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“Stop what?” Julen asked. Both he and Selinne leaned in, pulses hammering.

“The Fracture. He was trying to time it.” She made herself say the rest. “He wanted it to open.”

Selinne and Julen looked at each other, disbelief, fear, anger flaring hot and fast. Maia didn’t stop.

“They’re done with the rebellion,” she said. “It’s beyond that now.”

She swallowed.

“They’re going to open the Fracture completely. Not to fight. To let it consume everything: the Archive, Eryssan, all of us. They believe it’s the only balance left.”

Silence fell, thick and suffocating.

“And Caelith?” Julen asked. “He’s part of this?”

“He was,” Maia said. “For a long time, he was the reason they trusted anyone at all.”

“I knew it,” Julen said. “My father was right!”

Maia’s voice wavered as she looked Julen straight in the eyes. “But he stopped, Julen.”

They both looked intently at her.

“He didn’t abandon it because it was wrong,” Maia said quietly. “He abandoned it because something happened. He… didn’t always hate humans.”

Julen scoffed. “That’s hard to believe.”

“I know. But listen.” She swallowed. “He had a brother. Before the first rebellion.” Her voice caught on it. “His brother believed the Vow could mean something - that coexistence meant something real. The overseers were draining the Fracture too hard, too fast, and he tried to stop them. He held the breach with his own hands rather than let it take Caelith. It killed him instead. And afterward, nobody so much as spoke his name. He was just another expendable tool that had outlived its usefulness.”

Julen and Selinne said nothing.

“Caelith didn’t start as a monster,” she said. “He was made into one. By us.”

A sharp and dangerous understanding flickered across their faces.

“And then he stopped,” Julen breathed. “Because of you.”

The words felt too small for what the memory had shown her. But they were true.

“And because of that,” she said, forcing the words out, “the Umbralyn know he’s compromised.”

Selinne sighed. “They knew he was the one who stopped the Hollow Wraith. Who saved Julen. They knew he was foiling the plan.”

Maia nodded. “I don’t believe they’ll kill him,” she added. “Not yet. He knows too much. He’s still an integral part of their infiltration plan. They still need him.”

“So where do you think they’ve taken him?” Selinne asked.

“Like Julen said, the stone only shows the past,” Maia said. “But the rebels always seemed to stay dangerously close to the Fracture. I imagine with the defence lines they’ve been sending that way, he’s being held there. As a prisoner, of course. But also as help. He knows how to open the Fracture. He knows the creatures it keeps.”

Julen’s jaw tightened. “The glasshounds on the road to Meridon. Was that him too?”

No one answered. None of them knew.

“I believe he’s still trying to save us,” Maia offered. “And it’s costing him.”

She thought of Caelith alone, somewhere deep and dark, paying the price for the very thing that should have made him safest: choosing not to become the monster they wanted him to be.

She stood. “We need to find him,” she said. “Now. We don’t have time for more planning. Every hour he’s gone, the Fracture gets closer to alignment. He was slowing it down. If they’ve removed him—”