OMFG WHAT IS THIS? AN ACTUAL CHAPTER? NOT AN INTERLUDE? WHAT?

Not but seriously, I AM SO GLAD I FINALLY GET TO GIVE YOU AMAZING PEOPLE A REAL CHAPTER. I'm so sorry it's taken so long, but I hope you enjoy it! The story's finally moving again and I'm so excited for where it's going!

Much love to AtomBombBabie, Erieri4ever, and annhamilton, for leaving extra-lovely comments ^^ And EVEN MORE LOVE to my pack, who have yet to give up on me, and Starry, who continues to be a far better beta than I deserve.

AND NOW

AT LAST

ONWARDS!

Fourteen
The Sword Unsheathed

Simon saw Jace, golden and perfect, for one caught-in-amber moment.

And then he sank back into the velvet dark, into a nest of gold and silver fire, and slept.

He was so tired. He would remember to remember later; would be afraid and confused and need answers later. He would be himself later, but for now his soul ached for rest, and the waking world was the dream, far-away and unreal and bemusing. His memories dissolved into wisps of colour, his fears and tears evaporating with them—and the flames of silver and gold that wrapped around him like silken sheets burned away even his name.

Leaving absolutely nothing that could hurt him, no piece of the real world buried like shrapnel in his Self. The fire and the dark took it all away.

And the soul that some called Simon slept.

(0)

Until two whiplash strikes of pain seared through the dark like lightning bolts without warning, bright-white-wrong-right, shattering the quiet sanctuary into a thousand, a million spinning-glittering pieces—

And an ocean of light rushed in.

Some Pandora's box unlocked, some barrier broken, some smouldering coal exploding into a forest fire with an operatic ROAR: Simon woke and was himself and was more, the gold and silver flames that had embraced him now become him, rushing into the shape of him and expanding and he expanded with them, detonating outwards, a nebula being born; he was the fire and he was the Song and restraints he'd never known were there crumbled, a choke-chain he'd been born wearing suddenly slackened, the cage of meat and bone and name unfolding like a new galaxy and he could breathe.

For an instant like eternity.

And then the shockwave of his Self contracted, a devastating instantaneous implosion converging on his centre, a tsunami of Self, gold-silver-singing-screaming—

He crashed back into a shape he knew.

(0)

Curls of golden flame. Distant, muffled howls of thwarted rage. Shimmering silver, like mercury, like starlight on glass.

The taste of nebulas on his tongue. Dripping down his chin.

Wings.

(0)

Something. In his hand. Solid, smooth. It fits. It's right.

…It's gone.

(0)

REMEMBER!

(0)

Eyes with black whites and white pupils.

'You never need to be afraid of us'

demons are people

'She broke her oath to Samael'

Ol gi eol drilpá—I made you great—

'You are the Sword'

Firstborn, Only-born, child of Night and Poison, do you remember, do you remember who you are—

(0)

Do you remember what you've done—

(0)

Simon woke up.

He caught a quick glimpse of a ceiling covered in Marks before he closed his eyes tightly, struggling to breathe, to hold himself still, to be calm. Panic built like a tidal wave drawing itself back from the shore, climbing higher and higher, and he fought to keep it from crashing down; electricity flashed up and down his spine, raising the hair on his arms and the back of his neck, and there was molten lead in the pit of his stomach, hot and toxic. Dread and horror and something frantic and animal tangled together like unmatched puzzle pieces: it was the feeling of knowing something terrible was behind you but being unable to look, of clinging to the edge of a cliff with your fingertips and a hundred miles to fall, of standing on the surface of a frozen ocean as the ice started to crack and the dark water yawned open beneath you.

The feeling of move wrong, breathe wrong, and you will lose your grip and fall and drown and drown and drown—

Something nearby chirruped—it sounded like some kind of machine—and Simon heard footsteps move closer in response.

"Angeion Morgenstern? Are you awake?"

A woman's voice. A stranger's voice. Nephilim, but not a Shadowhunter—he could hear her runes, skynja-lembrin-dethau-hauora-sielvar-vereus, the runes of a doctor or healer, some kind of medic who didn't go out hunting demons every night—

"Angeion?"

He was shaking.

No.

The ice was breaking.

Don't.

The cliff was crumbling.

Please.

The darkness was breathing down his neck.

No.

The woman who'd spoken laid a gentle hand on his shoulder—

No no no no no no no no no no nonononono GodmomJaceClaryplease!

—and Simon fell: through the ice, through the air, into the maw of the dark that swallowed him whole.

He screamed—he sang; sang a scream, screamed a song, didn't mean to but the blast of it, the symphonic-shockwave of it flung the woman away from him, hurled her across the room to crash into tables, bottles, all splintering wood and shattering glass, and Simon didn't hear any of it because he was so, so far away.

Light-years, galaxies, universes away.

He remembered.

And his scream drowned out the stars.

)0(

"Your courtesies come too late." So spoke Silariel-eresh, Aĝarin of the Seelie, Genetrix Prime, Seven-Sired and Seven-Birthed, Dumu of Dôn, maš of Arawn, Starkeeper and Wayfinder; the one called Queen in the tongues of mortals, and Réalsitarí in the language of the knowes. "Long ago we named you Cairde, but friends do not commit trespass and seek to deceive. You come with sweet words now that your silence has earned you inconvenience, but your tongues are faithless." Si faced the Lightbringers garbed in the blue of war, sier gown a battle-banner woven from the wings of morpho butterflies and the feathers of royal sunangel hummingbirds, sier bare arms covered in intricate patterns of woad that spiralled into rearing tähtisuar—what humans clumsily named unicorns—and hooded cobras, aconite and belladonna flowers. Beads of lapis were woven into sier shining red hair, and bells of copper patinated blue: bells with no tongues, that rang silent as death. Around sier, the countless gems that filled the air of the heart of the knowe like stars in a sky burned cobalt and sapphire as the Réalsitarí's rage infected them. Some of those jewels had come together to form a glittering cathedra, and Silariel sat enthroned in azure anger.

"You have shown yourselves to be as fickle as all other mortals," si said, the veil of iced forget-me-not blossoms that obscured sier face doing nothing to hide sier contempt. "Be grateful my curse falls only on your cohort, and that I do not call home all the Daoine who walk with the Bringers of Light."

Olianthe stood with her sistren, the seven of them arranged in a crescent flanking their mother-sire; Siarien, who as heir wore the royal si-prefix affixed to sier name and bore the pronouns reserved for monarchs and monarchs-to-be, stood to the Réalsitarí's immediate right, gleaming blue moonstones in sier hair, a web of silver wire and shining beads hiding sier face. Olianthe was at Silariel's left, for she was captain of the Réalsitarí's knights and this a show of the court's strength; she wore her own diamond armour, the crystal tinted the same blue as the throne with the same royal anger, and held her spear in her hand. Her helm was down, and she looked through it at the Lightbringers kneeling before her dam-and-sire, and was glad Clary was not here to witness this confrontation, even as she worried for her olor with the city so unrestful.

The Lightbringer's captain rose to her feet, and her head was bowed but her spine was straight. "Radiance, you know what we hunt. We travelled in secrecy in the hopes of taking our prey swiftly, by surprise, without giving it a chance to bring devastation upon your territories—or upon you and your people. But we did not hide from you. We knew your knights would find signs of our passing, but we trusted that, in your wisdom, you would understand why we chose discretion over protocol."

"So now you will not just slight us, but insult us?" the Réalsitarí demanded, in a voice like light on ice. "You suggest we would speak of your coming to the Nephilim, in violation of our ancient accord? Or perhaps you imply that we would shelter your quarry—we, who were there when the anunnaki first rose, and who warned you of them, and sheltered you when they drowned the earth in the Great Flood! We who taught you the workings of metal that you could fight them, and fought beside you, glass blades aside bronze, to safeguard the lands of mortal men! You accuse us!"

Sier words filled the heart of the knowe like cold flooding through a winter door, and the living carvings on the walls echoed sier displeasure: Cŵn Annwn, the white fleethounds of the Tuatha, morphed into wolves who bared their teeth in silent snarls; darting geckos grew larger than trees and spread massive wings, hissing cream fire; orchids twisted into fields of oleander, as beautiful and deadly as the Réalsitarí sierself.

"I chose my words poorly," the Lightbringer woman said. "I apologise. I accuse no one. We erred, but out of caution and fear, not disrespect." She had presence, this one, and grace; her dark skin gleamed in the white chamber as she made a not-appalling approximation of At Hurricane's Heart, Dolphin Swims In The Stillness, a pose that spoke of long friendship, trust—and heartfelt entreaty. "Please, Radiance. There is now a matter of more than an anunnaku: Valentine Morgenstern, who wishes ill to all Daoine, is working to perform the Kilulšargad."

It was not timely for any of them to speak, but Olianthe felt the stir pass through her sistren nonetheless, saw them make the tiny shifts with their bodies that moved them into the ritualised poses of surprise and shock, conveying horror and outrage with the cant of a wrist, the angle of a shoulder, the precise curl of a finger. Around them on the floating platforms that filled the heart of the knowe, the Réalsitarí's courtiers made gestures of warding, stepped into poses of distress, whispers like starlings darting between the platforms.

The Kilulšargad. Oh, yes—they knew it. They remembered.

"We need to call our orders—we need more Lightbringers," the captain said, when with a flick of the Réalsitarí's fingers the murmurs died away. "Valentine must be found and stopped, and we need help to do it. Please forgive us our discourtesy, and let us summon aid. Before it becomes too late for any of us."

For a time the Réalsitarí was silent behind sier veil, and Olianthe was grateful for the cover her own helm provided. The Kilulšargad—did Clary know? Was she safe? Was the court safe, if Valentine succeeded in performing the ritual? Or would the knowe come unanchored from this world, if Clary's world died, and cast the Tuatha into the void again?

Would Silariel be forced to take up the mantle of Wayfinder once more? Could si find a new Way, if the fates demanded it? Or would the stars of Annwn finally go out, to shine no more upon the children of Dôn?

"No." The Réalsitarí's decision rang, a struck bell, silencing even thoughts of protest. "It is witch-children he will want, and witch-children you would bring here. No." Si rose from sier throne, and the jewels that formed it flew back to their places in the glittering galaxy of crystals that filled the room as si took on the pose called simply Dôn, which none but a monarch's heir could challenge. With it, si gave the weight of the Goddess' will to sier words, spoke with the Goddess' voice, stood as Her child by blood and Her living avatar by crown's right. "I will not have you bring Valentine's fuel within his reach. No more Lightbringers will enter this city until I will it. Twice I deny you, and thrice more I deny you, that all five pillars of the world stand witness; no, no, and no again!"

Si did not need to shout. The diamonds in the air magnified sier voice like mirrors reflecting light to one another, flooding the knowe's heart with the brightness of the Réalsitarí's edict, with the jewelled fire of divine judgement delivered, perfect and terrible.

"Nor will I permit you to leave," si said, sliding from Dôn to Redwood Edifies The Acorn Yet On The Branch. "You desired entry to this city enough to scorn millennia of good will, and entry was granted you. But New York's bounds will be your bonds until I am satisfied that the Bringers of Light know and respect their allies as they ought."

There were two other Lightbringers, alongside their captain, and neither of them human; the one a kumiho, one of the fox-sisters from the human realm of Korea, and the other a wakinyan with lightning behind his eyes. They both held themselves like warriors, and though the wakinyan tensed at the Réalsitarí's pronouncement, neither were foolish enough to protest aloud.

Olianthe counted nineteen heartbeats before the Lightbringer captain spoke: no doubt she had chosen her words with care. "Is the Seelie Court imprisoning us?"

"Who speaks of prisons?" the Réalsitarí asked. "We set no bars around you, and lock no doors."

"Among mortals," the captain said, "to restrict freedom is to imprison."

The Réalsitarí gestured—Sky Need Not Heed The Sparrow—and leaned back, sier throne re-forming to meet sier as si seated sierself upon it. The furious blue was fading from the gems. "You may make free of the city as you wish. The Daoine of the Seelie will not stop you."

A murmur ran through the court as the human woman, gaze fixed upon the Réalsitarí's veil, deliberately and without fanfare moved her body into what was unmistakably Tähtisua Raises Head; Moonlight Splinters Upon Her Horn. It was a more subtle and nuanced pose than Dragon's Wings Eclipse The Sun; not a threat, not a challenge, but one that said the onlooker should perhaps reconsider their stance. A unicorn drawing attention to her horn, reminding a would-be predator that there was easier prey to be had, and their current path was unlikely to end well.

