——Facades fade, Surface unholy confessions——
The sun no longer kept time. Days bled into one another; the seasons themselves seemed to fray at the edges.
Two days into the march, the sky had forgotten how to move. Shadows clung too long to roots and bark, their edges reluctant to let go. Sunlight threaded through the canopy in warped strands, tangled as if caught in a loom that no longer knew its pattern.
The forest thickened, its trunks older and darker with every step. The trees groaned in voices like splintering bone, leaning toward one another as though confiding secrets, bending inward as if to listen to something just beyond the reach of mortal hearing. In the far distance, one could swear they moved when no eye watched.
Birdsong fell silent.
No creature stirred.
It was as though the world itself had paused—holding its breath—bracing for revelation.
They had left Erl'twig behind, but it lingered in memory like a place half-dreamed. The Crusaders moved as if caught between breaths, through groves that had not been there hours before, beneath limbs that creaked like ribs bending toward collapse. Roots pulsed faintly beneath their boots—living veins. Bark bulged with ancient sigils that hadn't been carved, only remembered by the trees. Here, silence was not absence. It was reverence.
Something long forgotten had stepped into the world again.
Arkeia had not spoken of the night before—the strange murmurs through wood and wall, the glimmer of void-born fur, or the golden man whose warmth refused to flicker with firelight. Yet the way she moved had shifted. Her steps were sharper, her presence like a wire drawn taut. She had begun to walk not as a general, but as a herald awaiting calamity.
She felt it in her soul: the unraveling had begun.
Her men had begun to feel it too. Edmun whispered that their shadows no longer obeyed the light.
"They lean toward things I can't see," he murmured, eyes fixed to the dirt as though looking up might let something in. "Sometimes… they lean toward you."
Thalos claimed the moon had spoken his name, though the sun had not yet set.
"It said it would follow me into my dreams," he rasped, as if repeating a threat, "but only if I promised not to wake."
They laughed once—out of habit, not humor. The sound was thin and wrong, and it died before it could touch the air. No one smiled anymore.
That morning, beneath a sky that pulsed faintly with each breath of the forest below, Elissa lagged along.
She had drifted through half the journey in sleep. Now, barefoot and unsteady, she moved beside Galeel, his hold gentle as if she were a page too delicate for sunlight. Her gaze caught faint, shifting colors, and her mouth shaped sounds that never quite became words.
"He dreams the shape of us," she whispered, voice frayed with reverence and fear. "He is the hymn between dying stars… the path we forgot to walk… the silence that waits at its end."
Arkeia halted mid-step, last night's encounters stirring like coals beneath ash.
The Crusaders tensed, hands drifting toward steel though no enemy was yet named.
She closed the space between them in a heartbeat, her shadow spilling across the girl's boots. "What did you see?"
Elissa's eyes widened—pupils drowning the iris until only a ring of starlight clung to the edges. "He is dreaming still," she breathed. "And we… we are not outside Him."
Galeel stepped forward, interposing himself like a wall of feather and bone, his jaw locked against something unspoken. "She's delirious," he said, though the tightness in his voice betrayed unease.
"You know she's not," Arkeia countered, suspicion sharpening every syllable.
He didn't answer, but his gaze wavered, as if caught on some memory too heavy to lift. Behind him, the pale spans at his back quivered—wings weathered and tired, shedding faint whorls of ash as though recalling skies they could no longer reach.
"Please," he murmured, low and urgent, "just leave it be—"
And then—a cat as black as spilled oil bled into existence, its eyes like coins dropped into a bottomless well.
Arkeia noticed it first—a flash of grey fur nestled suddenly near Elissa's feet, then gone, then flickering again on a branch above them, then behind her shoulder. The creature purred not sound, but syllables. Fragments of a prayer meant for no ear born of this world. She turned—
—and Balfazar was already there.
As if he had always been.
As if the world had only just remembered him—
and resented the reminder.
He stood beyond the nearest trees—golden, still, and terrible in his poise—while the treeline seemed to bend around him in reverence, branches curling inward like a curtain drawn too far to be shut again. Shadows clung to him not as absence of light, but as loyal things, unwilling to leave their master's side.
"Let the lass be," he said, emerging with the unhurried inevitability of a statue stepping out from the unfinished dream of a sculptor.
The air thickened, weight gathering in the lungs. Leaves whispered without wind, their rustle sounding almost like speech. Above, the sun pulsed once—its light momentarily fractured into prisms—before hanging slightly askew in the sky, blinking, as if uncertain it still wished to bear witness.
"She's in your care," Arkeia replied sharply. "That makes her part of your deception. I'm sure no one in your company is innocent."
Around them, the Crusaders slowed, movements becoming languid, like figures trapped in a dream that had not decided whether to turn to nightmare. Hands hovered near hilts and triggers. The silence was taut as a bowstring, the moment coiling, holding its breath for the first strike.
