Yesterday, 04:23 PM
Seraphis had imagined that being personally summoned by the Pope would feel more impressive than alarming. She discovered almost immediately that she had been wrong.
Patricus stepped aside and gestured toward the chapel behind him. “Come.”
She glanced toward the priest as though he might offer some explanation, but his expression suggested he had no more idea what was happening than she did. The Kremlin officers were even less helpful. Seraphis straightened her shoulders and walked past Patricus into the chapel, acutely aware of the absurdity of the situation. Twenty minutes ago she had been wandering around the Kremlin because she was bored and worried about Theron. Now she was being invited into a private church by the Pope.
The door closed behind them with a heavy wooden sound that seemed to shut away more than the corridor.
The chapel was smaller than Seraphis expected. After the enormous halls of the palace, its intimacy was almost disorienting. Candlelight trembled across old painted faces and gilded halos. The air smelled faintly of wax and incense, though the latter had faded enough that she suspected no one had burned it recently. There were no cameras here, no screens showing the storm, no emergency maps or hurried officials. Even the wind seemed farther away behind walls that had survived centuries of Russian winters.
Patricus returned to the place where he had apparently been praying. There was nothing particularly regal about it. No elaborate throne or upholstered chair had been provided for him, only a small wooden kneeler positioned before an icon. The sight unsettled her more than she expected. She had seen him earlier surrounded by ceremony, dressed in white while powerful people waited for him to speak. It was strange to imagine that same man alone here on his knees.
He did not kneel again. Instead, he turned toward her and studied her with an attention so complete that Seraphis suddenly wished she had stayed in the state room where she belonged.
“Am I in trouble?” she asked.
For several seconds his face revealed absolutely nothing. Then one corner of his mouth moved.
“Should you be?”
Seraphis considered lying and decided the Pope probably had considerable experience with people doing exactly that. “Probably.”
Something almost approving passed through his expression. He moved toward one of the old wooden benches and sat, arranging the white of his cassock with unconscious precision before indicating the space beside him. Seraphis chose the opposite end. It seemed safer.
“You are with the Brotherhood of Ascension.”
It was not a question, but she nodded anyway. “I'm a Veilwarden.”
His gaze rested on her for another uncomfortable moment. “And what does a Veilwarden do?”
That was harder to answer than it should have been. Seraphis had never needed to explain it to the Pope before. She gave him the answer that came most naturally, talking about service to the Brotherhood, preserving its teachings, supporting the Luminar and helping others understand the truths the Brotherhood represented. Patricus listened without interruption. She wished he would at least try to argue with her. This quiet acceptance was unnerving.
When she finished, he asked, “And how old are you?”
Seraphis blinked. “Twenty.”
Again, that strange silence. His eyes moved over her face as though comparing the answer with something she could not see.
“Why do you ask?”
“I'm curious.”
“You don't seem like someone who asks questions just because you're curious.”
Patricus smiled then, though she could not decide whether she had amused him or irritated him. “You don't know me at all. I'm actually quite a curious person.” The smile remained a moment longer. It changed him when he smiled, though not necessarily in a comforting way. There was something clever behind it, something that made Seraphis feel as though she had walked into a conversation already in progress and simply hadn't been told what they were discussing.
His attention drifted toward the candles. “Why did you join them?”
“The Brotherhood?”
He looked back at her. “I am unaware of another religious organization represented in this room that you might recently have joined.”
Seraphis almost laughed. She managed not to, mostly because she couldn't tell whether he had meant to be funny.
She told him about Theron instead.
It happened more easily than she intended. At first she spoke about the Brotherhood, but Theron's name entered the answer almost immediately. Theron had explained things no one else could. Theron had helped her understand that the old stories were not merely stories. Theron had shown her how the world had forgotten what it once knew. He had seen something in her when she had still been trying to understand herself. The whole time, Patricus listened fully.
Eventually he interrupted with a single question. “Do you believe him?”
