As my oldest friend and I stood there, locked together above the kneeling crowfriar, I felt the rage creep in through the confusion.

“Lias.” My voice sounded oddly calm to my own ears. “What is this?”

Lias’s green eye narrowed, while the false one remained still. I could make out my own fragmented reflection in the crystal’s red surface, blood-smeared and angry.

Instead of answering me, Lias spoke to the knight confessor. “Can you stand, Vicar?”

He knew the crowfriar’s true name. He knew, and he’d saved him.

Growling, I tried to free my weapon. Lias kept the lock with a deft movement, his form stiffly perfect. I was stronger, but he hadn’t been idle the last decade. He’d trained, and in more than just sorcery. He used leverage with a warrior monk’s expertise. By the odd pressure I felt, I suspected he used aura as well.

Vicar rose to his feet, backing away. His hands were ruined and useless, but even still I didn’t trust him not to be dangerous.

My focus remained on Lias.

“Stop this!” I snapped. “He’s a monster. I won’t let him roam free.”

“Monster?” Lias shook his head. “Alken, he is us. He simply serves different masters.”

“Are they your masters now, Li?” I shifted a step, adjusting my grip. Lias responded by rotating his staff, freeing my axe. He carried the motion in a whirling movement, the air whooshing around the length of ebon wood. The iron nail froze under my chin. I batted it away, glaring.

We backed away from one another, a cautious dance. We’d done this before. We’d once trained together, he and I. The pang of nostalgia was a bitter medicine in that moment.

It all made sense now. A terrible, horrible sense.

“All your talk of change and progress…” I shook my head. “I should have known. You were the one who encouraged Markham to lift the trade ban with the continent. You knew, didn’t you? You knew it all.”

Lias nodded. “I did.”

“Why?” I asked, unable to understand. In my mind, I recalled his marions, the continental alchemy in his lab — had there been Devil Iron there, too? I recalled Rosanna’s words, about Lias removing those who’d objected to the new trade.

I’d seen all the signs. I’d just ignored them.

This is why he didn’t rescue me from the Inquisition, I realized. He and Vicar have been allies this whole time.

And I’d put Emma in front of him. Had he known her identity…

How could I have been such a fool?

I knew how. Am I always going to make this mistake?

Lias’s features hardened, the angular lines of his fox face stiffening with emotion. “Because we are trapped by nostalgia! Because our land is a tired backwater filled with bickering warlords and superstitious peasants. We must change.”

“Into what?” I demanded. “Into what he wants?”

I pointed my axe at the crowfriar.

Lias shook his head. “There are worse things out there than devils, Alken. There are worse things than apostate lords. There are even worse things than demons. You have no idea just how small we are, how vast the theater in which we play is.”

“This is not a game,” I told him with bitter anger. “That’s always been your problem, Lias. You see everything as some grand competition. Your ambition has gone too far.”

A pensive look came over the wizard. “Perhaps. Yet, if the beings who rule this land would keep us trapped in this tired dream, if I must burn it to wake us up…”

He shrugged. “Well, cauterizing a limb is sometimes necessary, to prevent rot.”

I bared my teeth at him. “You sound like Reynard.”

Lias flinched. Then, mastering himself, he held out his hand, palm up and empty. “Please, Alken. You don’t have to remain their hound.”

“You think I’m doing this for the gods?” I asked him. “For faith? I thought you knew me better.”

His eye and voice turned cold. “We have been strangers for more than a decade now. I know you little better than you know me, paladin.”

“And Rose?” I asked him.

Lias went very still. Then, his one eye narrowing he said, “This is for Rosanna’s good as much as anyone’s. She could rule this land, if she was not so afraid of what she might become.”

I remembered then, a conversation between me and my queen. Lias’s queen, too. We’d both sworn oaths.

Am I a tyrant, Alken?

I remember thinking about it for a long while.

Yes. But this is a war. We can build from here, right?

…I’m not certain.

She had built. Perhaps many people feared her, but fertile seeds had been sewn in these dark times because of Rosanna Silvering.

