The nave of St. Hollow's swallowed sound.
Outside, the Ward had still been alive—boots on stone, people arguing, children crying, carts rattling past. Inside, the noise shrank to a tight, echoing murmur, like someone had cupped a hand over the world.
Cassian counted heads as they were herded into the open space between the pews and the altar.
Twenty-three Draft names, including his. Fifteen made it here. A few more were being dragged in by wardens: one cursing, one trying not to sob. Three gaps remained where names had been called and nobody answered.
Ran, Cassian thought. Or hid well enough the wardens didn't find them in time.
The Church would call them cowards. The Ward would call them smart… if they survived the consequences.
A priest in dull gray and gold stood on the raised dais before the altar. He was youngish, his hair thinning already, his face soft around the jaw. His eyes were tired but not unkind. Behind him, the carved stone basin shimmered faintly, sigils along its rim glowing like embers under ash.
To either side of the dais stood two Radiant Wardens in full armor, their sunburst sigils etched into polished breastplates. They watched the gathered Draft with the detached attention of men expecting most of what they saw to die soon.
The priest raised his hands. The murmur died.
"Children of Virelion," he began, voice smooth with practice. "Brothers and sisters of the Final Dawn. You stand here today not as victims, but as chosen."
Cassian felt the lie fall and settle over the room like a fine dust.
"Chosen to serve," the priest continued. "Chosen to test yourselves in the Shroud's crucible. Chosen to carry our Ward's share of the burden that hangs over all mankind."
His gaze swept over them. For a moment, it caught Cassian's. There was no recognition there, no flicker of what the scribe had seen—just another face in a line of faces.
"That burden," the priest said softly, "is fear."
Lyra leaned closer, whispering without moving her lips. "I thought it was hunger. Or taxes."
Cassian's mouth almost twitched.
"The Nightmare Trials are not punishment," the priest went on. "They are opportunity. The Shroud is a wound in the world, yes—but it is also a place where the Final Dawn's light can burn brightest. Those who survive the Trials come back… changed. Stronger. Touched by Paths and powers that can shield our homes and drive back the dark."
He let the promise hang there, bright and hollow.
"And those who fall," he said, calming his voice again, "do not fall in vain. Their souls are refined by the Dreamfire and returned to us in other ways—Shards, blessings, memories. Nothing is wasted. In the Final Dawn, all things serve."
Cassian listened without moving, cataloguing each phrase.
Nothing is wasted. Efficient. Terrible, but efficient. If you accepted the premise that people were fuel, it even made a kind of sense.
The priest spread his hands.
"You may feel fear. That is natural. The bravest among us feel fear, and step forward anyway. That is courage. Remember this: the Nightmares are not meant to be unbeatable. There are rules. There is order, even in the Shroud. Keep your heads. Trust your fellow candidates. Hold to your faith."
His eyes flicked toward the Radiant Wardens.
"And if faith is difficult," he added quietly, "then hold to any light you can find."
He lowered his hands. "We will now perform the Rite of Marking. When you bear the Mark, the Shroud will recognize you as a participant in the Trial. It will not spare you, but it will… notice you. Respond to you. Without the Mark, you will simply drown."
Lyra swallowed audibly beside Cassian. He heard it even in the hush.
One of the Radiant Wardens stepped forward and gestured.
"You will come in lines of three," he said. His voice was higher than Cassian expected from a man in that much armor, but firm. "Stand before the basin. State your name. Offer your left forearm. You will not pull away."
"What happens if we do pull away?" someone muttered from the back.
The Warden's eyes moved, found the speaker, held.
"Don't," he said.
The first three stepped up.
Cassian watched carefully.
The basin's interior liquid wasn't water. It was too thick, too still. Its surface reflected nothing, even under the church's light. It looked more like shadow made liquid. Sigils crawled around the stone lip—tiny, intricate lines, some in shapes he recognized from ward-marks and talismans, others more complex, looping back on themselves.
As the first candidate—wide-shouldered woman with a butcher's arms—held her forearm out, a priest beside the basin murmured something. The liquid shivered. A thin tendril of darkness rose, like smoke in reverse, and coiled around her skin.
She flinched. Held. Her jaw clenched. A faint hiss, like oil on hot metal, sounded. When the shadow withdrew, it left behind a mark in the flesh: a small sunburst made of interlocking lines, black as ink, still faintly smoldering.
The Mark.
The second man up jerked when the shadow touched him and almost yanked his arm back. The Radiant Warden's hand landed on his shoulder, iron-hard, holding him in place until it was done.
By the third, the shock had dulled. The room watched as if seeing the same blow fall again and again numbed its impact.
When the first three stepped away, flexing burned fingers, the Warden called the next.
Names moved in clusters. Cassian tracked them without effort.
