The Archangel's Gift: A Fantasy Serial

The Archangel's Gift: Judgment Day

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:07:13 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

The year is 1611. The city-states of Renaissance Italy were long ago transformed into floating islands to escape a second worldwide flood. But now the Chosen Isles need saving once more. Portals to the nine circles of hell are opening wide, spilling out legions of demon-like inferni.

Serafina Corso, the daughter of the man whose forbidden voyage opened the way to the inferni in the first place, discovers her father’s lost journal, which would allow her to retrace his steps and close the gate for good. But the notorious outlaw Lorenzo de Montague needs that journal if he ever wants to see his missing son again.

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

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Part I

Part II

Part III

Rome Besieged | To Empyrea | The Isle of Thieves

PREVIOUSLY: Lorenzo and Serafina approached the Isle of Thieves, where they planned to use their stolen skyship Mist Queen to attack the fortress of the crime lord called the Spider, who has kidnapped Lorenzo’s son Giuliano. But as they drew nearer, they saw that the Isle—actually a network of small islands—was under attack by inferni. Fearing for his son’s life, Lorenzo took the ship’s voltorro—a small one-man flying craft—and flew off toward the flames.

Serafina leaned on Mist Queen’s rail, watching the voltorro carrying Lorenzo shrink until distance swallowed it up. Beyond the point where Lorenzo had vanished, the Isle of Thieves was close enough now that she no longer needed a spyglass to make out the conflagration enveloping the islands. Twisting and raging against the pall of night, those fires were making short work of both the islands’ structures and the original plan Serafina and Lorenzo had cooked up.

What in the names of all the angels was she supposed to do now?

She was aware of another presence beside her at the rail, also staring at the flames: Sanguini, Mist Queen’s de facto captain now that Lorenzo had fled the ship—perhaps for good.

Lorenzo, gone. Serafina felt an unexpected pang at the thought. Say what you would about Lorenzo de Montague, but he was a good man to have around. When he managed to resist the urge to double-cross you, he had a way of making impossible plans seem a little more possible.

And speaking of impossible, could it be that Serafina would miss his company on a level that transcended his mere usefulness? A rogue he might be, but he had a charm to him that—

She scoffed. Hardly. She’d fallen for that once. Never again.

Sanguini cleared his throat. “Signorina? What are my orders?”

“Orders?” she repeated, then turned questioningly to the man on the other side of her. Surely, if anyone was about to give orders, it would be the one who’d set them on this quest in the first place. Rafael de Medici stared grimly at the devouring flames, hands white where he gripped the rail.

“I’d say a resupply is out of the question,” Rafael murmured, half to himself. He paused, staring into the night, and Serafina imagined him thinking through their alternate resupply options: Porto Blanco, Messina, maybe even the monastery at San Giacomo. But they’d already committed to the Isle of Thieves, putting all the others just too far out of reach.

That left only one choice.

She exchanged a glance with Rafael, whose eyes told her he’d reached the same conclusion.

But even before she could voice the thought, someone called out, “Ship ho!”

Sanguini seized a spyglass from a crewman and pressed it to his eye, frowning. He passed it to Serafina. “What do you make of this, signorina?”

She squinted through the glass and examined the object that had caught the crew’s eye. In that instant, her heart leaped. Could it be? The course of action she’d been about to suggest suddenly looked a hell of a lot less daunting.

It was a skyship—a three-masted galleon, bristling with cannons, bigger than Mist Queen by a third at least. And on its sails—the very sight filled Serafina with a curious mixture of nostalgia and regret—was the sunburst emblem of the Divinocracy, bisected by a sword.

Angels beyond! The Knights of the Threshold had arrived.

In another life, one where I’d never set out to follow my father, I might be sailing aboard that ship. She wondered which unit was aboard. The Thirty-First was known to patrol this area, unless they’d been recalled to assist with the siege of Rome. The Sixteenth, perhaps? She wondered suddenly if she knew anyone aboard the ship from militant seminary—and for a moment, it was as though she’d never left the Knights behind on Rome. She had a sword at her hip, inferni to kill, and fellow Knights of the Threshold at her back.

It would be just like old times if she ignored the small fact that the Serafina of old was fading in the most literal way.

“Signal that ship,” Serafina ordered Sanguini. “Offer our aid.”

“Aid?” repeated Sanguini.

“Aid,” said Serafina firmly. “That island is under siege by the worst sorts of inferni. We have a caravel stocked with gunpowder and cannons and more plucky attitudes than any one ship can possibly hold. The Knights of the Threshold are already here to defend the islands. It is the least we can do to lend a few cannons.”

“Signorina, I must insist—”

“You will direct the crew to guide this ship toward that one,” cut in Rafael, “or we will find a captain who can.” He shifted his blue cloak, tugging meaningfully at the sunburst pendant around his neck. Sanguini glanced at the pendant, no doubt imagining Rafael calling upon the Canticle to turn him into a newt or somesuch creature, and glowered at the two of them, but he offered no more resistance. He had no idea, of course, that Rafael had lost much of his power when Cosimo di Marco had shot him in the lung several weeks ago, and Serafina very much preferred Sanguini remain ignorant of that fact.

The captain turned and began bellowing orders. “Come about!” he yelled. “All hands to wear ship! Helm to leeward!” All around her, crew surged forward to the yards—running, hauling, belaying lines. She could smell sweat and hear the grunts and curses endemic to their efforts.

“Thank you,” she said softly to Rafael.

“Your heart does you credit,” said Rafael with a small smile. “Never once in the time that I’ve known you, even when we faced a Rome overrun by inferni, did you balk at the idea of turning around and helping where you’re needed. I am happy to stand by your side.”

Serafina blushed.

“I never knew your father, of course,” said Rafael, “but I imagine he’d be proud.” Before Serafina could blush further, he changed tack. “I do wonder why the Knights of the Threshold are out here, though. Surely a pirate haven isn’t on their typical patrol route.”

“In times like these, I like to think the Knights of the Threshold go where they’re needed,” said Serafina. She jabbed the stump of her left arm toward the flaming islands growing larger with every passing moment. “We were founded to assist all of humanity, not just the ones we like.” In practicality, of course, the Knights did not always honor that ideal, but Serafina Corso had always been an idealist at heart.

Rafael nodded at the other skyship, which Sanguini and his men were now attempting to hail with signal lanterns. “Are you concerned that they might betray us to our enemies?”

Serafina shook her head. “Even if these particular Knights had some way of knowing that the ship approaching them is one stolen from Venice a few days ago, full of fugitives from holy justice, well … if I were them, I’d just be grateful for the assistance, wouldn’t you? We can sort out who’s on the run from who later.”

“Well, that’s—” Rafael started to say, but Sanguini broke in, hurrying up to the quarterdeck from where his men were still waving lanterns at the other ship.

“They seem uneager to be respond,” Sanguini called. “Shall we keep trying?” By his tone, he very much hoped Serafina would give the order to call it a day and put as much distance as they could between them and the islands.

“Yes,” said Serafina. “I imagine they’re quite busy, what with repelling inferni and all. Give them a moment.”

“That’s the thing,” said Rafael suddenly, peering into the darkness toward the other ship. “They don’t actually seem to be engaging the inferni, do they?”

Now that he mentioned it, that was odd. Serafina could see the flapping forms of harpies now as the creatures menaced the islands; she could see the striding shapes of thorn lords and the fiery silhouettes of cinderborn. But the Divinocracy ship didn’t seem to pay the attacking inferni any mind.

But they were Knights of the Threshold. What else would they be—

Thunder boomed from the other vessel. Fire flashed from the hull, from a place Serafina belatedly recognized as the muzzle of a cannon. Something zipped past Serafina’s head with tremendous force, the wind of its passage knocking her back a step. A wet sensation splashed across her face.

She turned to Rafael. “What was—”

It took a moment for her mind to come to terms with the evidence of her eyes, a long moment in which she was dimly aware of more thunderous booms, more screams. But even then she knew not to look too closely at the reddish something scattered across the splintered rail. She knew what she would find if she wiped off whatever had just splashed across her face with a gloved hand.

Rafael was gone.

“My apologies, Your Blessedness, but I must once again state my opposition to this course,” said Knight-Commandant Vesperini, raising his voice to be heard as his ship’s cannons erupted in a roaring chorus. “We are Knights of the Threshold. Our purpose is to slay inferni, not attack human vessels. We are here to drive away the creatures of hell.”

“Your opposition has already been noted in the log,” said Nicanora Pirossa. She turned from the ship’s rail to face him. He was an impressive man, tall and muscular within his suit of burnished golden armor, his thick mustache bristling under the open visor of his sunburst-crested helm. Nicanora, by contrast, was a head shorter, wearing armor that was still battered and blackened from days of fighting. But she didn’t falter as she looked him in the eyes, bolstered by the fire of conviction blazing in her breast. “You are here,” she said slowly, “to do as a member of the Ascendant Conclave demands.”

She was rewarded to see Vesperini, captain of the forty-gun sky carrack Judgment Day, flinch at her gaze.

Truth be told, pulling rank like this didn’t sit well with her. But then again, neither did many of the things she’d been asked to do recently, starting with the murder of Serafina Corso.

If you’d succeeded there, you wouldn’t be here, would you?

She’d quit the besieged city of Rome with all haste, coming here to where the stolen Mist Queen hoped to resupply. Except no one would be resupplying here ever again. She’d arrived to find the place in flames and overrun with every manner of inferni. And she’d also arrived just ahead of another Divinocracy vessel. Judgment Day was crewed by two hundred Knights of the Threshold fresh from the defense of Florence. It was pure chance that Judgment’s scout voltorro had sighted the burning islands, prompting the carrack’s captain to change course and fly here to save what little remained.

She had to credit Knight-Commandant Vesperini for that; a lesser man would have passed by—this was a place of thieves and miscreants, after all. Many would deem them no small loss.

But his arrival here was fortunate not only for the people of the Isle of Thieves, who were surely already lost, but also for Nicanora herself. At first Knight-Commandant Vesperini had been happy to see her, eager to have an Ascendant’s powers to draw upon as they defended the island from the marauding inferni. His attitude had changed once she made it clear that she intended to attack not the inferni but the caravel they could just then see approaching the islands.

Now, Knight-Commandant Vesperini bent low, whispering to Nicanora in a brief lull between cannonfire. “I will do as you say, Reverend-Ascendant,” he whispered, low enough only she could hear, “but mark my words—on your hands be the blood of every man or woman who dies on those islands.”

And a lot more besides. He didn’t know she’d abandoned Rome to be here. He didn’t know of the men and women and children who were surely dying in her city because there was one fewer Ascendant to defend them. But what good would it do to point that out?

She stood there on the deck for a moment, watching as Judgment Day unleashed its full broadside at the unsuspecting caravel. Beneath her feet, the deck shuddered as twenty portside guns belched fire and metal. The sound was cacophonous, ear-shattering, as loud as the ship’s namesake apocalypse. Nicanora had to hum a small spell to muffle the roar lest her eardrums suffer.

She hoped Serafina and Rafael would have the good sense to surrender when they saw how hopelessly outmatched they were.

After all, she had no wish to harm either of them.

Oh, angels.

Serafina gripped the rail to steady herself as the full horror of the situation dawned. Rafael de Medici had been by her side for only a month or so, but they’d braved countless dangers together in so short a time. He’d been the one to extend his hand and invite her on this quest; without him, she’d still be fighting a losing war with no hope of ever balancing the scales.

A great gulf opened up in her heart. She knew at once what was about to sweep in and fill the void: grief and anger, sadness and despair, all poured together into one inexorable flow.

But she couldn’t afford to be paralyzed, not with cannonballs screaming overhead. Not with a hailstorm of splinters raining every direction. There would be time to mourn if she survived the next few moments.

Rafael…

“Return fire!” she bellowed at Sanguini. Then the world came back into focus, the full roar of the battle returning to her ears, and she realized Sanguini was already shouting orders.

“Cast loose the guns! Clear the deck for action!”

Around her, men rushed to battle stations, some already streaked with blood and soot. Another cannonball clipped the mizzenmast, leaving one side frayed and splintered, like some monstrous beast had been chewing on it. The acrid tang of gunpowder hung thick over the deck, layered over the coppery scent of blood.

“Signorina!” Sanguini called at her over the din. “Get down below! Get somewhere safe!”

Serafina bristled; she was a Knight of the Threshold, not some dewy-eyed damsel to be shut up in a tower when trouble arrived. But what could she do? She could hardly charge the opposing ship with a sword, could she? She was still locked in mid-debate with herself when the ship lurched, sending its own cannon volley screaming into the darkness toward the enemy. The motion sent Serafina sprawling, her boots slipping in Rafael’s remains. As an ear-shattering roar shook the timbers and curtains of smoke rose between Mist Queen and the other ship, Serafina found herself on her rump, looking through the smoke at the approaching enemy.

Enemy. That word was never meant to be applied to Knights of the Threshold. But why were they attacking? Could they possibly know of Serafina and Rafael’s quest? But how?

Such questions vanished from her mind a moment later as the enemy ship fired again. But this time no cannonballs shot from the darkness. This time, something small whistled through the air and struck Mist Queen’s mast…

…and green fire bloomed like the petals of a terrible flower.

A cold weight dropped into her stomach so quickly it nearly pulled her forward. No. She knew what weapons the Knights of the Threshold could bring to bear. But some things were designated by Divinocracy charter for exclusive use on inferni. The Knights would never use Greek fire on humans.

She was still telling herself that as emerald flames spread along the wood and canvas with the ferocity of a starving animal.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next: Lorenzo mourns his son and decides his next course of action.

BEHIND THE SCENES

I’m going to start including this section as we finish up the story.

Let’s talk about Rafael, shall we? Truth be told, he’s one character I wish I’d done more with. I had to kill him off, because there’s no room for him in the story from here on out. He’d be dead weight, narrative-wise. I’ve got lots of ideas for things I could have done with him, but implementing them would require a massive rewrite. So it’s a good thing I’m doing such a rewrite at the moment as I prepare a version of The Archangel’s Gift to send to my agent. In that version, Rafael has more of a personal arc.

If you recall, in part 2 of the story, Rafael lost his family connections, his wealth, his brothers, and his powers. As each part of his identity was stripped away, he lost himself a little more. In the new version, instead of bouncing back again, he realizes that all his grand plans meant a lot more when he had everything he wanted in the world. His altruism is exposed as hollow. He then seeks the Divinocracy to help restore his powers and his position. Remember the lighthouse that failed to fire its death ray at the end of the last section, throwing a wrench in the heist? In the new version, Rafael’s betrayal will be the reason for that failure.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Rome Besieged | To Empyrea | The Isle of Thieves

To My Paid Subscribers

Ryan Kunz — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:46:54 GMT

Hey, paid subscribers!

The Archangel's Gift: The Isle of Thieves

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:40:10 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

Subscribe now

Part I

Part II

Part III

Rome Besieged | To Empyrea

PREVIOUSLY: Lorenzo and Serafina approach the Isle of Thieves, where they plan to use their stolen skyship Mist Queen to attack the fortress of the crime lord called the Spider, who has kidnapped Lorenzo’s son Giuliano. They’ve worked out an elaborate plan: during the attack, Lorenzo will take a voltorro (a Leonardo da Vinci-type glider) and make off with his son, after which the others will continue on their journey toward Empyrea, the Archangels’ forbidden mountain.

“Tell it to me straight,” Lorenzo told Sanguini, the first mate, as he hauled himself onto the quarterdeck of the Mist Queen.

Sanguini held up a spyglass, peering into the twilit sky. “Better to show you, ser.”

Ser. Lorenzo would never get used to that. Sure, he was technically the bloody captain of the Mist Queen, but that had always been a temporary arrangement. Still, the honorific troubled him for no more than a second. He took the spyglass from Sanguini and held it to his eye.

Lorenzo’s heart nearly stopped. His breath stalled. Impossible… He grabbed the rail with his free hand to keep from swaying where he stood.

Footsteps on wood heralded the arrival of Serafina and Rafael. “We heard the lookout caught sight of the Isle of Thieves,” said Serafina, holding the hood of her cloak to keep the wind from snatching it away from her face.

“So they did,” said Lorenzo grimly, still peering through the spyglass. He could make out the tiny dots in the distance that would eventually resolve themselves into the interconnected floating islands that together made up the Isle of Thieves. There were at least twenty of them, the shattered remnants of a greater floating island, connected to one another now only by rope bridges and the common purpose of their inhabitants.

And now, by the shared fire that blazed across them all, unmistakable against the purple-black of the sky.

“Palermiel’s tits,” Lorenzo swore, fighting the sudden bleak dread that welled up in his guts. Even that curse was hard to get out through his suddenly dry throat. “Oh, angels.”

“What is it?” Serafina demanded.

“Whole bloody place is in flames,” said Lorenzo. He removed the spyglass. Surely he’d seen the worst of it, but what he saw next poured a fresh cascade of icy dread down his back. Behind the islands—it was hard to make out in the glare of the flames, but there was no mistaking it once you saw it—was an ugly, glowing scar in the air. Unnatural red light leaked from inside.

The curse that escaped Lorenzo’s lips then was foul enough to stop a cantore’s heart. “Inferni,” he whispered, mouth still dry. “It’s under attack by inferni.”

He pressed the spyglass into Serafina’s hands and rushed past her without another word. He heard Serafina and Rafael calling for him, heard the cries of sailors as he brushed past them, but they may well have been ghosts for all he cared. Down the companionway he went into the hold, past stowed cannons and dwindling barrels of salted pork and mead. Shafts from open gunports lit his way as he found the door to the voltorro rack and tore it open.

Most skyships these days carried at least one voltorro—the great false birds of wood, rope and canvas that were so ideal for scouting or quick sorties to land. Lorenzo found the crank on the wall that would open a large hatch in the hull big enough to disgorge the voltorro into the sky; he removed the stalling pin and let the crank unspool, allowing the hatch to fall open.

Outside, the wind howled through the endless sky. Lorenzo grabbed a pair of goggles from a hook, pulled them on, and threw himself into the voltorro’s pilot’s harness. He then pulled a set of leviathan’s breath bladders from a rack and fitted them into their casings beneath the voltorro’s batlike wings. Lastly, he climbed inside, cinched tight the straps, and slid his arms into the sleeves to control the wings. The whole rig was heavy, but not so much that he couldn’t stand up wearing it. Any heavier, and it wouldn’t be able to fly.

Lorenzo stood on the edge by the open hatch for only a second before he flung himself into the sky.

He hated voltorro. There was no railing, no bulkhead between him and a straight drop to nothingness. Nothing but a bloody safety harness. Nobody liked heights—it was a natural trait human brains evolved to keep them from splattering themselves at the bottom of a cliff out of sheer idiocy—but as long as they were smart and respected the sky, they could thrive there. From the deck of a skyship, the sky was a friend. You, the skyship, the sky—you were all part of a partnership, a mutual agreement to keep each other safe as you crossed the endless blue.

It sure wasn’t like that from within a voltorro. A gust of wind tried to pluck him off course, shaking the canvas wings and jarring Lorenzo’s teeth. It was cold, too, exposed as he was—in his haste to reach the Isle of Thieves, Lorenzo had neglected to bring along a heavier coat.

But still he flew on.

Lorenzo had been to the Isle of Thieves a dozen times over the course of his life, and he remembered a bustling place full of color and life, two dozen small floating islands all joined by a webwork of rope bridges. A tangled net of taverns, inns, palazzos, and shanties, where mugs clinked and coins jangled, where blood and wine flowed freely, where you could buy a grisly death or a shiny new caravel with equal ease. A rough place—but to rough men, a paradise.

No longer.

He was half a mile out when he saw the first inferni. They were harpies, those wretched hybrids of vultures and old women, circling what looked to be the charred ruins of the old lighthouse that had long ago been converted to a brothel. The cinderborn that had set the structure ablaze had already moved on, terrorizing a marketplace—you could always tell where the cinderborn were lurking thanks to the smoke and the stench of burned flesh on the wind. Further on, up a rope ladder and on another of the tiny islands, a colossal bronze figure that could only be a thorn lord laid waste to a tavern. Lorenzo, with another twist of his stomach, recognized the shapes of taverngoers still impaled on its spikes.

Peeling his eyes away from the horrors, Lorenzo spied his target: a tall, walled structure that abutted the cliff of one of the larger islands. Its crenelated ramparts could have belonged to the castle of some mighty lord, but Lorenzo wasn’t fooled. This was the fortress of the Spider, the mightiest crime lord in Venice.

Or at least, it used to be.

Lorenzo didn’t know how long ago the inferni had arrived, but the fortress was already in ruins. One wall had already been reduced to a crumbling pile of masonry, flames licking timbers that stuck out like shattered bone. The roof of the great keep had collapsed, smoke billowing from the hole.

He landed near a clump of stunted trees, his boots skidding across the mud, and tucked the voltorro behind the trees. He would need it again soon. Then he bolted toward the ruined fortress.

He’d gone perhaps fifteen feet before he heard irregular footfalls. A trio of cinderborn marched out of the darkness. Lorenzo had never seen one up close before, but he’d heard the stories: midnight-black armor that gobbled up the light, fiery swords, air warping with heat in their wake. Serafina had told him once how she’d seen a single cinderborn lay waste to twenty soldiers; three could spell the end for Lorenzo de Montague swifter than a whore’s sermon. Lorenzo melted into the darkness, praying to every Archangel that the creatures would pass without noticing him. He held his breath, heart thumping so loud he was certain they must have heard the bloody thing all the way in Venice.

At last the inferni passed to wreak fiery destruction elsewhere, and Lorenzo hurried on. He found the doors to the fortress shattered and passed without obstacle, his heart never ceasing its frantic tattoo. His lungs felt like they might never find enough air in the world again. The tile beneath his boots was warped and melted, the tapestries on the walls scorched an ugly black.

Wails sounded in the courtyard beyond, so Lorenzo pressed on.

He spotted a pair of guards trembling in the shadow of a crumbling arch, their arquebuses forgotten. Hell, he thought he recognized them from his attempted exchange with the Spider on Venice. They’d looked tough then, another pair of hired muscle meant to deter the Spider’s enemies.

This time, neither of them lifted a finger to stop him.

Lorenzo followed the cries into the courtyard, where he was greeted by more piles of rubble. Smoke trailed from a pair of burning corpses, neither small enough to be Giuliano. Small tongues of flame grew like fiery sprouts amidst the once-manicured topiaries.

“Spider!” Lorenzo called out. “Spider! Giuliano!”

There came a cough behind him. Lorenzo spun, his heart threatening to shake loose from his ribs, and saw a cluster of forms hiding in the shadow beneath a marble colonnade.

The firelight glinted off the four eyes of the figure in the front.

“Lorenzo,” gasped the figure in a strange, two-toned voice. The Spider wheezed in pain, raising a small dagger with one of his four arms. His richly embroidered cloak was stained with blood, and there was a cracked porcelain carnival mask in the dust at his feet. “Lorenzo …”

“Where the bloody hell is my son?” Lorenzo demanded, kicking aside the dagger. He seized the man who pulled every string of power in Venice and slapped him like a misbehaving child. “Where is he?”

“I—I’m sorry…”

“I don’t want to bloody hear you’re sorry,” Lorenzo snarled. He spared a glance for the other figures with the Spider—guards all. Two didn’t move at all; one raised a pistol weakly and then dropped it again. A fourth reached for a sheathed sword, but stopped at a glare from Lorenzo. “I want to hear where you’ve stashed him!”

“This wasn’t supposed to …” the Spider choked out. Blood burbled from his mouth.

Lorenzo wrapped his fist around the crime lord’s throat. “Spare me the regrets. They’re worthless as a tin ducat. Where is my son?”

The Spider coughed. More blood. “Cinderborn attacked…” Slowly, one hand pointed to the corner of the courtyard, and Lorenzo’s eyes followed the motion …

To a blackened form lying beside a toppled fountain.

Lorenzo crossed the span of fifteen feet so quickly he may as well have used some sort of Canticular spell. He slid to his knees, heart in his throat, a low buzzing sound in his ears. The world around him seemed to gray out, even the guttering flames.

The body lay still, most of its surface covered in burns, but it was just the right size. Lorenzo was vaguely aware of someone alternatively sobbing and swearing as he cupped the burned face—the right size, the right shape. And was that the scar on the chin, the one Giuliano had gotten falling out of the little yew tree on Palermo? The index finger on the right hand was missing too. Who the bloody hell was sobbing—could they just shut the hell up?

How could it end like this? After all Lorenzo had done, after all the pieces of his soul he’d spent to get Giuliano back…

“Why?” Lorenzo croaked, his voice catching, and only then did he realize where the sobs were coming from. “Why?”

“Why … what?” the Spider managed weakly, pulling himself up against the wall, perhaps to lend more comfort to his final moments. He left a red streak across the courtyard tiles.

“What was all this for? Why extort me?” Lorenzo hung his head over his son’s body. “Why did you want those bloody journals in the first place?”

“To … reach Empyrea ...”

“Oh, right. And there I was, thinking you wanted the journals because you’d taken up antiquing,” Lorenzo spat. “Well, bloody obviously you wanted to get to Empyrea. But why?”

“Because …” The Spider waved his two right hands—the strong one and the stunted one both—and then pointed to his four eyes, his misshapen face. “I wanted to—I wanted the Archangels to …” He sighed. “Never you mind, de Montague. It matters not … anymore.”

“It matters,” said Lorenzo. Magma churned in his mind, burbling and hissing beneath the thinnest of crusts. “My boy died for it.”

“Just one boy,” said the Spider, his double voice fading. “You of all people … know that … boys die … in the gutter … all the time.”

Lorenzo’s fist clenched around something cold and brittle on the ground. A memory flashed in his mind with the swiftness and starkness of lightning: a young boy, a bloody stiletto buried in his chest. Inside Lorenzo, the magma burst. He stood. Only then did he notice the cracked brick in his right hand. He didn’t remember picking it up. He still wore the Drago pistol, but he didn’t bother reaching for the weapon.

Lorenzo raised the brick.

The Spider looked up, fear flickering in his eyes, but by now he was too weak even to defend himself. His remaining guard tensed, but the only one with the energy to resist was the one who’d tried to draw his sword earlier, and he was far too slow.

When Lorenzo was finished, his hands were spattered red, and he could feel hot blood on his cheeks. The guards were all dead, and the Spider’s face was a caved-in ruin; you’d never even be able to tell he was altered if you didn’t look closely, and even then you’d have to sift through all the shattered skull and bits of meat. All four arms lay in the dust; the two vestigial ones still twitched.

And Lorenzo fell again to his knees, the bloody brick tumbling free into the rubble.

Somewhere out there, inferni were still raging across the Isle of Thieves, but for now, all was quiet. Quiet enough for Lorenzo to hear the thump of his own heartbeat in his ears. The rage was gone, replaced by a curious numbness. A total absence of feeling, as though someone had taken a ladle and scooped out everything inside him, good and bad, and left him utterly hollow.

That was when he heard a voice, a whisper so faint that Lorenzo at first thought it was nothing more than a memory.

“Father …?”

Lorenzo stiffened, his heart seizing up. He spun back toward the body of his son. The body whose arm was now lifting an inch or two. “Giuliano? You—you’re—?”

He reached out for his son’s blackened fingers—

And Giuliano recoiled.

The effort of pulling back his hand clearly cost the boy, who moaned in pain. Lorenzo knelt there, frozen. “Giuliano—”

“What … why did you …” Giuliano motioned faintly to the Spider’s corpse. “He was unarmed. Couldn’t … hurt you. What have you …?”

Lorenzo dragged himself to Giuliano’s side, heedless of the way the boy tried to pull away again. “Giuliano—I’m so sorry—I had to—he—” Realizing he was just spitting out nonsense, he started over. “He—he kidnapped you. He said…”

“I don’t…” Giuliano whispered. Angels above, there was fear in his voice. “Father … who are you?”

“Giuliano!” Lorenzo hissed, leaning forward. “Giuliano, I’m sorry!”

But Giuliano did not speak again.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next: Serafina, back on Mist Queen, deals with the inferni.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Rome Besieged | To Empyrea

The Archangel's Gift: To Empyrea

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:06:41 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

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Part I

Part II

Part III

Rome Besieged

PREVIOUSLY: Serafina and Lorenzo stole the skyship Mist Queen. Their bargain allowed Lorenzo to use the ship to rescue his kidnapped son, after Serafina could take it to the Archangels’ mountain, Empyrea. To enable their escape, Serafina called upon the arcane gift her father left her, disabling the pursuing ships. However, the gift came with a cost, and half her body became translucent and frail. It’s now been a few days since their escape…

Lorenzo de Montague bent over the desk in the captain’s cabin, tracing a finger along the parchment spread across the desk’s length. “From here,” he said, his fingertip starting on the notation marking the floating island of Venice, “we’ve been three days out. We should reach the Isle of Thieves by tomorrow evening.”

“You’re certain we can’t convince you to stay on once we rescue your son?” Rafael de Medici asked from the other side of the table. His voice was still a rasp, but his posture was as straight as it had ever been. “We’ll need someone like you to pilot the ship beneath the storms.”

Lorenzo scoffed. “You mistake me for someone with a death wish. I’ve been clear from the start about what I’m after. I wish you folks the best of luck. Sanguini here will handle the helm once I’m gone.” He gestured to the sallow-faced sailor standing to his right, a recruit from the dockyards of Venice who could handle a ship as well as anyone.

There was a small cough. He peered across the captain’s cabin—a sumptuous space with gold filigree snaking across the doorframe and velvet carpet underfoot—at the hooded figure standing beside Rafael. They’d found the cloak in the ship’s hold on the second day of the voyage, and Serafina had welcomed the barrier between herself and the pitying stares of the crew. In the dim light of a handful of candles spread across the map, her face was nearly invisible—even the half that her accursed gift hadn’t claimed. Still, he was fairly certain he heard disappointment in that cough.

“What are you complaining about?” Lorenzo asked. “Keep me around for too long and I’ll just betray you again.” He meant it as a jest—mostly—but he still wondered what lay expression beneath that cloak. “In any case—the Isle of Thieves. Anyone here been there before?”

Sanguini nodded, but Rafael and Serafina shook their heads.

“It’s not really one isle, despite the name. Used to be—they say it was part of Lucca before the Great Cataclysm. Broke off and floated around the world for a bit before breaking into a few more pieces. Now it’s maybe ten or fifteen islands, all strung together with rope bridges. The Spider’s fortress is on one of the larger islands. Our good skyship Mist Queen will approach the fortress from the west, cannons blazing. Their battlements have armaments as well, but if you keep the fortress just within our cannons’ range, you’ll be able to hit them long before they can hit you.”

“You left out the bit where we’ll still need to resupply somewhere on the Isle,” Rafael said, scratching at his chin. “I don’t see how that will be possible when we’ll have the Spider’s minions swarming all over us before too long.”

“You’ll resupply first,” said Lorenzo. “Your arrival won’t garner much attention; ships come and go all the time. When you turn around and unleash a cannon barrage, well… that will get their attention. Meanwhile, I’ll take the volturro in the hold and come at the fortress from the other side. I’ll sneak in, find my boy, and get out.” He shot Serafina a quick glance. “And that, my friends, will be where we part.”

The boundless expanse of the sky was the perfect blue of a robin’s egg, marred only by the laziest wisps of cloud. From the rail of the quarterdeck of the Mist Queen, Lorenzo fancied that he could see the whole earth. That was a silly notion, of course, but it didn’t stop him from peering into the pristine expanse of the sky for some sign of his destination.

No Isle of Thieves in sight yet, with all the dangers and delights it promised. No Giuliano yet, no clever rescue. No final reckoning with the Spider. For now, at least. For the moment, Lorenzo had to content himself with the sight of the sky in all its azure clarity.

Around Lorenzo came the music of the sky: the shouts of sailors, the clang of metal on metal, the groaning of ropes, the creak of halyards and flutter of canvas, all bound together in a familiar symphony. He allowed himself a deep breath of contentment. It seemed a betrayal of sorts, yielding to the joy of riding the open skies while his son still languished in the Spider’s clutches, but Lorenzo could forgive himself. There was much he’d done that was unforgivable, but not this. Not taking a moment to savor the fact that he was back on a ship’s deck—a proper ship this time, not a little skiff like the Lady Lucia. Mist Queen was a three-masted sky caravel, one of the finest ships in the Doge’s armada.

Well, formerly.

Lorenzo felt a smile crinkle the corners of his mouth. There was much to be concerned about these days, but for this moment, this shred of the vast tapestry of time, Lorenzo could smile.

This was where he had always dreamed of ending up, after all. Not the bit about being on the way to storm a notorious criminal haven and rescue his son, nor worrying about catching sight of black sails on the horizon. But the big, blue, open sky—that was what Lorenzo was born for.

He didn’t remember his parents; he and his younger brother Estevan had been alone as long as he could recall. As two urchins in Venice’s poorest district, they’d learned quickly to stick together. One of the district’s child gangs, led by a gangly brute named Filippo, caught Estevan and Lorenzo working the crowd for purses. Lorenzo had been a damned good pickpocket, but Filippo saw wasted potential in the tall, broad-shouldered lad. And so, at ten, Lorenzo became Filippo’s best enforcer.

He always kept his marks breathing. He wasn’t a killer. He didn’t like what he did, but he did like eating and breathing—and without the gang, he and Estevan would be carted off by the child-takers or worse.

Filippo also allowed Estevan to tag along, using the poor kid to carry messages. Lorenzo shielded Estevan from the worst of the real world; when Filippo brought him along to beat senseless the kids who fell behind on the tribute they owed the gang, Lorenzo would wash the blood from his hands before going home.

And yet, all the while, Lorenzo de Montague looked to the sky.

He sometimes lingered near the docks, watching the skyships heave in and out and fantasizing about one day taking Estevan and sailing far away. Eventually Lorenzo decided it was time to make firm plans to get both of them out. But if he planned something without Filippo and the older boy found out, there’d be hell to pay. So, in a calculated gamble, he told Filippo what he was going to do. Filippo wasn’t a friend, but he had kept the brothers safe from worse things, and Lorenzo respected him for that.

