Caelum kept his golden eyes on the script carved across the sealed door.

"It has been a while, Caelum."

The voice rolled in from behind him, deep enough to drag along the stone and come back off the walls with a growl buried under it. Caelum did not turn. His hands stayed folded at the small of his back, leather gloves pressed together, his posture unbroken before the slab rising ahead of him — a door with no handle, no seam wide enough for a blade, no mechanism that strength or clever fingers could ever persuade. Once shut, it opened from the inside or it did not open at all.

Which meant Valttair would let them in when he decided their waiting had cost enough.

"Indeed," Caelum said, wearing the same even calm he carried everywhere. "It has been a while, Moses. I trust the years have treated you well."

A long breath left the warrior at his back, rough with old irritation rather than any kind of weariness. "Dry as ever. Decades under the same banner, bleeding into the same stone, and that cold streak of yours has not thawed by a single degree where I am concerned."

Caelum let that pass and kept his eyes on the door.

Moses filled the space behind him, enormous even in a chamber built to house giants. Two and a half meters of armored muscle, horned, broad through the shoulders, his black hair yanked into a tie that lost half its battle to the wild of it. Two horns curved from his skull in dark ridges and gave his silhouette a weight the eye read as demonic before the mind caught up. His eyes were purple, deep and cutting, brighter than the chamber’s pale light had any right to make them. Half-human, half-demon — and in him the demon’s portion had done more than leave a few decorative marks.

Moses captained the First Morgain Squadron, and among the soldiers sworn directly to the house, no blade stood above his. Not even Caelum’s. Decide the question by steel, by fist, by speed or endurance or the plain arithmetic of who could open more throats before breakfast, and Moses won it without ceremony.

And yet Caelum stood nearer to Valttair’s private business than he did.

That was the splinter lodged under Moses’s tongue, and it had been working itself deeper for years.

The chamber held its cold around them, carved beneath frozen peaks far from any road worth a name. The air tasted of ice, iron, and old enchantment. Somewhere far above, snow hauled itself across the ridges in endless white sheets. Down here the world had narrowed to stone, frost, and one door that refused them.

Moses’s armored boot began striking the floor in a slow beat. Not nerves — impatience, wearing the sound as a disguise.

Caelum turned his head enough to grant him that much. His gaze went first to the horns. Memory had filed them down over the years; the flesh put every ridge back. Moses had never been a man you forgot, but recollection shaved him to something survivable, and in person he read less like a soldier of House Morgain than like one of the family’s older punishments, handed armor and a captain’s rank.

Moses bared his teeth in a thing that fell short of a smile. "There he is. I was beginning to think you had become part of the door."

"You would have found that disappointing."

"I would have found it fitting. Cold, shut, impossible to move without Lord Valttair’s leave. Very you."

Caelum’s face gave nothing back. "Your comparisons have grown theatrical."

"My missions have starved me of decent conversation."

"A hardship for your men, surely."

Moses snorted hard enough to scatter the mist curling off his breath. "My men enjoy my company."

"I am sure they have rehearsed saying so."

His purple eyes narrowed, amusement riding beneath the irritation. "There. Nearer the Caelum I left behind. I had started to fear the young masters polished all the venom out of you."

"The young masters have offered no shortage of reasons to keep it."

Moses dragged a heavy step closer, the joints of his armor grinding. "Speaking of them. You truly have nothing worth telling me? I vanish for years on our lord’s word, crawl back to a world louder than the one I left, and you greet me like a butler remarking on the frost."

Caelum returned his attention to the door. "You have come back at an inconvenient hour."

"Now that sounds promising."

"It was not offered as such."

"For me it counts." Moses folded his arms across the chestplate, the silver wolf’s eye catching the thin mana-light. "There was a war. A real one, from the scraps that reached us. Thal’zar banners burning, Sylvanel steel on the move, Morgain soldiers finally let off the leash. A pity our lord never thought to call me or my boys. We would have made a feast of it."

"You were not required," Caelum said. "The forces sent were enough."

The boot stopped.

"Enough," Moses repeated, rolling the word around his mouth like wine gone to vinegar. "You are certain of that? With me on the field, perhaps no heir rides home in a box."

Caelum turned fully now.

By rights the exchange should have looked absurd. Moses overtopped him by the better part of three heads, a horned rampart of black steel and demon blood; Caelum stood there in a tailored suit and leather gloves, a servant’s restraint stitched into every line of him, out of place in a room built for ancient doors and buried orders. Yet his golden eyes climbed to meet Moses’s without surrendering an inch.

Moses did not frighten him. Moses knew it. That galled him worse than any fear could have.

"That is a heavy claim," Caelum said. "I would urge you to repeat it to Lord Valttair once we are let inside. I am certain he would treasure an account of how neatly you might have won the war from the far side of a mountain range."

Moses clicked his tongue. "Forget I said it."

"You dig a thing up and then ask me to fill the hole back in." Caelum’s voice did not rise. "You were always fonder of the swing than the mess it leaves behind."