Sade. Merin. Jore.
The panicked boy from outside Smith Row. The older woman who'd been arguing with a priest last week. The taciturn man with scarred knuckles who'd once thrown a bottle at Mara and apologized after she broke his nose.
All of them walked forward. All of them bared their arms. All of them came away marked.
"Next. Thorn, Maeric. Senn, Lyra. Rael, Cassian."
Lyra blew out a breath between her teeth. "Well. Good ordering. Keep the interesting ones together."
Cassian moved without comment. He stepped into line at the basin, Lyra on his left and a stranger on his right.
The stranger—Maeric Thorn—was obviously not a slum rat.
His clothes were simple, but well-made, cut to allow movement, of good cloth that hadn't started as someone else's castoffs. The leather worn over his chest was reinforced in the right places with steel plates, edges smooth and polished. He carried a sword on his hip that had never been used to cut rope or pry open crates, only enemies.
He had a noble's face too—sharp nose, clean jaw, hair tied back neatly. But what marked him more than the gear or the posture was his expression.
He wasn't trying to hide fear.
He wasn't fearless.
He looked… eager.
"This where we prove they're wrong about us?" he murmured, half to himself.
Lyra glanced at him. "They being?"
"All of them," Maeric said. "Family. City. Church. Take your pick." He smiled, quick and bright, but it didn't touch his eyes. "You first?"
"Ladies first," Lyra said, and gave him a little mock bow. "But by all means, show us how it's done, noble boy."
Maeric's mouth twitched. He stepped up to the basin.
"Name?" the priest at its side asked. Not the main speaker from before; this one was older, with a narrow face and ink stains on his cuffs. The Glass Quill scribe from the doorway hovered nearby, ledger ready.
"Maeric Thorn," Maeric said, forearm already extended.
The priest murmured a phrase. The liquid shivered, then rose.
It coiled around Maeric's arm in a thicker tendril than Cassian had seen on the others. For a second, the shadow brightened—from within—shot through with pale light like dawn behind storm clouds. Maeric's teeth gritted, but he didn't flinch.
When the darkness withdrew, his Mark glowed brighter than the others had, rays of the sunburst more defined, edges sharp as a brand.
"Strong resonance," the basin-priest murmured. The Glass Quill scribe scratched something quick and elaborate next to Maeric's name.
Maeric stepped back, flexing his fingers. The skin around the Mark was an angry red, but he looked almost satisfied under the pain.
"Lyra Senn," Lyra said, stepping up.
Cassian watched the priest more than the basin now. The man's fingers traced a subtle pattern in the air over the liquid. The Shard-light under the stone flickered. There were rules here, patterns, ways to adjust output. This wasn't pure mysticism; it was craft.
The liquid rose thinner around Lyra's arm, like a ribbon. It left a Mark the same size as the others, but for an instant after the darkness withdrew, the lines seemed to waver, like heat above a flame. Lyra hissed through her teeth, eyes watering, but kept her arm steady.
"Mercurial resonance," the priest said softly.
The scribe wrote that down too.
Then it was Cassian's turn.
"Name?" the priest asked, looking up.
"Cassian Rael."
For a fraction of a heartbeat, the basin-priest and the Glass Quill exchanged a glance. The tiniest flick of eyes. The faintest tension around a mouth.
Cassian extended his arm.
The liquid stilled.
For a moment, the basin's surface went mirror-smooth. Cassian saw nothing reflected there—not his face, not the vaulted ceiling, just a flatness that made his skin crawl.
Then something moved beneath.
Not like the tendrils that had risen for the others. This was slower. Dense. As if something larger was turning, deep below the surface.
The hairs on the back of his neck rose. The ward-lines etched into the basin's rim brightened, then dimmed, uncertain.
The priest's lips moved, reciting the same phrase as before, but his voice had gone tight.
The darkness rose.
It was colder than it had been for the others. Not physical cold—that he could have understood—but a clean, marrow-deep chill, like stepping barefoot onto stone that remembered winter. It coiled around his forearm with careful precision, each loop the exact width of the sunburst it would leave.
For a heartbeat, Cassian saw something that wasn't there.
Not the Final Dawn's sigil. Not the neat little sunburst all the others bore.
He saw a circle of ash branded into his skin, drawn in lines of soot-black and ember-red. Around it, symbols rotated—rings within rings—turning with slow inevitability, grinding against each other like gears. At the center of the circle, a tiny, crystalline shape pulsed: a fragment of something vast and mechanical and alive.
He heard the faint, echoing sound of his dream again. A voice like stone collapsing.
Again.
The vision flickered and broke.
The shadow withdrew, taking the impossible mark with it. In its place, burned into the underside of his forearm, was the same sunburst as the others wore. Simple. Clean. The skin around it throbbed with pain.
