LEVEL 0 IMMORTAL

Mira reached the stairs and began to descend, and only when she was three floors down did she let herself breathe.

The Lower Levels. Something waking up. Elias in the tunnels. The Commander using him.

She did not know what it meant. She did not know if she should tell Elias or keep silent. She did not know if she had just heard the truth or a lie designed to mislead a man who was already suspicious.

She did not know anything.

And that was when silver eyes appeared in front of her.

Mira stopped. The eyes were normal, and then they began to expand until they filled the entirety of her vision, and then the world tilted, and she found that she was no longer on the stairs.

She found herself in a corridor she did not recognize, a corridor of black stone that seemed to breathe, and the Commander stood before her.

Yseult did not look angry, not even surprised. She looked at Mira the way a cat looks at a mouse that has wandered into its path, curious, a bit patient, and utterly certain of the outcome.

Mira learned at this moment that Cold Mind was painfully insufficient when it came to a presence like the Commander; she could as well not have activated it for all the difference it made.

"You heard more than you should," the Commander said.

Mira's mouth opened, but no sound came out. Cold Mind screamed at her to suppress the fear, to find words, to say something that would save her life. But the fear was a tidal wave, and Cold Mind was a child's wall of sand.

"I…I did not mean…I was only…"

"Hush." The Commander stepped closer, and behind her, something moved.

Wings.

They unfolded from the Commander's shoulders like a promise and a threat, vast and terrible. One was made of ice, crystalline and sharp, each feather a dagger of frozen light. The other was darkness, living shadow that drank the glow of the Ember orbs and seemed to reach for Mira's throat.

Mira had heard stories of Angels, worshipped them as the closest to divinity. Unlike those in the cities, the settlements outside did not forget the old gods and their miracles.

But hearing and worshiping were not the same as being before the real thing.

'This is what she is,' Mira thought. 'This is what she has always been. And I have been serving breakfast to a being that could swallow the sun.

The Commander tilted her head, and the wings folded, vanished, as if they had never been. But the silver eyes remained, and they were not kind.

"You will not speak of what you heard," Yseult said.

The statement was flat and final. The words were more binding than a command, and Mira knew at the back of her mind that the Commander had allowed her to hear the previous conversation because she wanted this moment to happen.

Mira nodded. She could not stop nodding. Her head moved like a puppet's, jerking up and down.

The Commander stepped back, and the corridor shimmered. Mira blinked, and she was standing on the stairs again, three floors below the Commander's chambers, the morning light filtering through a distant window, and she was alone.

Mira leaned against the wall and slid down until she was sitting on the cold stone. Her hands were shaking. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps.

'Cold Mind,' she thought. 'Use your talent. Suppress the fear. Suppress the memory. Forget what you saw.'

But Cold Mind could not touch the image of those wings. The ice and the darkness, folded together, waiting.

She sat there for a long time, and when she finally stood, her legs were steady, and her hands were still. She walked back to the ninth floor, entered Elias's quarters, and began to clean.

She did not think about what she had heard, nor did she think about what she had seen.

Whatever speculations in her head were buried so deeply that it was almost as if they did not exist.

However, there was a small voice in her heart that was screaming, "My master is being forced to be alone. The Commander wants him to be alone…"

That voice was slowly dissipating as she was forcing her mind to forget.

Mira swept, and dusted, and polished, and when the sun set and Elias did not return, she lit a candle and sat in the kitchen, waiting.

'I will not speak of it,' she told herself. 'I will not speak of it. I will not speak of it.'

But the words echoed in her head, and the wings waited in the dark behind her eyes.

'The Lower Levels... Something waking up… Elias in the tunnels…'

'What did the Commander use him to awaken?'

Mira closed her eyes and wished, for the first time since the oasis, that her talent was stronger.

Ⓔ

The Upper Districts – The Hall of Glass

Lady Seraphine Arathor, mother of Tarian Arathor, and the seventh wife of the Lord Protector, pressed her gloved fingers against the cool surface of the viewing orb and felt the world shrink to a single point.

The orb was ancient, one of a matched set of twelve that had been salvaged from a fallen citadel three centuries before the city was built.

It showed her not what her eyes could see, but what the paired orb in the lower districts saw, a floating eye of crystal and bronze that hovered above the eastern wall, its gaze fixed on the chaos below.

The image flickered, then steadied.

There were bodies. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They poured from a pit at the center of the sealed district, a pit that seemed to have no bottom, no end, and apparently, no mercy.

And against them, the young ones fought, but mostly she was not focused on them, but on her son.

Seraphine had seen the list of names. Three thousand young Siphons, the best the city gathered, were sent into that crucible to prove themselves.

She recognized some of the sigils on their armor, the silver tree of House Valdris, the crossed hammers of the Ashford line, the crimson rose of the Alchemist Guild.

She did not envy them.

From her vantage, the battle looked less like a contest and more like a slaughter.

The creatures came in waves that never seemed to end. They died in droves, turned to ash that rose in choking clouds, and still more came.

"The formation is breaking on the eastern flank," said a voice behind her.

Lord Veyris's aide, a thin man with a ledger and no name that she cared to remember. "The Guild teams are pushing toward the pit, but the Academy's left wing is being overrun."