The moment Radeon stepped into the newly raised pavilion, the air changed.

Five wraiths followed him in a loose line, and Calyx came last, as if he could still choose to turn aside.

Every door and window shut at once. Wood thudded into its frame. Glass shivered.

The sound carried upward into a ceiling built too high for any mortal comfort.

"Relax yourselves," Radeon said. "Ceiling's high for a reason."

The five stopped fidgeting, but their eyes did not settle. Their borrowed shapes peeled back.

Limbs lengthened. Tongues lolled. Jaws sharpened into predatory lines, and their eyes burned a dull red.

Radeon looked them over one by one, not as a man might count allies, but as a craftsman checks flawed tools.

"Do you know why you all failed?"

They traded glances. The silence tasted metallic. Oisin was the first to break it, as he always was, eager to argue even with the gallows already measured.

"Is it not because you meant to teach us something?" His tone carried two blades, one keen with curiosity, the other honed for mockery.

Radeon did not rise to it. He did not even look at Oisin. His gaze slid to Calyx instead.

Calyx met it for half a breath, then averted his eyes, letting Radeon speak first, as if the questions in his own skull were too heavy to share.

"I won't dance around it," Radeon said. "You're ghosts, but not ghost enough."

For a heartbeat, the five were stunned into stillness. Then their faces twisted with disbelief.

They looked down at their bodies, at their claws and their dead flesh and their hunger, as if proof of their nature should have ended the argument.

Radeon watched them do it and waited for the certainty to fail.

"It's true, you're getting your consciousness back," he said. "But do you even understand the nature of what you're fighting?"

Something cold slid into his hand out of nothing, a crystal that caught the pavilion light and made it look wrong.

Inside, a creature writhed, sealed by the causality of misfortune and luck.

Even Calyx flinched. It was a small motion, almost nothing, yet it carried the weight of his old years.

The memory of holding such a thing down for millennia had left scars in him that no ghostly flesh could hide.

"This is something this realm shouldn't even have, is that correct?" Radeon asked.

His eyes stayed on Calyx. Not hostile, not kind, but he wanted Calyx to say what he knew.

Calyx swallowed a breath he did not need and spoke anyway.

"Correct." His voice was rough as gravel over stone. "These are the very beings who hounded the all types of wraiths and ghosts of this realm, until we were driven to the brink of extinction."

Oisin's head snapped toward Calyx. So did Elsin, Maeron, and Ewan. Their eyes narrowed, and the red in them looked less like hunger and more like accusation.

A secret that large had been kept in their midst, and kept cleanly. They stared at Calyx as if he had just named himself traitor.

The questions started piling behind their teeth, each one sharper than the last.

Radeon lifted a hand. His voice did not grow louder, yet it cut through them.

"Listen. Clear your heads."

Then he turned his palm toward Calyx, fingers spread like a ward.

"Do you remember what you can tell?"

Calyx jerked as if struck. His body convulsed. His ghastly hand clenched, and the pavilion timbers trembled under the force of it.

Fear too profound poured out of him, not a thought, not a mood, something that had rooted in his bones long ago.

The four others had never seen him like this. To them, Calyx was the oldest ghost, the strongest, the one who did not bend.

Seeing him shake made something sour bloom in their bellies.

Radeon did not step back. He drew the fear in.

His Constitution took it, swallowed it, made it part of him. Thirteen thousand four hundred seventeen years of living under constant threat.

Years spent listening for the scrape at the door that meant the seed had stirred. Years of holding the line while the mind begged to break.

Radeon closed his eyes as it hit him, and he let it sink all the way in until it sat in his bones.

When he opened his eyes again, Calyx grabbed him by the front of his robe and hauled him close, searching his face as if looking for cracks.

"What did you do, Radeon?" Calyx demanded. The words came out raw, half fury, half terror. "No man endures such a thing unless he has been tempered for it... for thousands of years."

Radeon looked at him with bored eyes.

"Unhand me, Calyx," he said.

Calyx released him, but his gaze kept circling, scanning for any sign that Radeon had been changed in ways that mattered.

The crystal still sat in Radeon's hand, quiet as a coffin.

"Are you able to tell us what you know now about the seed?" he asked.

Calyx's throat bobbed. He thought an incense worth of time, then shook his head.

"Can you say something about it?" Radeon asked again.

Calyx shook his head again, slower this time. His eyes dropped, useless with it, because he did not want others to pay for the secret.

"I can tell you," Radeon said. "If you hear it, it's yours forever." He let that sit. "Some people die from knowing. You still want it?"

He did not push his aura. He did not threaten. The words themselves did it for him. The words themselves touched something immemorial in the wraiths, instincts honed by death and danger and worse than death.

Their bodies screamed to leave, to unhear, to shed their senses so the knowledge could not cling to them. Even their skin seemed to recoil, as if the secret could be felt like hot ash.

Calyx fought his own warnings, conscious and unconscious, and forced his voice steady. He chose his next words like stepping across a blade.

"I would know a secret," he said, "yet pay the least price I can stomach. Is that possible?"

Calyx knew what secrets did to mortals. A mortal who heard Radeon speak plainly would not faint or weep. He would be erased, flesh and soul, with no clean return.

Not by the Heavenly Dao, but by something that surpassed it by magnitudes, beyond what any mind was said to fathom.

Oisin's hands flexed. Elsin shifted his feet as if the floor had turned to ice. Maeron and Ewan looked ready to bolt, their limbs twitching with the urge to flee the pavilion and never speak of this again.

They were lost, caught between hunger for truth and the animal need to survive it.

Radeon studied Calyx for a long moment. His knowledge came from another cosmos, and this realm ran on the same rules.

Still, if the mechanism fit, it would turn. What mattered was the price. And Radeon, in the end, was the eldritch who would benefit and swallow it all.

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