CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ALDRIC
I found the Socket by accident.
That's a lie. Nothing in the Threshold happens by accident—the whole dimension is designed around intentionality, doors appearing only for those who know how to want them. But it felt like an accident. It felt like wandering through impossible geometry for three days, following leads that dissolved when I looked at them directly, until finally I turned a corner that shouldn't have existed and saw a sign that read: Socket. By Appointment Only. You Don't Have One.
The door opened anyway.
She was waiting for me inside. The conservator. Morrow's wife.
"You've been looking for us," she said. Not a question. "Inquisitor Aldric. Third-rank. Bleach-born. Perfect record until two weeks ago, when you stopped reporting to your superiors and started asking questions you weren't supposed to ask."
"You know a lot about me."
"We know everything about the people hunting us. It's a survival requirement." She was small—shorter than I'd expected, with the kind of quiet intensity that made the space around her feel charged. "The question is: are you still hunting?"
I thought about the records I'd found. The text in the abandoned temple. The notes in the margins, generation after generation of questioners reaching the same terrible conclusion.
"I don't know," I said. "I'm not sure what I am anymore."
"That's the most honest thing a priest has ever said to me." She smiled. It wasn't warm, exactly, but it wasn't hostile either. "He'll want to talk to you. But first, I need to understand something."
"What?"
"What broke you." She moved closer. I had the uncomfortable sensation of being examined—not physically, but structurally. Like she could see the places where my certainty had cracked. "Inquisitors don't just stop believing. Something has to shatter. What was it for you?"
I remembered the angel. The theology is not your concern.
"They wouldn't tell me why he was wrong," I said. "I asked for the refutation—the evidence that would prove his claims were false—and they told me it wasn't my concern. Just follow orders. Just hunt the heretic. Don't think too hard about what he found."
"And that bothered you."
"The theology is my whole life. I didn't become an inquisitor for power, or status, or any of the things people accuse us of wanting. I became one because I believed in the truth. In divine order. In the idea that existence has meaning and the gods are the source of that meaning." I heard my voice breaking. Couldn't stop it. "If that's real—if the Eternal Economy works the way we're taught—then proving Morrow wrong should be easy. Show me the math that balances. Show me the evidence that souls return whole. Show me anything except silence and orders."
"And instead?"
"Instead they sent an angel to tell me my questions didn't matter." I laughed—a sound with no humor in it. "So I started looking for answers myself. And everything I found..."
"Confirmed what he found."
"Yes."
Veraine—that was her name, I remembered from the briefings—studied me for a long moment. Whatever she was looking for, she seemed to find it.
"Come with me," she said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CAEL
The inquisitor looked like someone had taken him apart and put him back together wrong.
Not physically—physically he was fine. Young, fit, the kind of priest who took care of his body because the theology said the body was a temple. But something behind his eyes was broken. Shattered, actually. The specific kind of shattered that happens when your entire worldview collapses and leaves you standing in the rubble.
I knew the look. I'd worn it myself, once. After the fever. After the seminary fire. After every moment in my life when the patterns shifted and showed me something I couldn't unsee.
"Aldric," I said. "The inquisitor who stopped reporting."
"Morrow." He seemed to be deciding whether to bow, attack, or run. Eventually he settled on standing very still. "The heretic who won't die."
"I've died several times, actually. It just doesn't stick." I gestured to a chair. "Sit. You look like you need to."
He sat. It wasn't the graceful movement of someone choosing to sit—it was the controlled collapse of someone whose legs had decided they were done for the day.
"You have questions," I said. "Everyone who finds their way here has questions. Ask."
"Is it true?"
"Which part?"
"All of it. The harvest. The Thrones feeding on souls. The math that doesn't balance." He leaned forward, and I saw something I hadn't expected: not anger, not fear, but hunger. The desperate need of someone who has lost everything and is looking for something—anything—to believe in instead. "Is any of it true?"
"Yes."
"How can you be sure?"
I told him. Not the whole story—we didn't have that kind of time—but enough. The ledger. The numbers. The moment of death when I'd seen the wheel and the Thrones and understood what they were actually doing. I laid out the evidence the way you lay out cards in a game, each piece building on the last, until the conclusion was unavoidable.
