Where Saints Lie Sleeping
Edda Vance is running toward a place she was told never to find. The coach rattles across the moorland, heather brown and seed-dead under a sky the color of old iron, while in her chest the wound she carries pulses with something that isn't blood. She has been following a trail of half-remembered prophecies and a dead sister's last letter to the monastery of Saint Caelum, where seven saints lie sleeping beneath the church floor, sealed by oath, stone, and three hundred years of unbroken vigil. But the vigil has cracked. Brother Caelum Madren, the order's young keeper, argues the saints must be woken to face a coming darkness. Mother Seraine Ousborne, the ancient matriarch who has guarded them since Edda's grandmother was a child, insists that waking them will shatter the world's foundations. Father Orin speaks only in parables that make Edda's hands shake. Sister Pelia and Brother Toma have stopped speaking to each other entirely. And Vesper Halloway, the one person Edda trusted to meet her at the gate, has vanished into the moor carrying something she shouldn't have touched. Each day the seal weakens. Each night the ground beneath the monastery groans. And Edda, who came here seeking answers, is starting to suspect the wound in her chest isn't the only one opening. When the final seal breaks and the saints stir, she will have to choose: trust the order that failed her, or break the seal herself and let the sleeping dead decide what kind of world wakes up with them.