Aaron Graves, Saint of Fire and Ash and Accidental Resurrection, sat on a torn cot wrapped in three relic-cloths and a trauma blanket stitched from the robes of dead penitents. His hair hung in limp strands. His breath fogged in the cold.
And suddenly—
Trenaxa.
The memory hit like a knife in the lungs.
Not a vision. Not a vague emotion.
The last thing he remembered before everything turned fire and silence was her flying off that scaffolding.
Her body spinning like a broken banner.
Her vanishing into a pile of burning rubble.
He sat bolt upright, dry-throated and shaking.
"Aleric—"
"Still alive," came the reply before Aaron could say anything else.
Aleric leaned against the trench wall, Codex balanced on his thigh, blood-stained pen stuck behind his ear like a priest's blessing dagger.
"She's recovering," he added. "Medicae Sisters have her under psalmic sedation. She's already trying to walk. They had to tie her to the cot."
Aaron blinked, body halfway through a breakdown he no longer had the strength for.
"You're serious?"
Aleric gave a slow shrug. "Fierce as a zealot on fire. I wouldn't be surprised if she comes out of this with canonization paperwork and a bayonet patent."
Aaron slumped back, weak with something like relief.
"Good," he rasped. "Good, that's… that's good."
Then he noticed his own body.
And everything got worse.
His ribs pressed against skin like prison bars.
His arms were corded tendons wrapped in pale parchment.
His chest was sunken, his stomach hollow like a devoured grave.
He stared at his hands, shaking, gaunt, somehow both too light and too heavy.
They didn't look like his.
Not painted. Not living. Not right.
"Holy hell," he muttered.
He felt every vein in his body at once.
The pressure of air. The weight of bones.
"I need a mirror," he croaked.
Aleric, without rising, reached into a bag and tossed him a bent fragment of relic-glass wrapped in bandage string.
Aaron caught it, stared.
The face that looked back wasn't a Saint.
It wasn't even a soldier.
It was a death mask, eyes ringed black and sunken like relic wells, skin stretched tight across cheekbones, lips chapped and cracking. A faint golden shimmer played at the edges like a cruel joke.
"I look like a cursed relic someone forgot to bury," he whispered.
He touched his face.
"Getting back up from the dead comes with side effects, huh?"
Then—
Hunger.
It crawled up from the base of his spine, gnawed at his insides, hollowed out his thoughts. His stomach twisted like a snapped wire. His mouth filled with dust.
He clutched his gut and croaked, "Food. Please. Anything."
Aleric raised an eyebrow.
"You sure? You've been on miracle drip for a day. The Sisters said your organs might still be figuring out what's real."
"I will eat a relic-shovel if it holds calories."
"Well," Aleric said, rising with exaggerated reverence, "I have just the thing."
He returned moments later with what looked like a punishment.
A Sancta Loaf, compressed grainmold brick, roughly the color and consistency of sanctified drywall. Edges chipped. Corners blunt enough to bludgeon a heretic.
And a tin of Protein Paste, the label long-since boiled off, the contents a cold gray-blue sludge that shimmered slightly in bad lighting.
"You're feeding me corpse goop," Aaron whispered, staring at it.
"Corpse-slurry," Aleric corrected. "Sanctioned corpse-slurry. Recycled from the Righteous Dead, according to Codex-Entry G-119.4."
Aaron gagged a little. Then took the tin.
He ate.
He chewed the Sancta Loaf.
It squeaked against his teeth like sanctified chalk.
He slathered it with paste.
The flavor hit like regret.
Rotten salt. Burned bones. Faint hint of relic wax.
His eyes watered.
He ate anyway.
And as he chewed and swallowed and winced, something inside him eased.
The hunger shrank.
The ache faded.
And for just a moment, the taste, horrible, gritty, soaked in despair, felt perfect.
A tear slid down his face.
Then another.
Aleric, now seated again, watched in quiet confusion.
"Why are you crying?"
Aaron choked down another bite.
"I-it's just…" he sniffled. "It's so delicious."
There was a silence.
Then Aleric nodded solemnly.
"I know, right?"
*****
Aaron licked the inside of the ration tin, the last smear of corpse-slurry now a memory clinging to his teeth like sacrament. He set the tin aside with solemn reverence and laid his head back against the trench wall, the warmth in his stomach strange, holy, and upsetting all at once.
For a long, silent minute, he just breathed.
Not well, but enough.
Then the thoughts came..
Like rats finding their way into a collapsed shrine.
Why am I here?
Not metaphorically.
Not emotionally.
Literally.
Why was a guy from a city apartment with a backlog of unfinished miniatures and a folder full of saved army lists suddenly a walking miracle with a title that made battle-choirs cry?
He remembered the kitchen.
The gas leak.
The flame.
The explosion.
The forum thread.
lore when—
Boom.
Then this.
He rubbed his face with shaking hands.
He wasn't supposed to exist here. He hadn't earned this. He hadn't trained in trenches or survived pilgrimage crucibles. He hadn't climbed the Choir-Rank ladder or been recognized by any blessed order.
