The questions came fast, the way they always did when I walked into a room with something on my face. Sera's hand found my wrist before I'd said a word, her green eyes reading the weight I was carrying like a page she'd already turned. I told them about Falcon, about Aethelred's hand finding nothing at his chest while I promised to dig up his son from a walled-up grave. The silence that followed had teeth in it.

"Not tonight," Sera said, her voice gentle but firm. "Tomorrow is the chamber test. We need to be sharp, not spent digging through a thousand years of rubble." Mike snorted from against the wall. "Also, imagine waking up after all that time and your clothes rotted off. And your bed's gone. And everyone you knew is dust. That's a hell of a first five minutes." Marcus looked up from reading his copy of the Dungeon Master's guide and the notes he was taking. "He's not wrong. The logistics alone—" I laughed, and the sound surprised me, cracking through the stone and grief of the hall above us. "Fine. Falcon waits. But the catacombs aren't going anywhere, and neither is the promise I made."

The garnet ring pressed against my sternum as I settled onto the bench beside Sera, and I felt the weight of it differently now—not just a vote, but a debt with a name attached. I looked at my party, my family, the four people who'd crossed an ocean because I asked them to, and asked them what they thought we'd actually walked into here. Marcus's pen stopped mid-sentence, “Are we sure the catacombs aren't going anywhere? They have to have undead killing swords for a reason.”

Dani leaned across the bench, chin propped on her fist, the deva glow banked down to a faint warmth behind her skin like a fire told to behave. "Falcon," she said, tasting it. "Guy wakes up in 2026 and that's the name he's got to introduce himself with. 'Hi, I'm Falcon.' He's gonna get asked if he does birthday parties."

Sera's mouth curved, the dragon still coiled somewhere behind her eyes even in this small human face. "It's probably a translation. Half the names down here got sanded into something we'd recognize—Falcon, Aethelred, Galahad. The man's been dead nine hundred years. His mother didn't name him for a bird, she named him for whatever the scribe decided to write down."

Aria felt the laugh come up before she could stop it, bright and a little wrong for a hall this old, and she let it out anyway. "Nomenclature is for the birds," she said, and watched Marcus go still over his notepad like a man deciding whether he'd actually heard that. Mike didn't decide. He just tipped his head back against the stone and groaned, loud enough to bounce off the vaulting, and Aria caught the garnet ring between her fingers and grinned at the ceiling.

"So," Aria said, "are we all okay with jumping into another testing arena, this time with seismometers or whatever?" She turned the garnet ring over against her collarbone, watching Marcus's face do the arithmetic of a warded chamber he hadn't seen yet. "Gareth said the walls eat magic. That means whatever I throw in there, the room is going to swallow some of it before it lands. I'd rather know that before I'm standing in front of forty people who already buried the last miracle they couldn't explain."

Marcus capped his pen and set the Dungeon Master's guide flat across his knees. "Seismometers, thermocouples, a couple of grad students with clipboards—no. What I want is to know what the ward does to a spell that's already inside a person." He looked at Dani, then at Sera, and Aria watched him choose the careful version of the question. "You've all been remade by magic that's sitting in your bones right now. If the chamber dampens that, we're not testing bolts. We're testing whether the four of you walk out the same people who walked in."

Sera's hand found Aria's wrist again, and this time she didn't let go. "Then we test it first," she said. "One of us steps in alone, we watch what the ward does, and we decide from there. Not Aria. She's the one they're all here to see." Mike pushed off the wall, cracking his neck, and Aria caught the small, familiar set of his jaw—the same one he'd worn the night he'd first called her his little sister. "I'll go first," he said. "Champion's got nothing to hide. If the room eats me, you'll know it eats everything." Aria looked at the ring in her fist, then at the vaulting above them, and let the laugh die in her throat. "Tomorrow, then," she said. "We walk in with our eyes open, and we find out what they built this place to hold."