"I belong to the Sword of Isis," the woman said. "My companions are drawn from the Messengers of Inari, the wakinyan, the Leiomano, and Tangaroa's Select. All will be greatly distressed to learn that the Seelie Court's hospitality has grown so cold."

"The rules of guest-friendship do not apply," the Réalsitarí said coolly, "to those who do not present themselves as guests."

"And is Valentine a guest of the Seelie?" The human held her pose. "He is the only one who benefits from your geas, Radiance. Whether you intend it or not, by punishing us this way, you aid him."

"Are your forces so great that Valentine will cut through the walls of the world with ease without you and yours to obstruct him?" the Réalsitarí asked. "Does removing you from the board leave the way to his goal clear for him? Are you all that stands between him and his ritual?"

The human woman did not relax her pose. "No."

"No," the Seelie monarch echoed. "When Tammuz attempted the Kilulšargad in Sumer, it was not the Sword of Isis that laid him low. The ritual was stopped without your kind before, Lightbringer. It can be done again." Si moved into a dismissive pose, Moon's Face Turns From The Earth, altered slightly to accommodate sier seat. "Now get you gone. I have spoken, and my words are my truth."

The woman was still a moment; then she bowed, stiffly but formal and correct, and the kumiho emulated her—but the wakinyan did not. Olianthe shifted her grip on her spear as the young male stepped past his mentor, walking a few steps closer to the Réalsitarí—but before impropriety could pass into insult, he stopped, and took on the pose Winter Bough Reaches for Spring very nearly as perfectly as if he'd been born to the Tuatha.

"You don't belong to this world," he said bluntly, his tone at complete odds with his speaking-pose. "But you've become a part of it. Enough that Valentine won't need kashshaptu children for his ritual. He can take one of yours."

Deathly silence fell over the hall like a shroud.

Siarien was the one to speak first, and si was succinct: "Why do you think this?"

The young wakinyan didn't waver; he smelled of ozone and petrichor, not fear and sweat. "Because one of the magical geniuses on my team said so," he said. "And I trust her to be right." He tilted his head slightly; it was not a part of the speaking-pose. "And because I doubt Valentine knows the kashshaptu-ene exist. But he definitely knows about you."

Nelesdiar hissed. "You think us easy prey?"

"No," the wakinyan said. "But it doesn't matter. We can disappear the moment Valentine moves against us; we don't have to engage him. But your knowes are anchored to the mortal realm, and you can't move them. If Valentine comes for you, you have nowhere to run."

"Who speaks of running?" Nelesdiar said. "Let him come. If he dares—"

"Do not speak words you have not the strength to make truth," Virdiridon, one of the Réalsitarí's closest advisors, said sharply.

Nelesdiar shot Virdiridon a furious glare, but fell silent.

"Even if Valentine knows about us," the wakinyan said after a pause, "he'll still probably choose you instead. He's killed plenty of you, but I've never heard that he's killed a witch, or a kiasu. And hunting prey you know is always easier than prey you don't."

His words rang true, and pierced Olianthe's heart like iron nails. She knew better than to look towards her mother-sire—to signal her uncertainty so clearly even humans would recognise it—but the subtle shift of her body was a question, asking her Réalsitarí what si wanted to do.

But Silariel-eresh made no answer.

Without moving from her captain's side, the kumiho said, "What did the original instructions for the Kilulšargad call for?"

"Five children bound to the magic of the world," Irlaridí murmured. "No two alike in kind."

"Then if Valentine received the same instructions," the kumiho said, "there was no mention of the kashshaptu-ene or kiasu-ene. He won't know about us." She shrugged. "And if whatever demon told him about the ritual was more specific, what's more likely? That it wound send him chasing after something he's never hunted before? Or that it would name the five nasaru-ene kindreds he knows?" She counted on her fingers. "Ashipu-ene, ubar-ene, ekimmu-ene, ubārum-ene—and the Nephilim." She lowered her hand. "Hell wants the world-wards destroyed as quickly and efficiently as possible. They would have given Valentine the easiest shopping list they could."

More than one courtier hissed at the kumiho's blithe tone and callous phrasing—a shopping list! But Siarien raised sier hand in a command, and all fell silent.

The Lightbringer captain spoke again. "Valentine is somewhere in this city, Radiance, and your people cannot search through it. There's too much iron. But we can, and we will, if you let us. If not us, then it will be, must be, the Nephilim. But they aren't trained for this kind of hunt, and I don't know how much they'll care to protect you while they attempt it."

"Oh, I am certain they will not bother to try and protect us," the Réalsitarí said, and every word burned like the dawn. "But I am equally certain we will not need them to." Sier rage was a cold thing, stark and sharp and perfect as a glacier; if she had been human, Olianthe would have shivered at the bite of that chill. "How timely, that you discover now that the blood of the Tuatha will serve Valentine's needs. Now, when you need credit to buy back the goodwill you spent so blithely."

The wakinyan took a deep breath, and Olianthe thought she heard the rumble of thunder in it. Then, decisively, the wakinyan brought his body into Stag Stands Tall As The Wolves Close In, and the poignant grace of the speaking-pose made more than one courtier catch their breath and gesture varying levels of appreciation. "Just because I can lie," he said, "doesn't mean that I do. Ask your own spellworkers if I'm right that your blood will power the ritual."

The Réalsitarí swung sier head towards Virdiridon. "Is it true?" si demanded.

"Radiance, I do not know." Virdiridon took a pose of apology. "It may be so; it may not be so. There are tests that can be performed, and I can perform them, but in this moment my eyes cannot see the truth."

"Very well." Silariel-eresh returned sier attention to the Lightbringers. "The Seelie will investigate your claims. If they prove true, we will return to this conversation." Sier voice hardened. "If they are not, and you seek to deceive and manipulate us, we will no longer name you Cairde, our friends, but Naimhde—enemies. Do you hear my truth?"

"We hear," the Lightbringers' captain said.

Olianthe gestured for two of her knights to escort the Lightbringers from the chamber and out of the knowe. The courtiers dispersed swiftly, reading the Réalsitarí's mood in the restless movements of the hall's carvings. In a very short time, only the Réalsitarí, sier children, and sier closest advisers remained.

Si held out sier hands, and as they had formed sier throne, jewels hanging suspended in their air flew to sier, joining and melting together into a wide, narrow bowl. It filled with water, and, cradling the bowl in sier lap with one hand, the Réalsitarí pricked sier finger with one of sier sharply gleaming finger-sheaths and let a drop of blood fall.

In the water, the blood traced a smoky spiral, filling the bowl to its edge. For a brief moment, there was nothing else to see, but then the Réalsitarí stirred one clawed finger-sheath through the water, and a face appeared in it; a pureblooded Shadowhunter youth, with white skin and ebony hair and eyes a mortal might have mistaken for black, but which Olianthe could see were instead the darkest of greens, like the shadows in the wildwoods that had been old when the Tuatha came to this world.

"Silariel-eresh," the Shadowhunter said. "Is it done?"

"It is," si told him. "Thus is the Seelie Court's debt to you paid, Zahriel's Son."

The young man in the water smiled. "Agreed. All debts between us are wiped clean." He bowed his head, briefly. "My mother and I are grateful."

"And your father?" the Réalsitarí asked. "Does he know of your plots, little cousin?"

A terrible, haunting scream sliced through everything-and-all before the Shadowhunter could reply; a sound without sound, a howling Olianthe heard not with her ears but in her bones, her blood, her bronze. It tore through the water in the bowl, whipping it to a bloody froth and shattering the connection; Zariel's Son vanished in the churning water, and the scream was like sunlight set to music, exquisite and excruciating, cutting Olianthe to the core even through her armour. The carvings on the walls writhed in distress and pain; the countless gems hanging suspended in the air burned white like fire and trembled, and Olianthe and her kin shuddered too, at the sickening-sweet draw of it, like iron fish-hooks piercing the heart and pulling—

)0(

Dawn's onset was washing the darkness from the sky, and Alec only noticed because Izzy appeared at his side to push a new cup of coffee into his hands.

"Relax," she said, rolling her eyes at the question he didn't have to voice. "One of the scholae apprentices made it. It's perfectly drinkable."

Alec managed a tired grin, his gratitude spilling through their agela bond. "Thanks." It was Idrian coffee, he discovered when he raised the mug to his lips; rich and dark and infused with the flavour of pears, so that for a moment as he swallowed he saw the orchards outside Alicante, remembered how the wind carried their scent into the city in the summer.

"Some of the Coadjutor's people brought it," Izzy said, sensing his question. "Thought you should get a taste before it's all gone." The New York Institute rarely got its hands on Idrian delicacies; Portals were difficult to arrange between Idris and the outside world, and an Institute run by ex-Circle members didn't rate the effort.

"Thanks," Alec said again, all he had time for as another group of seekers came in to report what they hadn't found and the places in which they hadn't found it.

Yesterday he had stood beside Nomlanga Sithunzi, the representative sent by the Spiral Court, as the man explained to the Coadjutor—the second-most powerful Nephilim in the world, after the Consul—and the Kleidoukhos—who was the third—that Valentine had a way to bring the world-wards down, and all the evidence pointed to the conclusion that he meant to use it.

An angel walking the earth in a Nephilim vessel was a miracle. The massacre of the Silent Brothers was a tragic disaster. The Mortal Sword in Valentine's hand was a catastrophe.

The world-wards torn down would be the apocalypse.

The revelation tore through the Nephilim like Michael's trumpet sounding the call to war—and they'd answered. An army worthy of the end-times had flooded into the Institute, and for once there'd been no arguing, no posturing, no politics; all of them unified by a single shared purpose—

Stop Valentine.

There was no time to stop or rest, and no pair of hands that could be spared. Alec had spent the rest of the day and the past night coordinating the search efforts of the Shadowhunters and inquisitors that came pouring through the newly-opened Portals; forming them into groups, assigning them areas of the city to comb through, and smoothing things over between them and the warlocks Nomlanga summoned from the Spiral Court to help. It was obvious to Alec that they needed the warlocks' expertise—they had a clearer idea of what to look for, what kind of place Valentine would need to perform his ritual, what supplies, what kinds of signs or magical spoor might be left by his workings—but neither side was at perfect ease with the other. Alec was run ragged stitching the tattered seams where Downworlder met Nephilim into something whole and smooth; the sight of his white mourning clothes and red grieving Marks calmed the wary and uncertain members of the Court, and the seraph-sword sharpness of his pureblood-honed cheekbones quelled the rumblings of resentful inquisitors and scathing Shadowhunters.

Meanwhile Izzy spread maps across the tables and walls, consulting with Nomlanga to circle likely sites for Valentine's ritual, marking off neighbourhoods that had been cleared, taking the reports of each pack of exhausted searchers as they returned to the Institute and shooting off fire messages to the High Inquisitor, the Iron Citadel, the Coadjutor. Jace dispensed weaponry and armour from the Institute's stores, accepting the crates of supplies coming through the open Portals from the Iron Citadel and handing them out as fast as he could inventory them; swords, bucklers, dragon-leather gear, chain-mail over-jackets light and fine as silk. There were more prosaic supplies, too; bandages and tisanes and books of healing telesme for the iatroi-physicians, and food and drink for everyone from Idris' own fields and orchards, which was received especially gratefully—food grown in earth blessed by Raziel was more healthful, as was meat from animals raised within its borders, as if some trace of Raziel's power lingered in the land, to be absorbed by what grew and fed upon it. There was nothing better for tired and worn-out Nephilim.

There were probably people who would have refused food from Jace's hand, had they known of his 'crimes', but the Kleidoukhos had placed an injunction of silence on the High Inquisitor and the secretari kept their own counsel. There was far more at stake now than the Inquisitor's personal vendetta.

The smell of something delicious reached Alec through the agelai bond, and his mouth watered, his stomach clenching tight. Even with nourishment and energy runes, there was only so long a person could get by on nothing but coffee; his own hunger surprised him, a ravenous hollowness. But of course, it was almost dawn; dinnertime, for nocturnal Shadowhunters.

And, Alec realised belatedly, he was feeling the hunger of three people, not just his own.