The answer came so quickly that Seraphis almost talked over him. “Yes of course.”
His gaze sharpened.
“Entirely?”
“Yes.”
“That is unusual.”
A tiny spark of irritation caught inside her. “Not if you know him.”
“I met him today.”
“You know what I mean. you don't really know him.”
Patricus absorbed that without visible offense. Seraphis realized belatedly that she had just snapped at the Pope and folded her hands together in her lap before they could betray any further opinions.
“No,” he said after a moment. “I suppose I do not.”
The concession should have satisfied her. Instead, it made her suspicious.
He asked how long she had known Theron and what she had been before joining the Brotherhood. His questions were not intrusive exactly, but they were difficult to predict. Sometimes he seemed interested in doctrine. A moment later he wanted to know whether she had family, whether she had always been religious, whether she had ever believed something with absolute certainty and later discovered she was wrong. Seraphis answered more carefully as the questions accumulated.
“Are you interviewing me?” she finally asked.
“Would that trouble you?”
“It would make more sense if you were interviewing me.”
His eyes settled on her again. “Must everything make sense? I find almost nothing does.”
She didn't have an answer for that. For a moment neither of them spoke. Somewhere high in the chapel, old wood creaked softly. Seraphis found herself looking toward one of the painted saints staring solemnly down at them. The faces were beautiful, but remote. She wondered how many people had sat in this room asking God for something they never received.
Patricus broke the silence. “Your Luminar worships Nikolai Brandon.”
Seraphis turned back to him immediately. “Ascendancy.”
His eyebrows lifted.
“That's what we should call him.”
“I am aware of the title he gave himself.”
There was no mockery or defensiveness in the words, which somehow made them more pointed.
“Do you worship him?”
Seraphis hesitated only because the question sounded strange coming from Patricus. “Yes.”
Patricus leaned back slightly. “Why?”
This time she was ready for him. She spoke of the truths preserved in the Codex, of the return of powers the world had once called divine, of Ascendancy's place among them and the evidence written across the past two decades of history. Theron had taught her that humanity remembered more than it realized. The players changed. The stories distorted. But the truth beneath them endured.
Patricus had gone very still.
“The Codex?”
Seraphis nodded. “The Brotherhood's sacred text.”
“How old is it?”
She hesitated. “Ancient.”
“How ancient?”
“I don't know exactly.”
“In what language was it written?”
That stopped her.
“I... I don't know.”
Patricus's expression did not change, but she suddenly felt as though she had failed an examination she had not known she was taking.
“Theron knows more about its history than I do.”
“I imagine he does.”
Something in his tone made heat rise into her face. “You think he's lying about it?”
Patricus considered her. “I did not say that.”
She couldn't keep the scoffing from her tone, but she folded her arms and tried to not be so defensive, “You didn't have to.”
Her voice had sharpened again. She knew it and couldn't quite stop herself. It bothered her that he could sit there in his old chapel and reduce something beautiful to a sequence of suspicious questions. Theron had given her a way to understand herself. He had never laughed at the things she felt or made her feel foolish for wanting the world to mean something. Patricus did not know any of that.
“You met The Luminar once,” she said. “You don't get to decide what he is from one meeting.”
Patricus watched her anger rise with an expression that was neither offended nor particularly surprised.
“You care for him very much.” His face tilted slightly as if he uncovered something that sated his curiosity.
The words were quiet. Seraphis felt something close around her chest. “He's my Luminar.” She looked away. The candles suddenly became extremely interesting.
Patricus allowed the silence to remain, which Seraphis decided was cruel. She expected him to pursue it, but he did not. When he spoke again, his voice had lost whatever edge she thought she had heard before.
“There is nothing shameful in loving someone.”
Her eyes snapped back to his. Patricus regarded her for one long, unbearable second. Seraphis hated him a little.
She crossed her arms and stared toward the altar, wishing suddenly that she had listened to the Kremlin officer and gone back where she belonged. Her heart was beating harder than it should have been, partly from embarrassment and partly from the fear that Patricus had seen something she had worked very hard not to name. He let her recover.
