As I approached Rose Malin over the wide courtyards of the capital’s church district, a fog blew in over the bay. It spilled into the streets, choked the alleys, filled the canals to bursting. Bell towers and high walls covered in crenelated stone and sneering gargoyles rose through the brume, like ghost spires in a phantasm city.
As the fog enwrapped me, I recalled the words of the dark elf Irn Bale, who’d given me the black armor I wore.
You are no thief in the night, and it diminishes you to act like one. Face the evil. Punish it.
I heard Ser Maxim’s words, earnest even in the midst of his despair.
Our mien during benighted times shows our true worth, you mustn’t forget that.
Umareon’s divine contempt, like a brand, scalded through the other voices.
Like all mortals, you hide your truth behind a veneer of nobility and higher purpose. A twisted truth is no different from a lie.
I remembered Cat’s lips against mine. Her soft cries echoed in me.
I heard Dei’s pleading voice.
You have to know that I do love you. That wasn’t a lie.And her voice seething with anger.
Keep your oaths then, and see if they warm you!
The scars she’d given me prickled, lines of sharp heat over my left eye.
I approached the steps of the church wrapped in my red cloak. I wore the pointed cowl over my face, covered my shoulders and arms with the long folds, the garment wrapped many times around my neck to better shadow what lay within. Elf glamour and black iron made the interior of the shroud almost empty.
Figures stirred before the doors of Rose Malin. Priorguard stood watch, the Presider taking precautions with the night’s tensions. I could almost see their eyes squinting through their black veils, trying to make me out through the fog.
One called out a challenge, like any proper sentry. One of those nearer stiffened as I kept approaching, no doubt taking in more details. They would see my height, the faint shimmer of dark iron, the almost liquid undulations of the faerie cloak. The way the fog seemed to swirl around me as it got caught in the eddies of my aura.
I slipped my axe from beneath the cloak’s folds, holding it openly. Voices cried out in alarm.
I spoke with the echoing pressure of aura in my voice, making certain my words were listened to and understood.
“I have come for Horace Laudner, Grand Prior of the Arda.”
“Stop!” One called out, lifting a compact crossbow. “Don’t come any closer, damn you! Identify yourself!”
I didn’t stop walking, or speaking.
“For crimes against the Choir of God, the Hidden Folk, and the Accorded Realms of Men, the Grand Prior has been given this Doom.”
Amber fire flickered along the cleaving edge of Faen Orgis. The Inquisition soldiers had, for the most part, remained still, spellbound by the power I burned.
“I would claim no other life but Prior Horace’s. Only he has been judged. Stand aside, and we will have no quarrel.”
And with that, I had no more words to give. The ritual, improvised though it was, had been woven, the spell cast.
No going back.
The man with the crossbow fired. Even in the fog, it was a good shot. It went right for my chest.
But it never struck me. The flickering tongues of aureflame beginning to wreath my body condensed, forming a shimmering buckler in the shape of an oak leaf. The bolt struck it, broke, and burned as it fell apart.
The priorguard captain spat a curse. “It’s him! It’s the red cloak! Don’t let him past!”
I exhaled slowly. I hadn’t wanted to claim more than one life tonight, but that had been wishful thinking. I had given them their choice. I had approached openly, declared my purpose, offered them their lives.
The Priory devotees surged forward, chains and staves and man-catchers in hand. I gripped my axe and took one final, purposeful step. A ripple went through the world, like a disturbance in stilled water. My cloak pooled onto the ground beneath me, a curtain of blood.
Faen Orgis glowed molten gold.
I looked past the priorguard, and up, my eyes fixing on the tall doors of Rose Malin, with the auremark embedded in metal into its face. My gaze lifted to the stained glass window, the three towers, centuries old, a marvel of Urn’s history.
Prior Horace, Oraise, and Renuart Kross had already defaced it. Time to make appearances match reality.
I lifted the Doomsman’s Arm high overhead, let the final gear in my soul shift into place as the Art finished forming, then slammed the weapon down into the stone of the plaza.
The world shuddered.
A blazing curtain of golden flame erupted like a sun ray from the point of impact, chased by a dolorous sound. A lightning bolt of phantasm ripped into the front of the cathedral, crackling, brilliant, a thunderclap of auratic fury.
Crude and ill-formed compared to the original, but High Art all the same. Godsven’s Dawn slammed into Rose Malin, tearing the doors from their hinges, scattering the priorguard who moved to surround me. It burned two who’d been directly in its path to cinders. They fell in smoking, disintegrating heaps.
