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“Shouldn’t you two be there?” I ask, quiet. “At the coronation.” Speaking aloud about the very thing I’m very carefully not thinking about.

Hex’s voice comes low, careful, barely a whisper. “Politics. A former prince and a former king, both openly loving humans, both standing in that hall while the new king takes his crown. It would make a statement nobody needs made today. Better we’re not seen there at all, even if it costs us both something to stay away.”

“Oh, that’s sad,” I say.

Hex and Dark are good friends, I know that much. Not being there must hurt. But then again, the Shadow Realm throne was supposed to be Hex’s, and then it was taken from Dis. Perhaps witnessing it being given to someone else would be difficult.

“In many ways,” Dis says, simply, and that, apparently, is that. He shifts slightly within Felix’s shadow. I get the distinct impression, without being able to say exactly why, that this particular topic isn’t one he wants to sit inside for very long.

Something coils around my heart. Something bitter and uncharitable. If Hex had stepped up, or if Dis had been stronger, then Dark would not be forced to take the throne.

I take a deep breath and then let go of all my nasty thoughts. They don’t help anyone.

“So!” I say brightly. “You’ve decided to watch a partial eclipse in Bristol instead. That’s fun.”

“I have seen many celestial events,” Dis intones gravely. “I am here to keep an eye on my Little Witch.”

Felix huffs beside me. “He’s been like this since the solar flare, by the way. Won’t let me out of his sight for more than an hour. Stood outside the bathroom yesterday like a sentry. I half expected him to salute when I came out.”

“That sounds exhausting,” I say.

“It is.” But there’s something soft underneath the complaint, something in the set of his mouth that gives him away completely, and I decide, out of pure kindness, not to point it out. Felix has never once admitted to being fond of anyone. I don’t intend to be the one who ruins that particular streak over a shadow being who guards bathroom doors.

I hide my smile, put my cardboard glasses on, and look up at the sky just as the moon begins its slow crawl across the sun right on schedule. The whole hillside falls into a proper hush, the sort of collective wonder you only get from strangers all watching the same impossible thing together. The light softens into something golden and strange, shadows sharpening at their edges, birds falling quiet in the trees behind us.

It’s beautiful. Properly, genuinely beautiful. For a few minutes I let myself just watch it, glasses on, forgetting entirely that anything’s waiting for me once the sun comes back.

Then it doesn’t stop.

The moon keeps going, past the point where it should have paused and started its retreat. The sun’s crescent shrinks further than any app or prediction accounted for. The light dims past gold into something greyer, colder, properly wrong.

“That’s not right,” Felix says, glasses still pressed to his face. “That is not what the app said would happen.”

Around us the festive murmur curdles into something uneasier. Phones come out everywhere, confusion rippling outward across the whole hillside like a stone dropped in a pond. The man in the anorak has stopped talking entirely, mouth slightly open, apparently finding this particular development considerably harder to account for than anything his explanations can cover.

The eclipse has gone total.

Not partial. Total. The sun’s light is swallowed whole, day collapsing into a darkness with absolutely no business existing at this hour. Actual stars appear overhead, despite it being barely three in the afternoon. The temperature drops properly, sharply, gasps rippling across the grass. Somewhere behind us a small child starts crying, in the particular frightened way children cry when even the grown-ups around them have stopped pretending everything’s fine.

I turn my head, and then blink. I can see Hex and Dis fully.

Not the crisp-edged suggestion of them I’ve gotten used to catching sideways, but properly, completely, the way I see Adam or Felix. Skin like polished obsidian, black and faintly gleaming even in this failing light. Hair the same deep, unbroken black, and clothes to match, something old-fashioned and formal, high collars and long coats that look like they belong in a portrait rather than a hillside in Bristol. Beyond the colour of them they’re entirely human in shape, cheekbones and jaws and the particular way Hex’s mouth still curls even now, and it’s almost unfair how handsome it makes them, something out of a painting nobody warned me could step off the canvas.

And then the rest of it catches up with me properly. This is the opposite of the tower and the solar flare. That was thinning, flickering, both of them fighting just to hold a single shape together while the light did something it shouldn’t. This is the dark doing something it shouldn’t, and it’s making them more solid than I’ve ever seen either of them.

Shadow beings becoming more solid is, objectively, a delightful development, and I could get thoroughly used to it. Mostly I just want to know if it’s happening to Dark too, whatever he is doing right now, whether he’s even more handsome for it, and whether I’ll ever actually get to see it for myself.

The thought doesn’t get to stay comfortable for long. Whatever’s doing this to Hex and Dis is doing it because the sky above an entire city has started misbehaving, and that’s not something to feel delighted about, however nice the side effects.

High Priestess Magdalene didn’t foresee this. I didn’t foresee this and I’m the one who’s supposed to stop this kind of nonsense from happening.

A cold, stark thought hits me. I lean towards the newly solid Hex, barely breathing the words. “What time is it? In the Shadow Realm.”

A pause, and then, low, certain.

“Nightfall. Dark’s coronation.”

Something heavy and final settles in my chest at that. The two facts lock together, this darkness, that crown, one single moment happening in two worlds at once.