They nodded, all of them, and Aria nodded with them, because that was the shape the moment wanted and her face had gotten good at giving it. Under her ribs something else was already turning over: the ward. Gareth had said the walls eat magic, and she had filed it as a tactical problem — bolts landing soft, Marcus's blade dimming — but her own skin was a spell. She had rewritten Mike's bones, Dani's, Sera's, her own, and if the chamber swallowed magic the way Gareth said, it might swallow the polymorph too. She pictured Mike walking through that door and walking out the other side as the man he was three months ago, shoulders narrower, no weapon-familiarity humming behind his hands. She pictured Sera mid-step and then not — a woman where a dragon had been. Aria turned the garnet over against her sternum, slow, and kept her voice level. "Sera's right," she said. "If that room eats magic, we don't all walk in at once. We find out what it does to a spell that's already living in someone before we find out the hard way."

Mike looked at her a beat too long — the same flat, reading look he'd worn the first night she'd knocked on his door with pointed ears and his brother's voice — and then shrugged. "You're the one who keeps saying we walk in with our eyes open." Marcus had his pen out again, already sketching a column of variables down the margin of his notes, and Dani bumped her shoulder against Aria's with a soft, warm pressure that said she'd caught the worry even if no one else had. "Bed," Dani said. "You get strange when you're tired, and strange-Aria makes promises she has to keep." Aria let herself be pulled up off the bench, the garnet swinging against her collarbone, and did not tell any of them what the Order probably already knew — that a room built by Merlin to hold things would have been built to hold *everything*, and that if the ward stripped a body back to what it was before the spell, the five of them had spent the last months becoming people who might not survive being un-made.

Dani's hand was already on her elbow, steering her toward the corridor and the dark stair, and Aria let herself be steered for exactly four steps before she planted her feet and Dani nearly spun around her own grip. "No," Aria said. "We're in an ancient hall full of ancient magic. Ancient halls full of ancient magic have cellars, and cellars have casks, and casks have been sitting down there getting delicious for longer than my entire country has existed." She pointed a finger at Dani's chest, the deva glow banked warm under her collarbone. "You want me to sleep? I'll sleep. After I find out what a nine-hundred-year-old port tastes like and make somebody whose whole job is fetching things fetch it."

Dani opened her mouth, closed it, and looked past Aria to Sera with the expression of a woman appealing to a higher court. Sera only leaned against the arch, arms crossed, the small human face doing absolutely nothing to hide the dragon behind it. "She's not wrong," Sera said. "You don't crack open a place like this and go to bed thirsty." Marcus was already drifting toward the far passage with his notepad, following the smell of beeswax and old wood like a man tracking a signal, and Mike peeled off the wall with a shrug that said he'd decided this was Aria's problem to start and his to finish. Aria turned toward the nearest man in dark wool—thin, ancient, holding his cup with both hands like it was a relic—and asked him, in her best court-adjacent tone, where a founder might find a drink. He blinked at the garnet at her throat, then at her ears, and then did something she hadn't expected from anyone in this hall: he smiled, and pointed down a side stair, and said the cellar door had not been locked since before his grandfather was born.

The stair went down farther than the hall above had any right to, and the cellar smelled of cold iron and apples and something older underneath, and by the time Aria reached the bottom she had a clay cup in her hand that a woman in gray had pressed on her without a word and a bottle Marcus had identified as "probably older than the concept of France." She drank. It tasted like plums and smoke and the inside of a church, and it went down warm and slow, and she stood in the lamplight with her party around her and let the ward and the catacombs and Falcon's walled-up grave wait one more night, because the room built to hold everything could hold tomorrow too.

Marcus found the rack first — a lattice of oak pegs older than the concept of the wine he'd been holding, and on it, a bottle whose label had gone to dust so long ago that the dust had its own dust. He held it up to the lamplight and squinted. "I'm going to identify this," he said, "and if it turns out to be from a year that starts with a one and has three digits after it, I'm drinking the whole thing and none of you can stop me."