The angelic statues cracked and tumbled. The beautiful, ancient window shattered, and the golden lightning bolt continued to tear across the upper floors of the structure, not straight in its path. It etched a jagged scar into the building, climbing to the highest tower where the bell and the Trident of Inquisition loomed above, striking the former and ruining the latter.
The bell tolled, its call filling the foggy streets.
I rose, threw back my cloak — my hood had come off in the blast of wind from the Art’s backlash, the same force scattering the fog for nearly thirty feet in every direction. I followed the deep furrow my magic had made in the stone as I ascended the broken stairs, each click of my boots echoing in the silence, the black rings of my armor rattling like a mesh of funeral bells.
The priorguard, stunned and senseless, moaned and stumbled around me. One tripped into my path. I caught him by his collar. His veil had fallen off, revealing a young, frightened face.
“Flee,” I commanded him. Then, pushing him aside, I stepped into the Inquisition’s fortress.
I had not split the building fully in half. Perhaps one of the knight-captains of the Alder Table could have, with the mightiest form of a paladin’s smite. But I had not intended to bring the building down. I only wished to make my presence known, to open the door.
To declare war.
Priorguard, not all of them in full uniform, waited for me inside. They were confused, disoriented, but well armed and in numbers. They had adepts.
I was done trying to cut my losses.
No more holding back.
No more trickery, or avoidance.
Blood and iron. The gods had spoken, and the Headsman had come.
Dust filled the entrance to the nave, helping cover my advance. It scattered quickly enough when I surged forth out of the cloud, blazing with aureflame, my axe swinging in ember-tailed arcs.
By his build and commanding voice, I recognized the leader of the defense. The burly man who’d originally told me of Rose Malin, and who’d stalled me long enough for Kross’s guardian to subdue me. Garm, I think his name was.
He died first, advancing bravely with his iron-shod staff to stop my charge just he had the last time. But I burned with power, my oaths old and new roiling in me, drowning out every other voice. My axe cleaved through his staff, through him, severing a hand at the wrist, slicing through bone and heart beneath.
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He fell. I lunged forward, ducking under a man-catcher and ripping the blazing axe up into the wielder’s chin, opening his skull. Blood splattered me, invisible against my red cloak and black armor, painting my face like Laessa Greengood’s angry brush strokes on the canvas.
The branch of the Malison Oak drank it, and grew. Wood creaked and cracked, and the axe grew long and fell, burning with a power wholly darker yet no less potent than my own.
I swung with a crackling roar, ripping the axe — nearly long as a halberd now — across the disorganized row of shocked priorguard. Near half a dozen died, burning phantasm and magicked steel shredding through them. The aureflame rippled out beyond the cut, a whip of fiery amber, scorching more of the defenders.
I had not fought this hard in many years. Not since the war.
But tonight mattered. It would change things.
I swore it.
I hurled myself into the midst of my enemy, and they died.
The Priory employed adepts, and they had been training hard. They attacked me with wailing guillotines of copper aura. I danced through them, cleaving the veiled defenders even as the eerie music of their Art filled the nave.
They tried to bind me with golden ropes covered in cruel thorns, a crude yet effective variant of Lisette’s threads. But my soul burned hotter, and I shattered their barbed phantasms.
Crossbowmen and aura wielders formed ranks on the upper balconies and in the pillars, barraging me with steel-tipped bolts and phantasm alike. In a whirl of amber fire and blood red cloth, I avoided death by the width of breaths, of flinching reflex, of spaces no thicker than an elf’s hair.
I took wounds. When their golden barbwire wrapped my left arm, I ripped it free with a roar of effort and rage. The auratic constructs took flesh with them, but I had gone somewhere beyond pain, beyond restraint.
Crossbow bolts struck me, embedding into the black chain mail, finding gaps. They slowed me, but not enough.
Man-catchers and hooks clawed at my skin, leaving furrows and cuts. Staves slapped at my shoulders and back, marking me with bruises.
For every wound I took, I took a life.
I remember little else. The violence became a nightmare blur. It was not the first time I had lost myself in such a way, but in the past I’d often had something worth keeping my focus — a mission, a promise, a hope.
All I cared about that foggy night was delivering Umareon’s message. And my own.
It came as a shock, when the last scream faded from the nave and the last echo of clashing steel was gone. I stood in the midst of broken, burnt bodies, cloven and destroyed. No matter how beautiful it might seem, sorcery destroys bodies in ways just as ugly as any other form of violence.
