The third impact came before anyone could speak.

Stone groaned beneath the interrogation room.

A crack raced across the floor between Lyra and the table, splitting one of the old black tiles from wall to wall. Dust fell in a pale curtain from the ceiling. One of the captured Temple operatives cried out and tried to scramble backward on his knees until a royal guard forced him still.

Kael caught Lyra around the waist as the floor lurched.

Pain did not come through the bond this time.

Something colder did.

Recognition.

His.

"You know what that is," Lyra said.

Kael stared at the fractured stone.

"I know what it feels like."

Darius drew his sword again. "Which is?"

Kael's mouth tightened.

"A dragon trying very hard not to become one."

Silence struck the room harder than the tremor.

Adrian looked toward the floor. "Aren?"

"Perhaps." Kael released Lyra only after the shaking stopped. "Or whatever three centuries beneath your palace have made of him."

Cassian's attention remained fixed on the trembling prisoner.

"When did Elian leave you?"

The man blinked at him.

"Your Eminence?"

"The man calling himself Elian Vale. When did he leave the sacristy?"

"Before sunrise. He gave us the order and said he had another task below."

Cassian went white.

Lyra felt the meaning land before anyone said it.

"Below where?" she asked.

The prisoner shook his head frantically. "He didn't say."

Mira pushed herself upright against the table. Her injured face had lost what little color remained in it.

"Someone claiming to be a dead monk orders me kidnapped, tells his men the heart awakened too soon, and then announces he has business below the palace."

She glanced toward the cracked floor.

"I am prepared to call that related."

Another pulse ran through her wrist mark.

Darius hissed as his own answered.

Adrian grabbed his forearm.

The three marks did not flare this time. They pulled.

Lyra saw it clearly in the way all three turned toward the eastern wall at once, not physically but with the same involuntary shift of attention.

"You felt that," she said.

Mira nodded. "Like being summoned by an architectural feature."

Darius scowled. "East."

Adrian looked at Kael. "The chapel and heart-vault are south of here."

"The entrance you know is south," Kael said.

Lyra remembered the stone ribs around Aren in the vision.

The vault was older than the palace built over it. There was no reason to assume Saint Orienne's chapel was its only access.

Cassian turned sharply to the prisoner. "Did Elian mention the eastern crypts?"

The man's expression changed.

Only slightly.

Darius noticed.

He stepped forward.

"Answer him."

"He said—" The prisoner swallowed. "He said the old door would open when three witnesses woke."

Mira slowly raised her marked wrist.

Three witnesses.

Thorne.

Vane.

Valerius.

Adrian cursed softly.

Cassian looked devastated in a way Lyra had never seen before, but when he spoke his voice was steady.

"There are royal crypt passages east of this wing. They were sealed before Adrian was born."

"Why?" Lyra asked.

Cassian looked at Adrian.

Adrian answered instead.

"My grandfather ordered them closed after part of the lower palace collapsed. Officially."

"And unofficially?" Kael asked.

Adrian's jaw hardened. "Apparently my family has been keeping enough unofficial history to build a second kingdom beneath the first."

Darius pointed to the guards. "Two of you remain here with the prisoners. No one touches the genealogies or the residue on that table."

He looked to the third guard. "With us."

Mira pushed away from the table.

Darius frowned. "You are injured."

"And marked."

"That is not an argument for walking into an unstable underground passage."

"It is when the unstable underground passage specifically wants my wrist."

Lyra almost smiled.

Almost.

Then Stage Three stirred.

Not a full memory.

A flash.

A stone doorway.

Three hands pressed against three circles.

Aren laughing somewhere beyond them.

And Kael's voice, younger and unburdened by centuries of hatred:

"You cheat every time."

The vision vanished.

Kael had gone rigid beside her.

"You saw it?" Lyra asked.

"Yes."

"Three hands."

"Yes."

Mira's expression sharpened. "Then perhaps our inconvenient glowing wrists are keys."

Kael looked at Lyra.

Through the bond she felt his urgency, but beneath it something more dangerous.

Hope.

She took his hand.

"We find the door first. We do not free Aren until we understand what keeping him bound is doing."