Filippo didn’t like the idea.

“You belong here,” he told Lorenzo. “You’re the best muscle I’ve got. You can’t change what you are, ‘Renzo.”

But Lorenzo had begged and begged and begged, and finally Filippo relented. He helped him plan a con that would set Lorenzo and Estevan up with the money they’d need to buy berths aboard a ship and sail for the horizon.

He and Estevan slipped out the next evening and spent some purloined silver lira to stay the night in a little inn at the airdocks. There they laughed and plotted, telling each other all they were going to do with their new life. Estevan was going to become a merchant captain, with his own skyship, while Lorenzo was destined to be an explorer like Jacopo Zampa. They went to bed, their hearts full of hope and their heads full of dreams of flying the great blue in their trusty skyships. They had escaped their lives of crime, free to be whoever they wanted.

Lorenzo had woken in the middle of the night to see Filippo standing over Estevan’s corpse with a bloody stiletto in hand.

“Changed my mind,” said Filippo with a leering grin. “I need you here. I told you—you can’t change what you are.”

He was right.

Filippo became the first soul Lorenzo ever killed. He was far from the last.

“Am I interrupting?”

The familiar voice intruded upon Lorenzo’s reminisces like a ship’s prow cutting through a cloud. He turned to see the cloaked figure of Serafina standing at the rail to his left. One sleeve hung empty.

“Nah,” said Lorenzo. “Just—never mind.” He leaned forward and low, the better to crane his head and peer under the hood. One green eye glinted at him. “How are you holding up?”

Serafina gave a light chuckle. “Well, I’ve been better.” She waved her empty left sleeve for emphasis. “But I’ve still got one arm and one functioning eye. Half my body is even still opaque, so that’s something.”

Lorenzo allowed a faint smile. He had to admire someone who could pay the price she’d paid and stay the course. “For what it’s worth—I’m sorry. Sorry that happened to you.”

She shrugged. “If we reach our destination, I’ll think be able to, erm, rectify the situation. And if we don’t—well, perhaps it won’t matter for long anyway.”

Lorenzo had the sudden, intrusive urge to place a hand over her remaining one. Where the hell had that impulse come from? Instead, he settled for a kind word. “You—you’re a brave one.” For some reason, the words caught in his throat, snagged on some inconvenient scrap of emotion.

Serafina turned toward him and offered what he was fairly certain was a quizzical look, though the hood and the half-missing face beneath made facial expressions a bit hard to read. “New experience for you?”

“What?” Lorenzo scowled.

“Saying something kind about someone.”

Lorenzo growled. “It’s—” He cleared his throat and settled for a nod to convey whatever else he’d been intending to say. A man could only be expected to show so much vulnerability in one conversation. The next thing you knew, people were hugging you. Lorenzo shuddered.

Her smile turned knowing, and she turned away again. The next few moments passed in silence until, to his surprise, Lorenzo found himself speaking up again. “Do you resent him for it?”

“Who?”

Gods beyond, he already regretted asking. It was as though, somehow, that earlier brief moment of vulnerability had left a crack in his veneer through which all his most personal thoughts could escape—a troubling state of affairs indeed. In any case, there was no reclaiming the question now. “Your father. He’s the one who stuck you with that … that gift, curse, whatever it is, right?”

She didn’t answer immediately. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I used to curse his name. Then I learned at least some of the circumstances that led to … to this power. His intentions were good, at least. Even if the results were … less so.”

That was an understatement, if the rumors were true and Salvatore Ventura had truly let the inferni into the world, but Lorenzo didn’t feel the need to point that out.

“Can you forgive him?”

Serafina looked mildly surprised at the question. “I don’t know. Perhaps. Why do you ask?”

Lorenzo frowned at the sky. You can’t change what you are. The memory of Filippo had stirred half-formed questions into being, questions he’d been studiously avoiding since first learning of Giuliano’s abduction. The boy had always been his tether to the man he wanted to be, rather than the man he was. The irony, of course, was that in pursuing Giuliano, Lorenzo had stooped to shameful lows. Armed mutiny, for one.

And murder—

Like Alonzo Diarco, the smuggler Lorenzo had pretended to be in order to gain Serafina’s trust so long ago. It had been an accident. Hadn’t it?

Anyway, Diarco’s blood wasn’t the only thing staining Lorenzo de Montague’s hands.

“No reason,” Lorenzo answered, fingers tightening on the rail.

Serafina seemed to study some distant cloud formation. “I’ll say this: I used to hate him. You’d think I’d hate him more, now that…” She waved her empty sleeve again. “Now that things have advanced so far. But I don’t. When I read his journals, I know he loved my mother and me. And that whatever he did, however misguided his actions, he had us in mind when he did them. That counts for something. I haven’t forgiven him—not yet. But I can imagine a world where someday I do, and that’s a start.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next up: It’s time to reach the Isle of Thieves … and see if everything goes according to plan.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Rome Besieged

The Archangel's Gift: Rome Besieged

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:28:07 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

Subscribe now

Part I

Part II

PREVIOUSLY: Lorenzo and Serafina set out for Venice to find a ship suitable to penetrate the wall of storms around the Archangels’ holy mountain. In the process, Serafina discovered a strange power, inherited from her father, that allowed her to shape the world around her—but only at great cost.

The high-ranking holy warrior Reverend-Ascendant Nicanora Pirossa, acting on the orders of the Archangel Lucial, pursued them—until a breach opened over Rome, spilling inferni into the streets. Rather than continue her pursuit, Nicanora chose to stay and protect Rome.

The mawworm reared from the shattered street, cobblestones tumbling like crumbs from its ten-foot mouth.

The unlucky Knight of the Hearth screamed as those massive jaws closed around his torso and lifted him from the ground. Thousands of yellowed razor teeth clamped shut, puncturing his armor and spraying blood in a fine mist.

The lower half of the poor knight toppled in a wet heap to the street.

“Back!” Reverend-Ascendant Nicanora Pirossa shouted, and then she realized she was talking to an empty street.

She had started the day with six Knights of the Hearth at her back, but now she stood alone in the shattered avenue, breath rasping beneath the press of her gilded helm. In the dim pall of ash-choked daylight, the mawworm loomed over her—a vast, bloated thing with a pallid hide slick as drowned flesh. Those rings of gnashing teeth ground through stone, timber, and flesh alike. The ancient stones of the Via dei Coronari were slick with ichor and filth.

For three days now, the mawworms—denizens of the Third Circle of hell, the embodiment of unchecked hunger—had been her primary foes. They had joined the infernal invasion of Rome a week ago, dropping through the breach and vanishing into the earth before heaving up through cracked dirt and broken vaults, leaving a ruinous spoor of bile and smoke in their wake.

“Hungry, are you?” Nicanora spat, raising her sword. “You’ll not find me an easy meal.”

The monster lunged at her, ranks of teeth flashing in the sun. Nicanora was already diving to the side with a well-chosen song on her lips. It was the Grand Canticle, the governing song of the universe, but with its notes modulated to alter a crucial aspect of the world around her: the air’s temperature. She reshaped the distribution of heat around her, directing all of it to one particular destination. She shivered as the air grew icy, its heat stolen away, but all at once a mighty flame kindled right in the mawworm’s mouth.

The creature roared in pain, belching fire as it writhed, and its voice was the sound of a hundred damned souls in anguish, twisted and bestial.

Nicanora called forth another song to follow up her strike—

Just as a second worm burst from the ground almost directly beneath her. As the creature’s mouth opened wide in terrible exultation, she was hurled aside, along with several tons of displaced cobblestones. She struck the side of a ruined building, her armor shrieking with the impact, the wind driven from her lungs in a daze.

Nicanora, wincing at the pain and struggling for breath, pulled herself onto one elbow. Where was her sword? She couldn’t summon the Canticle, not when she could hardly breathe …

The two mawworms rose above her, hungry and triumphant. And then both gaping mouths swiveled as whatever unseen sensory organs they possessed locked upon some new target—and Nicanora saw then that she was not alone after all.

A knot of Knights of the Hearth, it seemed, had garnered the worms’ attention. They staggered down the street ahead—seven perhaps, bloodied and limping beneath blackened armor, dragging two wounded between them.

Both worms, sensing a more tempting prize than one battered warrior, shifted their bodies with a mighty crunching of fallen stone. The ground shook beneath their weight as they pursued the retreating knights; the grinding of their jaws sent a tremor through Nicanora’s marrow. The monsters closed fast.

Then the street rumbled and a third worm rose from the embattled earth to slither alongside its kin.

A few of the knights turned, lifting swords with weary defiance.

Nicanora found her breath at last. She raised her arms, weaving a swift and silent invocation with her voice in the familiar cadences of the Canticle. The air shimmered—wavered—and then took shape.

Now an entire company of Hearth-Knights filled the street, helms gleaming, shields locked, spears bristling in perfect ranks. An illusion, but a potent one; to infernal senses, the false warriors looked as solid as the living. The first of the mawworms drew up short, slavering jaws clashing impotently, scenting the air with a predator’s hunger. The other two inferni rumbled to a halt beside it. Perhaps they were dismayed by the sudden appearance of more foes; perhaps they simply needed a moment to select from the newly presented menu. In any case, only a second or two passed before they greedily dove toward the illusory knights.

Behind the line of phantoms, the true knights stumbled toward safety.

Nicanora held the illusion steady as long as she could, sweat running cold beneath her mail. The spell frayed at the edges—her will was not inexhaustible—but it every moment she bought was effort well spent. Only when the last of her comrades had vanished from sight did she allow the image to dissolve, leaving the snarling worms momentarily confounded. Nicanora considered facing all three monsters for the briefest instant before conceding that such a course would be suicide, even for an Ascendant.

While the predators’ limited minds struggled to make sense of the scene, Nicanora turned, boots sliding on blood-slick stone, and fled through the smoke.

The makeshift command post was a gutted old inn in the shadow of the ruined Capitoline, known to locals as the Three Harts though its sign was long since blackened to ash. The Conclave had had little choice but to claim it; with the Basilica of the Angels besieged by cinderborn and much of the Curia in ruins, they needed a place—any place—where orders could still be given. Yet there were few left to issue or receive them. The other Conclave members were scattered, tending to the wounded, sealing breaches, rallying what remained of the defenders. Nicanora herself had not stopped here in nearly two days—there had been no time, no breath between the cries for aid. Now her body was beginning to betray her: her limbs felt heavy as lead, her mouth thick with the taste of smoke and blood.

She pushed through the battered doorway and sank onto a rough-hewn bench, letting her back lean against the nearest wall. The great hearth was cold and dark, its soot-caked stones abandoned. The long trestle table lay strewn with torn maps. Nicanora closed her eyes and let her head sink into her hands. Her bones ached.

Only the distant rumble of collapsing stone, the faint cries that rose and fell through the broken streets beyond, gave testament to the slow unmaking of the city she’d sworn to protect. Nicanora sat motionless, hunched on the bench, unable to summon the will to move. Her helm weighed like iron in her lap, her gauntlets streaked with black gore and ash. The world beyond this room felt impossibly distant now, as though she had slipped beneath the surface of dark waters, rendering the surface world distorted and thin.

A figure moved in the far doorway. One of the junior Knights of the Hearth—she couldn’t recall his name, and in her weariness the faces blurred together. He gave a stiff bow. “Your Eminence. Another breach has opened near the old Baths. The south quarter—”

I’m so bloody tired, she thought. Her energy was a commodity long spent, her vitality owed entirely now to energy borrowed from the Canticle. That bill would come past due very soon.

But—angels willing—not yet.

“I’ll come,” she said, her voice hoarse but steady. She reached for her helm, her movements slow but sure, forcing her limbs to obey through sheer will. “Give me a moment.”

The knight rushed off, letting the door close.

It was then that she felt the shift of air, the faintest presence beside her. She stiffened as the room glowed in a way that shouldn’t have been possible with just an empty hearth and a few guttering candles—or even the grandest of chandeliers.

Impossible. Nicanora’s heartbeat quickened. Could it be? It had been weeks since—

“Nicanora.” The voice was somehow both a rumble and a whisper, like the sound of a distant waterfall.

She turned and fell to her knees. He stood there, looking just as he had the first time he appeared to her, when he had asked her to kill Serafina Corso—tall and watchful, wings spread over his shoulders, his gaze unreadable.

“My lord,” she said, with all the deference she could muster in her weariness.

“You chose to remain here,” said the Archangel Luciel. “When you could have pursued the traitor Rafael and his companions. Did you not?”

Why are you asking? You know the answer. “I did, my lord.”

“Why?”

Why does it matter now? “Because Rome needed me. The entire city was—is—under attack. It was my duty.”

His eyes narrowed a few degrees. “Your duty is to the world. Those traitors imperil all the Chosen Isles, not just one.”

“So they do,” Nicanora agreed. “But—forgive me, lord—Rome’s needs were closer.” It was hard to put the abstract threat above the concrete one, not when the crackle of flames, the screams of the innocent, and the howls of inferni rarely left her ears. And when she could no longer hear them with her ears, those sounds still echoed within the confines of her mind. It was easy to speak of saving the world. It was another thing to watch a child crushed beneath a mawworm’s bulk, to pull a dying knight from the rubble and know there was no hope left in him. What was the good of a world left saved if its people were abandoned in the hour of their need?

The Archangel Luciel studied her, his gaze implacable. She fought the urge to shrink away, feeling that gaze flay away her armor, her cloak, and even her flesh. There was nothing prurient in his stare, only cold calculus.

“Rise, Nicanora,” he said after a moment. “The situation has changed.”

She did as she was bade, her breath catching. “Changed? How?”

“The traitors have managed to steal a ship capable of following Salvatore Ventura’s course.” “They have secured his journals as well. There is nothing now to stop them from penetrating the storms and gaining access to Empyrea. Nicanora, they are mere steps away from profaning our sacred mountain.”

Was it her imagination, or was there a note of pleading hidden under the haughty steel of the Archangel’s voice?

“My lord …” Perhaps she was too weary to care, or perhaps the encounters with the worms had left her brazen. In any case, she knew she could never even think the question rising in her mind. “Surely there’s something you can do…” The last time she had questioned him, he had simply said that Rome was the domain of another angel, and he dared not interfere directly. But if the traitors were approaching Empyrea itself—

She expected rage. She had half expected his glory to consume her in his anger. But what happened next involved nothing she had anticipated. As the lights flickered and dimmed, the Archangel slumped in dismay.

“We are bound by ancient laws you cannot comprehend,” he said. “We angels are all-powerful in this world, but when it comes to matters of other worlds, we are powerless.”

“Other—” Questions sprang to mind like weeds. But she flattened them and plucked up the courage to ask the most pressing one. “But the traitors are in this world, are they not? Why can’t you simply—”

“We are … weakened,” said the Archangel. “Do not ask me again.” There was a finality, a door erected of cold steel in his voice, that made it clear she was to press no further. “Do you disobey me, Nicanora Pirossa?”

Nicanora lowered her gaze. Somewhere outside, she could hear distant screams again. “I cannot abandon—”

“Nicanora.” His tone turned suddenly gentle. “You have a strong heart. A good soul. These serve you well. But you act without the full knowledge of what’s at stake.”

“What’s at stake?” Nicanora repeated, a little disbelieving, gesturing vaguely at the walls of the inn and the horrors behind. She dared not show more disrespect that she already had, but how could he imply that, after all she had been through?

He turned the full force of his gaze on her. “It’s time I told you everything.”

“Everything?” Nicanora repeated, feeling her brow furrow.

“Some truths are too heavy for mortals to bear,” said Luciel, and then he did another thing she hadn’t expected, seating himself in the old chair in the corner. Somehow, under his heavenly weight, it seemed a throne. “But I need you to understand the choices before you. And I believe you have the strength not to wilt under its weight. You may sit, Nicanora.”

Nicanora rested again on the bench, feet touching the floor.

“Salvatore Ventura,” said Luciel. “It all comes back to him. What do you know of his life before he became a merchant and an explorer?”

“He was a cantore,” said Nicanora. “I’ve heard all about it from Raf—from former Reverend-Ascendant de Medici.” The name still stung, even with weeks separating her from his betrayal. “Ventura came before the Conclave and claimed to have heard some sort of flaw in the Canticle itself. He presented no proof except hearsay, and the Conclave dismissed him.”

“Ventura was right,” said Luciel.

The three words slapped away the weariness from Nicanora’s mind. “What?”

“Ventura was born with a rare gift,” said Luciel. “An aberration, really. A sensitivity to frequencies beyond the Canticle.”

“What’s … beyond the Canticle?” Nicanora asked, suddenly breathless.

“The world from which we Archangels came,” Luciel said calmly. Nicanora let that statement pass, too surprised to be insolent. “A world much like yours in many ways, but instead of the Canticle, a different song governs creation. A greater one. We shall call it the anti-Canticle for now, because its frequencies would sound dissonant to you. Ventura sought the source of this anti-canticle, and for that reason he made his famous, forbidden voyage to our mountain. When Ventura reached Empyrea, he encountered my . . . sister.” Luciel’s lip twitched. “Romaliel sensed that he was endowed with abilities most mortals never receive, and so she granted him a new power on top of it: the ability to not only hear the anti-Canticle, but to sing it. And because the Anti-Canticle is greater than the Canticle, it meant he could invite its power into this realm to work wonders a mere cantore could never dream of.”

Nicanora gaped, all attempt at deference forgotten. “Why would an angel do such a thing?”

“For her own reasons,” said Luciel. “When he tried to wield the power, however, the damage he caused to the Canticle was … catastrophic.”

Another chill. “He invited the inferni in, is that it?”

“Correct, my dear. The power was too much for him to carry. He was like a child carrying an alchemical cannon, firing it haphazardly into the streets. The power shattered the wall between realities, letting the denizens of a far more terrible plane into your world.” He gestured out the window, where smoke billowed out over the rooftops of Rome. “As you well know, they encroached upon your world with a feral eagerness.”

Nicanora’s stomach twisted. She’d always subscribed to the theory that it had been Ventura who brought the inferni, but to hear exactly how sent white-hot snakes of anger twisting in her gut. She forced herself to think, to recall what Luciel had said to begin this conversation. After all, she still had inferni to fight once this conversation was finished. “What does this have to do with his daughter and Rafael?”

And yet even as she asked it, his words from their first meeting returned, lent urgency by fresh context: Should they succeed in following Ventura’s course, the result will be a catastrophe that makes the war with the inferni seem a mere triviality. Empyrea is left weakened by Ventura’s trespassing. Another such incursion could be the end of everything.

“Empyrea was the focal point of the damage between worlds,” said Luciel. “The blow left the fabric of reality fatally weakened. Another such blow, even a minor one, and this plane of existence—your world in its entirety—will collapse like an arch without a keystone.”

He let that hang for a moment, and Nicanora felt the air around her grow cold, just as it had when she had directed heat at the mawworm. But this time, there was no Canticle spell at work. Just the icy realization of what lay ahead.

“That fate is mere days away if you do not act,” said Luciel. “The traitors are now less than three days from the Isle of Thieves. Once they conclude brief business there, it’s only two more days to the outskirts of the storms surrounding the mountain.” He stood again, wings brushing the ceiling. “And the utter ruin of everything and everyone you have ever loved.”

The wind stank of salt and smoke where the river Tiber reached the edge of the island, falling eternally in curtains of mist to the Abyss below. The docks were in shambles, half-burned, the piers cracked and broken. Once-mighty towers stood like broken teeth against the brightening sky. Nicanora strode toward the waiting skyship, her sword clinking softly at her side. It was a lean, fast lighter, useless in battle but perfect for spiriting her away to where she needed to go. Her hired sailors were already at work loosing the mooring lines. It had been a simple matter to find crew eager to leave the city; she didn’t even have to pay them. Finding an airworthy vessel had been a harder matter, but one of her new crew had claimed to know where a drydocked lighter was being kept, if only someone could cut through the line of hollowkin inadvertently guarding it.

Nicanora had opened up a sinkhole beneath the street to swallow them.

Now, she was halfway up the gangplank when she heard rapid footfalls on the planks behind her.

She turned; it was Knight-Aspirant Bellucci, the messenger who had carried the order to join the fight for Rome weeks ago. She had wrestled with that order, watching Rafael and his companions flee ahead of her, but she had complied in the end.

“Message from the Grand Pontifex!” Bellucci called. “He requests your reason for departure!”

She turned back toward the lighter. “Tell him I have business elsewhere.”

Bellucci stopped a few feet away, hesitated, and added, voice lower, “He says if you leave, Reverend-Ascendant, your rank may be forfeit.”

She did pause then. Briefly. Her eyes drifted east, toward the dome of the Basilica of the Angels, cracked open like a massive egg. Toward the shattered palaces of the Capitoline Hill rising over tightly packed rooftops now billowing with smoke. Toward the ancient aqueducts, now the nesting ground for flocks of harpies.

Toward the wounded city she loved.

She looked back at Bellucci. “Tell him…” She searched for the right words but found them only in her own silence. “Tell him I’m sorry.”

Without waiting for his reply, she stepped aboard the lighter. Her hired sailors acknowledged her with nods as they finished casting off the mooring lines and hauling out the sails.

As the ship lifted from the fractured dock, the wind snapping at its sails, Nicanora drew herself to full height, squared her shoulders, and turned her eyes west.

To Rafael de Medici and Serafina Corso.

To the end of the world.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next up: We catch back up with Serafina and Lorenzo, currently on their way to the Isle of Thieves…

Part I

Part II

How to Swear in Fantasy

Ryan Kunz — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 22:33:55 GMT

Quick, your character just got stabbed in the chest and would really appreciate an appropriate curse to express the severity of his agony! Does he let out a muttered oath impugning the honor of his opponent’s mother? Does he take the name of his deity, Mar’balak’thargra’shag, in vain? Or does he go with a tried-and-true four-letter word?

When it comes to adding flavor to your fantasy novel, a little cursing can go a long way. Here’s the thing, though: you can use all the swears your mother taught you never to use (if that’s your vibe), or you can exploit the benefits of well-salted language without being a potty mouth. I grew up in a straight-laced religious home, and I don’t think my wife has never heard me curse to this day. The first time I said crap, I felt like a video game character unlocking some potent new weapon. For a long time, I avoided any sort of swearing in my books, preferring to just say “He swore” instead.

And yet, at some point I realized a good curse is more than just an exclamation of dismay. It can also supply some much-needed worldbuilding.

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Some of the most famous (and occasionally infamous) examples of cursing in fantasy come from Brandon Sanderson. He tends to go for a fairly PG-13 rating in his books, so rather than employ modern curse words, he lets his characters get creative:

Original art by Michael Whelan for the cover of The Way of Kings.

While these oaths can occasionally get a little corny, they show an understanding of why people choose the curses they do—why certain words become anathema or offensive. Throughout Sanderson’s books, characters employ creative curses based on elements of their world that carry deep meaning, whether the connotation is positive or negative. They aren’t arbitrarily chosen. On the planet Scadrial, for instance, characters frequently utter the phrase “Rust and Ruin!” That simple curse not only tells you a little about the world’s theology but also allows you to glimpse the magic system at work: Scadrial is where the god Ruin once reigned, where metal figures prominently in the way magic works. On Roshar, a world known for its constant hurricane-like “highstorms,” characters frequently use the aforementioned oath “Storms!”

And while storms form a major aspect of the Rosharan environment, you don’t see me hitting my thumb with a hammer and yelling out, “Bad air quality!” (I live in Utah, where the mountains often trap cold, heavy air—along with pollution—in the valley.) So what is it about storms that qualifies their names to be uttered in times of great distress? One could make the case that “storms” aren’t taboo enough to swear about (more on that in a minute), but they still inspire awe, reverence, and fear—an essential theme throughout the series.

Good curses don’t just sound different from ours—they could only exist in your made-up world. They hint at history, religion, politics, and everyday life in the space of a single well-chosen word. When done well, these words are tiny pieces of lore disguised as dialogue.

What makes a realistic swear word? I group curses into one of three categories:

Scatological: For example, sh**. (My mom reads my Substack, guys. I have to keep it censored.) These words refer to bodily functions, which are pretty much the same whether you live in our world or a fantasy world. These are perfectly fine curse words, but other categories are a little more ripe for revealing your creativity.

Anatomical: These words refer to some aspect of the human body (usually, the parts whose functions humans find gross or off-limits). They’re often sexual in nature. Think of the top two “worst” swear words you know. You know the ones. One (a particularly common and versatile one that can be employed as a noun, adjective, and verb) refers to the act of intercourse, while the other is a vulgar term for female genitalia. I’ve seen these aplenty in fantasy literature, but you also see lots of anatomical curses that fall on the tamer side. The characters in Harry Potter are frequently heard to exclaim, “Merlin’s beard!” In my own serial, characters occasionally refer to the anatomies of the holy Archangels in a crude fashion, like “Romaliel’s tits!” or “Palermiel’s holy buttocks!” (I know, I know. I’m intruding into “Storms!” territory here in terms of cringiness. Sue me.)

The interesting thing about the latter curses, however, is that they straddle the line between anatomical and the third category of curse: theological. Anything that invokes religion falls into this category. Making light of serious theological concepts usually constitutes blasphemy—which also makes for great curse words. Hence hell, damn, and various faiths’ taboos against taking the names of their gods in vain—which happen to be some of the most common swears out there. This latter area offers the most potential to subtly flesh out your fantasy world. Short of having your characters stop to hear a sermon, there’s perhaps no better way to allude to your invented religion than having someone stub a toe.

You could offer plenty of other swear word classifications, but however you group the swearing (whether it has to do with bodily functions, sex, or religion), it all has to do with taboo: something you either don't make light of or don't talk about in polite company.

The trick, then, isn’t to invent a random fantasy substitute for an existing swear word. (Looking at you, frak.) It’s to ask what the people in your world consider sacred, shameful, frightening, or disgusting. What do they fear? What do they revere? What would make a sweet old grandmother gasp if she overheard it? If your society worships dragons, “Dragon’s teeth!” might be a suitable blasphemy. If they believe speaking a dead king’s name invites his ghost, then invoking that name in anger becomes taboo. If sailors dread the sea above all else, “Depths take you” might carry the same weight as “Go to hell!”

And if your hero has just been stabbed through the chest, they’ll probably be too busy bleeding to deliver an eloquent speech. One well-chosen oath that feels native to the world will tell your readers far more than a paragraph of exposition ever could.

Did you enjoy this article? You might also enjoy my serial, The Archangel’s Gift, now with parts I and II completed. It’s a Renaissance Italy-flavored story of a thief and a holy warrior who must come together to save their world of floating islands from a demons from another world.

The Archangel's Gift: Grand Theft Skyship

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:58:33 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

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Part I

Part II

PREVIOUSLY: Serafina discovered that her father had somehow accessed a gift from an Archangel, allowing their family to touch a strange power beyond the world’s boundaries. She used it once to save her friends at great physical cost; the gift claimed one of her arms. She hasn’t used the power since, instead focusing on working with Lorenzo to steal a ship so they can follow in her father’s footsteps. They executed a plan, with Serafina pretending to steal a different ship and betray Lorenzo to gain time for their comrade Rafael to steal the right ship…

The plan was supposed to go like this.

“So you’re going to betray me,” said Lorenzo thoughtfully, sipping from another tankard in the dim candlelight of the Broken Wing tavern. His expression was one part shrewd consideration, one part skepticism, and one part Serafina couldn’t quite name.

“Pretend to,” said Serafina. “And put up a very convincing act.”

“And you won’t betray me?”

“No, I already said that.”

“But … why?” asked Lorenzo, wearing a look that was nearly all skepticism now, as though Serafina were doing her very best to convince him that the fountains of Venice flowed freely with aged Vin Santo wine.

“Because …” How to explain it? There were so many reasons, like a cabinet of curiosities, each as unexpected as the last. Because Lorenzo had done what he’d done for love. Because part of Serafina saw the appeal of rubbing dirt in the Spider’s eye. Perhaps even because (loath as she was to admit it) there was still something roguishly appealing about the man, even after what he’d done. But most of all—

It’s because that’s simply not who I am. Because I’m better than that.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Serafina. “But if I hadn’t told him yes, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And I have little doubt he’ll have people watching the Mist Queen. Best not to give him any reason to look at that ship too closely.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because while we’re delivering you aboard the Kestrel, keeping the Spider’s many eyes busy, Rafael here will steal the Mist Queen.”

Lorenzo frowned appraisingly at Rafael. “You’re in on this already?”

Rafael’s eyes shone with a sense of purpose Lorenzo hadn’t seen since Rome. “You’ve already laid the groundwork. Recruited a crew, got the fake papers, applied all the proper bribes. It’d be a shame to waste all your efforts.”

Lorenzo squinted again. “And yet I don’t hear anyone addressing the giant fire-breathing lighthouse in the room.”

Serafina smiled, looking rather pleased with herself. She turned to Aurelio. As usual, the hired hand had been sitting quietly, soaking in the conversation rather than contributing. “Your man here has a particular liking for powder and explosions, does he not?”

Lorenzo gave Aurelio a questioning look.

“I don’t think we can just … blow up the lighthouse,” said Aurelio with both eagerness and disappointment, as though his sense of logic were just catching up with his elation at the possibility. “It’s one thing to blow the rudders of the ships on patrol, Lorenzo. It’s another to—”

“No, we won’t touch the lighthouse itself,” said Lorenzo as understanding bloomed, swinging his gaze to rest on Serafina. “The smuggler tunnels.”

And Serafina thought again of the map he’d shown her late into one of their planning sessions. Most of the candles had guttered to misshapen lumps, but there’d been enough light for him to point out the subterranean network running beneath the city.

Lorenzo’s smile turned wolfish. “You’re going to place the explosives underground and collapse the tower’s foundation.”

Serafina matched his grin.

Now, on the deck of the Kestrel:

Two dead men lay at Lorenzo’s feet: both of Marcello’s guards. Dr. Corvamori, in his plague mask, lay moaning and bleeding on the deck. Another man, Federigo, would be dead at any moment. That particular fool was all flash and fire; strip him of his flaming sword and he was little more than an empty suit.

Next to him, Serafina danced with Bianca in a whirl of blades. Serafina too was winning; Bianca was more of a viper than Lorenzo had ever been, preferring to strike swiftly and melt into the shadows. She had never had the aptitude for a prolonged fight. And that was exactly what Serafina was giving her.

Marcello skulked behind the mast, ever a man who feared to get his hands dirty. His pistol was emptied; the shot meant for Lorenzo was now lodged somewhere in Dr. Corvamori’s thigh.

And beyond them all, the Mist Queen glided out of the harbor, easy as you please. The lighthouse was still standing, for the moment at least, but Lorenzo trusted Aurelio where good money was involved. He’d blow the ground from beneath the lighthouse in moments, and then the Mist Queen would be clear.

Lorenzo didn’t have much time to reflect further upon the plan, though. Federigo, clumsy as he might be, was keeping him busy. Well, not for long though—Federigo took a false step, his boot catching on a raised plank. His eyes went wide for just an instant as it occurred to him exactly what his mistake would cost him. It was a moment’s faltering, a moment’s realization—and a moment for his own former sword to cleave a burning path right through his neck.

And not a moment too soon, either. For that was when, under the measured crackling of flames from his blade, Lorenzo heard the faint whine of a wheellock pistol being cranked. By the time Federigo’s head bounced to the deck, Lorenzo was already pivoting to face Dr. Corvamori, who had pulled himself up to aim a pistol at Lorenzo. He kicked the pistol from the man’s hand—but of course that was just a feint to divert Lorenzo from the tiny glass orb in his other hand, where a wick had burned nearly down to a stump—

Lorenzo snatched the orb and wrenched the plague mask upward, revealing the doctor’s stubbled black jaw. He stuffed the orb into the mask’s great leathery beak and then let it fall back into place over the man’s face.

There came a pop. Faint tendrils of greenish gas escaped the seams of the plague mask … and the doctor slumped.

Lorenzo turned to Serafina, intending to aid her against Bianca, but the latter woman was already throwing herself off the side of the ship, ball gown ballooning around her as she fell. Lorenzo reached the rail in time to see her land in a roll on a wooden platform ten feet or so down the cliff face and disappear through a door bolted to the rock.

Serafina joined him at the rail, looking distinctly disappointed. “I almost had her,” she lamented, thumbing the alchemical catch to shut off the flaming blade.

“Well, she was never one to prolong a relationship,” Lorenzo murmured.

He heard a scuffling sound and turned back to see Marcello trying to pull himself upright, only to stumble on Federigo’s blood and fall onto his back, gasping as the wind was driven from his chest. Chuckling to himself, Lorenzo glanced at the Mist Queen, still making her way serenely from the harbor. To anyone on shore—and there remained thousands on shore, crowding the docks like ants as the Passing revelry continued unabated—there might not be anything amiss, just the Doge’s prized ship leaving on its maiden voyage. But there on the forecastle stood a familiar figure in blue cantore robes, waving at Lorenzo.

“Good old Rafael,” said Lorenzo. “You know, I’m almost beginning to like him.”

He felt a familiar rush, that feeling when a job came to its expected resolution, no matter how many detours Lady Fate forced him to take along the way. In moments, the Mist Queen would pull alongside Kestrel, allow Serafina and Lorenzo to board—the Black Armada ships on patrol would already have their aetheric rudders disabled thanks to Lorenzo’s careful ministrations—and then they’d all make their way from the harbor. Lorenzo de Montague had never cared much for the stories people told of him, but not one of them had been earned lightly. He was a professional, after all, and he would not be standing here today if he’d allowed the odd complication to stand in his way. He sometimes even—

“He’s not waving at us,” said Serafina.

Lorenzo looked again, and there was certainly something uncharacteristically frantic about Rafael’s motions. Angels beyond, he was signaling.

And with a cold lump forming in his throat, Lorenzo cast his eyes across the harbor, where the Doge’s new lighthouse still rose above the skyline like the upturned horn of some otherworldly behemoth, its tip glowing with a silent promise of menace.