*That's the last of them,* Izzy sent. She closed Alec's eyes and opened her own, pulling at both her agelai to show them what she saw: yet another group of Nephilim trailing in from the fruitless search. The High Inquisitor walked at their head, the line of her mouth grim, the angle of her shoulders tired. *We've officially failed to find him tonight.*

Alec rubbed a gloved hand over his own eyes, anchoring himself back in his body. *The daylight shift will take over after dinner,* he said. He was wild with impatience, with a fevered desperation, but rushing ahead by himself when he was this tired, or forcing drained and exhausted searchers to keep looking, wasn't going to help Magnus. Someone would get hurt, and that was fine, they were Shadowhunters, getting hurt was what they were for—but they would get hurt uselessly, without accomplishing anything, and needlessly damaging the defenders of the world was a kind of sacrilege. *Let's focus on getting everyone fed and runed—we can assign each person a room as they finish eating—*

The scream seemed to shatter the world.

)0(

In their knowe the Seelie heard it, a scream that pierced the wall between world and world-shard and slid into Annwn's heart like a knife.

In their packhomes the werewolves heard it, sharp as silver as it sliced into their dreams and left them tattered nightmares.

In their sanctoriums the vampires heard it, a cry like a crucifix flashing in the sunlight, holy fire and unholy pain.

In their spell-wreathed homes the witches heard it, a concussive whisper that struck against their wards like steel on crystal, chiming sweet and cold and terrible.

In her bed above a flowershop a girl who was sometimes a boy heard it, shocked awake and gasping by a sound that shook her soul and pounded against her heart, and for a moment the whites of her eyes were black and her pupils were lily-white.

In their safehouse the Lightbringers heard it, Cas clapping his hands around his talisman to hold in the burst of light and unearthly music that sang from the glowing diamond at its heart, the gem in Ana's pendant heating against her throat, Sam staggering under the blow to the wards; halfway across the city Chi and Lucio doubled over under the sound, hands pressed to their ears in pain as the captain's axe reverberated like an Aeolian harp, vibrating so long and deep she could feel it in her bones.

And outside, in the dying darkness—in the shadows shrinking from the rising sun, in the alleyways and subway tunnels and abandoned, derelict buildings slated for destruction, in all the behind-spaces and between-places of New York City—something answered.

)0(

The whole Institute shuddered, every brick and every stone, and Sariel were already moving, were already one, Alec-Izzy-Jace poured like three streams of molten metal into a single compass needle of meius because they knew that sound, they knew it, it was Simon—

But they weren't fast enough.

Because before the scream could end the whole world seemed to roar, echoing Simon's cry, mirroring it, answering it. It was a roar of a thousand voices and it made every drop of Nephilim blood run cold: even those of them who were not and never had been Shadowhunters knowing what it was they heard, the parts of them that were Raziel's recognising the nature of that savage, bestial choir as they would know their own twisted reflections in a funhouse mirror—

Demons.

Marks and telesme flared gold all over the walls and floors and ceilings, numberless as the stars as the Institute's wards howled their own answer. Shields of blessed and warded rowan and silver slammed down over the windows as every Shadowhunter called on their blades, the names of angels casting seraphic light on hard faces and frightened ones alike.

Sariel didn't stop to think: they thrust up their hand, the one with the si̱mádi angélou hidden beneath their new white gloves, and made a sharp and sudden fist. The noise of the wards abruptly cut off. "Non-combatants to the naos!" Sariel commanded, using all three of their voices so the order flew through the Institute like an arrow from a bow. "Warriors with me!" There was no time to get armour for those who weren't wearing it, or even to arm those who had set their weapons down for the day; Isabelle's silver serpent bracelet uncoiled into its gleaming whip-form as Sariel ran for the entrance hall, the doors of every room between here and there swinging open for Alec's claim on the Institute, for his gloved hand.

Their Jace-body they flung upstairs, towards the secretari and the screaming and Simon, Simon, Simon.

"I need daiosaskōs," Sariel said as the High Inquisitor fell into step beside them, and wordlessly the woman pulled three sheathed seraph blades from her belt.

"Baruchiachel, Mahariel, Jehudiam," she said, slapping them into their palm, and Sariel took one for their Izzy-body—to pair with their whip—and one for each of their Alec-hands, and the gold light from the Marks on the walls made the beryl bracelets around their Alec-wrists gleam like fresh blood.

And then they were in the entrance hall and the many locks of the great doors yielded to a wave of Sariel's hand, the doors themselves swinging outwards and open—

Onto a nightmare.

Shadowhunters were forbidden from patrolling in Lightworlder warzones; there were too few of them to risk in the crossfire of mundanes' petty feuds, too many who fell beneath fang and claw to lose any to bullets and bombs as well. The closest Sariel had ever come to war was the scripted battles in the movies and tv shows Simon and Clary had introduced them to.

This was not like that.

Fire. Fire and chaos and it was Hell, it was a nightmare, it was worse than when Izzy and Magnus had stepped into the Void to fight for Alec's life because there were never supposed to be demons here, like this, hundreds of them turning their power on the wards, sending black fire, hellfire, raining down, flames so much darker than the pre-dawn shadows that they burned Sariel's eyes like knives, like being blinded. Others summoned meteorites of garnet and bruise-green magics that crashed like hailstones into the invisible dome of the wards, sending ripples of silver-gold light through them, and the demons not working magic were using their claws and teeth and dagger-tipped tails, gouging at the wards so they shrieked like glass scored by metal—

And even with four eyes Sariel only saw them all in flashes between the unlight of the hellfire, but it was enough, enough to recognise none of them, to see no demon-breed they knew, even though that should have been impossible—

Nothing in their training had prepared them for this, for demons risking the very edge of dawn to attack an Institute, demons that were entirely absent from the Infernal bestiaries in Alec's encyclopaedic memory, demons Sariel knew nothing about—

"What in the Angel's name…?" the Inquisitor breathed.

"The sun's about to rise," another Shadowhunter said, coming to stand by Sariel and the Inquisitor. Sariel had caught his name earlier in the night—Syr De la Croix. "We can wait them out."

All three of Sariel's hearts stopped. "No," they said, "we can't." And pointed.

It wasn't everywhere, wasn't every demon. But Sariel's eyes saw too many places where demons laid their grotesque paws directly on the wards—and darkness spread from the contact, like an infection, like rot. The invisible boundary of the Institute's protections were rapidly becoming defined by patches of black and grey, dulling, crumbling, just like the statue of the Angel outside the Silent City had crumbled when Simon—when the angel inside Simon—had eaten a part of the world.

These demons were doing the same thing, except that an Institute's wards were made from angelic energies, which should have made them impossible for demons to consume that way—and yet holes were starting to appear, growing like acid eating away at shimmering silk—

Sariel flicked Isabelle's whip back into its bracelet-form and quickly sketched night vision Marks on the arms of both their present bodies. Neither of them were in armour and there was no time to get any. "We have to fight," they said. "Now. We only have to hold them until dawn, but we have to hold them."

Without waiting for an answer, Sariel invoked the seraph blades the Inquisitor had given them and stepped out through the doors, into the darkness, and the light of the angels threw back the shadows.

There could be no subterfuge; there was no way to hide their charge. They ran for the wards and leapt through them, clearing the iron fence at the edge of the grounds like gazelles, and as they landed Alec's bracelets blazed up like blood moons, the witch's ladder around his neck coming alight like the aurora australis in the dark, and the demons fled from the green-and-garnet light as though it burned. Sariel took instant advantage: they used their light-wreathed Alec-body to drive the demons towards Isabelle's whip, electrum lashing out like silver lightning as their seraph blades seared like stars, scything through Infernal flesh. Ichor splashed and demons howled and Sariel rolled, stabbing, slashing, the silvery strangeness of the night vision rune outlining every demon in stark sharpness, and they heard-sensed-saw other Shadowhunters following them, the battle engaging like titans colliding, and every seraph blade invoked was another demon distracted from breaking down the wards.

Talons gleaming with lilithium claw-sheaths swung at Sariel's face and they backflipped away from them, kicking the arm-thing away and landing and lunging in with their swords, whip snapping like a cobra around the demon's neck and it screamed with too many mouths, pits of spiralling fangs all over its body and Mahariel went to gut it—

Only to be parried, clang, a lilithium blade meeting the seraph sword and deflecting it and Sariel ducked away as another demon broke in to defend the first, throwing itself at Sariel with a snarl and a barbed tail dripping venom and another demon hissed steam through jagged teeth as it grabbed Isabelle's whip to claw it off the first demon, even as its tentacles wept black blood at the touch of the blessèd metal—

But demons didn't help each other—work together—defend each other. It was like seeing them walk in sunlight—

Even with an agela's speed of thought Sariel didn't have time to consider it: something with four twisting, asymmetrical tusks charged them and they dodged aside and used their Alec-body as a springboard for their Izzy-one, leaping up onto its back and running lightly as a ballerina along the demon's spine, plunging Baruchiachel deep into its domed skull—

The sound it made as it died was like white noise twisted into a screamed word.

"Adokazzz!"

)0(

Upstairs in the Institute, eyes of light and night snapped open.

)0(

Prince, Sariel heard, the comprehension just there, something in their Alec-self understanding like he'd understood the angel in his memories. Adokaz meant prince, and they were all saying it, Sariel realised, snatching seconds to confirm the impression. All the demons—every one of them—whether fighting or dying or beating at the wards, they were all crying the same word—

"Adokaz!"

Some of them howled it like a battle-cry and some of them sang it like a prayer and some of them cried out like drowning men calling on God, but Sariel heard it from all sides, coming from every direction, roaring and screaming and pleading—

"Adokaz!"

"Adokaz!"

"ADOKAZ!"

And then a different, sharper sound, metallic and out of place, heard through their Jace-ears as they argued with the secretari, who were refusing to let them into Simon's room, even after that terrible scream; refusing to move him to the naos, or better yet through a Portal to Alicante because what other treasure could the Institute hold that might drive demons to attack a bastion of the Nephilim like this—? Maybe it was Valentine directing them with the Mortal Sword, maybe it was by Hell's own command, but the only thing they could want was Simon and his angel and both of them needed to be kept safe—

But.

Metal. Breaking.

The Kleidoukhos didn't seem to hear; she wasn't a pureblood, her ears weren't as sharp. "He can't be moved," she insisted. "He needs to rest, the sun's about to rise, and we've warded the room—even if the Institute is breached, he'll be safe here."

"Those demons outside are eating the Institute wards," Sariel argued, "and they'll do exactly the same to—"

Yours, they were going to say, but a sharp note of snarled sound cut like a sword from within the room, and there were cries and crashes, someone shouted "Angeion!" and someone else called for the Kleidoukhos with desperation and pain, and she finally snapped towards the door just as it was obliterated.

There was a door, and then there was not; like an instantaneous eclipse, a sheet of golden fire exploding across it so fast and hot it left no ashes, the door handle spilling to the ground as pure liquid, droplets splashing the Kleidoukhos' prosthetic leg, and out of the flames came—

Something.

Sariel couldn't see it: not with their Jace-eyes, which saw clearest and furthest of all their eyes, and not with their agela-mind, which processed input so much faster than they ever had when they were three-not-one. Because this thing was faster still: a shooting star streaking-searing through the doorway and past them as if tearing across the night sky, all light and midnight, a flaming aurora of black and gold and white and silver.

It was there and then it was gone, flown into the Institute and away, leaving sunspots on Sariel's vision and a trail of molten steel droplets and bloody footprints behind it, and pain broke through the agela, the long spikes of bone sprouting from a demon's knuckles slicing a gash across their Alec-body's hand in their moment of distraction, confusion, alarm, fear—

Their own blood ran down their forearm as they snapped their whip across the demon's pustulant eyes and blinked the blindness away and ripped their torn, blood-slick glove off with their teeth and pushed past the Kleidoukhos and through the no-longer-burning doorway and ducked and parried another lilithium blade and—

The room that had held Simon had telesme covering every inch of the walls and floor and ceiling, half a dozen secretari and healers picking themselves up off the floor or unconscious, four broken chains dangling from the bedframe as if whoever had lain on it had been manacled there. Two piles of molten slag were all that were left of a pair of golems that had been standing guard.

