Isabella waited until Lambert’s footsteps had faded down the east corridor before she moved.
The council had dispersed. Wylan had retreated in the direction of his workshop. Laila headed off to preside over the manor, with Max not far behind. Lambert had stood observing the Pendulum through a window for a full minute, then went in the opposite direction.
Now’s my chance.
In short time, she found herself in front of Lambert’s private chambers. It’s not that I don’t trust you, brother, but...
Before she finished the thought, she was stepping into the room. Trust, but verify.
She could not help but recall the strangeness she had felt watching Lambert speak in the council room. He had spoken with Alexios’s cadence, or what she could remember of it. Like a ghost wearing a cassock.
Perhaps she would find nothing but homilies and platitudes.
Lambert’s room was as she expected: austere, orderly, and a bed made not by any servant.
A single candle stood on the writing desk, unlit.
His cassock hung on the back of the door, a spare, and the faint smell of incense clung to the air.
However, all of those details fell away as she saw Alexios’s journal arrayed on the desk, open, as if it had been left mid-meditation. If the stale coffee was any indicator, he hadn’t given the journal much thought in the last few days.
She recognised Lambert’s handwriting: precise and angular, alongside Alexios’s original and measured script. The margins were dense with cross-references: Calderon — confirm C’s account of V’s movements. Cross-ref with Basilica appointment records. Esteban — timeline of disappearance, overlap with V’s elevation.
She turned a page to see the same pattern across almost every entry. He had turned their father’s private journal into an intelligence dossier.
Their father’s, the thought returned. This journal did not belong to him for all he had commandeered it, and now it seemed abandoned in light of new revelations.
Will you even miss it?
Isabella closed the journal and took it.
Back in her own room, she spread the journal open on her desk and began to read. Not Lambert’s annotations, but Alexios’s original script. Most of the subject matter eluded her, but she took small comfort in almost hearing Alexios’s voice from deep in the past.
As she let the words flow over her, she realised she was seeing the shape of a pattern, but none of it resolved clearly enough to make sense of. A word here, a symbol there, and some discussion of a great work. It was there in and among the details Alexios had collected of the dragon cult. She caught snippets of bloodlines and inherited traits. I’m missing something.
She closed the journal to drag the words away from her field of vision. Her thoughts were a swimming jumble of detritus.
She weighed the journal in her hand and couldn’t tell if it was heavy or just felt so. Now, turning it over, her fingers caught on the seam. Upon closer inspection, she saw where the leather had been restitched. Not recently, perhaps years ago. She had seen this before.
She fetched a small blade from her desk and slit the seam.
Inside, folded with painstaking precision, was a piece of parchment. The paper crackled as she unfolded it, revealing notes in a hand that was neither Alexios’s nor Lambert’s. It was sharp and pointed, but with elegant ticks.
These were not diarised notes. They were... schematics? They reminded her of Wylan’s experimental logs, but they were not a father’s reflections.
She read the journal again in light of these discoveries. The words did not improve.
Then finally a pattern jumped out at her. Three symbols, in different entries of the diary, on different pages, seemingly years apart. And under them were the initials: L, M, and W.
She almost dropped the diary and scanned the room as if about to be caught.
The symbols nagged at her. She had seen them before. Not in the diary though.
Isabella reached into her satchel from the Dungeon and carefully drew out the scroll she had found there, the one labelled: The Eternal Eclipse.
There right under the title were those three same symbols.
She needed Wylan.
The nursery was bathed in the soft golden glow of lamplight. Lambert heard the fussing before he reached the door, and Greta’s voice beneath it, murmuring in Eisen with the firm gentleness of a woman who had soothed more infants than she cared to count.
? Pursuant to his gothic archetype, Lambert possessed the unnerving knack of materialising behind people with all the silence and inevitability of bad news.
“Oh, Lambert,” Laila said from the rocking chair, smoothing the fabric of her dress. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I actually came to find my niece,” Lambert said. “It appears we had the same idea.”
“Madame de Vaillant,” Greta acknowledged with a whisper clipped enough to cut paper. “May I assist with something?”
“We’re fine, Greta, thank you,” Laila said. “How has she been?”
Greta’s expression tightened. “The little one is unsettled. Mistress Mirembe has not come to visit. Not yesterday, not today.” She adjusted the swaddling with brisk efficiency. “They are not talking, ja? The duke and his wife. The staff whisper. The baby knows.”