And yet he'd resurrected—resurrected in front of thousands, amid ash and flame and war.
"Why?" he whispered.
His voice sounded small in the trench.
Why had he come here?
Why had he lived?
Why had the fire taken him and then given him back?
Saint Grave.
Ash-Born Prophet.
All titles he didn't understand. Didn't earn. Didn't want.
He looked to the horizon, broken bunkers, flickering prayer-torches, shattered banner poles rising like crooked ribs from the soil.
In this world, gods were real.
And demons?
They walked the frontlines.
Aaron had seen them. The Red Choir Butcher. The Woundwalker. Goetic Warlocks whispering holes into space.
This was a universe that didn't debate whether miracles existed, it measured them in blast radius.
So then…
"Do the gods have something to do with me being here?" he muttered aloud.
Were they watching?
Was this a divine prank?
A misfiled prophecy?
Was he a glitch in some eschatological war-dream?
Did the Emperor of Flame, or the Saint-Mother of Barbed Grace, or the Prophet-King of the Hallowed Oath reach through the void and accidentally grab a dude from a hobbyist painting desk?
His fingers crawled up to his scalp and began aggressively scratching.
"AaaAAAAHHH—forget it!" he barked, hair sticking up at random angles.
"This is a future-me problem!"
Aleric, seated beside him again and quietly noting something in his Codex, didn't look up.
"A vision?" he asked mildly.
"No, just... a breakdown." Aaron groaned. "Same thing, I guess."
Aleric didn't argue.
Aaron rubbed his temples, then blinked.
"Wait. What year is it?"
Aleric stopped writing. Looked up.
"The calendar year?"
"Yes. I need to know how bad this is."
Aleric shrugged. "Fourteen-forty. Forty-one years past the Ascension Compact."
Aaron blinked. Then blinked again.
A slow, cold sinking started behind his sternum.
"You mean... 1540?"
Aleric nodded. "441 A.A.C. Why?"
Aaron didn't speak for a moment.
The cold wasn't going away.
1540.
He repeated it again, mentally, checking it against the timelines he used to read on lore forums. The history scrolls. The deep-cut event trees.
1540 was...
bad.
1540 was very bad.
His voice came out hoarse, barely audible.
"Five years before the Fall of Antioch."
Aleric tilted his head. "That's... oddly specific."
Aaron didn't answer. He was already spiraling.
1540 A.A.C.
Known in only a few obscure codex-fragments and disputed battle-sermons as the Last Vigil of the True Bastion.
The final candlelight before the storm.
The year before the sacred mechanisms began to fail.
Before heretic forces surged like rot through New Antioch's golden veins.
Before the siege towers of the Unyielding Mourning cracked open the gates like relic eggs.
Five years before the last pure fortress of the Old Faith was annihilated.
Not defeated. Not surrendered.
Obliterated.
"No no no no no..." Aaron whispered.
He clutched his head again, fingers pressing into his temples as if trying to squeeze the knowledge back out.
Of all the times, of all the ages—
He didn't just land in any point in Trench Crusade history.
He'd landed in a narrative keystone.
One of the biggest, bloodiest, least-recoverable catastrophes in the war's timeline.
He'd landed before the Fall.
Before the end of the last bulwark.
Before it all went to hell.
Aaron turned to Aleric, who was watching him with increasing concern.
"What happens," Aaron said slowly, "if the last stronghold of the Faith is about to fall... and the enemy doesn't know it yet?"
Aleric frowned. "Then we hold. We light the trenches. We bleed the line. We endure."
Aaron stared.
Aleric was completely serious.
No one knew.
Not yet.
No one realized that a grand collapse was already baked into the bones of this time. That the very timeline under their boots was about to rot from the inside out.
But Aaron did.
Because he wasn't supposed to be here.
He'd read the sourcebooks.
He'd seen the forums, the debates, the maps, the apocryphal side-lore.
New Antioch would fall in 1545.
The Heretic Legions would breach the Saint-Mantle.
They would swarm the cathedrals.
The flame towers would blacken the sky.
And the faithful would lose more than territory.
They would lose the sense that this war could ever be won.
Silence stretched between them like a taut wire.
Then Aleric exhaled slowly, like someone being handed a lit candle in a powder tent.
"Your eminence," he said finally. "I've followed you into fire, through death, and into a trench of screaming heretics while you were technically dead. If you tell me the sky is going to fall in five years..."
He closed his Codex and tucked it beneath his arm.
"I'll start digging a roof."
Aaron let out a strangled laugh.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was too much.
He looked at the sky—still gray. Still thick with smoke.
He could see the black spires of the Virex Cathedral rising beyond the horizon.
The parade was coming.
The ceremonies.
The eyes of the Faith.
And now?
He was walking into them with a secret no one else could know.
Aaron whispered, "New Antioch hasn't fallen yet."
He clenched his fists.
"Maybe this time... it doesn't have to."