"What do you mean?" Bernadette asked.
"He just prayed to me and asked me about the 'Son of Chaos.'"
Vincent ran through the exchange quickly. After he finished, Bernadette paused — and then raised a question he hadn't expected: "How did you know the 'Son of Chaos' is the genie inside the Magic Wishing Lamp? Was that from the Nation of Disorder as well?"
"No. I found out through other channels."
"..."
A silence. Bernadette didn't press further. "Have the Invisible Servant take you to find Stephen."
"Alright."
He'd anticipated this question from the moment he decided to mention the "Son of Chaos" to Bernadette. Honestly, after everything they'd shared — including the HP-world Bernadette already having guessed that he knew where Voldemort's other Horcruxes were — there wasn't much reason to think this Bernadette had fewer suspicions about him.
She was perceptive enough. That was the thing about sharing a body with someone who could feel your emotional fluctuations.
Vincent didn't really mind telling her everything anymore. He just hadn't figured out how to open that conversation yet, and wasn't sure how she'd take a full confession.
Wait a little longer. Once he reached demigod, he'd tell her all of it.
Having made that quiet decision, he felt noticeably lighter. He snapped his fingers, and the Invisible Servant appeared: "You know where Stephen is?"
"Squeak. (Yes.)"
"Take me to him."
...
A few minutes later, Vincent stepped out of the Spirit World behind the Invisible Servant — arriving at the Glinros family's old house.
"Squeak?"
The Invisible Servant made a baffled sound, conveying: he's gone?
"Gone?"
Vincent moved quickly to the front door and pushed it open. "Can you track Stephen now?"
"Squeak. (No.)"
The two of them swept through the house — every room, inside and out. Completely empty.
Vincent tested the Clairvoyant's divination ability. Nothing useful came back at all.
Bernadette's voice dropped slightly. "Someone used anti-divination beforehand. For it to be this clean — whoever it was isn't at a lower Sequence than me."
"So Stephen really is in trouble. Whether it's connected to Solicitor Derlin, or to his being a Tudor descendant — hard to say."
"Head back. Then try the Nation of Disorder — see if the Scale can reach him."
"Right."
Several minutes later, 19 York Street.
Vincent returned from the Nation of Disorder and shook his head, expression serious. "The Nation of Disorder can't reach Stephen either. He's like he's vanished off the face of the world."
The unspoken implication: Stephen might be dead. The Nation of Disorder was a source of Sequence energy. Even if it couldn't match the Grey Fog for reaching across distances, it wasn't something that could be casually blocked. Unless the person was gone entirely.
Bernadette thought quietly for a moment. "If someone high-sequence engineered Stephen's disappearance, and deliberately had him pray to you asking about the Son of Chaos first — then whoever it is has something in mind."
Vincent's expression shifted. "Wait. I think we just did something stupid."
"What?"
"Stephen prays to the Lord of Chaos, revealing that something is wrong — and we immediately go to find him. That's essentially… announcing ourselves unprompted."
Vincent immediately scanned the room around him, half-expecting someone to materialise from a corner.
Bernadette remained entirely calm. "That only confirms we have some connection to the Lord of Chaos. We've never made any effort to hide that."
That eased him somewhat. "So what now? You're not just going to leave it?"
"Go back to Stephen's ancestral tomb. The Evil Spirit in the underground vault — he might know something."
...
The Gloucester family ancestral graveyard, Backlund.
The moment Vincent crossed into the abandoned cemetery, Bernadette spoke with a quiet certainty: "Someone has been here."
"Could someone have wandered in by accident?"
"No." Her tone was definite. "They entered the underground burial chamber."
"But didn't you leave a magic seal? Shouldn't you have been alerted the moment someone intruded?"
"I should have. But it was you in control these past few days — and you apparently didn't notice."
"Ah."
"Let's go in and look."
Vincent nodded, dissolved into a stream of water bubbles, and passed through the earth into the dark underground passage. He swept his hand and starlight magic lit the corridor.
"The bronze door is open."
Even from a distance he could see it — swung wide. Several shadow-jumps brought him through to the vault itself. One look at the far wall stopped him cold.
The seal was broken. The wall had crumbled. There was a dark hole where the containment had been.
"Medici got out."
Vincent's mind raced: was it Ince Zangwill who freed him — or Stephen? If Stephen, that explained his current situation — Medici had taken him as a new host.
"Could it be Stephen?"
"Only a possibility," Bernadette said, thinking it through. "Based on the state of things here, this probably happened in the past two days."
A pause. "Keep going inside. There might be more information about the Evil Spirit."
"Alright."
Vincent walked to the collapsed wall, swept another starlight illumination over the space beyond.
The room behind it wasn't large. Every surface looked as if blood had been poured over it and left to dry — vivid crimson stains coating the walls, floor, and ceiling. Long since dried now, but still carrying a thick, dense smell of iron.
Across from him was a set of double doors, bloodstained, presumably on the inner side of the original sealed chamber. Beyond these — if he remembered correctly — should be the vault from the original novel, the one with the seven god-statues, the one Sharron and Klein had once visited.
"Shall I go further?"
"Yes."
Vincent crossed to the double doors, activated the Corrupt Baron ability "Distortion" from the Blood-Drinking Bracer, and eased the doors open without resistance. A wave of damp, stale, musty air washed over him.
A few seconds later, a hissing sound from the other side of the doors. Then — more hissing. And then a flood of triangular-headed vipers poured through the gap in a writhing, seething mass, dozens upon dozens of them, forming a carpet ten or more metres across. The slithering, glistening sound of it hit him like a wall.
Vincent felt his skin crawl immediately. He flung several handfuls of powder in rapid succession, generating intense fire and biting cold that surged into the snake mass — like cold water thrown into a hot pan. The swarm exploded into chaos, serpents scattering in every direction, fleeing into the dark.
Two or three minutes later: a floor littered with charred coils and shattered ice-chunks. Whatever had survived had vanished somewhere in the shadows.
"Phew."
"Are you afraid of snakes?" Bernadette asked.
"A few, a dozen — that's fine. But a writhing mass of them like that isn't about being afraid anymore. It's physically revolting."
Vincent lit up the area ahead with starlight. What emerged from the darkness was a collapsed room — two stone doors on the walls. The right one was half-open and packed solid with mud and rubble. The left stood slightly ajar.
He pushed through the heavy left door. A vast hall opened before him.
The style matched the other vault — dark stone slabs throughout, eight matching columns running the length of the space. From the high vaulted ceiling descended rows of metal rods ending in candleholders, each sculpted into a different creature.
"So this is what the burial chamber actually looks like," Bernadette said. "The Glinros family graveyard was only the back wall. Someone built it that way — and I'd like to know why."
Her eyes moved to the candleholders along both walls. "And whatever the Evil Spirit's true identity is — he was someone of considerably higher rank than I first assumed."
Of course he was, Vincent thought quietly. That was Medici. If not for Adam and Amon setting him up, he might have ascended to Red Priest back in the Fourth Epoch.
To be continued…
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