Chapter 16

Icarus was standing at the bottom of the steps to the Church of Saint Lazriel. It was dark, the pitch black of just past midnight. 

This wasn’t right. 

He was just on Pearse Street heading for the docks, the opposite direction. It wasn’t even six when he left. When did it get so late?

He shook his head to clear it. His palms stung and he turned over his hand to find four half moons dug into the heel, one of them deep enough to split the skin. He eyed the dirt packed into the beds of his nails and scraped a bit of it out. His head ached, but the buzzing had vanished. 

He scowled up at the monstrous building looming overhead, taunting him now that its residents had thrown him out for good. Icarus shoved his hands in his pockets and turned on his heel to begin the dreary march to his flat. The back of his head throbbed faintly. Edith was right, he shouldn’t have been drinking with a head wound.

**

Icarus made it home and choked down a few hours of sleep until the living alarm of Dublin’s early workmen roused him from his fitful effort. It was strange to dress in something other than his black shirt and pants, the uniform had made mornings so simple for just short of two decades. After the events of the week, however, he couldn’t bring himself to put it back on. It felt like slipping into some mud-soaked garment left to rot in the rain.

Maren was waiting by the front door to the office when he rounded the corner. She eyed his cream-colored shirt left open at the collar, the quality of his dark gray vest and well-matched trousers, all swallowed under his heavy winter coat and into dark leather shoes. She made a face at him, “Your hair’s too long for a hat.”

He adjusted the brim of his flatcap and huffed, “I’ll see a barber, then. Ready?”

She nodded. Her black coat swept back as she walked and he realized she had abandoned her traditional priestly garb as well, opting in favor of a very smart maroon suit and offwhite dress shirt. Unlike him, she had a loose scarf in maroon and gold knotted deftly around her collar. They looked like the two halves of Irish society walking side-by-side. He rummaged around until he found a comforting stick of tobacco and jammed it into his mouth, lighting it with a rogue match and a practiced thumbnail.

She glanced at him as they headed towards the old row house in Portobello, “You disappeared last night. Thought you’d have come back.”

He shrugged, exhaling a cloud of smoke, “Just needed the walk. No point in going back to an office with no answers.”

Icarus had chosen to dismiss the small detail of his peculiar side trip to the Church and the blank space in his memory. Maren didn’t need to be worrying about his head injury on top of all this. Neither did he, but he could only protect one of them from it. 

She was studying him before deciding whether or not she accepted his answer, he never found out if she did. They split around a woman and her cart bowing under the weight of too much laundry, Icarus dodged a baker threatening an urchin with a burnt loaf, Maren paused to answer directions from a woman in a dress so lovely it was clear she was very lost and very English—two things that never ended well down this way. 

Icarus paused at the mouth of an alley that was crowded with memories he wasn’t sure he wanted anymore. Brass pipes rattled and hissed, in the distance he heard the whistle and whoop of a conductor as the intercity tram steamed its way down the tracks on the other side. The old corner tavern had been remodeled in his absence and no longer looked like the ramshackle neighborhood bar he remembers. Now, it was whitewashed with pressed glass windows and the familiar amber glow of gaslamps newly fixed into old walls, but the old sign with The Painted Goat still swung in the cool morning air. He flicked the expired butt of his cigarette into a small pool of something he was better off believing was rain runoff. Maren waited patiently at his elbow, careful not to disturb his moment of reverie. 

He shoved his hands in his pockets and thumbed the old key, “Third on the left.”

When he was ready, she trailed after him to the off-center front door set in a facade that had once been white and was now a soft gray. The windows were thick with dust even from the outside, the gables sooty and black with the telltale signs of their proximity to industry. For all that the main thoroughfare was brimming with activity, the alley was quiet and insulated from all the bustling. 

He slid the brass key into the old, tarnished lock, then pressed the handle until it gave and swung inward. Dust poured into the air in front of him and he coughed into his elbow, letting it linger until it cleared. When he stepped inside, the sense of familiarity in the cramped front room pulled him under in a riptide. It was hard for him to fathom he had once been small enough that this room felt like the perfect size—large on good days. 