"Res—"
The priest's voice cut off. He frowned, leaning closer, not touching Cassian's skin but peering at the lines as if they might rearrange themselves while he watched.
"Resonance… unstable," he said at last, very quietly.
The Glass Quill scribe wrote that down in a different column, using a different symbol. Cassian tracked the movement of his hand, the way the ink line hooked downward at the end.
"Is there a problem?" Cassian asked.
His voice was steady. That, more than the question, seemed to draw the priest's attention.
The man studied his face for a moment, then shook his head. "No. The Mark holds. That is all that matters for the Trial."
He gestured. Cassian stepped back into the group, flexing his fingers as the pain settled into a deep, hot throb. Lyra glanced at his Mark and gave a low whistle.
"Looks the same as mine," she whispered. "Feels like someone shoved my arm into a forge, but otherwise…"
"It's fine," Cassian said.
Inside, the echo of the other mark still lingered behind his eyes.
They processed the rest quickly. One boy fainted when the shadow touched him and had to be dragged aside by wardens to wake up with a Mark and a bruise on his jaw. An older man clenched his eyes shut and whispered prayers under his breath. A woman cursed steadily throughout.
When it was done, fifteen candidates stood in the nave with fresh black sunbursts burned into their skin.
"Good," the young priest from earlier said, returning to the dais. "You are now bound to the Trial. The Shroud will admit you. It will test you. It will—if the Final Dawn wills it—temper you."
He gestured to a side door near the front, flanked by two more wardens. "Through there. You will be armed and equipped."
"Armed," Lyra murmured as they began to move. "That sounds promising. They aren't just feeding us in naked, then."
"They want some of us to live," Cassian said. "A little. For a while."
"That's the spirit."
The side door led into a narrower corridor that smelled of oil, leather, and old stone. They passed under an arch carved with more sunbursts and script. Cassian didn't recognize the language, but the intent was obvious: blessing, warding, containment.
Small alcoves lined the hall, each manned by Church attendants and, in one case, a Magus in Consortium blue. Wooden racks held simple weapons: short swords, long knives, cudgels, battered spears. Another bench bore mismatched pieces of leather and chain.
"Take what you can carry," a warden barked. "Nothing from here comes back. You either drop it in the Shroud, or it's buried with you if there's enough left to dig up."
Maeric snorted softly. "Inspiring."
He moved toward the weapons with a clear eye, selecting a short sword to pair with his existing blade, testing its weight and balance with a practiced flick. He grabbed a serviceable buckler and a leather jerkin to layer over his already decent gear.
Cassian lingered at the edge, watching.
A shaky-handed boy grabbed a spear far too long for an enclosed environment. A woman with butcher's arms took a heavy cleaver and a thick leather coat, familiarity in the way she slid her arm through the straps. Lyra picked up a long knife and a short, iron-shod baton, rolling her shoulders as she adjusted a borrowed leather vest.
"What about you?" she asked, looking back at Cassian.
He stepped forward. The selection was already picked over, but that was fine. He wasn't looking for something perfect. Just something that matched the likely scenario.
First Trial. Low-level Nightmare. They would be thrown against things strong enough to kill rookies, weak enough that a little skill and luck could let a few survive. Rooms, corridors, perhaps open ground, but not vast fields.
He picked a short sword with a plain hilt, testing the weight. It was a little blade-heavy, but serviceable. He added a second knife, longer than his own, and slid it into his coat. A leather bracer would do something against glancing blows and fangs.
"Not taking a shield?" Lyra asked.
"If I use a shield," Cassian said, cinching straps, "I have to trust whoever's next to me not to open my side."
She considered that. "Fair."
At the far end of the hall, a table bore small vials and strips of cloth. A woman in simple healer's robes handed each candidate a strip and a vial as they passed.
"For blood," she said. "If you are injured only a little, bind it and keep moving. If you are injured a lot…" She lifted one of the vials. "Drink. It may buy you a few more breaths to do something useful."
"What's in it?" Lyra asked.
"Shard-laced tincture," the woman said. "It will make your heart race and your hands shake. It will also drag you back from the edge for a short time."
"Any side effects?" Cassian asked.
"You go to the Trial," she said. "How much more side effect do you need?"
He liked her.
They passed through another arch and into a circular chamber.
The air felt thicker here. The stone underfoot hummed faintly, thrumming in time with the Mark on Cassian's arm. The walls were inscribed with dense sigil-work, lines spiraling and branching, converging toward the ceiling's center, where a crystal the size of a child's head hung suspended in midair.
Shards, plural, embedded within. He could feel it.
