diff --git a/projects/crimson-vows/staging/polished/chapter-ch-07.md b/projects/crimson-vows/staging/polished/chapter-ch-07.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dea6572
--- /dev/null
+++ b/projects/crimson-vows/staging/polished/chapter-ch-07.md
@@ -0,0 +1,109 @@
+Chapter 7: Forbidden Alchemy
+
+The Great Hall was a structure of failing joints and whistling drafts, but the King was the only pillar at risk of collapse. 
+
+Seraphine did not move her hand from where it hovered near her own throat. The phantom sensation of caustic needles sewing her esophagus shut was not her own, yet the blood-bond cared little for the boundaries of the skin. It was a structural flaw in the ritual—a leak in the plumbing of their shared existence. Every time Aldric’s heart stuttered, a rhythmic percussion of agony hammered against her own ribs.
+
+Below the dais, the High Provost’s body was a slumped heap of velvet and discarded ambition. The nobility of the Lowen-Court stood frozen, their breath hitching in a collective, terrified stasis. They were looking at the King’s hands. They were watching the way the silver-toxin forced his fingers into a rhythmic, clawed tremor that he could not master.
+
+"The audience is concluded," Seraphine said. Her voice did not shake. It was the sound of a heavy portcullis dropping into a stone groove. She over-articulated the consonants, the *d* and the *t* clicking like the mechanism of a trap. "You will vacate the hall. You will return to your quarters. You will speak of the High Provost’s sudden... cardiac insufficiency to no one. If a single whisper of 'silver' reaches the city, I will treat the source as a secondary conspirator."
+
+She did not look at them. She looked at the pulse in Aldric’s neck. It was too fast, a frantic, hammering thing that threatened to crack the vessel.
+
+"Go," she commanded.
+
+The rush of silk and the frantic scuffle of boots followed. They fled like rats sensing the rising tide. Only the inner circle remained: Captain Kaelen, his hand white-knuckled on the hilt of his blade; and High Priestess Malcorra, who stood like a gargoyle carved from shadow, her iron thurible swinging in a slow, hypnotic arc. The scent of metallic incense, sharp and biting, began to compete with the ozone shift in the air.
+
+"He needs the Sanctum," Kaelen said, his voice low, private. He stepped forward, reaching out to steady Aldric as the King’s knees buckled. 
+
+Aldric shoved the Captain’s hand away. The movement was sloppy, lacking his usual predatory grace. He forced his spine into a line of tempered steel, though the effort caused a bead of cold sweat to track down his deathly pale temple.
+
+"I... can walk," Aldric said. He avoided the contraction, his speech clipped and singular. He was retreating into the fortress of his own ego. "I do not require assistance."
+
+"You are vibrating at a frequency that suggests impending structural failure, Aldric," Seraphine said, stepping down from the throne. She did not touch him yet. The proximity was already enough to make her vision swim with his nausea. "The silver is in the marrow now. If we do not purge it, the bond will draw the toxin into my own system to maintain the equilibrium. I have no intention of dying because you failed to smell a traitor in your own cup."
+
+Aldric’s gaze snapped to hers. His eyes were bloodshot, the irises a fractured grey. "I smelled the iron. I did not... anticipate the concentration."
+
+"It is written in the vein," Malcorra’s voice drifted over them, operatic and chilling. She stepped between the sovereigns, the heavy iron thurible cutting a violent path through the air. "The blood demands a purging of the unholy. The silver is a judgment, Queen Seraphine. You mistake providence for preference. Perhaps the Vow finds the King's constitution... wanting. It is a refinement through fire. To interfere may be to deny the blood its rightful Song."
+
+Seraphine turned a look on the Priestess that would have withered a hardier soul. "The Song is mine to conduct, Malcorra. The King is not a sacrifice; he is a cornerstone. Kaelen, take his left side. We are going to the Sanctum."
+
+"The Sanctum is consecrated ground," Malcorra whispered, her voice losing its projection, becoming a dry, raspy wheeze that forced Seraphine to lean in. "To perform the Extraction there... it is a forbidden alchemy. You would mix the sovereign essence with the profane. You risk the purity of the Valerius line for a Thorne who cannot even defend his own chalice. Sacrilege."
+
+"Balance is the only purity I recognize," Seraphine snapped. "Move, or I shall find if your own blood sings as loudly when it hits the floor."
+
+They moved through the arterial corridors of Castle Sangue, a grim procession of shadows. Kaelen served as a silent brace for Aldric, whose breath was coming in ragged, wet hitches. Seraphine led the way, her senses expanded, feeling the weight of the stone above them and the vibration of the blood-links humming in the walls. 
+
+The Alchemical Sanctum lay beneath the archives, a room of cold basalt and glass carboys filled with suspended memories. The air here was heavy with the scent of dried herbs and the sharp, conductive tang of copper. 
+
+As they crossed the threshold, Aldric finally collapsed. 
+
+He didn't scream. He simply folded, his body hitting the stone floor with a sickening thud. The tremors had turned into full-blown seizures, his muscles locking in a battle against the heavy metal in his veins. 
+
+"On the table," Seraphine ordered, her heart hammering in a chaotic duet with his. "Kaelen, strip his tunic. I need the access points to the primary arteries."
+
+Kaelen moved with the efficiency of a man who had seen too many battlefields, but his hands shifted with a rare tremor of their own. "He is turning Grey, Seraphine. The silver is binding to the magic."
+
+"I know," she whispered. She went to the central vat, her fingers flying over the glass vials. She needed a catalyst. She needed a bridge.
