“Something’s wrong,” Catrin said, as we approached the village in the hour preceding dawn.

I had noticed the same. There were no guards at the gate, as there’d been when I’d arrived with the doctor. The streets of the lakeside community seemed quiet. Empty.

Out over the lake, the black towers of the Falconer castle jutted from a shifting haze of fog, cast in its own eerie glow against the black horizon. A ghost castle, brooding and watchful.

I wondered if the Baron was watching us even then.

“Maybe something’s happening at the keep,” I said.

“Or maybe your hunter friends killed everyone,” Catrin suggested, half joking.

I grunted a non-reply. I didn’t think the doctor was that dangerous, but it paid to be ready for anything.

We approached the village cautiously, but openly. Tiny blue lights flitted around us, illuminating the overcast gloom. They giggled like little bells and chased one another, toying with the frayed hem of my cloak or flitting in and out of my raised hood. They played with Catrin’s hair too, though she swatted at them, half-annoyed and half charmed. They’d followed us from Irn Bale’s manor.

“You remind them of the Gilded City,” Irn Bale had said. “They are fickle creatures, but perhaps they will give you some comfort. Remember, Sir Knight, there is beauty in this world still worth fighting for.”

I wish I could believe it.

We passed through the gates, and no one challenged us. It wasn’t until we were in the village square that we found anyone.

“Bleeding Heaven,” Catrin cursed.

I guessed it was the priest the Baron had sent me and Quinn to kill. He’d been strung up on a post above the square’s fountain. The fountain was old, some remnant of more bountiful days, a piece of clever masonry bearing the image of an Onsolemite herald, which had likely once filled itself from some underground spring.

Now the stone basin was filled with blood. The priest had been beheaded and disemboweled, though his gold-brown preoster robes remained. The head adorned the fountain itself, eyeless and tongueless. Night insects swarmed it.

Whatever Olliard had done to rescue the man, it hadn’t worked. Had they been caught out in the marsh? Were the doctor and his adept apprentice dead too?

“I’m guessing this was the Mistwalkers,” I said. It reminded me of the butchered bridge troll.

“Fucking butchers,” Catrin said. There was a strained note in her voice, almost desparate. She inhaled sharply through her nose, taking in the fountain’s gory scent. She shuddered, and a blush formed on her cheeks. “We…” she licked her lips. “We should get moving. Get away from this.” She cast her gaze around, and it was obvious she was trying to look anywhere but at the fountain. “Where do you think everyone else is?”

I swallowed my disgust at her reaction and started moving toward the village church. “I can guess.”

The chapel, like the fountain, was older than much of the rest of the settlement. Its bell tower rose high above the rest of the structures around it, made even higher by the low hill it sat on. A single gargoyle perched atop the overhang of the oak doors, its beaked face contemplative, almost sleepy.

I paused and reached out with my aura toward the gargoyle. Dead, or so long dormant it may as well have been.

Catrin eyed the chapel dubiously. “Need a quick pray before we head back to the keep? I’m not judging, but I think I’ll wait out here.”

I moved to the door and, like with the gargoyle, inspected the auremark worked in solid gold to the front doors. I sensed very little power in it. The metal seemed faded. Tarnished. Several wisps flitted toward the door, drawn perhaps by its faded energy or my own attention. Their light dimmed as they touched it and discovered, to their disappointment, its lack of magic.

I glanced back at the dhampir. “This place is barely hallowed. You should be fine.”

Catrin shook her head, her mop of hair swinging with the motion, and remained planted on the street. “I’d rather not take any chances with holy ground. Sorry big man. I’ll be out here when you’re done.”

I shrugged and tested the door. It was locked. I frowned — outside of a crisis, it was taboo for any chapel or temple to lock its doors. They were supposed to be open sanctums, places of refuge for the faithful warded against threats by faith and ritual, not by barred doors.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Technically, I was forbidden from going into churches unless ordered. But I’d sinned often enough this seemed a small heresy, and it was for a good cause.

I placed my fingertips against the auremark — it was nearly as tall as I was, and almost perfectly matched the little talisman Lisette had carried, the golden plates forming an arch pierced by three converging lines. I murmured a prayer, using the barest touch of aura.

Excommunicate or no, I was yet sanctified. The holy symbol split in two at my command, the double doors swinging open.

I stepped inside, and nearly gagged on the smell. The wisps retreated into the shadows of my cloak, hiding from what I found.

I’d found the villagers.

The chapel was fashioned in an older style, the dais in the center of the room instead of at the far end from the entry — a tall basin, usually filled with blessed water, worked into the floor in the center of a circular, dome-ceilinged room. Windows lined the upper walls, allowing either sun or moonlight in at all hours, the outer parts of the room half hidden behind supporting pillars encircling the central space.