But no Simon, which could only mean—

Sariel tossed Jehudiam to their Izzy-body and threw up their hand, palm-out with the si̱mádi angélou blazing like a diamond through the blood, and the demons shrieked, throwing themselves away from the shining mark, leaving themselves wide open for Sariel's gleaming whip—

:NO!:

The earth shook; the sun rose. Light blazed and Sariel fell—fell backwards; felt the too-familiar pressure in their Marks pick them up and hurl them back towards the Institute, over the fence and onto the unforgiving stone of the steps leading up to the great doors. They were dimly aware that they weren't the only ones; all the Shadowhunters had been thrown back, and Sariel rolled to their feet with practised, instinctive grace, ready to defend those slower to react.

And they saw—

The sun and its eclipse come to earth in all their glory, sheets of auric gold and sweeps of ebony lightning, flames like frozen shockwaves and curling-flowing-arcing like dark water, wings like star-dusted galaxies and others spiralling in all the brightness of nebulas, transcendental and terrible and glorious, all light and night stopping their hearts and taking their breath and stealing the strength from their knees. Every Shadowhunter, even those too wounded for it, kneeling one after another in a wave as the blood in their veins—the blood of Raziel, kin and kindred in some small way to this shining being—recognised what was before them, and trembled with awe and adulation.

But the angel ignored them all. The wards had not held it, and it had torn through them like tissue paper; now it knelt on the far side of the fence, and the angle was imperfect, its back to Sariel, but the agela thought—it looked like—

Tentatively, they stood their bodies further apart, and their lines of vision doubled and merged to confirm it—

The angel was holding the carcass of a fallen demon, the tusked, bison-sized monstrosity that Sariel had put down. It was so huge that the angel could only cradle its head, but the angel bowed over it, curving its spine. Tongues and ribbons of its wings flickered out to touch, to hold, to—Sariel had no idea what, no idea what the angel was doing. But as the demon's carcass began to dissolve, as demonic remains always did, the angel…

It started to sing.

There were no words, or nothing Sariel recognised as words. There was only sound, spiralling and beautiful and utterly alien, soft as starlight and sharp as steel, sweet and bitter and strange. It was a music made with an angel's wings, with flames and curling shadows that splayed like harp-strings and brushed against each other to make a sound like wind and water and fire, and like none of those things at all. It was a song like the light of a seraph blade and the last drop of a heart's dark blood, like the diamond-dust cold of deep space and the epoch-ending passion of a volcanic eruption, like the northern lights dancing above endless ice and all the places where rivers met the sea and dissolved into the waves, losing themselves and being found, remade as part of something so much greater.

Coming home.

Sariel found themself weeping, tears streaming down their faces, even as they couldn't name the emotion that made them cry.

Was it a song of triumph? A dirge? A salute to a fallen foe, as Shadowhunters said ave atque vale—hail and farewell—to the dead? Or something else, something stranger, some urge or drive or emotion completely unfathomable to mortal minds?

Whatever it was, it held them all entranced, Nephilim and demons alike. Nothing else existed but the song.

It was only as the final unearthly notes ended that Sariel became aware again of their surroundings; and it was only then, as the angel's wings unfolded around from the emptiness where the demon's husk had been, that Sariel was able to notice, able to see, that not all of the Shadowhunters had survived being thrown back past the fence.

Some of them had been impaled on the razor-sharp iron posts, and hung there, suspended and still. The only motion was the metronome-drip of their blood; hypnotic, dreamlike, unreal.

Sariel stared at the still bodies, more confused than horrified at first—but they kept their eyes on the angel, too, as it rose to its feet, and for the first time turned to face the gathered Shadowhunters.

They'd expected—of course they'd expected—they'd seen this before, when the angel's aspect came over Simon; when it defended Jace and faced down the Inquisitor; when it swept Izzy to the Silent City; when it fought the demon it had found there. They knew what it looked like; they knew what Simon looked like, when the angel took over.

This was not Simon. The being—the angel who stood at the centre of the black-and-gold firestorm of its wings was an impossible thing, primordial and otherworldly, and its face—its face was not Simon's face, the bones of it sharper and angled differently, wild and elemental and heart-constrictingly androgynous, beautiful as a blade, without the scar Hodge had left on Simon's cheek. It was taller than Simon, and its hair was longer, not Simon's earthy brown but spilling past its shoulders in a shimmering white rainbow that moved and flowed like fire; skin as gold as Jace's sheathed lean, powerful muscle, harder and more than Simon had had time to build, after a lifetime as a Lightworlder and only a few months' training.

And it wore no glasses to disguise the galaxies in its eyes.

Or its rage.

Before anyone, even the agela, could react it flung itself forward, a meteorite of heat and flame only visible as a streak of light; it moved through the fence, the metal posts in its way collapsing instantaneously to hissing molten puddles and then it was simply there, standing in front of Sariel, and before they could register more than awe and fear it grabbed them by the throat with one golden hand and lifted them effortlessly into the air.

:YOU,: it said, and its voice was an earthquake, an avalanche, the end of the world. :YOU DID THIS. YOU DID THIS!: Simon had always been two inches shorter than Sariel's Alec-body but somewhere in the rapid-fire burst of frantic calculations that took place between Sariel's facets in those milliseconds, it registered that the angel was three inches taller than them, this couldn't be Simon, Simon wasn't in there, he couldn't be. :IOLMOZYOR WAS OLDER THAN YOUR PLANET. IOL WAS OLDER THAN YOUR UNIVERSE!: Its eyes—its eyes set Sariel's soul on fire, and it didn't move its lips to speak; the very air vibrated around it, forming and carrying its words like thunder. As if it were speaking to them through the whole world, all of physical reality remade into its voice. :HOW DARE YOU, YOU MEAT-THING, YOU DUST-ROT, YOU SONGLESS CARCASS! WHO ARE YOU TO END THE ENDLESS?:

"Sariel," the agela gasped, answering because an angel had asked and they had an angel's blood inside them, because like called to like and they were helpless to resist it. They held out their hand, imploring, offering, the gleam of the si̱mádi angélou reflecting back the light of the angel's wings. "I'm Sariel."

It didn't blink, or go still, or react in any other way Sariel could recognise. Its conflagration of wings, flickering like flames and lightning and shredded ribbons of night, whipped and swirled around it; waves of light moved beneath its skin, white and clear.

Without warning, a tongue of braided white-gold and blue-goldstone-black flicked forward, serpentine and scintillating. It left a streak like sun-glare across Sariel's vision, and then it was touching the si̱mádi angélou.

For a brief moment, it was soft and warm and dry, gently tasting the mark on their palm.

And then it slid in, like a plug into a socket; a shock of not-heat sealing them together, locking, piercing, connecting, and every one of Sariel's bodies went limp and boneless as that connection blossomed open, the white-water rush of sensation that came pouring through drowning them instantly. There was no way to fight it, no way to resist, no way to want to as the angel reached right into their core and strummed it like a harp and everything they were was singing, singing, singing.

*:YOU ARE ONE,:* the angel said, directly into their mind, and their skulls vibrated with the effort of containing that voice. *:AND THREE. LIKE ME. I SEE YOU. WHO ARE YOU?:*

It plucked at them again, drawing impossible music from their most central-fundamental parts—but it could not tear them apart, or at least it did not, and later Sariel would be grateful, would be able to be grateful for that. But right now they were on fire, they were burning, shuddering and near-convulsing with a terrible, helpless ecstasy, and between the flames licking over their three-fold soul Sariel felt the urge to abase themself, to whimper, to crawl, to yield to this creature and acknowledge its glory. They were so much smaller than this being, so much less, the weight of its presence a pressure crushing them down into diamond—

The angel tilted its head, its expression nothing Sariel knew how to read. It sang at them, an unbearably sweet ripple of notes that made their Marks hum and heat on their skin, made the si̱mádi angélou glow in luminous echo. A question? Laughter? Contempt, rage, delight, confusion? Sariel had no idea.

They didn't know if the angel was waiting for a response or if it was just considering them, looking into them, reading their every flaw and secret. But after what seemed like a thousand eternities, it let them go.

They crumpled, soul thrumming like a strummed lute, sensation too intense for pleasure spilling over and into their Izzy and Jace bodies too. It took everything they had not to curl into a ball on the ground and clutch their knees to their chests.

Dismissing them, the angel turned away, and Sariel was pierced with a sharp sense of loss, bereft of its attention. It felt like the world would never be warm again.

:SET DOWN YOUR SWORDS,: the angel said, and they did, Sariel wasn't sure who it was addressing but everyone obeyed, Shadowhunters and demons both, blades of adamas and lilithium alike falling to the ground or retracting into their hilts, slid reflexively into sheaths or even tossed aside by those who held them. All the demons had fallen quiet, and Sariel couldn't hear a single Nephilim breathe. :YOU WILL NOT HUNT THESE ONES.:

It tilted its head again. There was a long, drawn-out pause.

:GO,: it said, in that voice that was wind and fire, that spoke through Sariel's blood and flashed like lightning through their neurons.

And the demons—bowed, contorting their various shapes into forms of respect, and gathered their weapons, and left, in perfect silence.

Rays of sunlight reached over the crest of the city like tentative fingers in their wake, too late to catch their shadows. But the angel's wings faded, folding and collapsing in on themselves like a detonation in reverse, dissolving in the daylight like a mirage, and as the radiance drained out of its body it fell to one knee on the bloodied grass.

And it was—perhaps—over.

)0(

There were a dozen missed calls from Cas waiting for them when they left the knowe, and a single ominous text: it levelled up somehow. And then, before they had a chance to call him and ask what in Isis' name that meant—

María hauled Chi and Lucio into the nearest alley, supporting Lucio's weight as the two kiasu-ene slowly regained their bearings.

"What just happened?" she demanded. When she was sure they were steady, she reached one hand behind her to touch her fan-axe. The golden weapon was still vibrating, a hum she could feel in her fingertips.

"Screaming," Lucio said through clenched teeth, leaning heavily against the grimy wall. He still had his hands pressed to his head.

"Someone—something—screamed," Chi clarified. Gingerly pulling her hands from her ears, she shook her head quickly, like a fox shaking off water. "I don't know what—I've never heard anything like that before."

"A demon?" the captain asked sharply.

Chi shook her head, slowly this time. "I don't think so."

Which left the anunnaku, Valentine, or some as-yet-unknown threat. And the six of them stranded without any way to call for back-up.

As if the thought was a spell, María's comm chimed. She tapped the bud in her ear to answer.

"Captain!" It was Ana. "Did it hit you?"

"Yes, but we're all fine. You three?"

"No injuries here. Cas thinks it was the anunnaku."

"He thinks?" María echoed sharply.

A different chime signalled Casimir's comm joining the line. "I don't know how to read what just happened, Captain. It's like—like there was an actual angel there for a minute."

María's blood ran cold. "Was there?"

"I don't know! My talisman's not built for angels, it's built for anunnaki!"

"Angels don't come unless they're summoned," Ana said, but she sounded doubtful.

"That's the thing, though," Cas said, anxious and frazzled. "That—scream—it was a summoning. Not like a full ritual or anything, but—it was in pain, I think. Or something. And what happens when a bear cub cries?"

"Its mother comes to smite whatever's hurting it," María said softly. "You think…?"

"I don't know," Cas insisted. "But—maybe?"

María allowed herself a vicious curse in Arabic. "Another reason to find Valentine. He's probably the only one who knows which one he summoned."

Another ping announced Sam. "The mother might be able to tell us," he said, sliding smoothly into the conversation. "We should visit her at the hospital, see if witchery can wake her up where warlockry failed."

" 'Warlockry' is not a word," Ana said disapprovingly.

"Not the point here, pöljä."

"Visiting the mother goes on the list, but it's low-priority," María interrupted. "She's unlikely to know the specifics of what was done to her, and I'm sure she'd get in our way if we did manage to wake her. As far as she's concerned, that thing is her child; she won't stand by and let us put it down."

"And she's a Shadowhunter pureblood," Chi added, not jumping onto the comm-chat but responding to María nonetheless. "If she puts herself in our way, we're not getting around her; we'll have to go through her."

"Even without knowing which specific one Valentine worked with, there are some more generic defences we can use," Ana said. "With your permission, Captain, I'll start crafting them right away."

"Do it," María said. "Cas, help her. The rest of us will join you ASAP. We have to find Valentine and stop the ritual, but the last thing we need is a mother bear on the warpath."

)0(

Before the last echoes of that terrible scream had quite faded, Kheylandrnil leapt down from lis floating platform, landing lightly upon the monarch's dais. Lis hair streamed behind lem like a bloody banner. "The children," le said.