"Your cloak does not breathe. The insects veer from your path. The sun tilts when you pass beneath it. You are not veiled by illusion—distortion is your mask. Reality forgets itself in your presence."
Her eyes narrowed, the heat of conviction sharpening her tone. "But I serve Mar'aya, pillar of clarity and flame. I see the edges of your being. I see the shape that writhes beneath the skin."
To her, he was a Rex—perhaps the favored son of that wretched line. A noble fugitive wrapped in song and smile. An abomination feigning the life of a wanderer. The name alone was a chain of guilt, binding him to the cruelties of his blood.
"Your name," she said, each syllable weighted like a blade, "I know it. I have seen the foul works wrought by the blood that flows through you."
But she did not know.
Not yet.
Balfazar tilted his head with that effortless, unsettling elegance. "Oh, if words could kill, Lady Arkeia. You take me for a mere scion of that dust-choked dynasty? You think of me as they all do—" his smile curved like a blade "—small enough to fit in the coffin of your assumptions."
"Aren't you?" she countered. "You wear the name like a sigil. Poisoned charm meant for harm. A smile sharpened for the kill." She spat on the ground, the gesture more ritual than insult.
"I wear many things," he said, offering a slow, mocking half-bow. "Gold. Grace. A smile. Bloodlines are but costumes—stitched by frightened men, torn by braver ones."
"You deflect."
"And you accuse." His smile deepened, almost fond. "Admirably so."
She studied him as if weighing a weapon in her hand. "Then what are you hiding?"
He lifted one hand, fingers brushing the air with false modesty. "Only my modesty."
Her stare sharpened, not to a point, but to something colder—like a spearhead resting just beneath the skin.
"Perhaps," he added slyly, "a name best left unspoken."
He leaned in, close enough for his breath to feel like the stir of a distant storm. "Shhh…" The hush was drawn out, as though coaxing the world itself into silence—then it broke into a laugh, light but edged, like glass chiming in a crypt.
Aethon and Vharn joined in, their laughter crooked and knowing.
"Come now, brother," Aethon quipped, "you'll make her think you're dangerous."
"She already does," Vharn said, plucking an invisible note in the air as if playing some unheard melody.
"You're no traveler," Arkeia growled. "Your companions speak in riddles. The veiled woman prays to you—and to other things that should remain unspoken. The winged one follows as though bound by a spell. And the other—" her gaze flicked toward Aethon "—he bears your shadow as if it were stitched into his very flesh."
Balfazar chuckled—low and dry, like wine poured into the hollow of a tomb. "You mistake devotion and loyalty for conspiracy."
"I mistake nothing." Her jaw tightened, her voice vibrating with the threat of a roar.
He stepped forward, and the fractured sunlight filtered through the canopy seemed to cling to him, tracing the hard edge of his jaw as if reluctant to let go.
"I could be a noble," he mused aloud, tone almost playful. "A scholar with tragic lineage… a charlatan poet with an angel's face…" His voice dipped, drawing the pause out like a held breath. "…or perhaps…"
He stopped beside her, his shadow folding over hers, and his next words curled into her ear, warm and certain:
"…the Promised One."
Arkeia didn't flinch. But her divine sight did—and in that moment, what it showed her was not wholly meant for mortal eyes.
She saw him—all of him—for one heartbeat too long. Layered realities rippled around him like fractured mirrors drifting out of alignment: Balfazar the noble, Balfazar the beast, Balfazar the end. Each flicker was a truth, each a lie, all belonging to him. Then Mar'aya's clarity surged back like a shutter slamming shut, locking him into a single, palatable shape.
"You dare mock prophecy," she said. "You—"
"—I am prophecy," he cut in, his voice a silken whisper that seemed to press directly against her thoughts. "Just… not the one you think." The words slid from his mouth with the composure of a man holding an unplayed card close to his chest.
Her eyes burned with a quiet, coiled rage, the air around her drawing taut as if the world itself awaited his reply. "Enough games," she said, each word falling with the precision of a blade. "Drop the act. Show me what you truly are."
For an instant, something in him shifted—like a curtain tugged back in a room that should not exist. The light in his eyes deepened, pulling at the edges of her vision, and the air seemed to pulse once before stilling. Then it was gone, as if the world had swallowed the moment whole.
He sighed—not in weariness, but with a playful lament, the way a gambler sighs when a winning hand is spoiled too soon.
"Oh, radiant Arkeia," Balfazar said, his smile softening into something dangerously close to fondness, "you've gone and ruined my fun. Shame… shame."
And the mask unraveled.
It did not fall. It was not torn.
It unwound—slowly, inexorably—like thread drawn from the spool of being, each strand unmaking the lie it had been woven into.
