Fragmentary Record · Rebuilt from Recovered Documents
The trial of two monsters, conducted before witnesses; what came through the skylight; and the night San Cristóbal met the wolf.
It began with a letter in Roswitha's graceful hand: urgent, frightened, asking Axel to come alone to the crypt beneath the east-wing chapel before moonrise. He went. The chamber beyond was lined with silver filigree; the air itself bit at his lungs; and by the time the door slammed, the silver was already, as Friedrich put it, doing God's work. They strapped him into a chair of worked silver seared with scripture. In the inner chamber, ringed in salt and candles, knelt Roswitha, gaunt, torn, terrified.
That evening the Cardenal himself collected the rest of the company for "the Blessing of the Spring," and would not hear a refusal: "Axel awaits you already." They were seated on wooden pews facing the altar. "Please, sit," said Friedrich. "You are not prisoners. You are… witnesses."
Friedrich's address survives nearly whole, and it is a courtroom speech:
"You were invited here not as guests… but as evidence. It was I who sent the invitation that brought you to San Cristóbal. Not Cardinal Verdugo. Not chance. Me."
"In Eisen, patterns emerge for those willing to look. A Countess who does not age… a coffin carried as luggage under diplomatic seal. A man who lives longer than records allow… whose nights are marked by chains, locks and guards — not to keep enemies out, but to keep something in. These are not accusations. They are observations."
"Silver unmasks liars… You are not cursed, Axel. You are revealed." And, to the Countess: "You are no Countess of Eisen. You are a vampire — a false Queen of Eisen." The rite he read was not an execution. It was an exorcism: both souls, to hell.
Mid-rite, a figure entered wearing the Cardenal's shape, and the shape did not quite hold. The light bent around it. Its shadow moved on its own. Its eyes caught the candlelight like mirrors, and its breath was a hiss of steam on stone. Friedrich crossed the room, knelt, and offered it a silver medallion: "For services rendered. The trap holds. They will burn."
It said nothing. It looked at Grigori the entire time. And Ruprett, for once, went very quiet before he went very pleased: "That isn't a demon, my dear prophet. And it certainly isn't a man. That is something older than scripture… You lot fled once, didn't you? Slithered sideways through time when the world stopped belonging to you." And after it, cheerfully: "Run along now. The stars aren't right yet."
The record is now settled on how it broke: in the chaos of the party's defiance, a guard's gun discharged as he grappled with one of them, and the shot found the veiled skylight above. Moonlight poured in like a verdict. The chair did not hold what it became. The chains snapped like thread; the company scattered the salt and snuffed the candles, and Roswitha rose from the broken circle. "I owe you more than you know," she told Henryk, and went out through the window grate as mist.
The wolf went up, and out, and into the city.
What San Cristóbal remembers is a festival crowd trampled apart at the edges, a fruit cart in a fish cart, a burning alley, and a wolf the size of which grows with each telling, running with half the watch behind it. What the company remembers is harder: silver-armed hunters closing in, a lost child crying in the road who was not touched, and a barefoot man running through all of it, speaking Ussuran to something that had stopped being spoken to. In the Garden of the Lost Saints, among the graves, Grigori, shapechanger and prophet and never once a liar, brought Axel back. A small foreign woman none of them had met walked out of that same night beside them, following a vision of a broken man who brings the light. She has been with them since.
They went to ground. Kodai sat up sober-adjacent with a blunderbuss across his lap: "No leave. City not safe… Yellow Lady say wait. You trust Kodai last night, yes? Then trust Kodai now." Axel lay grey under a horse blanket. Aruma's verdict: "The beast has eaten. The man has not."
Then three soft knocks, a pause, two more: Santina, the palace's smallest spy, breathless: the city being searched room by room. Ilsa taken. And Otto: "They came for the big one. Your guard. He killed them. All of them. Seven. Then he was gone." Friedrich, she said, was leaving for Eisen, swearing to hunt them both, lord and countess, until his dying breath.
The Yellow Lady's summons came the same hour. At that council (Amanda coiled beside the veiled woman, ready to kill something on principle) the company's tempers ran hot, until Kodai stood on his dignity and delivered the wisest foreign policy anyone has offered all year: "If my enemy make enemy of another… I make enemy's enemy good friend. Better you swim together than fight current." And the Queen, from the shadows: "If you wish them to trust you, you must trust them."
The Yellow Lady removed her headdress. Diego, being Castilian, mistook her for the King, which was the point: Princess Rocío, the twin the Inquisition never knew existed. Amanda asked Axel the only question that mattered to her, "Can you control it?", and did not like the honest answer. The Queen overruled her: "In these situations we take what allies we can find. We don't get to choose."
The Chronicle Resumes