The archives are in the cathedral’s basement. Three floors of vaulted stone chambers lined with shelves that stretch from floor to ceiling, crammed with texts and scrolls and bound volumes spanning centuries of accumulated knowledge. The air is cool and dry and smells of old paper and preservation spells.
Fiora is at her desk.
She’s been the Cathedral’s archivist for as long as Knox has been a Templar, and he suspects she was here long before that.She looks up when they enter and her expression shifts through several phases in rapid succession: recognition, confusion, alarm.
Her gaze locks on Dimitri.
“Knox,” she says carefully. “You’ve brought a demon into my archives.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I need your help.”
“Yes, I assumed so. But there's a demon with you.”
“Fiora—”
“A demon. Into my archives. Where I keep the irreplaceable texts. The ones that are older than the city. The ones that are older than the country.” She takes off her glasses and polishes them on her sleeve, which Knox knows is something she does when she’s resisting the urge to yell. “Start talking.”
Knox talks. He tells her everything. The warehouse, the rift, the witch, the blood, the binding. He tells her about the bond’s mechanics: the emotional bleed, the distance limitation, the pain. He doesn’t tell her about the electricity when they touch, or the wall outside the apothecary, or last night in his living room with Dimitri’s hands on either side of his head and a clawed finger tracing his jaw. Those things are not relevant.
Fiora listens without interrupting. Her eyes move between Knox and Dimitri, and Knox can see her mind working, cataloging, cross-referencing, pulling from decades of accumulated knowledge.
“You should tell the Order,” she says when he finishes.
“I know.”
“But you’re not going to.”
“Not yet. Not until I understand what we’re dealing with.”
Fiora sighs. She puts her glasses back on and turns to the shelves behind her desk, running her fingers along the spines of a row of ancient texts.
“A soulbind forged with freely given blood,” she murmurs. “Anchored to a botched summoning circle. Between a nephilim and a demon.” She pulls a volume from the shelf and drops it on her desk with a thud. “You don’t do anything halfway, do you, Knox?”
“Not usually, no.”
She opens the book and begins turning pages, scanning text that Knox can’t read from where he’s standing. After several minutes, she stops.
“There are steps,” she says. “The bond is anchored to the summoning event. The rift, the circle, the blood. To sever it, you need to dismantle the anchors.” She looks up at him over her glasses. “First, the breach. The rift in the warehouse was closed, but it left a scar, a weak point in the dimensional barrier. That scar needs to be destroyed. Sealed permanently. As long as it exists, the bond has a foundation to cling to.”
Knox nods. “What else?”
“The lesser demons that came through the rift. The rifthounds. They’re fragments of the same event, loose threads from the same torn fabric. They need to be exterminated. Every last one. As long as they’re alive in this dimension, the bond’s anchors remain intact.”
“And then?”
Fiora closes the book. She takes off her glasses and looks at Knox directly, and her expression is serious in a way that makes something cold settle in his stomach.
“Then the witch who bound you has to sever the bond himself. He’s the caster. His intent, his blood magic, his connection to the event, those are the threads that hold the whole thing together. He has to unpick what he stitched.” She pauses. “And he has to accept the original terms of the summoning. Whatever deal he made with the demon when he called him through, that contractis still open. The binding redirected it, but it didn’t cancel it. The witch has to honor his end, or the bond won’t release.”
Knox absorbs this. Three steps. Destroy the breach. Kill the rifthounds. Find the witch.
He thanks Fiora. She tells him not to thank her, to tell the Order, and to get the demon out of her archives before he touches anything. Knox glances at Dimitri, who has been suspiciously quiet throughout this exchange and is now examining a shelf of scrolls with the casual interest of someone browsing at a bookshop. He catches Knox’s look and smiles innocently. Knox doesn’t trust it for a second.
They leave the archives and climb the stairs in silence. The cathedral is busy. Templars move through corridors, administrative staff carry files, the distant sound of training drifts from the courtyard. Knox keeps Dimitri close, guiding him through the halls with the practiced authority of a man escorting a prisoner. No one questions them. A few Templars glance at Dimitri with sharp, wary eyes, but Knox’s presence is enough to keep them at bay.
They turn into an unoccupied hallway, and Dimtri's good behavior comes to an end.
“How delightful.” His voice is light, conversational, with a razor edge underneath. “That little witch is going to be indebted to me after all. He summoned me and then bound me to you instead of holding up his end. When this is done, he’ll owe me everything he promised and then some.”
