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I wanted to cut them down. I would tear this hall apart stone by stone until I found my way back to Cassia.

But Michael did not flinch, nor did he look afraid. He looked bored. He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, and the floor around me erupted.

Bars of jagged metal shot up from the marble and slammed together to form a cage. I slammed into them, expecting them to shatter under my bronze fire. Instead, my skin sizzled, and I screamed.

It was not celestial steel. It was iron. Cold, black, and infernal iron. The metal of Hell here in the heart of Heaven.

The iron leached the heat from my blood, suffocating the bronze fire and pressing it back under my skin until I fell to my knees. I clutched the bars while the smell of my own burning flesh filled my nose.

I chuckled grimly, looking up at him through the smoke. “Hypocrite.”

Michael descended the stairs of the dais slowly, looking at me through the bars with a face twisted in a sneer. “Your powers are nothing without your brother, boy,” he spat. “You are half a battery. A spark without fuel.” He stopped inches from the cage, his voice dropping to a whisper. “And he is already being cleansed, his memory wiped again. And then he will be on his merry way, watching my other daughter. But I am so tired of playing this charade with you two.” He turned his back on me, pacing with his hands clasped behind his back. “Every era, you wake up. Every era, you remember. And every era, I have to put you back to sleep.” He spun around, his eyes blazing. “The faster I become the true lord of this universe, the faster I can get rid of you primordials once and for all!”

He screamed the last words, the sound of a desperate king clinging to a crown that was too heavy for his head. I seethed behind the bars. The iron burned my palms, but the hate burned hotter. He wasn’t judging me. He was afraid of me. Afraid of us.

Michael stopped and looked at me, his face going blank. He jerked his chin.

Pain exploded in my chest.

A celestial blade had rammed through my back, shattering my sternum and bursting out of my chest. I gasped, blood filling my mouth. I looked down to see the blade’s tip glowing with a pale light.

It wasn’t meant to kill. It was meant to anchor.

I tried to reach for it, to pull it out, but my arms wouldn’t move. The blade had paralyzed me. I knew with the last flicker of my fading consciousness that it was not coming out. Not anytime soon.

Darkness took me.

The memory releases me with a violence that shudders my bones. It then shoves me back into the present, abrupt and brutal.

Gasping, I stumble in the gray dust of Limbo, boots skidding over calcified ash, while the phantom sensation of a celestial blade shattering my sternum continues to echo in my chest. For a heartbeat, I am back in the Celestial Tribunal Hall, breathing sterility and blood and tasting Michael’s rage like copper on my tongue.

The silence then rushes in to fill the space it leaves behind.

It is heavy. Absolute.

“Easy,” Jareth says beside me, his voice threaded with static. He catches my elbow before my knees buckle. His grip is firm, the strength of an angel who has not fallen but walks the line close enough to feel the heat. “You went somewhere deep, Brother. I thought we lost you to the static.”

I blink hard. The white marble and judgment of my memory dissolve into an endless swirl beneath a flat lightless sky. The tower pulses in the distance, a white wound in the gray. It feels impossibly far, never seeming to move.

“I am fine,” I rasp, gently shaking him off as I straighten. “I simply remembered.”

“The blade?” Vyxia asks from my other side. Her stride is smooth and measured, long steps eating the ground as if Limbo itself is something to be conquered through persistence alone. Her violet eyes sweep the horizon with a soldier’s precision, and her hand loosely rests on the hilt of her sword, ready.

“The betrayal,” I say.

We walk. The crunch of our boots through the gray dust becomes a steady cadence, a grim metronome. The ash shifts beneath our feet. No wind stirs it. No scent clings to it. The tower’s distant thrum is the only other sound, steady and wrong.

It is a mostly suffocating silence, thick with the weight of everything we are not saying.

I glance at my companions in this desolate march.

Jareth walks with his hands shoved into the pockets of his coat, his shoulders loose in a way that pretends to be careless. He wears his celestial heritage like a leather jacket: casual, slightly scuffed, but unmistakably bright. His jaw is tight, and every few steps, his gaze flicks forward, drawn to the woman leading us. The hunger in his eyes is sharp, barely leashed.

Vyxia does not look back. She moves with the grace of a queen and the fatigue of a veteran. There is power in the way she walks but also a sense of constant readiness, as if she expects the ground to give way beneath her. Whenever he shifts too close, her shoulders tense, like a wound that still remembers how it was made.

The air between them is thick enough to choke on. It is not merely history but something tangled and unresolved, a knot pulled too tight and left to fester.

“So,” I say, letting my voice cut through the dead air, “how did you two meet? The angel and the princess. It sounds like the start of a bad joke.”