“The bloody lighthouse,” said Lorenzo, his insides growing colder still. “Aurelio—”

“Ha!” wheezed Marcello, rising to his feet once more, still clutching his chest where the wind had been knocked out of him. “I told you! Didn’t I tell you! The Viper of Venice got clumsy! You forgot the most important detail?”

There was something manic in his wheezing laughter, a note that Lorenzo itched to silence with a swift rap of Marcello’s head against the mast. Lorenzo grabbed him by the back of the head and smashed his forehead against the mast.

Marcello slid to the deck, unmoving.

“We have to call it,” said Lorenzo. “Follow dear Bianca off the edge. I had a halfway decent backup plan I was working on before you walked back into my life; I can take it up where I left off.”

“And abandon Rafael?” Serafina snapped at him. “As soon as that thing fires—”

Lorenzo ground his teeth. “You’ve never been on a job like this, have you? Every man owes a duty to himself.”

He’d be lying if he said he felt good about it. Blame that on one of the most aggravating of the traits imbued in man by his vanished Creator. Some people called that spark of do-gooder impetus a conscience. Lorenzo just called it damned inconvenient.

But he’d come too far, risked too much, given too much of himself, to let it slow him.

Serafina glared at him. “After all we’ve been through … you’re still thinking of your own neck?”

“Signorina, I’ve only got one of them.”

Angels save him from that look of disappointment on her face. Lorenzo peered over her shoulder to where the glow from the lighthouse’s upper window was intensifying. How long before it was ready to fire? Why was he taking the time to argue this? Why not just hurl himself from the deck onto the platform below and be rid of her?

“What? You thought I’d, what, sprouted a heart of gold somewhere? Hate to puncture your sails, but everything I’ve done’s served one purpose and one purpose only.”

She gave him a shrewd sort of look. “That so? Well, the only way out—the only way to your son—is aboard the Mist Queen. You know it, I know it.”

“How do you figure?”

“If the lighthouse is still working, it’s because Aurelio failed. Maybe he was caught. Maybe he betrayed us. Either way, I doubt it would take much to get him to talk. Every safehouse you had, every plan we made, is compromised.”

“I wouldn’t say every safehouse—” But at that moment, Lorenzo froze. Because around the edge of the island, its bladelike silhouette cutting through the mist, came a Black Armada sky galleon: three towering masts, a dozen sails black as night, and enough cannonry to make any respectable scoundrel rue the day he’d ever chosen a life of crime.

Serafina caught Lorenzo’s look and spun. Her breath caught. Around them, the noise of revelry on the docks seemed to stutter as more and more of the onlookers sighted the newcomer and turned rapt attention toward it.

“You said you disabled the rudders of the patrol ships,” she said in a small voice.

“That one wasn’t on the list,” said Lorenzo. Damn you, Aurelio. Lorenzo had truly thought he was paying the man enough. Just went to show how far trust got you.

You trusted Serafina, and she proved trustworthy, insisted an irritating little voice in the back of his mind. He shut the door on that voice and took in the rapidly unfolding complications before him.

Standing on the deck of the Kestrel, currently moored alongside a platform in Venice’s airdocks, he had a fine view of both of the other ships. The Mist Queen was growing nearer with every breath, but the Black Armada galleon was closing in fast, blocking both their paths out of the sky harbor. As long as that behemoth squatted there in the skies, neither the Mist Queen nor the Kestrel was getting out.

And of course, on the other side of the harbor lay the lighthouse, mere seconds from firing, if that white-hot glare at its tip was any indication.

If there was ever a good moment to leap for the platform and make a run for it, this was it.

So why wasn’t he running?

Serafina took in the sight, a coldness swelling in her breast. Death on the shore; death blocking their way out of the bay.

Heart hammering, she could see Rafael clearly on the Mist Queen’s deck, standing beside the helmsman on the quarterdeck as the latter man labored to push the ship to its limits in some vain hope that it could escape the galleon. What did he hope to do? With the Black Armada ship penning the Mist Queen in the bay, the lighthouse would make short work of it.

The Kestrel was safe for now, or so Marcello had promised, but Serafina doubted that protection would hold if the Spider’s people realized they were no longer in control of the ship. How long before the Kestrel fell to either the lighthouse or the galleon?

The trap had been sprung. And at that moment, the lighthouse fired.

It began as a warping in the air, a slithering of superheated wind. Then the light blazing at the apex of the tower flashed, and a blade of pure light sliced across the bay toward the Mist Queen.

What Serafina did next was neither a conscious decision nor purely instinct but born somewhere in the no-man’s land between, an impulse forged from years of defensive reflex and a deep-rooted sense that this was the right thing to do. The only thing to do.

So she reached for something she’d never intended to touch again.

She was singing before the lighthouse had even fired, while the air in the bay was still crackling with latent energy, like the last hints of a storm. She sang the forbidden song her father’s long-ago voyage had granted her access to, touching that power that had nearly killed her once before. She sang, breaking past the Grand Canticle that governed the universe and reaching for that unknown current of will and order beyond.

The light blazed across the bay…

But at the last moment, the light bent. Instead of arcing across the bay like God’s own sword to behead the Mist Queen, it swung and struck the Black Armada vessel instead. Masts shattered, sails burned—and suddenly the galleon was foundering, tipping to one side as one leviathan’s breath cask burst from the heat. Serafina could hear the cries of terrified sailors—

And then she heard no more.

She awoke slowly to the creaking of wood and rope, to blue skies and rippling clouds ahead.

“She’s awake, Captain.” She didn’t recognize the voice.

Serafina blinked as several hazy shapes stood over her. One bent down, inspecting her. “Angels beyond,” came the whisper. “Oh, angels.”

“Hush,” said the other voice. This one she recognized. “Don’t scare her.” A little louder: “Serafina, can you hear me?”

She didn’t recall him ever calling her by name before. “L-lorenzo?”

“Aye, that’s me. No—don’t get up. Not yet. Rest a moment. What you did—it took a lot out of you.”

She blinked again; the word was starting to come into focus. She tried again to rise, but Lorenzo gently pinned her to the deck with a boot. “Not yet.”

“You’re still here.”

“Well—like you said, it was the only way forward, wasn’t it?”

“Who was that? Why did he call you captain?”

“Oh, just one of the crew. You remember the crew, don’t you? A lot of scoundrels, picked from the streets of Venice. Hardened scum, the lot of them. Helped Rafael steal Mist Queen.” There was a false jauntiness to Lorenzo’s voice, a veneer over something she couldn’t name. “Somebody has to command this sorry lot.”

“What’s wrong?” She tried to sit up again, and this time Lorenzo didn’t stop her. She pushed herself into a sitting position with her one remaining arm. The motion felt too easy, too light. “Where am I?”

“The deck of the Mist Queen. We’re four leagues out from Venice. The heist was a success, in large part thanks to you. You disabled the galleon. The Mist Queen swung alongside the Kestrel, took us on, and there we were, making for open sky before you could say divine intervention.” He scowled. “You were right about Aurelio. Rafael said he spotted him with the Doge’s guards as they tried to ambush Mist Queen. Rafael had to cast off early, lighthouse or no lighthouse, or be taken.”

“So what went wrong?” Serafina looked around; a dozen or more crewmen—unwashed brigands masquerading as sailors, by the look of them, but she found herself grateful for their presence nonetheless—pausing in their various pursuits to regard her with a mixture of horror and awe.

“Wrong?” Lorenzo’s voice was far too casual. “What do you mean?”

“Your voice, the way you’re speaking to me.” She shifted, trying to rise to her feet. She swayed, and Lorenzo caught her. “What happened?” She blinked again; despite the world coming into focus, there was still something … off about it all. As though the world had flattened somehow, its depth bleeding away. Even as she thought it, she blinked again, closing one eye, then the other.

When she closed her left eye, the world went dark. Her pulse raced.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” Serafina demanded, panic rising like a mythical sea serpent from the depths of the Abyss below. “Lorenzo—”

“Serafina, calm—”

“Don’t bloody tell me to calm down, Lorenzo. Don’t you dare.” She said with cold venom that seeped from her voice a moment later; it wasn’t a tone Serafina could sustain. But still… “Fetch me a mirror, Lorenzo.”

“Serafina—”

“Fetch. Me. A. Mirror.”

Lorenzo turned to the nearest crewman and nodded. “There’s one in the captain’s cabin. Be quick about it. And tell de Medici she’s awake.”

A moment later, there was a new set of footfalls, and Rafael came running with the crewman. His face was pale, and he carried a small steel mirror. “Serafina!” he cried. “I came as soon as I heard you’d regained consciousness. I owe you my life. What you did there—gods beyond…”

Serafina snatched the mirror and held it before her.

A moment later, she sank to the deck, her legs giving out under the shock. She barely managed to hold onto the mirror as she collapsed. Lorenzo and Rafael caught her between them this time, but the deck seemed to sway as she made an attempt to process what she’d just seen:

The right half of her face was the familiar freckled visage she had known all her life. But the left…

The left half of Serafina’s face simply wasn’t there anymore.

She could still feel her skin with her remaining hand, but she couldn’t see it in the mirror. Not with her one remaining eye, for her left eye seemed to have vanished entirely with the socket around it. The skin faded into translucency, just as her arms had been beneath her gloves for so long.

She was half a ghost.

The family curse.

Once again, the bill for the Archangel’s gift had come due.

THE END OF PART II

To be concluded in Part III

Next up: Part III begins with a return to a familiar locale. How does inferni-infested Rome fare after all this time?

Part I

Part II

Death on the Empyrean

Ryan Kunz — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:17:12 GMT

The story takes place in a world of Leanne’s invention. Here’s the basic idea:

The Gifting: This event occurred in late 1815 and affected some people, but not all. They discovered they had the ability to heal, to heat, to cool, to move heavy objects, to do various tasks, some more magical than others. Some gifts were deemed dangerous and the afflicted incarcerated (for their own safety, of course).

This marks the first time I’ve ever played in someone else’s sandbox, and it was an interesting exercise to keep to the constraints of the world while making it my own. I hope you enjoy!

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Official Report from Alphonse Crumb to the Admiralty of the British Empire

To the Right Honorable Lords Commissioners:

I regret to inform Your Lordships that the following report concerns not merely the loss of a rescued man, but also his murder.

On the 14th day of September, whilst conducting our customary air patrol between Aberystwyth and Dover, His Majesty’s Aetheric Dirigible Empyrean rescued a man who identified himself as Silas Finch. He was taken aboard the good ship Empyrean and given the best convalescent care available.

Three days later, he was discovered dead in a most unusual fashion.

Subsequently, Captain Edmund Harcourt requested that I, Alphonse Crumb, investigate the matter. While I would gladly exchange every mystery in this report for a quiet kitchen and an afternoon to myself, I have endeavored to represent the investigation in its entirety with complete fidelity. What follows is an accounting of said investigation, arranged in the order in which the relevant testimonies came into my possession.

Yours in service,

Lt. Alphonse Crumb
Psychometrist, His Majesty’s Aetheric Dirigible Empyrean

Crew Manifest, H. M. A. D. Empyrean

Edmund Harcourt (un-Gifted), captain

Sybil Monroe (telepath), first lieutenant

Alphonse Crumb (psychometrist), lieutenant

Arthur Bell (technopath), lieutenant

Charlotte Bryce (telekinetic), lieutenant

Barnabas Figg (empath), warrant officer

Duncan MacLeod (healer), ensign

Extract from the Log of Captain Edmund Harcourt, Commanding Officer of His Majesty’s Aetheric Dirigible Empyrean

14 September 1818

At six bells in the afternoon watch, whilst proceeding westward under fair conditions, our empath Mr. Figg detected a distressed soul somewhere on the sea below. Upon further investigation, at approximately half past six, we discovered a drifting lifeboat with a single passenger inside. We then descended from an altitude of approximately twelve hundred feet to effect a rescue.

The man appeared little different from any unfortunate soul hauled from the sea. He identified himself as Silas Finch. He was suffering from exposure, dehydration, and exhaustion, though no grave wounds were apparent.

Mr. Finch was placed under the care of our healer, Ensign MacLeod, and assigned temporary quarters adjacent to the infirmary.

16 September 1818

Under the tender ministrations of Ensign MacLeod, Finch’s physical condition has improved considerably, though he remains withdrawn. Our telepath, Lieutenant Monroe, interviewed him on my orders. In addition to the information he volunteered willingly—namely, that he had been a cook aboard the seabound merchantman Perseverance—Lieutenant Monroe was able to detect that Mr. Finch had also witnessed a terrible crime and subsequently fled his ship to avoid reprisal.

17 September 1818

At four bells in the morning watch, Lieutenant Charlotte Bryce knocked on Mr. Finch’s door with an invitation to join the rest of the crew for a meal later that day. When she heard nothing, Miss Bryce attempted to open the door. Finding it locked, she contrived to employ a prybar, eventually managing to gain access to the room.

Inside, she found a ghastly sight: Mr. Finch was dead, killed in a manner that made self-infliction an impossibility. Some crewmen were overheard to suggest that the ship itself had killed him.

Given the circumstances, I provisionally recorded the death as accidental, pending examination by the ship’s healer, Mr. MacLeod, and review by the Admiralty upon our return to port, though further investigation is warranted.

As it happens, I know just the man for the job.

Personal journal, Alphonse Crumb

17 September 1818

Captain Harcourt has asked that I look into the matter of Silas Finch’s death. He interrupted me with this request in the middle of preparing a sponge cake in the galley, as it happened. (The cake survived, luckily, unlike our dear departed Mr. Finch.) I bemoan the interruption, though I can hardly fault the captain’s lack of advance warning: it is one of the many discourtesies of murder that it rarely announces itself in advance.

For the Admiralty’s benefit, I shall now endeavor to introduce myself. I am Lieutenant Alphonse Crumb, of Croydon, south London. My Gift is psychometry; by touching objects, I can divine traces of psychic energy that cling to them. Some have called this Gift psychic memory; as a side effect, my ears and brain retain the psychic imprints of words spoken nearby, giving me a perfect memory for conversation.

(I also make an excellent raspberry flan, though the Admiralty has yet to truly engage this particular talent.)

Aboard the Empyrean, my duties include those of the purser and cargo officer, ascertaining the provenance of our cargo and munitions. This is especially useful when it becomes necessary to ensure that adequate baking supplies are brought on board. I am also tasked with guarding against sabotage and theft. And in certain circumstances, my talents are put to other uses, as this report shall indicate.

I shall begin my investigation by reviewing the report of our ship’s telepath, Lieutenant Sybil Monroe, regarding the victim before his demise.

Report of First Lieutenant Sybil Monroe Regarding Interview Conducted with Silas Finch

To Captain Edmund Harcourt:

I visited the subject, Mr. Silas Finch, in the infirmary. This interview occurred at two bells in the forenoon watch on the fifteenth of September, two days before his untimely death. At the time, no other crew members were present. The purpose of the interview was to determine the circumstances that led to his abandonment of the Perseverance and that ship’s current whereabouts.

I began the interview by introducing myself. I initially withheld my status as a telepath, as is standard maritime protocol for such an interrogation under British law (see The Naval Employment of Gifted Persons Act, 1816, Article 4; it should also be noted that my interrogation thus confirmed that he is no Gifted, as telepaths cannot read the minds of fellow Gifted.) Nevertheless, Mr. Finch was initially reluctant to discuss the matter beyond the essentials: that he was a cook aboard the seabound sailing vessel Perseverance, owned by the Mercer Trade Consortium.

“Why did you leave the Perseverance?” I asked. “Did it suffer some sort of calamity?”

I could hear the thoughts he was marshaling for a reply. My Gift is not absolute—some thoughts are louder than others, while some remain utterly opaque to me—but he even before he spoke, I could detect the echoes of tragedy.

“Because if I didn’t,” said he, “I’d be a dead man.”

I urged him to elaborate, all the while listening to the storm of his thoughts. I caught names and scattered images. Little by little, I eased further confessions out of him, supplementing the words he spoke aloud with the words I heard in his head. Thus, I am now able to furnish the complete narrative regarding Mr. Finch’s untimely departure from the Perseverance:

On the night of 12 September, Mr. Finch—the ship’s cook—was in the process of delivering a meal to the cabin of the Perseverance’s captain. He paused, hearing raised voices. No sooner did he elect to retreat so as to avoid a potentially awkward encounter than he heard a cry and the report of a pistol. Mr. Finch saw the captain bleeding on the deck. He did not recognize the murderer in the dark, but he was certain the murderer recognized him. Mr. Finch indicated that he feared for his life. As others rushed to investigate the source of the sound, Mr. Finch ran for the lifeboat and cast himself overboard, determined to put as much distance as possible between himself and the murderer.

“It might have been a rash thing,” he confided in me, “but I knew he’d marked me. If I hadn’t run, I’d be lying next to the captain.”

He drifted on the waves for two days before being discovered by Empyrean.

By the conclusion of our conversation, he seemed noticeably calmer than he had at its beginning. I attributed this improvement to the simple fact that he had at last confided his experience to another person. I regret that the information provided is insufficient to identify either the murderer or the circumstances surrounding the death of the Perseverance’s captain.

Nevertheless, I submit this report in the hope that it may prove useful to Mr. Crumb’s investigation.

Respectfully submitted,

First Lieutenant Sybil Monroe
Telepath, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

Interview Conducted by Lieutenant Alphonse Crumb with Captain Edmund Harcourt, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

(Note: I conduct this interview within the captain’s personal cabin. Captain Harcourt is a tall, thin man with thick red hair going gray, his erect posture and precise accent attesting to his good breeding.)

Crumb: If I may ask, sir, where were you at the time of Mr. Finch’s death?

Harcourt: Surely you don’t suspect the captain of the ship of murder.

Crumb: Surely you don’t expect me to leave any stones unturned, sir.

Harcourt: Very well. I was here, in my cabin. It was late at night, I understand, when the death occurred. I was in my bunk, asleep.

Crumb: Can anyone verify your whereabouts?

Harcourt: Damn it, man. I’m not a suspect. I’m not in the habit of keeping my crew apprised of my every move aboard ship.

Crumb: Of course not. I shall abandon that line of questioning for the moment. Might I trouble you instead, sir, to tell me what you know of each member of the crew?

Harcourt: What sort of information are you looking for, Mr. Crumb?

Crumb: Any information that might be relevant to this investigation. Any predilection for crime, perhaps. Or a tendency toward violence.

Harcourt (laughing): Well, that’s more than one, I assure you. Something I feel as though I’m a prison warden as much as I am captain of the ship. Those with a Gift are rare—though thankfully not as rare as those with two, can you imagine? As such, His Majesty isn’t going to leave a posting vacant for a little thing like a criminal record. As you yourself know, Mr. Crumb.

Crumb: I’d rather not stray down that avenue, Captain, as I do not consider myself a suspect. We all leave indiscriminate youths behind, do we not?

Harcourt: Of course, of course. As for the crew, well—this is strictly confidential, mind you—but for the purposes of this investigation—

Crumb: None but the Admiralty will hear of it.

Harcourt: Good, good. It’s bad for morale if the public learns that its heroes have checkered pasts. Now—where to begin? Figg’s clean as a whistle, but he’s one of the few. Lieutenant Bryce killed a man in a pub, did you know that? Skinny thing, she is—wouldn’t think her capable. Apparently, the man made a pass at her. In any case, he didn’t get up afterward.

Crumb: Do you know the identity of the man she killed?

Harcourt: I’m afraid not. And … let me think. Well, there’s Bell, our technopath. Convicted of mutiny back in India. It was a rather famous case. You’ve read of the Emerald Star, have you not?

Crumb: I have.

Harcourt. Ghastly business. If Bell hadn’t been Gifted, he’d never see the other side of a prison door. And then—let’s see, who else—ah, yes. Monroe. Our resident telepath has never been convicted of a crime, but I heard she had some trouble with the Gifted Registry office. You’ll have to ask her.

Crumb: And MacLeod?

Harcourt: There was that unfortunate business with that merchant consortium. MacLeod and some friends were accused of—shall we say—misrepresenting their business interests. Nothing was ever proven, though his family’s social standing suffered. His father is the earl of Strathearn, did you know that?

Crumb: I did not.

Harcourt: The earl tried to sweep it all under the rug, but that sort of thing’s easier said than done. Which leaves … well, I believe that’s all of the officers, is it not?

Crumb: So it would seem. Thank you for your time, Captain.

Harcourt: And, Mr. Crumb?

Crumb: Yes?

Harcourt: Do find the killer, will you? It’s one thing for crimes to have happened in the distant past. But aboard my ship? That I cannot tolerate.

Personal addendum, Alphonse Crumb

After my interview with Captain Harcourt, I commenced an examination of the compartment in which the deceased, Mr. Silas Finch, was discovered.

The compartment itself revealed little of immediate value. As noted in the Captain’s log, the door was neither locked nor damaged aside from the marks made by Bryce’s crowbar. The offending cot exhibited no irregularities. I pushed it up, then pulled it down again, and saw no evidence of any unusual tension that might have resulted in the unfortunate death.

I therefore turned to the use of my Gift. Objects touched during moments of strong emotion frequently retain psychic impressions. These impressions are not memories in the ordinary sense. I’ve found that a psychic impression is rather like a drunk sailor’s account of events: vivid, emotional, and frequently incomplete.

The first object examined was the cot. First, I detected fear. This was unsurprising, given the sudden manner of Mr. Finch’s death. The second object examined was the deck immediately beneath the deceased. At this point, the investigation became considerably more interesting.

I experienced a brief but unusually vivid impression: a man’s voice, not spoken aloud, but remembered. The words themselves were indistinct. One name, however, emerged repeatedly: Alexander Kruger.

The impression lasted no more than a second, so I immediately repeated the examination. The same name recurred.

Experience has taught me that mysterious names rarely improve one’s day. I considered the possibility that Kruger had been a member of the Perseverance’s crew. Perhaps the second mate, named by Finch as the murderer? It seems a likely conjecture. Unfortunately, we possess no manifest for that vessel, nor any complete list of her company. Only once we reach Dover will we be able to apprehend such a document, and only after writing to the Admiralty, but making landfall would give our murderer far greater opportunity to escape than here in the sky.

Nevertheless, I consider the name significant. The emotional intensity associated with it was considerable. In my experience, objects do not retain impressions of this strength without reason.

Whether this Kruger was connected to the murder of Perseverance’s captain, to Mr. Finch’s death, or merely to some unrelated circumstance, I am presently unable to determine.

I submit this report with one observation: until now, the principal question before us has been whether Mr. Finch died by his own hand. I am no longer convinced that this is the correct question. Rather, I find myself asking:

Who is Alexander Kruger, and what does he have to do with our dead man?

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with First Lieutenant Sybil Monroe

(Note: I conduct this interview within First Lieutenant Monroe’s quarters, which she shares with Lieutenant Bryce. Bryce is not present. Monroe is a woman of middling height and build. Her blond hair, tied behind her head in regulation fashion, is just starting to go gray. She comports herself with the posture of a career Navy veteran.)

Crumb: I thank you for your detailed report regarding your initial interview with Mr. Finch. I found it illuminating.

Monroe: Of course. How else can I help you?

Crumb: First, a name. Do you know of Alexander Kruger?

Monroe: I’m afraid not. Who is he?

Crumb: No one, I’m afraid. You’ve never heard the name?

Monroe: I cannot say I have. Is it German?

Crumb: Perhaps. Are you certain your report conveyed everything Mr. Finch told you, both verbally and otherwise? You never caught the name Alexander Kruger?

Monroe: Never. If Finch knew it, he kept the name well hidden from me.

Crumb: I see. Very well—a new line of questioning. The captain imparted to me some information which I shall continue to keep confidential, but we must examine every man and woman aboard and their prior capacity to commit similar crimes.

Monroe: Go ahead. I’ve never committed a crime.

Crumb: That seems to be consistent with my information. If I may ask, what sort of trouble did you get in with the Gifted Registry Office?

Monroe (chuckling): Oh, that. You’d be surprised how many people in this brave new world of ours, even those who work with the bloody Gifted Registry—pardon the language, Crumb—don’t know the difference between a technopath, a telepath, and a telekinetic. One talks to ships, one reads minds, and one lifts objects with their minds. It’s not a difficult distinction.

Crumb: You were incorrectly registered, then?

Monroe: Yes. The folks at the Registry Office didn’t much take to the idea of a woman telling them they were wrong. Even a Gifted woman. Fools.

Crumb: You have my sympathies. How did you discover this?

Monroe: I had to file a report regarding the loss of several of my crewmates. I needed their Gifted registry numbers on the death certificates.

Crumb: What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?

Monroe: I don’t mind. My previous vessel went down over Kent with nearly all hands lost. Just me and a few others survived. There was a problem with the gas release, I’m told. Evidently, our technopath made some grave error, and the rest is unfortunate history. There was an inquiry; that’s why I had to file the report in the first place.

Crumb: I’m sorry to hear about the accident.

Monroe: Is there anything else? I’ve got duties to attend to.

Crumb: Thank you for your assistance.

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with Lieutenant Charlotte Bryce

(Note: With First Lieutenant Monroe having returned to her duties, I have invited her bunkmate in to answer questions instead. Bryce is a slim, spare woman of thirty or so, with wiry black hair and a thick Manchester accent.)

Crumb: State your name and position.

Bryce: You know me, Alfie.

Crumb: This is for the official record.

Bryce: Oh, aye. Charlotte Bryce, lieutenant. Telekinetic.

Crumb: Do you know an Alexander Kruger?

Bryce: ’Friad not. Who’s he?

Crumb: I’d like to know as well. You were the individual who discovered Mr. Finch’s body, then?

Bryce: Aye.

Crumb: My condolences. Tell me exactly what happened.

Bryce: Captain wanted Mr. Finch invited to dine with the officers later that day. Since I’d drawn the short straw, I was sent to fetch him.

Crumb: What time was this?

Bryce: Four bells in the morning watch. Just after six, I reckon. I knocked. No answer. Thought he might still be asleep, so I knocked again.

Crumb: Still no answer?

Bryce: None.

Crumb: What happened next?

Bryce: I tried the handle. Door was locked.

Crumb: Was that unusual?

Bryce: Not particularly. Some passengers lock their doors.

Crumb: Yet you became concerned.

Bryce: My bunkmate had seen him go in the night before, and nobody saw him go out. So he had to be in there. I just had a feeling, that’s all.

Crumb: So you forced entry.

Bryce: Eventually. Took me a few minutes to find a prybar.

Crumb: And when you entered?

(The witness visibly paled at this point.)

Crumb: Describe the scene you saw upon your entry.

Bryce: His berth had folded shut.

Crumb: Explain for the benefit of the Admiralty.

Bryce: It’s one of the wall berths. Folds down at night, folds back into the bulkhead during the day. Saves space.

Crumb: Go on.

Bryce: Finch was caught … in it.

Crumb: Describe what you saw.

Bryce: He was lying across it, sort of sideways. The berth had snapped closed around his neck and shoulders. Like a trap.

Crumb: Was he alive?

Bryce: Heavens, no. Ruined my day, it did.

Crumb: Indeed; my ideal day involves no corpses whatsoever. I’m afraid we have one on our hands nonetheless. What part of the sight confirmed that he was dead?

Bryce: His neck.

Crumb: Broken?

Bryce: Aye. I don’t think I’m properly describing the situation. It was … the cot didn’t just close. It clamped shut. With violence a cot shouldn’t be capable of. It grabbed him and snapped his neck like a lion catching a—what do you call those horned things in Africa?

Crumb: Gazelles?

Bryce: Aye. Like a lion eating a gazelle.

Crumb: Did you touch anything at the scene?

Bryce: No, sir. I rang for Mr. MacLeod.

Crumb: Did anything else strike you as unusual?

(The witness hesitated.)

Bryce: These berths don’t close on their own. The weight of a person is designed to keep them open.

Crumb: Could it have malfunctioned?

Bryce: Anything can malfunction, sure. But even if it closed on its own, it wouldn’t have had enough force to snap somebody’s neck. It’s like someone invisible was under it, pushing it closed. Or…

Crumb: Or?

Bryce: Like someone was controlling it. We both know who did it, don’t we? It’s got to be Bell. Arthur Bell, the technopath. It’s his job to keep the ship in the air. Works the envelope and the sails. He just puts his hand on the ship, and from there he can control every part of it. Nobody else could have shut that cot without being in the room.

Crumb: Thank you. I will be speaking to Mr. Bell next. But first, I have a few personal questions, if you don’t mind. This is part of the investigation, delving into each crew member’s past for any indication of motive or capacity to commit this crime. You understand, I’m sure.

Bryce: Ah. I was wondering when this would come up.

Crumb: You know of what I speak, then?

Bryce: Aye. Landfall in Bristol. Big sailor in a pub starts leering at me. I politely decline. He doesn’t like hearing no. Later he corners me in an alley. Things get rough.

Crumb: I’m told he didn’t survive the encounter.

Bryce: Idiot took a jackknife to the belly. I don’t regret it. Got into some trouble with the Navy, of course, but the sailor wasn’t anyone important and I was a Gifted, so … well. Call it unfair, but I see the other way—if it hadn’t been like that, no jury would have seen it for what it really was, and I’d have gone to prison for a long time. That all you needed? I’m not ashamed to admit what I did, but I haven’t done it since. Finch was nobody to me, and he never so much as looked at me. I had no reason to want him dead, and no way to kill him. You want someone who mighta actually done it, you talk to Bell.

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with Lieutenant Arthur Bell, Ship-Technopath, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

(Note: I conduct this interview at the ship’s rail while Mr. Bell is engaged in his duties. He’s a wiry, lean fellow, tattoos snaking down his arms. Across his knuckles, more tattoos spell the words “fate” and “hope.”)

Crumb: State your name and position for the record.

Bell: Arthur Bell. Lieutenant. Ship-technopath.

Crumb: Explain your duties for the benefit of the Admiralty.

Bell: I commune with the Empyrean. Keep her in trim. Listen when she complains. Convince her not to shed rivets in bad weather. The usual.

Crumb: The ship complains?

Bell: Constantly. You’ve met the old girl.

Crumb: I have … sailed aboard the ship for some months, yes. I would not say we are intimately acquainted. I have rather an excess of human company, I’m afraid; I have little need to add ships to the list.

Bell (laughs): Then you’ve had the better of the bargain, Mr. Crumb.

Crumb: Let us remain on topic. Do you know an Alexander Kruger?

Bell: Kruger? I knew a Franz Kruger once. German mercenary. Could drink any of my crew under the table. Never met an Alexander, though. Did he kill Finch?

Crumb: It’s unlikely.

Bell: A pity. Well, then. Get to the point, shall we? You think I killed that Finch fellow. Because I’m a technopath, so I’m the only one who could have told that cot to snap him up. Is that right of it?

Crumb: Something like that, yes.

Bell: Well, sorry to rain on your jubilee, Lieutenant, but I was next door in the infirmary all night. Ensign MacLeod can vouch for me. I was—well, I had a bit too much to drink. I’ll go out and say it. So I was in the brig, sleeping it off.

Crumb: You say Ensign Macleod can vouch for you?

Bell: Damned right he can.

Crumb: One more thing. Apologies, but I must intrude upon your past for the good of the investigation. I’m told you were involved in a mutiny over India. The Emerald Star. What can you tell me of that affair?

Bell: What the devil’s that got to do with anything?

Crumb: I’m afraid I’m simply ascertaining each crew member’s capacity for violence.

Bell: It’s past and done. That’s what you need to know. You want to know more, you take it up with the Admiralty. They told me my record was clean as long as I gave them ten years on a dirigible. And here I am.

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with Ensign Duncan MacLeod, Healer, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

(Ensign MacLeod, currently sitting on a stool in the infirmary, is a tall young man whose Oxford accent doesn’t quite conceal the Scottish brogue hiding beneath.)

Crumb: State your name and position for the record.

MacLeod: Ensign Duncan Hamish MacLeod, healer.

Crumb: Thank you for agreeing to speak with me. I will begin by asking if you’ve ever heard the name Alexander Kruger.

MacLeod: Can’t say I have, regrettably.

Crumb: Very well. I’d for you to confirm the alibi of Mr. Bell. He was in the infirmary all night, yes?

MacLeod: That’s correct.

Crumb: Did he ever engage in technopathy with the ship?

MacLeod: Lieutenant Crumb, what a man does with his ship in his spare time—

Crumb: Please do not finish that sentence. What I mean is, did he ever use his Gift to commune with the ship?

MacLeod: Oh. Yes, that. I never saw him do it. You know what it looks like, right? He touches the deck, and there’s this sort of glow. Then the sails move or the spars start swiveling or something like that.

Crumb: So you would know he ever had a chance to order the ship to kill Mr. Finch.

MacLeod: That’s right. And he didn’t. I can tell you that for certain.

Crumb: And there’s one more—

MacLeod: You want to know about my past sins. Aye, Bell told me. You want to know about the affair with the Mercer Trade Consortium. I’m afraid I’m not obligated to say anything to you.

Crumb: Are you aware the Perseverance, the ship from which Mr. Finch came, is owned by said consortium?

MacLeod: I don’t see why that matters. They own a great many ships. Why shouldn’t Mr. Finch’s ship be one of theirs?

Crumb: You’re saying it’s a concidence that a man working for the merchant consortium you once defrauded was found dead aboard your ship?

MacLeod: That’s precisely what I’m saying. Why would I kill him? Assuming you’re right and there was some fraud involved in the distant past, what good would it do me to revisit it? If you’re right and I was guilty, it seems I would want to move past any reminder of the affair.

Crumb: Perhaps so.

MacLeod: Is that all?

Crumb: Perhaps. I may visit again.

MacLeod: Not to offend, Lieutenant, but if I see you again, I hope it’s because you’ve got a broken bone that needs mending. I tire of interrogations.

Crumb: Well, no one undergoes an interrogation for the sheer thrill of it, do they? Good day, Ensign.

