His journey led him to Whitebridge, a city that had not existed before the war, now a bustling hub of trade and faith, a testament to the prosperity of the "Arlenic Peace." It was a city of gleaming white limestone and steep roofs of blue slate, its bridges elegantly arched, its streets scrupulously clean. It was also a city living in a gilded cage of doctrine. Priests of the Order, clad in immaculate white and gold, patrolled in pairs, their eyes missing nothing, their expressions a blend of benevolence and unshakable authority. The people's adoration for Saint Arlen was a palpable, fervent thing, a desperate kind of love that seemed to border on fear, as if their salvation was a fragile thing that could be revoked at any moment.
He saw a merchant blatantly overcharge a foreign trader, then immediately drop a handful of the extra silver coins into the collection box of a passing priest, receiving a bland, approving nod in return. He saw the way people's eyes would dart away when a priest passed, their lively conversations dying into a respectful, tense silence. This was not the free, joyful peace he had envisioned. This was a peace enforced by tithes and theology, a world where righteousness was a currency and doubt was a sin.
He found a tavern, The Gilded Lily, tucked away in a less savory district where the whitewash was peeling and the eyes of the patrons were harder. He took a corner table deep in the shadows, his hood pulled low. He wasn't drinking; he was listening, his senses, terrifyingly heightened by the fusion of light and void, picking out individual whispers from the din of the crowded room.
"…another sighting near the old borderlands," a grizzled old miner was muttering to his companion, his voice low and gravelly. "My cousin's boy was with the patrol. Said the man had a cracked aura, he did. Gold, like the Saint's, but shot through with shadow. Like a broken vase glued back together with tar."
The companion, a younger man with a nervous twitch, made a quick, furtive warding sign, touching his forehead and then his heart. "Abyss-touched. By the Saint's light, preserve us. You heard the last sermon from the capital. The defeated darkness leaves echoes, fragments that seek to wear the faces of our lost loved ones to sow doubt. To make us question the Dawn."
Arden's hand tightened around his clay cup of cheap wine, his knuckles turning white. The faces of our lost loved ones. The truth of it struck him with the force of a physical blow, more painful than the clubs of Oakhaven. They weren't just forgetting him. They were systematically erasing him, and any ghost of his memory was being branded as a demonic plague, a spiritual infection. He was a heresy in the religion built upon his bones. His very existence was an act of blasphemy.