When he spoke again, he surprised her by returning to the topic of the Ascendancy.
“Your belief in Nikolai Brandon. Does that also belong to Theron?”
Seraphis frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You have explained to me what Theron believes. You have explained what the Codex teaches. I asked what you believe.”
“I already told you. I believe he's divine.”
“Because Theron does.” It wasn't phrased as an accusation, but she heard one anyway. A defensive reply rose immediately, but something else rose beside it.
The media images of the tunnel and endless lights disappearing into blue darkness filled her mind. She remembered the Ascendancy standing at the gates while the storm tore at everything around him. He had not announced what he was doing. There had been no speech, no grand moment prepared for an audience. He had simply gone, and Theron had gone with him. Her irritation softened before she could hold onto it.
“I saw him do something today.”
Patricus's expression changed almost immediately. “You saw him at the summit.”
“No. I mean after.”
She told him about the footage. At first she meant only to explain the tunnels, but she found herself describing the lights instead. How simple the weave itself was. How anyone trained could have made one. How there had been so many that she had stopped counting. She explained that it was a miracle that the lights remained after he moved on, and her voice changed as she spoke despite her best effort to keep it matter-of-fact.
“He didn't have to go out there,” she said finally. “That's the part I don't understand.”
Patricus watched her closely. “Why not?”
“Because he's Ascendancy. There are people whose entire job is to do things like that. He could have stayed here and commanded everything from inside.”
“And instead?”
Seraphis looked down at her hands. “He went.”
Something about saying it aloud made the thought feel heavier.
She remembered the dark figures disappearing into white on the broadcast. She had called him stupid in the moment. She still thought it had been reckless. Yet the more she had watched afterward, the harder it became to dismiss what had bothered her about it. He had gone where everyone else was suffering. Patricus's gaze lingered on her face. Seraphis suddenly felt self-conscious again.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You keep doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me like I said something I didn't say.”
For the first time since entering the chapel, Patricus laughed. It was brief and surprisingly warm, though it did nothing to make him easier to understand.
“We all speak many things we do not say.”
Seraphis wasn't sure what that meant, and judging by his expression, he had no intention of helping her decipher it.
His attention shifted toward the altar again. Something changed in him then. The cleverness did not disappear, but it receded enough for Seraphis to see the exhaustion beneath it. He had looked tired in the corridor. Here, in the candlelight, he looked older than he had at the summit.
“People often prefer certainty,” he said. “Religions are particularly skilled at providing it.”
Seraphis glanced around the chapel. “That's a strange thing for the Pope to say.”
“Is it?”
“A little.”
He considered that. “Faith and certainty are contradictions.”
Seraphis expected him to explain, but he didn't.
She thought of Theron, who always seemed certain when he spoke from the Codex. She thought of the Brotherhood and all the things she had accepted because Theron spoke them as though remembering rather than teaching. Then, against her will, she thought of Nikolai disappearing into the storm again.
“Do you believe he's a god?” she asked.
Patricus looked at her.
For once, the question seemed to surprise him.
“Ascendancy,” she clarified. “You asked me. So I'm asking you.” She tried to sit a little taller.
His eyes moved briefly toward the icon before them, then back to her. Whatever answer Seraphis expected, it did not come quickly.
“I believe Nikolai Brandon is a man capable of things I do not yet understand.”
Seraphis frowned. “Now it's you who isn't giving an answer.”
“It is the only one I have.”
She stared at him. Something about the admission unsettled her more than certainty would have. Theron always had answers. Even when the answers were strange, even when they demanded that Seraphis rethink everything she had once assumed about the world, there was comfort in the way he delivered them. Patricus seemed entirely willing to stand in the middle of something enormous and admit he did not understand it.
She wasn't sure whether that made him wise or simply frustrating.
“May I ask you one more question?”