Maren stepped in behind him and closed the door, snuffing out the dim sunlight and forcing them to conjure up a sheet to wipe down the uneven glass panes.It was a small row house, but it had served as his childhood home whatever that counted for. The living room was covered in a yellow wallpaper with a delicate floral patterning that had begun to peel in a far corner. To his left twisted the staircase just beside the old hall closet his father loved to rummage in. Beyond the small living room through an empty doorway stood the dusty kitchen with its old woodfire cookstove and the small two person table hidden against the far wall. Try as he might, Icarus had no memories of ever hosting another person for a meal. 

In the hallway to the right, a small washroom, a slip of an office, and another slender hall closet stood tucked away. So many closets for such an austere set of tiny rooms. It took several minutes to situate themselves, but eventually Icarus stoked a fire in the simple fireplace that fluted up the middle of the house beside the stairwell and found the push-button switch to ignite the gas sconces dotting the walls. It should have lent itself to a sense of hominess or coziness, but managed to make the space look bleaker than when it was covered in dust.

“The neighbors will certainly call,” he muttered. “Small, nosy folk can’t help it when a long-dead house springs to life.”

“People do tend to be cautious about the undead,” Maren agreed and shrugged out of her coat, hanging it on a hook beside his. 

Synchronized, they rolled up their sleeves to the elbow and he looked down at her, “I’ll start in his room upstairs. You take the office ‘round the corner through the kitchen, yeah?”

He didn’t wait for her to reply and started up the old, creaking steps. They cried out in elation at the pressure of his heavy feet, the floorboards of the familiar hallway joining the chorus of greeting. He paused outside the ajar door to his old boyhood room and reached to push it open with light fingers. 

Everything was the same, not a paper out of place. There was nothing special or unique to it, nothing that screamed Icarus had his childhood here, but it still held onto the smell of him for the last of its dear, miserable life. 

Daedalus was not a bad man, but he was a hard one. Icarus had not known his mother, so there was nothing of her in the place. His father had always been a priest and his mother had always been a subject about which they did not speak. He had tried a few times in his youth during his more rebellious era and the fights it ignited were so explosive it was a wonder the roof stayed in place. 

Having a priest of the Pale God for a father left little room for fun to squeeze itself into his life. The Church was everything, it was the glue that bound his little family together. Without it, Icarus wasn’t sure he had anything in common with his father. Now he was standing here, excommunicated as all Hell, and reeling from the idea that the Church caused its congregations to suffer on purpose. The antithesis to all of his father’s preaching—to all of his own.

He scowled and fought the urge to spit. The loss was nominal considering he had left in all but name five years back with Maren, abandoning the familiar comfort of the calderist priests for the embrace of the necessary yet derided netherists. Icarus had been fading within the Church for many reasons before that day, though. Daedalus disappearing and being presumed dead had never sat well with him, it had eaten away at his faith in his brothers and sisters as much as any Rot could have. 

It was Maren’s family that had been his final straw in the end. The two of them had been kindred spirits in their disillusionment before that—him with his slow spoiling of blind faith, her with her constant sense of otherness. When the report came back and Maren saw what they had decided, it was the look on her face that broke the last thread Icarus had left to hold him there. Maren—the one the Cardinal had always expected to ascend to his role or higher, the gifted one, the unofficially anointed heir—had been told everything she witnessed was a hallucination and told in no uncertain terms to drop it. 

Instead, Icarus dropped the Church with Maren on his heels. That same night, they had made the cuts and taken the oaths that would open the way for their access to the endless earthen well of fae magic—netherism. The blood magic that could be wielded against the fae. If Maren was right about what she saw, they needed it.

Calderism didn’t affect fae, netherism didn’t affect demons. The calderist Church controlled the ability to access either with an iron fist. Netherism was still looked upon as a barbaric, heretical violation of the high holy well of God calderists drew from through the Pale Doctrine. 

Both essential and yet only one of them reviled. It was ironic to him that the detested of the two was the one requiring more empathy. Calderism had its own side effects, but netherism suffered the user to Rot. Fae magic leeched away at the body and soul over time until its wielder eventually died from it. That would be him someday. It would be Maren. 

He shrugged the thought away and turned his attention back to his father’s door at the end of the hall. He stood where he was for several heartbeats before closing the very small distance and shoving it open with more force than it required. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find or why he was barging in as though Daedalus might just be oversleeping for fifteen years. 