“Babies don’t know things, Greta,” Laila said.
“In Eisen, we say the child who weeps at shouting will sleep through cannon fire. This one weeps at silence. She knows.”
Laila rose from the chair and crossed to the crib. She reached out, brushing her fingers gently over Aurora’s dark brown curls, threaded with streaks of red. For a brief moment, she could convince herself that all was right in the world, her with her granddaughter.
The fussing continued. Laila reached into her sleeve and produced a pinch of coloured powder, scattering it gently over the crib. The pigment caught the lamplight for a moment, shimmering, and then Aurora’s breathing eased. The fussing softened to silence.
“Don’t you think she’s had enough magic used on her?” Lambert said quietly.
Laila did not look up. “Let me just enjoy this moment with my granddaughter.”
Lambert let it rest. “However, you seem distressed from recent events.”
Laila exhaled a faint laugh, though weariness underpinned her words. “Right now, I think I just need someone to listen. And while you may not be the most emotionally sensitive person in this household...”
“My vocation requires a degree of detachment,” Lambert cautioned. “Without it, I might buckle under the pressure.”
Laila sighed. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Still, I can’t shake the feeling we’re missing something vital. Everything traces back to Aurora’s birth. What do you think?”
Lambert raised an eyebrow. “Do we wish to continue this discussion in private?”
Greta, cradling Aurora, glanced up with a faint smirk. “Oh, there’s no one else here. It’s just me and the baby.”
Lambert conceded the point. “Puzzles often have missing pieces. Sometimes they’re not lost. Sometimes they’re never included to begin with.”
“That’s comforting.”
“I’m saying what we see might be part of a much larger design. This isn’t just about our family, or even Alexios and his war against the dragon queen. It’s a thread in something much older, a struggle as old as humanity itself.” He paused. “Perhaps it started when the first human decided a stick made a fine argument.”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“That’s remarkably cynical, even for you,” Laila observed.
“The stick was quite a theological advance at the time,” Lambert said mildly.
Laila couldn’t suppress a quiet laugh. “And here I thought you’d give me answers, not existential riddles.”
“Riddles are often more useful than answers. They force us to look deeper.” Lambert’s expression softened. “This is a daunting task, Laila. It’s unreasonable to expect clarity right away. But your role matters. You’re playing it well.”
She tilted her head, studying him. “Do you really believe that?”
“I do. Invictus smiles upon us, as do others who see value in what we’re doing. Take heart in that.”
Laila sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to trust your riddles for now.”
“You could do worse,” Lambert replied. He glanced at Aurora, sleeping now, the red in her curls catching the lamplight. “Right then. I think I am going to find a quiet place and enjoy whatever sunshine exists on this winter day.”
Laila looked up. “Are you alright? You’re not ill?”
“I’m fine, Mother.”
“Lambert, you have never voluntarily sought sunlight in your life.”
“Then perhaps it’s time I started.”
He left the nursery as quietly as he had arrived.
Wylan’s workshop occupied its usual state of collaborative catastrophe. Wylan himself was hunched over a set of notes, cross-referencing something with the intensity of a man who had replaced sleep with purpose and was beginning to regret the exchange.
His musings were interrupted by a knock at the door.
“I need your eyes,” Isabella blurted from the doorway.
He looked up.
Isabella was already inside and bearing down on him, brandishing a book in his face. A moment later he realised it was the diary she had extracted from the Dungeon.
“Did you take that from Lambert?”
Isabella had the decency to look embarrassed. “I borrowed it, and he wasn’t using it.”
“Well, which was it?”
“That’s not the point. Look here!”
The book was thrust into his lap, open on a page of stylised and sometimes colourful symbols.
“What am I looking at? You know I can’t read this cipher.”
She pointed down at an entry. It had the letter L and the alchemical symbol for the Pendulum at dusk.
“So what?”
She flipped the pages again. Another entry and the letter M, alongside the alchemical symbol for the Pendulum at zenith.
“Uh...”
By the time she was flipping the pages again, Wylan knew what to expect. He was both pleased and dismayed simultaneously to see a W next to the symbol for the Pendulum at dawn.
“These are alchemical notations. Old ones though.”
“What do they mean?”
“I mean I think you’ve already figured out the letters are our initials: mine, Max’s, and Lambert’s. It’s us.”
“You.”
“That’s not better.”
Isabella pulled the hidden parchment from beneath the journal. “There’s more. I found this stitched into the lining of the back cover.”
