Three days passed since Selena's ascension. They spent the first of those days resting in the outskirts of Carcera, the woods cloaking them while she recovered. But unease grew like ivy around their camp. The city had not forgotten them, and the web of power they'd disrupted had begun to tighten its threads again.
Loki and Selena returned, not as fugitives but as faces lost in the crowd.
To learn more about who—or what—was pulling the strings behind their journey, they needed information. And in Carcera, information came in exchange for favors, silence, or gold. Lacking all three in surplus, they turned to what the city offered most freely: odd jobs.
Their first came in the form of a message hidden within a loaf of rye bread delivered to a tavern by a girl with no name. The message was sealed with a symbol neither had seen before: a serpent biting its own tail, surrounded by angular glyphs that shimmered and shifted when viewed from the corner of the eye.
Selena turned it over in her hands. "This isn't one of the families. Not even the Veyrons use motion glyphs in their seals."
Loki's fingers traced the serpent. "Could be someone outside the city. Or someone who wants us to think they are."
The job was simple on paper—escort a caravan transporting old relics from the eastern wharf to a vault beneath the Cauldron Market. But the cargo was unmarked, the guards unarmed, and the merchant had eyes that glowed faintly in dim light.
When ambushers struck, it was not for the goods. They came for Loki and Selena.
The fight was brief but brutal. Selena's newly awakened Sequence allowed her to predict their feints before they made them. Loki danced between blades, illusions flaring like sparks, until one of the attackers looked directly into his eyes and whispered:
"The eye watches. The eye wakes."
They left no survivors. That was not part of the contract—but it was necessary.
In the aftermath, their employer led them down a spiral stair that corkscrewed into darkness beneath the Cauldron Market. At the base was a chamber lined with masks—some carved of stone, others cast in metal, a few made from bone.
"Welcome to the Pale Assembly," said the merchant, pulling back his hood. His face was unremarkable except for the lack of anything behind his eyes. Not emptiness. Not blindness. Just... void.
"We deal in things forgotten," he continued. "Truths not suitable for polite tongues. You seek the pattern, yes? The one sewn behind veils and prophecy?"
Loki's smile was thin. "What makes you think we're not just thieves with pretty faces?"
"Because your blood remembers. And your shadows cling too tightly."
Selena stepped forward. "Tell us what you know."
"The Assembly serves neither the crown nor the crypt," the merchant replied. "We walk the border between what is allowed and what is real."
He produced a scroll from his sleeve and offered it. On it were seven symbols—each representing one of the major bloodlines of Carcera. At the center: the ouroboros and the closed eye.
"Each family was gifted power by a different entity, long before records. Their sequences are reflections of these boons. But there were others. Forgotten ones. Exiled ones. And one whose gift was not a blessing, but a warning."
"The Trickster," Loki murmured.
The merchant inclined his head. "And the Seeker. The only two Sequences that do not require permission from the original pact."
Selena's pulse quickened. "Why us?"
"Because you are outliers. Exceptions. And because exceptions, when pressed, become catalysts."
Loki folded his arms. "And your Pale Assembly—what do you want from us?"
The merchant smiled. "To ask the right questions. To keep moving. There are places even the Dumornays will not tread. Names the Veyrons will not whisper."
He leaned closer. "And someone—something—is stitching new pacts beneath their feet."
That night, back in their temporary refuge above a forgotten apothecary, Loki stared at the symbol on the scroll.
"Do you think we were born for this?" he asked.
Selena shook her head. "I think we were made for something else. And now we're being repurposed."
Loki laughed softly. "A tale as old as gods."
They didn't sleep much that night. The city had begun to change. Even the air felt different—thicker with potential, charged like the silence before thunder.
Something was coming.
And now, at last, they had reason to walk toward it.