Rituals. Bloody rituals. Heralas had once held them sacred, back when he was a naive little lamb bleating for Goddess Selene's favor. Back then, every rune he carved, every incantation he whispered, was an act of reverence, a holy bridge to the radiant Goddess of Life.

She, whose divine blood ran through the veins of the kingdom's pompous, inbred nobility.

He’d been awestruck when he joined the Order, trembling like a virgin on their wedding night, handpicked among the masses to bring these preening nobles closer to divinity. The Goddess herself supposedly whispered through the Queen, and Heralas had hung on every word like a lovesick fool.

Every painstaking ritual, every setback endured, every ounce of his devotion had been poured into not disappointing the ever-watchful Selene.

But now? Now, the whole bloody charade was a cruel joke.

Heralas’ hands moved with practiced precision, his fingers tracing runes through golden dust in flawless concentric circles around the whimpering heir. Decades of repetition made the motions second nature, and while the preparations were slapdash at best, it didn’t matter. He’d promised Elnor he’d see this through, and Heralas wasn’t one to back out—unlike the limp-spined twits he worked for.

The sounds of battle rumbled faintly from outside the cavern; whoever had come to disrupt them had finally arrived. He trusted Elnor to deal with it—he’d bloody better—while he focused on the ritual, forcing it into place with sheer will and spite. His fellow ritualists scrambled alongside him, but each misstep was grating against his fraying patience.

And then there was him.

Heralas flicked a glance at Eryndor Faenlith, the little shit sprawled stark naked on the freezing stone altar, acting like the Goddess owed him a bloody apology for the inconvenience. The wanker had the gall to whinge and ask how much longer it would take, and Heralas’ fists clenched so hard his nails bit into his palms. Divine gift, my arse.

This arrogant, pampered tosser was about to be blessed by Selene herself, and he couldn’t even muster the decency to sit there without his entitled prattle. Heralas fought the very real urge to throttle him then and there.

The bitterness rose in his throat like bile. It wasn’t just Eryndor—this wasn’t the first time the Goddess had seen fit to bless some spineless sack of nobility who wouldn’t know strength if it smacked them across their powdered face.

Lately, it seemed every so-called “chosen” was weaker than the last, their minds too dull to wipe their own arses, let alone lead a kingdom.

He swallowed hard, forcing it all down. The rage, the doubt, the ugly, choking truth he couldn’t admit aloud. Nobility. What choice did he have? He wasn’t born with the Goddess’s blood in his veins. He couldn’t be chosen. So he played his part in Her crusade, clinging to that hollow privilege like a drowning man to driftwood. But the cracks in his devotion were spreading, and with each ritual, they threatened to swallow him whole.

The cavern shuddered faintly, a low tremor as the first tendrils of divinity began to stir. The runes carved into the stone floor pulsed with a rhythmic, silvery glow, soft as a heartbeat. Lumière de Sélène. Selene’s light. That’s what the pious called it. Heralas had once believed it, too—oh, how he’d believed.

But now? Now he wasn’t so sure.

Something had shifted. He couldn’t say when it started. Perhaps it was the light itself—the way it had grown colder, more piercing, less like moonlight and more like tempered steel. Or maybe it was the nobles. Those damnable nobles and their peculiar requests, always pushing the boundaries of the rituals. The subtle shifts he noticed after each ceremony but couldn’t voice aloud.

He thought back to the changes in them. At first, they seemed radiant, brimming with power and charm, as though touched by divinity itself. But when he spoke with them—really looked at them—it was all a brittle veneer. Their eyes were darker. Their tempers shorter. Their laughter as hollow as the caverns they dragged him into for these rituals. He told himself it was natural, that connecting with a shred of divinity would leave its mark. But even that excuse tasted sour.

They weren’t the same people afterward. They didn’t even feel like the same people.

His spiraling thoughts were interrupted by the naked little wanker sprawled across the altar. "Are you quite done wasting time with these elaborate theatrics, Arcanist Heralas?" Eryndor drawled, "The stone is cold, and this whole spectacle reeks of tedium. If you’re doing this to spite me, cease this nonsense immediately."