“The Choir should have ordered you to kill Markham,” Lias said. “It would have done us all much more good.”

He’d learned all the wrong lessons, and I’d heard enough. I raised my axe, letting amber fire burst to life around it. Lias became dispassionate with calm, the green in his eye turning moon bright. Shadows and mist shifted around him. He lifted his staff, aiming it at me.

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“I will drag you back to the Empress if I have to,” I told him. “This has to end.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Let us end it, this charade.”

He raised his staff high, and I felt the shifting of invisible, mighty energies in the world. Hidden mechanisms of realities, of potential realities, of memory imprinted like burn scars into the fabric of existence, turned.

Lias had once told me that Art turns reality on your axis, for just a moment. The world turned on his then, and the shadows pressed in to swallow everything except him.

His ruby eye became a distant blood star, his robes of blue and red and silver a nebula.

I formed my own technique, focusing on one of my oaths. The Alder Knights are holders of lanterns in the dark paths that tangle Creation.

But Lias did not make a shadowed road in some eldritch wood. A lantern cannot brighten the void. The light of the red star fell on me, a distant and malign eye wrought in ages long before Urn had even lifted out of the sea.

I had seen him use this once before, to kill the Recusant magi Logan Dee. There had been nothing left.

I had expected him to try to bind me, or subdue me in some nonlethal way. I’d been prepared to do the same thing — injure, yes, but not kill.

A mistake. He did not let nostalgia chain him down.

He’s got me, I thought. I’d told Emma I could beat him, but I’d been thinking of the Lias I’d known in my youth. This was a wholly different power.

I felt myself drawn to the center of that nebula, toward the baleful eye. I tried to plant my feet, but there wasn’t anything to brace them on. I swung my axe, trying to catch it on the room I knew I truly stood in. Disoriented, I kept falling, unmoored from the material reality around me.

When I touched that star…

I would die.

I felt afraid.

I jerked to a stop as something caught me. A soft, warm light filled the void.

I’d been caught by golden threads.

The phantasm broke, leaving me in the misty chapel again with the congregation of red-robed priests, the wounded devil, my oldest friend. Lias stared, confused as me.

“Alken!”

My eyes went to the door. There, her fingers working small lines of white-gold aura, stood Lisette.

Lias’s expression changed from cold resignation to dark anger as he turned his staff on the girl. It began to glow with silver light.

Lisette’s threads loosened, and I leapt. Lias caught my charge out of the corner of his eye and cursed, spinning to face me. More threads caught his left arm, the one that held the staff, stalling him.

He broke Lisette’s Art as easily as he would have swatted a fly, shattering it with a sharp gesture of his free hand, but a moment’s pause had been all I’d needed. I swung.

Faen Orgis cleaved through the top of the wizard’s staff, cracking the wood in two and breaking the iron nail free. It went sailing, sinking into the wood inches from a traumatized cleric’s foot.

Stumbling back, Lias swiped his hand in a savage motion, spitting some arcane invective. A spiral of silver moonlight struck me across the chest, emitting a keening tone as it burst. Though the rings of the elven hauberk saved me, several broke free of the mesh and the impact knocked the wind out of me.

The force of the blast knocked me back. I spun at a painful angle, hit the ground hard, and slid a ways before stopping.

I’d managed to keep hold of my axe. I used it to lift myself, turning with a snarl toward the magi. I lifted the axe, cocking it to throw.

I didn’t want it to come to this. I’d come back for him, for Rose, for us.

But there was no us anymore. We three had gone separate ways, and there could be no mending that broken string. Even tied together, all it formed was a knot.

Just as I moved to hurl my weapon, I felt a flash of prickling heat against my skin. My instincts screamed at me, and I rolled aside as a blast of hellfire roared across the spot I’d been standing. It caught one of the clericons instead, who screamed as he reeled back in a frantic tumble.

Vicar stepped between me and Lias. His eyes blazed with infernal power, and beneath his angular chin…

His throat bulged out against his armor, the skin stretched and transparent, full of flame.

