Corvian, 3181.
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The police dormitory sat at the edge of the complex like an afterthought, a box of pale concrete and narrow windows, each one holding a different flavor of human exhaustion. The building carried the scent of discipline—laundered uniforms, floor polish, breath held for too long. Structures like this always felt hollow to me. Mortals built built for order, beating with hidden disarray: shame stuffed under mattresses, prayers whispered into worn fabric, dreams clinging to ceilings like smoke that would not leave.
I perched on the sill of Harry's window, feathers pressed close to my body, claws resting against the cold ledge. The form of the raven settled over me more easily now, less disguise than condensation—my essence folding itself into something narrow and vigilant. Through the glass, the room opened in modest lines. A single bed with crisp sheets, walls bare except for a clock, a bulletin pinboard, and the dull outline of a mirror that reflected nothing of me.
Harry moved inside with the purposeful quiet of someone accustomed to watching himself. He straightened the objects on his desk—stacking papers into even piles, wiping away a line of dust with the side of his hand. He folded a shirt with slow precision, smoothing the fabric flat before placing it atop a neat column of clothes. His movements were stripped of the unsteady softness humans usually carried when alone. Everything he touched was arranged with deliberate care, as if he feared leaving a trace of anything uncalculated.
I watched the line of his shoulders, the edges of his posture too disciplined for a man in his own room. The Witness inside him—if that was what it truly was—had settled deep. Not possessing. Not puppeteering. Nesting. It had shaped him into a creature of angles and stillness, a vessel emptied of hesitation. Whatever Harry had been once, the version standing before me felt curated, like a page sanded clean for scripture.
He crossed to the nightstand and adjusted a frame. A photograph—blurry around the edges, taken poorly. A woman leaned against him in the picture, smiling with a tired sort of pride. His mother, perhaps. Harry's expression in the photograph had a softness I didn't see now. The absence of that softness unsettled me more than it should have.
I shifted my weight on the sill, wings folding tighter. Mortals rarely sensed me in this shape unless they were already fraying at the edges. But Harry did not fray; he had been hollowed and filled with something that sharpened him. Even through the glass, I felt the pressure of it—a quiet vigilance that brushed the outer rim of my attention like a breath that wasn't human.
Harry turned toward his desk again, placing a pen in perfect alignment beside a notepad. And then he stilled—not the easy pause of someone thinking, but the sudden halt of an instinct catching something beneath the surface.
His head lifted.
He looked directly at the window.
At me.
The contact triggered nothing dramatic. No gasp, no flinch. His eyes rose with slow, unhurried clarity, like someone opening a ledger to a page they already expected to find. His gaze brushed through the dark where I perched, not searching for explanation. Simply acknowledging presence.
For a heartbeat I wondered if he saw the bird or the shape behind it. The pupils contracted, the way mortals do when light sharpens into meaning. But there was no fear, no curiosity, not even annoyance. Only recognition—quiet, clinical, unearned.
As if he had been waiting for me.
The Witness inside him stirred then. Not visibly. Not through movement. I felt it in the way the air inside that room seemed to straighten, as though bracing its spine. A presence measuring me, taking stock of what the raven carried under its feathers. Cataloguing intention. Calculating danger.
Harry stepped closer to the window. Not enough to touch it, only enough to watch without obstruction. His face remained unreadable, stripped of all the mortal clutter that once made boys like him predictable. The purity inside him—manufactured, not divine—glowed in a way I could feel along my own bones, like old scripture breathing against the skin.
My claws curled tighter on the sill.
The mark inside my chest pulsed once, reacting to the gaze on the other side of the glass. Hugo would not sense this moment, but the tether still tugged gently, a reminder of my limits. I could not go near Harry without triggering the structure he carried.
Harry's throat moved with a slow swallow. Then he did something unexpected—he tilted his head by the smallest angle, the gesture subtle enough to be human but measured enough to be something else. A silent question. A silent answer. Or a ledger's line being checked off in a ritual only the Witness understood.