Heralas felt his jaw clench, the vein in his temple throbbing again. Of course, the bloody prat was complaining—his lordship’s arse was a bit chilly. Never mind that Heralas was balancing on the razor-thin edge of spiritual precision, coaxing the life energy of sacrificed beasts through hastily prepared conduits, ensuring the three altars synced seamlessly, and maintaining the delicate veil of spirituality.

A masterpiece of improvisation—one he would have taken pride in, if not for the spoiled sack of entitlement splayed out as the ritual’s target.

“Patience, my lord,” Heralas said flatly, his voice devoid of reverence. It felt wrong to say the words, to bend to the whims of the unworthy, but he was far past caring. The brat was undeserving of Her grace. A disgrace to even stand in Her light.

Eryndor huffed like a sulking child but fell silent as the runes beneath him flared brighter, their silvery light creeping up like a rising tide. He shifted uncomfortably, but Heralas didn’t bother looking up. He had work to do.

Eyes closed, he focused on the spiritual energy swirling through the cavern. It resisted him, like wrestling a wild beast, but Heralas pulled at it with sheer force, shaping it, commanding it, his fellow ritualists straining to hold the threads in place. The fabric of the world itself was starting to weaken, heavy with an ancient presence clawing its way in.

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It was almost done.

Focus, Heralas. Anchor yourself. This was the final step. The spirituality bent to his will, his dominion over it absolute.

The monster corpses sprawled across the altars began to change. Flesh sloughed away, blood pooled and spiraled into intricate symbols glowing with divine resonance. It was a grim. A grotesque beauty.

Selene, the radiant Goddess of life and blood—She of persistence, even beyond death.

Words of power spilled from his lips, his mouth dry and cracking, the air around him suffused with thick, cloying spirituality. Bones stirred, their marrow igniting with an unnatural force. Symbols etched themselves upon spines as the corpses rose, no longer dead but something other.

Around them, a blooming riot of flora erupted. Vines twined with roses of crimson and gold, stalks of lavender intertwined with fiery marigolds, while eerie sunflowers with dark, watching centers sprouted in grotesque clusters. Eyes of dandelions bobbed gently atop slender stems, gazing at the ritual like mute witnesses. The bodies moved now, and from their throats spilled guttural incantations, a hymn to Her power.

This was Her might—Selene, The Mother. The Moon. The Radiant Goddess.

A shiver ran through Heralas’ spine as the fabric of reality strained further, the barrier between worlds tearing with a soundless cry. An oppressive weight bore down on him. More crushing, unrelenting. A vine erupted beside his ear, tendrils reaching like groping fingers. Shit. Just basking in the edge of Her divinity warped the flesh. He glanced around; hastily erected protections flared weakly, barely holding.

The ritualists weren’t nobles. They bore none of Her blood, no spark of Her divinity to shield them. They were interlopers, pawns, fragile. Disposable. The enchantments they scrawled in desperation bought time, but Heralas could feel the creeping effects: his hair sprouting buds, the flesh along his arms hardening and twisting into bark. His fellows fared no better.

This wasn’t even Her. It was a mere fragment, a servant, a herald. Lord Styn Lor. The cavern quaked under the force of his arrival, the dungeon’s very stones groaning as the world buckled beneath the weight of his presence. The spirituality became erratic, writhing like a thing alive, slipping through his control.

A treacherous thought slid into his mind. What if you’re wrong?

He crushed it with the force of a hammer. No. Blasphemy. Whatever Her will, he was but an instrument. A cog in the grand design. If Her divinity changed people—warped them—it was exactly as she intended. He dared not question it. He could not.

Yet the question came again, whispering louder, insidious. What if it’s not Her at all?

Heralas’ heart thudded in his chest, each beat reverberating in his skull. The thought made him feel unmoored, unmade. But again, he killed it. Enough.

The pressure grew. The suffocating force that crashing against him like a tidal wave. Vines erupted from his pores, buds blossoming into strange, alien flowers. Around him, the other ritualists convulsed, their shapes distorting grotesquely under the strain.

