In the present, Verune walked out of the alley, onto the street.

Market Street.

He turned his head.

If this is Market Street, then…

The expansive forest-garden up ahead had to be Cascaton Park.

Then his memory resumed. He remembered how his night had met its end. The memory sent a spark up the Lassedite’s back. He shuddered in horror.

He’d been screaming at the sky, begging to understand why. Why had he been forsaken? Why had his people been forsaken? Why had the Angel let them lose their way? Why had Orrin been taken from him?

The hummingbird robe had glistened beneath the streetlamps as he’d raged and wept. And then, from behind, he’d heard a voice.

“Helllp… me…” A cough tore between the words like a blast from a shotgun.

Verune turned. A man had come up to him, pleading for aid. He was barely able to stand on his own two feet.

The man’s body was a ruin.

The Lassedite backpedaled in horror, heart racing.

His blond hair was coming up by the roots. Ulcers tore through his fair skin. Spiderwebbed darkness wove beneath his flesh, sprouting up from his wounds like weeds. He could barely speak. Another cough rocked him as he reached for the Lassedite. He crumpled forward, hawked up gobs of black ooze, speckled in green, splattering it all over Verune’s neck and face.

Verune ran.

He heard a crack of bone on stone.

Verune looked over his shoulder. The corrupted soul had collapsed onto the sidewalk, skull split open like a broken egg. Black ooze spilled out from the crevices. And beneath the newspost’s shadow, Verune could see fungus within the man’s head, softly glowing.

Verune ran and ran. He smeared the ooze onto the holy hummingbird robe, desperate to get the vile ichor off his body. By a stroke of luck, he came across a water fountain: a miniature statue of a woman, standing beneath a gazeboed wrought iron basin. A constant stream of water trickled from an urn in her arms.

Verune stuck his hands into the current. He wiped his face, and his neck. He cupped water in his hands and spilled it onto the hummingbird robe to wash the unholy darkness from his body. The water was exquisitely refreshing. It tasted sweet, with the slightest hint of fruity tang, and left a pleasing tingle as it passed on his skin, like the touch of champagne.

And then he’d walked. He walked without stopping. The Daily Caller told him the Melted Palace still existed. The apostate civilization that had taken the Second Empire’s place still had enough sense to leave the holiest site in Lassedicy in one piece.

He couldn’t begin to fathom how they must have molested it across the passage of time.

He hadn’t paid much heed to the people in the vehicles on the road before, nor to the sights he could spy through open windows on apartments above the streets. But now, he looked. He looked everywhere, and saw it everywhere: a great darkness; a taint upon the people and the land; a rot that ate through to the very core of the City of God.

He kept walking, even after his limbs had turned strangely heavy; even as his thoughts had seemed to fog. He was in a frenzy.

He passed projections of wide-eyed cartoons—barely clothed maidens, smiling and fantastical. He passed herb-stunk storefronts bearing the tools of whoredom.

Nausea boiled in his stomach. His sweat was icy in the Night.

Verune ran, not knowing where to go, hopelessly lost in the city he once knew like the back of hand.

He passed moving pictures of dragons and armored demons battling on a rocky plain. He passed a pile of fungus-rotten corpses, men in wigs, dressed in women’s clothing.

He ran.

He ran until a shudder cut him off mid-step. His legs had suddenly failed him.

He fell.

Grabbing the corner of a storefront, he pulled himself into an alley, away from the streets, and, as he had toppled forward, his last thought before passing into unconsciousness had been confusion at the taste of the color blue that had been running through his mind.

Then the vision ended.

Verune was back in the present again, feeling as if he’d just returned from elsewhere.

Did I travel in time again?

He didn’t know.

Verune slowly lowered himself to his knees. His lagging limbs shook.

Had the Moonlight Queen died? Had Time itself lost its way?

Verune scraped his fingernails across the sidewalk’s concrete pavement. He trembled as he wept.

The last time he’d cried like this was as a child, kneeling at the foot of his mother’s rocking chair, tugging at her leg, begging her to wake up.