+
+"The vessel is cracking," Malcorra said. She did not remain in the doorway; she paced the perimeter of the stone table, her thurible swinging with a rhythmic, clanking precision that disrupted the silence. "The Thorne blood is thin. It cannot hold the weight of the Vow. Do not mistake the pulse in your wrist for your own music, Seraphine; it is merely the drumming of ancestors who are waiting for you to fail them. Let it break. We can find a more... stable foundation."
+
+"The foundations are set!" Seraphine screamed, the first crack in her composure. She grabbed a silver-glass lancet and sliced a long, shallow line across her own palm. The red was dark, nearly black in the dim light of the Sanctum. "Kaelen, hold his head. This will not be delicate."
+
+She climbed onto the stone table, straddling Aldric’s hips. He was burning. He was freezing. The sensory bleed was a deluge now, catalyzed by the sudden, sharp memory of her own fracture: the smell of spilled wine and the damp, oppressive dark of the cellar during the Red Winter. She saw her father’s leniency turn to a spray of red against snow. It was a chaotic architecture of grief, and she was drowning in the blueprints.
+
+"Aldric," she hissed, pressing her bleeding palm against the bare skin of his chest, right over the erratic thud of his heart. "Focus on the leverage. Do not fight the extraction. Give me the silver."
+
+Aldric’s eyes flew open. They were wild, unfocused. He reached up, his hand catching her throat—not in a gesture of violence, but as a drowning man grasps for a ledge. His grip was crushing. He was looking for a singular point of reality in a sea of agony.
+
+"I... cannot," he gasped. The "I" was raw, a singular cry from a man stripped of his titles.
+
+"You can," she said, her voice dropping into a predatory growl. "I do not permit you to fail. I have invested too much in this masonry to watch it crumble now."
+
+She began the incantation, activating the Gilded Pulse not as a passive sensor, but as a violent suction. She visualized the silver-dust in his blood—microscopic shards of moonlight that were cutting him from the inside out. Her own hemomancy reached into his vessels, acting as a biological sieve; she caught the jagged metallic grains in her own flow, filtering his heartbeat through her lungs. 
+
+She felt the first tug of the toxin as it crossed the blood-bond.
+
+It felt like swallowing ground glass. 
+
+Seraphine’s head snapped back, her spine arching as the silver entered her own stream. Behind her, Malcorra’s rhythmic chanting rose in volume, a liturgical condemnation that pulsed in time with the pain. The Priestess thrust her thurible forward, the bitter smoke choking the space between the sovereigns.
+
+"It is written in the vein... the impurity shall seek the source... the Queen shall take the burden of the slave..."
+
+"Silence!" Seraphine roared, though it came out as a strangled wheeze. 
+
+The silver was moving now, drawn by the magnetic pull of her own high-order hemomancy. She could see it beneath Aldric's skin—streaks of grey light moving toward the point where their flesh met. It gathered at his chest, a swirling vortex of metallic poison.
+
+Aldric’s body bucked beneath her. He let out a sound that was less a groan and more a splintering of wood. His hand tightened on her throat, his thumb pressing into her windpipe. She couldn't breathe, but she didn't pull away. She leaned into the pressure, her own blood pouring onto his skin, mixing with the sweat and the grey-tinged discharge of the toxin.
+
+The sensory intrusion was total. 
+
+She saw him as a boy, standing in the rain as his father explained the necessity of the sacrifice. *The Crown is not jewelry, Aldric; it is a cage.* She felt the weight of the bars. She felt the cold, lonely steel of his spine as it had been forged in the fires of duty. And in return, he was seeing her. He was seeing the wine cellar where she had hidden as a child while her family was slaughtered above. He was feeling the way she had built her heart out of stone and mortar, brick by brick, until there was no room left for a pulse.
+
+They were no longer two sovereigns. They were a single, fractured entity, trying to hold back the dark.
+
+"Now!" Seraphine gasped, her hand moving to his throat, her fingers finding the jugular. 
+
+She didn't use a blade. She used the Gilded Pulse. 
+
+With a sharp, violent psychic jerk, she tore the silver from his system. The metal could not be contained by her flesh any longer; it reached its saturation point and erupted from his pores, forced out by the pressure of her will. It manifested as a fine, metallic mist, a shimmering and lethal dust that coated her skin and the stone table. 
+
+Aldric let out a final, shuddering breath and went limp. 
+
+Seraphine collapsed on top of him, her face buried in the crook of his neck. The silver was burning her skin, a thousand tiny fires, but the rhythmic hammering in her chest had slowed. The equilibrium was returning. 
+
+The silence in the Sanctum was heavy, broken only by the rhythmic swing of Malcorra’s thurible. 
+
+"You have polluted yourself," the High Priestess said, her voice a raspy whisper of disappointment. She stood at the head of the table now, staring down at them with unblinking intensity. "You have taken the King’s dregs into your own vessel. The Cathedral will not look kindly upon this... intimacy."
+
+"The Cathedral," Seraphine panted, her voice clicking with exhaustion, "will look at the King and see a man who lives because his Queen commanded it. And you, Malcorra, will tell them that this was a testament to the strength of the Vow. Or you will find how long a High Priestess survives without her tongue."
+
+Kaelen stepped forward, his face a mask of restrained horror. "Seraphine... your hands."
+
+She lifted them. They were covered in a fine, grey sheen, and they were shaking—not with the toxin, but with a profound, structural fatigue. She had reached the limit of her leverage.
+
+Aldric stirred beneath her. 
+
+He did not move to push her off. His hand, which had been clutching her throat, slid down to rest on the small of her back. It was a gesture of such startling, human vulnerability that Seraphine felt a phantom pain more acute than the silver.
+
+He looked at her then, not as a King looks at a rival, but as a drowning man looks at the shore, and for the first time in forty years, Seraphine felt the structural integrity of her own heart begin to give way.
\ No newline at end of file