25. Syneca
Syneca
When you cannot recall whether you dreamed a thing or lived it, it was a warning either way. Dreams and prophecy share a border, and the guards are easily bribed.
The rune controlling the evidence filing system hummed beneath my hands as I worked through another extraction.
I’d never seen so many files associated with one filing number.
But then again, I usually dealt with the Magistrate’s finances and this…
took a turn. The dragon scales were classified as evidence. This was a criminal investigation.
Silas stood at my back, silent and still, watching the door while I tore through records that should have been straightforward and weren’t.
The letters should have led me to simple acquisition information about the red dragon scales. Where they came from. When they were taken, stolen, or otherwise acquired. If they were linked to the Chancellery, there had to be a reason.
As I thumbed through another file of records, I considered the alternative; that the scales had simply been placed into a jar that already had a filing code etched into it. That Eda Mire had used whatever container was convenient and the numbers meant nothing.
But the jar had been sealed shut with magic.
Permanent runes that would have required breaking the glass to open it any other way.
Eda Mire didn’t seal things permanently by accident.
She didn’t waste that kind of power on storage.
And she was fury-born, linked to the dragons, if only by reverence.
Perhaps she’d been doing her own investigation.
Or perhaps she’d really only stolen the scales for whatever magical properties they might’ve provided.
That wouldn’t have been out of character at all.
Even still, the scales had to link to what I was seeing in these records.
I scanned through another file. Then another. It was clear the jar had gone missing from official custody. There was an empty box entry that it had once fit inside of, cataloged and sealed. So Eda Mire had robbed the Chancellery of the dragon scales. That much wasn’t the mystery here.
I kept searching for the acquisition log I assumed I’d find. The trade record or inventory chain that would tell me who owned the scales originally and where they came from.
There was none. There was only a restricted incident record. And at the top was a location stamp that stopped me completely.
Staren Falls. Everyone knew that location for one single thing. A massacre that had always been a mystery.
My hands moved faster, racing through the pages. Reports stacked themselves in front of me as I pulled them forward one after another, scanning as quickly as I could process the words.
“The reports are contradicting,” I said, not looking away from the files. “All of them. Four factions, four accounts, four completely different descriptions of the same event on the same date in the same place.”
Silas shifted behind me, listening.
My throat went tight. “Hunters call it a containment breach. Shifters call it a territorial conflict. Nymphs call it a desecration. Lycan call it an unauthorized extraction.” I flipped to the next page, then the next.
“None of them name an origin for the fragments. All of them say collected post-incident. All of them are different and pointing in different directions, which means none of them are likely true.”
Silas nodded. “They’re each lying to whatever central record-keeping body required a report, and they filed those reports knowing the others would contradict them, and nobody came back to reconcile the discrepancy. Which means someone above all four factions had let it stay that way.”
“The scales weren’t bought. They weren’t traded. They were taken from whatever happened in the Staren Falls massacre. And people are already pointing fingers.”
He took a step toward me, lowering his chin to read my expression as he asked, “Are you satisfied enough to leave now?”
I tucked the scales back into my pocket and snatched the only helpful record. “I guess I have to be.”
“Good. Now, run.” He stepped aside so I could take the lead and he could have my back.
The corridor outside the records room swallowed us immediately, long and dim and eerily quiet. Our boots hit stone in a cadence that was too loud. I kept the stolen record tucked against my ribs, and tried to remember which direction Pip and Calder had gone.
East wing.
“Dez and Ramiel?” I asked.
Silas was already angling left. “Opposite direction. We get Pip first. The demons can wait.”
I didn’t argue. We turned, and that was when I felt it. A pressure shift, subtle but something magical, for sure. I slowed without meaning to.
“Something’s—”
“I know.” Silas’s hand found my shoulder blade, not gripping, just… there and gone again the second I moved. I’d have thought nothing of it if my body hadn’t felt the touch to its core. “Don’t stop.”
We found Pip and Calder around the next bend, and whatever I’d been about to say died in my throat.
Calder’s expression was grim. Pip was hovering, staring at a carefully placed line of runestones embedded into the wall.
Not surprising, there were likely millions throughout the Chancellery, but the runes were glowing.
“Tell me those are decorative,” she said.
Nobody answered her. Instead, Calder guided her away. “Time to go, Pip Squeak.”
We all hustled back the way Silas and I had come, toward Dez and Ramiel.
I heard them before I saw them. Ramiel’s voice was tight and clipped. “—can’t shield us from it. It’s not visually seeing us.”
Dez’s face was ashen.
I caught his arm. “What’s wrong with you?”
He spoke with clenched teeth. “Nothing.”
“He’s lying,” Ramiel said. “Something in this building is trying to get through his shield. He says it feels like—”
“Talons,” Dez managed. “Scraping down the inside of my skull trying to find the seam in the shield I put up to protect us. I’m fine.”
I thought about the records. About Tiberius Veyne and his endless paranoia.
About the weight of the world crushing us.
“The Aegis runes. The Magistrate had them woven in as a failsafe. The whole structure is designed to identify and contain anyone who doesn’t belong.
Windows seal, doors lock, a barrier closes around the building the second it decides you’re a threat.
” I was already moving, pulling them with me toward the main hall.
