In the darkness, in the cold and the damp, my whole world contracted into a single thought, a single sensation, a single truth.

Pain.

Despite the Presider’s orders, the priorguard beat me for killing three of their own. The man I’d stabbed in the chest with Faen Orgis’s branch had died badly, sweating himself to death, and nothing the clerics could do with medicine or Art could save him. The cursed weapon’s od was too angry.

I learned this, and guessed the latter bit, because the ones who beat me half to death told me as they did it. Weak with dehydration, lack of food, and prior injuries, I hadn’t been able to fight back or defend myself.

I had cracked ribs as I lay in the dark of a filthy cell, possibly a fractured wrist. My nose had been broken, not for the first time in my life, and my whole body felt like a single throbbing bruise.

They’d taken my clothes, and given me an itching smock instead, threadbare and unwashed. It did nothing for the cold, and rubbed my skin raw.

I lay in the dark, wondering how I’d gotten myself here.

Not how. I knew what foolish decisions had brought me here. Why. What had it been for? For a quest I didn’t have to avoid dreaming to hide from? For agency over my life?

I’d grown arrogant. I’d forgotten I didn’t live in a time of legends anymore. I lived in a world of brutal consequence, and now I faced one.

I could only hope the people who’d made the mistake of getting close to me didn’t share in it.

“Got ourselves in deep this time, eh Al?”

“Donnelly?” I turned on that hard cot, regretted it as the world went red for an endless moment. Groaning, I reached out into the darkness. Felt cold, damp stone. Nothing else. No presence, alive or dead, met me in that cell.

Donnelly’s ghost wasn’t here. I’d just been hoping he’d appear, give me some way out, some new mission.

I couldn’t say how long passed in that black cell. They gave me a chamberpot, and men came to check on me on occasion. They brought food and checked me for worsening injury, but otherwise said nothing. Every time men came they were under heavy guard, and I knew if I even twitched wrong I’d get another beating.

And, so badly hurt and weakened, my spiritual strength suffered too. No doubt Kross had made certain of this, knowing what I was capable of. The body and the spirit are conjoined, and if one suffers both are made less.

I had no power.

So I waited. I hurt. I fretted.

When would the questions come? The hot brands and the pliers, the scalpels and the cruel hooks? Images of Hell played through my mind. Images of metal and fire.

Eventually, the door did open. I heard the clank of armor, the hiss of a long cape against stone. I twisted to glare at the serene face above me through my matted hair.

“Such a sad sight you seem, Alken.” Kross sighed regretfully. “We could have avoided this.”

“What are you doing here, Kross?” I hadn’t been given much water. My words were a dry rasp. “Why risk it? If they find out what you are—”

“All they see is a man with an angel on his shoulder,” the crowfriar said. The door had shut behind him, leaving us alone. He paced over to the small grate in the wall. No light came through it — we were too far underground — but some engineering trick pushed stale air into the cramped room.

From my prone position, I watched Kross stare a moment at the crusted stone of the cell’s wall, a pensive look on his face.

“You should take the Presider’s offer,” he said, without meeting my eye.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Become one of his Knights Penitent, you mean? He hasn’t offered me anything the Choir didn’t, and they at least have the means to back up their promises. All Oraise can do is change some paperwork.”

Kross grimaced. “Don’t be a fool, Alken. This isn’t about what becomes of your remains — I’m speaking about the girl.”

With clenched teeth, I forced myself to sit. I had to scoot back against the damp wall to keep upright, wincing as I felt its coldness against my skin. “You won’t find her,” I told him. “I’ve trained her well this past winter, and Garihelm is large.”

Kross shrugged. “Believe as you will, but know this — Emma Carreon is young, and has her entire life to grow desperate. You believe Nath the Fallen has forgotten about her? The Briar Angel’s schemes thread through centuries, Hewer. She has plans for that girl, and nothing you do will keep your ward from the lefthand path.”

