Seraphis lasted twenty-three minutes.
For the first ten, she sat where she had been told to sit. For another five, she paced. After that she found increasingly pointless reasons to cross the room, examine the windows, check her comms, and look again at the same reports she had already read. Theron had gone out into that. Every time she approached the windows, all she could see beyond the glass was white. Not falling snow in any recognizable sense, but a moving wall of it, thick enough that the world seemed to end somewhere beyond the panes.
The room was beautiful, of course. Everything in the Kremlin seemed determined to remind a visitor that empires had existed here before them and would probably exist afterward. Gold, polished wood, carved moldings, ceilings high enough to make ordinary people feel appropriately small. Seraphis had admired it all when she arrived. Now it felt like a very expensive cage.
So she left. No one actually told her that she couldn't. The distinction carried her through two corridors before anyone challenged it.
The Grand Kremlin Palace had changed since the summit. Earlier, its halls had possessed the strange stillness of a place under intense security, every movement anticipated and every person precisely where someone had decided they should be. Now people moved quickly beneath the chandeliers. Kremlin staff passed carrying equipment cases. Uniformed officers spoke into comms while walking. A table that Seraphis distinctly remembered holding flowers earlier in the day had become an improvised station covered in chargers, batteries and handheld equipment.
She wandered slowly enough to appear as though she belonged somewhere. It was an old skill. At the first guarded passage she tried, a Kremlin officer stepped into her path before she had made it three strides.
“Miss.”
Seraphis smiled.
He did not.
“Not this way.”
“Of course.”
She turned around with perfect obedience, waited until the corner concealed her, and took the next corridor instead. The palace opened unexpectedly into another magnificent hall, enormous even by Kremlin standards, though Seraphis had no idea what it was called. She stopped beneath a painted ceiling and turned slowly, taking in columns, gilding, chandeliers and doors tall enough for giants. It seemed absurd that such a place existed while, somewhere beyond its walls, Moscow was being buried alive.
A large display at the far end of the hall had once carried information for the summit. Now it showed the city. Seraphis drifted toward it.
The map was almost unrecognizable. Districts were shaded according to accumulation and infrastructure loss. Emergency notices crawled along the bottom while a presenter spoke over footage of snow swallowing buildings. The numbers beside the map kept changing. Accumulation. Power failures. Heating outages. Emergency shelters. Rescue deployments.
Then the image changed, and she saw the Kremlin. Seraphis stopped.
The footage had been taken earlier, probably from one of the palace cameras. The storm had already been ferocious, but visibility was still good enough to distinguish figures moving away from the walls.
There was Theron. Her heart jumped despite herself.
The camera was too distant for faces, but she knew from the way he moved. Six other figures surrounded the man ahead of them. And at the lead, Ascendancy. The caption beneath the footage identified him unnecessarily.
The presenter spoke with the careful composure of someone who understood that millions of frightened people were watching. The Ascendancy, she explained, had personally joined the Dominion response after directing emergency operations from the Kremlin. Specialized teams were opening routes through central Moscow to allow trapped emergency personnel access to residential districts otherwise unreachable by conventional means.
The footage showed them all disappearing into the white. Seraphis folded her arms.
“That was stupid,” she murmured.
A Kremlin employee passing nearby glanced at her, but Seraphis pretended she had said nothing. She meant it, though.He was the Ascendancy! There were Dominions for this. Soldiers. Emergency workers. Entire custodies whose purpose was dealing with catastrophes. Theron going made some kind of sense, even if she hated it. Theron had spent years telling people that service was sacred. He could hardly remain drinking tea in the Kremlin while Moscow suffocated, but Nikolai Brandon had an empire. He had no business walking into a storm.
The broadcast moved on, but Seraphis remained. A few minutes later another report interrupted it. This footage was different. She stepped closer.
For several seconds she couldn't understand what she was seeing. The camera moved through a long corridor whose walls were pale blue-white. Emergency personnel drove slowly ahead of it across a floor that looked almost unnaturally smooth. Overhead floated spheres of white light. The caption identified the location as somewhere in central Moscow, but it was a tunnel. They had tunneled through the snow.
Seraphis stared.
The correspondent explained that the first emergency corridors had reached several previously inaccessible residential blocks. Teams were moving while the Dominions stabilized buildings threatened by the extraordinary accumulation. The camera passed beneath another sphere. Then another. And another. Seraphis moved closer to the screen. She recognized that type of light.