"That's not how a party works," Dani said, already peeling the wax off a clay jug with her thumbnail. "A party means we all get weird together. You don't get to have a private vintage and a private revelation. That's just masturbation with extra steps." Mike made a sound like a man who'd swallowed a laugh and a cough at once, and Sera — Sera, who'd spent the last six months learning to be a woman in a room full of men who'd decided she was a weapon — went pink to the ears and busied herself with the cups. Aria caught it. She always caught it. She reached over and hooked a finger through Sera's belt loop, tugging her close enough that her hip pressed warm against Aria's thigh. "You're allowed to laugh," Aria murmured. "The dragon doesn't have to be dignified down here. Nobody's writing minutes."

They drank. The port was plums and smoke and something like a church, and the second bottle was honey and fire, and the third was a cloudy amber thing Marcus refused to identify because he said the answer would ruin it. Somewhere in there the woman in gray came back down with a plate of hard cheese and dark bread, set it on a cask, and left without a word, and Mike — Mike, who never did anything without a reason — watched her go and said, "I think she likes us," and Aria said, "I think she's been waiting sixty years for someone to come down here and be loud," and Dani said, "I think you're both drunk," and was correct.

The cheese was the color of old bone and smelled like a barn that had made peace with itself — nothing Jewel or Stracks would ever stock, but it tore soft under her thumb and tasted like salt and grass and something faintly like the inside of a walnut shell, and it was the right thing with the amber. Aria ate it off the blade of a small knife Marcus had produced from nowhere, which was itself a question she decided not to ask. Dani had wedged herself onto the cask beside her, one knee drawn up, gnawing the crust off a hunk of bread with the unbothered appetite of a woman who had spent the day throwing cutlery through oak and deserved every carb the Order owned. The lamplight caught the banked glow under Dani's collarbone, gilded the dust in the air, made the cellar feel like a room the twenty-first century hadn't found yet, and Aria was, for the first time since the driveway, genuinely warm.

Mike had found the fourth bottle and, more importantly, had found a reason to keep refilling Sera's cup whether or not she was drinking from it. "You know what I never asked you," he said, leaning a shoulder into the arch and letting it hold him up, the way he'd leaned into doorframes in every kitchen Aria had ever watched him in. "When you designed the campaign. Was the dragon always going to be the one who got the last word? Because I've been thinking about it for six months and I think you rigged it." He slid the bottle toward her, grinning, and bumped his knee against hers where they sat on the same bench. "You've got the face for it. That's a compliment, by the way. The face."

Sera took the bottle, set it down without pouring, and smiled at him with the specific patience of a woman explaining a rule to someone who was very smart and very drunk. "Mike. I'm married." She lifted the hand Aria had hooked through her belt loop, gently, and held it up between them like evidence. "To her. And to Dani. In that order and also not in that order. You were at the wedding. You wore a tie." Mike stared at the ring on Aria's finger, then at the ring on Sera's, and the arithmetic finally landed somewhere behind his eyes. "Right," he said. "Right. I knew that. I absolutely knew that." He reached for the bottle, missed it by a hand's width, and tried again with the dignity of a man who had never once in his life been embarrassed in front of his little sister. "I'm gonna go find Marcus."

Marcus found them before Mike did — or rather, Marcus's voice did, drifting down the stairwell ahead of his footsteps, halfway through a sentence that had clearly started several rooms ago. "—and the failure mode of a ward is always the same. It doesn't stop the magic. It stops the intent. Which means it doesn't care what you cast, it cares what you meant, and that's a much worse problem, because I have never in my life cast anything without meaning it—" A woman in gray came down the stairs behind him carrying a lantern, unhurried, the way you'd walk behind a man who had been talking without interruption for twenty minutes, and set the lantern on the cask and left again.

It was the lantern, and the way the woman had moved around it — not past it, not through its light, as if the flame had a radius and she knew it to the inch — that finally put the hour in Aria's head. She looked at the clay cup in her own hand, then at the stairwell, and did the math she'd been avoiding since the second bottle. The flight had landed in the dark. The hall had swallowed the afternoon. "What time is it here," she said, to no one in particular.

