The Angel was nothing like the paintings in the temples.
Those depicted radiant beings of gold and white, arms outstretched, eyes full of divine warmth. Seraveth was none of that. She was tall — impossibly so — with wings that had once been white but were now the color of old bone, torn at the edges like pages ripped from a book. Chains of black iron coiled around her wrists, her ankles, her throat. Each link was carved with symbols Kaël didn't recognize but felt in his chest like a second heartbeat.
She looked at him the way someone looks at the last candle in a very dark room.
"You're just a boy," she said. Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
"Everyone keeps saying that," Kaël muttered, clutching his burning palm.
A silence stretched between them. Wind moved through the Ashen Wastes like a living thing, carrying dust that tasted of old iron and something sweeter — like incense from a ceremony long abandoned.
"How did you find this place?" Seraveth asked.
"I didn't. It found me."
She studied him for a long moment. Then something shifted in her expression — not quite hope, but the ghost of it.
"The sigil chose you," she said quietly. "That hasn't happened in four hundred years."
"What does that mean?"
She looked up at the veiled sky — that permanent grey curtain that hung over the Wastes like a held breath.
"It means," she said, "that the Veil is thinning. And those who put it there will know."
Somewhere in the distance, a horn sounded. Church soldiers. Already.
Seraveth's eyes dropped back to him, sharp as broken glass.
"Free one chain, boy. Just one. And I will keep you alive long enough to understand what you've stumbled into."
Kaël looked at the iron links. At his burning hand. At the vast, empty wasteland around him with nowhere to run.
He grabbed the chain.
The Church is closing in. The Angel is not yet free. And Kaël is only beginning to understand that the sigil on his hand isn't a curse —