Question: what does one do when the world has gone mad?

Answer: set it right again, one step at a time.

Verune understood the significance of the Cascaton. His experience there was a visionary thing, a taste of the deeper truth hidden within the world. The Park symbolized this future world, doomed and damned. The Angel had led him to the Cascaton just as surely as He had led him to this time and place.

The time for patience and contemplation had passed.

Now is the time for action.

He would not strengthen his faith through an act as feckless as meditation. No.

The destruction of evil shall fuel my faith.

The Lassedite moved through the city like the ghost he nearly was. The few pedestrians he passed—sobbing, rotting—stared at him as if he couldn’t be real. The hummingbird robes gleamed like jewels in midday’s light—red and gold and turquoise green—or like the defiant fire that burned in Verune’s eyes.

It was pure poetry. The Angel had sent him forward in time, so that he might turn back the clock.

Verune wove through the standstill traffic, going so far as to climb over the streamlined vehicles’ metal bodies. Passengers and passersby shouted and stared, but he did not let them deter him. In some places, where the traffic had thinned to the point of emptiness, Verune saw behemoth vehicles thunder down the boulevards on giant wheels or cycling treads, bearing that contemptible Dicolor flag—the Blue and the Green.

Hilleman’s flag.

The armored men—and, to his horror, women—manning those vehicles wore the armor of the future. The Lassedite didn’t dare contemplate the power of the rifles in their hands.

When Verune had first crossed paths with the passing behemoths, he’d hidden behind the plebeian vehicles stranded at the edge of the sidewalk. Though it might have been a groundless worry, he did not want to take the chance that the soldiers might recognize him as the ancient enemy of their godless state. But he quickly learned the soldiers were just as foolish as the rest of the world of tomorrow. The evidence was right in front of their eyes, but they refused to believe it. At best, they stared; at worst, they jeered.

Verune hoped he would be able to save them.

Some, however, were already lost to the darkness.

He had to be his own teacher.

There was little in Scripture to guide the faithful in the Last Days. The accounts were mystical and visionary, filled with metaphysical imagery and spiritual truths, rather than a literal account of the end of the world.

Though, now, Verune wondered if the literal reading might have been more justified than what magisterial tradition made it out to be.

To the best of his understanding, the Green Death had to be Hell’s invasion of the mortal world. He wasn’t certain if the demon armies had already arrived—as was foretold—or if they had yet to come.

But then he turned down a darkened alleyway.

From the shadows, something moaned.

Verune’s breath caught in his throat.

A twisted thing crawled out of the shadows in the alley, from behind a large bin. The being was barely worthy of the name of man.

If anything, it was a living corpse—with hairless, rotting skin suffused by black lightning. A branch of fungus grew from one of its eye-sockets, tipped in softly glowing green bulbs. The monster shambled through the hallway, bestial and moaning.

Verune clasped his hands together and spoke a prayer: the Prayer of the Whirlwind.

The Prayer of the Whirlwind was due to Arthomer I, 152nd Lassedite, and the last Chosen to reign as Lassedite until Eadric Athelmarch’s ascension more than a century later. Unlike Enille or Eadric, whose miracles could light up the sky, Arthomer had adapted the Sword’s powers to suit his preference for subtlety and intrigue. He could turn drink to poison while it sloshed in aristocrats’ bellies or boil corrupt clergymen alive while they took to bathe. And he didn’t even need to have the Sword in hand to do so.

Verune recited the prayer. He didn’t even need to close his eyes.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

“Twist like twine, enemy mine. Twist like twine, enemy mine.”

It was a short prayer, one to be repeated rapidly by the speaker. The rhythm of the consonants and vowels suggested the spinning pattern that Arthomer I imagined surrounding his target’s neck like a ruff.

The monster lunged at him.

Verune glared the creature in the eyes as he drew deep from his connection to the Angel.

“Holy Angel, I call upon You.”

The Angel’s unseen light answered the Lassedite’s call. It surrounded the creature, and then twisted and spun.

The creature’s head spun around with a sickening crack. Black ooze trickled out from the monster’s neck as the Angel’s miracle twisted off its head. Both head and corpse hit the ground with wet thuds.

Bending down, Verune grabbed the fungal branch sprouting from the head’s eye-socket and pulled it free, holding the head steady beneath the sole of his shoe. He ate the uprooted fungal growth piece by piece, like how a child might eat a licorice stick. The Angel’s presence buzzed within his body as he swallowed. Verune could feel the miracle playing out within him as the unholy flesh was transfigured into divine power. A feeling like light danced through his limbs and neck.