I held the stare, even though the raven's eyes were not meant for that kind of confrontation. Something in Harry's expression shifted—barely. A tightening around the mouth, a small crease at the brow. Not confusion. Not surprise. More like acknowledgment.
His lips shaped a single word—Corvian—and the glass fogged once with his breath, like a seal placed on a record.
Harry lowered the curtain slowly, as though closing the lid on an altar, and the window sank into darkness. The air pressed close again, the tension lingering like a hand that had not fully withdrawn.
I stayed on the ledge longer than necessary. The building below breathed with the dull rhythm of mortals sleeping in shifts, dreaming in the language of their duty. But Harry's room no longer felt like part of the dormitory. It felt like a chamber prepared with intention. A vessel chosen for a purpose I had not yet understood.
And the Witness behind Harry's eyes had looked at me without bowing its head.
The mark inside my chest tightened again.
Something was changing in the world, and I had arrived too late to pretend otherwise.
The stairs to the Pantheon always felt longer when I was angry.
Stone rose around me in quiet tiers, walls carved with scenes mortals would have called myth if they ever saw them. Faces eroded into suggestion, wings without bodies, hands reaching toward a sky that was no longer there. The air tasted of old incense and burned oil, whatever prayers had rotted here long before the fall. Every step up tightened the mark inside my chest, as if Hugo's borrowed breath objected to where I was bringing it.
Voices bled through the archway at the summit. Not words. Sounds. Pleading, laughing, some somewhere between a moan and a hymn. I already knew what I would find.
Thea lay sprawled across the uppermost steps like an idol thrown sideways. Their back rested against a pillar, one leg bent, one arm dragging lazily over the carved rail. Creatures crowded around them, pressed close in a tangle of skin and color and shifting limbs. They had been made for nothing but wanting. Some wore human faces softened into excess, others carried mouths where no mouths should have been, eyes blooming across shoulders, fingers that never stopped stroking. Perfume clung to the air: spice, sweat, wine, sugar gone sour on the tongue.
One of them had its head buried against Thea's throat, shuddering as if in prayer. Another knelt between their knees, hair falling like a curtain as they laughed at something I didn't care enough to hear.
"Thea," I said.
My voice cut through them like a blade through silk. The creatures froze, all at once. Every head turned. Their eyes, dozens of them, slid toward me with the same dull hunger they turned on anything new. I ignored them.
Thea rolled their head in my direction, lashes heavy, mouth wet with someone else's devotion. Their expression sagged into annoyance before the rest of them bothered to catch up.
"Is this shit ever going to end," they muttered, more to the ceiling than to me.
They lifted a hand. Not a grand gesture. Just a flick of fingers, as if dismissing smoke.
The creatures went away.
No scream, no flare, no crack of displaced air. One moment they pressed against Thea, breathing and trembling, and the next the steps were bare stone again. Only the echo of their warmth remained, clinging to the air like a bad aftertaste. Thea wiped their mouth with the back of their wrist and reclined again as if I had interrupted a nap, not worship.
"You look terrible," they said. "Which usually means you've been doing something interesting. Speak."
I climbed the remaining steps. My shoulders still carried the memory of metal bars and human shouting, Hugo's panic rattling along the bond like something trapped inside a pipe. I didn't bother to kneel.
"There are other entities," I said. "Different from us. Active. Present. That fucker Harry isn't inhabited by a devil."
Their eyes sharpened. It was always fascinating, how quickly they went from indulgent to precise. As if there were two Theas overlapping, and pleasure never quite smudged the other one.
"Oh," they said slowly. "No shit. You finally noticed."
I let the irritation pass through me without showing. "So you knew."
"Corvian," they sighed. "You thought we were the only creatures in this world capable of threading ourselves through a human? Charming. Arrogant. Very on-brand."
"I can feel what's ours," I said. "What inhabits Harry is not."
"Not ours, no," they agreed. "But not theirs either." Their gaze flickered upward, toward the high black dome of the Pantheon, where carvings of wings never quite resolved into anything you could name. "You've been living too long inside your own hierarchy. Devils, angels, mortals. Three neat rows. You forget what spills out between them."