Personal addendum, Alphonse Crumb

17 September 1818

At this point in my investigation, I elected to speak with the next member of the crew on my list, a certain Mr. Figg. Familiar with the various dispensations of the crew, I alighted at the door to Mr. Figg’s cabin and knocked. However, I received no answer.

Unlike the situation involving Miss Bryce and the unfortunate Mr. Finch, this alone was no cause for alarm. Mr. Figg, as the ship’s empath, is unusually sensitive to the emotions around him, even for one with his Gift. As such, it is his wont to repose in his cabin when no actively engaged in his duties. It is also his wont to refuse any interaction when not on duty.

However, I knocked again, persisting in my efforts, until at last the door opened to reveal the scowling face of Warrant Officer Barnabas Figg.

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with Warrant Officer Barnabas Figg, Empath, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

(Warrant Officer Figg is a sour-looking, portly man with a penchant for smoking tobacco. The scent of his vice of choice fills his darkened quarters as he faces me.)

Figg: Yes? What is it?

Crumb: I’m terribly sorry to bother you—

Figg: The hell you are.

Crumb: —but you are the last name on my list of interview subjects. I’m trying to ascertain—

Figg: Who killed that wretch we pulled from the sea. I know. Would you leave me alone if I said I didn’t know anything and I didn’t do it?

Crumb: I’m afraid not.

(The subject let out a long, mournful sigh.)

Figg: Very well. I suppose there’s only one way to get rid of you.

Crumb: Thank you.

(Here the subject admitted me into his quarters.)

Crumb: I shall not waste your time. Do you know of an Alexander Kruger?

Figg: Never heard of him.

Crumb. Nor has anyone else, evidently. No one seems to have anything to do with him.

Figg: I envy the fellow, then.

Crumb: Where were you last night?

Figg: I was at Buckingham Palace, giving the King a massage. Where do you think I was? I was right here in my quarters.

Crumb: I’m inclined to believe you. Tell me this: have you detected anything unusual using your Gift? Any emotional anomalies since shortly before Mr. Finch’s death?

Figg: That’s like asking a man at a formal ball if he’s heard any music. There’s no such thing as an anomaly, Crumb. Emotions always run hot. Even the ones you woudn’t think of doing so, like contentment. It’s just the color that changes. And I feel every last one, like sandpaper in my brain.

Crumb: I’m sorry. That sounds unpleasant.

Figg: I’ll tell you this, though. You’re probably looking for something like fear, alarm, that sort of thing, eh? I felt that, not long ago. I can’t hear heartbeats, but I’d be willing to bet whoever felt like that had a heart beating a hundred beats a minute. Scared, they were.

Crumb: Where?

Figg: I’m not a damned bloodhound, but it was … that way.

(Here the subject pointed aft, toward the stern of the dirigible.)

Figg: Wasn’t that long ago. Half an hour, maybe? Maybe they’re still there, loitering about and burning evidence, or whatever guilty parties do.

Crumb: Thank you, good sir. I shall have a look.

Figg: Good. Close the bloody door on your way out.

Personal addendum, Alphonse Crumb

17 September 1818

Following the directive of Mr. Figg, I made my way toward the stern of the Empyrean. Along the way, I passed both Mr. Bell and Miss Bryce going the opposite direction. When I reached the stern, I saw nothing amiss. The sky was a familiar birds-egg blue, the sea a green carpet far below. Clouds stretched along the horizon. The winds were out in full force, rattling the canvas of the dirigible’s envelope overhead without gentleness or care.

I ran my hand along the rail, intent on discovering some clue not immediately apparent. I was rewarded a moment later by a burst of imagery—fleeting but intense. Someone had gripped this portion of the rail with one hand while casting something over the edge.

I peered out over the rail.

At first I saw nothing, but then my efforts were rewarded by a flash, the briefest glinting of light from somewhere below. Something was caught in the lower rigging leading to the ventral sail apparatus—the sails that hang below the ship, in layman’s parlance.

I immediately attached one of the harnesses used for external repairs in the air. One loses much of their fear of heights after a certain time in the service aboard a dirigible, and I thought little of clambering over the side of the vessel, secured by a sturdy line.

I reached the lower rigging and found the object that had caught my eye. It was a medallion of sorts, but I had little time to examine it, because just as my fingers closed around it, I heard a snapping sound and saw the upper end of my safety line falling beside me.

The impossibility of such a sight delayed the inevitable fear for a few moments. The safety line had been tethered to a brass ring, which was still mounted in plain sight there on the rail. I had seen no one come by to unfasten it.

Only then did my heart begin to beat in accordance with the gravity of my situation, a turn of phrase whose irony I certainly did not appreciate at the time. I found myself wishing with more fervency than ever before that I had been allowed to stay in the galley and bake something this morning.

The wind plucked and slapped at me, and suddenly I was extremely conscious of the great fall waiting for me if I slipped. Sweat greased my palms where I clung to the ropes. My stomach bucked and swayed with the motion of the rigging, and my heart beat still faster.

Wrapping the hand with the medallion around the rigging, I began to climb. With one hand clenched around the medallion, I had only one good hand for climbing, but I managed to wrap both arms around the rigging. It was slow going, especially with the wind shaking the rigging with every foothold I was able to gain, but slowly, inexorably, I ascended.

At last I reached the rail and threw myself back over, exhausted. I lay on my back for thirty seconds, during which time an alarmed Sybil Monroe came running, wondering why the devil I was lying there. She thought perhaps I’d had a fit.

I told her all was well, that I had been overcome by a brief swoon owing to the altitude. It happens sometimes, even to seasoned aeronauts.

Back in the safety of my quarters, I finally took a moment to examine the medallion I had risked so much to procure: it was a tiny bronze icon of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers.

And there, on the back, was an inscription:

To my heart

From your loving brother, Alexander

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with the crew entire, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

(Note: I have gathered the entire crew in the captain’s cabin to hear my report. Captain Harcourt conceals his eagerness beneath a professional veneer. Bryce and Monroe are seated together, both looking curious but impatient. Bell cracks his tattooed knuckles, while MacLeod is clearly going to great effort to look bored, as though this whole affair is beneath him. Mr. Figg, at the captain’s request, has deigned to join us as well. )

Crumb: I suppose you’re all wondering why I gathered you here.

Bell: Gotta assume it’s because you figured out who offed that Finch fellow.

(At this, several gazes in the room seemed to sharpen.)

Crumb: That is correct.

Harcourt: Excellent. Well, who is it, man?

Crumb: To understand the who we must first understand the why. We must understand the event that Mr. Finch witnessed aboard the merchantman Perseverance. According to Lieutenant Monroe’s excellent report, Mr. Finch witnessed a dispute between two of the officers, one of whom was the captain, which resulted in the death of said captain. I am still uncertain of the victim’s identity, pending landfall and consultation with the Admiralty, but I feel reasonably certain about the identity of man who killed the Perseverance’s captain. His name is Alexander Kruger.

Bell: That’s the bloke you kept asking us about.

Crumb: Correct.

(At this point, I produced the St. Christopher’s medallion and held it aloft for all to see.)

MacLeod: Where’d you get that?

Crumb: I’m glad you asked. One of you, as I revealed my interest in Alexander Kruger during my interviews, feared I would discover their connection to Kruger, however tenuous. So they threw their brother’s medallion over the edge of the ship. Unfortunately, the winds were against them, and the medallion was caught in the ventral rigging. They must have realized it wasn’t properly disposed of, because they hung around, intending to climb over and rid themselves of it properly—however, that’s when I came along, delaying their plans. Desperate, they tried to dispose of me as well.

(There was a sharp intake of breath from around the room.)

Harcourt: They what? That’s an outrage—

Crumb: No harm done, Captain. The medallion did not name its owner. Had it done so, this would have been a far simpler matter and considerably less irritating. It told me only that Kruger had a sibling aboard this ship. The rest I was obliged to determine by the more laborious method of thinking. So it was fortuitous that in the attempt to kill me, our suspect overplayed their hand. They used their Gift to compel the ship to unfasten my safety line, thus revealing themself as either a technopath or a telepath.

(All eyes turned toward Charlotte Bryce and Arthur Bell, who let out indignant snorts.)

Bryce: What? Me? I didn’t—

Bell: I told you, Crumb! I’ve got an alibi! Ask MacLeod again!

Crumb: No need. I know for certain that neither of you did it.

Bell: But you just said—

Crumb: I know our killer is either a technopath or a telepath. But it’s neither of you. Someone, you see, has been hiding a second Gift. And this was the clue that allowed me to make the relevant connections and discern the identity of our killer.

(Surprise greeted this pronouncement. At this point, with great deliberation, I turned to Sybil Monroe.)

Monroe: Wait—me? You’re mad.

Crumb: Normally, a second Gift is something to proclaim from the rooftops—but not you. Because your second Gift is responsible for the deaths of your entire former crew. You were the technopath who doomed your previous vessel. When did you run into that trouble with the Gifted registry office—when you tried to change your name from Kruger, or when you attempted to erase one of your gifts from the record?

(Monroe was silent, though her face paled.)

Crumb: It seemed odd to me that Finch never recognized the man who killed the captain—it was too dark, youre report said—and yet he seemed certain enough that the killer had seen his face. He knew very well whom he’d just seen kill the captain of the Perseverance, didn’t he? You left that detail out of your report, because it would have implicated your dear brother. And since you and your brother have a close relationship, you couldn’t bear to see anything that might jeopardize his career. So you acted, didn’t you? Later, you saw me going after the medallion you had clumsily tried to discard. You were the first on the scene after I regained the deck, indicating that you had never gone far.

Monroe: I …

Crumb: You don’t know your brother’s motive for murder, but you trust him—and you’re willing to cover up the crime. You used your second Gift to compel the ship to kill Finch, thus preserving your brother’s career. In doing so, however, you’ve doomed your own. Do you deny this, First Lieutenant Monroe?

(There was a long silence. Sybil Monroe glanced around with a desperation befitting a cornered animal.)

Monroe: I—you’re a liar, Crumb. Madness! Utter madness!

Harcourt: I’m ashamed of you, Monroe. You are an officer of His Majesty’s Navy. Bell, Bryce—secure her in the brig.

Personal addendum, Alphonse Crumb

17 September 1818

After Harcourt’s order, a long moment of silence ensued, in which every soul seemed to be waiting for someone else to take action.

As it happened, Monroe was first to do so. She leaped forward, landing on the deck on all fours, rather like a lizard. With her palms in contact with the ship, her intentions became clear.

Before any of the rest of us could act, the ship itself seemed to come alive. Monroe’s newly revealed technopath Gift manifested itself as the planks on the wall warped, shoving a shelf of Captain Harcourt’s books away from the wall. As books spilled like rain and Mr. Figg fled from underneath the falling shelf, Monroe fled for the door.

Luckily, I was prepared for such a rash gambit. I nodded to Mr. Bell and Miss Bryce, to whom I had had a brief conversation before this interview. It is fortunate that telepaths cannot read the minds of other Gifted, or she may have known what was to come. Instead, I was able toI prepare Bell and Bryce for what I suspected Miss Monroe might do and offer a few considerations they might employ.

And employ they did.

Bell and Bryce, technopath and telekinetic, brought the full force of their own Gifts to bear. The door slammed shut. Ropes—concealed in a cupboard—sprang to life and wrapped around Monroe’s ankles, pulling her to the ground. She struck the deck with a curse and lay there while the rope continued to enshroud her in its fibrous cocoon.

She was still cursing at us when Harcourt reiterated his command to take her to the brig.

From the purser’s manifest, H. M. A. D. Empyrean, item 39

Technopathic restraints, enclosed-palm pattern, qty. 2 pair. Iron cuffs lined in boiled leather, each terminating in a locked mitten of triple-riveted plate that sheathes the fingers to the second knuckle and seats a disc of deaf-iron against the palm. Chains run not wrist-to-wrist but wrist-to-belt, keeping the hands pinned at the hips and well clear of any hull timber, line, or fitting. Designed to keep technopaths from touching the ship and therefore initiating their Gift.

NOTE: Used to secure S. Monroe (technopath, telepath). If these devices cannot keep her restrained, perhaps only God can.

Personal addendum, Alphonse Crumb

17 September 1818

And so we come to the resolution of the matter of Silas Finch’s death. It is my hope that we can put this entire sordid affair behind us. After all, the H. M. A. D. Empyrean has duties to attend to. There are skies aplenty to be sailed, enemies to be overcome, heroic feats to be achieved.

And of course, raspberry flans to be baked.

—A. Crumb

THE END

Did you enjoy this story? You might also enjoy my long-running serial The Archangel’s Gift, which also involves both death and airships in equal measure.

The Archangel's Gift: Trust

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:46:57 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

Subscribe now

Part I

Part II

PREVIOUSLY: As Serafina and Lorenzo prepared to steal the Mist Queen, a representative of the Spider (Venice’s biggest crime lord) approached Serafina with an ultimatum: fulfill her debt to him by leading Lorenzo into a trap. She is to persuade Lorenzo to steal a different ship, the Kestrel, which will be packed with the Spider’s men.

Long ago, when the Archangels had wrenched the Chosen Isles from the bare rock of the earth, the angels had somehow—in all their inscrutable wisdom—neglected to provide a series of easily traversable, cobblestone-paved thoroughfares through the rock underneath the island. This, Lorenzo reflected as he squeezed through a particularly narrow cavern opening, was mighty inconsiderate.

Mighty inconsiderate indeed.

He paused, torch in hand, and looked back through the rocky tunnel. A second torch bobbed behind him, carving Serafina’s face from the blackness.

“You’re certain the Doge doesn’t know about these tunnels?” she asked, sliding through the opening Lorenzo had just passed through. With her slimmer build, she managed it with more ease. “Or the Spider, for that matter?”

“Not a lot of people do,” said Lorenzo. “They used to be smugglers’ passages, but they got walled off about … I dunno, fifty years ago? I found them on an old map of the city a while back. Been keeping them to myself for just such an occasion.”

“Well, the secret’s out,” said Serafina. “How long till someone finds the hole we smashed?”

“We’ll be long gone,” said Lorenzo, though his imagination treated him to the sight of an entire contingent of the Doge’s finest guards, along with slavering hunting hounds straining at their leashes, all outside the hole in the wall of the church crypt that had provided entry into the tunnel system. He quickened his pace as much as he could without stumbling on the slick rock floor of the tunnel.

Lorenzo’s boots clomped on uneven stone, while around them—like clockwork counting down the minutes until pursuit caught up—came the steady, echoing drip-drip-drip of water from stalactites. The air was cool and weighted with an earthy scent. Lorenzo fought a vague sense of unease, a sure knowledge that this scheme could easily come crashing down around them. That promise hung there above his head, as sure as the oppressive weight of thousands of tons of rock overhead. He could almost hear the baying of hounds far behind him in the tunnel.

But if the scheme did collapse around him, it wouldn’t be for lack of planning. If Lorenzo allowed himself to laud his own victories, he was quite pleased with all he’d accomplished over the last few days. What remained of his gold had been well spent, securing schedules for Black Armada patrols and buying the loyalty of the desperate miscreants willing to crew their stolen vessel. Not to mention a handful of alchemical explosives. Both Aurelio and Rafael had their parts to play, too: the former would place the aforementioned explosives, while the latter would be in charge of getting the crew aboard once the ship was secured.

All in all, it was a plan to be proud of.

So why did he feel so apprehensive?

The light shone on two passages ahead, one smaller and one wider. He drew forth the map and consulted it in the torchlight. Naturally, the smaller one led where they needed to go. Cursing, Lorenzo squeezed through, wincing as the rock pressed painfully on his still-healing ribs. Serafina, ghostlike, slipped through behind him without a word. Come to think of it, she hadn’t said a word in quite some time.

“Not having second thoughts back there, are you?” Lorenzo wondered.

There came a small noise like a snort from behind him. “Hardly. Can’t say that makes me any less nervous about what we’re about to do, though.”

You’re not the only one. “I’ve stolen plenty of ships,” said Lorenzo with a shrug she probably couldn’t see. Well, he’d stolen two, and neither of them had been as big as the one they currently had their eyes on, but two was more than most people could boast. “Long as your information’s good, we’ll be right as rain.”

Serafina had come to him a few days ago after her visit to the Grand Ducal Bank, reporting that she’d run into a representative of the Spider, who’d given her some inside information: that the Mist Queen would be all but impossible to steal, but the nearby Kestrel would also be en route to the Isle of Thieves, crewed by men who owed their allegiance to the Spider. The Kestrel would be the ship to steal, not the Mist Queen.

Naturally, Lorenzo had had questions. “He volunteered the information freely, did he?” he’d wondered when she told him what she’d learned.

Serafina had hesitated before answering.

“I’m asking you to pay back the man who already betrayed you,” Marcello had told her, there in the bright sunlight of the piazza next to the Grand Ducal Bank. “I’m asking you to see some small shred of justice done in this unjust world of ours and then see yourself on your way to your heart’s desire.”

“That all sounds well and good,” Serafina had replied, “but Lorenzo, whatever else he may be, is no fool. He’ll ask how I came by the information about the Kestrel. What am I to tell him?”

“Tell him you sought out an old associate from the Knights of the Threshold,” said Marcello. “A disgraced cantore, perhaps, who now makes his home within the Spider’s Web. We have a number of those on retainer. You hoped this friend might have information that could be useful in your coming endeavor. And—what exquisite luck!—he came through.”

“I see,” said Serafina, weighing the lie in her mind.

“He told you exactly why the Mist Queen will be so damnably difficult to steal, and why the Kestrel is your only option,” Marcello went on. He pointed through a gap in the Venice skyline, where the Doge’s new lighthouse rose in the sky harbor like a spear of ivory. “The Mist Queen isn’t the only new toy His Serene Majesty is hoping to show off as the festivities end. That is no mere lighthouse.”

Serafina squinted at it. “It looks like a lighthouse to me.”

Marcello’s smile turned condescending. “Long ago, in the ancient world, a great thinker named Archimedes built a weapon that used the light of the sun to strike his enemies. It was rudmentary at best, however. The Doge’s alchemists have improved on the original designs.”

“It uses sunlight?” Serafina couldn’t help herself. “How?”

“The lighthouse gathers the sun’s rays, stores them, and releases them in a focused beam to devastating effect. Its crew has orders to destroy any stolen ships in this manner. Better to make an example of them than see them in the hands of pirates and brigands.”

Serafina couldn’t hide her skepticism. “You’re telling me the Doge is willing to destroy his pride and joy? Sink the Mist Queen?”

“A demonstration of his new weapon is worth just as much as another skyship,” said Marcello. “Perhaps more, if Venice’s potential enemies are watching. In any case, the crew of the lighthouse know not to fire upon the Kestrel. My employer has exerted the necessary pressure to make it so.”

Serafina frowned, her sense of morality chafing against the iron cage of circumstance. “And the lighthouse can’t be disabled?”

“It’s guarded by a contingent of elite ducal guardsmen, including a detachment of cantori on loan from the Divinocracy. Should you somehow manage to defeat all of them, the doors to the lighthouse’s inner sanctum are sealed while it’s in operation. There’s no getting in. You cannot stop the lighthouse from firing. As I told you—the only way you’re getting a skyship out of Venice is at the Spider’s pleasure.”

Serafina let out a low, distinctly unladylike grumble of frustration.

“So that’s your story,” said Marcello. “The bit about the lighthouse, at least, is certainly factual. The rest is up to you to sell…”

Lorenzo kept his eyes on the narrow, flickering path his torch painted on the cavern floor ahead.

“I gotta admit, I don’t much like this either.”

“This passage?” Serafina asked, her voice echoing.

“The plan.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said. I don’t see a better option, do I? But it makes my stomach do a little twist every time I think about how much I have to take on nothing but your word. Trust is like gold. Offer it around too freely, and suddenly you’re in danger of winding up alone in a ditch somewhere.”

He had, at the very least, managed to confirm the function of the Doge’s new lighthouse. A few ducats from his rapidly dwindling supply had pried open closed lips among the Doge’s constabulary, and it seemed people in the city’s employ believed the story, at least. The lighthouse—if it functioned properly, at least—could indeed do what Serafina had said. Lorenzo considered for a moment: what an awesome weapon that could be, if it truly worked. Any sky harbor guarded by such a tower would be impregnable.

But the bit about the lighthouse not firing on the Kestrel? That he couldn’t verify. The gap between what he knew and what he didn’t yawned unnervingly wide, ready to swallow him.

“I don’t like going into a job with information I haven’t verified myself,” Lorenzo grumbled, knowing full well that further elaboration wasn’t necessary. So why did he feel the need to explain himself? “Don’t much like diving off a cliff if I haven’t confirmed there’s someone there to catch me, you know?”

She sniffed. “Oh, you’ve already made your position on trust quite clear.”

And so he had. It had been three days ago, just after she recruited him to help her steal the Mist Queen, and before she’d run into the Spider’s man outside the Grand Ducal Bank. She’d managed to keep her anger and frustration at him bottled up for the sake of the job they had to do, but at the end of a three-hour planning session, when ideas had risen up and been cast aside, emotions running hot as a forge, it had all come spilling out.

“You betrayed me,” Serafina had spat at him, there in the tavern, feeling her face taut with anger. “I’ve managed to keep it to the side, but it’s still there, like a burr in my boot. Hurting with every step. You took advantage of my … well, my trusting nature, and you stole the journals from me. But that’s not what gets me the most, did you know that? Because I know why you did it. It was all for your son. You did what you had to do. Except—was it really necessary?” Her voice rose in pitch and tempo, and she took some satisfaction in the way Lorenzo seemed to shrink back from the heat of her gaze. “You could have asked for help. You saw what Rafael, Rosso, and I were willing to do, to risk, for the first journal. We could have helped you. We could have worked out a way to trick the Spider. Or—here’s a mad idea—we could have copied down the journals’ contents and then just given them the bloody things to you.”

Lorenzo blinked. For a moment, she thought he might have realized his error. That perhaps he could have trusted them after all.

“You’d have done that, huh?”

“Of course!” Serafina’s voice rolled like thunder across the cave walls. “Because that’s what people do when their friends are in trouble! They help!”

“Friends?” Lorenzo couldn’t help but let derision drip from his words. “We weren’t friends.”

“We’d already saved each other’s lives multiple times. That’s even better.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Lorenzo. "

“Exactly,” said Serafina, “because that would have required you to trust us. To take a chance.” There was an unexpected bitterness in her voice that sawed at Lorenzo’s heart, despite his best efforts to cloak himself in a thick mantle of insouciance. “What we’re planning here today—if you don’t trust me, we’ve already failed.”

But that, of course, had been before Marcello had given her his ultimatum.

“So what will it be?” the Spider’s man had asked on that bright day in the piazza. “Will you do as we ask?

Serafina had stood, staring in the ripples of the fountain. He made a compelling case. If she went along with him, she could find the answers she sought and perhaps save the Chosen Isles—all those countless lives—from the threat of the inferni.

She glanced down at the stump of her left arm. At her right, translucent beneath the black glove. The only way you’re getting a skyship out of Venice is at the Spider’s pleasure.

He betrayed me. Led me along. Stole the journals. A memory stung her, a vision of her planting a quick kiss on his cheek after he’d helped her chase down Cosimo di Marco. The way he’d flushed with embarrassment and pleasure. The way he’d played along, like he cared at all. How much had been a ruse simply to get what he wanted? What did Serafina Corso owe him, anyway?

What, if anything, would betraying him cost her in the end?

“The answer is yes,” she told Marcello.

They fell silent again as they traversed the tunnel. It was only a few minutes to a place where the cavern widened enough to make out a junction that branched away into three more tunnels. Lorenzo, recalling the map, led the way without another word and proceeded through the leftmost passage.

After another few moments, a pinprick of daylight appeared and began to expand like the first spark of divine creation in the darkness that the cantori liked to go on about. They came to a narrow ledge overlooking the open sky; far below, Lorenzo could just make out the churning expanse of the Abyss through a veil of mist.

But it was the sight above them that most commanded attention. For the hull of a skyship loomed overhead, tethered to an outstretched dock with thick cables.

From here, Lorenzo could even make out the name stenciled on the hull. Kestrel.

“You got us here, I’ll give you that,” said Serafina, gazing up at the ship. “But how do we get up?”

Lorenzo pointed to a set of handholds carved into the rock, and Serafina’s face went pale. She waggled the stump of her left arm. “Climbing isn’t my strong suit these days,” she murmured.

Lorenzo had already considered that. He fished a rope out from under his cloak and tied it around her waist. The other end he tied around his own waist, then pulled the knot tight so only ten feet or so of slack rope remained between them.

“If you can find decent footholds,” said Lorenzo, “you can manage the climb with one arm. But if you slip, I’ve got you.”

Back in Lorenzo’s younger days on the streets, there’d been a butcher who made soup for the locals by throwing his castoffs and scraps into a bowl. Rumors abounded that it wasn’t just pork and goat and chicken in there; cats tended to disappear when it was soup time, and Lorenzo’s friend Tulio swore he’d found half a human finger once. The look that Serafina now gave the rope looked just like the one Lorenzo had so often seen on people about to eat that stew.

He clapped her on the shoulder, giving her a sardonic smile. “Guess you’ll just have to trust me.”

Serafina didn’t say another word as they climbed. It was only twenty feet, but he could sense her tension, her fear. At one point, one of her feet slipped and she very nearly dangled over the Abyss, but she held on with her one remaining hand long enough to regain her footing.

As they ascended, the topside of the island came into view. Church spires rose like incisors above ranks of red-tiled roofs. The jagged skyline was still half-hidden behind the city’s encircling crenelated wall, which was impervious to all but the waterfalls that poured into the sky at intervals. The sight came with the gradual swell of thousands of voices as the Passing revelry continued.

The rest of the sky harbor came into view too, a floating forest of masts and sails bunched up against the side of the cliffs. The tallest mast, unless Lorenzo was very much mistaken, belonged to the grand skyship Mist Queen. The Doge’s favorite ship was moored several hundred feet away, stationary.

Lorenzo came level with the rail of the Kestrel and peered onto the deck. Despite the teeming masses he could hear in the streets, the deck was deserted. Serafina climbed up a moment later, visibly relieved to be finished climbing. The relief quickly deserted her face, replaced by a look of suspicion.

“No guards?” she asked.

“Not that I can see,” said Lorenzo, throwing himself over the rail on light feet. He drew the Drago pistol. “Keep a weather eye.”

Serafina alighted next to him, untying herself from the harness, and together they stood on the otherwise empty deck of the Kestrel.

Lorenzo gave the Kestrel’s sails a quick inspection, running a mental inventory of everything that stealing a ship required. Setting off was no small job—after the moorings were freed, you had to get to work casting off the sail gaskets and freeing the running rigging. Except the lateen mainsail—best leave that gasketed till the last moment. You had to check that the halyards weren’t fouled, too, and then there was the matter of the leviathan’s breath casks…

He reminded himself that the plan, for the moment, required none of those things, though his aeronaut’s mind rebelled against the notion. He had half a mind to ignore the plan and do as his instincts instructed. All he had to do was—

“Hello, love.”

The voice was silky and horribly familiar; so was the sound of lace slippers on the deck. Lorenzo spun to see a woman in an incongruously ornate ballgown climbing the companionway from down below. Steel glinted in her hands.

“Bianca,” Lorenzo sneered.

More footfalls on the deck: two more people had swung down from their hiding places among the yardarms. Two more terribly familiar faces. One of them spoke a greeting.

“Good afternoon,” said Federigo, holding his flamberge sword aloft and squeezing some hidden alchemical release; his sword burst into flame.

Beside him, Doctor Corvamori, in his wicked plague mask, simply nodded at Lorenzo.

That wasn’t the end, either. Behind Bianca came an unassuming, bespectacled man flanked by two more armed men—one with a whip and an axe, and the other carrying a blunderbuss trained on Lorenzo.

“Welcome aboard the Kestrel, Lorenzo,” said Marcello. He turned toward Serafina. “Thank you, signorina. We could never have cornered the illustrious Viper of Venice without your help. I always knew you’d do the right thing.”

Lorenzo raised the Drago pistol and trained a questioning gaze on Serafina. The bounty hunters each took a step toward him.

“Take him,” said Marcello. “And you should know—my employer has no need to see him alive.”

Bianca lunged first, followed closely by Federigo. Knives flashed alongside the flaming sword.

But none of those blades reached Lorenzo.

Another sword arrived to parry the flaming sword and batter aside the knives. Serafina dove in, planting her heels and driving Federigo back against the mast. The flaming sword spun from his hands, guttering out as it struck the deck.

Serafina took a step back and met Lorenzo’s eyes. They said nothing as they formed up, back to back, to repel the next blows together. Lorenzo reached down to grip Federigo’s fallen sword, grinning as he found the catch to ignite it once more. Flames boiled along its curved blade.

“What are you doing?” Marcello snarled at Serafina.

“This?” Serafina called back. “Just following the plan.”

“This was never—”

“Oh, did you think she meant your plan?” Lorenzo joined in. He had a few more witty rejoinders queued up to hurl at Marcello, but at that moment, both of the guards flanking Marcello came at him at once. He dropped one with a shot from the Drago and met the other with the stolen sword.

“So…” Marcello rounded on Serafina, who was now engaged in a duel with the plague doctor, who had drawn his own blade. The surprise was gone, leaving only cold disappointment. “You chose … consequences.”

“Don’t get too worked up about it.” Lorenzo parried a thrust from Marcello’s remaining guard. “After what you had planned—” Another parry, steel singing off steel. “Taste of your own liquor, eh?”

“But why?” Marcello wondered. He made no move to engage in any physical violence himself. “I made it clear that aligning with us was the sole avenue to success, signorina. The Kestrel—the lighthouse—surely you’re not so foolish…”

Lorenzo spared him a glance to see a look of consternation on his face. Then Federigo came at Lorenzo bearing a new sword from who the devil knew where, and Lorenzo was otherwise engaged. He backed up, alternately fending away both the guard and Federigo, steel flashing in the sun.

“Look!” Bianca cried.

From somewhere to the side of him, Lorenzo heard Marcello swear as he saw what Lorenzo guessed he must be seeing. Lorenzo drove back his attackers for just enough time to glance over the rail himself, and was rewarded by the sight he’d risked this mad plan to see:

A few hundred feet away, the Mist Queen was moving, sails unfurling and mooring lines falling uselessly to the dock.

Good old Rafael. Not a bad fellow, for a cantore.

“I told you!” Marcello called, his voice ringing with sudden triumph. “Ha! Did I not tell you? The lighthouse will burn the Mist Queen before it leaves the bay!”

“Oh, will it?” asked Lorenzo, giving Federigo and the guard his full attention once more. Blades sang against one another.

Marcello’s laugh faltered. “What did you do?”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next: Part II concludes as the heist continues. Things will go smoothly now that Serafina decided not to betray Lorenzo, right?

Part I

Part II

The Archangel's Gift: The Ultimatum

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:02:45 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

Subscribe now

Part I

Part II

PREVIOUSLY: Lorenzo stole Serafina’s father’s journals, intending to exchange them for his kidnapped son. The exchange went awry; Lorenzo still has the journals but not his son. (He stored the books in a bank for safekeeping.) Serafina, though she hasn’t forgiven Lorenzo, recruited him to help her steal a skyship to get to the Archangels’ mountain…

Serafina stood at the edge of a busy piazza, gazing past the dolphin-shaped fountain toward the massive edifice that rose on the far side.

No duke or king dwelled within its forest of marble colonnades, but the power held inside outstripped the reach of both. No angel or god was worshipped underneath its gilded dome, but those who crossed its threshold were just as zealous in service to the thing they worshipped.

It was, of course, the Grand Ducal Bank.

When Serafina had last set foot within its hallowed halls, it had been to receive rather disappointing news: that Rafael de Medici no longer enjoyed the financial backing of his wealthy clan back in Florence. This time, she was certain, her prospects were much more promising.

After all, how hard could it be to retrieve a couple of books from a safety deposit box?

Inside, a familiar sight greeted her: rows of uniformed clerks bent over wooden counters, some conversing with patrons while others weighed coins on scales with the single-minded attention of alchemists conducting arcane experiments. The smells too were the same as the last time Serafina had visited: ink, wax, and metal.

She also remembered the armed guards from before, too: men in crisp doublets embossed with the bank’s coat of arms, each armed with a rapier. They waited in the corners of the room, casting sharp looks at anyone who passed.

Serafina approached the nearest desk. The clerk behind it looked up from his abacus and squinted at her. “May I help you, signorina?”

She withdrew the key Lorenzo had given her earlier that day. “I’d like access to deposit box thirty-seven, please.”

A crease appeared between the clerk’s brows. “Ah—that is to say, er…” He considered her man’s doublet and trousers as though trying to convince himself of something. He eyed her sword with a special distaste. “Is there, ah, perhaps a …” He trailed off meaningfully.

Serafina kept her annoyance restrained. Of course—outside the Divinocracy’s militant orders, it was unbecoming for a woman to expect the same privileges as a man. She sighed and drew out her sword—hilt first, of course, so the clerk could see the sigil embossed thereon.

“Knight-Aspirant, is it?” said the clerk, his tone shifting. His back straightened. Suddenly, in his eyes, Serafina was a holy warrior deserving of deference, not some mad woman loose on the town with a blade in hand. Knight-Commandant. But she didn’t bother correcting him; it was highly likely Serafina Corso had no standing whatsoever within the Divinocracy any longer. Of course, the clerk had no need of that information.

“That’s right, and I require access to this safety deposit box.” She held out the key.

“At once, Knight-Aspirant,” said the clerk with a crisp little bow, disappearing through a door behind him.

Serafina waited. Her fingers itched to hold her father’s journals once more. This time, she would never let them out of her sight again.

With the journals once again in hand, she and Lorenzo could plot their course through the storms around the Archangels’ holy mountain. Lorenzo had his own task today: something that involved visiting old associates, collecting on long-forgotten debts, and calling in favors. Pulling off a heist with so little time to spare meant moving big weights with even bigger levers, or so Lorenzo had explained—and Serafina’s limited experience with crime in general meant she had to lean on his experience with such matters.