He’d breathed fire. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

He’d grown larger. His features stretched, the graying hair turning hackle-sharp, the eyes narrowing, ears growing pointed. Cinderous flame roiled and writhed around his form, and within it he became a black shadow, a coal inside a tongue of fire. Mangled human hands curled in on themselves, shriveling, then bloating, then sprouting claws.

Lisette rushed to my side, her face pale with fear. “What is he?” She asked, breathless.

“Something damned,” I replied, taking a guard.

The hellhound stepped out of the bonfire. Bigger than any I’d seen, twice as large at least as those Jon Orley had called during his fight with the Hunting knights. A low growl, more like the noise a furnace makes than any beast, rumbled through yellowed teeth.

Worse, these flames didn’t dissipate into harmless nothingness like normal phantasms. They began to spread across the floor.

“Get out of here,” I ordered the cleric at my side.

“Not without you,” she shot back, her fingers working with strings of aura.

I expected an attack, but Vicar only glared at me, a threatening rumble building in his bloated chest. Heat built in between his huge jaws. I got the message — step closer, and I’ll burn you to ash.

Could I survive it? I tightened my grip on my axe, prepared to take the bet.

I caught sight of Lias, and that gave me pause. He’d stopped fighting, instead moving behind the podium. I caught sight of a bundle of red robes where the corpse of the Grand Prior lay.

Lias knelt. When he stood, he had the quill in his hand.

The quill with Horace Laudner’s blood.

My heart became ice.

“LIAS!” I roared, turning. “STOP!”

I made to rush toward him, but the hellhound leapt into my path. It spat a plume of fire, forcing me to throw a hand up as I flinched back.

Calmly, almost without hurry, Lias wiped the quill on his sleeve, then stabbed it into his own palm. He winced. At first, I didn’t understand.

But I knew enough history that my confusion didn’t last long.

The Magi had helped found the Church. To the Zosite, who abided by ancient laws, they were as holy as any preost. More so, in some circles.

Had this always been his plan? Or had he just taken the opportunity presented?

I watched him, the man who was like a brother to me, cut our bond.

With his own blood and name, Lias signed the parchment still lying on the cracked stand. The moment he drew his hand back, it burst into yellow hellfire. The flame engulfed the podium, forming a profane altar. I felt a terrible power exuding from it as the contract, the Oath, became inscribed into reality itself.

Lias shuddered.

I stared in horror. Lisette, who didn’t understand, stood still and uncertain at my side, not knowing what to do with her magic.

“It is done,” Lias said, letting out a sigh of relief. “Now there’s no going back.”

He met my eyes, and had the gall to smile. It was a remote, eerie smile, full of self-loathing and pride in equal measure.

“Traitor,” I called him.

“In your heart,” he told me, as mist flooding out of the broken chapel window encircled him, “you betrayed them all long ago. Have you read the book I gave you?”

That froze me. It gave Vicar time to leap back, landing on all fours next to the wizard. The mist wrapped them, becoming dense as a fog in the deep sea. Lias’s power had been in the brume since the moment he’d arrived.

When it faded, he and Vicar were gone. So was the infernal contract.

The Priory clerics had fled during the fight, terrified by their champion turning into a beast of Hell, and by the spreading flames. Some had died in the violence, their corpses scattered across the edges of the room.

For them, this had been a matter of their leader promising… what? What had Horace told them about Vicar’s scrap of parchment?

I ignored the dead and fleeing, moving toward the window. I stopped where Lias had stood, staring out into the mist.

Behind me, flames had begun to crawl up the walls.

“Alken!” Lisette cried out. “We need to go! It’s going to burn down!”

I paused long enough to kneel and grab something off the ground — the thing which would change everything.

When Lisette saw what I had taken, her already pale face blanched.

“Let’s go,” I told her quietly, feeling an odd calm.

Lias had shown me who he really was. No, I’d already known since we were young. Only, now we both understand the true trajectory of our separate paths. His would take him to some uncertain and frightening future, one of brutal progress, guided by beings who moved in shadow and secrecy. Mine…

Dawn was coming.

image [https://i.imgur.com/IY3fv7W.jpeg]