The room was spartan, of course. Daedalus was a meticulous man and didn’t keep much. What he did keep, though, was highly organized. Icarus waved away a cloud of dust motes and inhaled the familiar paper and soap smell of his father that still lingered in the air, a spectre of his past still haunting the corpse of his childhood home. 

He began opening drawers at random, pulling things out, looking under things. He moved onto the steamer trunk and made a stack of books and journals, anything that seemed remotely of interest to them.Tossing open the closet, he hunted down several more books and research papers that seemed well-worn and important then tossed them on the growing stack. 

**

It took him two hours to thoroughly search the place. When he turned to survey the damage, he realized with a small recoil of horror that he had subconsciously been arranging everything exactly as it was. The room was immaculately undisturbed, a long-forgotten habit from his younger years when he would desperately search for any word of his mother. That wound had long since festered and scarred, though, and he had never recovered the same youthful zeal for it after he’d taken the cloth. 

Icarus sighed and stacked his bounty precariously, then made his way down the stairs and ignored their wooden complaints. He deposited his findings on the low coffee table and was considering how badly he wanted to risk a seat on a fifteen year old couch that had gone untouched when Maren dropped her own stack of treasure beside his. 

She sniffed and coughed, snapping his attention. She wiped at the trickle of blood seeping from her nose on a face gone too pale for his liking. She swayed, Icarus caught her arm and guided her to the musty couch despite his misgivings. She coughed harder into her fist, he patted himself down until he found a rogue, neglected kerchief to give her. 

“Pale God knows when I used it last, or for what,” he handed it to her and she took it without complaint. 

Her cough deepened, too wet and full of what he knew would be tissue and mucus and whatever else the Rot had decided to strip away from her body. He thumped a hand on her back and disappeared to find her a glass of water. It took longer than he’d like, he listened to her fit while he washed one clean and filled it from clear, still-working taps. It wasn’t a miracle or coincidence, part of the death stipend in Daedalus’s estate went to keeping the utilities on and paying the taxes. His father had expected him to occupy the house, but Icarus had unofficially declined. 

Maren’s fit passed and she palmed the kerchief rather than giving it back, which he took to mean it was worse than he expected. She thanked him and sipped slowly, blotting away the last of the blood from her nose. 

“That bad?” He folded his arms and frowned. She replied with a shrug and wouldn’t meet his eyes, “Mare. Burn an ampule. You need it.”

She shook her head, “We haven’t had a case, we’ll have to buy instead of brew our own. It’s alright, I can stretch what-”

“Mare,” Icarus insisted, “burn the ampule. I’ll take care of it.”

She tightened her lips in a thin line and he watched her consider fighting him, but the threat of another round of coughing loomed in the set of her shoulders and she relented, “Fine. Give me a half hour, then.”

“I’ll start chipping away, there’s no rush. He’s not getting any deader,” he paused and raised an eyebrow, “or is it less undead? Not sure, all this has thrown me.”

She shook her head and landed a nudge at his ankle before liberating a small vial of opalescent Eidolon from one of her omnipresent pouches. With a crack and a sigh, she let the drops fall into her eyes and sank backward.

Icarus lingered, watching the blue flood her sclera and her mouth curve in a vacant smile he knew too well. It was a joke, really, that the only thing staving off the Rot was also killing them. Most priests who turned to netherism died of Eidolon addiction before the Rot could win. There was irony in it somewhere, he just didn’t have the energy to find it.

He sank to the floor bending knees that crackled like logs in the fire and began, pulling folders and files into his lap. Notes upon notes upon notes, some he could make sense of and others that made no sense at all. Nothing about a gaol or an Azure Prince or anywhere the three realms met. 

One journal entry caught his eye—Daedalus had been a generous recordkeeper, but not all records needed to be kept and that appeared to be something he had never learned. Icarus almost overlooked it, but it nagged at him until he read it again. 

Righteous Admonitions 13:4 to 27:12

The potential is there, all of the great Saints of Admonitions say the same things. There are ways to break it apart and call down the holy fire. They will come for us all one day, why would we give them the chance to decide when that day is? All of this droning and talk about keeping them at bay. The people don’t understand, none of them do, they don’t know how afraid they need to be. The brothers barely understand it, content to just sit on their hands and do nothing. 

