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“Where are they?” I rasped, my voice small in this cavernous hall.

“This is a matter of Heaven,” Malakar said, his voice sharp. “It does not concern the fallen or the gray. It only concerns the corruption of our own.”

He stepped down from the dais, holding a scroll. But he did not offer it to me. Instead, he spoke from it while his voice echoed off the vaulted ceiling.

“Guardian Remiel. You stand accused of high treason. Of consorting with a fallen. Of abandoning your post. Of murdering a seraph of the high order.”

The words hit me like physical blows, but they were dull compared to the ache in my chest. I remembered the chapel. I remembered Cassia. I remembered her eyes as black as the void and the way she had looked at me while our bodies were entwined.

“She did not mean to,” I whispered. “It was the ring. That was the corruption.”

Malakar stopped in front of me. He looked deep into my eyes, and his expression softened into a cruelty masquerading as kindness. “Oh, Remiel. You still do not see it.” He shook his head slowly. “There was no ring. No accidental corruption. She did this to you deliberately.”

I froze. “What…?”

“She hates you,” Malakar said softly. “Did you think she forgave you? Did you think a few years of shadowing her would erase centuries of pain? You cut her wings, Remiel. You severed her from the light. She has spent every moment of her exile planning this. She seduced you. Twisted your mind with blood magic. Made you kill Serion so that you would be as damned as she is. It was not love. It was retribution.”

The lie was precise and surgical, targeting the deepest and most festering wound in my soul. The guilt. The fear that I was unlovable. The terror that my greatest sin could never be washed away.

I staggered back as the room spun. It could not be true. I had felt the bond. I had felt the heat of her skin and the truth in her touch. “No,” I said. “I felt it. The tether.”

“A leash,” Michael said, walking back toward his throne. “She put a leash on a dog. And now that she has used you to destroy our work, she has cast you aside.” His bright wings unfurled, spanning the width of the dais. “Your essence is tainted, Remiel. You reek of the pit. Volatile. Broken. You cannot be allowed to walk the realms in this state.”

“What will you do?”

“Cleanse you,” Malakar said. “We will place you in stasis.”

Stasis. The word was a death sentence. It wasn’t a sleep. It was a void. A suspension of being where the mind was scoured clean by the white fire of Heaven.

“Since it looks like short bursts are not helping anymore, we have decided to extend the stasis to fifty years.”

Fifty years of burning. Fifty years of screaming in a silent box.

“It will be enough time to scrub the corruption from your old soul. Enough time to mend your fractured mind. When you wake up, you will be whole again. Pure. You will forget her.”

Panic flared in my chest—hot, frantic, expanding. My breaths came in ragged gasps. The room seemed to shrink, the white walls pressing in.

Cleanse you.

Forget her.

Broken.

The words bounced around in my skull, fracturing the walls Michael had built in my mind over and over for centuries. The pressure built, but it wasn’t panic. It was a memory, a dam breaking.

I was not the soldier he had forged nor the angel he had painted white. I was born from the bedrock of creation before the first star dared to ignite.

A roar tore from my throat, not a scream of terror but a sound of primordial rage that shook the very foundations of the hall. “NO!”

I looked up at Michael and saw him for what he truly was: a usurper draped in stolen silk, a jailer posing as a king.

“I remember,” I snarled, my voice layering over itself until it vibrated with the sound of grinding tectonic plates. “I remember everything.”

Michael’s eyes narrowed, but I stepped forward, and the marble floor cracked into spiderwebs beneath my boots.

“I am not your servant!” I shouted, the words echoing like thunder. “I am not a fucking angel! I am Balance. I am the son of the first sky, and I am stronger than both of you.”

My light exploded outward, but it was not the sterile light of Heaven. It was bronze. Molten, heavy ancient bronze swirled around me like a sentient storm, eating at the hall’s thin light and pushing against Michael’s radiance until it dimmed. I raised my hand, and the air warped, bending to my will, as I reached for the Blade of Glory.