Olianthe, too, was already in motion. Without waiting for her sire-dam's command, Olianthe ran to the edge of the platform and jumped. She fell like a shooting star, plummeting through the haze of jewels, the carvings on the walls flashing past. Twenty metres, as mortals measured things, and she grasped the edge of another platform to alter her course, swinging acrobat-like to give herself a straight trajectory to the ground. Without ever letting go of her spear, she dropped another forty-nine metres and took off running the moment her armoured feet touched the floor.

The knowe's great halls were in chaos; everywhere Olianthe saw her people recovering from that siren-scream, climbing to their feet where they had been struck down, gathering books and beads that had been scattered when they fell. The knowe's very walls trembled, and 'Lianthe paused to lay her palm against one.

"The Réalsitarí stands," she said, which was like saying all is well without speaking words she did not know were true. "The Seelie are strong. Today is not the day we need find a new Way."

The shivering eased under her touch. Olianthe pressed her brow to the wall in silent communion, reassurance, promise—and then went on.

Countless mortals had been dazzled by the riches of the Tuatha, by the singing trees and enchanted jewels, the gowns woven of snowflakes and sighs and the crowns of dragon-gold, the harps strung with the hair of tähtisuar and the fires that held glimpses of the future in their flames. But no human had ever come near the Seelie's true wealth, the rarest and most priceless of their treasures, their némarétainn—their pearl-stars.

Their children.

The crèche was buried deep in the knowe, guarded by waterfalls of glass shards and shadows whose snarls bared teeth of flint and bronze; by gates of dragonbone and gates of cold iron; by Cŵn Annwn whose red ears heard all and whose black eyes never closed, and by velvet moths whose wings shed a dust that trapped any who breathed it in a century of nightmares. But all gave way and opened for Olianthe-lugal-nin, princess of the Seelie and first among her people's knights, and then she was inside the spiralling snail-shell of suites that were set aside for the némarétainn.

There were only four of them, four children born to the Seelie in the last five hundred years: Yltiryu, Eiathgial, Adálbroreídh, and Rhóssíneiar. The Tuatha had never been a fertile race, but as humans cut down the wildwoods and filled the world with iron and steel, the Seelie's children had come ever more rarely—and Olianthe knew the Unseelie suffered the same. But even if there had been ten times as many némarétainn, she still would have gone down on one knee and opened her arms as Eiathgial abandoned the nurse comforting ter and flung terself at her, burrowing into her—as much as tey could with her in armour.

"Do not tell me you were so afeared as all that, acorn," Olianthe said gently, embracing her nespring—her sibling's child—tightly. "What danger do you think could best me, as any must who wish you or your age-mates harm?"

Eiathgial looked up at her, white-and-silver eyes—like snowfall and stardust, the court bards said—gazing up solemnly at Olianthe through the long, jewelled braids of ter blood-red hair. "Shadowhunters kill Daoine when they can."

Olianthe kissed the child's forehead. "But they cannot often," she said, "and in all the years since we came to this world, no Shadowhunter has ever bested me."

Nor ever would, may Dôn give her the strength to speak that promise into Truth.

Before Eiathgial could reply, a small chirrup sounded from within ter blouse. A familiar orange face, crowned with shimmering antennae, popped up from inside Eiathgial's collar, looking supremely pleased with herself.

"Étaín!" Olianthe straightened, bringing her shoulders and the angle of her wrists into Cub Pounces on Tail; Mother Snaps Her Teeth for a playful scolding. "What are you doing in there?"

Olianthe's pet squirmed out of Eiathgial's clothing, fluttering her rainbow wings as if to shake out any wrinkles. But though they looked like a butterfly's, they were tough, and appeared unharmed from her misadventure.

"She comes and plays with me sometimes," Eiathgial said, as Étaín purred and coiled around the child's arm with unabashed fondness. Eiathgial rubbed her head between her antennae. "My age-mates like her too."

"She is easy to like," Olianthe agreed. "And utterly spoiled, are you not, you ridiculous creature?" She stroked the dragonet's frills, instantly raising Étaín's purrs to twice their initial volume. "Did you help her with this?" she asked her nespring, pointing with her thumb to the small golden chain around Étaín's neck. From it hung the earring Clary had given her, the hoop with its little heart.

"Yes," Eiathgial said proudly. "The earring is her favourite."

Olianthe smiled. "It was given to her by someone she likes very much," she said. "But the chain—it is very fine." She traced the little collar; there was no clasp, and the chain was smooth as silk. "Will you not tell me how you made it?"

Seelie némarétainn were not human children; Eiathgial would remember that unearthly scream, and how it had pulled at ter intrinsic self, for as long as tey lived. But for now, tey was well, and with one of the children's guardians dispatched to assure the Réalsitarí that none of them had come to harm, Olianthe could spare some time to spend with her nespring and her mischievous pet before returning to her duties.

)0(

If Sariel had been asked to guess—if they'd been able to guess—then they would have said that it was the angel's presence, its manifestation, that made Simon look like—like that. And as its wings sighed away, Sariel expected—was waiting for—Simon to look like himself again.

Because it had to be Simon. Didn't it? There was no one else it could be. The angel's aspect had gilded him, and it had let its own immensity shine out of him as if his body was a lantern with a sun inside, but now it was gone and that strange, mouth-drying beauty would go too and Simon would be himself again.

Except that it didn't happen.

Oh, the blinding brightness faded from its skin, and its hair no longer burned like the tail of a shooting star. But the skin stayed the colour of fire shining through honey, and the hair was still long and still impossibly golden, not blond but gold, as if every strand had been spun from soft metal. And even kneeling on the grass the shape of the body was wrong, and still too tall, and something like cold mercury spilled down Sariel's throats to pool sick and chilled in the pit of their stomachs.

All over the yard, Shadowhunters were tentatively picking themselves up off the ground, awe and uncertainty making them glance at the unfamiliar figure; at Sariel who had suffered an angel's rage and its communion; at the dull gleam of the wards; at the High Inquisitor as if she might have answers for them.

But she was looking at Sariel. And Sariel…

The not-Simon had gone done on one knee. They could see the sole of its left foot, the slightly paler skin facing towards them. There was a wound there, and it was bleeding.

Sariel's Jace-body reached the Institute doors, finally, coming to a stop at the top of the steps, but the tableau was the same through those eyes too. The Kleidoukhos was on their heels, though, and she'd brought healers with her, and Sariel came back to themselves enough to raise their voice. "Look to the wounded," they ordered, and the routine familiarity of it—of injuries and healing runes and taking care of each other—seemed to settle most of the other Shadowhunters, at least a little bit. Sariel saw a number of people making the sign of the Angel, or touching holy medals, lips moving as if they were whispering prayers. But people glanced at the not-Simon, and at Sariel and the Inquisitor and the Kleidoukhos, and didn't try to swarm the golden figure kneeling just inside the gate.

That was about all Sariel could ask for.

The Kleidoukhos hurried to the stranger's side. "Angeion! Are you hurt?" She snapped her fingers impatiently at her fellow secretari, at the iatroi-healers. "Here, quickly!"

Sariel made it there ahead of the others, in time to see the golden figure violently push the Kleidoukhos' solicitous hands away. "My name," the stranger said, in a voice Sariel didn't recognise, didn't know, had never heard before, "is Simon." And it—he—doubled over a little, not clutching his stomach but wrapping his arms around himself. "And everything hurts."

"Angeion Morgenstern—Simon—you need to be resting," the Kleidoukhos said.

It struck Sariel like lightning: she knew who he was. Had recognised Simon, unsurprised by the changes wrought on him. She'd known before she stepped outside.

"I don't know you," Simon said, and his voice—Sariel was exhausted, they were tired and in pain, and Simon's voice was wrong and they wanted to weep. "Back off." He tried to get to his feet and nearly fell, catching a groan of pain between his teeth.

Sariel caught him without even thinking about it, because they were more afraid of Simon's pain than they were of this new strangeness.

Despite being taller than he had been, he weighed less, as if his body had been remade from some new material; as if he was no longer flesh like Sariel was flesh. But it was his eyes, flicking up to meet theirs, that cut them to the quick.

They weren't brown any more.

"Jace," Simon said, and the way his new voice shaped the name cut deep and echoed in their Marks. "What's going on?"

Sariel swallowed. "You don't remember?"

Simon—it almost broke their mind, thinking of this as Simon—snapped, "Would I ask if I did?" The frustration-fear in his new voice burned like sparks, scorching even as Simon said quickly, "No, wait, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snarl. Just—everything hurts."

Sariel nodded, but they didn't let go of Simon's hand, and Simon didn't take it back. "What do you remember?"

"I remember…" Simon closed his eyes as if to concentrate—but they flew open again almost immediately.

"Oh, gods," Simon whispered. "I remember."

He pulled his hand from Sariel's—and their Jace-body went sprawling into the grass and the mud, yanked off their feet by the speed and strength of the gesture.

"Jace!" Simon did a kind of half-lunge towards them, but the Kleidoukhos' hand on his shoulder held him back. His head whirled around to glare at her, furious, and shoved her hand away—

And

It

Broke.

Sariel heard the snap of too many small bones with all their ears, and saw how the Kleidoukhos bit her lip so hard it went white, holding the sound of her own shattering bones inside her—

Saw how Simon's expression flowed from anger to confusion to appalled understanding—

Saw how he glanced down at his own hands, holding them out before him, gold-skinned and changed—

"No," he said. "No no no no no no." He turned his hands over jerkily, and they were shaking, he was shaking, his breath coming in fast, heaving gulps like sobs, faster and faster. "No no no no no no no."

Iatroi in their black uniforms approached hesitantly, awe and uncertainty warring as they looked at Simon, and Sariel couldn't blame them for it. They pushed their Jace-body out of the dirt and knelt it in front of Simon, grasping his wrists as they told the healers, through their Alec-lips, "The Kleidoukhos' hand is injured. Please take care of that first."

They seemed grateful for the direction.

"Simon," Sariel said, "look at me."

He did, and his eyes were wrong, wrong and afraid and it twisted like barbed wire in Sariel's chest, the spectral strangeness of the shape of his face, the honeyed gilt of his eyes, the shining fall of Rumplestiltskin-spun hair; all of it a wall of thorns they could barely glimpse Simon through.

(Would Clary recognise him? Would Luke? Would Jocelyn know the son she'd raised if she woke today, if this was the face that greeted her, these the eyes?)

"You're okay," Sariel said. "It's going to be okay."

Simon shook his head slowly, as if dazed. "Everything hurts," he whispered.

He tried to raise his hands—maybe to touch his face—but Sariel gently kept hold of his wrists, preventing him.

"Let the healers look at you," they said, "and we'll go inside, and we'll figure it out. All of it. Okay?"

The pendant under their shirt throbbed like a heart, like a wound, against their skin.

"Okay," Simon whispered, and he didn't look away from Sariel once as they used their Izzy-body to gesture for the healers to tentatively, carefully began their work.

The only injuries they could find were to Simon's feet, which they cleaned and bound with soft white bandages. Sariel had scratches and rising bruises, nothing that needed more than a simple iratz; when the question of returning Simon inside was raised, they ended the discussion by picking him up with their Alec-body rather than let him walk on wounded feet.

He was too tall, and too light, and he hid his face against their neck as if he knew it.

But at least this way he couldn't see the healers lifting the impaled bodies down from the fence.

)0(

This is not real. This isn't happening. It's not real. It's not happening. It's not real it's not happening it'snotrealit'snothappeningit'snotrealit'snothappeningIT'SNOTREALIT'SNOTHAPPENING—

Simon kept his eyes closed and told himself it was because they hurt—but that meant acknowledging that it wasn't tears making them burn, and his thoughts flinched away from the knowledge even as they circled it, endlessly, masochistically, like probing a hangnail, a broken tooth, a shattered heart.

Something is wrong my hands my hands—

No, it's not real it's not real—

It should have been humiliating to be carried like this, but he couldn't feel the sting of embarrassment over the raw, shredded ache filling every inch of his body. Couldn't think about strangers' eyes on him when he kept seeing, over and over, the moment he'd looked down at his hands and realised they weren't his.