Light was among the simplest things a trained channeler could make. She could have created one right then and there if she wanted to, but what bothered her was how many there were. The footage continued forward. They never stopped. The correspondent mentioned them almost incidentally. Illumination had been established throughout the emergency route by the Ascendancy and would remain in place for responders working below the surface.
Seraphis's arms slowly unfolded. The camera turned at an intersection. The lights continued in both directions.
“Wow,” she whispered to herself. She watched until the footage ended.
The next report showed rescue personnel entering one of the corridors. Another showed a ventilation shaft breaking through the surface somewhere near Kitay-gorod, air and snow erupting upward together. There was footage of emergency vehicles disappearing into a snowy opening. The official commentary remained controlled and reassuring, but the images hardly needed assistance.
The city was changing beneath the storm. And Nikolai Brandon was somewhere inside it. Seraphis became aware that she had been standing in the same place for a long time. She finally shook herself out of it and moved on.
The deeper she wandered into the palace, the quieter it became. The frantic movement of the emergency staff gradually receded behind her. The rooms grew smaller, although smaller was relative in the Kremlin. State halls gave way to older corridors and heavier doors. The architecture changed too. Less imperial grandeur and more age. Walls thick enough that Seraphis wondered what century lay beneath the wallpaper.
She encountered another guard, but this one merely looked at her. Seraphis smiled pleasantly and kept walking. He let her. That was encouraging. The next one did not.
“Restricted.”
Seraphis stopped.
Two Kremlin security officers occupied the corridor ahead, but they were not alone. Beyond them stood men she recognized from earlier in the day. Dark suits and clerical black. One unmistakable flash of scarlet farther down.
They were from the Vatican, which meant she had accidentally found the Pope. Or at least his people.
“I am with the Brotherhood delegation,” Seraphis summoned her confidence and proclaimed herself.
One of the officers consulted something on his display. “Your delegation has rooms assigned in the state apartments.”
“I know.”
“Then you are in the wrong place.”
She thought quickly. “I was looking for His Holiness.” That earned considerably more attention.
A priest standing beyond the security line looked toward her. He was older, silver-haired, with the exhausted expression of someone whose day had ceased making sense hours ago..
“His Holiness is unavailable,” he said.
Seraphis looked past him. “Is he here?”
The priest hesitated just long enough to answer the question.
“He is at prayer.”
“Here?”
“In one of the old palace churches.”
Seraphis looked toward the heavy doors at the end of the corridor. For reasons she couldn't quite explain, the answer unsettled her. Outside, Nikolai Brandon was walking beneath Moscow. Inside, Patricus was praying. She wondered what the Pope was asking God.
“Can I wait?”
“No.”
The answer came simultaneously from the priest and one of the Kremlin officers.
Seraphis smiled with fake demurity.
“Right. Of course.”
She should have left. Instead she wandered several steps away and stopped before an old painting as though it had suddenly become the most fascinating object she had ever encountered. She could feel the security officer watching her.
Seraphis studied the painting and the officer continued watching. So she studied it harder. Somewhere behind the doors was a soft sound. Seraphis glanced over. The priest straightened. One of the Vatican men moved first, but the door opened before he reached it, and Patricus appeared in the doorway.
He had none of the spectacle around him that had accompanied his arrival at the summit. No procession. No announcement. He seemed somehow smaller without it, dressed simply in white against the darkness beyond the door. For a moment Seraphis could see the church behind him, old walls illuminated by candlelight, the gleam of an icon, shadows gathered in corners that looked centuries deep.
Everyone in the corridor changed when he appeared, despite herself, Seraphis did too. Patricus spoke quietly to the priest, who leaned closer to hear him. Then his gaze moved beyond the gathered men. It found her. Seraphis immediately became aware that she was standing where she had explicitly been told not to stand.
The Pope stared at her, and looked surprised.His expression changed so subtly she might have imagined it, but something in his face went still. His eyes remained on hers with an intensity that made Seraphis forget whatever excuse she had been preparing.
The priest followed his gaze. “Your Holiness, she is with the Brotherhood delegation. We were just escorting her back.”
Patricus did not answer him, but he continued looking at Seraphis. Then he stepped into the corridor.
“No,” he said.
The priest paused, but Patricus's gaze never left her.
“I would like to speak with her.”
Seraphis blinked.
“With me?”
For the first time, something almost like amusement touched the Pope's face.
“Yes,” Patricus said. “With you.”