Seraphis sighed softly. “You've asked about thirty.”
A faint smile touched his mouth. “Then one more should hardly matter.”
She nodded.
His expression became unreadable again.
“If the day came when what you loved and what you believed demanded different things from you, which would you choose?”
Seraphis went still. The question landed differently from all the others. She thought first of Theron. That annoyed her. She thought next of everything he had taught her, which annoyed her even more because surely those were not different things. Then Nikolai entered her mind without permission: not the Ascendancy of broadcasts or the god of Theron's Codex, but the distant man walking into impossible snow.
“I don't know.”
Patricus' gaze fell to her hands, currently folded on her lap, and she stopped wringing her fingers at the attention. Then his eyes returned to her face.
“Good.”
Seraphis frowned. “You think that's good?”
“It means you did not lie merely because you disliked the question.”
She wasn't sure whether to be pleased or not. She was really starting to dislike this Pope.
Patricus rose, and Seraphis realized the conversation was apparently over. She stood with him, feeling oddly as though she had survived something despite having spent the entire time sitting on a bench.
He walked her toward the door, but before reaching it he stopped. For one strange moment he seemed about to say something else. His eyes searched her face with the same startled intensity he had shown when he first appeared in the doorway. Then whatever he had considered saying disappeared behind the practiced composure of the Pope.
“Take care whom you allow to answer your questions for you.”
Seraphis stiffened immediately. “If that's another criticism of Theron—”
“It is a criticism of everyone.”
That stopped her, but Patricus opened the door before she could rebut him. The corridor beyond returned all at once: security officers, Vatican personnel, distant footsteps and the muffled urgency of a palace attempting to govern a city buried beneath snow. Seraphis stepped through, then turned back despite herself.
Patricus had already begun closing the door.
She caught one last glimpse of the chapel behind him, candles burning before the icons and old gold shining softly in the dark. His expression had changed again. The intensity was gone, replaced by something she could not identify.
Fear, perhaps. But that was ridiculous. He was the Pope! The door closed between them and she shivered.
Patricus stepped aside and gestured toward the chapel behind him. “Come.”
She glanced toward the priest as though he might offer some explanation, but his expression suggested he had no more idea what was happening than she did. The Kremlin officers were even less helpful. Seraphis straightened her shoulders and walked past Patricus into the chapel, acutely aware of the absurdity of the situation. Twenty minutes ago she had been wandering around the Kremlin because she was bored and worried about Theron. Now she was being invited into a private church by the Pope.
The door closed behind them with a heavy wooden sound that seemed to shut away more than the corridor.
The chapel was smaller than Seraphis expected. After the enormous halls of the palace, its intimacy was almost disorienting. Candlelight trembled across old painted faces and gilded halos. The air smelled faintly of wax and incense, though the latter had faded enough that she suspected no one had burned it recently. There were no cameras here, no screens showing the storm, no emergency maps or hurried officials. Even the wind seemed farther away behind walls that had survived centuries of Russian winters.
Patricus returned to the place where he had apparently been praying. There was nothing particularly regal about it. No elaborate throne or upholstered chair had been provided for him, only a small wooden kneeler positioned before an icon. The sight unsettled her more than she expected. She had seen him earlier surrounded by ceremony, dressed in white while powerful people waited for him to speak. It was strange to imagine that same man alone here on his knees.
He did not kneel again. Instead, he turned toward her and studied her with an attention so complete that Seraphis suddenly wished she had stayed in the state room where she belonged.
“Am I in trouble?” she asked.
For several seconds his face revealed absolutely nothing. Then one corner of his mouth moved.
“Should you be?”
Seraphis considered lying and decided the Pope probably had considerable experience with people doing exactly that. “Probably.”
Something almost approving passed through his expression. He moved toward one of the old wooden benches and sat, arranging the white of his cassock with unconscious precision before indicating the space beside him. Seraphis chose the opposite end. It seemed safer.
“You are with the Brotherhood of Ascension.”