Wylan took it. The handwriting was unfamiliar, neither Alexios’s nor Lambert’s. Sharp and pointed, but with elegant ticks. He scanned the contents, and his frown deepened.
“These are schematics. Someone was documenting experiments, inheritance patterns, bloodline traits.” He looked up. “These are relevant to each of you. Something to do with birthright, or perhaps blood right?”
“Do you think this has something to do with Seraphina being a vampire?”
“Maybe.” Wylan turned the parchment over in his hands. “Wait, when did she become one? Before or after she married Artan?”
“Before. We know that much.”
“Can vampires even have children?”
“How should I know? Aren’t you the monster expert?”
“I’ve never hunted vampires, Wylie! Why would I?” Isabella crossed her arms. “Besides, I was thinking it was something to do with the de Vaillant Dungeon. It’s designed to turn its scions into Heroes.”
Wylan was quiet for a moment. “You know,” he said, “I think these notes make a lot of sense if it’s somehow a combination of both.”
“What does that mean? You have vampiric blood in your veins?”
“I don’t know, Isabella. And honestly, I think it’s kind of dangerous to speculate in this moment.”
“Do you know what’s worse? Look at the dates.”
Wylan turned back to the journal. He checked the entry with the W. The page was dated. “This entry is from the year I was born.”
Isabella leaned over his shoulder. He flipped to the M entry.
“That’s Max’s birth year,” she said.
Wylan flipped to the L entry. The date on the page was clear: 1776.
“Lambert wasn’t born in 1776,” Wylan said. “What’s the significance?”
“That was the year Father brought Lambert home.”
Wylan looked up.
“It was also the year we thought Grandmother Seraphina died,” Isabella said.
“We’re going to need Lambert,” Wylan said.
Lambert had found a bench in the courtyard that caught the afternoon light. He sat with his face tilted toward the sun, eyes closed, prayer beads loose in his hands. The warmth was pleasant. He was not praying. He was not thinking. For a few minutes, he was simply a man sitting in sunlight, and that was enough.
He heard them before he saw them. Two sets of footsteps, one purposeful, one reluctant, which told him it was Isabella and Wylan before he opened his eyes.
Isabella was carrying the journal. His journal.
“You took my journal,” he said.
“Father’s journal,” Isabella corrected. “And you weren’t using it.”
“That is not the point.”
“That’s what I said,” Wylan offered, unhelpfully.
Isabella sat down on the bench beside him and opened the journal. Wylan hovered. Between them, they laid it out: the hidden parchment stitched into the lining, the schematics in an unknown hand, the alchemical symbols next to the initials L, M, and W, the match to the Eternal Eclipse scroll.
“The symbols are Pendulum phases,” Wylan said. “Dusk, noon, and dawn. Mapped onto the three of you.”
Lambert listened. He did not interrupt. When they had finished, he held out his hand for the parchment.
He read it carefully. The handwriting was unfamiliar. Sharp, pointed, elegant ticks. The language was clinical: unions, progeny, blood rights, latent traits. He turned it over, examined the dates.
“You said the entries for Wylan and Maximilian correspond to their birth years.”
“Yes,” Isabella said.
“And my entry is dated 1776.”
“Yes.”
Lambert was quiet for a moment. The sunlight was still warm on his face.
“Given the order of the dates,” he said, “it doesn’t appear that Father knew about me until shortly before I was pulled out of the parish and brought to the estate.”
Isabella frowned. “How do you mean?”
“Wylan’s and Maximilian’s entries are dated from birth. Mine is not. If Father had known about me from the beginning, there would be an earlier entry. There isn’t. He discovered me in 1776, the same year I arrived.”
Lambert turned the parchment over in his hands. “Now. Mother briefed us on what Genevieve d’Amboise told her. There was a night Father was furious. He said something about ‘that bloody woman.’ Shortly after, I appeared at the doorstep. And not long after that, Seraphina ‘died.’”
“You think he found out what she was doing,” Wylan said.
“I think the dates are close enough to build a case. We cannot say for certain that Father wasn’t complicit, or that he is exonerated. But given Madame d’Amboise’s comments, at some point, he and Seraphina had something of a falling out.”
“How do you know it was a falling out?” Isabella asked.
Lambert looked at her. “Who else could possibly have put Grandmother Seraphina in a sarcophagus at the bottom of the de Vaillant Dungeon, to which only he had a key?”