“I’m sure your masters have something kinder in mind,” I sneered.

“We will give up our claim on her,” Kross said quietly. He did meet my eyes then, fearless of the light in them.

I stared at him a long moment before answering. “I don’t believe you.”

We do not lie

A shiver of primal revulsion ran through me at the touch of that voice. It was like frozen iron on my soul.

The Zosite’s voice.

“Why?” I croaked.

“Because the Iron Tribunal is more interested in you,” Kross said frankly. “We have all the Carreons already, save Emma, and it is her great-grandmother who desires the set in any case. One fallen house, no matter how we might use it, is of little consequence to us… but a champion of the Alder Table? That we can use.”

He knelt near me then, fearless of what I might do. And why would he be afraid? I might break his teeth, but I was too weak and too injured to stage an escape.

And he had that seraph guarding him, in any case.

“Take the Presider’s offer,” he insisted. “Work with me. The Inquisition would root out my brothers as well — but we serve the same order as your Choir, even if they detest how we do it. We also await Her return. Together, we can steer this army of zealots into something more… constructive.”

When I didn’t respond, his jaw tightened and he spoke with more heat. “You want to do right by this land, paladin? Help me bring order. The Choir is disunited and confused. They are becoming irrelevant, and have been ever since they lost their leader. The Church no longer heeds their guidance, but follows men like Oraise. He is dangerous, Alken.”

“You want me to believe you’re trying to save Urn?” I asked him. I felt more tired than scornful. Difficult to stay angry, when most all you feel is hungry and sore.

“I am,” Kross insisted. “I am Vicar of the Credos Ferrum. I lead the Orkaelin missionaries in this land. I have been entrusted with establishing the Iron Tribunal’s presence in Urn, so that we may try to undo some of the damage your neglectful gods have done.”

He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “There could be a place for you among us, Knight of Karles.”

Knight of Karles, not of the Alder Table. A soldier of Urn, rather than guardian of legends. I had to give it to Kross — he was a clever devil, and knew me better than I’d thought.

“You want me to strike a devil’s deal with you,” I said. “Is this where you produce a sheet of parchment for me to sign?”

In response, he did. He let it unfurl, showing me the harsh script crawling across the yellowed page. It was an angry runic, like knife wounds in the weathered material. It hurt my eyes to look at it.

“We do not make idle vows,” the crowfriar told me. “Sign, and we will fulfill all our promises. We will no longer press our claim to Emma Carreon, and we will protect you from any retribution from the Choir. All you need do is serve, as you have always done.”

I stared at the page a while. I couldn’t read it, but knew in my gut he told me the truth.

“And when I die?” I asked him softly.

“This is a term of service eternal,” he told me with no hesitation. His eyes had changed — small lights burned within the pupils, like embers on coal. “You will be bound to Orkael. Very likely, we will set you to capturing the Adversary — there are more stray demons than we would like, and we always have empty pits.”

Bound to Hell for all eternity. Just like poor Jon Orley, though in this case by my own choice. He offered me damnation, and in the same breath claimed it to be a better fate than I could expect otherwise.

Maybe he was right.

And, in the Iron Realm was…

I tried to swallow, only half succeeded with my dry throat. I studied the contract with more focused eyes.

“You’ve already helped us before,” Kross said. I heard his seraph whispering into his ear, and knew the words now were from it. “You have already filled a few of our gaols with the dark spirits you banished during your tenure with the Alder Knights. This is a worthy purpose, Alken.”

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A worthy purpose. I closed my eyes, breathing in deep. How long had I been looking for that?

Was this one?

I did not know. I did know one thing, though.

“Jon Orley,” I said, meeting Kross’s burning coal eyes. “I saw what you did to him. What sins did he commit, besides loving the wrong person?”

Kross’s face set into a stern mask. “Do not be a fool, Alken. Don’t let your shallow discontents get in the way of—”

“Get out,” I told him. “Show me that scrap again, and I’ll piss on it.”