They are coming, but I refuse to accept I must wait for them. There is a way, there has to be. We can do more, whatever we are trying is not enough. I can feel it in my blood, this is what I am called to do. I cannot look my son in the eyes and proclaim myself a man of the Pale God while I permit the Church to simply do nothing. 

I will find a way. I will show them. They will see. The Pale God and His Pale Son will be with me and we shall pry open the jaws of The Morrigan and the Stygian Lord and end this once and for all. I will be His anvil and he will be the hammer. I will become the Saint of Ending.

A chill spidered along Icarus’s arms and his hairs stood on end. He almost dropped the book and chastised himself for only giving it half of his attention the first pass. Maren inhaled and sat upright with a soft sound of alarm. She was doubled over and wiping the last of the Eidolon from her eyes, blinking herself back into the real world, when he looked up. 

She already looked better—more color in her cheeks, all her blood where it was supposed to be, no wheezing when she breathed. She sighed and leaned her elbows against her knees, rubbing her forehead, “Better.”

He nodded. It was the closest to a You were right, Icarus he had come to expect. She sidled onto the floor beside him and he handed her the journal. She frowned and read it again, then a third time. 

“Icarus,” she murmured, “the Saint of Ending. Pale Sons and Daughters, what is this?”

He grimaced and leaned back on his hands, “Much as I hate to entertain this idea, it sounds a lot like my own father was trying to find a way to bring about the end of days.”

“We have to find his Pale Doctrine then,” she set the journal aside and began to rifle through the others. “His personal one, not the one he used for his work.”

Icarus shook his head, “I never saw where he kept it, didn’t pay that much attention.”

“Boys,” she huffed, “no survival instinct at all. If you have one, raise him to care about his surroundings.”

He leaned forward and stared into the fire steadily grinding itself to a halt, “I’m long past the illusion I’m a family man, unfortunately,” he chewed idly on his thumbnail and paused, turning his attention to the closet in the hall. “A moment.”

Icarus got to his feet and pulled it open. This was another absent storage space Daedalus had used—old maps, books about forgotten wars on the continent, refuse from his sparse life outside of the Church—but that wasn’t true,was it? His father didn’t have a life outside of the Church, which meant everything in this closet was related to that life somehow. 

He began to pull boxes upon boxes from it, setting them in front of the coffee table and heading back for more. When it was emptied, he leaned in and inspected the walls, then lifted a leg and tapped the wooden floorboards. Maren had paused her searching to watch, unable to follow whatever thread of old memories Icarus had pulled on in his mind. 

He was methodical in a way that was uncharacteristic when he brought down his heel. One by one, testing each thin board, until his foot fell and he heard the blessed call and response of a boot on hollow wood. He looked up with a triumphant grin and pressed his toe to the edge of the board. It seesawed up, tumbling over, and revealed its precious innards. 

A secret bundle of journals held together by aging twine. In the middle of them—thick, worn, and pulsing with secrets—Daedalus’s personal annotated copy of the Pale Doctrine. 

So excited to kick off our very first Neverending TBR book club!

We have three books to choose from:

The Witches of Serna by Morgan Spring-Glacé

Blood Daughter by Wil Ogden

Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison

You can vote in the poll here or on discord.

Happy Reading ❤️

I've started the book club picks for this month and wrapped up a bunch last week, so I'm gonna tell ya all about that and in return lemme know what you plan on reading this week in the comments!

READING

REVIEW

THE UNSELECTED JOURNALS OF EMMA M LION: VOL 3-4 by BETH BROWER (epistolary historical fiction)

Progress: Finished

Each volume gets better as the characters and themes continue to flesh out, and Volume 4 was friggin’ brilliant, one of the better books I’ll read this year.

One of the things these two volumes did was shift the focus harder toward companionship, or “alchemy,” as the books put it. That actually made them feel less overtly romantic, even though there are deep undercurrents of romance running throughout. And to be clear, these are historical fiction first, not romance, despite the constant and sometimes rabid online discussion about which of the men readers would like to see Emma end up with. Even with the relatively low stakes, I find the wit and the clever little episodes of conflict carry the books more than well enough.