The pews had been broken, covering the beautiful mosaic floor with shattered splinters that mixed with blood and gore. Intestines lay across some of it like spilled sausage in a butcher’s shop, making a foul-smelling soup with brain matter and bits of bone.
Old stonework, the life’s labor of long-ago artists who’d spent generations raising this place from the ground, had been defaced by flame and arcane force, leaving cracks in the pillars, the floor, the walls. Half faded phantasm remained embedded in some of the architecture, golden thorns and flickering copper lines yet to cool into unreality.
The dust had yet to settle. It cast a haze over everything, giving it all an obscure and oddly dreamlike quality.
I rested my axe head down on the floor to keep upright, sucking in the reeking air with gasping breaths. My hair had been plastered to my skull by sweat and worse. My red cloak had turned near dark as the armor beneath, and I had two bolts in my left shoulder, another in my hip. Near half the skin on my left forearm was gone, and my neck and temple had been badly cut.
The pain was there, but distant. So long as I burned my aura, let the golden flame of the Alder flicker, I would not succumb to death.
I could not burn my soul forever. It would give out, and soon if I didn’t slow.
I still had strength. I would not slow.
I began to walk for the stairs which would take me into the upper floors of the old cathedral. Faen Orgis’s blade dragged behind me, grinding against already abused stone. I did not hurry overmuch — Horace Laudner had nowhere to run, and Qoth had orders to warn me if he tried to sneak away.
I didn’t trust the Briar Elf, but something told me he wouldn’t betray me here. He wanted to see where this went as much as his dark lady.
I met no more priorguard during my ascent up a spiraling stair cut into one of the towers. It brought me to a long hall. The damage the Dawn had done to the structure became more evident here. Walls had cracked, doors splintered off collapsed frames, beams tumbled from the ceiling.
I found Oraise beneath one of those beams. He lay trapped beneath it, his collar bone broken, his face ashen. He sweated, pushing feebly against the beam. A young woman in the black robes of the priorguard, her cowl and veil removed, knelt at his side. Her long fingers worked in complex patterns. Thin, shimmering gold thread ran from the beam to the ceiling, while more sewed themselves through Oraise’s flesh, staunching the bleeding from grievous splinters.
When he saw me, the Presider let out a dry chuckle and relaxed. Dust rained in loose falls from the broken ceiling. The woman turned her blue eyes toward me, and they widened.
“Alken,” Lisette said. Her face, already pale from effort, lost more color when she saw the state of me. “God and Her Angels, what have you…”
She realized her mistake and pressed her lips tight.
“Don’t… bother.” Oraise grimaced as he tried to shift and failed. “I’ve known you were one of the Empress’s a while now, girl.”
Lisette started. Oraise ignored her, turning his gaze on me. He looked terrible. His elegant uniform had turned gray with dust, his brown hair clinging to his sweating skin.
I considered killing him, then spoke. “Where is the Grand Prior?”
Oraise considered a moment, the fingers of one hand wrapped around the beam that trapped him. Then he nodded down the hall to a large, ornate door. “There’s a communion chapel a floor above us. It’s fortified, and Horace has locked himself in with his clericons. Whatever you did to the cathedral, it convinced them they’re under siege. They think the Houses have decided to attack them.”
I felt very little then, but even still I tilted my head in confusion. Lisette bowed her own, her eyes shutting. I thought she might have murmured a prayer.
“Well?” He asked, lifting a thick eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to get on with it?”
The beam fell a fraction of an inch, and the man let out a hiss of agony. Lisette cursed and began to work her magic with more fervor. The fallen support went still as the golden threads tightened.
“What is this?” I asked. My voice came out as a croak.
Oraise sighed. He no longer looked like the tall, dire inquisitor who’d interrogated me beneath this very church all those weeks ago. He looked tired, and in pain.
“Did you know, before he became Grand Prior, Horace managed orphanages?” Oraise’s tone, despite his situation, was conversational. “He pulled me out of one of them. A nameless peasant boy, made an aide to such a respected personage. Oh, how jealous the others were.”
His eyes were remote. Lifeless. Lisette watched him with an odd union of pity and anger.
“I did some investigating after I spoke with you, you know.” A shadow of a smile touched the inquisitor’s bloodless lips. “What you said about the Knight Confessor?”
I’d told him that Kross was a devil. He’d seemed to dismiss it.