He glared at me a moment, then stood. “You will regret this. When Oraise begins to drill into your bones, when you shit yourself and beg him to let you give up all your allies to spare you further pain, you will remember what I offered.”

I ignored him, leaning my head back against the wall and closing my eyes. Eventually, I heard him leave. The door slammed shut with a hollow boom.

I sat again in the dark, listening to water drip and the dregs of the dead squeeze their way through the stones.

I didn’t know what would happen to me when I died. Because of my failures and their cataclysmic consequences, I felt certain my soul would be consigned to some deep prison of Draubard, exempt from the great exodus the priests said would begin when the God-Queen returned to lead the dead beyond the world. Or I’d wander, lost, like the mad ghosts who dogged my steps.

I could hear them whispering through the cracks in the stones. Some had found their way down into whatever dungeon I’d been brought, and they mocked me.

If I took Kross’s offer, I’d go to Hell. I'd fight forever, burned and angry. Maybe that was justice.

There was a fourth fate I expected might be possible, one I didn’t much like contemplating. Yet, in that empty dark that stank of an unemptied chamberpot, sweat, and my own dry blood, I couldn’t help but consider it, that last potential afterlife.

This is what you did to me.

As I sat in the dark, and time passed, I felt the crushing weight of all that stone above, all that darkness. I imagined I could hear grinding stone, as though the entire weight of the cathedral and its dungeons were sinking. Slow, relentless. I would be pressed down flat, squashed into nothing with slow, unceasing pressure.

They’d taken my ring. Taken my axe. I had no friends coming to help me. No one knew I was here. Not Donnelly. Not Catrin. Not Rosanna or Lias, or Emma, Rysanthe or Oraeka. Not Maxim, come to my rescue in his gilded armor and wielding his mythic sword.

I was alone.

Not without company, though. The nightmares indulged me well in that regard. For many days I slept black thanks to the regular beatings and exhaustion, but it wasn’t long before I healed enough to start dreaming.

They’d taken Rysanthe’s ring. In the dark, with my ring gone and the sun and stars who knew how far above me in that subterranean pit, I was entirely at the mercy of the dark things in my dreams.

They had none.

***

Do you, Alken of the Herdhold, pledge yourself? Do you pledge your body, your sword, your heart, and the blessed spirit gifted to all men? Do you pledge to defend these shores with life and soul from this day and through all days, until death or your liege release you?

“I do.”

Do you swear to forgo reward, to seek justice for its own sake?

“I do.”

Do you swear to live with temperance in times of famine and plenty? To keep love in your heart in times of peace or war?

“I do,” I croaked into the darkness.

Do you swear to act always with wisdom, or to seek council from the wise when the path is unclear?

“…I do.” I tried to rise on the filthy cot. Pain flared in my broken wrist and I collapsed, groaning, turning onto my back. A rat scurried along the wall nearby.

And in my memory, Rosanna’s voice went on inexorably, clear as the day she’d made me a knight.

Do you swear to act always with fortitude? To never allow cowardice to stay your hand, and to never turn your back on an enemy?

“…Yes.” My voice was barely a whisper. The darkness drank it.

Do you swear to protect those weaker than you? The innocent and the infirm? To allow none to abuse such persons, and to challenge tyrants? Do you swear to treat those less fortunate than you with grace and aid them if their cause is just?

“I swear,” I said into the stinking cot. My wrist throbbed. I needed water. No one had come to my cell in nearly two days. I think it was so long. There was no time in the darkness.

Do you swear to act always with honor? Do you swear to safeguard the honor of your comrades, to challenge any who would question that honor, be it yours or your fellow knights?

I opened my dry, cracked lips to say the words, but nothing emerged but air. “I—”

It is done.