The villagers had been piled around the dais. Blood dried within the floor’s many grooves and cracks, like a hundred miniature charnel rivers. I could barely see the holy basin for all the corpses piled around it. Young and old.

My eyes, with their cursed blessing, saw the entire thing clearly. No detail was hidden, no shadow so deep I couldn’t capture every facet of the nightmare in my memory. My gaze fell on the old innkeeper who’d properly welcomed me to the community. His eyes stared unblinking from the mound, rimmed with red. His teenage daughter lay against him, as though clutching him for safety.

I’d known. I’d known there was no way the diabolist nobleman could properly use his minion without something profane. This is what he needed the mercenaries for.

Too late. I was too damn late to make any sort of difference. Orson Falconer hadn’t been fooled by my improvised ploy, he hadn’t sent me out into the marshes as a test.

He’d wanted me out of the way.

I stumbled toward the altar. The smell of rotting meat, feces, and blood made me want to flee from that place, empty my guts out under the clean sky. I moved toward the slaughter instead, some unseen gravity tugging me onward on unwilling legs. I kicked something and nearly fell. When I looked down to see what it was, the corpse of a child stared up at me. It had rolled off the mound.

I did vomit then.

When I was done, I wiped my mouth and started to turn to leave. Something gave me pause. Movement in the edges of the room? I tightened my grip on the Faen Orgis and turned slowly, glaring at my surroundings.

The domed ceiling and pillars of the chapel were carved with complex scenes, all meant to depict the history of the Faith. Ranks of archaic knights battled the slave armies of Recusant kings. Alongside them congregated images of ancient lords offering their crowns to the God-Queen. Great storms and floods swept across the plains and mountains of the continent as the converted Edaean kings led their armies into Urn, to fashion new bastions against the chaos in the West.

Legend. History. The long march of history and legend, inscribed into ivy-wrapped stone.

Blood had been splattered across all of it.

My eyes took in more scenes, more wars, more fables I’d known since childhood stretching across those walls. My gaze lingered on one pillar which showed a group of knights surrounding a tall, regal figure with flowing hair and pointed ears. The elf held an axe, very much like the one I carried, his image superimposed over a towering tree encompassing most of the stone pillar’s length. Lines of gold had been worked into the stone to add definition and color to the great tree.

I knew the elf. I knew the tale. And the greatest lord of the Eld, wisest among all who walk the world in flesh, took an axe to the great golden alder which had stood in that place since the silence of the world was broken. And he, the elf king, hewed down that tree, and from its ruin shaped a power then bequeathed upon Men, so they may hold a candle against the hungering dark.

My heart began to beat faster. I blinked, and the image changed.

The stone-etched image of the elf had fallen. The knights had driven their swords into his back, pinning him to the ground. The tree became a blackened, charred husk half its original length. The scenes of war carved along the other pillars took on a more visceral aspect, until I was certain blood was beginning to trickle down like miniature waterfalls, pooling onto the open space in the room’s center, even dripping from the ceiling to form a macabre rain. Fiendish things danced within the chaos, crouched on the shoulders of kings, spurring on scenes of slaughter, laughing.

I could hear them laughing.

I blinked again, and images were as they had been. The knights bowed before the elf king, who stood tall again, their swords held in supplicant hands. The rest of it was just cold stone, unmoving. Dead.

Profaned.

I moved closer to the basin. I used some of my cloak to cover my mouth and nose, though my gorge gibbered threats with every step. There was something in the stone hollow. Something moving.

I leaned over the piled bodies and looked into the receptacle. It was full of crawling insects. Centipedes, spiders, maggots, beetles… they swarmed over one another, devouring, breeding, dying. Many had spilled into the piled corpses of the villagers and the same horror was occuring there.

Somehow I knew — though I couldn’t say whether it was some insight from my oaths or a more primal instinct — that there was a hollow within the basin, an emptiness just under that crawling, writhing mass. A hole in the world.

Something had been born here. Something terrible.

Too late.

“He said this was justice.”

I whirled, a snarl half-formed on my lips, only to see a figure slumped against one of the pillars encompassing the room’s center. He was young, overweight, dressed in the plain brown robes of a chapel brother. His brown hair was matted to his head. Blood and worse soiled his robes.

The young priest’s eyes slid up to me. They were bloodshot. “He said this was justice for our sycophancy, that the Onsolain would not save us for all our prayers.” He lifted cracked fingernails to his temple and clawed at the raw flesh there. His words took on a hysterical edge. “He made me pray as he killed them. He said they could not hear me.”

I approached the monk and knelt at his side. He shied away from me.

I showed him the Faen Orgis. The Doomsman’s Arm. Wil-O’ Wisps emerged from the shadows of my cloak to flit about the weapon, illuminating the elven patterns engraved to the axe blade. The monk’s eyes widened.

“They heard you,” I told him.