They stopped before a pair of great doors. Once beautiful, carved scrollwork, gold leaf, lacquered black, they were now mostly slag. Toxic ink had eaten the finish to a sickly shine, and where the veneer had sloughed away, pale wood showed through like exposed bone. From the seams bled Sol: orange, dense, and wrong enough to make teeth ache. The thin yellow current they'd followed through the mansion ended here, pooling at the threshold like a trail that refused to cross on its own.

Ivan swallowed. His voice came out thinner than usual. "We're sure there isn't… you know… an Angel behind that, or someone on that level?"

Celestine didn't answer. The sweat at her temple said enough.

Kaiser smiled, unbothered. "Only one way to learn."

"Kaiser—!" Celestine snapped, but he was already pushing.

The doors gave with a dead, wet crack and swung inward on half-melted hinges.

Sol hit them like heat from a forge. For Ivan and Aria it was a physical thing, lungs locking, heads going light, skin buzzing as if held too close to a fire. Aria stepped closer to Kaiser by reflex, small frame angled forward like she might shield him from anything that tried. Celestine's mouth flattened, the last of her easy calm burned off in a breath. Kaiser didn't stop smiling.

The chamber beyond made mockery of the word room. Twenty meters to the dome. Fifty across. A perfect circle made of white marble walls and a white marble floor, made dirty by what had spilled here: broad fans of black ink cooked at the edges to a tarry red, glossy pools that reflected the ceiling like oil lakes under moonlight. The light itself didn't seem to come from anywhere.

Two things seized the eye.

The first was above them.

A dragon covered the dome. Not sketched, not even suggested, but placed. Its body coiled to fit the circle, wings sweeping the curve in a span that felt larger than the room allowed. Scales were laid in strokes that looked like hammered metal—blues so deep they passed for black until the light turned and found the color hidden inside. The eyes were molten gold, half-lidded. Smoke hung in its throat, caught at the instant between breath and fire, breath detailed so cleanly the illusion warmed the room. Along the wing's edge, the paint thinned to near transparency, letting the white undercoat read as thin membrane. A single claw pressed the dome with enough weight to make fine hairline cracks radiate from the point, as if the artist had gone one step further and painted strain. It did not feel like a painting. It felt like a ceiling that had chosen to be a dragon.

The second was at the center.

She sat in the middle of the circle as if dropped there and forgotten. Slouched forward, spine curved, head tipped so hair fell like a curtain and hid her eyes. The rest of her was clear enough. Black body-suit, if you could call it that, cut in sharp, inhuman panels, the seams glowing a slow, arterial red. That same red bled out of her skin in thin ribbons, floating instead of rising, coiling around her arms and thighs in lazy orbit. Long ears, rabbit-like, hung limp, their tips stained the color of fresh ink. Bare feet rested in the center of a circle drawn in living scarlet; the lines crept and receded the width of a hair with each of her breaths,.

Something drifted behind her left shoulder. Something that was not quite a mask nor quite a skull. A chunk of glossy dark matter with a single red eye embedded in it, the iris widening and narrowing without pattern, tracking them all at once. Smaller flecks, broken lenses, splinters of bone and scraps of metal turned with it as if the whole cluster were held inside an invisible current.

Ivan swallowed hard and tried to keep his voice level. "Kaiser… what do we do?"

The reply he expected was not the one he got. Kaiser turned, not to answer him, but to face Celestine. His tone was casual, almost conversational. "Can you handle this?"

Ivan blinked. The words landed like a misfired arrow. His stomach dropped. Out of all the Sol he had ever felt, this was the most suffocating, most oppressive wave he had ever experienced up close. Every nerve in him screamed that even all of them together might barely manage to bring this thing down. And Kaiser was asking if Celestine could handle it alone? The thought was absurd enough to make his knees feel weak.

Celestine stared at him, stunned, but for a very different reason. She'd already noticed what Ivan had missed: the Sol here wasn't all coming from the slouched woman. Most of it, an even heavier, more saturated presence, was leaking from the smaller set of ornate double doors behind her.

The implication was obvious. Kaiser didn't intend to stay. He meant to go deeper.

"…Why?" she asked. It wasn't a demand so much as a quiet refusal to believe what she was thinking.

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Kaiser didn't answer right away. Instead, he reached into the satchel at his side and drew out a small, weathered book, its leather cover faded to a pale brown, edges worn, the thin clasp tarnished but functional. He handed it to her without ceremony.

Celestine hesitated, the weight of it in her hands feeling disproportionate to its size. The slouched woman didn't move, didn't so much as breathe differently as Celestine unfastened the clasp and opened it.

The pages inside were sparse. Many were empty. The ones with ink were written in a neat, delicate writing, the strokes controlled and light, as if each word had been considered before it was allowed to exist.

On the first written page, she found the name: Rosaline.