Ser Beck’s voice. I saw him there, as though he stood far away in that empty dark of the prison cell, or somewhere beyond it. He stood alone in an empty void yet was illuminated, sword drawn and bloodied. He looked to me, not a hint of apology in his face for what he and the others had done. No shame or regret. Only weary determination.

“It is done, as are we. The Table is broken. Go! You will need your sword.” He pointed with his own sword toward me. Past me.

Do you swear to see to the end any course begun?

I breathed into that darkness lined in stone and filth. I clenched a hand into a fist. Somewhere nearby, rats, or some beast like a rat, scurried and whispered their secrets to one another. Ghosts mocked me in tiny voices from the seams between the stones. Somewhere beyond my cell, a man screamed in pain as the questioners tortured him. He'd been screaming for hours.

“I do.”

Liar.

***

Cold. Hunger. Pain. A memory of my childhood in the Herdhold.

This isn’t one of your mother’s stories. My father’s voice, weary and distracted. You don’t have to respect your betters, only obey them.

Cold. Hunger. Pain. A bloody axe in my hands, and Lias’s cheerful laugh.

Well done, well done! Hewed him good, didn’t you? Oh, please tell me you’re not about to throw up.

Cold. Hunger. Pain. Rosanna as a youth, dirty and half-starved, her black hair tangled with leaves, sitting across the fire from me as I cleaned the sword I’d taken from the first man I’d killed.

Maybe I could just disappear, even live a happy life. But then they’d have won. I refuse to live in a world where the traitors who butchered my family can grow old while everyone forgets what they’ve done. They won’t forget me, I promise you that.

Cold. Hunger. Pain. Whispering in the dark.

You speak often of what your queen and comrades gain from all the war and intrigue, but what is it you want, Alken? Is it for duty? For some dream?

…I don’t know. I thought it was for this. Look at all of this!

Golden trees and silver towers. Beautiful armor and a cape woven of leaf-dappled sunlight. A blessed sword. A seat at the table. Honor and respect.

Who wouldn’t want all of that?

Your eyes don’t seem to linger on any of it. They keep going elsewhere… I cannot see where.

I wish I could tell you. I feel lost at times, Dei.

Dei…

No. I didn’t want to dream of that. I didn’t want to remember that.

I did. I fell deeper into the Dark.

***

“None of this makes any sense, Dei.”

We stood in my apartment in the upper city. Waterfalls dimly roared down the cliffs beyond the balcony, open to the room save for vine-wrapped columns and curtains for when the weather turned. Sister Fidei paced along the white stone floor. As usual, she wore her Cenocaste garb, a white robe beneath a black cape and mantle. She wrapped the shroud around herself and turned, looking troubled.

No, not just troubled. Nervous. I’d never seen her nervous.

“I know. I know, Alken, but you have to believe me, it is all true, and we can stop it.”

“Stop what, exactly?” I wanted to laugh, because what she’d told me sounded ludicrous. Only, she didn’t seem to be jesting. Not at all. “You’re telling me the knights — the Knights of the Alder Table, mind — mean to…”

I couldn’t even bring myself to say the words.

“Murder the Archon,” she confirmed, stopping her pacing to face me. She clasped her hands over her chest, the pose she took almost one of prayer. “Take command of the city and open the gates for Rhan Harrower and his allies.”

The Knights Alder, going Recusant. “You can’t be serious,” I said, without humor.

She took a deep breath, her pale face tight with nerves within the bounds of her wimple. “It’s not all of them — just a dozen or so of the captains, led by Alicia Wake.”

“The Knight-Commander!?” I did laugh then — a mistake, because Sister Fidei’s expression grew angry. I stifled the manic burst of mirth and held my hands out placatingly. “I still don’t understand any of this. It all sounds like madness. Why would they do this?”

I was tired. I’d just returned to the city after weeks away, and had barely cleaned the blood from my sword. Ser Maxim and I had hunted a pack of chorn through Graill, and it had been… ugly.