It was not a question, but she nodded anyway. “I'm a Veilwarden.”
His gaze rested on her for another uncomfortable moment. “And what does a Veilwarden do?”
That was harder to answer than it should have been. Seraphis had never needed to explain it to the Pope before. She gave him the answer that came most naturally, talking about service to the Brotherhood, preserving its teachings, supporting the Luminar and helping others understand the truths the Brotherhood represented. Patricus listened without interruption. She wished he would at least try to argue with her. This quiet acceptance was unnerving.
When she finished, he asked, “And how old are you?”
Seraphis blinked. “Twenty.”
Again, that strange silence. His eyes moved over her face as though comparing the answer with something she could not see.
“Why do you ask?”
“I'm curious.”
“You don't seem like someone who asks questions just because you're curious.”
Patricus smiled then, though she could not decide whether she had amused him or irritated him. “You don't know me at all. I'm actually quite a curious person.” The smile remained a moment longer. It changed him when he smiled, though not necessarily in a comforting way. There was something clever behind it, something that made Seraphis feel as though she had walked into a conversation already in progress and simply hadn't been told what they were discussing.
His attention drifted toward the candles. “Why did you join them?”
“The Brotherhood?”
He looked back at her. “I am unaware of another religious organization represented in this room that you might recently have joined.”
Seraphis almost laughed. She managed not to, mostly because she couldn't tell whether he had meant to be funny.
She told him about Theron instead.
It happened more easily than she intended. At first she spoke about the Brotherhood, but Theron's name entered the answer almost immediately. Theron had explained things no one else could. Theron had helped her understand that the old stories were not merely stories. Theron had shown her how the world had forgotten what it once knew. He had seen something in her when she had still been trying to understand herself. The whole time, Patricus listened fully.
Eventually he interrupted with a single question. “Do you believe him?”
The answer came so quickly that Seraphis almost talked over him. “Yes of course.”
His gaze sharpened.
“Entirely?”
“Yes.”
“That is unusual.”
A tiny spark of irritation caught inside her. “Not if you know him.”
“I met him today.”
“You know what I mean. you don't really know him.”
Patricus absorbed that without visible offense. Seraphis realized belatedly that she had just snapped at the Pope and folded her hands together in her lap before they could betray any further opinions.
“No,” he said after a moment. “I suppose I do not.”
The concession should have satisfied her. Instead, it made her suspicious.
He asked how long she had known Theron and what she had been before joining the Brotherhood. His questions were not intrusive exactly, but they were difficult to predict. Sometimes he seemed interested in doctrine. A moment later he wanted to know whether she had family, whether she had always been religious, whether she had ever believed something with absolute certainty and later discovered she was wrong. Seraphis answered more carefully as the questions accumulated.
“Are you interviewing me?” she finally asked.
“Would that trouble you?”
“It would make more sense if you were interviewing me.”
His eyes settled on her again. “Must everything make sense? I find almost nothing does.”
She didn't have an answer for that. For a moment neither of them spoke. Somewhere high in the chapel, old wood creaked softly. Seraphis found herself looking toward one of the painted saints staring solemnly down at them. The faces were beautiful, but remote. She wondered how many people had sat in this room asking God for something they never received.
Patricus broke the silence. “Your Luminar worships Nikolai Brandon.”
Seraphis turned back to him immediately. “Ascendancy.”
His eyebrows lifted.
“That's what we should call him.”
“I am aware of the title he gave himself.”
There was no mockery or defensiveness in the words, which somehow made them more pointed.
“Do you worship him?”
Seraphis hesitated only because the question sounded strange coming from Patricus. “Yes.”
Patricus leaned back slightly. “Why?”
This time she was ready for him. She spoke of the truths preserved in the Codex, of the return of powers the world had once called divine, of Ascendancy's place among them and the evidence written across the past two decades of history. Theron had taught her that humanity remembered more than it realized. The players changed. The stories distorted. But the truth beneath them endured.
