The heavy gloom of Sylvia Bloodwood’s office clung to her like a second skin. Dust hung in stagnant beams of light slanting through the high windows, catching on the ritual glyphs carved into the ancient oak walls. The air tasted of cold iron and forgotten sorceries.

  Sylvia sat hunched behind her desk, her fingers digging hard into her temples, as if she could squeeze clarity out of her pounding headache. Her amber eyes—normally so sharp, so unflinching—were narrowed into slits of burning frustration. She should have been better than this. She was better than this. But no amount of experience, no degree of ruthless intellect, could decipher the enigma that had been flung into her mind like a dagger:

  “Be aware of the Archbishop of Greed when he comes. When he arrives, there will be nothing left. Nothing but Famine.”

  Her fists clenched until the leather of her gloves creaked, and then—SLAM—one of them hammered down onto the desk with a dull, brutal thud that rattled the occult tomes scattered across its surface.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” she growled aloud, voice low and serrated with irritation. “The Sect of Her Shadows? Is that a cult? A goddamn prophecy? What?!”

  The words echoed off the walls, answered only by the cold silence of the room.

  Her mind wouldn’t let her rest. She spent the remainder of the day, and deep into the grim marrow of the night, tearing through her vast library—dusty tomes, forbidden grimoires, cursed codices—all in a desperate hunt for even the faintest clue. Her fingers were raw from thumbing through brittle pages; arcane symbols crawled behind her eyes like spiders. But every search ended the same: nothing. It was like the term had been surgically cut from history itself.

  The frustration clawed at her nerves until she felt ready to scream.

  Then—

  The air in front of her desk shivered.

  Not a breeze, not a crack—reality itself began to fold, like a sheet of parchment crumpling and smoothing out under unseen hands. The space twisted, impossible angles snapping into existence and bleeding out, until a figure stepped from the rupture with a disconcerting, almost lazy grace.

  Elias Ravenscroft.

  He towered into the room as though he belonged to a different physics, a lean and athletic figure sheathed in an all-black trench coat that seemed to absorb the meager light. His raven-black hair, disheveled as always, framed a face too still, too composed—only the faint, calculating gleam in his icy-blue eyes betrayed the monstrous intellect roiling beneath.

  He smelled faintly of ozone and old pages, a paradox between storm and library.

  Elias struck a match on the desk’s edge, lighting a cigarette with casual, almost theatrical indifference. He took a long, deliberate drag, then blew out the smoke in a slow plume that seemed to whisper secrets as it curled upward.

  He cocked his head slightly, one hand tucked into his coat pocket.

  “What’s got you spiraling this time, Sylvia?” he asked, voice smooth and cutting, as if amused by the mere concept of her distress.

  Sylvia’s shoulders sagged ever so slightly—an involuntary easing, like the first breath after surfacing from deep water.

  “Ravenscroft,” she said, allowing herself a rare flicker of relief. “Just the man I wanted to see.”

  She leaned back in her chair, exhaling through her nose, before fixing him with a look sharp enough to cut glass. “I need answers.”

  Elias arched an eyebrow, amused. “Of course you do,” he said, deadpan. “The universe would be utterly lost without your insatiable hunger for the forbidden.”

  Sylvia ignored the jab and leaned forward, steepling her fingers. The talismans on her coat glimmered faintly, as if her Aura itself bristled with tension.

  “What do you know,” she said, each word dropping like a nail hammered into fate, “about the Sect of Her Shadows?”

  The room changed.

  Not dramatically. No thunder crack, no shattering of glass. Just a tightening.

  The temperature didn’t drop—but it felt colder. The walls seemed closer. The shadows deeper.

  Elias’s expression—normally untouchably stoic—fractured.

  Not with fear. Not rage. Not even dread.

  Shock.

  For the first time in the ten long years she’d known him—the second strongest High Warden of the Silent Veil, a man who had stared down gods and worse—Elias Ravenscroft hesitated.

  The cigarette drooped slightly from his lips, a forgotten thing. His eyes, those twin voids of piercing ice, widened by a fraction of an inch, pupils dilating like a predator catching a whiff of something bigger, something hungrier than himself.

  He said nothing.

  Sylvia sat back slowly, a grim satisfaction mingling with a growing, gnawing unease in her gut. She had rattled him.

  “You know,” she said, voice a low, predatory murmur, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you lose composure before. That bad?”

  Elias finally moved, flicking the cigarette into a nearby ashtray with a curt snap of his fingers. He straightened, his presence swelling—no longer the lazy scholar but something else, something colder and infinitely more dangerous.

