The night was not an absence, but a presence. It pressed in with a tangible weight, a suffocating blanket that felt less like darkness and more like a conscious entity leaning in, listening to the frantic beat of their hearts. It knows we're here, Ezra thought. It's tasting our fear.
He sat on the cold edge of a broken pillar, a shard of unstable light dancing between his fingers. It pulsed in a rhythm that mirrored his own heartbeat—a golden, living thing that felt alien and invasive. This wasn't power. It was a symbiote. A creature that had taken root in his soul and was now breathing through him. He glanced down at his shadow, a stark, motionless stain on the stone. Why won't you move? He poured his will into it, a silent, desperate command. Nothing. It was just a hole cut out of the world. He thought of Asli's shadows, how they coiled and purred like living smoke. He thought of Soren's, how they detached and struck with a mind of their own. His was just… dead. A constant, mocking reminder of his own inadequacy.
"Careful," Nora's voice was a muffled murmur from within her blanket cocoon. "You keep coaxing that thing and you'll burn a hole straight through your own spirit."
Ezra didn't look at her, his focus on the treacherous glow. "Pretty sure light doesn't work that way."
"Pretty sure the laws of nature took one look at this place and quit," she muttered, rolling onto her back. Her hair was a splash of vibrant copper against the dull stone, almost glowing in the temple's malevolent aura. "Also, you're turning us into a beacon. Ringing the dinner bell for every nightmare in a ten-mile radius."
Cassian's voice sliced from the darkness, cold and precise. "Let him. Natural selection. The bright ones always get eaten first."
The words should have hurt, but they just… landed. Numb. Ezra was too tired, too hollowed out by the constant dread to muster a defense. The insults had all been worn smooth, like river stones, by the relentless current of exhaustion.
Soren's quiet tone emerged from the deepest pool of shadow, laced with a profound weariness. "Do you ever listen to the endless, petty noise you all make and feel your will to live quietly evaporate?"
From his watchful perch, spine rigid and eyes like slits, Rowan spoke without moving. "None of you are sleeping."
It wasn't an observation. It was a verdict.
No one offered a rebuttal. The silence that stretched between them was thin and brittle—devoid of comfort, but also stripped of hostility. It was the silence of shared trauma, a language they were all now fluent in.
Rowan rose, a study in controlled motion, the moonlight etching the hard planes of his body. "Fine," he said, the word soft yet carrying an undeniable weight. "If you're all determined to stare into the abyss, you might as well be useful. You've seen what I'm able to do . Your turn. What curses do you carry?"
He called it a curse, Ezra thought. The word resonated deeply, a perfect fit for the beautiful, terrible thing sleeping in his chest. A blessing and a curse. A chain of light.
He didn't sound curious. He sounded like a general inspecting his arsenal before a final, desperate battle. Taking stock. Knowing who to rely on, and who will break first.
He hesitated, the light in his palm sputtering like a dying star. "Light," he forced out. The word felt pathetic. "I think." He swallowed, the truth a bitter pill. "It doesn't… it doesn't always feel like it belongs to me. It feels like it's using me as a doorway."
Rowan's gaze, sharp and dissecting, found him in the gloom. "It never does, at first. The power isn't a tool you pick up. It's a chain that chooses its anchor. You just learn to bear the weight."
Ezra let out a weak, airless laugh. "That's profoundly unhelpful."
"It wasn't meant to be helpful. It was meant to be true."
The faint, electric sizzle of the light was the only sound for a moment.
Nora sat up, a single, disciplined flame igniting in her palm—a contained, hungry thing, red and volatile at its core. "Fire," she stated, a thread of defiance in her lazy tone. "It answers to rage. Or to cold. Mostly rage."
Cassian didn't bother to look up from the knife he turned over and over, the steel catching slivers of light. "Blood," he said. A single, closed syllable.
Soren's reply was a whisper that seemed to emanate from the stones themselves. "Darkness."
Varik shifted, his chuckle the sound of dry leaves scraping stone. "Such a magnificent collection of world-ending gifts. And yet, not a single one can purchase you an hour of untroubled sleep."
Rowan shot him a look that could curdle blood. "You're one to talk, old man."
The old man's grin was a predatory flash. "The stone is humming a lullaby. Don't pretend you can't hear it."
A sudden, thick silence fell. Ezra could feel it then—a low, rhythmic thrumming through the soles of his boots. A vibration that was less a sound and more a sickness in the earth itself.
Then Rowan spoke again, his voice dropping into a lower, more dangerous register. "The Patriarchs will have a collective fit."
Ezra frowned. "What?"
Rowan gestured with his chin toward Nora, Cassian, and the unconscious Atlas. "The three of you. Cohabitating without attempting murder. The scions of three Great Houses, whose families would rather burn the world than see you share a cup of water."
Nora let out a long-suffering groan, throwing an arm over her face. "By the gods, Rowan. Now? You're picking now for a politics lesson?"