“Signorina?” The clerk was back, but now he wore a mild expression of concern.

“Yes?” Serafina didn’t like that expression one whit.

“I’m afraid to say the box is empty.”

Serafina’s stomach became a stone. Gone? How?

His look shifted to apologetic. “Have you—perhaps—already withdrawn?”

Oh, silly me. You’re right, I already grabbed some of my most valued possessions in all the world, but I forgot. Curse my woman’s brain. “I’m afraid not,” she said, frowning at him, attempting to harness all the authority of her occupation and throw it into that gaze. “Who emptied it?”

“I’m afraid we have no record. Most irregular, I assure you.”

Serafina felt her frown turn increasingly frosty with little effort on her part. Perhaps it was simply that she already felt cold all over. “May I speak with someone about this?”

“You are, signorina.”

“Someone else. Someone who might know where the contents of that box have gone.”

The clerk flashed a nervous grin. “If there was no record—I’m afraid I cannot help you, signorina. Nor can any of my associates. I bid you good day.”

Serafina took a step forward.

The clerk’s eyes didn’t miss the positioning of her hand on the hilt of her sword. “Please! I hope there is no need for a fuss, signorina. I need only signal the guards.”

Serafina glared at him. She could see other eyes in the establishment shifting toward her. Clerks’ hands darting furtively below counters. The rapier-toting guards each took a single step from their posts in the corner of the room.

“My property is gone,” she told them. “I’m not leaving until I have answers.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the guards advance another few steps.

“And I told you,” said the clerk, with a little more courage now that the guards were clearly aware of the situation, “that I’m unable to provide them.”

One of the guards was at Serafina’s side now. Despite his fine doublet and silken hose, his face was that of a brute, with an oft-broken nose and scars that ran into his shaved scalp. He gave Serafina a leer that suggested he clearly believed he could best her in any contest. Serafina dearly wanted to correct him on that account.

But the other guards were moving too. Serafina was confident she could defeat a handful of hired swords, but would spilling blood on the floor of the bank give the answers she was looking for? Or would it simply close those doors forever?

“Very well,” she told the clerk, ignoring the smirk on the face of the nearest guard.

She hesitated one more time, but then she strode from the building without deigning to give the guards another look.

She kept her composure until she reached the far end of the piazza. She seated herself on the edge of the dolphin-shaped fountain before the fear and frustration could get the better of her. Throughout the square, the Passing festivities were still in full swing. Without a mask, she was in the minority, as brightly colored faces glittered on every side: birds of paradise, leering demons, and snarling beasts. Laughter bubbled around her; music rose to the pulse of lute and drum.

Serafina felt a species apart from the carefree, cavorting humanity around her. How could they celebrate? Disappointment and anguish crushed down on her. First the Venetian Aethergraphic society had gone up in emerald flame; then had come the brutal deaths of Zampa and Rosso. Serafina’s plans were like shifting sands, ever flowing from between her fingers despite her valiant attempts to gather them up again. How much hope could she possibly keep salvaging from a world determined to sabotage her? Serafina Corso always got up, always kept going—but how long could she do so until the ground beneath her simply crumbled away?

She forced herself to consider her next steps. Perhaps Lorenzo had a contact with the bank who could find out where the journals had gone. Or perhaps she could find some leverage—

“Pardon, signorina, but if I may be so bold, you look in need of comfort.”

She looked up to see a young man studying her with concern on his mild features. He wore no festival mask, just a pair of spectacles balanced on his nose. He was neither good-looking nor ugly and carried a satchel over one arm—a messenger, perhaps. One of many who traversed the streets and canals. There was also something faintly familiar about that face, though Serafina couldn’t place him.

“I’m all right, thank you, good signore.” Serafina realized a few tears had escaped her eyes; she wiped them with her gloved hand.

“Would you begrudge me if I offered you some company? I’m afraid my scruples will not allow me to walk away from a lady in such a state.” A slight smile tugged at his mouth as he studied her sword. “Even a lady who looks as though she can handle herself.”

“That’s kind of you, but I really don’t—”

“I insist.” Something in his tone initiated a faint peal of alarm in the back of Serafina’s mind. Her hand flicked toward her sword, but she didn’t grab it yet.

“What is your name?” she asked, wary.

“Marcello,” he said, sketching a little bow. “At your service. And I do apologize for any distress you suffered in there.” He gestured toward the bank. “I imagine the loss of the journals stings quite acutely.”

If she had felt cold all over before, she was positively frozen now. Her sword was out in an instant, its point tickling his chin. A few of the revelers nearby edged away, but otherwise nobody seemed to give any heed to the sudden drawing of a blade. To his credit, Marcello didn’t flinch except to use a singer finger to adjust his spectacles, which had fallen down his nose.

And then Serafina realized where she’d seen him before. “You were in the Spider’s retinue,” she spat. “In the Web.”

He smiled. “Correct.”

“Where are the journals?”

“If you’ll remove that sword point from my face, I’ll give them to you. As a good faith offering before we begin our business.”

“I have no business with you.” But even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. The Spider’s voice spoke from the shallows of recent memory: But the day will come, someday soon, when you will receive a messenger asking for a favor.

She let the sword fall away. “The journals. Give them to me.” On a hunch, she slashed at the strap of his satchel; the bag fell to the cobblestones with just the right amount of thump. She sheathed her sword, then reached down and took it; Marcello made no move to stop her.

The fist that had tightened in her chest unclenched momentarily, and she let out a heavy breath. Pinning the satchel to her chest with the stump of her left arm, she withdrew the two journals with her right.

“They have been neither damaged nor tampered with,” Marcello told her.

“Why give them back?” She tucked them into her own satchel. “And how did you get them in the first place?”

“As for the first question, because we’ve already copied everything of use inside the pages,” said Marcello. “And to answer the second, well—you underestimate the power my employer has in this city if you think he cannot apply the right leverage to open a simple safety deposit box.”

“Why do you want them? What does the Spider hope to gain from what my father wrote down?”

“Not your concern,” said Marcello. “There is a great deal that is your concern, however. Such as how you’re going to pay the debt you owe to my employer.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What did you have in mind?”

Marcello gestured to the spot beside her on the fountain rim. “Mind if I sit?” Without waiting for a reply, he settled down next to her. To all appearances, they could have been a pair of lovers enjoying the festival sights. “We want Lorenzo de Montague.”

Serafina let out a little snort. “Lorenzo? Good luck. The man’s as slippery as a jellied eel.”

“That’s where you come in, my dear.”

Serafina didn’t much like the sound of that. She let him go on.

“Lorenzo has recently become a source of professional embarrassment for my employer,” said Marcello. “Unfortunately, further attempts to bring him in have simply resulted in additional embarrassment.”

“You’re referring to the three bounty hunters who tried to capture him yesterday afternoon?”

“And the two who attempted to apprehend him today.” Serafina blinked in surprise, and he shrugged. “Fear not, signorina, your friend managed again to fight them off. Guido of Ventresca has a broken leg, while poor Bobino the Pursuer has suffered a head injury and the inability to remember his own name.”

“He’s not my friend,” Serafina said, a little too quickly.

“Good,” said Marcello mildly. “Because we want you to bring him in.”

“Me?” Serafina allowed her mouth to settle into a grim little line. “If all your mighty bounty hunters couldn’t get the better of Lorenzo, I’m not sure I could.”

“The difference is that he trusts you. Or at least, as much as Lorenzo de Montague trusts anyone. You’re planning to steal the Mist Queen in two days’ time, are you not?”

Serafina briefly considered denying it, but his information was too specific. “How did you know?”

“Again, you underestimate my employer’s reach. Lorenzo has begun probing the criminal underworld for assets who can assist with the endeavor, and it’s only natural that word would get back to us. But again, fear not—we won’t hinder you. In fact, we want to help you on your quest. We only ask that you persuade Lorenzo to steal a different ship.”

“A different—” Serafina shook her head. “Only a few ships in the city have—”

“A pressure differential built into the leviathan’s breath casks, yes,” said Marcello. “The other such ship is the Kestrel. Which, as it happens, has a crew and a captain who are already in the Spider’s debt.” He chuckled. “Why go through all the trouble of stealing the Mist Queen? The Kestrel has nearly as many guns, and it’s practically already stolen for you. All you have to do is coerce Lorenzo to steal the Kestrel instead, then lead him aboard. We’ll take him, and then you and the Kestrel will sail unhindered to the Isle of Thieves, where the Spider will join you.”

“The Spider? He’s coming?”

“Just so,” said Marcello.

Serafina frowned. “So you’re asking me to lead Lorenzo into an ambush. And in return—”

Marcello shook his head. “You mistake me. This is no bargain. This is an ultimatum. If you refuse, there will be consequences.” He smiled pleasantly as he said it, but there was no missing the dangerous gleam in his eyes behind the spectacles. “But if you prefer to think of it that way, I’ve already given you the journals. That’s what you get out of it. That, and the chance to find the answers you’re seeking. What happened to your father, and how to reverse … that.” He glanced at the stump of her left arm.

She sucked in a breath in surprise.

He smirked. “Yes, I’ve read the journals, too. I know what waits for you. I should add that the Doge has employed certain security measures this year, things Lorenzo will know nothing about, that guarantee that any attempt to steal the Mist Queen is doomed to fail.”

Serafina absorbed that fact. “So the only way I’m getting to the Archangels’ mountain is aboard the Kestrel. The only way I get what I want is with your help. Do I have the right of it?”

“Indeed. I should mention that our representatives have already approached Rafael de Medici with the same ultimatum. He has already agreed. But we need your cooperation more. If there’s anyone who might be able to lead Lorenzo along by the nose, it’s you.”

“You overestimate my allure,” said Serafina.

“I’m a keen judge of such things,” said Marcello, smiling. “So … will we be seeing you, then?”

Serafina opened her mouth, but she closed it just as quickly. She studied a ripple in the fountain, light bouncing off in little shining arcs, her thoughts buzzing like the murmur of the crowd around her. Yes, Lorenzo had stolen from her. But if she could glimpse the logic beneath the layers of resentment she still harbored, she could admit to herself he’d done it for love. If Serafina stripped away her own anger and mistrust, could she truly tell herself that Lorenzo deserved whatever fate was waiting for him in the Spider’s clutches?

“You’re asking me to betray Lorenzo.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’m asking you to pay back the man who already betrayed you,” said Marcello. “I’m asking you to see some small shred of justice done in this unjust world of ours and then see yourself on your way to your heart’s desire.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next up: The heist begins!

Part I

Part II

The Archangel's Gift: The Viper's Task

Tue, 19 May 2026 12:15:59 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

Subscribe now

Part I

Part II

PREVIOUSLY: Lorenzo stole the journals from Serafina, but the exchange went poorly, and his son is still in the clutches of the crime lord called the Spider—who, for reasons unknown, is relocating to the Isle of Thieves. Serafina then rescued Lorenzo from bounty hunters and informed him (somewhat begrudgingly) that she needed his assistance.

“So …” Lorenzo began. “You need my help. Elaborate, if you please.”

Across the table, Serafina and Rafael exchanged glances, their tankards of ale untouched. Lorenzo was glad to see Rafael de Medici back on his feet, even with that rather sallow cast to his skin.

Serafina glanced with suspicion around the room. The Broken Wing tavern was a far cry from the respectable Silent Lion inn, where they had reposed after the destruction of the Venetian Aethergraphic Society. The dark spots all over the floorboards could have been either beer or piss, judging by the smell. The patrons smelled even worse; Lorenzo was willing to bet his Drago pistol that the cumulative baths taken by the people sitting at adjacent tables in the last year couldn’t have exceeded more than three or four, and that was being generous. The place lacked any sort of natural light, with a handful of candelabras carving small refuges of light from the darkness. It was a flea-ridden hole where the most pathetic of drunks could crawl into and never come out.

“Is he going to stay?” Serafina gave Aurelio a sour look. The mercenary sat beside Lorenzo, wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his face as he slurped down his ale.

“He’s with me,” said Lorenzo.

“I see the necessity of a meeting in a place like this,” grumbled Rafael. “It’s out of the way, it’s dark, it’s not the sort of place any officer of the law would be caught dead in—I get it. But can we make this quick?”

Lorenzo grinned. Good as it was to see Rafael recovering, he didn’t mind seeing the former cantore squirm. It was always gratifying to see the high-and-mighty humbled, even a little. “You’re the ones with the information,” said Lorenzo, wiping his mouth and leaning back against the wall. He had already drained his tankard. No need to waste ale when someone else was buying, even when it stank like the devil’s own putrid sweat.

“Very well,” said Serafina. Her look of suspicion, so recently trained on the establishment and then Lorenzo’s companion, settled on Lorenzo himself. He didn’t blame her, but still—sure, he’d suggested the location, but she was the one who’d wanted to talk to him in the first place.“First—you still have the journals, I assume?”

Lorenzo shrugged. “Safe in the Grand Ducal Bank. Wouldn’t want some enterprising thief to whisk them away, now would we?”

Serafina glared. “I’ll need them back. I need your help, but don’t think I’ve forgiven you for taking them.” She sneered a little. “How much did the Spider offer you?”

“I’ll have you know,” said Lorenzo, glaring back, “that no coin was involved.”

“Owed him a favor, then?” Serafina pressed. “What was it?”

”Something like that,” said Lorenzo. “Let’s just say he has something of mine and call it there, shall we? You haven’t told me how I can help you yet. Surely it’s not just the recovery of your property.”

“We need the journals to plan … our venture,” said Rafael, eying Aurelio as one might examine a spot of persistent grease on one’s robe. “I don’t know how much I’m willing to say around … this person. Wait, wasn’t he one of the fellows trying to capture us when we first arrived?”

”Oh, was he?” Lorenzo gave Aurelio a theatrical once-over. “You know, I think he might have been.”

“That’s it,” snapped Rafael, clearly about to stand. “We’re better off finding our own way. Serafina?”

Serafina studied Lorenzo through narrowed eyes. It was clear that some small part of her—perhaps a bit more than that—wanted nothing more than to stand up and walk out of Lorenzo’s life forever. But something still tethered her to him, some desperate want only he could fulfill. When she spoke again, it was with a stiff jaw and flat lips, as though her mouth hadn’t fully agreed to the words coming out of it. “We … we need him, remember?” she told Rafael.

“Me?” Lorenzo couldn’t help but enjoy this. A little.

Serafina faced him. “You’re Lorenzo de Montague, aren’t you?” When Lorenzo didn’t deny it, she went on. “They call you the Viper of Venice. I asked around, after … after we had to leave the Silent Lion. Quite the stories they tell of you. Did you really steal the diadem of Lady Fortescue while she was abed with the Duke of Naples?”

“She was in the privy, actually,” said Lorenzo. “Violent indigestion.”

Rafael frowned. “And did you truly switch the Florentine diamond with a fake?”

“That one gets blown out of proportion,” said Lorenzo dismissively. “It was hardly guarded.”

“There were two armed guards posted at its side day and night while on display,” said Rafael, his voice frosty.

“One of them was drunk, and the other owed me money.”

“And you stole a chest full of Borgia gold,” said Serafina, leaning forward now.

“I suppose most of the stories get that one right,” said Lorenzo, allowing himself a moment to look back fondly on that particular venture. It wasn’t every day you made your escape by lifeboat balloon through a palace skylight, after all.

“So he’s our man,” said Serafina to Rafael. “I don’t like it either, but I don’t think we’ll find someone better.”

Rafael, scowling, gave a curt little nod.

“Better for what?” Lorenzo demanded, his curiosity piqued.

“We need a ship,” said Serafina. “Specifically, we need a ship with a pressure differential mechanism in the leviathan’s breath casks. To get just the right altitude so we can slip underneath the storms around the Archangels’ mountain.”

“Beneath the—” Lorenzo snorted. He glanced around to see if any of the tavern’s other patrons had heard, but nobody else seemed to be paying attention. Probably all too concerned with the bottoms of their own tankards.

Aurelio, who’d been silent up to this point, let out a chuckle. “You’re mad, signorina.”

“Runs in the family,” said Serafina, her arms folded now across her chest—or as much as they could be with one missing past the elbow. The suspicion was gone, supplanted by an attitude of smug calmness. An affectation, but a convincing one.

“And you can’t get these ships from Zampa?” Lorenzo felt his brow furrow. “Say, where is Zampa? And Rosso, for that matter?”

Serafina and Rafael exchanged another look, this one laden with a weight that Lorenzo didn’t like at all.

“Both are dead,” said Serafina.

Lorenzo’s gut clenched. He’d liked Rosso, and Zampa—he was Jacopo Zampa, for the angels’ sake! Jacopo bloody Zampa! “How?”

“That’s a tale for later,” said Serafina, pushing aside her still-full tankard. “But back to that ship we find ourselves in need of—”

“Answer’s no,” said Lorenzo, who’d already figured where this was going. He took a last swig of his ale. “I’m not helping you steal a bloody ship. If that’s all, thanks for the drink.” He gestured to Aurelio, who lifted his hat in a little salute and rose.

“Wait,” said Serafina, displaying a crack in her confident veneer. “Where is it you need to go?”

“Here and there,” said Lorenzo airily. “Places to be. Other crimes to perpetrate. Aurelio, come.”

“You can’t go—” It was almost sad, the look of sudden desperation on her face, cracking apart the smugness like dried earth. And it very nearly tugged at Lorenzo’s otherwise stony heartstrings. Some traitorous part of Lorenzo hated to disappoint her so, maybe even wanted to say yes just to see a very different look on her face. But to commit to her cause would be to betray Giuliano, and that was something he could not do.

“I think you’ll find I can,” said Lorenzo. “Look, Serafina. I like you. You’re a bold one. You faced the Spider without flinching, and there aren’t many who can say that. But what you’re asking—stealing a skyship is something that, under normal circumstances, would make a nice lark, but I’m busy.”

“It’s your son, isn’t it?” Serafina asked, with the air of someone throwing a last-ditch dice.

Lorenzo froze.

“I knew it,” said Serafina, a hint of the previous smugness returning, and this time it felt genuine.

“And why,” he said, trying to recover his own momentum, “do you think that?”

“Back in Rome,” she said. “When we convinced you to turn around and sail back to the island. I heard you mutter, Sorry, Giuliano. I didn’t know who it was at the time. But you just implied that the Spider blackmailed you into stealing the journals. Giuliano—not a woman’s name, so it’s not a wife or lover. Not a daughter. Might be a brother, but my money’s on son.” A slow smile spread across her freckled face. “Am I right?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Lorenzo, fighting a spate of irrational irritation at her perceptiveness. “Nothing you can do for me, or for him. Not unless you’ve got an army on hand to snatch him from the Spider’s clutches on the bloody Isle of Thieves.” The moment the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. Why did he have to mention the Isle? He was getting sloppy. You never told anyone anything they didn’t need to know. Knowledge was every bit as good as coin. Better, sometimes.

“Isle of Thieves?” Rafael let out a huff. “Hardly the sort of—”

“No.” A sudden spark of hope seemed to animate Serafina’s face. “You know, as a matter of fact, I might.”

“Oh, I gotta hear this,” said Aurelio, sitting down again.

“The Isle of Thieves is less than two hundred miles from the Archangels’ mountain, is it not?” asked Serafina, straightening as some new mad plan came together in her head.

“It is,” said Lorenzo, feeling his eyes narrow. And then he caught on. “You want to use the Isle of Thieves as an anchorage. To resupply before the final push into the storms.”

“It’s either that or Porto Blanco,” said Serafina. “Or maybe Messina.”

Rafael gave her an impressed look. “You know your maps.”

“We fought off an infernal incursion on Porto Blanco once,” said Serafina. “The Knights of the Threshold, I mean.” She turned back to Lorenzo. “What if I could give you a way to get your son back? A way to storm the Spider’s fortress?”

“Let me guess—the ship you’re stealing is gonna be a warship,” said Lorenzo, trying not to show that he was beginning to see some flashes of merit in the midst of the madness of her idea. “But you’ll need something with twenty guns or more.”

Her smile unfurled. “It’d need less if it was a fast ship. Maybe … twelve guns?”

“Might work,” he conceded. “Not a lot of ships fast enough to get close to the Spider’s fortress, break a few walls, and get out, though.”

“Oh, certainly.” Serafina leaned forward. “Add in the requirement of the pressure differential mechanism that we need to navigate beneath the storms, and the number of potential candidates available in the city drops drastically.”

“You’ve got a ship in mind?”

In answer, Serafina spread a piece of parchment on the table before Lorenzo. He recognized one of the handbills he’d seen plastered on walls outside. Above an engraving of a majestic four-decker skyship were the words By Order of the Festival Council: On the Final Day of The Passing, Behold the Sky Galleon Mist Queen. “The Doge always likes to trot out his newest ship on the last day of the festivities, does he not?”

Lorenzo raised an eyebrow. He’d met battle-born brutes with smaller balls than the woman who sat across from him.

“It’ll be well guarded,” he said, not to dissuade her, but because he felt a duty to remind her.

“Yes,” she agreed.

“And you’ll have to get past the patrols once you take her.”

“Yes.” She was still smiling.

Lorenzo glanced at Rafael. “This your idea, or hers?”

“I’m afraid my ideas ended with the Venetian Aethergraphic Society,” said Rafael. Lorenzo chose to ignore that faint whiff of bitterness.

Lorenzo looked to Serafina. “You’ve got a plan, I take it?”

“Better,” she said. “I’ll have you.”

Lorenzo gave a snort of derision that sounded, even to his own ears, unconvincing.

“If there’s any job worthy of the Viper of Venice, it’s stealing a skyship from the Doge himself.” Serafina leaned back in her seat, that smugness back on her face. She had him, and she knew it. “So, let me ask again, Lorenzo de Montague … will you help me?”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next up: It’s time to get everything together they’ll need for the heist.

Part I

Part II

The Archangel's Gift: Bounty Hunters

Tue, 05 May 2026 14:44:33 GMT

Hello, readers!

This chapter marks my triumphant return to a weekly schedule. Let’s hope I can maintain it! I’m excited to keep up with Lorenzo and Serafina’s adventures.

A few weeks ago, knowing Lorenzo was about to face off against some of Venice’s most notorious bounty hunters, I asked readers to pitch their coolest antagonists to me. I picked a few of my favorites for inclusion here. Federigo comes courtesy of , while the plague doctor was inspired by . Hope you guys like the way your characters were brought to life, and rest assured this won’t be the last time we see them.

But it wasn’t the only thing I wrote this week. Have you read my May the Fourth piece yet? I wrote an article defending Luke Skywalker’s arc in The Last Jedi. Controversial? Let me know.

And now, let’s return to The Archangel’s Gift…

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

Subscribe now

Part I

Part II

PREVIOUSLY: Lorenzo de Montague stole the journals from Serafina Corso and tried to trade them for his missing son, Giuliano. But the Spider—Venice’s biggest crime lord—betrayed him, and Lorenzo (along with his hired hand Aurelio) escaped the Spider’s clutches empty-handed.

Lorenzo laid low for the next day or so in some hole-in-the-wall inn on the other side of Venice. He had to use most of the last of the money he’d saved to get them the room, and the rest to keep Aurelio from taking off while he was injured. Aurelio was a nice enough fellow once you got past his obsession with things that went boom, but Lorenzo wasn’t naïve enough to think he was sticking around out of some heart-of-gold nonsense.

Lorenzo bandaged his own arm wound. It wasn’t too bad, really. Worse off, though, was the overall plan. His primary plan had been to make a clean trade and walk out the door with Giuliano. His backup plan had involved a daring escape on a voltorro. Both of those plans were shot to the Deep, so he was gonna have to pull off backup to his backup plan with some considerably limited resources.

He didn’t have much in the way of parchment, so he sketched his plan on the wall itself with a stick of charcoal. Much of the room’s stained wallpaper was already peeling, so he’d just tear it off once he was done. He munched on a piece of fried cloudfish Aurelio had grabbed from the market. Lorenzo wasn’t sure the meat seller had been aware of the transaction, but that was Aurelio for you. Aurelio himself was out doing some reconnaissance right now, keeping his ear to the ground and checking up with a few contacts about anything they could give on what the Spider was up to.

As Lorenzo ate, his backup plan took shape in squiggly lines up the wall and along the mold close to the low ceiling. He worked well into the night, till the room’s single flickering candle made his eyes burn and the noise from the street outside subsided into a dull buzz of hushed voices and creaking wheels.

And that’s when Aurelio came in and screwed everything up.

“Lorenzo, boss,” Aurelio said as he threw open the door. “We’ve got a problem.”

“If I were a more eloquent fellow, I’d say we have a plethora of problems,” Lorenzo grumbled in response, busy scribbling notes on the wall. “You got a new one to add to the list?”

“Spider’s headed back to his fortress on the Isle of Thieves,” said Ascalo. “I heard it from a cousin, who has a dicing buddy whose wife works in the Spider’s kitchen.”

Lorenzo’s head snapped around. “He knows I’m coming after him?”

Aurelio shrugged. “Nobody knows why. Fact is, though, he’s leaving today. Might already be gone.”

“And Giuliano?”

“He’s taking him, too.”

The stick of charcoal snapped in half. “Is Giuliano all right? He must have fallen at least ten feet while we were trying to escape. Do we know—”

“Nah,” said Aurelio, “but I can try to find out.”

Lorenzo looked down at the broken implement. His hands were clenched into fists. He looked back at his backup backup, sketched so beautifully across the wall. Art, that plan. Pure art.

With a grunt of rage, he tore a strip of the wallpaper and flung it across the room. He let out a louder grunt, this time of pain, as his injured arm let him know it didn’t much appreciate the sudden motion.

Aurelio waited, chewing on something he’d probably stolen. “So what now?”

It took Lorenzo a minute to get himself together. He looked again at his ruined plan, the scribbles seeming to writhe before his eyes. How long had he been up without sleep? It didn’t matter. He had to find a solution. Had to scrape together a backup to his backup to his backup plan.

But what the Deep did he have left to work with?

Aurelio was gone again the next morning, sent out to gather more information on the Spider’s apparent disappearance. Lorenzo sat alone at the tiny desk in the corner of the room, sketching his plan on an increasingly cramped piece of parchment. It was a cold morning, so he used a poker to prod the coals in the room’s tiny fireplace in a fruitless attempt to coax some flames into existence. Damn it all—shouldn’t have let the bloody fire go out. He shivered.

Then he heard it: not a knock, not even a proper footstep—just the faint, treacherous creak of wood under pressure. It was probably nothing. Old floors creaked, and every floor in Venice was old.

His hand dropped to his belt just in time to realize his pistol sat on a table across the room. No sooner had he come to this rather inconvenient insight than the door came apart in a single, thunderous instant. Wood vanished in a bloom of splinters and fire. And where the door had been now blazed a single column of light like the flaming sword of God.

Lorenzo blinked, squinting. “That you, Federigo?”

There was nothing remotely subtle about the man who stepped through the smoldering doorway. Federigo Abbondanzieri (angels beyond, even his name was a lot) wore a fur coat, a ridiculous little beard waxed to a fine point, and a devil-may-care smile that belonged to someone utterly sure of their place in the world.

All that, and—oh yes—the aforementioned flaming sword.

Lorenzo was fairly certain it was called a flamberge—a long, thin blade with flowing edges like flames. Add in whatever alchemical devilry Federigo was using to make it come alight, and it was quite the impressive weapon.

Less impressive when it was swiping for Lorenzo’s head, though. He dodged to one side, going for his pistol, but before he could reach his weapon, Federigo struck again, blocking his path. He needn’t have bothered; the weapon wasn’t loaded. Federigo swung the flaming sword in an artful flourish. This time, Lorenzo brought the fireplace poker to parry the blow; metal met metal with a ringing clang.

Federigo tutted in disapproval, as though disappointed that Lorenzo hadn’t managed to conjure up a more fitting weapon to repel that ridiculous sword of his. Lorenzo fell into a defensive stance—no way to penetrate Federigo’s guard when the fireplace poker was barely half the length of the flamberge. Sword and poker rang again and again like the tolling of church bells.

“Can I ask”—Lorenzo parried another swipe—“to what I owe”—another parry—“the pleasure of your company?”

“You’re not aware?” Federigo paused in his attempts to decapitate Lorenzo, stroking that awful little beard of his. Lorenzo took advantage of the pause, swinging the poker in hopes of braining his assailant on the side of the head, but Federigo was too quick, pivoting to block the attack.

“You’re still a wanted man,” said Federigo. He moved into an offensive position and drove Lorenzo two steps toward the far wall. “You committed mutiny, after all. And the Spider has officially rescinded his vaunted protection.”

Lorenzo blocked the sword, guts clenching, even as his back struck the wall. Still the flaming sword pressed his poker back toward him; Federigo was stronger than he looked. Huh. Forgot about that whole thing. To be fair, Lorenzo’d been busy working out how to get his son back. How was he supposed to trouble himself with little things like that outstanding bounty on his head?

The muscles of Lorenzo’s arms strained as poker and blade pressed together. Neither weapon yielded, but both trembled as their wielders poured all their strength into breaking the stalemate. Lorenzo was confident he could match Federigo’s strength, but he was less certain about the poker, which was beginning to bend dangerously. So he roared in Federigo’s face and shoved, buying himself a few bare inches to slip away while the blade swept down past his cheek.

Lorenzo scrambled back to his feet, rubbing his singed jaw. “Damn it, I already shaved. Mind if you get the other side, just to keep it even?”

“Lorenzo, my dear man,” said Federigo in a rich, hearty baritone. “How I’ve missed those silly japes of yours.”

“How I’ve missed the way you talk like a duke with a golden scepter up his arse.”

Federigo merely grunted this time, redoubling his attack. Lorenzo met him with the poker again, keenly conscious that there was only one way this could end. His makeshift weapon wouldn’t defend him forever.

“This a dead or alive situation, is it?” Lorenzo said. “Feels like you’re choosing dead, huh? I’d love to discuss the myriad benefits attached to the alternative, if you’ve got a moment.”

Federigo laughed, genuinely delighted. “I’m afraid that deceased is my preferred state for all my bounties.” Federigo took a step closer. He smiled, revealing several gold teeth that winked in the light of his sword. “Less fuss, you see.”

“Oh, sure,” said Lorenzo, eying his pistol on the table. No, the bloody thing wasn’t loaded, but Federigo might not know that. If he was fast, he might be able to snatch it up. But then what? Wave it menacingly until Federigo reconsidered his life choices? “But think of all the crucial character-building opportunities you’re missing out on. Alive’s the way to go, mark my words.”

“So you say,” said Federigo, and his next swing finally knocked the poker from Lorenzo’s hands. The weapon clattered on the floorboards. “Lorenzo de Montague, in the name of His Grace the Duke of Venice, I hereby—”

“Stand down!” came a new voice—lower, gravelly, strangely muffled. For a second, Lorenzo thought it was Aurelio, back to help. That hope dissipated with the next words: “That bounty is mine!”

Federigo turned his head a few degrees, keeping his blade pointed at Lorenzo, as he took in the newcomer.

Lorenzo peered around Federigo to see a figure from nightmares standing on the threshold. With a long, beaked black mask—a plague doctor’s mask—along with a black wide-brimmed hat and matching cloak, he might as well have been a specter of Death itself. Or at least, the fellow who filled in for Death when Death was otherwise occupied.

“Doctor Corvimori,” said Lorenzo. “Surprised to see you here. Figured you’d be gnawing on a dead cat in an alley somewhere.”

The plague doctor ignored Lorenzo, keeping the birdlike mask trained on Federigo. His voice was a low, menacing rasp. “This man is my bounty by the will of the Doge, Signore Abbondanzieri, and no puffed-up popinjay with a glowing knife is going to stand in my way.”

“Do I get a say?” Lorenzo piped up, still standing to one side of the Federigo, with the flaming sword separating him and Dr. Corvimori. “I feel as though I should get a vote here.”

“Shut up,” snarled Dr. Corvimori.

“Aye,” said Lorenzo, noting that Federigo’s blade had dropped a few degrees. “I’ll let you two talk it out, then.” And with that, he darted past the glowing sword, snapped up his pistol in his hands, and jumped through the window.

Glass shattered, cold rushed in, and a moment later he was out in the morning air, boots skidding before finding purchase on the tile roof outside the third story. He was immensely glad to see he hadn’t miscalculated, though the impact conjured waves of pain from his still-healing ribs.

Ahead of him, the rooftops of Venice stretched out in uneven lines of tile and chimney, all angles and narrow escapes.

Lorenzo took off at a sprint. He had taken perhaps three good steps when something hissed past his ear. He leaped from one roof to another, vaulting the narrow gap, and landed with a clatter of tiles on the adjacent rooftop.

A second dart struck the tile just ahead of him and shattered with a soft pop, releasing a faint, sickly vapor that curled upward before dissipating into the morning air.

Ah. That would be Dr. Corvimori’s handiwork, then. Lorenzo banked right, away from the expanding gas, and leaped another narrow gap between buildings. The garish decorations signaling the Passing celebration flashed below: hanging lanterns, brightly colored banners with Archangels' likenesses stitched on them, prayer ribbons shifting in the breeze.

The third dart came from his left this time, shooting right through a banner dedicated to the Archangel Romaliel. He twisted mid-stride, letting it pass, and caught a glimpse of movement along a parallel rooftop—a tall, dark figure draped in black, the long beak of the mask unmistakable. Damn, he’s fast. The doctor moved with unnerving smoothness, keeping pace without ever quite appearing to hurry, as though the chase were a matter of academic interest rather than urgency.

The fourth dart struck closer. This one burst against the tile, releasing a thicker plume, the vapor clinging low for a moment before drifting upward. Lorenzo adjusted his path instinctively, angling away from the cloud even as he ran. He didn’t know what unpleasantness awaited if he inhaled the stuff, and he could go the rest of his life not knowing. He’d heard stories of other fugitives Dr. Corvimori had apprehended. The mad plague doctor, they called him—the man whose charges always came in with agonizing chemical burns inside and out.