I’d wanted to talk to Dei, but not like this. After I’d confessed my feelings to her before the last mission, I’d felt so giddy. I’d felt happy, for the first time in…

I’d never felt so happy. I’d felt calm. Content. Bad time to be called away to hunt fiends, but that was my lot.

“They’re doing it because…” she bared her teeth and let out a hiss of frustration. I’d never seen her display as much emotion. “It’s complicated, Alken! It’s fucking complicated.”

I’d never heard her curse, either. I’d never heard any nun curse, and it shocked me.

“They’re working with the wizard Reynard,” she said.

I blinked, and the uncomfortable smile slipped from my face. Reynard. King Tuvon had suspected the banished magus had something to do with the troubles in recent seasons. He’d been spotted in several places across the southern realms, allegedly, and Ser Selen had barely survived an encounter with him in Duranike. She’d been in a bad way when her lance had brought her back.

I’d heard plenty of tales about the Traitor Magi. He’d been one of King Tuvon’s advisors, once upon a time, and a great councilor to all the high lords of Urn. I didn’t know all the details, but he’d taken to delving into studies the Onsolain forbade, and what the Choir of God forbade, the God-Queen had ordered forbidden.

He’d been chased from Seydis, banished from the subcontinent for a century and more. Most believed he’d died in the west.

Then, ten years back, rumors had started to circulate of a man wandering the countryside, one who shepherded wicked things. Most had believed it some aspect of the Briar Angel, but soon enough they had started to appear in greater numbers, preying on small villages at first, and later terrorizing larger settlements.

Demons.

“Why would they do that?” I asked quietly, half to myself.

She did not respond. Her moon-green eyes had gone distant, lost in some thought.

“Dei?” I said, hesitant. I didn’t like the look in her eyes — like she was preparing to do something unpleasant.

“I didn’t want to do it this way,” she half-whispered. “I didn’t want you to…”

To my shock, a tear fell beneath one of her eyes.

I didn’t think, didn’t make a conscious decision. In a moment I held her, heedless of the hard steel I still wore up to the neck, of the fact it needed cleaning after weeks of travel and violence. She didn’t seem to mind, pressing close and resting her forehead against the center of my breastplate.

“There’s something you need to know,” she said, breathless. “Something I need to…”

She might have stifled a sob, or a laugh. “I thought I had more time!”

“I’m here,” I murmured, brushing her veil back since I couldn’t touch her hair beneath the monastic garb. “I’m listening. Just talk to me.” Make sense of all this, I thought.

She was quiet a long while, and I didn’t rush her. I felt I should — there’d been a report just an hour back that soldiers were massing on the border of Verdanhigh. There was talk that the lords of Talsyn had brought ships across the Oslake and were burning towns across the Gylden.

War. A war was beginning.

It could wait a while longer.

“I need to show you something,” Dei said, lifting her face to look into mine. “You need to promise me, before I do, that you will listen. And… you have to know that I do love you. That wasn’t a lie.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Why would I think it’s a lie?” I asked her. My voice sounded much calmer than I felt.

My mind went over what she’d told me, working through it. Conspiracy among dissident factions across the land, and in the greatest martial order in the land. A dark sorcerer’s plot, and a scheme to slay the land’s holiest monarch, the voice of the Choir of God. The roots of a war generations in the making, one to upend the current order of the world and replace it with chaos.

How could she possibly know all of this? She, a lesser lay sister of an order of scribes and sin eaters.

Unless… I didn’t want to think it, but couldn’t imagine any other explanation.

She’d know if she were part of the conspiracy.

Impossible. But the words slipped from my mouth anyway.

“Everything you’re telling me,” I began. “About the other knights, the King… how do you know all this?”

The doubt and fear slowly faded from Dei’s pretty eyes. What replaced it didn’t comfort me at all.

I saw resignation in its place. Resignation, and something far stranger.

Hunger.

“…I will show you,” she told me.

image [https://i.imgur.com/ShORy2U.jpeg]