Cassian's focus on his knife intensified, a clear dismissal. Atlas gave no reaction.
Ezra's mind reeled, connections snapping into place with a series of cold, sickening clicks. Heirs? He looked at them anew. The pieces fit—the ingrained authority, the casual lethality, the sheer weight of history in their silence. They weren't just recruits. They were legacies. Weapons forged by generations of conflict.
"Different houses. The same gilded cage," Rowan clarified, his tone flat and final. "The Crown is the only leash holding them back from each other's throats. But here? There is no Crown. There is only the Trial, and it is a very equal-opportunity destroyer."
The air grew heavy. The faint light seemed to dim, as if ashamed to illuminate the truth.
No one denied it.
Ezra looked between them—Cassian's icy detachment, Nora's fiery restlessness, Atlas's prophetic burden—and a profound chill settled in his bones. He had been born with nothing. They had been born with everything. And yet, their gilded cages looked just as inescapable as his poverty. We are all prisoners. They just have fancier chains.
The oppressive quiet was shattered by Soren's hollow voice. It wasn't loud, but it cut deeper than any shout. "You speak of crowns and thrones as if they hold meaning in the real world."
There was no bitterness. Only a vast, echoing emptiness. The sound of a soul already burnt to ash.
Rowan's gaze shifted to him. "They don't."
"Tell that to the armies that razed my city to the ground for a flag and a title they thought gave them the right."
The words landed not with a crash, but with the finality of a tombstone sealing shut. Their weight smothered the air, suffocating all other sound.
A memory, half-forgotten from a history lesson with Kril, surfaced in Ezra's mind. The 27th day of the Ashen War. The 'Extinction.' The representative from the Isle of Noctis had failed to attend a council. A single perceived slight. The great houses of Arkanis, the Sky Kingdom, and other nations had used it as a pretext. A necessity to protect our people, the scrolls had called it. They had invaded, burning the island nation to cinders, erasing its culture, its people. Soren was a Duskborn. A child of the night. A survivor of a genocide sanctioned by our own kingdoms.
No one spoke. What was there to say? Nora's jaw clenched, her fire guttering out, the weight of her own house's complicity perhaps dawning on her. Cassian looked away, a rare, unreadable emotion flickering in his stony eyes. Atlas seemed to shrink further into his unconscious state.
Ezra looked at Soren then. In the dim, shifting light, the other boy's eyes were not just empty. They were a storm of quiet, carefully banked fury—a deep, abiding hate, and beneath it, a pain so profound it seemed to have fossilized. The question slipped out before Ezra could cage it, a raw, naive thing. "Are you planning on taking revenge?"
All eyes turned to him. The silence became acute.
Soren didn't look at him. He scoffed, a low, dry sound. "Revenge is a small word for what I'll do. I'll cloak that whole continent in an eternal night before I'm through. I'll start with the Great Houses and work my way down."
The chilling declaration hung in the air. And the most terrifying part was the lack of reaction. No one gasped. No one protested. Nora simply looked away, a complex shame in her posture. Cassian stared at his knife as if it held the answers. Atlas dozed on, oblivious. They all think he's justified, Ezra realized with a jolt. Or they're all too complicit to argue.
He sat there, staring at the ground, the abstract concept of hatred given a face, a name, and a terrifyingly clear goal.
It was Rowan who broke the silence, his voice quieter now, stripped of its command, revealing the raw truth beneath. "The blood in your veins means nothing here. The Trial doesn't care about your lineage. It only cares if you can bleed. And we all bleed the same."
Cassian let out a sharp, ugly sound that was nowhere near a laugh. "You say that like a part of you almost believes the lie."
"I don't," Rowan said. The stark, brutal honesty was more powerful than any platitude.
Strangely, that drew the faintest ghost of a smile from Nora. "New rule," she declared, her voice soft but firm. "No more family history until there's an actual sun in the sky."
"Seconded," Soren murmured, the emptiness in his voice momentarily filled with a thread of weary agreement.
Varik chuckled. "And what profoundly enlightening topic shall we discuss instead?"
Ezra looked up, meeting the old man's cynical gaze. "Nothing," he said. The word was simple, but it felt like a revelation. "That's the point."
It wasn't a solution. It wasn't hope. But in that moment, it was enough. A few tired, genuine smiles were exchanged. The suffocating tension bled from the air, replaced by a fragile, shared exhaustion. Rowan's shoulders lost a fraction of their rigidity. Nora unclenched her fists. Cassian's restless knife stilled.
They sat in a silence that was, for the first time, not filled with the specter of impending doom. It was just quiet. A temporary, precious armistice.
Ezra's eyes, almost against his will, were drawn back to the pyramid.
The moon had climbed, and the light along its peak had mutated. Delicate, vein-like filaments of gold now crawled down its ancient facade, pulsing with a slow, deliberate, hungry rhythm.
The temple wasn't sleeping.
It was watching. And it was waiting for the armistice to end.