  He ran a hand through his hair, dragging his fingers through the raven strands as if trying to ground himself in this reality.

  When he spoke, his voice was a scalpel—measured, precise, and laced with something Sylvia had never heard from him before.

  Urgency.

  “You don’t ask about the Sect of Her Shadows,” he said quietly, as if even speaking the name might summon something unspeakable. “You survive despite them.”

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  He met her gaze, and for once, there was no wall of sarcasm, no shield of aloofness between them. Only cold, brutal honesty.

  “And if they’re moving,” he continued, almost to himself, “then everything we’ve built—the Veil, humanity’s dominion over the supernatural—it’s already beginning to rot.”

  Sylvia’s fingers drummed a slow, restless rhythm against the scarred wood of her desk, the echo of her earlier outburst still humming faintly in the charged air. She studied Elias with a hawk’s patience, watching how the faint smoke from his cigarette coiled around him like a living thing, as if even the air itself listened for his next words.

  “So,” she said, voice low but edged with steel, “what exactly is the Sect? If anyone’s pulled enough threads to know, it’s you.”

  Elias struck the ash from his cigarette with a lazy flick, the ember briefly flaring like a dying star. He took a long, deliberate drag, exhaling a shroud of smoke that seemed to hang heavier than it should have.

  “The Sect of Her Shadows…” His voice, usually so laced with dry mockery, came quieter now, like he was invoking something best left forgotten. “It’s not just a cult. It’s… an institution. A monument built from madness and ambition, sprawled across the seams of mortal and celestial reality like a parasite too vast to see from the ground.”

  He leaned back, his trench coat whispering against the ancient wood of the chair. The glow of the cigarette briefly lit the sharp planes of his face, hollowing his features with stark relief.

  “They weren’t always like this,” he continued, a distant note creeping into his tone, like he was recalling something from the very marrow of his nightmares. “Once, they were just another group of supernatural zealots—dangerous, yes, but mortal. Containable.” His lip curled in a ghost of a grimace. “But somewhere along the line… they found a doorway. Or maybe they made one. Doesn’t matter. They crossed into something bigger. Something that changed them. Now they bridge realms—mortal, astral, primordial. And what returned… isn’t bound by the rules we know anymore.”

  The words settled between them, heavy and cold.

  Sylvia inhaled through her teeth, her mind stitching the implications together at a terrifying speed. But she wasn’t done yet.

  “Alright, then,” she said, voice slicing through the tension. “Let’s get to the real question. Who’s the Sin Archbishop of Greed?”

  Elias’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly—a tell only someone who knew him would catch. He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if warding off a migraine that had been waiting for this moment.

  “Alcor,” he said finally, his voice dropping even lower. “The Hoarder of Desires.”

  Even saying the name seemed to thicken the shadows.

  “He’s not just greed in the way you or I understand it,” Elias murmured, eyes distant. “He is greed. A living embodiment of the hunger that gnaws at the soul when it’s denied, or worse—when it’s fed endlessly and still craves more.”

  He crushed the spent cigarette into the ashtray with unnecessary force, the hiss of burning embers punctuating his words.

  “Alcor doesn’t want money. He doesn’t want power for its own sake. What he craves is everything. Every object, every soul, every ounce of meaning or beauty or life he can sink his claws into. He consumes, not to enjoy, but to possess. To own the very concept of existence itself.”

  Elias’s eyes, so normally cool and remote, gleamed with a raw edge of something darker—revulsion, maybe. Or fear.

  “And when he takes,” he said, voice cutting to the bone, “he leaves behind a vacuum. A void so absolute it devours what was once there. That’s why he’s also tied to Famine. When Alcor passes through a place, prosperity withers into ash. Fields turn sterile. Rivers dry to dust. Joy, hope, ambition—drained until nothing remains but hollow, desperate hunger.”

  Sylvia’s blood chilled at the vividness of it. She could almost see it: great cities crumbling into skeletal ruins under an invisible plague of despair; lush worlds bleached into gray deserts, the last cries of their people lost to the wind.

  “He doesn’t just take things,” Elias finished, voice a low growl. “He unmakes them. Famine isn’t a side effect. It’s the price of his existence—a natural law, born from a bottomless pit of wanting.”

  The silence that followed was heavier than lead.

  Sylvia leaned back in her chair, the old oak groaning under her shifting weight, as the revelation’s full gravity sank into her chest like an iron anchor. The shadows in her office seemed to close in tighter, as if the walls themselves could sense the creeping dread gnawing at the edges of her mind.