What a pair to chase me. One who always takes his marks dead and one who just makes them wish they were.

He heard footsteps on the roof behind him, along with the telltale whoosh of a flaming sword.

“Really,” Lorenzo called over his shoulder, vaulting another gap and landing in a skid that nearly took him off his feet, “all this attention is flattering, but you need to know when to take a hint.”

One more jump. He barely made it this time, tiles clattering under his feet to shatter below. It was no mere alley beneath him now but a full boulevard, complete with throngs of Venetians in their finest Passing garb—silks and puffy sleeves and ornate masks, the murmur of the crowd vying with the din of music. Some of those masks turned upward or emitted curses as the people jumped to dodge falling tiles.

Lorenzo knew he’d made a mistake a moment later. He’d misjudged the distance from this roof to the next and knew he hadn’t a cloud’s chance in the Abyss of making the leap. Instead, he slowed, spinning about and raising his pistol, still counting on his pursuer’s ignorance of its lack of ball or powder.

Dr. Corvimori stood on an adjoining rooftop, separated by a seven-foot-wide gulf, black mask leering in triumph. In Lorenzo’s wake came Federigo Abbondanzieri on the same rooftop, his flamberge’s glow splashed across the eager, satisfied look on its owner’s face.

“You two work out who’s going to bring me in yet?” Lorenzo asked. “Should I host a game of riddles, or would you rather just draw lots? By all means, take your time deciding.”

Then Lorenzo, with a salute, fell backward off the roof.

The waters of the canal below weren’t quite as soft as he’d been hoping; the impact jarred his bones before the water admitted him to its cold embrace. Once again, his injuries issued a formal complaint that he stop indulging in such reckless activities.

He burst above the surface, taking a shuddering breath, and swam for the nearest pier, eliciting a look of surprise from a gondolier. The two nobles in the man’s boat watched as Lorenzo swam past, eyes wide beneath their carnival masks. He managed a look over his shoulder to see the plague doctor and Federico still standing on the rooftop. A moment later, both were gone, no doubt seeking a way off. Federigo couldn’t jump into the water, not without extinguishing his ridiculous sword, and it seemed the doctor wasn’t willing to make the jump for reasons of his own.

“Better luck next time, fellas,” he called up. He had no illusions that he was finished with them, but he was certain that his daring had bought a respite, at least, from their attentions. Best look over my shoulder from now on. As if he hadn’t been doing that all his life.

Lorenzo gripped a vertical wooden post and pulled himself from the water, flopping onto the pier. He allowed two seconds’ rest before getting to his feet again.

In front of him, the Passing festivities were in full sway: shrines to the Archangels had been erected along the street, each one draped in banners and offerings, their painted faces gazing serenely out over a celebration that was anything but. The air smelled of spiced wine, roasted meat, cheap perfume, and the faint, ever-present stench of the canals—though the latter was probably just Lorenzo smelling himself. Musicians hammered out a rhythm with lute and drum, while revelers pressed shoulder to shoulder in a tide of silk, laughter, and masks.

Masks. He needed a mask.

Lorenzo strode up to the nearest reveler, a scrawny man in a gold-trimmed doublet that surely cost as much as Lorenzo could steal in a year. He wore red, laced-trimmed cape and a bronze-colored mask that covered his whole face. Unsteady on his feet, he had wandered a few paces from his knot of friends, perhaps considering vomiting into the canals.

Lorenzo pressed close to him and smiled. The man recoiled at what he surely thought was a sopping-wet beggar invading his personal space, only to stiffen when he felt the muzzle of Lorenzo’s wheellock pressing into his ribs.

“That’s right,” said Lorenzo. “All I need is your mask, friend. I’m sure you’ve got plenty like it back home.” He paused. “On second thought, I’ll take that cloak too.”

The man hastily untied his mask and handed it to Lorenzo. Underneath, he was a pale, pimply man with watery gray eyes. Ugh, I’d wear a mask too. Lorenzo thanked him and donned the mask. Then he knotted the cape around his neck and pushed the man away from the crowd; the poor fellow swayed and toppled into the canal. His companions, who had surely not seen anything other than their friend relinquishing his mask to a beggar and then falling drunkenly into the water, laughed uproariously.

Pulling his new cape over his shoulders and adjusting his mask, Lorenzo melted into the crowd, walking along the canal. The world narrowed slightly, the edges of his vision framed in painted lacquer, and for a moment, he allowed himself the luxury of slowing. Around him, the crowds swelled. To one side, a pair of young men were engaged in a loud argument over a woman in a scandalously low-cut gown, while on the other side, an amorous couple leaned against the wall, their masks pressed up and their lips pressed against each other with such passion that they seemed in danger of fusing together. Just further along, a cantore stood next to a shrine to Veneziel, gesturing importantly as he delivered an address to the crowd, but his words were swallowed by the clamor of musicians playing a bawdy tune across the street.

Damn. Over the heads of the crowd, he spotted a familiar black plague mask. Bastard got down faster than I thought. Lorenzo ducked below the tide of humanity and spotted a drunk slumped against a barrel of wine, his goblet rolling from his outstretched hand. He wore a green mask fashioned into a frowning face; Lorenzo swapped it for his current mask.

He popped up again, looking for the plague doctor. He caught sight of Dr. Corvimori making his way toward him, but as Lorenzo pressed through the crowd, he was relieved to see that the plague doctor didn’t deviate from his course.

Nevertheless, Lorenzo traded masks two more times—once for a silver ducat, and once at knifepoint—until he was satisfied the plague doctor was no longer following him. And of Federigo Abbondanzieri, there was no sign.

A woman bumped into Lorenzo, a goblet of wine sloshing in one hand. Long dark hair cascaded from behind a golden mask. “Oh dear, a thousand pardons, signore,” she slurred.

“No trouble, signorina,” said Lorenzo, pushing her away from him. He was just turning to continue pushing through the crowd when he felt something cold and hard jab him in the midsection. He looked down to see a silvery stiletto tickling his sodden doublet.

The eyes behind the mask twinkled playfully. Veneziel’s balls. I know those eyes. “Bianca? You too?”

Her voice was a precise purr, utterly devoid of the slurring from a moment ago. “How could I pass it up? You’re going for a hundred ducats these days.”

Lorenzo snorted. “Honestly, I think the Doge is overpaying. So … you gonna remove that dagger from my ribs, or no?”

Around them, the crowd milled about, oblivious. To one side, gondolas slid by on the canal, full of light and laughter.

“That depends on whether you come with me,” said Bianca. “Come, Lorenzo, it will be like old times.”

“I’ll pass,” said Lorenzo, gripping her wrist and pulling the dagger away. Her other wrist shoved a second dagger at him; he caught that one, but her knee came forward, pressing into his groin. To his utter surprise, she seemed to have something sharp and metallic beneath her dress, something with the potential to do very unpleasant things to his most intimate bits. “That one’s new.” He released her hands.

“You like it? It’s a brass spike on a leather strap. I’ll ask again, dear Lorenzo—will you come with me, or will you make this difficult?”

“You always show me something new, Bianca,” said Lorenzo. If she noticed the way his free hand roved underneath her skirts, she didn’t let on. His intentions, however, were more practical than carnal. “Unfortunately, you tend to stick with the classics, too.” He pressed a needle-thin razor blade to her throat, just beneath her chin. “Found this in its usual pocket.”

The crowd around them still passed by without noticing, or perhaps they assumed—with Lorenzo’s hand at her neck and their faces pressed close—that they were just one more amorous couple.

“So where does that leave us?” Bianca asked, still pressing the spike to his groin.

“Excuse me,” came another voice, and suddenly there was another woman standing there, to Lorenzo’s right. She too was masked, though the hair spilling from underneath was a deep red. “Mind if I cut in?”

“Scamper off,” Bianca snapped. “Can’t you see—”

“Oh, but I insist,” said the woman, and she shoved Bianca backward into the canal. Only then did Lorenzo see that she had just one hand.

Bianca screamed as she hit the water. She struggled, cutting a comical figure as her skirts ballooned around her. Several passersby laughed, while a tipsy-looking lad to Lorenzo’s right roared, “Signorina! Allow me to rescue you!”

As the young man dove into the canal to save the floundering Bianca, Lorenzo turned to the newcomer, ready to fight. But—unexpectedly—she hadn’t yet drawn her blade. “I suppose you want to take me in too, huh? Days like this never fail to make me feel popular. Well? Do it.”

“Take you in?” She removed her mask. Lorenzo regarded her with expectant curiosity. He’d known it was her—he knew that voice—but he still couldn’t work out why she was here, unless she too wanted a piece of the proverbial Lorenzo pie.

“You! I suppose you want revenge, then.” He sighed. “Look. I don’t blame you, but can we make this quick?”

“Angels above, Lorenzo. I’m not here for your bounty.” She turned to go. “We’d best get out of here, before your ladylove over there climbs back out.”

“What do you want?” Lorenzo demanded, disbelieving. After everything he’d done to this woman, he’d want revenge too, in her place.

Serafina Corso frowned. She seemed to speak the next words with difficulty, as if pushing through her better judgment. “What do I want? Bloody hell, Lorenzo. I need your help.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next up: Let’s learn exactly how Serafina plans to salvage the situation.

Part I

Part II

'The Last Jedi' Got Luke Skywalker Right

Ryan Kunz — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:20:28 GMT

Happy Star Wars Day! For May the Fourth, I thought I’d return to one of my favorite hills to die on. The people who disagree with me tend to really disagree, but read through to the end before coming after me, will you? I’d love to have a good discussion after that.

The Last Jedi was the last Star Wars movie I walked out of feeling excited.1

Finally, Star Wars (a franchise known for its reliance on familiar tropes) had taken a few swings for the fences, trying something new rather than relying on nostalgia (hello, The Force Awakens). The Last Jedi even formed a narrative around the trouble you get in when you’re mired in nostalgia. (It’s a lesson I wish Disney itself had learned, but that’s another article entirely.) One aspect of The Last Jedi I particularly enjoyed was its treatment of Luke Skywalker, which felt fresh, exciting, and ultimately fulfilling.2

Imagine my surprise when I got online and realized not everyone felt the same way.

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The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is

I get it.

I can understand how one might feel frustrated, even betrayed, to see their childhood hero, their vehicle for wish-fulfillment, their youthful symbol of hope, reduced to a grumpy, cynical, sea monster-milking has-been.

But reduced isn’t accurate. The way I see it, there’s no reduction at work at all. In The Last Jedi, Luke’s simply becomes a vehicle for a much more attainable ideal: failing and getting back up again. His arc shows us what each of us must learn in turn: that if we allow it, failure can make us better.

This is much more interesting to me than somebody whose character development peaked when they were twenty and was never challenged again.

Sure, you say. That’s a great ideal to strive for. Makes for some nifty motivational quotes to stick on the office wall. But, you contend, this version of Luke is inconsistent with his character from the original trilogy, isn’t it?

One of the most prevalent narratives I see online is that it’s impossible that the man who once saw good in his father, Darth Vader himself, would somehow devolve to the point where he tried to murder his nephew for turning a little bit emo.

That narrative is, of course, both reductive and simply untrue. Ben Solo wasn’t just a moody teen; he had the stirrings of real darkness in him (the very fact that he reacted as he did, burning the whole school down and murdering the rest of the students, suggests Luke wasn’t wrong about the destructive potential lurking in Ben’s soul).

That doesn’t justify killing him in cold blood, of course. Good thing Luke didn’t try to do any such thing.

From a Certain Point of View

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but this image? It didn’t actually happen.

In The Last Jedi, we hear the account of the school’s final night three times. First, we hear Luke’s sanitized version. Then we hear an alternate version from Kylo’s lips, colored by his own trauma and fear. (That’s the distorted version we see represented above.) Last, we hear from Luke again, this time with a more honest account.

In Luke’s own words:

Snoke had already turned [Ben’s] heart. He would bring destruction and pain and death, and the end of everything I love because of what he will become, and for the briefest moment of pure instinct, I thought I could stop it.

That’s right. Nobody tried to kill anyone. Luke entertained an unworthy, very human thought for “the briefest instant.” It just happened to be a terrible instant with terrible timing and even more terrible consequences.

It passed like a fleeting shadow, and I was left with shame and with consequence. And the last thing I saw were the eyes of a frightened boy whose Master had failed him.

Yes, you say. We all make mistakes, but my mistakes don’t usually involve bringing an ignited lightsaber into the room of a sleeping boy. I don’t buy it.

However, Luke’s actions become more understandable—and more in harmony with his character in the original trilogy—when we consider his motives. Let’s look at that quote again:

[Ben] would bring destruction and pain and death, and the end of everything I love because of what he will become, and for the briefest moment of pure instinct, I thought I could stop it.

Did you catch it? He feared that Ben would bring about the end of “everything [he] love[d].”

If there’s one thing almost guaranteed to provoke Luke Skywalker into action, well-considered or otherwise, it’s threatening those he cares for. It’s both his greatest strength and his most exploitable weakness. Obi-Wan even warned him once that his concern for others could one day be a liability: “Bury your feelings deep down, Luke. They do you credit, but they could be made to serve the Emperor.”

Remember, this is the same Luke Skywalker who once rushed headlong into Darth Vader’s trap because he thought Han and Leia were in danger, despite dire warnings from Yoda about leaving his training unfinished. This is the same Luke who once lashed out at Vader in rage when Vader taunted him about his sister.

And then, thirty years later, we see how Luke’s continued concern once again overrode his reasoning. He foresaw Ben/Kylo destroying the people he loved, and his instinct was to act. Were those actions ill-advised? Certainly. But were they consistent with his portrayal in the original films? Absolutely.

It’s Time for the Jedi to End

Faced with the magnitude of his failure, Luke took a step back for some introspection (and maybe even to do a bit of wallowing, because he’s human).

To some people, this looks like giving up. Would Original Trilogy Luke give up like that? Well, maybe. Maybe not. Here’s what we know:

In Return of the Jedi, when Luke realizes he’s being manipulated by the Emperor and edging toward the dark side, what does he do? He throws away his lightsaber and refuses to fight. He opts out. Essentially, he says, “I won’t play this game anymore,” even if it costs him his life.

That moment is usually read as moral strength (and it is!), but it’s still Luke responding to failure and fear by stepping back rather than pushing forward. He displays a willingness to disengage when he believes continuing would cause harm.

Now apply that to The Last Jedi:

Luke believes the Jedi legacy creates more darkness than it prevents. (Cynical? Certainly. We’ll come back to this.)
He sees himself as the common denominator in Ben Solo’s fall.
So he removes himself—and the Jedi—from the equation.

From his perspective, this isn’t cowardice; it’s the same instinct as before, just scaled up and tragically misapplied. He’s still trying to do the right thing, because that’s what Luke Skywalker does. He’s just trying to prevent further damage. He sincerely believes that if he intervenes, he might make things worse again.

One might reasonably suggest that Luke’s cynicism toward the Jedi’s legacy is also inconsistent with his younger self’s outlook. And maybe it is, though he would hardly be the first person to abandon the idealism of youth.

Such cynicism, however, might certainly be grounded in truth. I’m not saying the Jedi are the villains here, only that I understand why Luke might look somewhat askance at their legacy. After all, the Jedi Order, the guardians of peace and justice for a thousand generations, dropped the ball hard. Let’s review:

The Jedi Order from the prequels became rigid, politically entangled, and blind to the rise of the Sith.
They held tight to superficial policies (like prohibiting attachments) and eschewed time-honored ideals like balance and pacifism.
They helped enable Palpatine’s ascent by serving a corrupt system without questioning it.
Anakin Skywalker—their chosen one—fell and became Darth Vader under their watch.
Nearly the entire Order was wiped out by the clone troopers they were supposed to be leading. (Whoops.)

It’s natural, therefore, that the loss of his Jedi academy might prompt Luke to re-examine the Jedi legacy.3

But of course, Luke doesn’t dwell on his failures forever. Spurred on by Rey, he gets back up again and saves the day in the end, giving the galaxy a symbol larger than any man. The film’s final scene—in which the Canto Bight children act out Luke’s last stand—suggests that the story travels far and wide, giving hope to those who live under the First Order’s boot. In death, Luke Skywalker becomes the avatar of hope and justice that fans everywhere have always believed him to be.

There Are Alternatives to Fighting

It’s a great arc, but does it redeem him for his failures?

That’s a trick question, because I don’t see this as a redemption arc at all. I see it as a continuation of the same arc he began in A New Hope. In his heroic third-act stand on Crait, Luke displays the culmination not only of his own character progression but also the apotheosis of all that a Jedi can become.

Let me explain.

When Rey initially approaches him about fighting the First Order, Luke says scornfully: “You think, what? I’m gonna walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order?”

I’m sure the mental response from much of the audience was, “Yes!” Plenty of people probably wanted Luke to throw a few AT-ATs around and wreak bloody havoc (a la Starkiller ripping a whole Star Destroyer from the sky in The Force Unleashed). And yeah, that would have looked cool on screen.

But anyone who was disappointed that Luke apparently couldn’t be bothered to “show up” at the battle has perhaps failed to consider what Luke’s actions on Crait truly mean. In projecting himself across the galaxy with the Force, he becomes a true master and rises above all the Jedi who had come before. He embodies an ideal the Jedi have long sought for, an ideal whose loss proved the Jedi’s undoing: pacifism.

Don’t believe me? Let’s hear from a few venerable Jedi over the years:

“There are alternatives to fighting.” —Ben Kenobi

“Great warrior? Wars don’t make one great.” —Yoda

“We’re keepers of the peace, not soldiers.” —Mace Windu

The Jedi have believed in avoiding armed conflict as long as we’ve known them. It’s impossible to be the “guardians of peace and justice” while bringing death and suffering. Sure, any good Jedi can handle themselves in a fight, but a true Jedi will fight only if necessary. When the Jedi Order lost sight of that ideal, they were destroyed. In eschewing their preference for pacifism and leading clone soldiers into battle, they doomed themselves, destroyed by those very soldiers.

In Return of the Jedi, Luke redeems his father. But in The Last Jedi, he redeems the entire Jedi order. He does what they never could, showing us the truth of Obi-Wan’s words: “There are alternatives to fighting.” Where the Jedi lost sight of their role as defenders of the peace rather than soldiers, Luke really does “walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order”, holding off an army without striking a single blow.4

Yes, Luke Skywalker fails—as we all do. But he rises again—as we all must. He does so in a way that is both consistent with and builds upon his portrayal in the original trilogy. He fixes his mistakes, gives the galaxy a legend to inspire them, and revives the true legacy of the Jedi.

And if that doesn’t make him a true Jedi in the end, nothing does.

Did you like this article? You might like my regular serial The Archangel’s Gift or some of my other pop culture stuff:

I actually really like Solo, too, but it took a few viewings for me to really see it for what it did best: not provide a comprehensive backstory for every part of the Han Solo legend, but just exist as a fun stand-alone space western.

This article is focused on defending Luke’s arc. I’ll save a discussion of other controversial aspects of the film (Canto Bight, the Holdo maneuver, etc.) for another time.

For a more in-depth exploration of the Jedi’s failures, I recommend Rise of the Red Blade, a canon novel by Delilah S. Dawson. In that book, Jedi apprentice Iskat Akaris loses her master at the Battle of Geonosis. When the Jedi Order refuses to acknowledge her grief or let her feel anything at all about her master’s death, she looks for solace elsewhere, journeying along the path to the dark side.

To say nothing of the crazy, complicated Force trick he pulled off.

The Archangel's Gift: Hollow

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:14:25 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

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Part I

Part II

PREVIOUSLY: Serafina Corso recovered her father’s journals and met with her co-conspirators (the injured cantore Rafael de Medici, his half-brother Niccolo Rosso, and the famed explorer Jacopo Zampa) to plan an expedition. However, Lorenzo do Montague stole the journals. Not only that, but catastrophe soon struck over dinner. Unbeknownst to anyone, inferni called hollowkin had been incubating within Rosso’s body for a week. He died suddenly as three newborn hollowkin burst from his body. (Gross, I know.)

Artist’s representation of a hollowkin.

There were three of them now: spindly white, four-foot monstrosities crouching in a pile of viscera on the tabletop.

Claws clicked on wood. Needle teeth glistened in the candlelight. Red eyes regarded Serafina with naked hunger.

And she still didn’t have her sword.

The weapon lay in her room, separated from her by a journey of fifty feet through two closed doors. More importantly, the exit lay on the far side of the room, with the three ravening horrors squarely blocking her path. The distance to her blade may as well have been the Pan-Varecian Trade Route for all that Serafina was able to traverse it.

“Angels beyond,” swore Jacopo Zampa. The explorer was white as a sailcloth, eyes darting from the newly birthed monsters to the sundered corpse of his friend Niccolo Rosso, from which the creatures had just emerged. “Angels bloody beyond!”

Serafina, her heart a tempest within her ribcage, scanned the table for a weapon. A knife lay embedded in a block of cheese, but it was squarely under one of the creatures now rising shakily on twitching limbs.

Rafael was still humming, desperately trying to summon the Canticle. But the wounds Cosimo di Marco had inflicted on him took their toll; his voice was weak and ragged, and the clear song Serafina had so often heard from his lips was nowhere to be heard.

As Rafael’s fruitless melody floated through the room, the three hollowkin eyed their three targets and seemed to come to an unspoken accord. One of them leaped at Zampa, one at Rafael, and one at Serafina.

She heard Zampa scream, but all her attention was directed at the gore-slimed fiend now assaulting her. She blocked the creature’s initial lunge with her black-gloved right hand, praying its claws didn’t penetrate the leather. But the dispersal of the monsters from the tabletop left Serafina free to grab the cheese knife, and as the creature stumbled back, she seized it in her lone fist. As an offensive weapon, it left much to be desired, but she wasn’t in a picky mood.

Can’t let them touch my skin. Just one touch was all it took for three more hollowkin to gestate within the stolen warmth of your body. That was what had led to this whole fiasco; somehow Rosso had let one of them touch him in Rome, and now he lay on the table with his head split apart like a cracked nut.

Serafina heard a clattering sound behind her; it had to be Rafael, fighting off his own hollowkin with some physical weapon now while he continued to try summoning the Canticle, but she had no time to spare for spectating. She slashed again at the creature assailing her. The knife was far too short for comfort, allowing the creature well within her guard, but another swipe took off three of its pale claws. It hissed again, black blood splashing the tabletop. Serafina followed up with a thrust to its side, sinking the cheese knife deep in its pale flesh.

She pulled it away, preparing for a thrust that would finish it off—

Her peripheral vision alerted her to the presence of a second hollowkin not a moment too soon. Serafina retreated, head swiveling to see where the new monster had come from. Her heart, already sunken to the Abyss, found new depths in which to fall …

As she spied the torn body of Jacopo Zampa.

The greatest explorer in the Chosen Isles, the man who’d led an expedition to literal hell and back—and the holder of the key to Serafina’s grand plans—lay facefirst in a platter of bloody risotto. A red fluid too viscous to be spilled wine oozed across the tabletop.

Fighting back both vomit and a crushing wave of despair, Serafina turned her attention back to the two predators stalking her to either side. The wounded hollowkin keened something to its companion, which let out a peculiar clicking sound almost like laughter.

Could she reach the door yet? Could she make it to her sword?

“What’s going on in—”

The voice belonged to a ruddy-cheeked, thin man in a smock, who banged open the door to peer inside. Serafina couldn’t remember his name, but he was the Silent Lion’s inkeeper, the man who’d let Jacopo Zampa use the common room for the evening. The red drained from his face as he took in the scene and retreated.

Serafina was certain she heard the sound of a lock sliding into place.

So much for any plan involving her sword.

“Ha!”

Serafina and both of her hollowkin turned heads at the unexpected, rasped note of triumph. Rafael stood with something in the same genus as a smile stretching his face as he watched timid flames lick the skin of the creature across from him. Somehow, after all that effort, he’d managed to summon the Canticle after all. It was a far cry from the firestorms she’d seen him summon on Rome, but—damn it all—it was something.

She swiveled her attention away from Rafael again as her pair of hollowkin advanced. She slashed with her knife, fending off the closest one, but the monsters seemed capable of rudimentary counting, realizing that two of them against one blade were good odds. As she struck out at one, the other closed on, those thin teeth leering—

The hollowkin swayed as a candelabrum swung from nowhere and bashed it across the skull. Rafael followed up with a second strike, and Serafina turned her attention back to the first hollowkin. It let out a screech as she charged, battering aside its outstretched arms and plunging the cheese knife into its pale chest. Claws scrabbled uselessly on her glove, then the monster reeled, howling in agony. A follow-up slash across the throat sprayed black blood across her face.

Rage—white-hot as ore in a blacksmith’s forge—suddenly rose within her. This creature, this abomination, had come into this world unasked for, and a good man had paid the toll. Two men, now. She struck again. Again! And again! Until the hollowkin was slumped against the wall, bleeding from a dozen ugly wounds.

“That’s for Rosso, you slimy, angels-damned bastard,” she spat, her chest heaving with breath.

Next to her, Rafael was still beating the other hollowkin repeatedly with a candelabrum, having evidently decided that his attempts to summon the Canticle, while effective, were too time-consuming. Black blood coated the brass in his hand. Between blows, Serafina drove her knife into the back of the creature’s neck.

It flopped like a boned fish to the ground.

Which left the third hollowkin, the one Rafael had managed to set alight. It was writhing on the floor now, half its skin burning, letting out a high wail eerily like a child’s cry. Unwilling to hear that sound for a moment longer, Serafina drove the heel of her boot into its throat and stamped down hard till something crunched.

Rafael straightened, letting the last hollowkin collapse with a wet squelching sound to the floor.

For perhaps a full minute, there was no sound but the crackling of flames on hollowkin flesh and the steady dripping of blood from the two corpses at the table. Then the full horror and grief of the situation, which Serafina had managed to keep at bay only by virtue of the adrenaline in her veins, came howling back at her with a vengeance.

For the second time in a week, Serafina felt unseen talons curl around her hopes and rip them free, leaving her hollow inside.

“He was my half-brother,” said Rafael, his feet dangling over the edge of the pier into the murky waters of the canal. “But the word half was just for show. For propriety’s sake. From the time I was ten on—that’s when I met him for the first time—he was just my brother. My fellow schemer. Even when our father cast him out again, we were thick as thieves.”

Serafina acknowledged his words with a nod, watching the second of the two cloth-wrapped bundles bob toward the hole in the city wall where the water spilled through. On other islands, the dead were doused in oil, lit aflame, and lowered off the edge into the Abyss. But here, on this island of water enclosed by walls, the Venetians did things differently. Water burbled up from the Everlasting Well in the center of the island, drifted outward through the canals, and finally cascaded into the skies. They called this gate the Cloud Passage, the Venetians did: one of three arches throughout the city designated for the disposal of the dead.

“When he told me he’d found your father’s journal, Niccolo was the only one who could have convinced me to risk it all—to risk everything I’d built, everything I’d worked for—on the chance to save the world.” There was a brittle quality to Rafael’s voice, as though a single blow might shatter him. “How am I supposed to do it alone?”

“You’re not alone,” Serafina murmured, staring at her boots where they hung off the edge of the pier.

Rafael didn’t answer. Instead, he simply watched as the body of Niccolo Rosso—the bits they could round up before the innkeeper thrust them from his bloodstained inn forever, at least—floated toward its final journey. Jacopo Zampa had already gone over; Serafina had made certain of that. He was dead, but hollowkin could still emerge from his flesh if the body stayed intact enough. It could still happen—but by now, Jacopo Zampa would be sinking into the restless waters of the worldwide Abyss thousands of feet below.

They’d had limited moments to properly secure the remains of their comrades because of the time it had taken to first dispose of the dead hollowkin. On the battlefield, Serafina had seen even recently dead hollowkin infect unwary soldiers, so she’d thrown all three corpses into a cart and set the whole thing ablaze. The spectacle had attracted a goodly crowd, but in the midst of the Passing festivities, bonfires in the streets weren’t unusual.

“What now?” Rafael asked, his voice hoarse. “We lost more than just people today. More than just a brother and a comrade. Without Jacopo, we don’t have the influence to get a ship. Neither of us has the funds to purchase a trading cog, much less a ship that can cross the storms. The plan—everything we were working toward—it’s all gone. What do we do?”

Serafina blinked. He was asking her? She recalled the Rafael of several weeks ago: strong, self-assured, in charge. He would never have deigned to ask a lowly Knight-Aspirant for orders. (She supposed she was technically a Knight-Commandant now, if she was anything, but the promotion was an empty one at best.) Had he broken all at once, or had it happened little by little—disowned by his family, shot in the chest, and now deprived of his brother?

Something in the current moment—sitting with a comrade, staring into the dark tunnel of hopeless odds—reminded Serafina of another moment not that long ago. When she and Enrico had stood upon the parapets of Castle di Carini, wondering how on earth they were going to survive the infernal hordes gathered outside the crumbling fortress.

She remembered the way hope had seemed a distant light, too far to grasp.

She also remembered how she’d hadn’t waited around to feel the light’s cold embrace. She never had. Serafina Corso chased hope down … or when necessary, made her own.

She swallowed her fear. It tasted like bile.

“I can get the journals back,” she told Rafael. That would solve one problem—navigation to the Archangels’ mountain—but not address the thorny issue of where they were going to get a ship in the first place now that Zampa was gone. Still, she had a plan for that, too. Or the sketchy outlines of one, at least.

Rafael looked up. “Niccolo told me—”

“You recall Father Benvolio? The cantore who stitched you up?”

“Don’t think I’m likely to forget someone who saved my life,” said Rafael somberly.

“He was happy to do a few favors. Zampa had donated to his chapel, you see. Helped to keep it from collapsing into the canal. It was a small thing for him to put a tracking spell on the journals.” Despite the situation, despite everything they’d just been through, it was hard not to allow a slow, satisfied smile.

Rafael’s eyebrow quirked. “You knew Lorenzo was going to steal them?”

She scoffed. “Hardly. I didn’t see him coming. But after all we’d done to get those bloody books, I wasn’t taking chances. Benvolio told me how to follow the spell. All I need is someone who can sense the Canticle. Not touch it, not manipulate it, just sense it. Who can find traces of the spell Lorenzo left behind.”

She turned to look right at Rafael’s eyes. His weary, bloodshot, grief-stricken eyes. Was it her imagination, or had her words kindled a flicker of hope there?

“Know anybody like that?”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next up: Back to Lorenzo! Relations with the Spider aren’t what they used to be, which means the Spider’s protection no longer holds: a fact every bounty hunter in Venice is now aware of…

Part I

Part II

The Archangel's Gift: The Exchange

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:51:20 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

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Part I

Part II

PREVIOUSLY: Lorenzo de Montague, the notorious thief known as the Viper of Venice, was released from the Sinkhole, a hellish underwater prison, only to find that his entire home island had been overrun by demon-like inferni. He soon discovered his son Giuliano was being held by the crime lord known as the Spider on the promise of release if Lorenzo stole a pair of journals belonging to a long-lost explorer.

After an arc and a half of doing morally questionable things in the name of getting his son back, Lorenzo FINALLY has the journals. Now he’s on the way to make the exchange…

Whoever said that crime doesn’t pay must have had a pretty shoddy understanding of basic economics.

Take the Spider, the best example of Lorenzo’s favorite economic principle: corruption. When he wasn’t masterminding his criminal empire from the depths of the subterranean Spider’s Web, the Spider lived in a four-story palazzo on the east side of Venice. A true arachnid scuttling through the darkness could go without the sight of daylight, but the Spider was human, whatever his twisted transformations. His palazzo rose right up against the edge of the island, affording him a view of the vultures wheeling along the cliffs on one side and the city whose underworld he ruled on the other.

Corruption wasn’t all bad, though. It meant that very few problems couldn’t be solved with the proper application of coin. And luckily, Lorenzo had just sold the Lady Lucia, currently languishing in the caverns beneath the Spider’s Web, so he had a bit of coin to spare. This had come in handy when he’d needed assurance that this was a day the Spider would be enjoying his above-ground residence rather than holding court in the caverns below.

Lorenzo approached the gate, where the first pair of guards carrying firearms stopped him and asked his business. They carried wheellock arquebuses, long-ranged alchemical weapons. They let him pass, but only after giving him a good pat-down.

“No weapons here, fellas,” he told them. “I know the rules.”

The second pair of guards met him between the gate and the front door, giving him the same treatment. They didn’t admit him into the palazzo proper but instead pointed past yet another pair of guards down a hedge-lined avenue to the courtyard where the Spider often received visitors.

The next three pairs of guards were waiting in the courtyard with the Spider himself. Two were positioned in front of a winged fountain, two stood at the base of the steps that led up to a dais, and the last two lounged to either side of the table where the Spider was enjoying his evening meal. Marcello, the bespectacled man who’d given Lorenzo the job in Porto Nero and started him down this whole bloody path, stood to the crime boss’s right.

The Spider himself was hunched beneath an awning. Even when he craved daylight, he couldn’t resist hiding his twisted form in the shadow. The arms he’d been born with held utensils as he enjoyed his evening meal, the two additional arms twitching with occasional insectile spasms where they protruded from his shoulders at unnatural angles.

All this Lorenzo had seen plenty of times. But he’d never seen the Spider eat before, so he’d never seen him without the white carnival mask that nearly always covered the man’s face.

Lorenzo clamped down on the nausea that rose within his gut. The Spider’s thinning gray hair was combed in a neat part above a malformed bulge jutting from his right temple—part of someone else’s skull, by the look of it, complete with two extra eyes that blinked independently of his own.

“Ah, the Viper of Venice himself,” said the Spider, putting down his fork and wiping his mouth with a silk napkin—well, one of his mouths, Lorenzo noted with a mixture of horror and fascination. The crime lord had a mouth in the same place as everyone else, but he also had a smaller, diagonal mouth a few inches below those extra eyes. Lorenzo was used to the Spider’s eerie twin voice, and now the reason for it was clear: every motion of his true mouth was mimicked by the twitching muscles of the one on his temple.

