The chapel had once been a cathedral of light.
Now it groaned under soot and bone ash, its stained-glass windows shattered, melted into misshapen tears of color. Half the altar had collapsed, and fungal blooms spiraled up the ribs of the ruined nave like divine rot. Brass icons lay twisted in the dust, their saintly faces erased by fire.
Zevrak Kain stepped through the broken threshold, cloak trailing over scorched tile. He inhaled the sacred decay, letting the iron-sweet scent of old blood and burnt incense fill his lungs. The ghosts here were thick—murmuring, blind. Souls not yet departed.
He felt at home.
Behind him, Serana stood silent, armored in plague-stained leather, blade across her back. Her eyes lingered on the ceiling where cherubs had once flown. Now their wings had burned off, and their hollow eyes stared down in judgment.
"You picked this place for a reason," she said.
"I always pick the forgotten," Zevrak murmured. "They make the best weapons."
He moved to the pulpit—charred, cracked, and yet still standing. His fingers traced the runes etched into its spine. Beneath the altar was a cache—he'd placed it there the night before, after wearing the skin of the Butcher-King.
He had not lied when he told Serana he stole memories. The dead "hero," the reborn fool who had once slain Zevrak in an age long past, had seen a Black Sun in his final dreams—just as Zevrak had. Another thread in the weave. Another warning of the god-things drawing close.
But now, it was time to weaponize that dead man's face.
The holy order had returned to the slums.
They came not in gleaming caravans or trumpeting glory, but under plague veils and iron, with sunbrands seared onto their robes. Inquisitors. Trained not to save, but to purge. They'd heard rumors: a ghost in the rot streets, a man with silver eyes preaching to the broken. A false messiah.
They sought infection of the soul.
And Zevrak, in his mercy, gave them just that.
He wore the Butcher-King's face like an opera mask. Fused with bloodcraft, draped in shadow-skin—every nerve twitched in false memory. To them, he was "Brother Oris," a holy blade once thought lost in the war of the bleeding coasts. Oris had "returned" from exile with visions. Glorious, burning visions.
And the inquisitor—a towering man named Halvek—welcomed him with fervor.
Inside the chapel, as dusk fell, Halvek knelt. His robes were blood-washed, his eyes glassy with piety and hunger.
"Brother Oris," he rasped. "You returned from death?"
Zevrak's voice was honey and venom. "Death is the door. I have seen what lies behind it."
Halvek shivered, eyes wide. "The true sun?"
"No," Zevrak said. He stepped close. His breath fogged against the inquisitor's fevered skin. "A Black Sun. And it weeps for what you call holy."
The performance was divine.
For nights, Zevrak whispered visions into their dreams—false prophecies drawn from real horrors. The inquisitors were weak with guilt, craving redemption through purpose. He gave them purpose: purge the corrupt upper church, strike at the Cardinal of Gildhall, prepare the "Vessel."
He twisted the old rites, forged new liturgies from ash.
They followed him.
He marked their foreheads with bone oil and plague ash, calling it the "Halo of Thorn." A sacrament to shield them from the coming dark. They believed it. They wore it.
Only Serana watched with cold suspicion. She knew him too well now.
"You're using their belief," she said as he painted the halo on her with feigned solemnity. "Feeding them poison disguised as salvation."
Zevrak looked up. "The gods use belief to destroy. I use it to arm the desperate."
"Same method. Different mask."
He smiled. "I never claimed to be pure."
She stared a long moment. "But what are you really preparing for?"
He paused.
Then, quietly: "The gods remember me. They will return for what they failed to finish. When they do, I want an army of broken angels waiting."
The infection of influence spread.
From the chapel, "Brother Oris" sent his halo-marked believers into the slums. They lit corpse pyres, sang rewritten hymns, hunted corruption—not just sickness, but the noble-born who profited from plague. The city above laughed. Then it bled.
One magistrate was found crucified with his lungs turned outward, stitched into wings. Another, burned alive inside a confessional booth filled with locusts.
"Acts of purification," the Thorned praised. "By the will of the Black Sun."
And so Zevrak's cult grew.
Not of worship—but of control.
One night, beneath the chapel, as Serana sharpened her blade on a plague-bone whetstone, Zevrak began reconstructing his mind-palace.
He sat cross-legged on cracked stone, incense burning from a skull-shaped brazier. Chains of memory floated in the smoke—ghostly, coiling, clinking with echoes. From each, he drew fragments of his former lives.
A war-room in obsidian. A throne of spinal glass. Maps of gods' blood territories. The laughter of a daughter long dead. A knife made of names.
Piece by piece, he began to rebuild.
Serana stood at the edge, watching.
"You're not just gathering power," she said. "You're remembering who you were."
"I must," Zevrak whispered. "To become what I must be."
"What is that?"
He opened his eyes. They glowed silver.
"The one thing the gods fear."
But faith attracts fire.
Days later, the true church arrived—not Inquisitor Halvek and his band, but soldiers. Holy knights in brass-plated armor, wielding relics and purging flames. They'd traced the false prophecies. They saw the rot.
The chapel burned again.
But Zevrak was not inside.
He watched from the shadows, cloak inked in silence, Serana beside him.
"They burn what they fear," she muttered.
Zevrak nodded. "Good. Let them waste their fire."
He held up a parchment—sewn from human skin. On it, the seal of the Thorned Halo: a sun crossed with barbed wire.
"They think they killed the cult."
Serana looked to the night, to the slums that still whispered with infected dreams.
"But it lives," she said.
Zevrak smiled, and the rot behind his teeth shimmered with divinity.
"It thrives."
To be continued…