Characters

• Sybil Delling (Six): a foundling remade as a Diviner of Aisling who later claims her true name, becomes a knight, and leads the fight to end the Omens.
• Rodrick "Rory" Myndacious: a knight and former foundling tied to the Artful Brigand’s coin who trains, aids, and loves Sybil, and helps kill Omens.
• King Benedict "Benji" Castor III: the young king who seeks the Omens’ objects, reveals heretical histories, then betrays Sybil to center power on the crown.
• The Abbess (Aisling, the moth): the sixth Omen and architect of Aisling’s faith who drowned Diviners, controlled gargoyles, and is killed by Sybil.
• Bartholomew (the gargoyle): Aisling’s first foundling and first Diviner, later transformed into a gargoyle who protects Sybil and reveals the true origin.
• Maude Bauer: a veteran knight and mentor who aids Benji and Sybil, kills the Faithful Forester, and later opposes Benji’s betrayal.
• Benedict Castor I: Benji’s grandfather whose notebook records the Omens’ mortal origins and the vanishing of Diviners.
• The Harried Scribe: an Omen of knowledge with a lethal inkwell who is challenged and shattered by Rory.
• The Ardent Oarsman: an Omen who travels and wars by water and is slain by Sybil on his basin platform.
• The Heartsore Weaver: an Omen in the cliffs who reveals Aisling’s deceptions and asks Sybil to end her.
• One, Two, Three, Four, Five: Sybil’s fellow Diviners who vanish; One is found dead and Four disappears first.
• Hamelin Fischer: a knight of the Peaks who escorts the Diviners and appears during later rites.
• Helena Eichel: a Chiming Wood elder who presents the stone chime and dies in the birke attack.

Full Summary

The story opened at Aisling Cathedral on Traum’s highest tor, where a second-person voice recalled Bartholomew’s origin amid stone, wind, and a spring that taught obedience, dreaming, and drowning. Years later, Six—one of six shrouded Diviners—was chosen by lot to divine for the newly crowned King Benedict Castor, drank his blood, drowned, and saw five uniformly ill omens, while a hostile knight’s contempt foreshadowed conflict. Afterward Six, ill and shaken, clashed with the knight Rodrick “Rory” Myndacious and discovered the king’s theft of spring water, then vowed with her sisters to sneak off the tor and taste life beyond their cloister.

With idleweed and a grudging escort, the Diviners slipped to Coulson Faire, where Six was grabbed by a merchant and then defended by Rory’s dark humor. At the pyre, Benji staged a public challenge that ended with Six slamming Rory to the grass, binding him to submit to a Divination. Before dawn Six secretly drowned herself to dream for Rory and witnessed a pale moth unveil visions of living Omens and young Diviners twisted in agony; when she woke, Rory had departed with the king, and the next morning Four was missing. One by one Two, Three, and Five vanished from a locked cottage while the abbess tightened control with gargoyles; Six failed to secure help at Castle Luricht and was injured by stone wardens before Rory slipped through the bars, used a strange coin to phase through walls, and helped her escape the tor.

Traveling to the Seacht with a loyal batlike gargoyle, Six saw cruelty toward sprites and the coin’s uncanny power, then followed Rory and Maude into a hidden library to confront an elderly, stone-eyed scholar—the Harried Scribe. They invoked a rite to take his mantle, solved only one of his three questions, and defeated him by asking Six’s true name, which he could not answer; when he attacked with corrosive ink, Six knocked away his inkwell and Rory shattered him, then admitted the coin once belonged to the Artful Brigand, whom they had killed days earlier. Shaken, Six fled, searched the foundlings’ houses for her lost sisters, defended two girls in an alley, and was delivered by warrant back to the knighthood, where Benji revealed a heretical history: the Omens were mortal craftsmen empowered by stone relics from the tor’s spring, the abbess was the nameless sixth Omen who crafted the objects, and faith was theater that enriched Aisling.

Resolving to find her friends, Six trained and traveled with Benji, Maude, Rory, and the gargoyle into the Fervent Peaks, saved Benji during a mountain-sprite attack, and helped bait the Ardent Oarsman with spring water during a harsh basin rite. Following a cloaked figure to a hidden castle above a still basin, she wounded the limestone Oarsman and forced a duel in three days. Rory drilled her in footwork and in using the coin—smooth side to flicker, rough side to break—and their guarded barbs softened into mutual trust. On the day, the Oarsman forced combat over water; despite not knowing how to swim, Six endured a brutal assault, lost her shroud, stunned him with the sight of her eyes, and killed him with her chisel as he confessed to drinking a Diviner a week prior. At Petula Hall, she woke to Benji’s notes suggesting no Diviner survived her term, fled into the Chiming Wood in grief, and reclaimed her name—Sybil Delling—by sharing it with Rory.

Days of recovery hardened Sybil’s resolve to seek the Faithful Forester’s chime, kill the Heartsore Weaver, and return to end the abbess. In the Wood’s sacred glen, a ceremony with idleweed smoke and the mind-swaying chime devolved into a birke ambush; Sybil seized the chime midair with the gargoyle’s help, the behemoth fell, and Maude was crushed and later revived. Benji then knighted Sybil with vows stripped of Omens; that night Sybil removed her shroud for Rory, embracing intimacy and autonomy. At the Cliffs of Bellidine, Sybil publicly cast off her shroud, a hooded, stone-gaited intruder stalked their room, and a gentle unweaving rite failed to lure the Heartsore Weaver; instead, the gargoyle led them to a sea cave where traps split the party and moths guided Sybil to an oblong chamber holding One’s body and the goat-headed Weaver.

The Heartsore Weaver confessed that Aisling, once a shrouded stonemason, had fashioned gods from the spring’s stone and fed Omens on Diviners’ blood; when the Weaver used her loom stone to remember her human life, Aisling cut off the water and left her to petrify. At the Weaver’s plea, Sybil ended her. Rory and the gargoyle found Sybil among the dead, and Bartholomew told the hidden truth: Aisling had revived a dead boy, Bartholomew, with the spring, then five dead craftsmen as Omens with their objects; Bartholomew became the first Diviner, was broken by drownings and isolation, turned to stone, and was forced to fetch foundling girls to perpetuate the lie. Understanding the moth’s warnings and Bartholomew’s long attempt to reach her, Sybil led her allies back to the tor.

At Aisling Cathedral they shattered gates, confronted a fully stone Aisling wielding the loom stone, and were split as Aisling teleported Sybil into the spring to drown her while six gargoyles attacked. A melee tore through the nave: Bartholomew bit Aisling’s neck, Maude severed her stone hand, Benji blinked with the inkwell, and Sybil, with Rory and Bartholomew, smashed the gargoyles. Dragging Aisling into the spring and onto the chancel, Sybil killed the final Omen with hammer and chisel and then led the group to bury the true last object—the spring—by collapsing the cathedral. As dust settled and knights’ banners neared, Benji turned on them, stabbing Rory, shattering Bartholomew’s wing with the stolen coin, disarming Maude, and demanding Sybil as his queen and figurehead of a new faith; to spare her companions’ lives, Sybil surrendered and ordered them to flee, as Benji proclaimed her the last Diviner and his future sovereign symbol.