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I look down at the bronze tome beneath my hands, where the memory is seared onto the page. “Two coins,” I whisper.

The realization is a cold knot in my stomach.

I look up at the keeper, who is watching me with its steady hourglass eyes. “There were only ever two coins,” I say, my voice rising. “One for each black witch. One was stolen from the witch in Kraków. We saw the aftermath.” I look at Sera, who is sitting beside me with her face pale and her eyes wide. “One was with Krevna. I used it. I watched her use it. So, where did Lilith get the coin she had used to banish me?”

Sera frowns. “If Lilith had a coin…that means she took it.”

“She killed the witch in Kraków.” The horror dawns on me. “She didn’t just wait for us to find the passage. She hunted her down. She wanted a way out of Hell. She wanted a door.”

“But Kraków’s coin…” Sera stops. “Elara had both coins. She used it to open her way in.”

“How?” I ask, turning to the keeper. “If I used Krevna’s coin fifty years ago, and Lilith had the other…how did Elara have two?”

The keeper shifts, and the surrounding shadows seem to darken.

“Is Krevna dead?” I ask quietly.

“Yes. Mother Krevna is dead.”

“Then where did her power go?”

“It was decanted. Krevna’s essence…her knowledge, her power, her connection to the void…was placed into a vessel.”

“Elara,” Sera whispers.

“Elara carried the essences of both black witches,” the keeper says. “She was not just a witch. She was a reservoir. She held the weight of centuries of dark magic. The coins were given to her for safekeeping. Too many beings were hunting them, I assume.”

Sera stands, her chair scraping against the stones. “That…that’s impossible. She was strong, yes, but…”

“It is also why she was supposed to be very hard to kill. And why the fact that you killed her so easily, Seraphine, is…strange.”

She freezes. “What do you mean? I saw her die.” Her voice trembles. “I cut her myself. I watched her life leave her eyes.”

“You saw her body crumple, yes.” It leans forward. “But what happened to the body after you left the Crossroads?”

She stares at it. “I…” She falters. “I didn’t check. I was…I was so angry. I just wanted everything to be over. I just wanted the hurt to stop… I left her there.”

“You left her bleeding. But did you leave her dead?”

Sera looks at me, terror dawning in her eyes. “I didn’t check,” she whispers.

The silence in the archive is thunderous.

“If she isn’t dead,” I say, my voice cold, “then where is she?”

The keeper taps the open page with a clawed finger, the sound echoing like a gavel. “The location of the witch is a question for the present. We are here for the history of the past. You cannot find the truth until you understand what you have become.”

Sera releases my arm and steps back. Her face is hard. “Finish the past,” she says. “And we might figure out the present.”

I nod and look down at the dark leather of the tome, pushing the thoughts of Elara down.

36. Cassia

The return to Sighișoara was not a homecoming but a retreat into a mausoleum. The fortress loomed against the bruised twilight sky, a jagged silhouette of stone teeth biting into the clouds’ gray underbellies. It did not welcome me. It merely tolerated my presence.

I walked up the winding path, my stolen boots crunching on the frozen gravel, loud and intrusive in the dead silence. The trees, stripped bare by winter and my perception, reached out with skeletal fingers as if to drag me down into the earth.

I was hollow. That was the only word for it. The light I had bartered to Krevna left its absence like an amputation, a phantom limb that ached with a dull throb. The void that remained was not power but hunger. A vast, echoing cavern inside my chest.