He listened. Didn't interrupt. His face went through several stages of grief while I talked—denial, anger, something that looked like bargaining—and finally settled on a hollow kind of acceptance.
"I've spent my whole life serving them," he said. "Bringing people like you to justice. And the whole time—"
"The whole time, you were serving a lie." I didn't soften it. Softening would have been cruel. "But here's the thing: you didn't know. You were doing what you genuinely believed was right. The people who taught you were doing what they genuinely believed was right. The system is designed to make believers out of honest people. That's not your fault."
"Whose fault is it?"
"The gods'. The ones who built the lie. The ones who kept it going for eight thousand years." I leaned forward. "But fault isn't the question that matters right now. The question that matters is: what are you going to do about it?"
He looked at me. The shattered thing behind his eyes was starting to reform, to coalesce into something new. Not faith—that was gone, probably forever. But something else. Purpose.
"What can I do?"
"That depends. What are you good at?"
"Finding people. Tracking heretics. Understanding how the clergy's networks work." He laughed—a bitter sound. "I know how they hunt. I know their methods. I know their weaknesses."
"Then you know how to protect against them."
"Yes."
"And you know how to reach the believers. The ones who are still inside the system. The ones who might be starting to have doubts of their own."
He went still. "You want me to turn them."
"I want you to give them the same chance you had. Show them the evidence. Let them make their own choices." I smiled. "Some of them will reject it. Most, probably. But some will see what you saw. And those ones—the ones who chose truth over comfort—they're worth more than a thousand soldiers."
"You're asking me to betray everything I was."
"I'm asking you to become something new. A true believer who believes in truth instead of lies." I held out my hand. "It won't be easy. It won't be comfortable. Most of the people you knew will hate you for it. But you'll be able to look at yourself in the mirror and know that what you see is real."
He stared at my hand for a long time.
Then he took it.
CHAPTER NINETEEN THE EMBER
They were gathering.
I felt it in the dream-currents, in the passion-flows that connected me to every intense emotion in the mortal world. Cael Morrow's rebellion was spreading. Not as a physical force—not yet—but as an idea. A possibility. A crack in the architecture of belief that had held the Ascendancy stable for eight millennia.
The other Thrones felt it too.
"The Furnace wants him destroyed," the Sun said. We were meeting in the space between spaces, where gods go to negotiate. "Immediately. Totally. Before the damage spreads."
"The Furnace always wants that." I made my appearance flicker—flames and shadows, the shape of discontent. "She wanted to destroy the last three heretics immediately too. And the three before that. Her solution to every problem is fire."
"Fire has been effective."
"Fire has been suppressive. There's a difference." I turned to face him directly. The Sun was old—the oldest of us, the first to ascend, the one who remembered what we'd been before. His exhaustion was visible in ways that the other Thrones couldn't see. "This one's different. He died and came back. The harvesting mechanism doesn't work on him. You can't just burn something that refuses to stay burnt."
"Then what do you suggest?"
"Negotiation."
The word hung in the not-air between us. The Furnace—present as a radiating intensity, a pressure rather than a form—made a sound that was probably meant to be contempt.
"Negotiate with a heretic."
"Negotiate with someone who has a point." I felt the others recoil. Good. They needed to hear this. "We've been feeding for eight thousand years. The Gnaw grows larger every century. The cycle becomes more unstable. How long do we pretend this is sustainable?"
"It's sustainable until it isn't," the Corona said—and everyone went silent.
The Corona never spoke. Hadn't spoken in three thousand years. Even I had forgotten what its voice sounded like: resonant and strange, the sound of something that had moved beyond anything we understood.
"The mortal sees truly," the Corona continued. "The pattern is clear. We damaged the wheel when we took our positions. We have been slowing the damage by feeding, but feeding does not heal. It only delays. Eventually, we will face a choice: remove ourselves and let the wheel attempt to heal, or continue feeding until the Gnaw consumes everything and there is nothing left to feed upon."
"You knew this," the Sun said. His voice was hollow. "All this time. You knew."
"I have known for millennia. I waited for someone else to say it." The Corona's presence pulsed—amusement, maybe, or something too alien to have a name. "The mortal has said it. Now we must decide what to do."
"Destroy him," the Furnace insisted. "Destroy the information. Restore stability."
