Mikael's POV
The snow fell in thick, lazy flakes, settling on the black wool of my coat, on the shoulders of the mourners gathered around the freshly dug grave, on the simple pine coffin that held what remained of my wife.
Two days. It had been only two days since the fire, and now I stood watching strangers lower Wren into frozen ground while Father Atticus spoke words I couldn't process.
"Heavenly Father, we commit the soul of your servant to your eternal care..."
"She was so young…" Sister Agnes whispered beside me, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief already soaked through. "Such a tragedy. And after everything she'd already survived."
I couldn't respond. My throat had closed around any words I might have offered, leaving only a hollow ache where speech should have been.
"Father Mikael." Brother Thomas touched my elbow, his young face creased with concern. "Would you like to say a few words? Before we..."
"I don't think I can." My voice sounded foreign to my own ears—flat, empty, belonging to someone else entirely.
"That's alright." Father Atticus paused his reading, his grandfatherly eyes soft with compassion. "Grief has its own timeline. There's no shame in silence when words fail us."
From the front of the small gathering, Maria broke free from her mother's grip and rushed toward the grave, her small face twisted with fury and incomprehension.
"You have to stop!" she screamed, throwing herself at the workers preparing to shovel dirt onto the coffin. "Sister Wren can't breathe under there! She'll be scared of the dark!"
"Maria, sweetheart…" Her mother hurried after her, gathering the thrashing child into her arms. "Sister Wren isn't scared anymore. She's with the angels now, remember?"
"I don't want her with the angels!" Maria's wail cut through the cemetery like a blade. "I want her here! She promised to teach me chapter books! She promised!"
Something cracked in my chest at the child's grief—so raw, so honest, so much simpler than the complicated tangle of guilt and loss and unanswered questions churning inside me.
The condolences blurred together, meaningless syllables that required nods and murmured thanks but held no substance.
I performed the motions expected of a grieving widower while something inside me remained frozen, suspended in the moment before the fire, before the screaming, before everything fell apart.
Eventually, the mourners dispersed. The workers finished filling the grave, tamping down frozen earth with practiced efficiency. Sister Agnes lingered, her weathered hand finding mine with a squeeze that was meant to be comforting.
"You shouldn't be alone tonight," she said quietly. "Come have dinner with us. Mrs. Patterson made her soup—the one Wren always liked."
"I need some time." I extracted my hand gently but firmly. "I appreciate the concern, Sister, but I need to be alone with this. Just for tonight."
She studied my face with eyes that had seen too many people broken by grief. "Promise me you'll eat something. And sleep, if you can manage it."
"I promise." The lie came easily. I'd become skilled at lying lately—to others, to myself, to God.
I returned to my study as darkness fell over Portland, the winter night arriving early and absolute. The room felt wrong without her—too quiet, too still, missing the sound of her turning pages or humming tunelessly while she worked.
Her things remained exactly where she'd left them, untouched since the fire. I couldn't bring myself to move any of it, as if disturbing her belongings might erase the last evidence that she'd ever existed.
The small box on my desk caught the lamplight, drawing my eye. Sister Agnes had pressed it into my hands this morning, her face solemn with the weight of recovered treasure.
"They found this in the wreckage," she'd said. "A miracle it survived at all. I thought you should have it."
The medallion. The one I'd given Wren during our walk along the frozen harbor, the one she'd carved with our initials using my own knife. The chain was blackened, damaged by heat, but the silver oval remained intact.
I hadn't been able to open it at the cemetery. Hadn't been able to face the intimacy of those carved letters, the proof that she'd chosen to make us permanent even when permanence had never been part of our arrangement.
But now, alone in the silence of a room that still smelled faintly of her, I needed to see it. Needed to touch something that proved she'd been real.
My fingers found the tiny clasp, the oval face swung open…
Empty.
I stared at the unmarked silver, certain I was hallucinating. Certain grief had finally cracked something fundamental in my perception. But the interior remained blank no matter how long I looked—no initials, no carving. Nothing.
I watched her do it. She'd held it up for me to see when she finished—the R and M intertwined, crude but unmistakable.
But before I could process what I was seeing, the silver began to shimmer in my palm. The metal grew translucent, edges blurring like watercolors bleeding into wet paper.
And then it was gone.
I stared at my empty hand, my mind refusing to accept what my eyes had witnessed. The medallion hadn't fallen. Hadn't slipped through my fingers. It had simply... dissolved.
An Illusion. The medallion Sister Agnes had given me—the one supposedly recovered from the fire—had never been real at all.