Last week I got in the full set of eight published volumes, so I am now fully prepared to binge these before Volume 9 releases in February next year.

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY by ELIZABETH KOLBERT (popular science/natural history)

Progress: Finished

This ended up being super solid and eye-opening. The biggest thing I took away from it was a better understanding of biodiversity loss and how these species exist inside these webs of relationships. So when one population disappears, you can also lose the jobs they were doing inside that ecosystem and then you get into all the past/future knock on effects. Definitely one of those books where I came away feeling like I understood (as much as is possible for my smooth brain) how the whole thing works together and why it's a threat down the line.

BERSERK: VOL 28-30 by KENTARO MIURA [Deluxe Edition Vol. 10] (manga/grimdark fantasy)

Progress: Vol 28 Finished

Only one volume taken down during football yesterday as I was fairly locked into watching the Eagles collapse (yay! /s). I'm deeply fascinated/concerned by Moonlight Boy.

THE SECRET HISTORY by DONNA TARTT (literary thriller)

Progress: 136/559

Early doors with the Fiction Sickos Book Club pick but this is as pretentious as advertised and I'm sure I will hate every single one of these characters (positive).

Side note: Often I'll start a book by listening to the first chapter as I fall asleep, from there I usually start it fresh with my eyeballs the next day, possibly working in the audio for immersion reads/drives/cardio. The audio for this is narrated by Tartt, and boy oh boy is that not my cup of tea, so this will be a strictly eyeball read. Her southern accent stands out like a sore thumb (a young adult from SoCal should not sound like he's from Mississippi), the audio quality is rough (I don't wanna hear so many giant breaths), and her character voices are bonkers (especially for Bunny).

CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION by RICHARD MILES (ancient history)

Progress: 58/373

The prologue is so damn gruesome and does a fantastic job nodding to the stakes of Carthage's conflict with Rome. Miles also does a great job giving background on the sources he uses so we understand this isn't just another basic bih take on Carthage and how her aggression was her undoing.

PREVIEW

I doubt I'll finish these and start anything new but if I do finish my nonfiction, I've been sampling the early chapters of A People's Tragedy by Orlando Figes, which is a doggone tome of a book on the Russian Revolution. Been meaning to read it for ages and I'll say what I have sampled is quite excellent.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• Publication News: A simple reminder that if you've read and enjoyed A Complement of Scoundrels, reviews are super helpful right now (even in the audiobook apps!), so it would be cool if you rated/reviewed them wherever is applicable! And I'll be doing the giveaway for two Spotify audiobook codes this week so keep an eye out for that. More news on how our second acquisition is coming soon!

• Game of the Week: Okay I've finally been convinced by Sicko comrade Lyss to get Crusader Kings III on a Steam sale and am going to start playing that very very very soon. I'll likely stream some of it in the Discord like I did with Civilization VI last week (had a lot of fun nuking everybody off the map with Alexander the Great). This Thursday should be the test stream for the group I'll be gaming with on Twitch so follow me there if you're into that kinda thing.

• Show of the Week: I'm knee-deep in Slow Horses, halfway through S2, and I'm pretty hyped that I gave this a second shot with full attention. Also yeah I'll probably take down some East of Eden.

• Movie of the Week: I honestly don't know... recs?

As of this morning, October 5, 2026, PEN America reported 11,982 book-ban instances during the 2025–2026 school year, affecting 7,370 unique titles across 114 public school districts. This was the highest annual total since PEN began tracking school book bans in 2021. More than 4,500 titles appeared in the index for the first time. (https://pen.org/report/book-bans-spotlight-2026/)

Book bans affect more than the titles removed from a library. They affect whose experiences readers encounter and whose lives receive space in schools.

For queer readers, the stakes feel personal. A sapphic love story offers room to explore identity, relationships, and belonging. When adults label those stories inappropriate because they include queer people, the message extends beyond the book.

Books about racism, sexual violence, and LGBTQ+ lives face repeated challenges. Writing about these experiences does not mean endorsing harm. Readers deserve the opportunity to understand difficult subjects and meet characters whose lives differ from their own.