For the first ten, she sat where she had been told to sit. For another five, she paced. After that she found increasingly pointless reasons to cross the room, examine the windows, check her comms, and look again at the same reports she had already read. Theron had gone out into that. Every time she approached the windows, all she could see beyond the glass was white. Not falling snow in any recognizable sense, but a moving wall of it, thick enough that the world seemed to end somewhere beyond the panes.
The room was beautiful, of course. Everything in the Kremlin seemed determined to remind a visitor that empires had existed here before them and would probably exist afterward. Gold, polished wood, carved moldings, ceilings high enough to make ordinary people feel appropriately small. Seraphis had admired it all when she arrived. Now it felt like a very expensive cage.
So she left. No one actually told her that she couldn't. The distinction carried her through two corridors before anyone challenged it.
The Grand Kremlin Palace had changed since the summit. Earlier, its halls had possessed the strange stillness of a place under intense security, every movement anticipated and every person precisely where someone had decided they should be. Now people moved quickly beneath the chandeliers. Kremlin staff passed carrying equipment cases. Uniformed officers spoke into comms while walking. A table that Seraphis distinctly remembered holding flowers earlier in the day had become an improvised station covered in chargers, batteries and handheld equipment.
She wandered slowly enough to appear as though she belonged somewhere. It was an old skill. At the first guarded passage she tried, a Kremlin officer stepped into her path before she had made it three strides.
“Miss.”
Seraphis smiled.
He did not.
“Not this way.”
“Of course.”
She turned around with perfect obedience, waited until the corner concealed her, and took the next corridor instead. The palace opened unexpectedly into another magnificent hall, enormous even by Kremlin standards, though Seraphis had no idea what it was called. She stopped beneath a painted ceiling and turned slowly, taking in columns, gilding, chandeliers and doors tall enough for giants. It seemed absurd that such a place existed while, somewhere beyond its walls, Moscow was being buried alive.
A large display at the far end of the hall had once carried information for the summit. Now it showed the city. Seraphis drifted toward it.
The map was almost unrecognizable. Districts were shaded according to accumulation and infrastructure loss. Emergency notices crawled along the bottom while a presenter spoke over footage of snow swallowing buildings. The numbers beside the map kept changing. Accumulation. Power failures. Heating outages. Emergency shelters. Rescue deployments.
Then the image changed, and she saw the Kremlin. Seraphis stopped.
The footage had been taken earlier, probably from one of the palace cameras. The storm had already been ferocious, but visibility was still good enough to distinguish figures moving away from the walls.
There was Theron. Her heart jumped despite herself.
The camera was too distant for faces, but she knew from the way he moved. Six other figures surrounded the man ahead of them. And at the lead, Ascendancy. The caption beneath the footage identified him unnecessarily.
The presenter spoke with the careful composure of someone who understood that millions of frightened people were watching. The Ascendancy, she explained, had personally joined the Dominion response after directing emergency operations from the Kremlin. Specialized teams were opening routes through central Moscow to allow trapped emergency personnel access to residential districts otherwise unreachable by conventional means.
The footage showed them all disappearing into the white. Seraphis folded her arms.
“That was stupid,” she murmured.
A Kremlin employee passing nearby glanced at her, but Seraphis pretended she had said nothing. She meant it, though.He was the Ascendancy! There were Dominions for this. Soldiers. Emergency workers. Entire custodies whose purpose was dealing with catastrophes. Theron going made some kind of sense, even if she hated it. Theron had spent years telling people that service was sacred. He could hardly remain drinking tea in the Kremlin while Moscow suffocated, but Nikolai Brandon had an empire. He had no business walking into a storm.
The broadcast moved on, but Seraphis remained. A few minutes later another report interrupted it. This footage was different. She stepped closer.
For several seconds she couldn't understand what she was seeing. The camera moved through a long corridor whose walls were pale blue-white. Emergency personnel drove slowly ahead of it across a floor that looked almost unnaturally smooth. Overhead floated spheres of white light. The caption identified the location as somewhere in central Moscow, but it was a tunnel. They had tunneled through the snow.
Seraphis stared.
The correspondent explained that the first emergency corridors had reached several previously inaccessible residential blocks. Teams were moving while the Dominions stabilized buildings threatened by the extraordinary accumulation. The camera passed beneath another sphere. Then another. And another. Seraphis moved closer to the screen. She recognized that type of light.