The courtyard was quiet.
“Not only that,” Lambert continued, “but Seraphina’s own estimation of her length in a torpid state seems to match the timeline. She expected to be imprisoned for roughly as long as she was. Which means she knew it was coming, or at least considered it a possibility.” He set the parchment down on the bench between them. “Given all of this, the most likely author of these notes is Seraphina herself.”
“Can we just acknowledge,” Wylan said, “that we’re sitting here calmly discussing vampire reproduction like it’s a livestock breeding program? This is not a normal conversation for any day of the week.”
“Just another Ersday,” Lambert observed.
“That doesn’t make it better.”
“Which brings us to the real question,” Isabella said. “Who, exactly, was your mother?”
Lambert was quiet for a moment. “Lampetia,” he said. “The name has come to me twice now. Once from a netherborn who tried to bargain with it, and once in the revelation with Death. Seraphina seems to know who she is.” He folded the parchment carefully. “Then I guess we have a lot more to discuss with Seraphina. If anyone has answers, it’s her. Sitting here speculating isn’t going to bring us closer to the truth.”
“And we’re seeing her tonight,” Wylan said.
“Yes, and we go armed with this.” Lambert gestured at the notes. “We show her what we’ve found. We see how she responds.”
Isabella nodded. “Do we tell Max?”
Lambert’s gaze moved from Isabella to Wylan and back.
“Not yet,” Lambert said. “Not until we understand what this means for Aurora.”
“So,” Wylan said, leaning back. He had the look of a man trying to assemble levity from insufficient materials. “Our undead grandmother may have engineered our bloodlines to align with some secret design, Father knew and buried it, and the only person who can explain any of it is the woman we’re confronting tonight.” He paused. “Have I missed anything?”
“The part where none of this is like Dark Embrace: The Eternal Lover,” Isabella said.
Lambert shot her a disapproving look. “That’s pulp drivel.”
“You’re right, though, Isabella,” Wylan said, and couldn’t help but grin. “He is rather pale and gaunt.”
“The word you’re looking for is ‘cadaverous.’”
“That’s not better,” Isabella pointed out.
“It’s more precise,” Lambert insisted.
“Whatever experiment was done with our blood,” Wylan said, and the levity drained from his voice, “that probably makes you the prototype. And prototypes are usually... ill-conceived.”
The entendre lingered. Lambert’s hand moved in the sign of prayer.
“Components,” Lambert said quietly. “Not accidents. Not heirs. Components, calibrated and catalogued.” He looked at the parchment one final time. “We’re not going to Seraphina as grandchildren tonight. We’re going as evidence.”
From somewhere towards the front of the house, raised voices echoed across the courtyard.
Raised voices from the front hall. One voice, sharp with restrained authority, belonged to Maximilian. The other, steely and unwavering, was Mirembe’s.
The three of them reached the entrance hall to find that restraint had left the building ahead of them.
Mirembe stood tall, composed in the way that a drawn blade is composed. Her travelling cloak was on. Her bags were by the door. This was not an argument that had erupted. This was a departure that had been interrupted.
Maximilian reached for her arm. The air around him was warm, as it always was when his control slipped. “You can’t leave. Not in the middle of all this.”
Mirembe turned sharply.
The crack of her hand meeting Maximilian’s face echoed through the hall.
“Do not touch me,” she said. Her voice was cold as iron. “I’m going to my mother’s, and you will not speak to me.”
Without another word, she swept past them, her footsteps purposeful as she disappeared through the door. Her absence filled the hall as completely as her presence had.
The assembled family stood frozen, as though waiting for someone to declare intermission. Nobody did.
Maximilian’s hands were brandishing; fingers splayed in the involuntary gestures of a sorcerer losing hold of his composure. Flickers of flame licked through his hair. His breathing was uneven, the heat radiating from him in waves that made the nearest candles gutter.
Isabella took a step forward. Wylan caught her arm and shook his head.
“Let me handle this,” he said quietly.
“Max,” Wylan said, his voice calm but leaving no room for argument. “I think you and I need to have a talk, over a stiff drink.” He glanced toward Percival. “Percy, you’re coming too.”
From the far end of the corridor, Laila had arrived with impressive speed. Though she was muttering, her words carried pointedly across the entry hall. “Can we just have one day without a scandal? Just one day.”
The last thing Wylan heard was Lambert: “This is why I took a vow of chastity.”