"Three," the woman in gray said from the top of the stair, without turning. "In the morning. The bell rings at ten for the chamber." Marcus stopped mid-sentence. Dani stopped mid-chew. Mike, who had come back down the stairs at some point and found the bench and was now lying across it with his boots on the wall, said "That's not possible," and then looked at his phone, and then said nothing at all. Aria set the cup down, stood up, and discovered that the cellar had gotten taller since she'd sat down. She held the edge of the cask until the room agreed to be a room again, then reached over and took the bottle Marcus had refused to identify, tucked it under her arm, and pointed at the stairs. "Up," she said. "All of you. I'm not explaining to Aethelred tomorrow that his founder's vote was too drunk to stand."

They came up out of the cellar into a corridor that had been quiet for six hundred years, and Aria went first because someone had to and because the stairs were narrow enough that she could set her conjured sandals on each worn step and feel the stone through the soles — warm where the lamplight had lain on it, cold where it hadn't. The sandals had been the right call hours ago; now they were the only part of her outfit that had earned its keep, and she was grateful for them in the specific, unromantic way you're grateful for a good pair of shoes at three in the morning. Behind her, Mike carried the unidentified bottle like a trophy and Marcus carried his notepad like a man who had already started a new page, and Dani walked with one hand on the wall as if the wall were a patient she was reassuring, and Sera walked last, which Aria noticed, because Sera always walked last when there was something behind them to watch.

The woman in gray — the minute-keeper's assistant, or whatever she was, whoever she was, someone who had been down here long enough to know the flame's radius to the inch — led them up a second stair and down a third, and then opened a door onto a corridor of doors, five of them, set into the old stone at intervals that suggested each room behind them had been carved by a different century. She did not explain. She pointed, in order, and each of them peeled off without a word: Marcus to the second door, already murmuring about ward theory to no one; Mike to the fourth, because Mike had always taken the room farthest from the exit on the reasoning that nobody sneaks past a sleeping Champion; Dani to the third, pausing only long enough to catch Aria's eye and mouth *sleep*; Sera to the fifth, which put her closest to the stair, which Aria understood was the point. The woman in gray led Aria to the first door, the one nearest the corridor's mouth, the largest by the way the frame sat proud of the wall, and pushed it open and left without being thanked, because in this hall thanks were apparently a form of small talk and small talk was for people who weren't busy keeping minutes.

The room took her breath before she'd taken a step into it. A four-poster bed stood against the far wall like something that had been waiting for her specifically — black oak, each post carved into a spiral of leaves that climbed toward a canopy rail, and the wood so oiled and handled over so many centuries that it had gone the color of dark honey under the lamplight. Linen curtains hung from the rail in heavy folds, and when Aria crossed to them and touched one, the fabric was cool and soft and smelled faintly of cedar, as if someone had been folding these same sheets for longer than her country had existed.

The mattress gave under her palm, deep and yielding, and she sat on the edge of it and let the sandals slide off onto the stone one at a time. Through the wall she heard nothing. Not Mike's boots, not Marcus's pen, not Dani's low laugh — the stone drank it all, and Aria sat in the silence and understood that this room had been built to hold one person's sleep and nothing else, which was either a courtesy or a test.

She lay back in the dark with the garnet ring cold against her sternum and the curtains still open, and thought about Falcon in his walled-up grave, and about the ward, and about Sera one door down with her hand already on the stair. Tomorrow the bell would ring at ten.

She sat up, swung her feet to the stone, and went to the small leather satchel she'd left by the door — the one she'd carried down from the hall with the rest of her conjured wardrobe folded inside. Wedged in the bottom, wrapped in a scrap of linen she'd torn from a sheet, was the bottle she'd lifted off the cellar rack on her way up the stairs. No label. No wax. Just dark glass, heavy for its size, and a cork that had been seated so long it had gone the color of the wine. She'd palmed it while Marcus was arguing ward theory at the ceiling and nobody had noticed, which was its own small pleasure.