A shallow depression in the floor held lines of etched metal, forming a circle large enough to accommodate them all if they stood close. Priests moved along the edge, adjusting small metallic nodes and murmuring checks to one another.
The young priest from the nave joined them in the circle, hands clasped.
"This will not hurt," he said. "Much."
"Very reassuring," Lyra muttered.
"If you die," the priest continued matter-of-factly, "it will not be here. The Trial will begin when the Shroud takes you. Remember what you've been taught—stay together, keep your wits, follow the signs. The Nightmare will offer you choices. Some will be obvious. Some will be buried. All will have a price."
Maeric lifted his chin. "Do we know what kind of Trial it is?"
"Only that it is suited to your current… level," the priest said. "The Engine chooses specifics."
The word slipped out of him like a stone dropped into still water. Engine.
Most of the candidates didn't react. They had no context for it beyond Church rattling. Cassian felt his skin prickle.
Engine. The thing in his dream. The grinding rings. The circle of ash.
The priest hesitated, as if realizing what he'd said, then smoothed his expression and stepped back toward the circle's outer edge.
"Stand together," he said. "Breathe. The Final Dawn sees you."
The Radiant Wardens took positions at two cardinal points of the circle. The basin-priest stood at a third, hands raised. The Glass Quill scribe lingered near the fourth, quill poised as if he could somehow take notes on the Shroud itself.
Cassian stepped into the circle's center, not at the front or the back, but slightly offset, where he could easily see most of the others without being obvious. Lyra drifted to his left. Maeric, sword at his hip, took a position to the right, subconsciously ready to anchor a line that didn't exist yet.
The etched metal beneath their feet began to glow.
It started as a faint light, like forgotten coals, then grew. Lines filled with molten gold, energy chasing itself around the circle's curves, climbing the walls, reaching toward the crystal under the ceiling. The air warmed, then chilled, then settled into a strange, almost sharp neutrality.
Cassian's Mark burned. Not just pain now; it felt… active. Responding.
The priests began to chant.
The words were old, layered with rhythm and pattern. Cassian recognized fragments he'd heard in smaller blessings over doorways or at funerals, but here they were woven together into something larger. Calls and responses. Binds and releases.
The crystal overhead flared.
For a heartbeat, Cassian saw Shards within it—tiny facets, each with its own color, its own conceptual weight. [Light], [Path], [Threshold], [Dream]. Interlocked, forced into cooperation by the sigil-work around them.
The world tilted.
It didn't feel like falling.
Falling, he understood. Gravity had direction. Down. You could brace for it.
This felt instead like the floor under him had decided "down" was not consensus anymore. Like his body was being asked to agree with a new definition of where it belonged, and some parts refused.
Around him, people gasped. Someone cursed. Someone laughed once, too loud, high with panic.
The stone of St. Hollow's blurred. The chanting stretched into a long, thin thread of sound.
For a moment, Cassian felt like he was standing in two places at once:
In the circle, under the crystal, surrounded by chanting priests.
And somewhere else, where ash fell instead of dust, and the air smelled not of incense but of cold iron and something older.
His Mark flared hot.
The world snapped.
Color vanished first. Then sound. Then weight.
For a horrible instant, he was nowhere at all.
Then the Nightmare opened its mouth and swallowed him.
He hit ground hard enough to jar his teeth.
Not polished stone. Packed dirt, damp and uneven. The air rushed back into his lungs in a ragged breath, bringing with it the smell of mold, rot, and old fear.
He rolled, instinct, and came up on one knee, hand already on his sword. His vision cleared in stuttering pulses.
They were no longer in St. Hollow's.
They stood—those who had come through—in the center of a deserted street.
Not their Ward's.
The buildings here were unfamiliar, two- and three-story houses of dark wood and stone, shutters hanging crooked, doors cracked open like mouths. A fog clung low to the ground, thickest at the edges of his vision. The sky above was a bruised, unchanging purple, a sunless twilight that gave no comfort, no direction.
Silence pressed close.
Lyra groaned somewhere nearby. Maeric's curse was sharper, controlled.
A sound cut through the quiet—a slow, hollow tolling.
A bell.
Not the Ward's Shroudfall warning. Lower. Closer. It seemed to come from everywhere at once and nowhere at all.
Cassian's heart beat once, hard.
Words formed in his mind without anyone speaking them, not quite sound, more like the impression that something out there had… labels.
NIGHTMARE: The Ones Left Behind
RANK: MINOR
He didn't know how he knew the name. He just did.
One of the candidates turned in place, eyes wide. "Saints preserve us," he whispered. "This isn't real. This isn't—"
At the far end of the street, a door slammed shut on its own.
The fog shifted.
Something moved within it, too tall and too thin, joints bending at wrong angles.
Cassian's fingers tightened on his sword.
The Trial had begun.