Oraise closed his eyes, resting his head against the brick wall behind him. “I thought you worked for some faction in the Accord, the Silvering woman, or perhaps even the Emperor himself. I thought perhaps the elves, retaliating against us for the war…”
He met my eyes. “But I think I know the truth now. I’ve been having dreams. I realize now they were revelation.”
I recognized the light in his eyes. The fevered gleam of the fanatic. I shivered.
“The Grand Prior is no prophet,” Oraise continued. “He only desires power. I’ve known that since I was thirteen and assassinating his rivals for him. I thought, perhaps, I could direct his ambitions into something that might serve. But I see now…”
He reached into his coat. I tensed, remembering the evil little crossbows the priorguard used. But he didn’t pull out a weapon, or anything. He just sat there, struggling to breathe as his eyes closed.
After a moment’s consideration, I lifted the beam off the man. He was too injured to be a danger regardless. He let out a groan of agony, drowning out my growl of exertion. Lisette helped with her magic, her face tight with worry. Then the fallen rafter slammed into the floor. Oraise sat there, panting, a perplexed look crossing his face.
I knelt in front of him and jabbed a finger into his shoulder, the wounded one, as I spoke. He flinched and hissed, but I ignored his pain. Lisette said nothing.
“I haven’t forgotten your crimes, Oraise. When the sun rises tomorrow, things will be different. I could use a favor owed me inside the Church. But if you ever cross me, I will not need an Angel of Onsolem to command your death. Do you understand?”
He nodded, wincing.
I used the head of my axe to push myself up, then began to walk toward the stairs. Oraise, on the cusp of unconsciousness, spoke at my back.
“God forgive us both.”
I doubted it.
“Alken!”
I paused as Lisette padded up behind me. She took a deep breath.
“This… Alken, what is this? Did Her Grace—”
I interrupted her. “Do you honestly believe Rosanna asked for this?”
“Then…” The young cleric’s voice hardened. “Is this them?”
Lisette had been there the day I’d come for the Orson Falconer’s head. She knew my true identity — as the Headsman of Seydis, as a former Alder Knight. But they were just names to her.
“In the tower that day…” Lisette paused before asking. “Did the Onsolain command this slaughter? Did the gods demand so much death?”
What was I supposed to tell her, that gentle young cleric who’d seen so much horror? Just because my faith had been tarnished, it didn’t mean hers needed to be. Once, she’d saved my life. I owed her this much.
“I prayed for this!” Lisette’s voice had a sob in it. “I prayed for someone to stop him. I didn’t have the courage. He’s a madman. And worse.”
No gratitude in her voice. Just despair, and regret. I turned my head, catching her out of the corner of my vision. Lisette’s blue eyes glimmered with tears, but she had her jaw set.
“This isn’t work for you,” I told her. “Your Art is meant for healing. Don’t tarnish it further.”
Her voice held a brittle edge of grief. “Your powers were meant to heal, too. To protect. An Alder Knight came to my village when I was just a little girl. I remember how noble she was, how kind. This isn’t right, what they’ve done to you. This isn’t how I wanted my prayers answered.”
Right had nothing to do with it. It never had.
“Tell Rose…” I sighed. “Tell the Empress to remember what I asked her.”
“Tell her yourself!” Lisette’s voice struck loud in the narrow hall. “Damn it, at least let me go with you! I will shed no tears over Horace Laudner, but I can’t face the Empress if I just let you die.”
“I have no intention of dying,” I told her. Then I left her standing there in the hallway.
I broke the reinforced door at the top of the next stair. It took three strikes of my axe, each blow imbued with aureflame, before it shattered inward in a shower of burning wood.
I stepped into a prayer room. Somewhat smaller than the one below, but just as proud, of the kind many greater temples keep so the preosts can have private communion. The huge, circular window which would allow both sun and moon’s light in for different ceremonies had been broken by the Dawn. Gray fog, lit to glowing by the rising Living Moon, coiled into the open gap.
Red robed Priory clericons lurked within, some cowering, some standing tall and proud. Some sat on the floor, wounded by shattered glass and splinters. Younger clerics tended to them with healings arts, both mundane and auratic.
My eyes locked onto the Grand Prior. Old and bent, he stood in front of a podium near the window. His eyes widened when he saw my blood drenched form in the doorway. Veiled priorguard lifted their weapons to stop me.
“Leave him!”
The familiar voice boomed inside the room. Plate armor softly clicked as a gray-caped figure stepped into my path, lifting a plain sword.
“Enough of this,” Renuart Kross said, his fatherly visage stern. “Enough, Alken.”
I let out a breath flickering with aureflame. “Vicar.”
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