Beneath it, in smaller script: One of Hieronymus Bosch's love. The painter's brush was his soul, and some of the pieces he made were never meant to be hung on walls.

Celestine felt her throat tighten. She had suspected Bosch's hand in this already, his impossible mastery of create life from nothing, but seeing it here in writing felt like confirmation she had never wanted.

The text continued, each line darker than the last.

Embodiment of still waters.

Holds the gift I once cherished above all others: command over the currents, the rain, the tides.

In prophecy, only a woman may draw blood from her. A man's strike will slide from her like water over stone.

Her body is a canvas; her Sol, the paint. She bleeds what she wishes to, when she wishes to.

Celestine's eyes moved to the next page. A sketch took up most of it, a precise charcoal rendering of Rosaline's face. Not as she was now, slouched and shadowed, but upright, regal, smiling in a way that was almost warm. Almost. The details were intimate: the fine strands of hair, the faint line of a scar near the left ear, the subtle curve of lips drawn by someone who had traced them before.

Below the sketch, more notes, this time looser, harder to read:

She loved the sound of storms against glass.

Her laughter was rare, but never small.

If she wakes fully, do not speak her name unless you mean it.

She remembers everything. She will remember you.

Celestine's fingers tightened on the book. She turned one more page, but found it blank except for a single line written in the bottom corner, almost as an afterthought:

She is not gone.

Celestine shut the notes slowly, feeling the weight of the words settle in her bones. She looked back at Kaiser, her voice barely above a whisper. "…You're serious."

Kaiser's smile didn't waver. "I don't joke about matters like this."

Behind them, Ivan shifted his weight, eyes flicking between the two of them like a man watching a conversation in a language he didn't understand but knew was about him all the same. "Wait—what are you talking about? You're not actually considering—"

Kaiser glanced back at the smaller doors past Rosaline, then to Celestine again. "You can handle her. I'll handle what's behind her. There is a serious possibility that whatever is there will join her, once she awakes."

Celestine wanted to argue. Every instinct told her this was wrong, that splitting here, with this, was reckless. But the prophecy… the book's warning… the truth that she, and she alone, could hurt Rosaline… all of it coiled in her chest and left her without words.

Rosaline still hadn't moved. Yet somehow, Celestine felt the weight of her gaze through the veil of hair, like a ripple against the skin.

And the worst part was, she knew the creature was listening.

Kaiser took a single step forward, the sound of his boot against the marble cutting through the heavy silance. His gaze slid briefly to Aria. "You're with me."

The girl blinked, then straightened, the words striking her like a jolt of current.

Ivan's brow furrowed. "Kaiser—"

He didn't stop. His voice came calm. "She can handle this on her own." He tipped his head toward Celestine. "What she needs from you, Ivan, is simple—keep her standing. You've got your duplicates. Use them. There's barely any light in here, and so she can't recover naturally. You keep her supplied with med-peks and keep yourself alive. That's your role."

Ivan's jaw tightened. "A man can't hurt her. You said it yourself—"

"I don't need you to," Kaiser said, eyes flicking back just long enough to make the point land. "I need you to be useful to Celestine."

He turned back toward the center of the room, toward the other set of doors that loomed behind the slouched figure. "Just as Aria will be useful to me."

If the remark stung Ivan, Aria didn't notice, or didn't care. She felt her pulse thrum hot in her throat, pride swelling past the fear that had been sitting there since they entered. Needed. Chosen. She didn't even hesitate; she crossed to Kaiser's side with quick, sure steps.

The two of them started forward, the sound of their passage muffled against the marble. The room's vastness swallowed them. They passed through the first half of the chamber, the woman still hunched as if she were no more than a doll abandoned mid-play.

They were almost level with her when the air shifted.

Her head lifted, not much, just enough for the hair to part and show the faint glint of her eyes. Her back straightened with a grace that felt too sudden, too complete to belong to something human. In one smooth motion, her arm swept up across their path.

Crimson flared. An umbrella bloomed into her hand, its color deep red and glossy, as if lacquered in fresh blood. The handle curved like the spine of some long-forgotten creature, the ferrule tipped in a needle point.

Kaiser's sigh was quiet but carried in the strange acoustics of the room. "Can you really afford to get distracted with me right now?"

She didn't move. Not a twitch, not a blink. The ribbons of red around her body drifted lazily in the air, as if even gravity bowed to her pace. And then the room lit like a forge.

A column of pure white light roared in from the side, slamming into her with enough force to tear the air apart. The impact drove her from her place in an explosion of fractured brilliance, scattering her form into streaks of radiance and ink that crashed into the far wall high above. The sound landed a half-breath later, a hollow, ringing boom that echoed up into the painted dome.

Dust drifted down in slow spirals.

Kaiser brushed it from the curve of his pauldron with two fingers, the motion almost lazy. He looked at Aria, his smile faint but there all the same.

"Shall we?"

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