"Stability is an illusion," the Corona said. "The pattern is already in motion. Others will find what he found. Others will ask what he asked. The question is whether we fight the inevitable or prepare for it."
"Prepare how?"
"That is the choice before us." The Corona began to recede—presence fading back into the silence it had maintained for three thousand years. "I have stated my observation. The decision is yours. I suggest you make it quickly. Time moves differently for mortals than for us, and the mortal is not idle."
Then it was gone. Back to whatever state of existence it occupied when it wasn't speaking truths that shattered the room.
The Furnace raged. The Sun despaired. The others—the Blaze, the Flame, the Spark—wavered between positions, uncertain and afraid.
I remained silent. Thinking about what the Corona had said.
The pattern is already in motion.
Maybe that was true. Maybe Cael Morrow was inevitable—the culmination of eight thousand years of accumulating stress, the crack that would finally bring the whole structure down.
Or maybe he was something else. A possibility. A door that could open in more than one direction.
I still wanted to meet him. Not to destroy him—to understand him. To taste that intensity one more time before everything changed.
Whatever happened next, I wanted to feel something real.
Even if feeling it was the last thing I ever did.
CHAPTER TWENTY VERAINE
The information started spreading at midnight.
We'd planned it carefully—Cael's patterns, Sorrow's networks, Aldric's knowledge of clergy vulnerabilities. Simultaneous releases to a hundred different points. Hidden archives in every Reach. Copies planted in seminaries, universities, libraries, anywhere that scholars gathered and questions were asked.
By dawn, the truth would be everywhere.
By the next day, it would be unstoppable.
I watched Cael work and tried to quiet the fear in my chest.
Not fear for myself—I'd made my peace with the risks long ago. Fear for him. For us. For what we were about to unleash on a world that might not be ready for it.
"You're doing the thing again," he said without looking up.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you worry so loud I can hear it from across the room."
"I'm not worried. I'm... strategically concerned."
He laughed. It was the good kind of laugh—the one that meant he was present, here with me, not lost in his patterns. He stood, crossed to where I was sitting, took my hands.
"Tell me."
"What if it doesn't work? What if we spread the truth and people just... reject it? Choose the comfortable lie over the terrible reality?"
"Some of them will. Most of them, probably, at first." He squeezed my fingers. "But that's not the metric. We don't need everyone. We need enough. Enough questioners, enough doubters, enough people who see the cracks and can't stop picking at them. The system survives on universal belief. We don't have to destroy universal belief—just make it less than universal."
"And the gods? When they respond?"
"They'll try to suppress it. Obviously. They'll hunt us, discredit us, probably try to kill us in ways that get around your thread." His smile was sharp, feral, the expression he'd worn in the Seams when the odds were worst and the only option was forward. "But suppression has costs. Every time they silence someone, they prove the point. Every disappeared scholar, every burned archive, every inquisitor who stops reporting—it all adds to the evidence. The harder they fight, the more obvious it becomes that they have something to hide."
"That's a dangerous game."
"It's the only game." He pulled me to my feet. "But I didn't bring you in here to talk strategy. I brought you in here because it's midnight, and the information is spreading, and in a few hours everything is going to change. I wanted..." He paused. Searching for words, which was unlike him. "I wanted a moment. Before. With you."
I kissed him. It seemed like the most efficient response.
"We might die tomorrow," I said against his lips.
"We've died before. It doesn't seem to stick."
"That's not as reassuring as you think it is."
"Nothing I say is as reassuring as I think it is. You married me anyway."
At dawn, the first reports came in.
Sorrow's agents, confirming delivery. Aldric's contacts, confirming receipt. The truth had reached a hundred points simultaneously, too many to suppress, too widespread to contain.
And then the other reports started.
Angels descending on seminaries. Divine servants hunting scholars. The Thrones responding with everything they had, trying to contain a fire that had already spread beyond their reach.
"They're fighting it," Sorrow said. Her face was grim. "Hard. The casualties—"
"I know." Cael's voice was quiet. "I knew there would be casualties. I counted them. Calculated the cost against the alternative." He looked at me. "It doesn't make it easier."
"It's not supposed to."
The thread between us pulsed—a reminder that we were connected, that whatever happened next, we would face it together. I reached for him, took his hand, held on.
Outside, the world was burning. Inside, we waited.
The war for the truth had begun.
End of Chapters 17-20