I remembered the interrogation room. The way my power slid off the officers like water off lacquer, how Hugo's memory stayed bright even when I reached for it. How Harry's eyes had looked at him, clear and empty, like polished glass waiting for an engraving.
"It wasn't inhabiting," I said slowly. "Not the way we do. It sat inside him like… like something braided through his soul instead of replacing it. It felt clean."
The word tasted wrong in my mouth.
Thea laughed, a low sound that vibrated in the stone.
"Have you ever heard of soul cleansing?" they asked. "Of ritual baths, holy water, pilgrimages to shrines? Have you ever watched humans queue to be told they are pure again?"
"I watched priests fail to drown guilt with tap water," I said. "If that counts."
"You watched the wrong layer," they replied. "Mortals think they invented purification rites. They did not. They rediscovered an old craving. To be scraped. To be emptied. To be made simple enough to bear themselves. Think of it as tartar on the soul—accreted 'I'm clean now' hardening into a White Thing that files reports." Their fingers drummed on the step. "Every confession, every fast, every night spent kneeling on cold floors, bleeding through the knees into stone… they call it cleansing. They do not ask where what is scraped away goes."
I watched their hand. The bones were fine. Fragile, if they had ever been subject to break.
"It doesn't vanish," they went on. "It gathers. It accrues. All the fear, all the shame they try to burn off. The residue needs somewhere to rest. Sometimes it curls into little knots of intention. Sometimes those knots grow structures. Filters. Watchers. White things that drink the excess and leave the human feeling lighter. Empty enough to stand up and leave the chapel thinking God loves them again."
"You're talking about constructs," I said. "Thought-forms."
"Close enough for your vocabulary," they answered. "They are not born the way we were. They have no rebellion behind them. No memory of light. They're made from trust and terror. People invite them in. They call them peace. Protection. Grace."
I thought of Harry again, of the way his gaze had skimmed over Hugo, then sharpened, as if something inside him tightened its grip.
"This is the first time I've seen one inhabit flesh like that," I said. "Whatever sits in him is not a visitor. It is rooted."
Thea shrugged one shoulder. "It happened before. You were not watching. Do you remember the years mortals called the Great Healings? Those messy revivals with tents and shouting and palms on foreheads. People screaming and dropping like flies, then waking up serene. 'The spirit moved through me,' they said. Of course it did. The spirit needed somewhere to live."
"And you let it happen," I said.
"Let?" Thea smiled thinly. "We are not gatekeepers, Corvian. We are consequences."
The Pantheon's ceiling felt closer. The carved saints and beasts overhead seemed to lean down, stone eyes turned toward us, as if listening in.
"You said the police got a helping hand," I reminded them. "When my blurring failed. I thought you meant a devil. Kaelith or some other shoe-licker. But this is different."
"They got a helping hand," they agreed. "They just reached in a different direction than you assumed. Not downward. Not toward us."
"Upward," I said.
Thea made a face as if I had used a vulgar word.
"Sideways," they corrected. "Toward the residue of their own worship. They wanted something that smelled clean enough to parade in public. Devils and angels carry too much narrative baggage. Mortals panic when they learn their guardians have horns or six wings and too many eyes."
My thoughts sharpened around the memory of the car park, the quiet black vehicles, the officers whose minds I couldn't fog even by pressing hard through the mark. Their eyes had not wavered once.
"So what did they bind?" I asked. "What exactly is inside Harry?"
"A Witness," Thea said simply.
A pressure built behind my ribs at the word. Old theology, older than most chapels that still stood.
"They still exist," I said. "I thought they died when… we did."
"Nothing dies," Thea replied. "It just changes corridors. Witnesses are the result of too many people begging to be seen while insisting they are innocent. They are made from the accumulation of 'not my fault' and 'God knows my heart.' They are what happens when confession is performance, not surrender."
"That thing in Harry watched me," I said, remembering the way his gaze had moved through me rather than onto me. "It saw through my blurring."
