Lightning tore through Caelos' obsidian sky as Eleanor von Adler regained consciousness. The sting of Burgundian hail bit into her skin where her convent's woolen habit clung to flesh. She tasted copper—whether from the storm or the blood soaking the cobblestones, she couldn’t tell. Memory flickered like the dying embers of a pyre: the searing white light, the smell of burning parchment, the abbess screaming "God’s judgment comes!" before...

  "Still breathing?" Her whisper dissolved into the tempest. When lightning illuminated the carnage again, she saw the truth—twelve headless Teutonic knights in black tabards lay arranged like blasphemous clockwork around her, their severed hands still clutching zweih?nder swords pointing toward her trembling form.

  The glass alembic vial at her breast pulsed faintly—her alchemical mentor's last gift before the Inquisition took him. Eleanor clutched it as scarlet rainwater pooled in the raven sigil engraved on its surface. Her retreating steps faltered when stone scraped against her spine—the western curtain wall of Castle Schwarzmond, its gargoyles weeping rust-colored tears.

  Three hundred paces through the slaughter brought her to the granary. The reek of burning tallow candles and something fouler guided her shaking hands. When her boot caught on a corpse's gambeson, the dead man's arm snapped upward with rigor mortis finality, cold fingers closing around her throat.

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  "By Lucifer's chains—!" Her curse died as another flash revealed her attacker's identity: Lord Reinhardt von Hohenzollern, Imperial Regent to the Holy Roman Emperor, his throat slit so deeply the vertebrae glistened. Yet his dead grip tightened, forcing her to smash his wrist against an iron sconce until bones cracked.

  The secret hatch opened with a groan of protesting hinges. Below the blood-slicked stairs, Eleanor found the oubliette—and the dying man who'd haunt her nightmares. Moonlight through arrow slits revealed his Burgundian crusader's cloak, the silver griffon clasp marking him as a Knight Hospitaller. But the inverted cross branded into his chest still smoked faintly.

  "Who are you?" She pressed a wine-soaked rag to his wound. The alembic vial glowed brighter when his gloved hand seized her wrist. His eyes opened—one sapphire blue, the other milky white with a scar cutting through like a comet’s tail.

  "The Antichrist...comes..." Blood bubbled at his lips as he shoved a cipher wheel into her palm, its symbols matching those on the vial. Outside, wolf howls merged with the dying storm. Eleanor barely noticed the crusader's last breath frosting into a word:

  "Eleison..."