The words of his youth sounded in his ears.

“Mom, please, wake up. Momma, please. Please!”

It was just a fever. She’d been fine one day… and then…

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All alone…

He’d wandered through the night; a parentless child of a gentleman farmer’s servant girl, down in Vineplain, on Trenton’s southern coast, a land of rain and hail and fertile fields that swept across the rolling expanse.

As a child, it was the Angel who had saved him. A priest of the Abbey of Lct. Alora had found him, wandering the dirt road in the early hours of the morning. The Abbey’s monks fed and clothed him; they ensured his safe travel to an orphanage in the city of Seasweep, to the west. His mother had not been a pious woman; she had not told him of the Angel’s love. But the monks did, and Verune swore he would never forget them. They were there for him; they were the last light in the dark,when all others had gone out.

But where is that Light, now?

He lifted his head to the shadow of dawn, to the mammoth structures that speared through the fog.

Everything had been taken from him. The people of this future Elpeck were his countrymen no longer. Their souls were shriveled and empty. They had forgotten the Godhead. The ship of State had lost its way. It had forsaken the Church’s wisdom and guidance. And now it was dying; the whole world was dying. The Green Death was dragging it to Hell.

Why have you forsaken me? Is this a punishment?

Verune’s dead gut twitched.

“Was I too prideful?” he whispered.

Was this the fate that had befallen Lassedite Athelmarch? Had he, too, come unstuck in time?

Verune supposed he would never know.

The people of this world had tried to escape their fate, as if it was a thing to be stopped by mere wishes and ignorance. They were selfish. Even now, with the Outer Darkness at the gates, they were too stubborn and prideful to see the error of their ways. They did not think as men should think. Their thoughts were decadent and hollow. They’d let the pagan Munine rule them. They cared not for the fate of their fellow man. They were fools.

But the Angel’s truth could not be blotted out. Yes, it could be belittled or denied, but it could not be destroyed. He’d found glimmers of the Angel’s truth, tucked away in the distant corners of the world within the newspole’s glowing windows. It seemed there were still some who had the courage and the care to speak the truth.

The Last Day had come.

He prostrated himself upon the sidewalk.

“Have mercy, O Holy Angel! Have mercy! Please, forgive my trespasses!”

Verune had wanted to be a Light for the world. That was the vow he had taken when he had become a priest. It was the vow he had renewed upon ascension to the office of Lassedite.

It’s my fault. I should have done more! I—

—But Verune bit his lip. He let his head hang low, noting the washed out black stains on the hummingbird robe.

No more excuses.

Verune had forgotten the most fundamental truth: he was a sinner. All mankind was lost in sin. The sin of their selfishness. Their cruelty. Their vainglory.

We steal, we cheat, we lie. We destroy.

Man put himself before others, even as the whole of creation cried out in pain.

Verune clenched his fists.

“I am a sinner,” he said, nodding his head up and down. “I soil all that I touch.” He raised his arms skyward. “Righteous is the Angel’s Will! Just are His Punishments!”

It made sense.

He had abused the Sword’s power. The Imperial family was dead, the Holy Empire collapsed. The heretics had triumphed.

Mordwell Verune hunched over and wept, shedding the tears of one who now knew his own damnation.

“Orrin, my son… forgive me.” He mumbled under his breath, speaking to the young man he would never see again.

Raising the young boy in the faith, following his journey down the path of Light… that had given Verune more joy than any man deserved. The Lassedite’s seat was an awesome responsibility. Beneath its pomp and splendor, the demands made of the Lass’ successor were almost too heavy to bear. For one man, one, fallen, sinful man to steer the millions toward salvation? But for the grace of God, it would have been an impossible task.

But then, there was Orrin.

Sweet boy.

In raising Orrin, Mordwell the father had witnessed the father’s love that Mordwell the son had never known. And to know that love came from within himself—from the fragment of Divine Love that shone in the hearts of all men? It was nothing less than a miracle. It was priceless beyond measure, and it gave Verune the strength to guide the faithful on their way to Paradise.

