“Hello, Gemma,” the figure had said when she first entered the cave, his voice soft in a way that felt both fragile and unsettling. “My name is Anxio.”

  The name had hung in the air long after he spoke it, and even now, as Gemma stood a few hesitant steps from him, the syllables still seemed to ripple faintly through the cave, as though the stone itself were repeating them in a low, subterranean echo. Jori waited near the entrance, half cloaked in shadow, arms crossed, expression unreadable. The cave behind him framed him like the mouth of some ancient beast.

  Gemma swallowed and faced the man seated in the center of the room, the one who did not look entirely alive nor entirely dead. She had seen him in her visions, but that had not prepared her for the physical reality of him. His skin clung to bone in a way that made every contour of his skull visible; the unnatural yellow tint in his irises seemed to pulse faintly, not with life but with something older and hungrier. A single candle burned on a small stone, its flame bending toward him as though drawn by an invisible gravity.

  Gemma steadied her breath. “You said your name is Anxio,” she murmured. “But that doesn’t tell me who you are. What are you?”

  Anxio tilted his head, and the movement was so slow and deliberate that it reminded her of a creature studying prey before deciding whether to approach. “Knowing too much too quickly,” he said, “would break you. Not metaphorically, Gemma. Quite literally. Your mind is not yet ready for the structure of what I am.”

  “That’s not an answer,” Gemma said, though her voice carried less defiance than she hoped.

  He did not disagree. “It is the only answer you can survive.”

  Silence layered itself through the cave again, thick and uncomfortable. Gemma felt the weight of Jori’s presence behind her, felt the heat of her own uncertainty prickling beneath her skin.

  “What can you tell me?” she asked.

  Anxio’s thin lips curved in something like amusement. “I can tell you that I am like you. Or perhaps it is better to say that you are like me. You hold the Light in your veins, even when you believe it gone. And I… I have carried it far longer than any living man should have.”

  He lifted a frail hand, and the candle flame trembled as if reaching for him.

  “I saw you once,” he whispered, “in the memories of the boy who brought you here. Jori. I saw what you did, and what you refused to do. I saw your hesitation, your fear, your power. From that moment, I wished to meet you.”

  The words unsettled her more than she let show.

  “You saw what Jori did,” Gemma said. “All the people he killed. You know that, and you still wanted to meet me?”

  Anxio’s smile did not fade. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

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  “Because the people he killed were from the Valval Priesthood,” he said, as if reciting a simple fact.

  Gemma frowned. “So?”

  “Do you know,” Anxio asked quietly, “what the Valval Priesthood does to those it condemns? To those it studies? To those it uses?”

  Gemma hesitated. “No.”

  “Then your outrage is incomplete,” he said gently. “And your judgment premature.”

  He leaned back in the chair, though the movement made his bones creak faintly, as if his body were protesting every shift. “You will learn what the Priesthood has done. But not now. Not before you have the strength to bear it.”

  Gemma felt something twist inside her, a tension between wanting to know and wanting to flee from the knowledge entirely.

  Anxio continued. “You must understand at least this, Gemma. Jori was tortured for twelve years. Not interrogated. Not punished. Tortured. Every morning, every night. His Light extracted drop by drop, in the same manner the Priesthood uses on all beings like you. They hollowed him until nothing remained but pain and the instinct to survive.”

  Gemma felt the breath leave her lungs in a shallow exhale. She remembered the fragmented visions she had accidentally pulled from Jori, the glimpses of metal tables and screaming Light, the echo of anguish buried beneath his grin. She had assumed those memories belonged to someone else. To something else.

  “Twelve years…” she whispered.

  A faint nod. “Survival, after such a span, reshapes a soul. Do not judge him by the dead he left behind. Judge him by the fact that he is still capable of loyalty.”

  Gemma looked down, uncertain whether she felt sympathy or dread.

  “But why am I here?” she asked. “Why bring me to you?”

  “Because the danger that hunts him,” Anxio said, “now hunts you as well."

  His eyes sharpened, and the candle flame shrank as though bracing itself.

  “Caelos is not merely a hunter of one man. He is a hunter of Light. Of power. Of potential. If he finds any of you, he will kill you without hesitation, because that is what he was shaped to do.”

  Gemma felt a tightness close around her ribs, as though the cave itself were pressing inward. “I cannot fight someone like that,” she said. “I barely survived the last time I used my Light. I don’t even have it anymore.”

  Anxio lifted his hand again.

  Gemma felt the air shift. A vibration rolled through the stone beneath her feet, subtle at first, then rising like a pulse spreading outward in concentric waves. It struck her chest with a warmth so sudden and forceful that she gasped, stumbling back a half-step. Her hands flew to her sternum as something deep inside her unfurled. Not a spark. Not a memory.

  A resurgence.

  Light surged through her body, brighter than she had ever felt it, coiling in her limbs like a living thing. It filled the hollow spaces within her, the places fear had carved out, the wounds left by doubt and exhaustion. She felt it radiating behind her eyes, buzzing through her veins.

  She inhaled sharply. The cave seemed to brighten, though the candle had not changed.

  Anxio lowered his hand.

  “You see?” he murmured. “What was suppressed can be awakened. What was taken can be restored. And what is restored can grow.”

  Gemma trembled, the last remnants of fear dissolving beneath the sheer intensity of the Light inside her.

  Anxio leaned forward, and the cave quieted as though listening.

  “Help Jori,” he said. “Help him survive Caelos. Help all of you survive Caelos. There is no future in which he does not come for you. And there is no path forward unless at least one of you stands against him.”

  Gemma’s pulse echoed in her fingertips. She lifted her head and met Anxio’s gaze.

  “Yes,” she said, breath steadying. “I will help him.”

  Anxio smiled then, softly, knowingly, as though nothing in her answer had surprised him.

  As though he had been waiting for it long before she ever stepped into the cave.