THIS ISN'T HAPPENING—

None of this was real. None of it. This was officially too much; his suspension of disbelief had finally broken under the strain of those gold-skinned fingers. Angels, demons, Shadowhunters, magic, warlocks, Jace; none of it was real. Someone had spiked his drink that night at the club; maybe a pretty guy with blue hair and a creepy smile, someone his subconscious had cast as a demon. Simon had a bad reaction to some unknown drug, and maybe something else had happened too, some kind of trauma his mind had replaced with a Ravener and crystal swords and a plot ripped right out of a YA bestseller, something he'd snapped rather than face. This, all of it, was a hallucination, a dream, full-on psychosis, not real: maybe it was Simon in a coma, not Jocelyn, and everything since that night was nothing more than the ravings of a brain steeped in too many years of anime and fanfic.

Mom, please come wake me up.

Please

Please

Please

I'm so ready to wake up now. So ready. Please. Please. Pleasepleaseplease—

Alec was gentle and careful, but his every step sent lightning shearing through Simon's every nerve-ending, pain like a whiplash. And yet the place where his palm was set against Simon's back was the only thing in the world that didn't hurt, his si̱mádi angélou radiating soft, warm light through Simon's shirt, making a tiny sanctuary Simon could hide in, cling to, a bubble of oxygen in an ocean of agony.

There were stairs, and not-so-distant voices that felt too loud, and the memory the memory the memory of his hands that were not his hands.

The smell of smoke was sandpaper in his nostrils, his lungs.

"We will prepare another room, but for the moment, this is the only one appropriately warded," a vaguely familiar voice said.

Simon didn't need his eyes to count the people in the room: he could hear them, more loudly and clearly than he ever had before. Alec and Isabelle, their runesongs warm and familiar; five strangers, including the woman whose hand Simon had broken, all Marked with runes he didn't know; and Jace, and Jace, and Jace.

He knew he wasn't allowed to reach for Jace any more. But it hurt him as badly as his twisted-wrong-not-mine body did not to.

Alec was speaking, low and soft in Simon's ear. "Simon? I'm going to put you down now."

Simon swallowed, and the motion ripped his throat, and then he was being lowered onto a bed.

He'd braced himself, but a strangled sound of pain still escaped him as gravity crushed his aching body into the mattress, the pressure of it like being pressed down onto a hot forge; unbearable, impossible.

"Simon!" Simon didn't need to open his eyes to feel Jace dart close, the shape of him defined by the chorus of his Marks. "Help him!"

"Of course." It was a stranger's voice, and Simon heard her runesong and footsteps come closer to him—but before he could scrape up a snarl Izzy blocked her access.

"Wait! What are you going to do to him?"

Her voice was low, fierce, and behind his eyes Simon saw sparks of starlight.

"Only apply some painkilling Marks," the stranger said, startled by Isabelle's ferocity.

"There's no such thing," Izzy snapped, sharp and scathing and suspicious.

"What in the Angel's—? Of course there are!" The woman's confusion was rapidly shifting to something more like professional outrage. "Semdor, and gaphian, and kivuton—there's a dozen! And telesme for pain besides! Now let me tend my patient!"

There was a brief silence, small and fragile. Simon had no idea what thoughts might be flashing back and forth between the three agelai, until Alec said quietly, "Our apologies. Our tutor never taught us about Marks like that. Izzy?"

As if from very far away, Simon heard, or felt, or sensed Izzy step aside. It was hard to feel anything but the pain, hard to remember that anything else existed; Simon wanted to cry, and to scream, and to end, rather than be trapped in this body that wanted him as little as he wanted it—

He did scream, when the stele touched him; he couldn't help it, even though screaming hurt too, ripped him apart like a sword thrust down his throat. The hand guiding the stele was feather-light but it was still too much pressure, and the burn of a Mark being etched into his skin felt like a Greater Demon's claw carving him open.

There was only the softest whisper of runesong before the pain drowned it out.

Simon lost what little grip on reality he had. The world outside his skin swam and blurred, smudged ink, dripping blood. There was only the agony, caging him in skin and bone, turning his body into an iron maiden heated in hellfire—and maybe that was for the best, because if he hadn't been locked up inside himself he'd have burned the world down to make the pain stop.

Whisper, whisper, whisper. The stele's blunt point searing into him. Whisper, whisper, whisper. Deft hands shaking as fingers undid the row of buttons leading up his sleeve, almost all the way up to his shoulder. Whisper, whisper, whisper. A fingernail accidentally grazing his chest when someone opened his shirt, like a splash of sulphuric acid. Whisper, whisper, whisper. The heat of someone's hand against his cheek, not quite touching, the warmth alone like a burn. Whisper, whisper, whisper.

Incrementally, the whispers grew into murmurs, into sighs, into songs. When Simon could finally hear it, the music of the runes they were drawing on him, over and over, was cool fresh water running over smooth pebbles, gentle breezes humming over sweat-soaked skin on a hot day, crystalline wind-chimes singing softly through a summer night.

The choir they made drove away the pain as light banishes darkness—not completely, and not forever, but enough.

When he dared open his eyes again, it was to strangers' faces, in an even stranger room.

"Angeion?" A woman, with dark brown skin and a crisp voice unused to concern. She was bent over him, a gleaming stele in one hand. "Can you understand me? Are you still in pain?"

Simon took stock. "Yeah, but it's okay now." Gingerly, he tried to sit up—

—and came up short as the cuffs on his wrists and ankles pulled taut.

He stared at them in disbelief, unable to process what he was seeing for half a beat. Thick, dark leather bolted to the bedframe with freaking chains, the metal links as thick as one of his fingers. Four other chains, those ones broken, hung like dead snakes from the bedframe. And he was barely dressed—someone had put him in a pair of white trousers and a matching shirt, but both were practically hanging off him; his trouser legs were split up the sides where rows of neat buttons had been opened, and his sleeves were in the same state. His shirt was unbuttoned to his waist.

It was creepy and messed-up, and Simon felt rage begin to burn the foggy slugishness out of him.

"You're fine," Alec said, putting himself in Simon's line of sight, hands held up in a pacifying gesture. He had a bracelet of red crystal around each wrist; they drew Simon's attention like weak magnets. "Simon, you're okay. They had to restrain you to stop you from hurting yourself."

Simon had no memory of that, but even if it was true... And the broken ones? Did you have me chained up before I woke up outside? Was I danger to myself then, too?

Alec looked at one of the strangers. "Let him out, please."

It wasn't a request.

"And you needed to undress me why?" The snarl was a song, surging out of him, and beneath it Simon heard the music of the runes in the cuffs, a complex telesma of binding and containment, restraint and constraint. Layered, interlocking, impermeable.

Not a simple locking rune.

"So they could Mark you," Izzy said. She came and sat at the edge of his bed; something about her posture was protective, like she was making herself a barrier between Simon and the strangers in the room. "You're wearing curatio clothes. It's what we wear when we're sick; it makes it easier to apply healing runes. See?"

She didn't quite touch his leg, but she gestured towards the bared skin, and now that she'd pointed it out, he could see the faintly pearlescent scar-tissue of used-up Marks. The same ones, over and over, and he remembered the music he'd heard from inside the pain.

He didn't answer Izzy: one of the strangers stepped up, stele in hand, to unlock the cuffs, and Simon watched her instead. Heard her. Her runesong was like none he'd ever heard before, full of unfamiliar Marks, music played with unearthly instruments. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

He didn't like it, didn't trust it, didn't trust her (don't ever trust the Nephilim). When the tip of her stele touched his cuff, he jerked it away, unable to help himself.

She stilled. "Angeion, I swear by the Angel, I only mean to remove your bindings."

"My name is Simon." The words were rough in his mouth, strange, but just as fierce as every time he'd said them before. "Do I need to get it tattooed on my fucking forehead? Simon."

The woman gaped at him, then turned to one of the other women helplessly, her expression pleading for guidance.

Alec took pity on her first. "It's a term of respect, Simon," he said quietly. "A title. No one thinks it's your name."

"What does it mean?" Simon demanded. But he thought he knew, somehow, as though someone had whispered its translation into his ear the first time he heard it.

He just wanted to be wrong.

Alec didn't hesitate. " 'Vessel.' "

"An angel's vessel," Isabelle clarified, quietly. In front of all these strangers—

And Simon remembered that they knew. Everyone knew. The thing inside him had tried to kill the High Inquisitor, had swept Izzy to the Bone City and fought a demon there. He'd broken seraph blades and hurled Shadowhunters like dolls with nothing but this unpredictable force inside him. Any hope of hiding the creature in him from the Clave was long gone.

All the terror that had gone into hiding what he was—might be—what was inside him. It whipped through him like a wind, a twister with nowhere to go.

None of it was a secret any more.

Evidently, the strange woman took Simon's silence for some kind of acquiescence, because she leaned in, bringing up her stele again. She paused, giving him an uncertain smile, and Simon made himself hold out his wrist for her.

Her stele touched the cuff.

Simon had seen Jace, Izzy and Alec all use avata, the opening rune, dozens of times; to unlock doors and open chests and, once, a stubborn pickle jar. But it wasn't avata that the woman was drawing. This was a labyrinth in delicate miniature, intricately complicated, curls and loops weaving in and out of each other even as they spiralled inwards—only to blossom open at the last moment like a calligraphic fractal.

Zarali. It was the wind singing through glaciers and deep, pounding drums, rhythm and unpredictability twined and twisted together; the hiss of fire in the far-off dark and a voice raised in wordless song, guiding the seeker through the maze step by step—

Open. But a far more complex, and more powerful, Mark of opening than Simon had seen before.

And he

Saw it

Heard it

Inhaled it absorbed it knew it had it, made it his.

And it made him so angry. He flashed back to the night at Renwicks, standing over his mother in her manacles, in her disturbing white dress, the moment he'd understood that Valentine had drugged her, undressed her, chained her up. Exactly as these people had done to Simon.

Maybe it wasn't completely fair; maybe they really had only meant well. But they hadn't used cuffs with buckles, hadn't closed them with a simple travar locking Mark; they'd used a telesma like a binding circle and it wasn't even the first time, they'd chained him twice and left all his buttons undone, left him nearly naked and vulnerable and there was adrenaline pounding through him, they know they know they know and Jace in the corner of his vision like a pillar of fire he couldn't look at and cracks running through the dam in Simon's head, spreading like claw marks, like venom through veins—

(like poison through the arteries of the world, death and corruption spreading through the shining ley lines, snuffing them out inch by inch—)

He snapped. He hissed, instinctive, reactive, wanting her, wanting them all away from from him—

(I remember I remember GET AWAY FROM ME—)

Or at least, he meant to. But instead of a hiss—

Singing had always come naturally to him. This came naturally to him, but it wasn't singing—except for how it was—it was what singing would be if human voice boxes had a hundred vocal cords; if human voices could split and layer and echo themselves, twist and curl and spiral into exploding profusions of impossible, ethereal sounds; if a single human could be an entire hellfire choir all by themselves.

It was a song like no human could sing, made of sounds no human could make. But Simon made them; he sang the song that was zarali and it was a tetra-split lightning strike, surging in four directions as he jerked on his shackles.

I will not be bound—

It happened all at once: he Sang, his bindings broke like daisy chains and the cuffs opened like flowers, and as he sat up everyone flinched back.

—and I need no one else to set me free.

Except agela Sariel.

Simon smiled thinly. "Geh ciaofin vl?" he asked in Enochian. Are you scared yet?

"Fafen ge noan?" Alec shot back.

Should we be?

Simon stared at him, stunned to hear the language that had blossomed in blood and gold in his head when all this started now on Alec's tongue too. "Since when do you speak Enochian?"

"Apparently your angel gave it to me a while ago," Alec said, a little wry.

Simon blinked. "Gave you a language?"

Alec shrugged.

Someone cleared their throat, and Simon turned to face another stranger: a woman with a prosthetic leg and a runesong like the one who'd tried to open his cuffs, except with the old, quiet chords of a Shadowhunter running beneath the main melody. As if she'd been a Shadowhunter once, but had left that behind her a long time ago. "I beg your pardon, Angeion, but—what did you just do?"

"Simon, this is Secretar-Kleidoukhos Miracle," Isabelle said. "She's the head of the secretari, the order of angelologists."

Simon eyed the Kleidoukhos' brooch, the gold key with its six adamas wings, like a seraph's. "You were outside." This was the woman who'd ran to him when he came back to himself outside the Institute. "I broke your hand."

She smiled, and held it up. "It's fine now. I understand it was an accident."

"I don't understand," Simon said. "I don't know how I broke your hand, I don't know what I just did with the cuffs, I don't know how I broke the chains." He reached for the broken metal links—and saw his hand again.

Gold skin. Gold.

His fingers started to tremble.