  Her hands trembled slightly as she pressed her palms against her forehead, trying—and failing—to stem the rising tide of panic clawing its way up her throat. She felt sick. Raw. Exposed.

  “Shit,” she rasped under her breath, voice brittle. “And I sent my youngest exorcists out there too.” Her nails dug into her scalp. “Goddamn it, I’m such a fucking idiot. Such a bad senior exorcist…”

  Across the desk, Elias watched her with his usual stoic detachment, the faint glint of worry hidden beneath the ice of his gaze. He exhaled smoke slowly, almost thoughtfully, before speaking.

  “Isn’t the yokai hybrid of war with them?” he asked, his voice cutting through the thick tension like a scalpel. “From what I know about both the hybrid and the Sect, that creature could take on several of the Archbishops by himself.”

  Sylvia’s laugh was sharp, bitter, and far too thin. She dropped her hands and looked at Elias, her amber eyes fever-bright with a frantic sheen. “Yeah, yeah, Sutaro’s a powerhouse. But you’re missing the goddamn point.” She slammed her hand down on the desk again, rattling the artifacts and tomes precariously stacked there. “I didn’t just send him. I sent her.”

  She pushed back from the desk, standing abruptly, pacing like a caged wolf. Her coat flared behind her, talismans jingling softly like the chimes of a funeral bell.

  “I sent that newbie—Hikari Sato—into this.” Her voice cracked on the name. “She’s only been in this hellhole of a profession for a goddamn week. One week! She used to be a normal schoolgirl, for crying out loud! Going to classes, worrying about exams, about her crushes or whatever normal kids her age are supposed to be doing—and now she’s being thrown headfirst into a supernatural warzone?”

  Sylvia scrubbed her face with her hands, her breaths coming shorter, sharper. Panic buzzed beneath her skin, electric and uncontrollable. “How the hell do you expect a sixteen-year-old—someone who just learned monsters even existed a month ago—to survive the fucking Sect of Her Shadows!?”

  Elias leaned back, blowing out another slow stream of smoke, his posture deceptively relaxed. “Relax, Bloodwood. You’re working yourself into a frenzy.” His voice was low, steady, a lifeline thrown across the chasm yawning inside her. “Hikari isn’t just some schoolgirl anymore. She’s an Apostle now. She’s got immense potential. She’ll be able to hold her own for a while.”

  Sylvia whipped around, her coat snapping at the sudden movement, fury and terror blazing in her eyes.

  “But what if she isn’t?” she shot back, her voice breaking, raw and real. “What if I sent her to her death!? What if her blood ends up on my hands because I was too reckless, too arrogant, thinking I could throw her into the fire and she’d just—just learn how to survive?!”

  The words hung in the air, trembling with the sheer force of her guilt.

  Elias’s gaze softened—not much, but enough that the edges of his usual detachment dulled. He set the cigarette aside, folding his hands together loosely.

  “Trust me,” he said, his voice quieter now, “the hybrid will protect as many of them as he can. That’s part of what he was made for. But knowing the Sect…” His mouth twisted into a grimace. “It’s going to be a slaughter. No matter what we do.”

  Sylvia closed her eyes for a long moment, forcing down the bile rising in her throat. She drew in a ragged breath through her nose, let it out slowly. The weight pressing against her ribs didn’t ease.

  Her mind spun through possibilities, strategies, desperate gambits. But no matter how she sliced it, it all led to the same grim conclusion: they couldn’t afford to stay on the sidelines.

  Her voice was quieter now. Frayed at the edges. “Should the Veil get involved?” she asked, barely trusting herself to say the words aloud.

  Elias didn’t even hesitate.

  “Of course we should,” he said, his voice as solid and certain as bedrock. “This isn’t something we can just sit back and watch happen. If we wait, we’ll be picking up corpses by the thousands.”

  Sylvia let out a shuddering breath, sinking back into her chair as if all the fight had bled out of her. She pressed a trembling hand over her heart, muttering under her breath—a prayer, a plea, a desperate invocation to a force she no longer entirely believed in but still clung to like a drowning woman to driftwood.

  “May Lucien…” She hesitated, bitter at the words, but said them anyway. “…be with us all.”

  The room fell into a heavy silence once more, the only sounds the faint hiss of the dying cigarette and the steady, grim ticking of the old grandfather clock in the corner.

  Each second sounded like a countdown to disaster.