The side entrance, as it turned out, was not an entrance.

It was a window.

A very narrow, very old, very sanctified window set halfway up the western transept wall behind a row of decorative thorn bushes that had clearly been planted by someone who hated burglars, gardeners, and joy.

Mezzo got one shoulder through first.

Silver, with the confidence of a man who had never once considered physics a personal obstacle, attempted to enter at the exact same time.

They jammed.

Immediately.

There was a short, undignified silence.

Then Mezzo hissed, “Move your arse.”

Silver’s voice came back strained with outrage. “Perhaps if you weren’t built like a tavern door—”

“I’m built like a warrior.”

“You’re built like a wardrobe someone taught to bark.”

“Did the feckin’ scented lamppost just call me a wardrobe?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“You're wearing enough perfume to tranquillise livestock.”

Silver gasped. “It is not perfume, it's cologne. Dragon-musk amber.”

“It’s killing people.”

“It is refined.”

“It’s got my eyes watering.”

“That may have rather more to do with the fact that you're currently compressed into a window like an improperly packaged sausage.”

Mezzo twisted, elbowing him by accident.

Silver made a noise of pure aristocratic violation.

“Careful!”

“You careful! Your elbow’s diggin’ into me!”

“My elbow is exactly where elbows have traditionally existed for several thousand years!”

“Not in my feckin’ kidney!”

“You moved your kidney into its path!”

“That is NOT HOW KIDNEYS WORK!”

From somewhere below them, Ray whispered up with murderous calm, “Both of you shut up or I’m leaving you there.”

That did it.

Mezzo shoved.

Silver swore.

The window frame gave a faint, holy creak of protest.

Then both of them tumbled through at once.

They landed in a heap on the polished corridor floor.

Mezzo hit first.

Silver landed half on top of him.

For a second neither moved.

Then Mezzo said, muffled under Silver’s coat, “Get off me before I bite you.”

Silver scrambled upright with as much dignity as a man could manage after being briefly worn as a blanket.

“Savage.”

“Perfumed candlestick.”

“Spotty barbarian.”

“Walking divorce petition.”

They froze.

Footsteps echoed somewhere ahead.

Both men went still.

The corridor beyond was cool, dim, and oppressively grand.

Mana-lamps burned in golden sconces along the walls, casting honey-coloured light over polished stone and rows upon rows of portraits. Every few feet another Luminarch Pontifex stared down at them from an elaborate gilded frame—ancient carbuncles, foxes, lynxes, hounds, and cats draped in layered robes and impossible hats, all painted with the same severe expression people seemed to develop after a lifetime of being obeyed. Their jewelled staffs glittered. Their rings flashed. Their eyes seemed to follow movement with the smug confidence of the permanently dead.

Mezzo glanced up at one particularly sour-looking old priest with a nose like a hooked blade and muttered, “Stars. They all look like they died angry and stayed that way out of professionalism.”

Silver shot him a look.

“Do try to show a shred of respect.”

Mezzo snorted.

“For the wall of crusty old candle goblins?”

“They are Luminarch Pontifexes,” Silver said sharply, voice lowering automatically in the cathedral hall. “They held immense spiritual and political authority.”

“Yeah, and apparently access to the same miserable painter.”

Silver’s mouth tightened.

“You truly do make ignorance look effortless.”

“And you make being stuck-up look like a sacred calling.”

“I am beginning to regret assisting you through the window.”

“You fell on me.”

“A regrettable consequence of poor planning.”

“You climbed in at the SAME TIME.”

“I assumed you would move.”

“I WAS IN FRONT OF YOU.”

“Yes. Hence my disappointment.”

Mezzo stared at him.

“You know what? I understand why people keep trying to hit you.”

Silver smiled thinly.

“Jealousy is a terrible burden.”

“THAT'S not why.”

They kept moving, their footsteps softened by the runner laid along the centre of the corridor. Beyond side arches came faint sounds of cathedral life in disarray—clipped voices, hurried robes, distant bells, the hum of old mana systems under strain. Every now and then a paladin passed an intersecting hall, but the commotion Topsy had caused had clearly pulled most of the active security elsewhere.

Silver walked with the irritated stiffness of someone personally offended by the need for stealth. Mezzo moved lower, faster, his eyes constantly tracking corners, doors, shadows, anything that might hide a threat or an answer.

“You have the subtlety of a collapsing cart falling down a staircase,” Silver muttered as Mezzo peered through a half-open side door.

Mezzo didn't look around.

“And you've got the survival instincts of ornamental furniture.”

Silver stopped.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.”

“I did. I was merely hoping the cathedral's acoustics had betrayed me.”

Mezzo glanced over his shoulder.