"Of course it did," Thea said, amused now. "Witnesses don't look at surfaces. They record alignment. Oath versus action. Pact versus behavior. They don't care what you say. They care what you are. To them, you are a broken contract walking."
I swallowed the urge to bare my teeth. "You're telling me the police made a pact with one of these things."
"I am telling you they went shopping," Thea replied. "They wanted protection against creatures like us without admitting to their citizens that they believe in creatures like us. So they hid it in policy. In chaplain programs. In mandatory counseling. In those little prayer circles they hold for officers after 'traumatic events.' Every time someone begged to stay clean while working in filth, every time they asked whatever sits above them to keep them righteous while they did unrighteous things in uniform, they fed it."
"Until it had weight," I said.
"Until it could answer," they agreed. "Someone clever on their side realized they could negotiate with that weight. Offer structure. A role. 'Help us keep our institution pure of infernal influence, and we will give you access. Through one of ours. You will see everything.'"
Harry's face rose again in my mind. Not his childhood smile, not the fear when Hugo cut him, but the blank, steady calm in the station. As if he was listening to echoes only he heard.
"And they chose Harry," I said.
"They chose a vessel already touched," Thea corrected gently. "Do not forget what you did to him. His soul was displaced once already. You left cracks. Pockets. Perfect little rooms for something else to furnish."
Guilt was a human word. It still crawled through the mark sometimes when Hugo remembered that hotel room, the blood on the pendant, the way Harry slid toward the floor. It was not my guilt. I reminded myself of that, and still the memory itched.
"What kind of pact did they sign?" I asked. "Hugo is being charged under the Sovereign Integrity Act. They added something called the Pact Purity Act to his file. I want to know what I am dealing with."
Thea snorted. "Mortals and their Acts. They love to name the things they fear."
"They named it after us," I said. "Purity against pacts."
"They named it after the story of us," they replied. "It is not about you. It is about optics. The Pact Purity Act is their attempt to reassure themselves that their institutions are not crawling with creatures like us. It says no officer may enter a pact with an infernal being. No judge, no minister, no elected official. It frames their virtue in negative space."
"And yet here we are," I said. "They have supernatural backup in their cells. Harry is hosting a Witness. Where is the purity."
Thea shrugged. "They followed their own law. They did not pact with a devil. They invited a construct made of their own prayers. The Act has nothing to say about that. It forbids contracts with declared infernals. Witnesses are not declared. They are deniable. If anything, your Pact Purity Act protects them. There is no clause to limit alliances with 'entities of aspirational alignment.' That was the phrase they used."
I almost smiled. "Aspirational alignment."
"Yes—entities of aspirational alignment purporting to preserve institutional integrity—they love a halo with footnotes." Thea said. "They aspire to be what they told themselves God wanted them to be, so anything built from that aspiration must be safe. They forget rot can form in light as well as dark. Give something the job of keeping you pure, and it will start inventing new kinds of dirt to justify its existence."
"So the police promised this Witness what?" I asked. "Access to every sinner they drag in? To every pact case?"
"Closer," Thea said. "They promised it jurisdiction. Over cases involving you. Over any citizen who tangled with the infernal without permission. The Witness gets to observe you, record you, tilt outcomes so that every story ends with mortals telling themselves they were right to be afraid. In exchange, it keeps their memories clean of us. Your blurring fails. Your presence can be edited out of reports. But their belief in their own righteousness stays intact."
I let the architecture of it settle in my mind. The neatness. The horror. Every human compromise always came packaged as efficiency.
"You said there was no way out," I reminded them. "You told me I couldn't come close. Were you exaggerating to make a point, or do you understand something I don't."
Thea stretched, vertebrae shifting with soft cracks. The sound crawled pleasantly through the walls.
"You are marked, Corvian," they said. "Your essence drags certain reactions out of reality. The Witness inside Harry is built to respond to any contamination of that type. If you walk too close to him in your true form, it will not strike you. It will document you. And every mortal structure attached to it will react. Law. Church. Whatever scraps of conscience Hugo still believes in. You would light up every alarm they built into that pact."
"And Hugo," I said.