Lorenzo realized he was staring and hastily swung his gaze back to the Spider’s primary eyes.

“Good to see you, Lorenzo,” came that double voice. The crime lord smiled an almost paternal smile, his blue eyes twinkling, an effect somewhat spoiled by the two black eyes blinking on one side of his head.

Lorenzo grunted.

“Did you bring the journals?”

“I stole them successfully,” Lorenzo replied. If the Spider noticed that his answer left a little debate as to whether he’d actually answered the question, he didn’t let on.

“Come. Sit.” The Spider took a sip of some rich red wine and gestured to a chair opposite himself. “I want your opinion. The wine—is the earthy flavor excessive, or is it just right?”

“Don’t care, ser,” Lorenzo said.

Next to him, Marcello looked up sharply. The Spider’s smile only widened. “Same old Lorenzo de Montague,” he said. “Five years in the Sinkhole, and your manners still haven’t improved.”

“Strange, right? Took all the etiquette lessons they offered. Guess they didn’t stick. But where the hell’s my son?”

“You’ve chosen to pass on the wine, but would you like dessert? We have the finest gelato, made with real ice kept frozen by my specially paid cantore. The same cantore, I might add, who intercepted Rafael de Medici’s message and broke the Canticular encryption. Useful people to have around, cantori.”

“My son. Now.”

The Spider frowned. The arm arcing over his left shoulder twitched, the pale fingers opening and closing. “Produce the journals then, please.”

Lorenzo gave him a tired smile. “Aye, that’s not how this works. My son first. Then you get the journals.”

“I’m afraid,” said the Spider, “that you are the one who fails to understand how this works.” He gestured in a wide sweep of the courtyard with one of his left hands. “I have six men with arquebuses trained on you right now, and those are just the ones you can see. Are you really going to prolong the delusion that you’re the one who calls the shots here?”

“Look, ser,” Lorenzo said. “I’ve had a really bad week. I’m not in the mood to waste time strutting around like a couple of bull leviathans fighting over a cow, if it’s all the same to you. Give me my son, and I’ll tell you where to find the journals.”

“Tell me—” the Spider’s face turned a faint shade of red. “Signore Marcello’s instructions were you to bring the journal here. With you. To this meeting.”

“And I’m sure the Archangels were hoping Palermo wouldn’t get overrun by a maddened horde of inferni, but sometimes things don’t work out, do they? You want the journals or not?”

The Spider’s fist tightened around his fork. His extra hands twitched with greater rapidity.

“The journals are in a safety deposit box at the Grand Ducal Bank,” Lorenzo said. “Not sure if you’ve ever been there—fellow like you probably just keeps his gold in a giant vault in the basement where you can bathe in it—but there’re thousands of deposit boxes there, most of which you’d be hard-pressed to find keys to. So I’m perfectly willing to hand you the key and tell you which box it is, but first…” He smiled, offering a predator’s grin. “I think you know what you need to do.”

“Search him,” said the Spider to his guards. “Take the key through whatever means necessary. And throw what’s left of him over the edge of the island.”

“If you think I’d be idiot enough to bring the key, ser,” Lorenzo said as two of the guards advanced, “I’m pretty sorely offended by your estimation of my intelligence.”

The Spider’s face was the color of the wine that now sat untouched in front of him. He held up a hand to halt the guards. “So if I produce your son, you give me the key, is that it? And the number of the safety deposit box?”

“See, you do get it. So where is he?”

The Spider’s face twitched in a brief spasm of anger, his extra eyes blinking rapidly. “I have half a mind to give you to my torturers. They’ll have the location of the key and the box by supper.”

He sighed. “But that sounds tiresome, does it not?” He held up a hand and called out, “Show the boy!”

Yet another pair of guards marched forward from behind a high wall of topiaries. Lorenzo had just enough time to note the make and model of their wheellocks before they shoved a bound figure between them. He was a foot taller than he’d been the last time Lorenzo had seen him, still olive-skinned and dark-haired, but he’d filled out. It was like looking at a painting of Lorenzo himself at twelve.

Angels beyond…

Lorenzo’s breath stopped. A wad of emotion worked its way into his throat. His breath came out as an uneven rattle. He took an involuntary step forward, but the nearest guards raised their wheellocks in warning. Ropes bound the boy’s wrists and gagged him—and unless Lorenzo was mistaken, one finger on his right hand ended in a bandaged stump.

Lorenzo wanted to rip him free and then put a lead ball in the head of every man here. And then shoot them till they were more holes than flesh, just to do it properly.

“Giuliano,” he gasped.

Would Giuliano know what his father looked like, after five long years? Pressure at the back of Lorenzo’s eyes threatened to break tears free, but it wouldn’t do to sob like a baby in front of the Spider and his men, so he held it all back.

“There you have him,” said the Spider. “Where is the key to the safety deposit box?”

“An associate of mine’s bringing it,” Lorenzo said.

This time Marcello spoke up. “You were to come alone,” he said, his voice clipped and firm. “You were not to involve any… associates.”

“It’s gonna be awkward to tell my associate that, then,” Lorenzo said. “I’m gonna signal him, but you gotta promise not to shoot him down, all right?”

“Shoot him—”

“He’s comin’ by voltorro.” Lorenzo dug under his shirt, prompting the guards to level their weapons at him. He rolled his eyes. “You fellas afraid of a whistle?”

He blew it.

The courtyard was quiet for one, two, three heartbeats. Then there came a faint creaking of ropes, and a dark shape came hurtling out of the heavens. The guards jumped out of the way, a few of them scrambling on all fours, leaving all their dignity somewhere beneath the voltorro.

It was a conveyance of wood, rope, and canvas, with two batlike wings extending from the central hub where the pilot hung in a harness, clutching the cranks. It was the same model as the one Lorenzo had used to steal the Lady Lucia what felt like weeks ago.

“Lorenzo,” said the pilot, wearing flight goggles over a carnival mask not unlike the one sitting beside the Spider’s throne. It was Aurelio, one of the mercenaries who’d tried to apprehend Lorenzo a few days ago. As Lorenzo had hoped, the proper application of coin had persuaded Aurelio to rethink his stance on Lorenzo’s continued freedom and convinced him to lend a hand. But he’d had one condition—he’d help only if he never showed his face. The Spider had a long memory for people who crossed him.

“You got the key?” Lorenzo asked.

“Sure thing, boss,” said Aurelio, fishing it from a cord around his neck.

“All right now,” Lorenzo said to the Spider, “you ready to trade? My son for the key, right now. And the box number, too.”

The Spider adjusted his formerly neat gray hair, which had been flung everywhere by the wind of the voltorro’s wings and now floated above his head in wispy tangles. His extra arms twitched again. He glowered. “The key. And the number. Now.”

“Let’s not start this again,” Lorenzo drawled. He turned to his son. “Giuliano, let’s go. Guards, get those ropes off of him.”

The guards looked to the Spider, who shook his head.

“I’m not accustomed to others giving orders at my palazzo, Lorenzo,” said the Spider. “I’ll be frank with you—when you arrived, I was still on the fence about whether to let you and your son live. You’re a useful man, you know—this whole affair with the journal proves it. But certain people in my organization—” He flicked his head at the men who still held Giuliano. “—have been vocal about their lingering grudge against you.”

Lorenzo studied the two thugs. He’d been so caught up with Giuliano’s appearance that he hadn’t bothered to wonder where he’d seen them before. But he did know them.

The last time he’d seen Carlo and his kin, their faces had just been redone with mosaics of purple bruises thanks to Lorenzo’s fists. That had been on the island of Porto Nero, just before he’d gotten this little job.

“Carlo,” he said. “And your handsome brother, too.” Oh, bloody Deep.

“You killed two of my brothers,” snarled the brute. “Both of ‘em died in the infirmary on Porto Nero after the beating you gave us. I barely got up myself.”

No wonder Lorenzo hadn’t recognized him at first. Some master in the art of facial rearranging had really done a number on him.

“Carlo made his way back to me after you… dealt with him and his brothers,” said the Spider. “He told me the sorry tale of how you severely beat him within the edge of his life and left him for dead. I cannot abide that, Lorenzo.”

“This mean you’re letting your underlings talk you out of an honest deal, Spider?” Lorenzo asked. “Is that who the great Spider is, getting bossed around by hired hands?”

“Carlo is no mere hired hand,” said the Spider. “Carlo and his brothers—those you killed and the one you left alive—are my dear nephews, all that remain to me of my dearly departed brother.”

Oh, Palermiel’s balls.

“That’s how they skipped execution all those years ago,” Lorenzo muttered. Should have been obvious from the start, but he’d been distracted ever since he met Carlo again on Porto Nero. “The rest of the crew got the drop, but not Carlo and his brothers. You pulled strings and got ‘em off.”

“No thanks to you,” Carlo growled.

“I can forgive any long-ago betrayal you might have committed,” said the Spider. “But the slaying of my family demands blood in return. Which brings us back to the matter at hand.” With a pleasant tone that—from someone else—might have suggested he was about to dispense some sage advice or at least pass out some candy, he said, “Carlo, take off the boy’s hand, please.” To Lorenzo, he said, “Any illusion that you were ever in control has dissipated—you see that now, don’t you? I’ve indulged you long enough. My torturers will take from you what they need.”

Carlo grabbed Giuliano with one hand, pulling a wicked hooked knife from his belt with the other. Before he could follow the Spider’s instruction, Lorenzo shouted to Aurelio, “Now! Now, angels sink you!”

Aurelio reached into the voltorro’s saddlebags and pulled out a small, round object, which he tossed in front of the Spider.

Carlo hesitated, staring at the object. The Spider froze.

“Grenade!” someone shouted, and the courtyard went mad.

The Spider pushed the table forward and dove behind it with the speed of a much younger man. Carlo shoved Giuliano in front of him, while Marcello vanished behind a topiary. The guards scattered, diving behind fountains and statues and each other.

This wasn’t a typical alchemical grenade. Sure, it had the usual unstable chemicals inside, but Aurelio—alchemy and gunpowder enthusiast that he was—had tampered with the fuse. When it went off a second later, there was no explosion. No limbs flying, no blood spatter on the marble. The courtyard suddenly blazed with light ten times brighter than noon, like someone had bottled a miniature star and cracked open the seal.

Only Aurelio and Lorenzo had their eyes shut when it happened. Their lids flashed white from the glare, but when the spots began to fade, Lorenzo could still see better than anyone else in the courtyard.

And a few seconds was all he needed.

He was beside the voltorro in a heartbeat, rifling through the saddlebags for the small armory he’d had Aurelio stash there. He pulled out a pair of two-shot wheellock pistols, one of them the Drago—no doubt Marcello was regretting ever handing that over. Aurelio grabbed two more, and together they went to work evening the odds.

They fired fast and hard, lead balls snapping through the haze as they picked off guards still fumbling for their bearings. One man fell backward through a hedge, a hole drilled clean through his forehead. Another dropped near the edge of the fountain, clutching his gut. Aurelio nailed two more through the chest; Lorenzo added another pair to the tally before the first of the guards got his bearings and began returning fire.

By then, Lorenzo was sprinting toward Giuliano. He grabbed the boy’s hand. Giuliano, still bound and momentarily blinded, flinched at the touch, but Lorenzo hissed, “Jules! It’s me! We gotta go!” The boy sucked in a sharp breath and nodded.

Lorenzo didn’t shoot Carlo. Not yet. Killing him without taking the Spider down too would only guarantee revenge. But he did kick Carlo square in the face while the man was groping through the grass for his fallen weapon. Lorenzo felt something crunch under his boot. Maybe teeth. Hopefully teeth.

He pulled Giuliano toward the voltorro. The harness wasn’t meant for three, but they’d manage. He buckled himself in behind the pilot, grabbing Giuliano tight. “Go!”

Aurelio pulled back the crank and the wings unfurled again, knocking over a pair of statues as it lifted off. They rose fast into the sky.

In front of him, Giuliano let out a cry that was half relief and half exhilaration. He twisted to look back, and their eyes met. His gag had been pulled away, and the grin he gave Lorenzo was all dimples—just like he remembered. The kind of smile girls were going to fall over someday, if they weren’t already.

Everything, for a moment, was perfect.

Then a fireball from an alchemical arquebus punched through the voltorro’s wing. Wood, suddenly strained, snapped in half, and then the top half of the right wing was spinning away.

Giuliano screamed, Aurelio cursed, and Lorenzo’s stomach dropped as the world tilted.

Aurelio strained and struggled with the crank, trying to maintain altitude with one good wing—

—and Giuliano slipped from the harness.

Time didn’t just stop. It shattered.

Lorenzo lunged, reaching as far as he could. His fingers swept past Giuliano by an inch or a couple miles—it didn’t really matter. And then the boy was gone, tumbling ten feet or more onto the rooftop as arquebus fire crackled below. Lorenzo struggled to get a glimpse of him, to get any sense of his son’s condition after such a fall, but the voltorro spiraled as Aurelio struggled to keep it aloft, and it was all Lorenzo could do to hold on. They clipped the red tile roof of the villa next door, skidded across it, and crashed hard into a second courtyard with a sound like a cathedral being torn in half.

Lorenzo lay dazed on the cobbles, ears ringing. He could hear the fountain nearby. His vision blurred as he took in a lush garden—vines, ivy, statues. Not the Spider’s place. They’d landed in the gardens of someone else’s palazzo.

The voltorro lay in a shattered heap nearby. Lorenzo scrambled for cover behind a cluster of oleanders. Aurelio was already hauling himself up.

“Lorenzo—”

“We gotta go back,” Lorenzo said, cutting him off. “He’s back at the Spider’s palazzo. He might be hurt—we gotta—”

A lead ball tore through the statue inches from his face.

They dropped behind a pair of winged archangel statues—maybe Veneziel and Milaniel—and drew their pistols, ramming alchemical charges and lead balls down the barrels.

“Damn, should’ve known they’d follow us,” Lorenzo muttered, finishing the Drago and grabbing another pistol to load. “Gonna make it tough to get back inside.”

“We’re not getting back inside,” Aurelio said, the key still flashing at his throat. “You know it. I know it.”

Lorenzo said nothing. He peeked around the statue and spotted a guard behind the fountain. Another crept around the smashed voltorro, trying to flank them.

He fired, and the first one yelped. But another shot rang out from a different direction. Too many to track. How many had the damned Spider sent?

“We’re gonna be trapped,” Aurelio warned.

“I’m gonna draw their fire,” Lorenzo said. “I can make it to that statue—there—” He pointed with the Drago’s barrel. “Then I can take the others.”

“Bad idea,” said Aurelio. “He’ll kill you no matter what. Your son doesn’t even figure into it anymore.”

“Don’t tell me that!” Lorenzo snarled, grabbing Aurelio by the collar. “If I say—”

More lead balls punched through stone and scattered dust at their feet.

“Another one over there by the trellis,” Aurelio said, prying himself free. His mask had fallen away in the crash. “You see him? Lorenzo, we’re already half pinned down. The Spider’s got twice the guards we saw in the courtyard. We can’t go back through the front door.”

A burning pain lanced Lorenzo’s left arm as a ball carved through flesh and bone. He swore and turned, letting instinct guide his hand.

He pulled the trigger. He drilled a lead ball through the guard’s throat, and the man collapsed behind a topiary.

Voices were shouting now—more guards inbound from the villa. Lorenzo’s heart pounded. Lead ingots piled up somewhere in the pit of his stomach.

“Bloody Deep,” he muttered. “You got a plan?”

Aurelio jerked his chin past the shattered voltorro toward a tunnel of ivy. “Through there. Should lead to a side street. We’ll have cover most of the way. We might have to go through whoever owns the house, but they won’t be armed.”

Lorenzo took a breath. “Lead the way.”

“Three—”

Lorenzo fired again, catching a guard as he rose from cover.

“Two—”

Lead hissed through the air, snapping past his cheek.

“One!” Aurelio bolted for the archway.

Lorenzo followed, every step a promise. I’ll be back for you, Little Jules.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next up: Let’s return to Serafina, whose own plans have been violently shattered.

Part I

Part II

The Archangel's Gift: A Minor Affliction

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:31:36 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

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Part I

Part II

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Some fairly exciting things are about to happen in this chapter. But I’d like to assure my readers that none of it comes from left field. It’s hard to get a sense of the foreshadowing in a serialized format, but here’s a special recap that will help prep you for the events to come. And so … previously, on The Archangel’s Gift…

Serafina, Rafael de Medici, and Niccolo Rosso made a harrowing escape from inferni-ridden Rome, but not before a scrape with two deadly kinds of inferni: hollowkin and bonewrights.
With Lorenzo’s help, they rendezvoused with the explorer Jacopo Zampa in Venice. A traitor briefly stole Serafina’s father’s journals, burning down Zampa’s Venetian Aethergraphic Society building in the process, but Lorenzo and Serafina chased him down and recovered the journals.
Lorenzo then betrayed Serafina and stole the journals to bring to a crime lord in exchange for his son.
Rafael and Rosso are both the worse for wear; Rafael has been shot, while Rosso complains of splitting headaches. Rafael’s injury will interfere with his ability to touch the Canticle, the universal song that allows holy men to do magic.

Serafina was still reassembling her room when Niccolo Rosso found her.

“What’s all this?” Rosso asked, his eyes sweeping from the still-overturned cot to the torn-up floorboards.

“The journals.” Serafina felt no need to hide what had happened, nor her role in bringing it about. Her voice was a steely calm but inside, the cracks were spreading. “Lorenzo took them.”

Rosso stood up straight. “Why? Where?”

So Serafina told him—beginning with the aerial chase over Venice and how she’d taken his willingness to pursue di Marco as proof that he could be trusted. How her own feelings had blinded her to the threat Lorenzo represented, and how she’d allowed him to deceive her.

“I was a fool,” she finished. She was sitting on the cot—now righted again. The door was closed, and Rosso leaned against the wall, frowning. “I’m better than that,” she went on. “I should have seen him for what he is. But I’ve…”

She faltered. How to explain that to be a daughter of Salvatore Ventura, the man who doomed the Chosen Isles, was to live forever apart? And how to make it clear that when she’d finally felt a connection to someone, she’d seized upon it like a woman cast off a skyship, grabbing for a rope, willfully blind to the risks?

“I’ve made a mistake,” she finished, somewhat more lamely than she’d intended to sound.

“I’d say that,” said Rosso, his eyes narrowing. “And I’d be lying if I said this didn’t set our plans back by some measure. We’ve got a plan, but those journals still contain the details of the way underneath the storms. Without them, we’ll be flying blind.” He crouched next to her, his infernally altered cloven hoof protruding from under the hem of his cloak. He glanced down at it, a faintly rueful expression assembling itself on his face. “But we all make a mistake or two, and we all bear the marks, don’t we? Some of us more so than others. Did I ever tell you how this happened?”

She studied the hoof, feeling the tug of mild interest. “Only that it was bonewrights on your voyage to hell.” She recalled the details—inferni had boarded the ship and wreaked their wretched transformations upon a few of the crew. Rosso had gotten off with only a cloven hoof for a foot—while a few others were turned into half-pig, half-goat horrors.

“What I didn’t say was that it was my fault,” said Rosso. “I was the one who spotted the ruins. I was the one who suggested we go in for a closer look. Jacopo was against it, but I persuaded him that we were on a voyage of discovery, so we needed to do some discovering. Didn’t see the bonewrights lurking until it was too late.” He let out a bitter little laugh. “Now, every time I hear a goat or a pig, I think of my crewmates, hidden away now in a monastery, bleating because they can’t weep anymore. All of which is to say—mistakes get made. We pay for them. We move on. So what are you going to do about this?” He fixed Serafina with a calculating look. “I get the sense that you’re more shaken up about the fact that you’re the one who lost them than the journals’ actual absence. Am I right?”

Serafina gave a rueful little nod. “I can’t stop thinking about how I’m responsible. How I trusted him. If I’d only been less blind—”

“Which means you’ve already got a plan for getting the journals back.”

Serafina let a faint smile curl the corner of her lip. “I … may have taken a few precautions, yes.”

Rosso’s smile was proud, almost paternal. “Thought so. You’re not a fool, Serafina Corso, as much as you might tell yourself otherwise. What’s your plan?” His eyes darted to the stump of her arm. “It’s not … that, is it?”

Serafina shook her head. If she was willing to call upon that strange power her father had gotten from the Archangel Romaliel—the power she’d so long mistaken for a curse—perhaps she could whisk the journals back in a heartbeat. But who knew what cost she’d pay for that? Would she lose another arm? A leg? A lung?

Her life?

Rosso stood again, his robe falling over his cloven hoof. “So what is it? What’s your plan?”

Serafina told him.

She sat amid a spread of mismatched plates and dull pewter cups rubbed thin at the rims. Candlelight guttered from squat tallow stubs. The Silent Lion’s common room—usually thick with laughter, spilled ale, and the low roar of travelers—had been stripped bare for the evening.

Conversation flowed around her, buoyed by eagerness and wine. Even Rafael joined in from the chair across from Serafina, his entire chest still swathed in bandages. Thanks to the ministrations of the cantore who’d seen to him, he was up and about now, though the consequences of his injury still lingered: his voice was a rasp, and his skin had taken on a sallow aspect.

“We need not wait to recover the journals before we proceed,” Zampa was saying, chewing and swallowing. The meal was creamy risotto cooked with leviathan marrow, wild mushrooms, and a drizzle of basil oil. Even in hard times, Jacopo Zampa could still bend the world around him to his will, and he’d somehow prevailed upon the innkeeper to find food fit for his tastes. Not only that, but the innkeeper has also agreed to keep the common room vacant this evening. Serafina had a guess how he had achieved both feats: the Society’s coffers may have burned down, but Zampa still had his ancestral wealth to draw from. “We have until we depart to secure them again,” Zampa continued. “Until that point, we have what we need.”

“Which is?” Rafael asked, his voice straining.

“A ship, of course,” said Zampa. “The Mist Queen will be launched on the final day of the Passing festivities. Indeed, its maiden voyage will be the main event. I will see to it that the four of us are aboard.”

“That’s in a week,” said Rafael, setting down his fork. “Which isn’t much time considering the Doge still has no idea of our intent to borrow his ship.”

“Then we’ll need to act quickly, won’t we, my holy friend?” Zampa said. “But fear not—letters have been sent. His Grace has cleared a spot for me on his calendar this evening, as it happens. I’ll convince him of the plan.”

“What about a crew?” Serafina asked. She knew more of the plan than Rafael, having been present for the discussions, but that didn’t mean she had no questions. “Will the Mist Queen’s assigned crew be sympathetic to our cause, or do we have a week to find . . .” She glanced at Rosso. “How many men crew a caravel?”

“For a voyage of this length, only twenty or thirty,” said Rosso, taking a bite of his risotto.

“Twenty or thirty,” Rafael mused. “Well, Captain Zampa? Do we need to find a new crew, or will its current crew be amenable?”

“I believe I can persuade them,” said Zampa.

“If you’ll forgive me, Captain, you put a great deal of stock in your own powers of persuasion,” said Rafael.

“Well, he is Jacopo Zampa,” said Rosso.

Zampa raised his cup to Rosso with a smug little smile.

“And provisions?” Rafael asked.

“Taken care of,” said Zampa.

Rosso rubbed one of his temples. “I rather think that covers the portion of the plan before the voyage sets out,” he said. “But what of the voyage itself? What is our course?”

“We’ll sail east-southeast for five days before we hit the Varetti tradewinds,” said Zampa. “That’s where we’ll veer from our prescribed course and make for Empyrea. From there, it will be another three days until we reach the Interdiction.”

“And you’re confident the Mist Queen can do as the journal suggests?” asked Rafael.

“Why all the sudden skepticism?” Rosso asked his brother. He winced, rubbing his temple again, and took a swig of wine. “Surely you’re not losing faith, dear brother.”

“I’m not the sort of man to blindly charge into uncertain skies, no matter how much I believe in what might be waiting beyond our sight,” said Rafael. “Surely a little caution is no sin.”

“I will be able to plot a more certain course once I have the journal in hand,” said Zampa. He turned to Serafina, acknowledging her for the first time since the meal began. “Which brings us back to you. Dear Niccolo has assured me you have a plan for getting the journals back in a timely fashion. I would very much like to hear it.”

His tone sounded like a command rather than the request of one co-conspirator to another, and it rankled Serafina. She took some small, admittedly immature pleasure in ignoring the request for a moment or two. “Naturally. But first, I have a few suggestions regarding the procurement of supplies—”

“No doubt you do, signorina,” said Zampa, with a gracious little inclination of his head, “but—no offense intended, of course—perhaps it’s time to leave the planning to the minds of those with nautical experience.”

Serafina gripped her fork a little tighter. Zampa had been curt with her in the past, but never outright condescending. “As a Knight of the Threshold, I sailed—”

“That will be enough,” said Zampa. “Your contribution to this effort, signorina, has already been made. We will call upon you if we have another need to let valuable property slip into the hands of a common thief.”

Serafina’s guts twisted. So there it was. She took a deep breath, partially to arrest the rising tide of fury in her breast and partially to cut herself off before she could say anything foolhardy.

“In her defense—” Rosso began, but he stopped and let out a low groan.

“Are you all right?” Rafael asked.

Rosso held up a hand to forestall any further concern. “I’m—urggh!—quite all right. A minor affliction. Just a headache. I’ve heard of this happening sometimes—related to pressure differentials in the air, no doubt.” He coughed. “Evidently, it affects the lungs as well. Which only makes sense, given that—” He coughed again. This time, the sound carried sharply through the emptied common room, too loud without a crowd to swallow it. He brought a handkerchief to his mouth. From the sound of it, his lungs seemed intent on turning themselves inside out.

“Signore?” Serafina asked, her perturbation at Zampa momentarily forgotten. Her eyes had already dropped to the handkerchief, noting the stiffness in the way he folded it, the haste with which he swept it out of sight. She would bet her remaining arm that she’d just glimpsed something red there.

Rosso waved a hand dismissively. “As I said, a minor affliction, nothing more,” he said. “When the island passes through certain climes, it’s said—”

He didn’t finish. Another fit took him, harsher than the first. He doubled over, and this time the handkerchief came too late to catch the spray of blood from his lips. Serafina gasped, feeling the slick, hot wetness of Rosso’s blood all over her face, but she didn’t pause to wipe it away. She and Zampa were on their feet at once. Rafael clutched the table. Zampa reached Rosso first, seizing him—to do what, Serafina couldn’t imagine—as Serafina’s gaze flicked to the cup from which Rosso had been drinking. Had the Divinocracy—or someone else—found a way to poison the wine? No, Rosso had been complaining of headaches for days now. Surely that couldn’t be related—

Rafael was humming, falling into his old habit of summoning the Canticle, but something was wrong. Then notes came from his mouth, but they sounded stillborn, half-developed, even a bit pitchy. He tried again, rapping the half-healed wound in his chest as though it had deliberately decided to thwart him. That, of course, proved painful, and he barked out a roar of frustration while slamming his fist on the table.

Rosso’s eyes were bloodshot, bulging with silent pleading for someone to do something, anything—

“Angels beyond, we need a physician,” Zampa growled at the room. “You!” He pointed a spindly finger at Serafina. “Go! Send word!”

Serafina didn’t move, captive by the certainty that by the time she arrived with a physician, it would be too late. She stood in helpless horror as Rosso doubled over with a groan. The coughing stopped—abruptly, unnaturally, with the swiftness of a blade slicing through a throat. For a moment, it seemed he’d lost consciousness, his head bowed and his body trembling in his chair.

Then he raised his face to her, and Serafina saw something moving beneath the skin of his neck.

It took all the hard-earned composure of a Knight of the Threshold not to scream as a slithering bulge writhed beneath the collar of Rosso’s doublet, creeping up, distending his throat. Rosso’s eyes widened in agony and confusion. His mouth opened—perhaps to cry out, perhaps to beg—but no words came. There was only the sound of bones cracking.

And she knew.

Oh, sweet angels beyond, she knew.

The skin around Rosso’s jaw split.

And a pale, glistening hand emerged from the ruin of his mouth.

“Sweet Veneziel,” Zampa bit out, his face nearly as white as the thing coming out of Rosso’s mouth, fear seizing his words and squeezing till they were nearly inaudible.

Serafina’s hand went to her belt. Her sword—where was her sword? But course she’d left it in her room. No need to bring it to dinner, was there? She staggered back, bile rising in her throat. She watched, frozen, as the hand was followed by another. Then came the face—white and eyeless, with a mouth too wide and wet with blood. The creature pulled itself free with a slick, horrible slurp, collapsing on the table in a heap of glistening limbs, a newborn abomination about to take its first steps.

Memories of Rome filtered through the horror. Somehow her own words from that day sounded mocking, even accusing, in her head. Do not let them touch you. If a hollowkin lays a hand on you, its poison will infect you. A day, maybe a week later, three more of them will hatch from your body and rip their way from your flesh.

None of them touched us, she told herself. None of the hollowkin in Rome touched us. She’d driven them off before it could happen.

But the evidence that she was wrong was rising to its feet on top of the platter of risotto.

Then Rosso convulsed again. His chest swelled—no, bulged—as though something inside were still clawing to get out.

Serafina seized a knife and was about to stab when Rosso’s ribcage burst like overripe fruit, spraying her with blood and blinding her. When she had wiped away enough of the blood from her eyes, she could see two more hollowkin, slick and pale, shrieking with newborn rage. Rosso’s corpse lay sprawled across the table, peeled apart like a blooming flower.

The new monsters hit the floor hard, limbs flailing.

By then the first hollowkin was on its feet, already scrabbling to attack.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Longtime readers will recognize the error in my illustration: Serafina should be wearing a black glove on her right hand to conceal the effects of her father’s “curse.” I’ll fix this when I get around to it.

Next up: I’m gonna be a jerk and cut to Lorenzo as he brings the stolen journals to the Spider. Sorry, Serafina…

Part I

Part II

The Archangel's Gift: The Box

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:32:55 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

Subscribe now

Part I

Part II

PREVIOUSLY: In Venice, Lorenzo helped Serafina recover the journals that had been stolen by a traitor. He had a chance to take the journals for himself, which he needed to trade to the Spider (a crime lord) for the life of his son, but he hesitated too long. Serafina, unaware of Lorenzo’s true agenda, has begun to fall for his charms.

Next, the conspirators (Serafina, the explorers Jacopo Zampa and Niccolo Rosso, and the still-wounded Rafael de Medici) began using the journals to plot their course toward the Archangels’ mountain. Their plan so far involves petitioning the Doge of Venice to let them take his brand-new, state-of-the-art skyship on a “test” voyage.

Meanwhile, Lorenzo sets plans of his own into motion…

The Passing festival was still almost a week away, but you couldn’t tell the festivities hadn’t officially begun from a quick stroll through the streets of Venice. The citizenry had draped shrines and hung laundry lines with banners of various Archangels—Firenziel for moneychangers, Luciel for musicians, and so forth, though Venice’s patron angel Veneziel enjoyed the biggest and most colorful displays. The people had already started to don carnival masks, too, white faces popping up here and there in the crowd like gilded asphodel blooms in a meadow.

Lorenzo passed a fruit cart, noting that the vendors were already inflating their prices. He’d already seen the brothels on Ponte delle Tette taking the opposite approach, offering two for the price of one during the festivities, and Lorenzo had a good guess which was likely to drum up more business.

The tavern he’d just visited was following a business model similar to the whores’, offering a discount on drinks in the days leading up to the festival. Which was good for Lorenzo, because he’d needed plenty of wine to soften up his contact there. Aurelio the bounty hunter had been ready to apprehend Lorenzo just yesterday, but Aurelio had offered to meet up and have a drink after the Spider had made it clear that Lorenzo was under his protection. It was a social opportunity Lorenzo would normally sidestep, but he needed allies in this city, so he’d approached Aurelio with a singular offer. A few drinks later, Aurelio had accepted, though not without a steep promised reward and some rigorous conditions.

Nothing Lorenzo couldn’t deal with.

Now he strode along the street, whistling softly. All things considered, events were proceeding favorably. Aurelio was on board with Lorenzo’s plan, and he still had two days till his deadline with the Spider, plenty of time for him to get everything in place. He was a man of caution, and even once he actually had the journals in hand—another minor detail he was in the process of working out—he didn’t trust the exchange to be a straightforward one.

Almost there, Giuliano. Just a few more days.

A knot formed in his stomach as he considered the final task ahead of him. Serafina Corso would be loath to part with the journals—and to be honest, Lorenzo was growing pretty loath to part them from her—but there was no acceptable outcome where Giuliano didn’t come away safe, and that meant Lorenzo had to swallow a few distasteful morsels along the way.

“Pardon, signore? Spare a moment, please?”

Lorenzo looked down at the urchin blocking his path—a boy of maybe nine or ten, his hair a bird’s nest of wiry black. He was clean, at least—the benefit of living in a city with water never more than a stone’s throw away—but he wore clothes that could only generously be termed threadbare.

The rest of the crowd wove around the boy, perhaps recognizing the danger to their purses he represented. Lorenzo’s hand went to his own coinpurse on instinct, but he was reaching into it before he knew it to retrieve the coin the boy was surely about to beg for. The action surprised even himself, but then again, it was hard not to glimpse an apparition of his former self. A single act of generosity, when Lorenzo had been on the streets, could have kept food in his belly for a week.

But then he realized the boy hadn’t asked for coin at all.

“Spare a moment?” he repeated. “What do you want, kid?”

The boy pulled something from behind his back and held it out for Lorenzo’s inspection: a tiny wooden box, barely the size of Lorenzo’s palm.

“What the devil is this?”

“For you, signore. From him.” There was a weight to the word him that left further clarification unnecessary.

Lorenzo’s eyes suddenly darted around the street, wondering who else might be in the Spider’s employ—the jeweler hawking necklaces from a wooden stall across the way? The washerwoman carrying a basket of laundry from the canal? Maybe even the cantore perched on a crate, yelling something half-heard about Veneziel’s mercy into the crowd?