“Nope.”

Silver gave a quiet huff.

“One wonders how Commander Celeste has tolerated your company for this long.”

Mezzo's expression flattened.

“One wonders how anybody’s tolerated yours.”

That almost landed hard enough to make Silver stop walking.

Before he could reply, voices drifted down the next hall.

Both of them froze.

The corridor ahead branched into a narrow transept lined with smaller saint-statues and side chapels. The voices were not loud, but in the hush of the cathedral they carried just enough to sharpen the air.

Mezzo lifted a hand for silence.

Silver opened his mouth anyway.

Mezzo elbowed him lightly in the ribs.

“Shush.”

They edged closer, staying behind the stone archway where the corridor opened into a little prayer alcove beyond.

There, beneath a stained-glass window depicting some martyr wreathed in sunlight, stood Father Tamsin.

And beside him—

Skye.

Silver blinked.

“How in the name of—”

Mezzo slapped a hand lightly over Silver’s sleeve.

“Shut. Up.”

Skye stood stiffly with his hands clasped too tightly in front of him, his ears low, Arcbracer dim on his wrist. He looked as though he had been intercepted mid-thought and had not yet decided whether he was in danger. Tamsin stood opposite him with that same tired stillness he always carried, robes hanging straight, shoulders squared not like a priest but like a man who had once learned how to stand under fire.

“Perhaps,” Tamsin was saying, voice low and blunt as weathered stone, “you should consider joining the Church.”

Skye blinked.

“What?”

“You would be closer to the Artist here.”

Skye’s brow furrowed.

“I’m… doing well in the Knights.”

The words were quiet, but there was a little firmness in them too.

A boy defending a home he had only recently started to trust.

“And,” Skye added, after a pause that made it clear this part mattered more, “I don’t understand why you care now.”

That landed.

Even from the doorway, Mezzo saw the way Tamsin absorbed it without flinching outwardly. The priest’s face barely moved, but something in his posture went more rigid, as if the question had found an old bruise and pressed.

“It matters now,” Tamsin said at last, “because time is shorter than you think.”

Skye’s ears twitched with unease.

Tamsin looked toward one of the side halls, toward the deeper heart of the cathedral where Celeste had been taken.

“There are… inconsistencies,” he said. “With your Knight Commander.”

Behind the archway, Silver’s mouth curved.

“There,” he whispered smugly. “You see? I knew it.”

Mezzo turned on him with murder in his eyes.

“Shut it, dickhead. It may not be what we think.”

Silver raised a brow.

“You truly intend to cling to optimism while standing inside the cathedral illegally?”

Mezzo leaned closer.

“Yes.”

Then:

“And if you keep talkin’, I'll test whether these windows open from the inside.”

Silver gave him a scandalised look.

Tamsin went on, his tone unchanged.

“If matters develop as they may, the Knights of Clawdiff could be dissolved.”

Skye stared at him.

“Dissolved?”

“You are young enough,” Tamsin said, “that there are alternatives for you. Once you come of age, you could train as a paladin. There would be structure. Purpose. Safety.”

It was the closest thing to tenderness Mezzo had ever heard from him, and somehow that made it more frightening.

Skye shook his head slowly.

“No.”

Tamsin’s eyes narrowed by a fraction.

“You should think carefully.”

“I am.”

The answer was soft, but it held.

Skye was frightened—Mezzo could tell that instantly—but underneath it was that same strange stubbornness the fox always had when the thing being threatened mattered enough.

Tamsin exhaled through his nose.

“Your friends,” he said, “may not be spared.”

Skye went still.

The priest’s voice remained stripped-down and matter-of-fact, which somehow made the threat worse.

“If they are found to have sheltered Church property,” he said, “they may be executed.”

In the shadows of the archway, Silver’s face changed.

All the smug certainty drained from it in one sharp blink.

Skye swallowed hard.

“You can’t execute Silver.”

Tamsin looked at him then—not coldly, exactly, but with the exhausted pity of someone who had long ago stopped assuming rank could save anyone from institutions.

“Silver is a Hybrid,” Tamsin said.

Silver went completely still.

Tamsin’s voice did not rise.

“The laws on treason are clear. The laws on magical instability are clearer. If the Church can prove he knowingly concealed an unstable Kymara-class relic, Lady Umbranox will not be able to shelter him.”

Silver’s breathing changed.

Just slightly.

But Mezzo heard it.

Skye’s whole posture shifted.

Understanding.

This was not really about Silver. Not only. Tamsin was trying to warn him. Pull him loose before the trap closed. Save one life by quietly abandoning the others.

And Skye knew it.

His voice, when it came, was smaller.

“You’re trying to tell me to leave.”