The false skin did not peel away so much as melt inward, collapsing into itself. The world sighed in correction, as if its own memory had been jogged.
What stood before them was no longer a man.
Balfazar rose above mortal frames—taller than memory should permit, his presence stretching into the corners of thought. The air twisted in on itself; colors drained to ash; time stuttered like a skipping heartbeat. His beauty curdled into something unbearable—so perfect it became terrifying.
From his back, wings of void unfurled—stitched from a darkness that had never known light. They did not flap, nor stretch; they existed—vast, layered shadows born from the dusk between stars. When they folded around him, they shaped themselves into robes of sentient night, their edges breathing against the air like the slow tide.
His porcelain chest blazed.
A triad of emerald runes seared into view—alien, radiant, pulsing in a rhythm that refused the logic of mortal hearts. When Arkeia stepped closer, they flared sharply, as though her nearness woke something far older than either of them.
And beneath his brow… the Promised Eye twitched.
Closed, straining, a thin seam of violet light bled from beneath the skin, promising more than it revealed.
And as the truth emerged—so too did the others.
Aethon shed his charm like a serpent abandoning its first skin, revealing the cruel grin of a creature that had worn the discarded shell of a man. His smile widened past the point of comfort, stretching into something predatory. His eyes mirrored his brother's—but without grace, only a cold and patient hunger.
Somewhere behind Arkeia, a Crusader murmured, voice brittle with dread, "By the Twelve… holy mother help us…"
Vharn laughed—a cracked, spiraling hymn that sounded like it was tumbling down the throat of eternity—and the illusion peeled from him like damp paper. His form was a vessel of fractured opal, crawling with verses etched in living music. He wept as he sang, tears falling in rhythm with the discord. "O' kitten cosmic. Purr in his presence." Voidstor reappeared on his shoulder, tail curling like a hook, purring in a cadence that matched the hymn, wearing a crown spun from impossible dream-stuff.
Caelinda's veil did not blow or tear—it was dismissed. Her face flickered like a wrong memory forced into the mind, each shift a subtle fracture in reality. Her skin glowed faintly with dreamlight as she sank to her knees in prayer.
"The Ichor flows again," she whispered, reverent and trembling. "Oh, beloved Vessel, bleed into the world."
Elissa crumpled in rapture, her body shuddering in a rhythm that could not belong to her. Horror and longing warred across her face as tears streamed unchecked. Her mouth opened without will, and prophecy escaped like smoke through a crack in the world:
"The Old. The Outer. The One!"
Galeel remained still. No light marked the change—only the slow, deliberate shedding of a pretense, as the wings at his back darkened, their edges curled with ancient scorch, the surface dusted with a faint memory of ash. They drew one quiet breath, as though recalling skies they had long since abandoned.
Behind his quiet shell… something stirred.
As Balfazar stood radiant, Galeel heard it—a rift burning in rage, echoing through the hollow places of his skull. Horrors moved at the edges of a memory that was no longer his, shapes older than the world pressing against the seams of thought. He felt the weight of lost wings—wings that had once carried whole seasons in their span—dragging at him from within.
Only Arkeia remained.
She stood amidst the divine unraveling like a lone flame in a collapsing night, refusing to flicker. Her armor caught and bent Mar'aya's light, but even that sacred brilliance dimmed, as if uncertain of what it now touched.
"You," she said, her voice low yet thunderous, each word heavy enough to bruise the air, "you will answer. Not only to Mar'aya, but to history itself. Your house—your blood—marked the first omen of tragedy in my grandmother's time. People suffered. I suffered."
Her hand rose—not to strike, but in vow, the gesture trembling with contained force.
"Your blood is tainted with Rex. The current generation shall face judgment for the sins of the family. The rot lives on in you… and it will end with you."
The Triad upon his chest flared, emerald light searing brighter for a heartbeat, as though stirred by her defiance.
Balfazar tilted his head, regarding her in silence for a moment.
From the shadows behind him, Aethon snickered—low and sharp—like someone savoring the setup to a cruel punchline.
And then Balfazar laughed.
Not cruelly.
But with the heavy, aching sadness of someone who had walked unrecognized through the ages, carrying a name the world had long since rewritten.
Balfazar and Aethon spoke in unison—"Current?"—the word bitten off like a jest shared between wolves. They scoffed, the sound sharp and mocking, and let their chuckles drift like smoke into the tension.
"Ah… Arkeia," Balfazar breathed, her name rolling from him almost as a lament. "So eager to condemn—yet how could you hope to comprehend what you were never meant to know?"
His gaze deepened, as though peering not at her but through her, into centuries she had never walked. "Since your heart festers with such disdain toward my bloodline… I suppose I owe you… something of the truth."