The Kleidoukhos noticed. "Angeion, you underwent…some changes, while you were unconscious. There's nothing to be alarmed about, everything is exactly—"

Whatever he'd done with the cuffs, it had briefly washed away the lingering pain, but Simon's body still ached; bearable now, with all the painkilling runes, but still there. It was everywhere, all over, his skin raw and too-sensitive, every bone a throbbing ache from toes to fingertips to skull—his skull, his face, he felt like a sculpted thing, as if someone had taken a hammer and chisel and gouged him into a new shape. God, his nose and his ears, they burned and throbbed, exactly as if someone had been carving the cartilage with a knife.

And his eyes—

His eyes hurt so much—

He brought his shaking hand to probe the area around his right eye, trying to figure out what could be wrong. He was as careful and gentle as he could be, but he still flinched at the vicious pain that corkscrewed into his skull at the touch.

He couldn't feel a wound—no cut, no bruise—

No glasses.

Simon held himself very, very still.

No glasses. He wasn't wearing glasses. Or—he blinked twice to check, just in case the someone had put them in—contacts.

But he could see perfectly. Had been able to see perfectly from the moment he'd woken up.

He ran both hands over his face, searching for the scar-tissue left by Marks, any sign that they'd used runes to fix his eyesight, but there was nothing: no scars around his face, or on it, or—

On it. No scars on it.

"What did you do to me?" Simon asked quietly.

"Angeion, we didn't—"

It had taken him weeks to get used to the scar Hodge had left on his cheek; weeks before he could accept its presence in the mirror, or wash his face without flinching when his hands came into contact with the keloid tissue. And maybe he hadn't gotten used to it at all, because his first day back at St Xavier's people had stared and whispered and he'd been gutted by it all over again, sick with a shame that made no sense. He hated how much it had altered the entire cast of his face, how much it had changed how people looked at him, what they thought of him. Before Pandemonium, he'd regularly had elderly ladies ask him to reach high shelves for them in the grocery store, for crying out loud; he'd been that non-threatening, and he'd liked it that way, even if he'd sometimes wondered if Clary would see him as potential boyfriend material if he was a little less sweet and a little more of a bad-ass.

No one asked him to reach shelves any more. Now store clerks kept a wary eye on him when he went in to buy milk, and cops noticed when he walked by, and girls his own age ducked their heads to avoid eye contact if they didn't cross the street entirely to avoid him. And he couldn't blame them. The neat, ugly scar left by Hodge's chakram was the stamp of violence, a brand declaring him dangerous, and maybe broken, and definitely stained by horrors most people couldn't imagine.

It had been his own mark of Cain, warning everyone who looked at him that he was a murderer, a monster.

And now it was gone.

His mind was all white noise and static, unable to figure out how he felt: confused, angry, violated; disbelieving, overjoyed, desperately hopeful that it really was gone.

Terrified.

What did they do to me?

What did they DO?

"Angeion, I need you to stay calm," the Kleidoukhos said, but Simon was anything but. He lowered his hands, holding them out in front of them, forcing himself to really, really look—

They weren't his hands.

He felt himself start to shake, and had no idea how to stop.

He'd half-expected the scars on his wrists to be gone—the flame-shaped brands of the alligatura Marks Hodge had used to bind him, the day the traitor had given Jace and the Cup to Valentine—and they were. The angelic power rune on his right forearm was no longer cut in half by those sick scars; it lay on and in his skin like perfect calligraphy, deceptively simple and powerfully strong. There was no trace left of the old binding, nothing to suggest he'd ever been tortured with Marks meant for criminals.

But his skin. His fingers, his hands, his arms—they were golden. He hadn't dreamed it, hadn't been hallucinating: they weren't bookworm-pale like they should be but gold, gold in a way that skin was not supposed to be, gold that made his brain stutter and stop because it was not Mediterranean, South American, Asian; was not any shade found in southern Europe. It wasn't brown or bronzed and it wasn't a metaphor: he was gold.

Like Jace, he thought, dazed. He turned his hands over, and his heartbeat stuttered. The lines on his palms—they'd changed, too. He swore they had, but tears caught in his eyes because—because he couldn't remember what they used to look like. Not like this, he was absolutely positive, but—but he couldn't remember the exact pattern they'd made before.

He'd never really looked. They talked about knowing something 'like the back of your hand', but who could actually sketch their hand from memory? Who could pick their palm out of an array of photos, if they had no distinctive scar or freckle to help them? Simon had had none of those things, and he didn't have them now, and almost worse than the terrifying change was the crushing ache of loss. Something so integral to him that he'd never stopped to consider it—as basic and as vital as oxygen—now just gone.

Someone was keening. Someone was making a wordless, animal sound of grief and pain, high-pitched with agony and quiet with despair, and it was raining, he was inside but it was raining, rain falling on his face and his hands, the hands that were his but not his. Or maybe it was blood—maybe that would be better, if his powers were breaking him again, breaking him for good, if he would finally just bleed and bleed until he didn't have to deal with any of this any more. Maybe that was why everything hurt, why his every cell felt flayed and fragmented; because whatever was inside him had finally gone too far, and broken him, and I'm sorry, mom, I'm sorry, I just can't do this any more, I can't…

"Simon, it's okay, you're okay, you're okay," Jace said, darting close and folding his hands around Simon's, and it hardly registered because it wasn't, he wasn't, he wasn't.

But he didn't feel himself growing weaker, his strength draining away into the unrelenting, unforgiving black that had swallowed him so many times. Instead—instead of draining away, something was trickling in, slow and small and lost, at first, beneath the sucking chest wound of Simon's tears. But little by little, moment by moment it grew stronger, and surer, and faster. The trickle became a rivulet, and then a rill, and then it was a stream, molten crystal and liquid lightning flowing with rushing ease through Simon's body. Channels he'd never realised were clogged and choked had been burned clean; he could feel the shock of contrast, the difference between how it had felt to call his power against Abbadon, Hodge, Valentine, versus how it poured through him now without his needing to ask, without even needing to reach for it. It built and built until it was a white-water roar, dragon-fierce rapids and wolf-howl rush and it struck Simon blind, it drowned out the outer world so that all he could feel was the shooting-star streak of it, diamond-fire detonating through his veins as his whole body came alight—

Just as if he'd been made to contain it, to channel it, to blaze with it—

«WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?» he screamed, his vocal cords a seraph's harp-strings and reality resounding with the music played on them, the quantum symphony his voice had become, and there was no pain, he did not taste blood, this aching-altered body was made for this. «WHAT DID YOU DO?»

They dropped to their knees, the Kleidoukhos and her people, knelt and bowed their heads beneath his fury, one young man shaking so badly he dropped his stele, and it only made Simon angrier, this stupid, meaningless show of respect.

«TELL ME!» he screamed, and Marks lit like flames on every surface, runes Marked on the walls and ceiling and across the floor lighting up golden, telesme shining like fire, all the wards and protections they must have placed around him as he slept, but he didn't want protection, he wanted answers. Fissures spread through the glass flasks and vials on a table; cracks raced through the windowpanes, and Simon thought about sending them into the walls, pushing his power into the floor, into the Institute's foundations, bringing the whole building crashing down on top of them.

He wondered if he could.

In that moment, he wanted to.

"We found binding circles carved into your feet," the Kleidoukhos said, and her voice didn't quite tremble, but her eyes stayed fixed on the floor. "Circles of angelic binding. Old scars, virtually invisible. Someone must have cut them into you when you were very young—most likely when you were a, a newborn, an infant."

And just like that, all of the rage drained away, like blood from a butchered corpse.

Mom.

'She broke her oath to Samael.'

Mom, what did you do?

His throat—it felt bigger, it felt more, and he didn't know if he could speak properly, normally, without making glass shatter, without making the veins burst in the eyes of everyone who heard him. But he waved a hand for her to go on.

She did. "We broke the circles." The cuts on his feet. The ones they'd had to bandage. "When we did…your body changed, Angeion. Everything that was bound was set free. The angel within you, but also, I think, your Nephilim blood. It had been—suppressed. Now it is not. You are as you always should have been."

Simon tried to imagine his mother standing over him in the cradle, tears on her cheeks and a knife in her hand. He must have screamed and screamed as she drew the circles. Carved them. There must have been so much blood.

She'd never raised a hand to him. Not ever. She'd hardly ever even raised her voice.

She knew, Simon thought, sick and cold. Ashes and ice. She knew what was in me. She knew it had to be locked up and never let out. Nothing else could have made her hurt him like that. He believed that with everything he had.

Running away from Idris, changing their names, hiding his memories, blocking his Sight, the lies about his father, leaving him untrained, never telling him about the Shadow World—she'd done it all to protect him. He knew that.

Or to protect the world from me, something in him whispered. But if that was true, she would have killed him as a baby.

Wouldn't she?

She was a Shadowhunter, born and bred to guard humanity from monsters. She would have put him down if he—or the thing inside him—was a danger to the world.

Wouldn't she?

You made a deal with the Angel of Death. And then you broke it.

Mom, what did you know?

What did you do?

Simon swallowed, focussing on the motion as he did so. Trying to work out if it was safe to speak yet. When he couldn't tell, he side-stepped the problem by risking Enochian instead. "Aziamicol," he said, turning to Alec. Risking just the one word.

Nothing exploded.

Alec looked worried, or maybe concerned, but he nodded. "He wants a mirror," he told the room.

The Kleidoukhos raised her head. "I'm not sure that's wise," she said hesitantly. "Angeion—Simon—you're exhausted, and both your body and mind have already been put under enormous strain. It would be better to rest—"

Simon turned his head and snarled at her.

The floor trembled.

A mirror was found. But when Simon tried to free his hands from Jace's hold to take it, Jace wouldn't let him go.

"Simon," Jace said softly, desperately, "you're still you. What you look like isn't who you are. No matter what, you're still you."

Simon stared at him for a long moment. Then he dragged his hands free of Jace's, and reached for the mirror.

On the day of Jace's Dedication, Simon had looked into a mirror and not recognised himself. It had been disorientating and uncomfortable, a little frightening, a sharp shock. But that had been a matter of clothing and stance, the way he'd held himself and the shadows in his eyes where there had been none before. He hadn'tt recognised himself only because he hadn't realised how much he'd changed; it was still him, just…a him who was a little older, a little harder, and far less innocent than his mental image of himself.

This time, he saw a stranger looking back at him because it was not his face.

He stared at it, uncomprehending. The mirror's handle was shaped like an angel; its spread wings curved upwards to form the rim, framing the face reflected there like a portrait of a stranger—only instead of safe paints and ink, this face was in the glass, and it shattered into shards inside Simon's head.

Gone were his glasses, along with any need for them. The safe, normal brown of his eyes had become the colour of dark honey, if someone had sprinkled wisps of gold leaf into honey and let them hang there suspended—the little glints of gold in his eyes shone like metal, like sparks, like stars when Simon turned his head back and forth. He raised a hand to touch his cheek just to watch his reflection copy him, just to make sure this was real, because—because the bones in his face had changed; they were sharper now, his cheekbones and jaw, his forehead, even the shape of his eye-sockets. The face in the mirror looked sculpted, elegant and elven and eerie, androgynous in a way that reminded him, with a lurch, of that night after the concert, when he had passed out bleeding after seeing something like this in the bathroom mirror.

Something very, very like this.

This is the Sword's face, he realised. This is what was waiting underneath mine, this whole time.

This is the Sword unsheathed.

He traced the shape of his nose in horrified awe; no wonder the cartilage ached. It was thinner, straighter, than it had been the last time he'd looked at it… Following the shape of it led his finger to his eyebrows, and then he made a fist in his hair to confirm what he was seeing: his hair wasn't brown any more. It had grown longer and flushed fucking gold while he was unconscious; not blond, gold, a rich, impossible colour that no one would ever believe was natural.

Which, Simon thought hysterically, it wasn't.

"Get it off," he said nonsensically. He hardly noticed that his voice sounded almost human again; all he could hear was that it was not his voice. In the glass, a stranger's lips moved and a stranger's voice emerged.

The Sword. The thing that Greater Demons kneel to, that laughs at slaughter, that mauled Alec's soul, that mom mutilated me to keep locked up and it's in the mirror, it's in the mirror, IT'S IN THE MIRROR—

"Angeion?" someone asked uncertainly.