Outside of the alley, something rumbled along the street. The end of the fungal branch dangled from Verune’s mouth as he turned around and watched one of the military vehicles roll by. Verune kept silent and still, not moving until the behemoth had passed.

In all likelihood, the people of Elpeck’s future would not understand his actions, and would react with dismay. While Verune wished that would not be the case, he refused to let his distress deter him.

The creature in the alley was just the first.

Many others followed, though Verune fed only when he needed to. Each time he ate, his body surged with the Angel’s holy power. He refused to make a glutton of himself and consume more than he needed. He had already angered the Angel once; he refused to do so again.

At first, he walked through Elpeck without any particular destination in mind, wanting to better understand how the Holy City had developed during his centuries-long absence. Verune was well aware he was badly out of date, knew he would make few inroads with the future’s faithful as long as he remained in his ignorance.

Much to his consternation, remedying that ignorance was easier said than done. Books seemed to have gone extinct. He couldn’t find hair or hide of a library, or even or so much as a lowly bookseller’s shop.

That complicated matters.

But Mordwell Verune was a clever man. Yes, the future might have caught him by surprise, but he refused to allow it to outsmart him. And, God willing, the Angel would provide.

And the Angel did.

As Verune traveled through the labyrinth of steel and stone, he was gladdened to see that the past was not as lost as he had first thought. Off the beaten path, away from the grand boulevards and the limelight of the looming skyscrapers, bits and pieces of the Elpeck he had known had survived the passage of time, tucked away in the nooks and crannies, where the streets were still paved in stone setts. He followed the familiar-looking streets, nurturing a plan—and then, as he walked out into an intersection, he found what he’d been searching for.

The Lassedite smiled.

There it is…

A Tourist Center.

The property was built on the narrow, wedge-shaped lot at one of the intersection’s corners.

For once, Verune was thankful for tourists. This was a rarity, as he’d always hated tourists, ever since first being assigned to Elpeck as a freshly ordained priest. Even in the world he’d left behind, godlessness was on the rise. Everyone from the gentry and the well-to-do to the petite bourgeoisie themselves flocked to Elpeck to gander at the Church and its legacy, led by swindlers who fleeced their wallets with titillating tall-tales. Few tourists cared to take the time to truly learn about the history in their midst. Worse yet, they interfered with pilgrims. In 1803, it had been three tourists for every pilgrim. The problem had gotten so bad that the Church had had to purchase a block’s worth of properties off Market Street to use as emergency hostels to ensure the faithful would have a place to stay during their time in the Holy City.

How many would it be now? Twenty to one? Thirty?

Verune shuddered, but only briefly.

There was work to be done.

The Tourist Center’s doors were not locked. The sweet scent clung to the musty air within. Stepping through the glass-paned doorway, into the musty, sweet-scented air. A dead woman—presumably the proprietress—sat behind the counter at the back. The plague grew out of her much like the fungus he’d seen emerging from bodies in Cascaton Park or in the boulevards’ sewer gutters. There was no sign of any paper of any kind. The shop had no books, nor posters, nor pamphlets. Instead, everything was done through illusions, via glowing screens, or images projected onto the walls, as if from a magic lantern—but moving images, rather than stills, advertising sites of interest.

One of the moving projections spoke of a guided tour through the Imperial Palace—and, time permitting, the Melted Palace as well.

Verune’s mouth twisted in wry amusement as he read through the details.

Learn the last whereabouts of Lassedite Verune and the Imperial Family! You might even encounter a ghost or two! (This tour is intended for guests aged 18 or older.)

The text faded, leaving Verune unsure of what to do, but a moment later, the advertisement repeated itself in its entirety.

It seemed history had made him into something of a celebrity.

He wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that.

But it matters not.

The faithful would sing his praises in Paradise, at the other end of the rainbow.

From what he could gather, the Beast had left no traces of its wrath. When the newly elevated Lassedite Agan sent his partisans to check up on the Imperial Family, history had recorded they’d found the living quarters of the Imperial Palace completely abandoned, as if the captives had vanished into thin air.

Fortunately, the Tourist Center had even more useful offerings in store for him.

Verune smiled as he found it: a map of the city, projected by light onto the wall. It took only one look at the map to imprint it on his memory, and—much to Verune’s delight—simply thinking about the map summoned a copy of it onto his field of vision for him to peruse.

Turning around, he looked out the storefront’s windows and gazed up at the sunny sky.

“Praise the Angel! Hallowed be His name!”

There was much work to be done.