"And Hugo," they echoed. "He is already their prize. Evidence that the Pact Purity Act works. A public example. A magician who thought he could play with fire and walk away unscathed. If you try to pull him out by force, you will validate every fear they sold their people. You will become the monster they wrote into that law. Some devils would enjoy that."
"You know I would," I said quietly.
"Yes," Thea replied. "And yet you are here, asking about a way out. Which means you are trying, for once, to think beyond your appetite."
I looked down the steps. The Pantheon fell away below us in concentric rings, smaller altars and empty thrones fading into shadow. Once, every seat had been filled. Now dust held court.
"So what is your theory," I asked. "About their pact. About what I can do."
Thea studied me. Their gaze moved like a scalpel, peeling back habit and posture.
"Honestly," they said, "I had not heard of your little Act until you mentioned it. Mortals pass a new law every time they flinch. We cannot keep track. But if I were to guess…"
They trailed off, tapping a finger against their lower lip, eyes half-lidded as if savoring the shape of the idea before speaking it.
"…I would say they did not bind the Witness to themselves alone," they continued. "They tied it to your kind of sin. To the category of transgression you represent. Illegal pacts. Unregistered miracles. Fires with no root. They told it: whenever a creature like Corvian touches one of ours, you may inhabit whoever stands closest to that breach. Harry, in this case. You may use their eyes. Their authority. Their badge. In return, you will keep our story clean. You will make sure the world believes corruption came only from below, never from within."
"And you let them," I said. "All of this right under our nose."
Thea's mouth curved.
"You still think of us as a government," they said. "We are not regulators, Corvian. We are a symptom. Mortals want to be seen without being judged. They built the Witness to solve that contradiction. If the solution offends you, perhaps you should have thought twice before teaching a boy like Hugo how to burn without smoke."
The mark inside me tightened at his name. Hugo's breathing, still faintly synced with mine, stuttered in the distance. Even here, I could feel his chest rise and fall in that cell, each shallow breath counted as evidence by systems he did not understand.
"I need access," I said.
The words left me quieter than I intended, landing between us with a weight that didn't belong to sound alone. For a moment Thea didn't answer; their attention drifted toward the dome above, where the carvings of creatures who predated scripture clung to the stone as though waiting to resume breathing.
When they looked back at me, the indulgence had drained from their expression entirely.
"You can't," Thea said. "You simply can't. Unless you want to be banished."
The word settled into the chamber like a tolling bell. No theatrics. No threat. Just a fact spoken by someone who had lived long enough to remember what banishment looked like.
My jaw tightened.
Thea leaned forward, elbows braced on their knees, studying me with a kind of tired clarity that devoured every other emotion they might have projected.
"At this point," they said, "it's either you or him."
Silence thickened between us, heavy enough that even the Pantheon seemed to listen.
"If you push against that pact," they went on, voice low but steady, "the Witness will not break. You will. And when you break, Corvian, you won't fall. You will be driven out of this realm entirely. Not killed. Not scattered. Exiled. Outside the corridors. Outside the calls. Outside him."
A cold stillness moved through me, deeper than instinct and older than fear. Banished. The kind of word devils do not speak aloud unless its shadow has already passed near.
Thea straightened, hands smoothing the folds of their clothing with the detached grace of someone preparing to deliver a final diagnosis.
"You try to go to him again in your true state," they said, "you will trigger every clause they fed into that Witness. It will invoke the pact in full. And the moment it does, you will be judged by the story they wrote about you. Not the truth. Not your will. Their narrative. Their purity. Their law."
I did not look away. I refused to.
Thea's voice softened—not gentle, but resigned.
"And Hugo will be the proof they needed. The case that confirms every fear they used to forge this thing. They will keep him, and the Witness will stand between the two of you until the end of his mortal breath."
The mark inside my chest tightened, a single pulse echoing through bone.
Thea saw it. Their eyes dropped to that place, then lifted again, unreadable.
"So choose carefully," they said. "This world won't let both of you stay."
Their gaze dropped deliberately to my chest.
The mark pulsed once, slow and deep, as if answering to its name.