She set it on the bedside table and conjured the goblet with a flick of two fingers — crystal, tulip-shaped, the kind of glass that made a cheap pour look like a decision. She worked the cork loose with her thumbnail and poured. It came out slow and dark, almost black, and the smell that rose off it was plums gone to leather and smoke and something underneath like the inside of a church. She drank. It tasted the way a bell sounds when it's rung in an empty building — long, and lower than you expected, and it kept going after you thought it was done.

She drank again, slower this time, and let herself do the arithmetic she'd been dodging all night. Yesterday morning she'd been in an Indiana kitchen. Yesterday evening she'd stood on black stone in front of forty people who had been alive before America was a rumor. Somewhere in the last twenty-four hours she'd shaken the hand of a knight from the Round Table, and the hand had been warm, and the man had called her by her name. Galahad. Not a statue, not a story, not a card with a number on it — a real man with a real grip who had looked at her eldritch bolts and her wife's dragon shape and decided, on the evidence, to shake her hand and call her… not an ally and not quite a friend… to call her worthy of note. She'd walked into this hall braced for a trial and gotten something closer to a family reunion she hadn't known she had relatives for.

She set the goblet on the nightstand and turned the garnet over against her palm, its face worn smooth by somebody's thumb for centuries before it ever found her throat. Aethelred had worn this. Maybe at Hastings, maybe at a table where men argued about a king who might or might not have been real. And now it sat in her hand in a room with central heating somewhere above her and a four-poster bed that smelled of cedar, and the whole of it — the impossibility, the wonder of it — landed the way the wine had landed, long and low and still going after she thought it was done. She grinned at the dark ceiling like a woman who'd just realized the game she'd been playing her whole life had a map she could actually walk on, and it was bigger than any grid she'd ever drawn.

A knock — two knuckles, light, at the height of her shoulder — and Aria was on her feet before she'd decided to be, the goblet already in her hand, the garnet already cold against her palm. Then the sound registered properly: not the flat rap of the woman in gray, not Mike's whole-fist thud. She let the breath out and the goblet down. "Come in."

The door opened on Sera, and the corridor's lamplight came in with her — a slab of it across the stone, then a slice as she closed the door behind her and the room went back to dark, lit only by whatever came through the linen at the window. She'd let her hair down. It hung past her shoulders in the copper-dark fall that only showed when the light was low, and she'd traded the hall's gray wool for the loose shirt she slept in, sleeves shoved to the elbow, and she was barefoot on the cold stone as if it were nothing. Her eyes found the goblet first. Then the bottle. Then Aria, sitting back down on the edge of the cedar-smelling bed with her conjured sandals in a heap and her hair a mess and the ring against her chest, and something in Sera's face did the thing it did — the small recalibration of a woman who had spent six months learning to read a body in the dark.

She crossed to the nightstand without asking, lifted the goblet, and sniffed it. "You stole this." Not an accusation. An inventory. She turned the glass by the stem, watching the dark wine catch what little light the window gave, and Aria watched her decide not to care. Sera drank, and her eyebrows went up, and she drank again before she said anything. "That's obscene." She set the goblet down, pulled the loose shirt over her head in one motion, and dropped it on the heap of sandals. Then she climbed onto the bed and folded herself against Aria's side, knees drawn up, cheek finding the hollow where Aria's shoulder met her neck, and let the rest of the room go dark around them.

"How are you doing," Aria said, into the top of her hair. The question came out quieter than she'd meant it to, and Sera was still for a moment — long enough that Aria felt her breathing change against her ribs, one breath and then another, the way you breathe when you're deciding whether to tell the truth or the polite version. "Okay," Sera said finally. "I'm okay. It's just—" She stopped. Started again. "Galahad shook your hand and I couldn't stop looking at the door. Forty people watching us, and I kept counting the exits." Her fingers found Aria's wrist and stayed there, not gripping, just present. "It's been a lot. I don't want to be alone tonight." Aria shifted, pulled the linen curtain closed on her side of the bed, and worked the garnet ring off its chain so it wouldn't press between them. "You don't have to be," she said. "I'm right here."