You broke the seal on the eighth god

Eight raised the world. Seven spent their share of the First Light making things: walls, words, wilds, hearths, mercies, forges, bonds. The eighth could not bear to spend his.

Light that is never given fades. What was left of his hardened, and the coins learned to walk. The seven sealed him and his glittering vaults beneath the world and struck his name from every record, so completely that the striking is the only part anyone can still point at.

The Starspire keep a book with one word crossed out and will not say what it was. The Dawnflame set a place at the hearth every morning for someone they refuse to agree is gone. The Moonveil keep the name itself. Three orders each hold one piece of the same fact, none of them will trade, and each is quietly certain the other two are being careless with it.

What comes up out of the vault-mouths are the Minted: light that was loved wrongly, struck into cold imitations of life. Every dungeon in Lumoria is a museum of that one heartbreak. Above them stand the Vault Vanguards, and above those the Knights of the Sunless Court, and at the bottom of it is the horizon the Descent is walking toward.

There are seven gods a soul may lawfully swear to, and therefore twenty-one lawful fusions. No more. And yet the Moonveil keep one rumour they will not repeat: that a soul who has sworn everything it is allowed to swear may still, once, be offered an oath more, extended from below, by a hand that carries no light, at a rite no living master will attend.

Whoever asks about it a second time is simply never answered.