurried, toward the upper sky.

The morning held the boy in his charcoal jacket, the abomination cradling a foundling, and a horse named Nyxire walking, with the patience of a thing that had been a horse longer than language had been a human, back toward her stable.

The Last Warden of the Purity Realms folded her wings.

And vanished, in a soft golden inhalation, into the rest she had been forbidden, by ten thousand years of doctrine, to admit she had ever required.