This wasn’t the controlled, sacred embrace of divinity he had once known. This was something wild. Chaotic. Wrathful.

For a fleeting, dreadful moment, he allowed the question to bloom in his mind, a final time. What if it isn’t Her, after all?

He gritted his teeth, shaking his head violently. What the hell was happening to him? Was he losing faith, or was faith losing him? He clung to the protection scripts, fueling them with everything he had left.

The dungeon walls seemed alive, pulsating with glowing symbols that bled vitality. Vines sprawled like greedy fingers, sprouting buds, fruits, and grains in reckless abundance. Wheat. Rice. Apples. Mangoes. The overwhelming essence of Life poured out unchecked, and the very stones underfoot turned to loam. He felt the writhing tendrils curl around his boots and creep up his robes.

Only the brat—the noble-born bastard—remained untouched, lounging like a princeling atop a lush altar of blossoms. Light spilled in, fractured and luminous, as the dungeon itself quaked.

Then it began.

A whisper crawled along the edges of his mind. Cold. Venomous. The brat screamed—a high, broken sound—as vines plunged into his naked flesh, probing, testing his blood for worth. The air shifted; the pressure became unbearable as the presence intensified. He felt it, saw it, as the fabric of reality finally gave up the ghost and shattered.

From the rupture came vines, grotesque, alien, laced with eyes. Dozens of them. No, hundreds. Swiveling, blinking, judging. They shifted, impossibly fluid, and his sanity howled in rebellion. With trembling fingers, he triggered the final step, a last act of defiance.

The ritual circles ignited in brilliant white, shields flaring to life, drowning their vision in blinding light. Then, like puppets whose strings had been cut, they collapsed. One by one, heads hit stone as they fell to their knees, trembling before the impossible. This part wasn’t for mortal eyes. Couldn’t be. Not without unraveling, without losing every thread of who they were.

The brat screamed on. Around him, the skeleton-flowers—the reanimated beasts bound by Her sacred power—charged forward, only to dissolve into nothingness.

Heralas couldn’t see anymore. Couldn’t hear. But even blind and deaf, the presence of Her servant burned through every inch of him. His body betrayed him again, mutating past the protections, as the storm of divine power raged unchecked.

And then, as suddenly as it came, it withdrew.

Reality snapped back, stitching itself together with an eerie finality. Her divinity receded, leaving silence in its wake. Heralas dared to open his eyes, staring first at his trembling hands. Bark. Bark everywhere, twisting up his fingers. From his elbows hung ripe mangoes, and wheat sprouted like obscene antennae from his ears. His head—dear gods, his head—was now a riot of blooming flowers. His body wasn’t his anymore, but he wasn’t alone in his ruin. The others were no better off. Still, most of them were alive this time, and for that, Heralas managed a strained, weary grin. Small victories, eh?

The cavern had been transformed. A cathedral of green and color surrounded them, plants and vines dripping with fruit and flowers. Beneath, above, all around—Life itself had taken root and flourished in maddening, chaotic beauty.

And the brat?

The noble floated now, held aloft by twisting vines of emerald. Across his chest, a massive rose unfurled, its petals blood-red and glistening. Thorny tendrils cradled him with a cruel sort of reverence, their spikes biting into his flesh. But his eyes... those crimson eyes were colder than death. He stared blankly ahead, momentarily detached, as though the mortal world no longer mattered.

Heralas staggered forward, intending to bow, but before he could lower himself, a thorny vine lashed out, wrapping around his head. He gasped, choking as it yanked him upward, dragging him to face the noble.

“M-My Lord?” he managed, his voice strangled by the vine’s grip.

The brat stared for a long moment before his mouth twisted into a sneer. “I thought you had security in place, Arcanist Heralas.”

Before Heralas could respond, the vines went wild, lashing and thrashing in guttural fury. They surged toward the ceiling, converging in a writhing mass, before parting to reveal something new.

A scaled beast emerged, silver as moonlight, its claws marked with glowing runes that faded as it shrieked. Thorny vines coiled around it, burrowing deep into its flesh, pinning the creature in place as it writhed and screamed.

“What is this little pest doing here, then?”