Seraphine Starfire climbed the watchtower steps two at a time, because the Gods had given her until moonrise to prove she was one of them. She was a white elf with dark skin and hair the color of bone, and in the town below she was known as the investigator who took the cases no one else would touch. Tonight none of that mattered. Without a token from her divine parent, the council would laugh her back down to the street. She reached the top room and shoved the door open. Star-glass windows lit the floor in pale blue. On the reading table sat a bouquet someone had left for her that morning — purple and blue roses, layered tight, no note. She had assumed it was a client's thank-you. Now she stopped and looked at it again. Her hands shook as she lifted the bouquet. She had searched this tower for years. Every drawer. Every stone. Nothing had ever answered her. But a gift, on this day, from no one — that was not coincidence. That was a message. She pulled the stems apart. Petals scattered. At the center, wrapped in wet green leaves, lay a small iron key. Not gold. Not jeweled. A working key, warm to the touch. She knew where it went. Behind the tower, past the tree line, a waterfall poured into a black pool she had been forbidden to enter as a child. The retired priestesses who raised her had called it a shrine and locked its gate. Seraphine ran. She reached the falls as the first stars came out. The water glowed faintly, silver and pink, the way the old women said it did only for the blooded. She found the gate under the spray. The key turned. Inside the hollow behind the water sat a stone shelf, and on the shelf, a pendant on a broken chain. A blade crossed a star. Her mother's mark. The metal hummed when she lifted it, and the hum answered something in her chest she had felt her whole life and never named. She closed her fist around it and spoke the summons the council had taught her. The air split. Three figures in white stood on the wet stones, tall as the trees, faces like weather. She held up the pendant. The tallest one looked at it, then at her, and did not smile. "It is hers," the figure said. "You are acknowledged, daughter." Seraphine's knees almost gave. She had won. Then the figure spoke again. "Your mother is missing. The token was hidden because someone wanted her forgotten. You will find her, or the seat we grant you tonight will be taken back before the next moon." The three vanished. The waterfall roared. Seraphine stood alone with the pendant burning in her hand, and a new clock already running.

Seraphine came down from the falls with the pendant still hot in her fist and no idea where to start. Her mother had been gone before Seraphine could walk. The retired priestesses who raised her had never said where. The moon was already a thin sliver above the trees. She had until it filled again, and she had nothing. She went to the one door in Riverdale Grove that might still open for her. The old chapel on the ridge had lost its roof a generation ago, but one of the priestesses who'd raised her still slept there among the fallen stones. Cassandra Veil had been the eldest of them, the one who slapped Seraphine's hand away from the shrine gate as a child. She was blind now, and mean with it. Seraphine found her sitting in the nave on a broken pew, chewing something dark. The old woman didn't turn her head. "You opened the gate," Cassandra said. "I felt it in my teeth." "I need to know where my mother went." "I don't know. None of us knew. That was the point." Cassandra spat. "But she left a mirror. I kept it because breaking it further seemed unkind." She pointed a bone-thin finger at a cloth bundle behind the altar. Seraphine unwrapped it. The mirror was cracked from center to frame, the glass held together by nothing but habit. Symbols crawled around the edge in old gold. "It won't show you a place," Cassandra said. "It's too broken. It'll show you a direction. That's all she left. Take it and go." Seraphine lifted the mirror. Her reflection came apart in a dozen wedges. She spoke her mother's name into it, the way the council had spoken hers. The cracks lit. The wedges of glass showed different things at once — a road, a black sea, a doorway of white fire. None of them was Riverdale Grove. None of them was any place she could walk to. "She crossed," Cassandra said quietly. "I thought she might have." "Crossed where?" "Out. Between realms. You'll need better eyes than mine." A small voice answered from the chapel door. "I can look." Seraphine turned. A child stood in the broken archway, barefoot, white braids to her waist, eyes clouded over. Aria Moonsight. Seraphine had passed her in the market a hundred times and given her coins. She had not known the girl was an oracle. She had not known the girl was the last person in town to speak with her mother. "She came to me the night before she left," Aria said. "She told me to wait for her daughter. She said her daughter would bring a mirror and a crystal that could see across." "I don't have a crystal." Aria smiled. "You will. It's already looking for you." Seraphine held the broken mirror against her chest. She had a trail now. She also had further to walk than any road in this world.