The current wave of censorship involves organized campaigns. PEN America has identified Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom, and Parents’ Rights in Education as prominent groups pushing for book removals. Their efforts include filing challenges and speaking at school board meetings. PEN also documents Utah Parents United advocating removals in Utah.

Tools such as BookLooks help campaigns circulate objections to particular passages. PEN documented local Moms for Liberty members using the site to challenge more than 50 books in Carroll County, Maryland, resulting in bans or restrictions involving at least nine. Judging a whole book through selected excerpts leaves out context, purpose, and the larger story. 

Parents deserve a voice in their children’s reading. Removing a book for every student takes choices away from other families. A school library serves an entire community, including students with different identities, beliefs, and needs.

The stats

• ALA recorded challenges involving 4,235 unique titles in 2025. For comparison, its annual average from 2001 through 2020 was 273. 

• Nearly 92% of censorship attempts recorded by ALA in 2025 originated with pressure groups and decision makers influenced by them. This includes government officials, boards, and administrators.

• Among 3,743 banned titles PEN analyzed from 2024–2025, 44% featured people or characters of color, 39% featured LGBTQ+ people or characters, and 19% featured transgender or genderqueer people or characters. These categories overlap.

• Pew Research Center found 41% of public K–12 teachers said debates about teaching race and gender identity negatively affected their ability to do their jobs. The report was published in 2024 using a fall 2023 survey.

• In the same Pew research, 68% of teachers with more than one year of experience said sexual orientation and gender identity rarely or never came up in their classrooms during 2022–2023.

• PRRI’s 2023 survey found 88% of Americans opposed banning books depicting slavery from classroom teaching. Some 75% trusted teachers and librarians to choose appropriate materials teaching both positive and negative aspects of American history.

Sources

https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data

https://pen.org/report/narrating-the-crisis/

https://pen.org/report/facts-fiction/

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/02/22/teachers-views-of-current-debates-about-what-schools-should-be-teaching/

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/02/22/race-and-lgbtq-issues-in-k-12-schools/

https://prri.org/research/threats-to-american-democracy-ahead-of-an-unprecedented-presidential-election/

A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict a book. A recorded ban involves lost or reduced access, sometimes temporarily. One title banned in ten districts counts as ten ban instances. PEN and ALA track different settings and time periods, so their totals should never be added together. https://pen.org/book-bans/pen-america-index-of-school-book-bans-2024-2025/

What you do next matters

When we say reading is political, we mean society has made our bodies, identities, relationships, and rights subjects of political debate. What you read influences how you understand other people, whose experiences you believe, and which injustices you recognize. Those perspectives inform how you vote, speak up, and treat people. Choosing whose stories you pay attention to has consequences, especially when others are working to silence them.

Read banned books and recommend them. Support librarians. Follow your local school board’s decisions and speak up when proposed policies restrict access.

Buying a book supports the author. Protecting library access helps readers who lack the money, transportation, or privacy to obtain their own copy.

Queer stories deserve space. So do books about racism, difficult histories, and experiences some adults would prefer to avoid. Discomfort should prompt thoughtful discussion, rather than decide what everyone else gets to read.

Friends, we are ONE day away from launch and now is the time to kick it up a notch!

When I read What Feed Below, I read it in one sitting and immediately texted my director and said I NEED THIS BOOK!

What Feeds Below was turned down by all big 5 publishers because they didn’t know how to market it, didn’t know who would like it.

It now has a Kirkus star! (Super rare for horror!) A publisher’s weekly Star! An aardvark special edition! (Only the second YA book ever selected and one of their few special editions!) , we are on tables at Barnes and Noble! and over 1600 preorders, which honestly, is more than many trad books.

Bindery is doing something special. This community is doing something really special. Thank you to all of you for supporting this book and helping us compete with the giants.

We are down to the final moments of release, here are important things you can do to help make this book a bestseller!

Preorder

If you haven’t already, today is the day to make it count. Preorders are SO important for authors and can be the difference in making a list.

Review

1. Goodreads 2. Barnes and Noble 3. Amazon on release day.

These are the 3 most important places to leave your reviews .

Release day:

Check your library,l Barnes and Noble, and indie bookstores and if they don’t have it request! If they do, take photos!

I am so excited to welcome this book into the world!