“It can’t have triggered itself though. We should have been fine. ”
“There was a sprite in here!” Pip shouted from Calder’s pocket. “I knew it. He must have tripped something.”
We burst through into the entrance hall. The massive hourglass at its center rose up around us, sand frozen mid-fall, suspended by magic so old I’d always thought it was beautiful, in a cold sort of way.
Right now I wanted to put my fist through it. I hit the first exit door at a run, shoulder first. Locked. Calder tried the next one without being asked.
Also locked.
Pip shot upward to examine the frame. “There are runes above every door.” Her voice was steady. She was better at steady than most people I knew. “Can you break them?”
I opened my mouth.
Dez’s knee hit the floor. The sight of him braced against the stone, jaw locked, just enduring whatever was tearing through his mental shielding and into him was horrific to see.
“Drop it,” Silas said. Not a request.
“No.” Not a discussion.
“You are going to let it kill you.”
“I said no.” Dez’s voice scraped the bottom of something. “Keep moving.”
“I can’t break the runes that are activated. I’d have to take out the whole damn system and I don’t think I have enough power for that.”
Silas cleared his throat but didn’t argue.
I rolled my eyes. “There was a horde of witches that built the Aegis right after the last burning. It’s legendary because the Magistrate killed every one of them after it was created so there could be no breaking it.”
Ramiel swore under his breath and moved to Dez. Calder beat him there, hauling the demon upright by the arm, and we ran again because standing still felt like dying slowly as the magic in the massive hall began to vibrate.
Another door. Locked.
Silas stopped. “We have to go back to the Underworld. Now.”
Calder nodded. I watched his hand shift.
It was the smallest movement, barely visible, toward his chest and the magic that could carry us all away in a breath.
But before we could move at all, every runestone in the building ignited.
The light came from everywhere. Carved into walls, inset into floors, traced along the ceiling in patterns.
All of it alive. All of it awake. All of it pointed inward.
“Shield’s gone,” Dez said. His voice broke on the last word.
Pip dropped.
She didn’t fall slowly. She was there, hovering at my eye level, her wings a blur, and then she wasn’t. The sound she made when she hit the stone was so small. So unbearably, terribly small, I felt it like a knife had struck my heart.
“Pip!” I didn’t remember crossing the distance.
I was just suddenly on the floor with her, pulling her against my chest, her whole body fitting in the space between my ribs and my arms. I knew I needed to be careful, be gentle, be aware of how much smaller she was than everything else in every room she’d ever walked into.
Flown into. Commanded with kindness and optimism.
She’d never needed me to protect her. She’d made that very clear, every time she referred to the blade she kept on her belt.
“Pip.” I hated the broken sound of my own voice. “Pip, open your eyes.”
I reached for my magic again with the same instinct as reaching for her, it was automatic and desperate, but there was something else instead.
Pressure. The building’s power had settled over everything like a giant hand pressing down, and every attempt I made to draw anything forward was smothered before it could form.
“Syneca,” Calder said, kneeling down.
I shook my head, and everything slowed to this one horrible moment.
I couldn’t shield her. I couldn’t wrap anything around her.
I couldn’t do the one thing that mattered.
The only thing. I curled tighter anyway.
Pulled her closer. Made myself as small as I could around her, because my body could try even when the rest of me had run out of options.
I pressed my lips close to her ear, fighting against the sharp lump in my throat and the burning in my eyes. “Don’t you dare, Pip Willowbend.”
She didn’t answer.
The runes were still working. That relentless, building pressure had settled into my bones now, patient and indifferent, designed not to stop until there was nothing left to crush.
But I didn’t care if I was crushed to nothing.
Not with the only soul that never stopped believing in me fading in my arms.
I looked at her face. But it wasn’t hers that lay there still.
It was a mask. And I couldn’t stand it. I hated it more than anything in the world.
When my gaze snapped to Ramiel, he seemed to immediately understand, wordlessly peeling his veil away, though even his eyes seemed to be full of sadness.
The faint silver of her skin, the dark sweep of her lashes. Two, perfect blue buns, held tight with gold strands of buttons.
Fucking buttons.
Her wings had gone still in a way I had never once seen, not even when she slept, because Pip Willowbend was motion, she was loyalty and bravery and fierce, inconvenient love delivered without warning or apology.
I pressed my forehead to her chest, hearing the fading heartbeat. “You do not get to leave like this. Not on a stone floor in a building that doesn’t deserve you. You don’t get to go quietly. That’s not who you are.”
The pressure doubled.
I heard someone behind me make a sound. Dez, I thought, low and involuntary. I had no idea if it was from the pain of the power crushing us all or the heartache of losing the sprite that’d loved him the moment she met him.
I held Pip tighter. I had nothing else to give. I couldn’t save her any more than I could save the rest of us.
Silas stepped forward. The air changed. Some ancient power filled the room, so vast it made the building’s crushing magic feel like an afterthought.
When I finally looked, his eyes had gone black.
Not dark. Not shadowed. Black, all the way through, rim to center. He didn't look at the doors. Didn't look at the runes or the walls or any of the rest of them.
He looked at me.
At Pip, curled against my chest, unmoving.
His expression fractured. Just once. Just enough. The look of a man standing at the edge of a line he’d spent a very long time refusing to cross. “They hurt her.” His voice dropped to something barely recognizable. “So I’m going to bring this entire fucking building down.”