Tamsin said nothing.

He did not need to.

Skye’s eyes dropped to the floor.

“They’re my friends.”

Silence.

Then, even more quietly:

“They’re my family.”

That word struck the corridor and held there.

Tamsin’s face hardened, but not in anger. More like pain being forced back into shape.

“There is no family,” he said.

Skye looked up, wounded confusion all over his face.

Tamsin’s gaze had gone distant, fixed on something no one else in the hall could see.

“There is the Light,” he said. “And all it touches. The Stars shows us inevitability. The safest road is this one.”

Skye shook his head at once, small and stubborn and heartbroken all together.

“No.”

It was not loud.

It did not need to be.

Behind the archway, Silver leaned slightly toward Mezzo, his voice pitched low and suddenly less certain.

“How could they execute us?” he whispered. “Unless what they found was… bad.”

Mezzo turned on him so fast Silver actually pulled back.

Mezzo turned so quickly Silver actually recoiled.

“This.”

Silver blinked.

“This is your fault.”

His face hardened instantly.

“There it is.”

“What?”

“The inevitable moment where everything becomes my fault.”

“You handed her over!”

“I did not hand her over.”

“Oh, sorry!”

Mezzo spread his hands.

“You simply pointed at her, shouted ‘SUSPICIOUS WOMAN!’ and waited for the holy police to do the rest!”

Silver's jaw tightened.

“I was attempting to protect us.”

“Fantastic.”

Mezzo's whisper was furious.

“Beautiful work.”

Silver's ears lowered further.

“I was trying to—”

“Save us?” Mezzo whispered savagely. “By feeding her to the Church? Great plan. Magnificent. We’re all enchanted.”

Silver looked away.

“I believed—”

“You fed her to the Church!”

“I believed she represented a risk!”

“And now WE'RE apparently gettin’ executed!”

“That was not information available to me at the time!”

“Oh, magnificent defence!”

Mezzo gave him two sarcastic thumbs up.

“Put that on the gravestone.”

Silver's eyes flashed.

“You don't know what I was trying to prevent.”

“No.”

Mezzo leaned toward him.

“But I'm gettin’ a fairly good idea what you've CAUSED.”

That landed.

Silver’s jaw tightened.

For one rare moment, he looked genuinely shaken.

“I need to fix this,” he said.

And before Mezzo could stop him, Silver started to rise from the cover of the archway—already drawing himself up, already wearing the first skin of whatever polished lie he thought might smooth this over.

Mezzo’s whole body reacted before his brain quite caught up.

His gryphon side gave an indignant, muffled skwawk in the back of his throat that translated roughly to:

Stop that idiot.

His dog side, more practical and considerably less concerned with dignity, supplied with immediate certainty:

Let him do something stupid later. Find Celeste now. Protect her. She is good. Loyal. Smells nice.

Mezzo made a face.

Silver glanced at him, scandalised.

“Did you just—”

“Yes,” Mezzo muttered, grabbing the back of Silver’s coat and yanking him bodily down behind the arch again. “And now you’re shutting up.”

Silver twisted in outrage.

“Unhand me—”

“No.”

“I can resolve this.”

“No, you can make it worse with beautiful diction.”

Silver started rising again.

Mezzo yanked him down.

“STOP.”

“I am attempting to prevent our execution.”

“You'll get us executed faster!”

“How?”

“You'll walk out there and say something like—”

Mezzo straightened, mimicking him terribly.

“‘Oh, Father, what an unfortunate little ecclesiastical misunderstanding. Perhaps we might discuss this over imported wine while I insult your curtains.’”

Silver looked appalled.

“My accent does not sound like that.”

“That is your objection?”

“It was dreadful.”

“You were about to GET US CAUGHT.”

“And somehow your impersonation is the greater crime.”

Silver bristled.

“You cannot simply drag me around like some common—mmph!”

Mezzo clapped a hand over his mouth.

Silver went rigid with aristocratic horror.

Mezzo leaned in until they were nearly nose to nose, his whisper fierce enough to bite.

“We save Celeste first,” he said. “Then we sort this out.”

Silver glared at him over Mezzo’s fingers, offended on a spiritual level.

From the chapel alcove, Skye and Tamsin were still speaking in low, strained voices, but Mezzo had already stopped listening for content. He was listening for openings. For footsteps. For the route ahead. For the distant hum of the cathedral’s deeper chambers where Celeste waited.

He dragged Silver backward another step.

Silver made a furious muffled sound against his palm.

Mezzo did not let go.

Not yet.

Because whatever catastrophe Silver thought he could still outtalk, Celeste was somewhere ahead in the middle of it.

And Mezzo had absolutely no intention of losing time to noble nonsense.