And if the medallion was an illusion...
I was running before I'd consciously decided to move, bursting out of my study and through the cathedral's side door into the frozen night. The snow had picked up again, thick flakes swirling in the wind, but I barely felt the cold as I sprinted toward the cemetery.
"Father Mikael?"
Sister Agnes's voice came from somewhere behind me—she must have been crossing the courtyard, perhaps coming to check on me despite my earlier refusal of company. I didn't stop.
"Father Mikael! Where are you going? Wait!"
Her footsteps crunched through the snow, following. I heard her calling after me, heard the concern sharpening into alarm as I vaulted the cemetery fence without breaking stride.
Wren's grave was easy to find—fresh earth beneath pristine snow, her name on a temporary marker that suddenly felt like an accusation.
I dropped to my knees and began to dig.
The frozen ground tore at my hands, but I barely felt the pain. Each handful of dirt brought me closer to proof—proof she wasn't gone, that somewhere she was still breathing.
"Father Mikael!" Sister Agnes reached the grave, her breath coming in harsh gasps from chasing me through the snow. Her face twisted with horror as she took in the scene. "Stop this—she's gone! Desecrating her grave won't bring her back!"
"She's not in there." My voice came out raw, desperate. "The medallion—it vanished, Sister. Dissolved right in my hand. It was never real. Someone faked her death."
"You're not making sense." Agnes's tone shifted to gentle pity, the voice one uses with the mad or the broken. "The trauma has been too much. Please, let me take you back to the cathedral…"
"I don't need help!" I shook off her reaching hand and returned to digging with renewed fury. "I need to see the coffin. I need to prove she's not here, that—"
My fingers struck wood.
We both froze. In the silver moonlight reflecting off the snow, I could see the dark shape of the casket emerging from the earth, far closer to the surface than it should have been.
"Help me," I said, not looking at Agnes. "Please. Just help me open it, and if I'm wrong, if she's really in there, I'll go willingly. I'll accept whatever help you think I need, but I have to know."
I could feel Agnes wrestling with her conscience, her duty to the dead warring against her care for the living man kneeling before her in the snow.
"God forgive us both," she muttered finally, and knelt beside me to help clear the remaining dirt.
The coffin lid was simple pine, nailed shut but not locked. I found a rock large enough to serve as a makeshift hammer and worked the nails free with hands that had gone numb from cold. Agnes crossed herself repeatedly, her lips moving in silent prayer.
The final nail gave way and I lifted the lid.
Empty. No body, no ash, no evidence that anyone had ever lain within this wooden box.
"Holy Mother of God." Agnes's voice was barely a whisper, her face pale as the snow around us. "How… That's not possible. I saw the body myself. I helped prepare her for burial."
"You saw what someone wanted you to see." I sat back on my heels, the truth settling over me like a physical weight. "Magic, Sister. Illusion powerful enough to fool everyone—including me."
"But who… Why would anyone—"
"Witches."
The word came out hard, certain. Everything I'd trained for, everything the Order had taught me about supernatural threats—it all clicked into place with sickening clarity.
"This level of illusion magic, the ability to fabricate a death scene convincing enough to fool trained observers—this is witch work. They must have taken her."
"But why Wren?"
I shook my head, my mind racing through possibilities. "I don't know."
"Father Mikael." Agnes's hand found my shoulder, gentler this time. "If what you're saying is true, if she's been taken by... by witches—shouldn't we contact the authorities? The police, or…"
"The police can't help with this." I rose to my feet, brushing dirt from my clothes with mechanical efficiency. My mind was already racing ahead, cataloging resources, planning approaches, calculating odds. "But I know people who can."
The Order of the Silver Cross had been hunting supernatural threats for centuries. We had contacts, informants, archives full of information about witch covens and their practices.
If a coven had taken Wren they would have left traces—magical signatures, patterns of behavior, something I could track.
She'd come to me for sanctuary, and I'd failed her. I'd let myself be deceived by smoke and mirrors while the woman I loved was dragged into a nightmare she couldn't have imagined.
"Go back to the cathedral," I told Agnes, my voice steady with a new purpose. "Tell Father Atticus what we found here. Tell him I'm pursuing a lead on Wren's whereabouts."
"You can't just… Father Mikael, this is madness. You don't even know where to start looking!"
"I know she's alive." I met Agnes's eyes with an intensity that made her take a step back. "I know someone took her. And I know I will tear apart every coven between here and hell itself to find her and bring her home."