Patricus had gone very still.
“The Codex?”
Seraphis nodded. “The Brotherhood's sacred text.”
“How old is it?”
She hesitated. “Ancient.”
“How ancient?”
“I don't know exactly.”
“In what language was it written?”
That stopped her.
“I... I don't know.”
Patricus's expression did not change, but she suddenly felt as though she had failed an examination she had not known she was taking.
“Theron knows more about its history than I do.”
“I imagine he does.”
Something in his tone made heat rise into her face. “You think he's lying about it?”
Patricus considered her. “I did not say that.”
She couldn't keep the scoffing from her tone, but she folded her arms and tried to not be so defensive, “You didn't have to.”
Her voice had sharpened again. She knew it and couldn't quite stop herself. It bothered her that he could sit there in his old chapel and reduce something beautiful to a sequence of suspicious questions. Theron had given her a way to understand herself. He had never laughed at the things she felt or made her feel foolish for wanting the world to mean something. Patricus did not know any of that.
“You met The Luminar once,” she said. “You don't get to decide what he is from one meeting.”
Patricus watched her anger rise with an expression that was neither offended nor particularly surprised.
“You care for him very much.” His face tilted slightly as if he uncovered something that sated his curiosity.
The words were quiet. Seraphis felt something close around her chest. “He's my Luminar.” She looked away. The candles suddenly became extremely interesting.
Patricus allowed the silence to remain, which Seraphis decided was cruel. She expected him to pursue it, but he did not. When he spoke again, his voice had lost whatever edge she thought she had heard before.
“There is nothing shameful in loving someone.”
Her eyes snapped back to his. Patricus regarded her for one long, unbearable second. Seraphis hated him a little.
She crossed her arms and stared toward the altar, wishing suddenly that she had listened to the Kremlin officer and gone back where she belonged. Her heart was beating harder than it should have been, partly from embarrassment and partly from the fear that Patricus had seen something she had worked very hard not to name. He let her recover.
When he spoke again, he surprised her by returning to the topic of the Ascendancy.
“Your belief in Nikolai Brandon. Does that also belong to Theron?”
Seraphis frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You have explained to me what Theron believes. You have explained what the Codex teaches. I asked what you believe.”
“I already told you. I believe he's divine.”
“Because Theron does.” It wasn't phrased as an accusation, but she heard one anyway. A defensive reply rose immediately, but something else rose beside it.
The media images of the tunnel and endless lights disappearing into blue darkness filled her mind. She remembered the Ascendancy standing at the gates while the storm tore at everything around him. He had not announced what he was doing. There had been no speech, no grand moment prepared for an audience. He had simply gone, and Theron had gone with him. Her irritation softened before she could hold onto it.
“I saw him do something today.”
Patricus's expression changed almost immediately. “You saw him at the summit.”
“No. I mean after.”
She told him about the footage. At first she meant only to explain the tunnels, but she found herself describing the lights instead. How simple the weave itself was. How anyone trained could have made one. How there had been so many that she had stopped counting. She explained that it was a miracle that the lights remained after he moved on, and her voice changed as she spoke despite her best effort to keep it matter-of-fact.
“He didn't have to go out there,” she said finally. “That's the part I don't understand.”
Patricus watched her closely. “Why not?”
“Because he's Ascendancy. There are people whose entire job is to do things like that. He could have stayed here and commanded everything from inside.”
“And instead?”
Seraphis looked down at her hands. “He went.”
Something about saying it aloud made the thought feel heavier.
She remembered the dark figures disappearing into white on the broadcast. She had called him stupid in the moment. She still thought it had been reckless. Yet the more she had watched afterward, the harder it became to dismiss what had bothered her about it. He had gone where everyone else was suffering. Patricus's gaze lingered on her face. Seraphis suddenly felt self-conscious again.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You keep doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me like I said something I didn't say.”
For the first time since entering the chapel, Patricus laughed. It was brief and surprisingly warm, though it did nothing to make him easier to understand.
