Page 21
My mask felt too tight against my face, and the shadows inside my head grew suspiciously quiet.
As I passed beneath a narrow archway, I paused. There was something ancient about this cathedral. Not Roman or Gothic but more primal. An image flared behind my eyes like an echo, half formed: a younger version of myself, barefoot and bleeding, stepping over an almost identical threshold in another lifetime. It felt real, like a vision or a warning.
The jesters didn’t wait. Their imagined giggles rang ahead, bouncing through the hallway. Blue and violet lanterns cast dancing shadows without a source—some mimicked my movements, others didn’t. One shadow ahead of me wore wings. I pointedly did not.
The cathedral narrowed into a stairwell that spiraled downward, its railings carved with faces caught mid-scream, mid-laugh, and mid-prayer. The air thickened with incense and something more arcane—burnt sage, clove, and wet iron. My heels struck the first step, and the air tightened around my ribs.
I was not afraid. I was resolute, ready to face whatever the Undermarket had in store tonight.
But I was being seen, not by the jesters but by the cathedral itself. It watched me descend as something it had once held and lost and now returned. My name whispered once through the arches, not spoken but exhaled.
“Cassiel,” the wall seemed to say.
I did not answer.
I hate that fucking name…
“Why do you hate it so, your true name?” the keeper asks.
I go still. The silence between us thickens until it feels like a rope drawn taut across my throat. I want to refuse, but the truth pushes out of me, ragged and unwilling.
“Because it was never mine,” I say. “When the first angels were made, they were given choices—scrolls of names unfurled before them, each bound to a virtue, a purpose, or a burden they may claim for themselves. They chose what they would stand for.” My fists tighten in my lap, nails carving crescents into my palms. “But I was never given that. Neither was Sera. We were not forged in Heaven’s vaults; we were born of flesh. There was no choice. No scroll. No ceremony. Michael and Lilith named us as one, a name for a weapon or a curse. Cassiel—the keeper of silence. Seraphine—the watcher of the passage. Why? What did they see? Prophecy? Punishment? Or only experiments dressed as daughters?”
The keeper tilts its skull, grains shifting in its hourglass eyes. “Who knows what passed through Michael’s or Lilith’s minds when they named you? Even the first names were given for reasons no one remembers. Perhaps not even the receivers themselves.”
I bite back the fury rising in me. The silence is pressing down, heavy and absolute. I cannot bear it. “You wanted a story. Then let me speak it.”
With a skeletal hand, the keeper gestures, sweeping me onward.
Silently, the descent ended, and the corridor widened and opened. The Undermarket unfolded before me as a cathedral turned inside out.
The chamber was vast, impossibly so, and tiers spiraled downward into it like an amphitheater that someone had carved. I could not see the bottom, only a shimmering haze of heat and shadows. Above was no ceiling, just floating canopies of thin iridescent fabric that billowed and shimmered in a wind that did not blow. Lanterns hung without chains or anchors, their flames suspended midair like captive stars. Each one burned a different hue: some glacial blue, others warm amber, and some eldritch green. The light refracted across the stones, creating illusions: archways where there were none, faces that blinked out when I turned to look.
Stalls curved along each descending tier, forming a spiral of relics and forbidden trades. The vendors were as surreal as their wares. A hunched crone with lips sewn shut presided over a velvet-lined cart of blood-sealed scrolls, her milky yet watchful eyes following me with something like recognition. A trio of exiled fae stood atop a dais of bone-white stones, their ears ringed in gold and their mouths black with ink. They sold obsidian apples that throbbed like hearts and promised to erase memories with a single bite. Further down, a shadow-cloaked merchant bartered over a memory bottled in oil, pouring it between two crystal flasks like perfume.
Everywhere I turned, something stranger awaited.
A tall man in a silver-braided coat turned to face me and dropped into a deep bow. Others followed, a slow ripple of deference passing through the crowd like a shadow moving against the wind. An exiled fae woman selling petrified tears paused, narrowed her eyes, and whispered in an ancient tongue under her breath that made the hair on my arms rise. Another hooded figure took a single step backward as I passed, its thread recoiling into shadow as if afraid to touch mine.
The Undermarket was alive, like a creature breathing beneath the weight of centuries, and now watched me with a strange knowing. It wasn’t just because I was a guest of honor; it remembered. After all, celestial exile marked me as a key player in the intricate web of fate that had governed this place.
One by one, the guests turned toward the far end of the circle, toward an arch. It stood like a wound in the stones, black and wrapped in a fabric that moved like skin over bones. Torches, burning with a colorless flame, lined either side.
The arch called not with sound but with sensation. My core tightened, gently pulling forward. I took a step.
Every creature followed—some with reverence, some with hunger, and some with fear. I walked among them like a match through dry brush. Eyes followed me. Names whispered. The air charged, as if before a storm, as if I was no longer a guest but an invocation. Above us, the floating lanterns dimmed, and the light faded to deep violet and then to crimson.
The revel had begun. And I had not entered it. It had entered me.
11. Cassia
The jesters dissolved into the mist, their final exaggerated bows a lingering mockery. The smoke they left behind, thin and acrid, curled around my ankles and faintly smelled of a storm about to break. They writhed against my skin for a moment before fading.
I stood alone before the archway, a dark maw in the ancient stone. Two statues framed it: twin sentinels hewn from dark cracked marble, their forms weathered by time. One wore a tight blindfold that bit deep into the contours of its stone face, blood-like streaks carved where the fabric dug deep. The other had a cruel gag stitched into place, rough twine pulling its mouth into a permanent scream. Their hands were bound before them, one pair clenched in what might have been prayer and the other slack in utter resignation.
A warning. A promise. Choose your poison.
Beyond them, the tunnel widened, lit from within by a furious pulsing crimson light that throbbed like a diseased heart. The battered stone wall at the tunnel’s end bore bold scrawling letters in bright red neon that read “HOLY DAGGER.”