And now, my foolishness has cost me that love.

It was lost to him, forevermore.

Closing his eyes, Verune began to pray. It did not matter to him whether the Angel had forsaken him. Man was created to know God, and to love the Angel with all his heart.

That is our purpose, forever and always.

Verune prayed softly, barely above a whisper, cooing notes as old as stone.

“You raise us high; you bring us low. Great is the Godhead. Great is Their Glory.”

He passed from verse to verse, and then to the verse that was the Lassedite’s alone. A sacred prayer, passed down from Lassedite to Lassedite, in an unbroken chain that stretched all the way back to the Lass herself.

The Lassedite’s Cant.

The Cant was more than just a prayer. It was a ritual. According to legend, for the Chosen few to whom the Sword of the Angel revealed its powers, the Lassedite’s Cant would show them the way.

Holding his arms out in front, as if grasping the Sword by its hilt, Verune clasped his hands together, interlocking his fingers. Just as he had all the other times he’d performed the Lassedite’s Cant, Verune followed the steps as his predecessor had shown him. He pictured the Sword in his hands, and held in his thoughts the memorized images of the holy sigils as he intoned the prayer’s words. It was the very sigil embroidered on the cassock of the hummingbird robe, a thing of sacred geometry.

“Wyrcanen sum gar wiþ se lyft, Halig Engel. Ic sceawian du sunneleoht.”

The words were ancient, Old Trenton-speak, long since dead.

Behind his closed, dead eyes, in the stillness, Verune felt something he’d never felt before. A presence; a feeling of… potential. It was like an intrusive thought, something from elsewhere that burned in his mind.

He focused on it as he prayed.

“Ic bidden du, Halig Engel, wyrcanen sum gar wiþ se lyft.”

His hands gripped something solid.

Verune’s eyes fluttered open, and he gasped at what he saw. There was a solidness in the air; a blade-like shape, long and thin. It had no substance; it was barely visible, noticeable only in how the air moved around it. But it was bright in his mind, as if his mental image of the holy sigil had taken on a life of its own.

Despite being dead, all the hairs on Verune’s neck stood on end.

The last part of the Lassedite’s Chant was not a phrase, but an action.

Verune’s heart raced. He held his breath.

He slammed his hands downward, as if plunging a spear into the earth. His invisible spear hit the concrete with a metallic crash. Sparks and cracks shot out from the point of impact; Verune’s arms shuddered with recoil.

Shocked—gasping—Verune lost his focus. His hands squeezed shut as the invisible weapon vanished. He swooned, tired and dizzy. His nerves burned.

And he laughed. He laughed in disbelief. In joy. In terror. In awe.

The Lassedite tilted his head up to the sky. “You… you haven’t forsaken me,” he whispered. He wept in gratitude.

He had not been forsaken. No.

Mordwell Verune had been blessed beyond measure.

I’m… Chosen…

And not just any Chosen, but a Chosen on the Last Days.

“I’m… one of the Blessèd?”

Verune was wild with disbelief. His chest was filled with sky. He felt as if he could soar among the clouds. Across the ages, the ancient knowledge had passed from Lassedite to Lassedite. And now, that sacred wisdom would be used once again.

He hadn’t been abandoned. He’d been plucked from the stream of time to serve a higher purpose.

A holy purpose.

The Lassedite prostrated on the ground.

“Lord, I will walk among the Blessèd! I shall find the righteous in this place, and I will guide them to Paradise! I will guard them against the tides of Hell!”

And, at the very edge of his awareness, Verune heard something almost like a whisper. It sent frissons down his skull. He trembled in ecstasy.

“I hear You, Holy Angel!” he shouted. “I hear you! I will see Your will done!”

The hour was early on the dawn of the Last Days, but Mordwell Verune’s heart was full of cheer. He had heard the Angel’s message loud and clear. If any of the faithful still dwelled in the City of God, he would find them, and together, they would build an army—an army of the Light, to rage against the rising Night.