LOGIN(Apollo)Adelaide's scent was faint. Almost gone. But not gone enough.The discovery struck harder than it should have.Her scent lingered across the bedding in fragile traces, woven through the fabric so lightly that another demon might have missed it entirely. Apollo did not. He recognised her instantly. For one brief, terrible moment, relief flooded through him. Because she was there, this was proof that she still existed somewhere in the world beyond his reach.Then the relief died, because another scent emerged beneath it. Smoke. Leather. Cold ash. Shadow.Cael.Apollo's eyes opened. Slowly. Very slowly.The room seemed to tighten around him. The mountain itself felt quieter. Listening. Waiting.His gaze followed the scent toward the narrow space beside the bed where several travel items had been stored. A pack rested against the wall. A weapons case sat beside it. Partially concealed beneath both lay a dark cloak that had likely gone unnoticed for too long.Cael’s cloak.Apollo
(Apollo) By the time Apollo reached the eastern residential wing, the rage had changed shape. It was no longer sharp. It was vast. A red ocean beneath a black sky. The corridors grew quieter the deeper he moved into the palace. Torchlight shivered against dark stone. Ancient shadows gathered between pillars carved from volcanic glass. The servants who saw him coming vanished almost immediately, disappearing through side passages and service doors with the instincts of prey scenting a predator. No one stopped him. No one dared. Because everyone in the palace knew which chambers waited at the end of this corridor. Cael's. The guards outside his doors knelt before he came into view. One pressed his forehead so hard to the floor that blood smeared the stone. Apollo passed without acknowledgment. The doors opened for him, but too slowly. He tore one from its hinges. The sound of it ripping free rolled through the small chamber like thunder beneath the mountain. The door struck t
(Apollo)He found three mentions of Arkael.One placed him dead at the western breach. One placed him fleeing through the lower tunnels with a bloodied hand pressed to his side. One claimed he had been seen carrying a child.Apollo went very still. The vault seemed to tilt around that single line.He read it again. Seen carrying a child.No gender listed. No age. No identifying mark. No witness name. The report was unsigned, marked unreliable in a hand Apollo recognised as his own. A cruel annotation slashed across the margin: fantasy born of panic. Discard.His fingers hovered above the words.He remembered writing that.The war had been chaos then, every corridor wet with blood, every loyalist inventing miracles to comfort themselves, every surviving servant insisting someone had escaped, someone important, someone who would return one day wrapped in prophecy and vengeance. Apollo had dismissed most of it because it was mostly nonsense. Hope made liars of the defeated. He had learne
(Apollo)The deeper he searched, the more the missing places multiplied.Here, a burned census. There, a sealed birth registry with half its pages fused together by ancient fire. A witness ledger where someone had scratched a name out so violently that the parchment had torn. A marriage oath with the final line missing. A ward-tag bearing an Emberborn seal, but no attached record.He read until the chamber smelled of warmed vellum and old dust stirred by wrath, until the torchlight made gold and black dance over his hands, until his eyes ached from lines too small and meanings too incomplete.Nothing.Nothing definitive. Nothing Apollo could hold up to the light and name accusation.That should have pleased him.It did not.The absence had shape. That was what unsettled him. Missing things were rarely clean. Real history bled at the edges. It contradicted itself. It left scars. Yet every path he followed seemed to arrive at the same impossible smoothness, as though someone had careful
(Apollo)The records chamber had not been opened by royal hand in centuries, and the mountain seemed to know it, the stone holding a peculiar stillness around the sealed doors, the sort of silence found in tombs built for kings and abandoned by time.Apollo knew that before the doors groaned apart, before the old hinges shrieked into the corridor with a sound like something waking hungry beneath stone, before the first stale breath of preserved dust, dead ink, and cold vellum slipped out to meet him. He knew because the mountain knew. He felt it in the way the wards around the archway tightened at his approach, recognised him, trembled, then obeyed. Ancient locks uncurled from the door’s black iron bones one by one, sigils flaring dull red beneath centuries of grime before guttering out again, as if even magic resented being dragged from sleep for the sake of an old wound.The corridor behind him lay silent. Too silent.The sort of silence that gathered around the Devil when Hell had
(Adelaide & Cael) They resumed walking. The forest grew darker as they moved deeper, though Adelaide’s wings kept the worst of the shadows away. Cael watched the path with renewed focus, but his attention kept returning to her, to the impossible ease with which she carried fire, to the way her emotions brushed his own, to the new markings hidden beneath his sleeves, to the old palace waiting ahead like a sealed memory preparing to open its eyes. Adelaide felt his thoughts circling something and glanced over. “You’re thinking loudly.” “I am not thinking at you.” “You are brooding with force.” “That is not a measurable phenomenon.” “It is now.” He exhaled softly, and for a few steps, the sound of ash beneath their boots filled the quiet. Then he said, “Can you feel Apollo?” The question moved between them carefully. Adelaide’s steps slowed. Not stopped. But slowed. She looked ahead, her expression tightening. “Not clearly.” Cael waited. “That’s the worst part,” sh
(Apollo & Adelaide) Apollo stepped closer until his body brushed hers again, heat searing into every inch of exposed skin. A shimmer of hellfire rippled through the air where their bodies met. Her breath came faster, shallow and sharp. The heat rolling off him thickened the air, warping it like gl
(Apollo & Adelaide) By the time he pulled the cup away, her head spun less. The world sharpened. A faint pulse tugged at her chest—the bond—like a thread drawn taut between them. His pupils flickered, and she knew he felt it too. Felt her. A muscle jumped in his jaw. He looked away for a single he
(Apollo & Adelaide)Her breathing went ragged the instant the words left his mouth.He felt it through the bond—the spike of terror, the way her pulse hammered against the ropes of smoke binding her wrists, the tightening in her chest as every survival instinct screamed at once. The echo of it slam
(Apollo & Adelaide) Something touched her. Soft at first. A drag of heat across the back of her calf. A whisper of warmth against skin gone cold and numb. It slithered up from the stone like a thin tongue of fire, testing, tasting, coaxing life back into deadened nerves. Her body tried to flinch