He stepped forward, and the shadows bent to his passage, thinning and thickening in unnatural rhythm.
"It was never a home, you see," he murmured—his voice fragile in tone, dreadful in weight. "It was a reliquary for the dying faith of a withered line… and I, Arkeia, was only the hand that lit its final candle."
Then, louder—his tone sharpening like steel drawn across whetstone:
"Let me tell you what my birth truly was."
"I was born a hundred and thirty-seven years ago—not of man and woman alone, but of mortal lineage tangled with divine mistake. A demigod, brought screaming into the world beside a mortal twin, beneath a red eclipse that turned the air to iron.
My mother… a broken-eyed priestess whose dreams were not her own, her mind rifled through by things without form. My father… a relic draped in mortal flesh, clinging to power as a drowning man claws at driftwood.
They saw me. Felt what I was. And they used me."
His voice deepened, curling through the air like wind through hollow stone.
"They drained me. Fed my blood to dying gods. Bound me in rites no child should endure. They didn't want a son—they wanted a resurrection."
A pause—long enough for the silence to feel deliberate, for the weight of it to press against the ears.
"The only shred of joy I had," he said, his gaze lowering for a moment, "was my dear brother."
The air thickened, as though some uninvited memory had joined them.
"When I was a child… I dreamt of a ritual. A game."
Candlelight.
Symbols drawn in chalk and bone.
Two children, laughing—too young to know that one of them would leave the circle whole, and the other would not.
"We played it—Aethon and I. A child's game, we thought. We chanted the words, drew the shapes. We didn't know…"
His voice thinned, the sound of it fraying at the edges.
"But the ritual was real. And it demanded sacrifice."
His eyes dimmed, shadows gathering in them as though recalling not just what happened, but the moment before it did—the breath before the blade falls.
"Aethon was torn apart. Not only in body, but in soul. In meaning. Each fragment scattered into the Abyss, cast adrift through realms where even the dead dare not linger. Incomplete. Unremembered."
He paused, and for an instant the air between them felt stretched, like a thread pulled too taut.
"I was left alone…" The words settled, heavy and cold. "…but one day—he would return."
Balfazar turned his head slightly, his gaze finding the figure beside him.
"And he came back… wrong."
Aethon's jaw tightened, his mouth curving into a sour half-smile that never reached his eyes. "You make it sound as if I chose to be scattered," he muttered, his tone sharp enough to cut.
No grief touched Balfazar's voice—only memory, spoken with the precision of a scar that had never faded, a wound that never truly closed.
"My parents didn't scream. They didn't mourn. They wrote it down—as if the death of their son were merely the next entry in the family ledger."
"They wanted this—" He tapped the burning runes upon his chest.
"They wanted what my blood could unlock. A key to doors that should never have been built. They cared for status and control—the rebirth of their dead House…"
"…and they succeeded." His tone carried no praise, no bitterness—only the finality of a fact carved into stone.
His voice fell lower, the tone more dangerous in its quiet than in any roar.
"I left them. I was barely fifteen when I vanished into the world. I wandered—not as heir, not as demigod—but as a boy starving for meaning."
A shadow passed through his expression, subtle yet unmistakable.
"And I found it. Or rather… it found me."
"The Void took me for one hundred and seventeen years—folded me into itself, unmade me thread by thread, and rewove me in patterns no mortal tongue could name."
His gaze slid, deliberate and unblinking, to Galeel—like the slow turn of a celestial body. The air between them seemed to draw tight, as if acknowledging something only the two of them could truly remember… or bear.
"He followed—always. Even as the Void stripped him of his divinity, ground it to dust, and scattered his memory like ash on a wind that never touched the earth. He watched me rise."
"And when I returned…"
"We claimed the estate. Not for revenge. Not for the petty settling of mortal accounts… but for foundation."
"It stands now as the Cult of One's heart—a front to the world, a treasury to feed our reach, and a voice to whisper into the ears of kings and beggars alike."
"I returned not to punish…" His smile deepened, a note of reverence in his tone. "…but to complete the chorus."
Arkeia's breath caught.
The child her grandmother had spoken of in fevered dread…
The boy born beneath the eclipse.
He stood before her now—tall, serene, and impossible, as though carved from the very memory of an omen.
She did not draw her blade.
But she lifted her vow once more, the gesture carrying the weight of generations.
"Then you shall face trial."
Balfazar bowed—not with mockery, but with a grave, deliberate honor, as if acknowledging a dance that had been choreographed long before either of them was born.
"One more night," she murmured, the words tasting of steel and inevitability. "And the dawn shall judge you."
"I promised," Balfazar replied, his voice carrying the cadence of prophecy remembered. "And I always honor my word."
Somewhere in the stillness between them, the world seemed to lean closer—listening.