His eyes flashed.

"Lyra—"

"The memory called him an anchor. If removing an anchor collapses the heart-vault, freeing him blindly could kill him, us, or everyone standing above it."

Kael's anger flared through the bond.

Not at her.

At the truth of what she had said.

After a long moment, he nodded once.

"Find the door first."

They left the interrogation room together.

The eastern passages had not been used in years. Cassian led them through a narrow servants' corridor, down two flights of stairs, and past an iron gate Adrian ordered the accompanying guard to unlock with a royal key.

Beyond it, the palace changed.

White marble gave way to older gray stone.

The air smelled of earth, rust, and something faintly sweet that reminded Lyra of burned incense.

Mira's mark pulsed with every downward step.

Darius and Adrian felt it too.

Cassian did not.

Lyra noticed he kept looking at his bare wrist.

At the first landing they found a collapsed arch.

At the second, old royal burial niches stood empty.

At the third, the corridor ended at a wall.

Not a door.

A wall.

Mira stared at it.

"This is where the mark is pulling."

Darius ran his hand over the stone. "No seam."

Adrian examined the mortar. "Older than the palace renovations."

Kael stepped closer.

His pupils narrowed.

"Not mortar."

He scraped one clawed fingertip along the line between two blocks. A faint golden spark answered.

"Dragon glass mixed with stone dust."

Cassian whispered, "To hide a passage from magic."

Kael glanced at him. "From ordinary magic."

Mira lifted her wrist.

Nothing happened.

Darius joined her.

Still nothing.

Adrian stepped forward last.

The moment all three marks came within arm's length of the wall, silver-black branches blazed beneath their skin.

Three circular impressions appeared in the stone.

Exactly as Lyra had seen in the memory.

Mira stared at them.

"I preferred being an archivist."

"You still are," Adrian said.

"Archivists traditionally open doors with keys, not ancestry."

Darius placed his palm into the first circle.

Mira took the second.

Adrian hesitated at the third.

Lyra understood why.

His family had helped preserve the lies that built this place.

Now his blood was required to uncover them.

She said nothing.

The choice had to be his.

Adrian pressed his palm to the stone.

The wall breathed.

That was the only word Lyra had for it.

The blocks shifted inward as though the entire surface inhaled. Ancient dust poured from the seams. Stone folded aside in sections, revealing a stairway descending into blackness.

Cold air rushed upward.

With it came a voice.

Not Aren's.

"Cassian."

Cassian staggered.

Lyra seized his arm.

He stared down the stairs.

"No."

The voice came again.

Older than Cassian's memories must have been, roughened by years, but unmistakably human.

"Little brother."

Cassian's face broke.

Lyra had never before seen High Priest Cassian Vale look afraid of a voice.

"Elian," he whispered.

Kael moved in front of Lyra automatically.

She stepped around him automatically.

His irritation flickered through the bond.

She ignored it.

A pale light appeared far below.

Footsteps climbed toward them.

Slow.

Unhurried.

A man emerged from the darkness wearing the white robes of the Seventh Light.

He looked perhaps fifty, though Cassian had said his brother should have been dead for thirty-one years and would now have been far older.

Silver threaded his dark hair.

His face resembled Cassian's enough that Lyra's doubt vanished before he spoke.

But his eyes were wrong.

Around each dark iris shone a thin ring of gold.

The same gold as harvested Saintess magic.

Cassian whispered, "You died."

Elian smiled sadly.

"So did many people whose power your Temple found useful."

Kael's claws lengthened.

"Where is Aren?"

Elian's gaze shifted to him.

Something like recognition softened his face.

"Still asking the wrong question, Dragon King."

The stone beneath their feet shook again.

This time the impact came from directly below Elian.

He glanced down the stairwell almost fondly.

"You think the boy is trying to escape."

Lyra's wrist-ring tightened.

Silver light crawled beneath her skin toward her heart.

Kael's answering gold flared.

Elian looked at both of them.

"He isn't."

The next blow thundered through the passage.

From somewhere deep below came Aren's scream.

Elian's smile disappeared.

"He's trying to keep something else from getting out."