Chapter Eighteen

Outside the Church, Gabe holds the door but avoids Lore, heightening her sense of isolation as night settles over the Citadel. Battling frustration, Lore meets Alie, who is heading to the holding cells to gauge the fallout from Bastian’s arrest of the Kirytheans. Lore insists on silently accompanying her.

In the cells, Maxon sits in serene meditation while Caius greets Alie with polite warmth. Alie plays the concerned dissenter, implying most of court backs Bastian, and probes their treatment. Caius reports no interrogations, framing imprisonment as time for prayer and asserting Apollius’s dominion. He pointedly references Alie’s father, Severin Bellegarde, and the need for “adaptable” faith, momentarily rattling her before she withdraws.

Leaving with the lone sconce, Alie and Lore remark on the odd lack of questioning and the prisoners’ unnatural calm. Alie takes the small reprieve as a win and retires, while Lore, exhausted by escalating crises, resolves to fix whatever the eclipse changed in Bastian and to confront the war and divine threat bearing down on them.

In Bastian’s rooms, Lore finds a hurried note in his hand: an apology and advice to talk to Gabe. Frustrated by Bastian’s shifts and her own isolation, Lore challenges the inner voice that has been guiding her. The voice admits limits outside the catacombs and reveals it is bound to Apollius. When pressed, it confirms its identity: Nyxara, naming the divine presence inside Lore and underscoring the inescapable entanglement with a god.