"Get it off, undo do it, give me my fucking face back!" he screamed. He hurled the mirror away from him and heard it shatter, and for an instant he was certain his reflection, trapped in the glass, must have broken with it. But putting his hands on his face slaughtered that hope; his face was still wrong, was still not his, and the fingers on his cheeks curled, curled so he could get his nails in and rip, rip it off, get it away, get his real face back—

He heard cries of alarm but they didn't matter, couldn't matter more than the lightning strikes of pain streaking through him from the claw marks on his cheeks, pain that was white and bright and clean, certain and solid and sure. It felt so good (real, this is real, this will make my face real again) that he kept clawing, dragged his nails over his face until the skin was wet under his fingers, wet with salt and copper, tears and blood—

Hands reached for him, grabbing at his arms, trying to wrestle his hands from his face, but Simon hardly noticed: they were weak as kittens, all of them, they could not move him and he could not be moved, could not be prevented from clawing, ripping, defacing this face that was not his, no, he refused it, he refused, and the pain was a release and a relief, letting him breathe, letting it out of him, the storm the memories the screaming the terror the no no no—

"AIKANE!" Jace screamed, and gold flashed behind Simon's eyelids; he looked up through blood-wet eyelashes and saw Jace above him, Jace terrified, Jace holding Simon's wrists, a pendant swinging out of his shirt as he leaned over Simon. It was a little sphere, round and golden as Eris' apple, shining like a hearthfire through the blood in Simon's eyes, and it drew him, drew him like a sun drawing a wandering satellite home…

Pulled him back to himself.

Simon blinked. Jace was on top of him, straddling him, his eyes frenzied and wild, and the hands fastened around Simon's wrists were slick with Simon's blood.

A dull roaring filled Simon's ears. Oh, a small part of him whispered, beneath the sudden silence in his head, oh, you are such a liar, Janim Christopher Morgenstern.

Isabelle's whip gleamed around Simon's lower forearm; on his other side, Alec had hold of his other arm. But it had been Jace who screamed.

"Are you…?" Isabelle trailed off, clearly struggling to find the right word. Awake? Sane? Yourself?

"You can let go of me," Simon said, without looking away from Jace.

Jace couldn't seem to stop staring at him, either. But he slowly peeled his fingers from Simon's wrists—his grip tacky with Simon's blood—and drew his stele.

No one else was at an angle to see his face, to see the pleading in his eyes. But Simon could, and so he extended his arm towards him, mutely, his unbuttoned sleeve trailing on the bed as Jace Marked healing runes over Simon's new, strange skin.

He felt the wounds on his face closing, a kind of warm itching, and for a moment, everything in Simon was quiet and still and calm.

But then Jace was pulling away, and someone was handing Simon a wet, warm cloth to wipe the blood off his face, and Simon was grateful to be able to hide in it for just a second, breathing in the damp heat as Jace climbed back off the bed.

When he couldn't delay it any longer—when the cloth was dull pink with his blood—Simon raised his head and faced the small crowd again. "How do we fix this?"

"...'Fix it', Angeion?" the Kleidoukhos echoed. She was back on her feet, as were the rest of them.

"Reverse it, undo it. Fix it." Simon gestured at himself, at the face that wasn't his. "Whatever you want to call it. How do we make me look like me again?"

Slowly, the Kleidoukhos shook her head. "I'm sorry, I tried to explain—there's nothing to fix. This is your true form, what you always should have looked like. What you always should have been. It can't be undone."

'It can't be undone.' Just like all the worlds the Sword had murdered, burned, drowned in acid and blood, drawn and quartered and fed to the hordes of Hell—

"Simon?" Izzy asked softly, concerned.

No no no no! Simon held himself still, desperately trying to think about anything but the memories he didn't want, the holocaust in his head, genocide after genocide on a scale he couldn't imagine but was forced to remember—

'What you always should have been'—you don't understand, this thing in me has destroyed so many worlds that I don't know numbers big enough to tell you how many, and it did it on purpose, it enjoyed it, it laughed, and now I have its face and you want me to be this, I can't, I won't, I won't be what it is, I won't do what it's done, I can't, I won't, I can't—

He bolted. An ungraceful scramble off the bed and he almost hurled himself to the floor, thrown off-balance by how fast his body moved and how much lighter he felt. But even with needing to compensate for that he was still through the doorless doorway before any of them could move, call him, catch him; he crashed into the corridor wall and pushed off it, too strong too fast too light, his arms and legs all the wrong lengths and his feet with their broken binding circles shrieking at him, every step painful as the little mermaid's when she was granted legs and wasn't that perfect, wasn't that appropriate, because Simon had changed too, just like she did—

But she'd asked for her transformation, and Simon hadn't; hadn't asked for it, hadn't wanted it, didn't want it, and he ran as if he could outrun it, as if he could leave it behind and escape it if he only pushed himself hard enough. But no matter how fast he moved everything around him stayed crystal-clear, his changed eyes too good to let his surroundings blur and his brain somehow able to keep up, able to process all the impossible input, and it only made the frantic clawing-screaming panic worse. He slammed into walls as much for the way the shock of pain made his mind white and quiet for a precious millisecond as because it was the only way he knew how to stop moving; he was a kid from Brooklyn dropped into a Bugatti Chiron without warning and he had no idea how to drive this thing, this thing that was his body twisted and wrong, racking up bruises like points in a video game as he tripped over his too-long legs, crashing into the floor, the walls, down a flight of stairs, flashing past faces that didn't register his passing at all because even Shadowhunter eyes couldn't see something moving this fast—

They saw him when he burst into the library, though, arms over his face as he hit the thick heavy doors, using their resistance to slow his trajectory. They splintered open and he let himself fall rather than keep running, tumbling onto the tiled floor and rolling over and over until he hit one of the bookcases. He was back on his feet before the books his impact had knocked loose could hit the floor and he even caught them, easily, without even trying. There were voices, calls, alarm and confusion and even outrage, but they weren't what he was here for; he flicked through the books he'd caught and no, not these, they couldn't help him. He dropped them and darted to another shelf, tearing books down, his freakish gold eyes picking out titles like targeted missiles finding their marks, scrolls torn open and left to roll unhindered when they weren't right either and every wrong one made the panic in his chest twist tighter and tighter, a countdown where he couldn't see the clock ticking, only hear it. Folios and codices and quires, with covers of leather and linen and metal, pages made of paper and parchment and vellum, hand-written or printed with black ink, sepia, deep green, in languages Simon knew or recognised or didn't, but it didn't matter if he knew what the language was called or not because he could read the words regardless, all of them, meaning unspooling in his head as fast as he could turn the pages and he hated it, he would have loved it once but now it was just another hammer-blow on the anvil, someone-something trying to forge him into the Sword, trying to make him something he wasn't and wouldn't be—but he needed it, too, because what if the answer was written in a language he didn't know? He'd need the Sword's powers to read it, and maybe that would be best, if the Sword's powers were what allowed him to shove it back in the sheath; it would be fucking poetic if it worked out that way—

But it wasn't working out that way, or any way, or at all. Simon tore through book after book, a (not any more, not ever) human whirlwind scattering pages behind him, papers about demons and weapons and Nephilim history, collections of maps and recipes and diagrams, illuminated and illustrated and printed with wood-cuts and none of them were right, none of them had the answer. Even when he finally found the books of Marks and telesme, there was nothing, no matter how frantically he turned the pages, how quickly he wthrough each shelf, how thoroughly he burned through each bookcase—

No, they're lying they're wrong there has to be, there has to be, something, anything, there's always a way, this is magic and magic means THERE IS ALWAYS A WAY—

He heard them coming before he saw them, his self a radio tuned to their signal, their runesongs: angel-marked Alec and star-dancer Isabelle and Jace the liar, the liar. But Simon didn't turn to look at them, not even when Alec gently took the book he was holding from his hands.

"I can't find it," he said helplessly. He squeezed his eyes shut, his throat burning. "I can't—there has to be—I can't—"

He didn't know, after, whose arms wrapped around him first. But when he fell (like a star, like the son of the morning), crying because he was broken so badly there was nothing to fix, all three of them were there to catch him.

NOTES

Aĝarin is a Sumerian term that translates as 'matrix'—not as in the 'red pill/blue pill' movie franchise, but in the seriously old sense of the word, when it meant 'breeding female' or 'womb'. In Sumerian, it means something like Mother-Creator. This should not be taken as evidence that Silariel is female as humans understand the term.

Genetrix is an archaic term meaning 'mother'; Genetrix Prime is a Seelie title of great importance. Again, that Silariel bears this title does not mean Silariel identifies as a woman.

Dumu is a Sumerian word meaning 'child'. Please note that Silariel is not referred to as a/the daughter of Don, as 'daughter' is a gendered term and Silariel does not fit into the Western gender binary.

Maš is a Sumerian word that means 'twin', so 'maš of Arawn' just means 'twin of Arawn/Arawn's twin'.

Arawn is the name of the Unseelie King, as revealed to us in the Dark Artifices trilogy of canon. For anyone who's dropped out of the books, I really do recommend the DA trilogy, because it's awesome.

Réalsitarí is a word of my own invention, cobbled together from Sumerian and Irish; it's simply the Seelie title for a ruling monarch.

Cairde is Irish for 'friends' and is the Seelie name for the collected Lightbringer organisations. Came up in a previous chapter, but that was a while back, so explaining it again for anyone who needs a refresher!

'Daoine' is the plural form of 'duine', which is 'person' in Old Irish. As Magnus said in the chapter The Spiral Court, this is the correct term for a Seelie or Unseelie individual. 'Daoine', then, just means 'multiple Seelie or Unseelie fae'.

Olor means 'swan', and as Izzy implied in an earlier chapter, it's a term used to refer to a faerie's beloved, specifically in a romantic sense.

Cŵn Annwn are fae dogs; the term translates literally as 'hounds of Annwn'. They are described as fleethounds, with long silky hair and braided tails, and are completely white except for their red ears.

Tuatha, as explained in a previous chapter, means 'tribes'. Specifically, it refers to the different tribes/clans etc of Olianthe's people—who do not refer to themselves as the Fae and don't like it when other people do it either.

A quick reminder, since it's been a while: ashipu-ene = warlocks, ubar-ene = werewolves, ekimmu-ene = vampires, ubārum-ene = all Fae collectively (not just the Seelie and Unseelie). Kiasu-ene are shapeshifters, like kumiho and wakinyan, who are native to Earth, not the product of demonic viruses like werewolves are.

The naos is a kind of chapel or sacred space within a Nephilim dwelling, where Nephilim go to pray and perform ceremonies like the Dedication or parabatai joining. Jace's Dedication ceremony took place in the Insitute's naos in City of Dreams.

There are three different ways to acquire seraph blades; halikaskōblades are those given to you by your teachers or requisitioned from an Institute/some other cache of weaponry that is open to all; these blades are named by the person who claims them.

Armaskōblades are like Simiel, the sword Jace gave Simon; named by the giver (in as close an approximation to the name of the person the blade is being given to) and given to someone the giver loves, usually romantically (although it is possible, but rare, for armaskō blades to be given to family members). Armaskōblades, even once bonded to the giftee, can be safely handled by either the giver or the Shadowhunter the blade is bonded to.

Daiosaskōis a named blade which is bonded to a Shadowhunter, but is given to another Shadowhunter to use during or just prior to battle. You are expected to return a daiosaskōblade to its original owner after the fight; unless the original owner dies, in which case the blade becomes yours (and is technically then an aeímnēsaskō, or remembrance, blade).

This was covered way back in City of Shadows, but it's been a fair while, so here's a recap for anyone who needed it!

Baruchiachel is, according to some, one of the Archangels (the list of Archangels changes dramatically depending on the source) and the only angel capable of vanquishing the Demon of Discord.

Mahariel is an angel who guards the gates of Heaven, and leads the souls of the Elect to God.

Jehudiam is the angel who 'keeps the accounts of the righteous'.

Nossyn is the Runed term for the night-vision rune. (I know, in canon, it's named Nyx, but I think that's a stupid name so I changed it.)

For the record, Iolmozyor is a name cobbled together from bits of Enochian, and in the Runed-verse translates as something like 'roaring joy-bringer'.

Pöljä is a Finnish insult which literally translates as 'nut', but the meaning is something closer to 'doofus' and it's used mostly in a fond way (which is how Samuel uses it here!)

The Bugatti Chiron is the fastest car in the world (as best I can tell. I'm not a car expert and there seems to be a bit of debate?)