Light was among the simplest things a trained channeler could make. She could have created one right then and there if she wanted to, but what bothered her was how many there were. The footage continued forward. They never stopped. The correspondent mentioned them almost incidentally. Illumination had been established throughout the emergency route by the Ascendancy and would remain in place for responders working below the surface.
Seraphis's arms slowly unfolded. The camera turned at an intersection. The lights continued in both directions.
“Wow,” she whispered to herself. She watched until the footage ended.
The next report showed rescue personnel entering one of the corridors. Another showed a ventilation shaft breaking through the surface somewhere near Kitay-gorod, air and snow erupting upward together. There was footage of emergency vehicles disappearing into a snowy opening. The official commentary remained controlled and reassuring, but the images hardly needed assistance.
The city was changing beneath the storm. And Nikolai Brandon was somewhere inside it. Seraphis became aware that she had been standing in the same place for a long time. She finally shook herself out of it and moved on.
The deeper she wandered into the palace, the quieter it became. The frantic movement of the emergency staff gradually receded behind her. The rooms grew smaller, although smaller was relative in the Kremlin. State halls gave way to older corridors and heavier doors. The architecture changed too. Less imperial grandeur and more age. Walls thick enough that Seraphis wondered what century lay beneath the wallpaper.
She encountered another guard, but this one merely looked at her. Seraphis smiled pleasantly and kept walking. He let her. That was encouraging. The next one did not.
“Restricted.”
Seraphis stopped.
Two Kremlin security officers occupied the corridor ahead, but they were not alone. Beyond them stood men she recognized from earlier in the day. Dark suits and clerical black. One unmistakable flash of scarlet farther down.
They were from the Vatican, which meant she had accidentally found the Pope. Or at least his people.
“I am with the Brotherhood delegation,” Seraphis summoned her confidence and proclaimed herself.
One of the officers consulted something on his display. “Your delegation has rooms assigned in the state apartments.”
“I know.”
“Then you are in the wrong place.”
She thought quickly. “I was looking for His Holiness.” That earned considerably more attention.
A priest standing beyond the security line looked toward her. He was older, silver-haired, with the exhausted expression of someone whose day had ceased making sense hours ago..
“His Holiness is unavailable,” he said.
Seraphis looked past him. “Is he here?”
The priest hesitated just long enough to answer the question.
“He is at prayer.”
“Here?”
“In one of the old palace churches.”
Seraphis looked toward the heavy doors at the end of the corridor. For reasons she couldn't quite explain, the answer unsettled her. Outside, Nikolai Brandon was walking beneath Moscow. Inside, Patricus was praying. She wondered what the Pope was asking God.
“Can I wait?”
“No.”
The answer came simultaneously from the priest and one of the Kremlin officers.
Seraphis smiled with fake demurity.
“Right. Of course.”
She should have left. Instead she wandered several steps away and stopped before an old painting as though it had suddenly become the most fascinating object she had ever encountered. She could feel the security officer watching her.
Seraphis studied the painting and the officer continued watching. So she studied it harder. Somewhere behind the doors was a soft sound. Seraphis glanced over. The priest straightened. One of the Vatican men moved first, but the door opened before he reached it, and Patricus appeared in the doorway.
He had none of the spectacle around him that had accompanied his arrival at the summit. No procession. No announcement. He seemed somehow smaller without it, dressed simply in white against the darkness beyond the door. For a moment Seraphis could see the church behind him, old walls illuminated by candlelight, the gleam of an icon, shadows gathered in corners that looked centuries deep.
Everyone in the corridor changed when he appeared, despite herself, Seraphis did too. Patricus spoke quietly to the priest, who leaned closer to hear him. Then his gaze moved beyond the gathered men. It found her. Seraphis immediately became aware that she was standing where she had explicitly been told not to stand.
The Pope stared at her, and looked surprised.His expression changed so subtly she might have imagined it, but something in his face went still. His eyes remained on hers with an intensity that made Seraphis forget whatever excuse she had been preparing.
The priest followed his gaze. “Your Holiness, she is with the Brotherhood delegation. We were just escorting her back.”
Patricus did not answer him, but he continued looking at Seraphis. Then he stepped into the corridor.
“No,” he said.
The priest paused, but Patricus's gaze never left her.
“I would like to speak with her.”
Seraphis blinked.
“With me?”
For the first time, something almost like amusement touched the Pope's face.
“Yes,” Patricus said. “With you.”
![[Image: Seraphis-signature.jpg]](https://thefirstage.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Seraphis-signature.jpg)