“We all speak many things we do not say.”
Seraphis wasn't sure what that meant, and judging by his expression, he had no intention of helping her decipher it.
His attention shifted toward the altar again. Something changed in him then. The cleverness did not disappear, but it receded enough for Seraphis to see the exhaustion beneath it. He had looked tired in the corridor. Here, in the candlelight, he looked older than he had at the summit.
“People often prefer certainty,” he said. “Religions are particularly skilled at providing it.”
Seraphis glanced around the chapel. “That's a strange thing for the Pope to say.”
“Is it?”
“A little.”
He considered that. “Faith and certainty are contradictions.”
Seraphis expected him to explain, but he didn't.
She thought of Theron, who always seemed certain when he spoke from the Codex. She thought of the Brotherhood and all the things she had accepted because Theron spoke them as though remembering rather than teaching. Then, against her will, she thought of Nikolai disappearing into the storm again.
“Do you believe he's a god?” she asked.
Patricus looked at her.
For once, the question seemed to surprise him.
“Ascendancy,” she clarified. “You asked me. So I'm asking you.” She tried to sit a little taller.
His eyes moved briefly toward the icon before them, then back to her. Whatever answer Seraphis expected, it did not come quickly.
“I believe Nikolai Brandon is a man capable of things I do not yet understand.”
Seraphis frowned. “Now it's you who isn't giving an answer.”
“It is the only one I have.”
She stared at him. Something about the admission unsettled her more than certainty would have. Theron always had answers. Even when the answers were strange, even when they demanded that Seraphis rethink everything she had once assumed about the world, there was comfort in the way he delivered them. Patricus seemed entirely willing to stand in the middle of something enormous and admit he did not understand it.
She wasn't sure whether that made him wise or simply frustrating.
“May I ask you one more question?”
Seraphis sighed softly. “You've asked about thirty.”
A faint smile touched his mouth. “Then one more should hardly matter.”
She nodded.
His expression became unreadable again.
“If the day came when what you loved and what you believed demanded different things from you, which would you choose?”
Seraphis went still. The question landed differently from all the others. She thought first of Theron. That annoyed her. She thought next of everything he had taught her, which annoyed her even more because surely those were not different things. Then Nikolai entered her mind without permission: not the Ascendancy of broadcasts or the god of Theron's Codex, but the distant man walking into impossible snow.
“I don't know.”
Patricus' gaze fell to her hands, currently folded on her lap, and she stopped wringing her fingers at the attention. Then his eyes returned to her face.
“Good.”
Seraphis frowned. “You think that's good?”
“It means you did not lie merely because you disliked the question.”
She wasn't sure whether to be pleased or not. She was really starting to dislike this Pope.
Patricus rose, and Seraphis realized the conversation was apparently over. She stood with him, feeling oddly as though she had survived something despite having spent the entire time sitting on a bench.
He walked her toward the door, but before reaching it he stopped. For one strange moment he seemed about to say something else. His eyes searched her face with the same startled intensity he had shown when he first appeared in the doorway. Then whatever he had considered saying disappeared behind the practiced composure of the Pope.
“Take care whom you allow to answer your questions for you.”
Seraphis stiffened immediately. “If that's another criticism of Theron—”
“It is a criticism of everyone.”
That stopped her, but Patricus opened the door before she could rebut him. The corridor beyond returned all at once: security officers, Vatican personnel, distant footsteps and the muffled urgency of a palace attempting to govern a city buried beneath snow. Seraphis stepped through, then turned back despite herself.
Patricus had already begun closing the door.
She caught one last glimpse of the chapel behind him, candles burning before the icons and old gold shining softly in the dark. His expression had changed again. The intensity was gone, replaced by something she could not identify.
Fear, perhaps. But that was ridiculous. He was the Pope! The door closed between them and she shivered.
![[Image: Seraphis-signature.jpg]](https://thefirstage.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Seraphis-signature.jpg)