His fingers closed around the box. “What’s in here?”

But the boy had already melted back into the crowd.

Lorenzo, his heart suddenly beating against his ribcage, held the box close and lifted the lid to glimpse what was inside.

A sudden cold washed over him, dribbling droplets of icy dread down his spine.

“Veneziel’s bones.” He ground his teeth together, fighting the sudden surge of panic. “You think I needed this?” he called to no one in particular. “You think I don’t know what’s at stake here?”

A few heads turned his way, offering curious looks, but no one else paid him heed. Surely he wasn’t the first madman yelling at the air the people of this district had seen this morning, and whether or not any of the people on the street were currently serving as the Spider’s eyes and ears, no answer came.

Not that Lorenzo had expected it.

Fighting to steady his shaking hands, he snapped the box closed.

You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to get Lorenzo’s face to a place where I was somewhat satisfied. Faces are hard.

“… To His Serenity, the Most Serene Prince, the Doge of Venice,” Jacopo Zampa was saying, pacing back and forth as far as the cramped room in the Silent Lion would allow. Which wasn’t far, meaning that his pacing mostly amounted to spinning in circles. “We are humbled to dwell underneath your majestic gaze and look forward to many more years of your vaunted personage presiding over our heavenly city.”

Serafina glanced at Rosso, who was scribbling Zampa’s words on parchment with a quill at the small writing desk in the corner. Then she looked back at Zampa. “Isn’t that a bit much? To say both His Serenity and Most Serene?”

Zampa waved a hand as though beating away a flock of gnats. “His Serene Majesty loves a bit of buttering up. Back to it—As fellow Venetians, we celebrate our city’s ascension into the annals of history through our long history of expansion and discovery, a legacy whose arm extends long before the Flood and the ascension of the Chosen Isles. The time has come, Your Most Serene Majesty, to further this legacy …”

“We still say ascension twice,” Serafina murmured.

Zampa’s lip twisted in faint annoyance. “We celebrate our city’s … inclusion … in the annals of history through our long history of expansion…”

“Must we say that whole annals of history bit?” Rosso broke in, the scratching of his quill coming to a halt. “Can we get to the part where we ask the Doge if we can borrow his favorite skyship?”

“We can’t simply knock on the door and ask,” said Zampa, his irritation evidently nearing its breaking point, judging by the vein pulsing in his forehead. “I told you, we have to—”

“Butter him up, yes—aah.” Rosso suddenly winced and rubbed his temple.

“Headaches again?” Serafina asked.

“Damned things seem to be getting worse every hour.” Rosso winced again, and, with visible effort, seemed to shake the headache away, though Serafina didn’t miss the way one of his hands remained clamped to his temple.

“Have a runner fetch you some willow bark,” said Zampa with the air of a parent telling a child to stop asking for sweets and go the hell to bed. “We have work to do, Niccolo. As I was saying—”

Three solid knocks boomed at the door.

“Oh, what now?” Zampa threw up his hands. “Yes?”

The door swung open, revealing Lorenzo on the threshold. Serafina felt a smile tugging at her lips at the sight of him: the familiar ragged cloak, his stubbled jaw, the tired but discerning eyes.

“This is a closed meeting,” said Zampa. “The matters discussed here are not for public ears. I must ask you to refrain from throwing the door open like that, signore. Now kindly state your business and leave us be.”

A surge of indignation rose in Serafina’s breast. Despite her better judgment, she gave it voice. “It is thanks to Lorenzo, Captain Zampa, that we have the journals in our possession again. He’s a man we can trust.”

“He’s a pirate and a smuggler,” said Zampa, with a sharp look at her.

“He’s also standing right here,” Lorenzo observed dryly, with a glance at both of them.

Zampa snorted. “I have little time for interruptions. What is it, signore?”

“Actually, I have a private message for Signorina Corso,” said Lorenzo, nodding to Serafina. “I wonder if you might join me in the hallway.”

“Alone?” Zampa asked dubiously.

“Alone?” repeated Serafina, more curious than alarmed.

Rosso gave Serafina a questioning glance of his own, but she shrugged. “I trust him with my person. And if I’m wrong…” She patted her sword. “Though I feel I must repeat myself on the matter of Lorenzo’s trustworthiness.”

“Very well,” said Zampa. “Niccolo, let us resume the letter. Or better yet, start over. To His Most Serene Prince …”

Serafina stepped out in the hall as Zampa continued his long-winded dictation. “What is it?” she asked once the door was closed.

They stood now in the tight hallway of the Silent Lion’s upper floor, aged floorboards creaking under their feet with every shift of weight. Lorenzo frowned, seeming to consider something, and then said, “I just got a message from the Spider.”

Serafina tensed. “The Spider? What does he want?”

“Seems he wants to collect on your debt,” said Lorenzo.

A stone seemed to tumble into Serafina’s stomach. “Already?”

He nodded. “You’re wanted in the square down below. Right now.”

“And he told you this?”

“I ran into one of his messengers while I was out. I’m known to him, I guess—must have figured I’d make a convenient go-between. But his debt’s with you.”

Serafina folded her arms—or at least she tried to before remembering she only had one arm. “You said right now? Out in the square? He’s not there personally, is he?”

“No idea,” said Lorenzo darkly. “He just said to be there.” Something seemed to occur to him. “You don’t think he wants those journals, do you?”

“He must,” said Serafina.

“But you’re not going to give them to him.” It wasn’t a question.

“Of course not.” Serafina ran her hand through her hair. Somehow, the thought of being in the crime lord’s presence again filled her with more dread than most inferni. But inferni, horrible as they might be, were just monsters, things that could be slain. The Spider … he was more than a man, here in Venice. She could see that now. He was an entire culture, a network, a clan. He had eyes and ears and grasping hands everywhere. The very whisper of his name could shift fortunes and spill blood. He was a man, but at the same time he was far more. He was a myth, and you couldn’t stab a myth.

“The journals are safe, then?”

She nodded. “In my room. Under the bed.”

He snorted. “Well, thank Veneziel for that stroke of genius. No thief will ever think of looking beneath your bed. You left the room locked, at least?”

She gave him a sidelong glance. “Of course I did.”

“Good. Keep it locked.” Lorenzo squared his shoulders. “Well, best go see what His Holy Arachnidness has to say to you. You won’t like what happens if you make him or his people wait.”

“You’ll be at my side, I assume? In case things go poorly?”

He smiled. There was a pain in that smile, but that was nothing new. Lorenzo carried burdens few might be able to detect—but Serafina, whose soul was laden with heavy weights of her own, knew what to look for. Not that now was a good time for sharing such things.

“Of course,” said Lorenzo. Perhaps unconsciously, his hand drifted to his cheek, where she’d kissed him after he’d helped her recover the journals. Then he turned, leading her down the hallway.

They emerged into the afternoon light, blinking in the sudden brightness. The piazza wasn’t quite in front of the inn, but a block away; a minute’s walk brought them from the Silent Lion’s front door to the edge of the square. The piazza bustled with the usual crowds—craftsmen and traders selling their wares, children playing on the fountain in the center, and a couple of bored city watchmen leaning on their hauberds, trading gossip.

Serafina scanned the crowd, her gaze flicking from face to face, wondering which of them worked for the Spider, carrying a message to her from that wretched human arachnid.

“Which one is it?” she murmured. “Who works for the …”

She trailed off, realizing that Lorenzo was no longer beside her. That was odd, but perhaps he’d flowed into the crowd to flush out whatever messenger the Spider had sent. When he’d said he’d be at her side, perhaps that was more metaphorical than literal.

“Lorenzo?” she called. Surely his absence, while odd, was no cause for alarm. He was the sort of man who sailed on his own winds, after all, answering to no one. She’d find him back at the inn, perhaps with a story of having apprehended a pair of hidden assassins the Spider had sent to gut her …

She felt a tug at her waist—something subtle, barely there. She almost didn’t glance down. But when she did, she caught a glimpse of a small girl making for denser crowds.

And—angels above!—Serafina’s coin purse was missing.

Letting out a huff of dismay, Serafina darted after the child, whose head whipped around. She spotted Serafina coming after her and sped up, slipping between two merchant stalls. Apologizing to the vendors, Serafina edged between the stalls—a greater feat when you didn’t have a child’s frame—and picked up the pace in time to see the child disappearing around a corner.

Serafina hurried after her. The child sped along as fast as her undersized legs could carry her, but she couldn’t outrun an adult. Serafina caught up with the child near a bridge leading over a broad canal, seizing the girl by the collar and spinning her around.

The little girl—angels above, she couldn’t be more than eight—looked up at Serafina with a melange of terror and defiance. “Don’t hurt me, signora! Please! I was just doing a job, promise!”

Shame washed over Serafina, and she loosened her grip on the girl, snatching her coin purse back the moment she released the child’s collar. Focused as she was on the return of her purse and her embarrassment for roughing up a child, it took a moment for the girl’s last words to strike home. “Just doing a job, you say?”

The girl smirked at her, the terror washing away like spilled wine on the cobblestones. She’s good. I believed her fear. “Aye,” said the girl, and scampered away over the bridge.

Serafina didn’t pursue her. She surveyed the canal, trying to ignore the sudden prickle of apprehension.

She fled back to the inn, brushing past passersby, her pace quickening with every step. By the time she burst through the inn’s entrance and past the common room, she was nearly sprinting. Patrons in the common room looked up in befuddlement from tankards of mead.

She was moving so fast she very nearly missed the open door of her room.

She slid to a stop, then reversed and stood on the threshold, her heart striking a frantic beat. The door was ajar. She’d brought very few possessions along this journey so far, so there was little to be strewn about, but her bed was tipped on its side, the blankets in an unruly heap.

Serafina, she thought. The betrayal had come like a fox trap snapping shut: quick, painful, and obvious in retrospect. You utter fool.

She darted in, flinging the blankets aside. Her heart was a buzz, thrashing almost painfully against her ribs. She already knew what she’d find.

Or rather, what she wouldn’t find.

Lorenzo stalked away from the Silent Lion inn, the pair of journals clutched under one arm.

He told himself it had to be done. That Serafina had deserved it, leaving the journals where a half-decent lockpick could reach them. That she didn’t need them anymore. His need was greater.

And yet the bitter taste in his mouth still lingered.

But he couldn’t dwell on Serafina Corso. His left hand felt the box still held in a satchel at his side. The box that held a severed finger, just the right size to belong to a boy aged eleven or twelve.

The Spider wasn’t a man for subtle warnings.

Lorenzo couldn’t say with certainty that the finger was Giuliano’s, but it wore a ring he knew well. A brass trinket with an owl embossed on it, something Lorenzo had stolen years ago, then pressed to his son through the bars of his cell just before the constables hauled him off to the Sinkhole five years ago. He remembered the light in Giuliano’s eyes, as though the ugly little ring were the golden signet of a duke.

I’m coming, Lorenzo thought. He hurried along the street, his precious burdens in hand, trying to ignore that sour taste. He suspected—and this, perhaps, was the first honest thing he’d admitted to himself in the last hour—that it would take its sweet time going away.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next up: Serafina deals with the loss of the journals. Further complications ensue.

Part I

Part II

Announcement for Subscribers and Followers

Ryan Kunz — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 15:23:49 GMT

These past eight months or so on Substack have been a lot of fun. They’ve also challenged me in the right ways, keeping me on my toes as I keep to a self-imposed deadline of one post a week (and occasionally more). I’ve enjoyed engaging with those who’ve followed along with The Archangel’s Gift. You guys make me feel like a real writer!

But The Archangel’s Gift isn’t my only project. Far from it, actually. I’ve been able to juggle everything I’m working on so far, but it’s helped that nothing else I’m doing has had a firm deadline, allowing me to make adjustments as needed.

Until now.

Folks, I got my edits back for Valkyrie Moon, my upcoming debut novel (still a year out!). I’ve got about two months to turn them around and produce a new draft, which would be plenty of time if that were all I was working on. But of course, when you add in everything else—a weekly fantasy serial (including detailed illustrations that I’m doing myself for some reason), a sci-fi murder mystery I really want to get to my agent by the end of the year, a secret project I’m doing with a friend, and Valkyrie Moon’s contracted sequel, plus whatever I’m doing for my full-time job (oh, yeah, I have that)… well, it’s a lot.

All of which is to say that, to give me a little bit of breathing room…

The Archangel’s Gift will be moving to a biweekly schedule from now until the end of April. This means the next chapter will be released on March 16.

If you read fantasy, you’re probably aware of a few high-profile authors who’ve promised the next book and then either dropped off the earth for a decade and a half or are working very hard on literally everything except finishing The Winds of Winter (oh, sorry, did I almost name names?).

I don’t want that to be me, now or in some potential future when I have thousands of fans. The compact between author and reader is a sacred one: you’re the people who allow me to do what I love to do, and I owe you transparency in regard to my writing. (This, incidentally, is one of the reasons I appreciate Brandon Sanderson—the man gives his fans weekly updates on how his writing is going, for goodness sake!)

So—if you care—here’s my writing schedule for the next few months. It’s a little subject to change, depending on how long things take me, but I intend to stick to it as closely as possible.

March-April: Focus on Valkyrie Moon edits. As mentioned, I’ll scale back The Archangel’s Gift to give me time to get this done.

May: Work on an overdue project I’m collaborating on with a friend. I can’t say much more on this. Meanwhile, The Archangel’s Gift will return to a weekly format and remain so for the foreseeable future, including during the projects below. Huzzah!

June: Work on my sci-fi mystery. Some of you have heard me talk about this: it’s a locked-room murder mystery aboard a colony ship, where a handful of people wake up early from cryo to find one of their fellow passengers dead. Think Agatha Christie meets Andy Weir, with a little bit of cosmic horror thrown in. As mentioned above, I have a goal to get a revised version of this to my agent by the end of the year. We’ll see.

July onward: Hit the Valkyrie Moon sequel hard, with the goal of having a solid first draft by the end of the year. If I’m being fully honest, I haven’t really started this beyond the outlining stage, and I have till next April to deliver a fully revised manuscript to my editor.

Beyond that? The Archangel’s Gift is projected to conclude in late summer, after which I’ll probably try to serialize a totally different project that’s been stewing in my brain for years. (I won’t say too much, but it involves dinosaurs.) I’d also love to get a novel version of the first arc of The Archangel’s Gift out as well.

Anyway, thanks for following along. I appreciate every subscriber, follower, reader, and casual observer. Without you, the people in my head would just be imaginary friends.

—Ryan

Subscribe now

PS: Please answer a few quick questions to help me plan the future of this newsletter. Thanks!

Day in the Life of the Interstitial Writer

Ryan Kunz — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:30:43 GMT

This piece is part of “Day of the ___ Writer” an open collab on the daily experiences behind our writing. You’re welcome to join by posting about your day on your pub. Check out our growing mosaic of many lives.

Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

6:00. My alarm goes off. I roll out of bed next to my wife, though my ten-month-old daughter has inevitably ended up parked between us like the world’s cutest border guard. Then I go for a run. Running time is one of my favorite times of the day, when the sun is still peeking over the Wasatch mountains to the east. Sometimes I’ll put on an audiobook; sometimes I’ll run without accompaniment and let the ideas churn in my brain.

7:00. Time to shower, get dressed, and possibly sneak in some writing before the kids come raging down the stairs. Some people have dedicated writing time, but I seem to find success in the interstices, the empty space between the chapters of my day. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a page or so done. If not, I’ll have just opened my laptop when my five-year-old daughter starts bellowing for cereal.

8:00. Breakfast and hurrying out the door to catch my train, the closest I have to regular writing time. For an hour, my time is mine to do as I wish, though sometimes this means getting a jump on a presentation that’s due that afternoon. If there are no fires at work, however, it means I can settle in and write a chapter while enjoying the gentle rocking of the train.

9:00-5:00. Work. I write headlines, scripts, and concepts for cause-related clients at an ad agency. But whenever I have a moment, I flip to the browser tab that houses my latest story and plug away for a few minutes. Don’t tell my boss.

5:00. More train time. The ride home is always busier and more crowded, so writing on the train now means squeezing between someone watching TikTok without headphones and some guy whose eyes will follow every word I write. Hope he likes what he reads.

6:00. Dinner. There is no writing time during dinner. I tried that once. The powers that be were not pleased.

7:00. Put the kids to bed. If we can get through the screams that come with persuading a five- and three-year-old to follow the same ritual they do literally every night, it’s time for another highlight of the day: reading books. Sometimes my girls ask me to tell them a story off the cuff. Those often involve magical squirrels.

8:00. Post-kid time. Sometimes this space is filled with freelance writing work. Other times, I work on my own writing. Still other times, this is where my wife and I steal a few quiet moments together. My writing isn’t the only part of my life that has to exist between lines in a daily planner.

10:00. Time to get ready for bed. Sometimes I’ll stay up, but much of the time I’m exhausted and welcome the chance to flop into bed.

11:00-6:00. I dream of a time when my writing is the main event, not the space between.

I write fiction. I also write about fiction. Here’s the opening chapter of my ongoing serial…

… while here’s a recent nonfiction piece you might enjoy.

The Archangel's Gift: The Silent Lion

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:27:27 GMT

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Now, Serafina and Lorenzo must put aside their differences and forge an uneasy alliance—and possibly more—if they want to save the world…

Subscribe now

Part I

Part II

PREVIOUSLY: Serafina met the famed explorer Jacopo Zampa and several members of his crew. She found both volumes of her father’s journal, which will allow her and her companions to travel to the Archangels’ holy mountain and stop the inferni. However, a traitor stole both journals, shot her comrade Rafael de Medici (a powerful cantore capable of using the underlying song of the universe to change his surroundings), and set the Society building ablaze. After a prolonged chase, Serafina got the journals back…

This scene takes place in the daytime, but the night was much more interesting to paint. Sorry.

The inn sat on a narrow spur off Calle del Paradiso, a five-minute ride by water from the ruins of the Venetian Aethergraphic Society’s former headquarters.

It was called Leone Silento, the Silent Lion, and the wooden sign over its door was carved in the painted likeness of an angel stopping the mouth of a great golden cat. It was the sort of place that seemed to exist around every street corner in Venice, a building plastered in muted washes of ochre, faded rose, and smoke-stained cream. Laundry lines stretched overhead like forgotten banners.

Serafina, sitting in a chair in a room on the ground floor of the inn, turned her face away from the window and the street beyond to focus once more on the figure lying supine in the bed before her.

When she’d first met Rafael de Medici, he’d been hearty, hale, and handsome—confident in both his place in the world and his mastery of the arcane arts of the Canticle. The man in the bed, bandages wrapped liberally around his chest, was pale and drawn, his eyes closed. It had been such a small thing to work such a change: a lead ball the size of the end of Serafina’s little finger.

“Will he recover?” Serafina asked the gray-robed cantore at the foot of the bed. Father Benvolio, she’d heard him called—he’d been roused from his bed at a church near the Society building and had been among those to use his arcane abilities to put out the unnatural blaze. No sooner had he done so than he’d been enlisted to care for the injured—Rafael, most of all.

“The human body resists meddling from the Canticle,” said Father Benvolio, a wiry little man with a fringe of wispy black hair at his temples. “I’ve always believed that since God used the great song of the universe to create us in His image, it resists any instruction to change what He already ordained to be perfect.”

Serafina knew all this, of course—in her time among the Knights of the Threshold, she’d seen more than a few cantori fail to save those who should, in theory, have been healed by the all-powerful Grand Canticle. He didn’t know she was a soldier, of course.

The cantore seemed to realize he was rambling. “What I mean to say is … well, perhaps. I managed to halt the infection, at least.” His expression turned even more grim. “I fear, however, that while the injury itself does not threaten his life, its result could be catastrophic for a man in his position.”

Serafina tilted her head. “Meaning …”

The cantore pointed to the bandages encircling Rafael’s chest, looking surprised that Serafina hadn’t caught on yet. “The ball penetrated his lung. His ability to sing the Canticle will be … affected.”

“Affected?” Serafina repeated, feeling a renewed welling of dread.

Father Benvolio nodded sadly. “He will speak again, but touching the Canticle requires precise intonation, pitch, and force behind the song. It will be a long time, if ever, before he can sing as he once did.”

Serafina’s throat tightened, and so did her grip on the chair. The Canticular feats she’d seen Rafael perform over the last week or so had been some of the most impressive she’d ever witnessed, everything from heating his tea to the precise temperature to calling down a storm of ice to envelope a flock of harpies. To think that Rafael might never be able to do such a thing again …

She felt she knew—at least a little—what that might be like. Her eyes roved to the stump where her left arm should have been. But at least for her, healing lay at the end of the journey they were about to set out on. Empyrea, the Archangel’s holy mountain, held the keys to rescue her from the family curse that was slowly eating away at her body, though on days like today, that fabled peak felt so distant it may as well have been on the moon.

“Thank you,” she said to Father Benvolio. “I trust you’ve been compensated for your efforts? From what I’ve heard, you helped a great deal.”

The cantore bobbed his head. “Captain Zampa promised a sizable donation to my humble churchyard, yes. The east wall has been slowly collapsing into the canal, and he will see to it that the supports are repaired.”

“Good. If we have further need of you …”

“Captain Zampa will send a runner, and I will answer,” said Father Benvolio with a tight little smile. “I am happy to assist.”

“Thank you again, my friend,” said Serafina. She shook the cantore’s hand, and he departed.

It was mid-morning, the day after her disastrous arrival at the Venetian Aethergraphic Society with Rafael, Niccolo Rosso, and Lorenzo. Jacopo Zampa had temporarily relocated all Society operations—such as they were these days—to this inn, whose owner happened to be a great admirer of the famous explorer. Temporarily was the word Zampa had used, but Serafina failed to see how the Silent Lion would continue to serve as the Society’s base of operations for anything other than the foreseeable future—she’d seen the scorched ruins of the venerable old building that had served the Society for so long, and its serving days were over.

Lorenzo was in the room allocated for his use, likely sleeping off last night’s adventure. Serafina allowed a faint smile as she thought of the rogue, who had helped her procure the journals again from the traitor di Marco at great personal risk, with no apparent reward in mind. With Rafael indisposed, it seemed increasingly unlikely that he would ever be paid what he was owed for bringing them to Venice; that loose end was ostensibly keeping him here.

Serafina found herself hoping that, gold ducats or no, Lorenzo might find some other excuse to stay. Perhaps—and this was wishful thinking, she admitted to herself—he might even go on their journey to Empyrea when the time came.

Sitting in the chair next to Rafael, she snorted to herself. Why should Lorenzo embark on such a journey? Retrieving a pair of stolen journals was one thing. Braving the storms that surrounded the Archangels’ forbidden mountain was quite another.

Still, a girl could hope …

The door creaked, and Serafina looked up to see Niccolo Rosso entering. He wore new clothing, a strange look on him after she’d grown accustomed to the rags of a former prisoner, which he’d worn ever since their escape from the Sanctum of Penance in Rome. His scraggly gray beard had been given a cursory combing, and his hair was tied back with a leather thong. She could almost imagine him as he’d once been, a proud explorer on the deck of the Nimbus.

That mental image was fleeting, however; it shattered as he caught sight of his half-brother in the bed and everything about him seemed to shrink. He sighed and pulled another chair to sit beside Serafina.

“The cantore told you what the ball did to him?” Rosso asked quietly. “About the Canticle and all?”

Serafina nodded.

“Damn Cosimo to the Ninth Circle,” Rosso spat. “I still can’t believe he betrayed us, after all these bloody years. I wish you and Lorenzo had left him alive, though.”

“I didn’t kill him,” said Serafina, feeling slightly defensive. “He died in the crash, I told you.”

“I’m not upset you did him in,” said Rosso darkly. “I just wish you’d left some of him for me.”

A silence stretched for a minute or so after that. Outside, the campanile of St. Mark’s tolled the eleven o’clock hour, the proud bells mingling with the cries of gondoliers somewhere on the water.

“I didn’t know him until I was fifteen, you know,” said Rosso, and for a moment Serafina thought he was still talking about Cosimo di Marco. But his eyes were on his half-brother in the bed now. “I’m a bastard. A literal one—the spawn of the great banker lord Prosperino de Medici of Florence and one of his serving girls.” He gave a rueful smile. “You can imagine the scandal. He sent my mother and me away to Venice to be cared for by some of our family’s business associates. It was a decade and a half before my father allowed me to return, and that was for a short visit. That was when I first laid eyes on my younger brother, my trueborn brother.”

Serafina might have expected bitterness in Rosso’s words, but to her mild surprise, his tone carried only fondness. “We hit it off at once. Thick as thieves, as the saying goes. He was only ten, but his mind belonged in someone much older. I worked in my foster father’s merchant fleet, finding excuses to return to Florence to visit him, and we’d hatch grand plans …” Rosso looked vaguely into the distance, smiling. “He never discounted me or belittled me because of my birth. To him, I was his brother, and that was all that mattered.”

Serafina found she had little to add to his oration, so she kept quiet. After another silence, Rosso cleared his throat. “But I actually didn’t come in here just to keep vigil or reminisce about boyhood joys. Zampa has returned, and he’s called for you. With the journals returned—thank the angels for you and that bloody smuggler, by the way—we’re ready to begin preparations for the journey.”

“We won’t wait until Rafael wakes up?” Serafina was surprised. “Wasn’t this whole enterprise part his idea?”

Rosso shrugged. “When he wakes, he’ll join us. Time waits for none, however. The longer we wait, the longer the Divinocracy has to find us and bar our path.”

“Your father,” said Jacopo Zampa, “has given us a grand gift.”

They were seated in Zampa’s room in the inn. Zampa had generously allowed Rafael to convalesce in the largest room the Silent Lion had to offer—a room the inn’s owner said the Doge’s mother-in-law had once stayed in, though there was no evidence to back up this dubious claim—but this left little space for the conspirators to meet elsewhere. Zampa’s room was barely four feet deep and seven feet wide, with an avenue along the side of the narrow bed leading to the door. Into that avenue trailed six legs as Serafina sat on the bed on one side of Zampa and Rosso.

At least it was just the three of them—with Rafael, the space might have been unmanageable. And perhaps it was good Lorenzo hadn’t attended. She’d invited him to learn what it was he’d helped steal back, despite Rosso’s objections, but he had declined, citing business elsewhere in the city.

Zampa held up the first volume of her father’s journal, revealing a hand-drawn diagram. It seemed to depict the barrier between Empyrea and the rest of the world—the wall of storms known as the Interdiction. Zampa’s finger traced the place where the eternal waters of the Abyss met the lower reaches of the storms. There Serafina’s father had marked an X, with a few scrawled notations she couldn’t quite make out.

“You see?” Zampa said, grinning as though he’d just found the secret to eternal youth tucked away in his shoe. Rosso nodded appreciatively, but Serafina shook her head. “He slipped under the storms,” Zampa went on. “According to your father, signorina Corso, a low-masted ship with a skilled captain can fly low, nearly skimming the surface of the water, and avoid the worst of the storm.”

Serafina blinked. She hadn’t known such a thing was possible, of course. She’d always assumed her father had somehow flown through the storm—and likely been dashed to pieces.

Zampa was still speaking. “The ship would need to be sturdy enough to withstand the storm but light enough to maneuver. Bigger than a lighter, of course, but smaller than a galleon. And—most importantly, for that level of maneuvering, we’ll need a breath-differential array.”

Serafina looked blankly. “Sorry . . . a what?”

“A ring of multiple vents on each leviathan’s breath pylon,” Rosso supplied. “By controlling which vents release gas and in what proportion, we can create subtle shifts in trim, yaw, and pitch. Makes it possible not only for fine altitude adjustment but also tight turns, rolls, and lateral slides.”

“Perfect for getting through tight spaces between storm and sea, then,” said Serafina with a nod of understanding, slightly impressed with herself that she’d managed to penetrate the thick cloud of aeronautical jargon.

“Quite,” agreed Zampa.

“How many ships have those?”

“Maybe three in the Black Armada,” said Zampa. “Currently docked in Venice, at least. More scattered throughout the skies.”

Di Marco frowned. “I wonder . . . the Kestrel, perhaps?”

“A fine ship, but not for a venture of this magnitude,” said Zampa, turning back to face the group. “We’ll need something that will look the part in the paintings future generations will create of this voyage. The Mist Queen, I think.”

“What is this Mist Queen?” Serafina wondered.

“One of the latest ships to come out of the storied Venetian shipyards,” said Zampa without bothering to hide the pride in his words. His smile turned wicked. “Built for the Doge himself, as it happens, so no expense was spared in its making. Its rails are trimmed in gold leaf, with a golden statue of His Grace’s own grandmother, our revered Duchess Lucrezia, forming the figurehead. The pylons—with breath-differentials, of course—are fashioned in the shape of roaring dragons. It is truly a work to behold.”

“So this ship belongs to the Doge,” mused Serafina, glancing out the window to the distant spires that marked the dwelling place of the Doge, Venice’s head of state. “I’m guessing he would be perhaps a bit . . . reluctant to part with it?”

Zampa snorted. “We’re not going to steal it, girl. But you forget where you stand. This is the Venetian Aethergraphic Society, builder of the finest ships and leader of the finest expeditions.” He looked around the crowded room, seeming to remember the much-diminished state of said Society, but he ploughed on. “My reputation, at least, didn’t go down in those flames. His Grace will listen to us when we suggest a test voyage is in order, to assure that the Mist Queen is suitable to convey his noble personage in the air. Once in the air, we will find ourselves blown off course in the vicinity of Empyrea. When we return, covered in glory—”

“—and armed with the answers to save the Chosen Isles, no doubt,” Rosso interjected.

“Just so,” said Zampa, his smile never faltering, “When we return, His Grace will have no choice but to take credit for the whole expedition, absolving us of any wrongdoing.”

“When does the Mist Queen launch?” Rosso asked.

“It will serve as the Passing festival’s grand finale.”

“That’s in two weeks, isnt it?” said Serafina. She’d seen the angel icons and prayer ribbons in the streets as people prepared for one of the city’s biggest celebrations. “Do we have time to prepare for an expediton of this size?”

“Please, signorina,” said Zampa. “I’ve prepared for grander voyages in my sleep. Everything will work out, you’ll see.”

Serafina felt a tentative smile spreading across her features. They were fortunate to have Zampa as a patron, even if she wasn’t entirely convinced that altruism was his primary motivation. Or even a secondary motivation, for that matter. But even if he had eyes full of glory, Jacopo Zampa could open doors nobody else could.

To say the course had been smooth so far would be an outright lie … but at last, it seemed Lady Fortune might actually be affording them her favor.

But she checked the smile before it could fully bloom. Having lived the life she had, Serafina knew better than to take too much of the future for granted. Hard-won experience told her this was exactly the point when everything started to go wrong.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Next up: Lorenzo gets an urgent reminder about his deadline.

Part I

Part II

The Archangel's Gift: A Fantasy Serial

The Archangel's Gift: Judgment Day

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

TO BE CONTINUED…

BEHIND THE SCENES

Other great stuff I read this week:

To My Paid Subscribers

The Archangel's Gift: The Isle of Thieves

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

TO BE CONTINUED…

Other great stuff I read this week:

The Archangel's Gift: To Empyrea

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

TO BE CONTINUED…

Other great stuff I read this week:

The Archangel's Gift: Rome Besieged

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

The mawworm reared from the shattered street, cobblestones tumbling like crumbs from its ten-foot mouth.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Other great stuff I read this week:

How to Swear in Fantasy

The Archangel's Gift: Grand Theft Skyship

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

The plan was supposed to go like this.

THE END OF PART II

To be concluded in Part III

Other great stuff I read this week:

Death on the Empyrean

Official Report from Alphonse Crumb to the Admiralty of the British Empire

Crew Manifest, H. M. A. D. Empyrean

Extract from the Log of Captain Edmund Harcourt, Commanding Officer of His Majesty’s Aetheric Dirigible Empyrean

Personal journal, Alphonse Crumb

Report of First Lieutenant Sybil Monroe Regarding Interview Conducted with Silas Finch

Interview Conducted by Lieutenant Alphonse Crumb with Captain Edmund Harcourt, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

Personal addendum, Alphonse Crumb

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with First Lieutenant Sybil Monroe

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with Lieutenant Charlotte Bryce

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with Lieutenant Arthur Bell, Ship-Technopath, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with Ensign Duncan MacLeod, Healer, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

Personal addendum, Alphonse Crumb

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with Warrant Officer Barnabas Figg, Empath, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

Personal addendum, Alphonse Crumb

Interview Conducted by Mr. Alphonse Crumb with the crew entire, H.M.A.D. Empyrean

Personal addendum, Alphonse Crumb

From the purser’s manifest, H. M. A. D. Empyrean, item 39

Personal addendum, Alphonse Crumb

THE END

The Archangel's Gift: Trust

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

TO BE CONTINUED…

Other great stuff I read this week:

The Archangel's Gift: The Ultimatum

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Serafina stood at the edge of a busy piazza, gazing past the dolphin-shaped fountain toward the massive edifice that rose on the far side.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Other great stuff I read this week:

The Archangel's Gift: The Viper's Task

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

“So …” Lorenzo began. “You need my help. Elaborate, if you please.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Other great stuff I read this week:

The Archangel's Gift: Bounty Hunters

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Other great stuff I read this week:

'The Last Jedi' Got Luke Skywalker Right

The Last Jedi was the last Star Wars movie I walked out of feeling excited.1

The Greatest Teacher, Failure Is

From a Certain Point of View

It’s Time for the Jedi to End

There Are Alternatives to Fighting

The Archangel's Gift: Hollow

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

There were three of them now: spindly white, four-foot monstrosities crouching in a pile of viscera on the tabletop.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Other great stuff I read this week:

The Archangel's Gift: The Exchange

New here? Here’s what the story’s about…

Whoever said that crime doesn’t pay must have had a pretty shoddy understanding of basic economics.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Other great stuff I read this week: