The world was silent when he woke.
Not the silence of peace. Not the stillness of a sleeping church or the hush before morning prayer. This was the silence of absence. Of something vast and vital torn away, leaving only the hollow echo where sound used to live.
He opened his eyes to darkness so complete it pressed against his face like a hand. His body ached in ways that felt both distant and immediate, as though pain had been waiting centuries to reach him and had finally arrived all at once. Every breath scraped. Every heartbeat felt like an accusation.
He tried to move and discovered weight. Not chains. Not stone. Something lighter but infinitely heavier the weight of wrongness, of survival when survival should have been impossible.
His fingers found his face and met porcelain instead of skin.
The mask.
Memory flooded back in fractured shards: the eclipse totality, the moment when the sun's dying light turned black and God spoke His final word. The crowd of the unrepentant lined up in the cathedral square, hands bound, eyes wide. The Order of the Masked Penitents standing in perfect formation one thousand soldiers in blessed armor, each wearing a mask they'd carved themselves as penance for the executions they would perform.
His had been white porcelain. Smooth. Expressionless except for the smile carved into its lower half. Not a joyful smile. The kind nurses wore when telling children their mothers wouldn't wake up. The kind priests wore when blessing soldiers marching to certain death.
They'd called it mercy. Making the condemned see smiles in their final moments so they wouldn't die afraid.
God had called it mockery.
He remembered the heat. Not from the sun above but from within from inside his armor, inside his chest, inside his bones. The Eclipse fire igniting not the world but the souls of those who'd dared stand as judgment. One thousand Penitents burning from the inside out, flesh turning to ash inside their sealed armor, screams swallowed by porcelain masks that wouldn't burn.
He remembered falling.
And then nothing.
Until now.
He pushed himself upright slowly, every movement grinding against something deep in his joints. The darkness around him wasn't absolute anymore his eyes were adjusting, finding gradations of black and deeper black. Shapes emerged. Columns. Rubble. The skeletal remains of what had been vaulted ceilings now collapsed into geometric ruin.
The Basilica of Eternal Vigil. Or what was left of it.
He stood, and his armor moved with him not the gleaming silver plate he remembered but something corroded, stained, fused to his body in ways that suggested it had been there far longer than it should have been. Rust bloomed across the breastplate like dried blood. The joints didn't creak; they whispered, as though the metal itself had learned to speak in his absence but had forgotten what words meant.
His hand went instinctively to his hip. The sword was still there. Lament Edge forged from melted cathedral bells in the weeks before the eclipse, its blade inscribed with the names of every Penitent who would wield it. Except they'd all burned. All except him.
The blade sang softly when he drew it. Not the ring of steel but something closer to a bell's after echo, mournful and distant. Moonlight caught along its edge, filtering down through cracks in the stone above. But the moon had shattered during the eclipse. He remembered watching it crack like an egg as the sun died, silver fragments raining down into the Eclipse fire below.
This light was wrong. Cold. The color of things that should stay buried.
He moved through the ruins slowly, each step deliberate. His boots them crunched on something that might have been glass or bone or both. The floor was buried under debris and ash several inches deep. In places, shapes emerged from the gray powder: the curve of a rib cage, the hollow sockets of a skull, fingers still clutched around prayer beads that had melted into the bone.
The unrepentant. The ones they'd been seconds from executing when God ended the world.
Except God hadn't ended it. Not completely. Something was still here. Something was still alive.
He heard it before he saw it a sound like weeping filtered through water. Distant. Distorted. Coming from deeper in the basilica's corpse.
His grip tightened on Lament Edge. Every instinct screamed that nothing living should exist in this place. That whatever made that sound had no right to draw breath in a world God had abandoned.
But he moved toward it anyway. Because what else was there to do? Stand in the dark until the silence took him too? That wasn't even a choice.
The weeping grew louder as he descended a collapsed stairway, half sliding down rubble that had once been the Steps of Contrition where penitents crawled on their knees to reach the altar. Now it was just broken stone and darkness and that sound.
At the bottom, the ruins opened into what had been the basilica's lower crypt. Burial niches lined the walls, each one sealed with a stone slab carved with the name and sins of the deceased. Most of the slabs had cracked. Some had fallen away entirely, revealing the mummified remains inside, their hands still folded in eternal prayer.
The weeping came from the far end of the crypt.
A figure knelt before the largest niche the resting place of Cardinal Ephraim the Merciful, who'd commissioned the Order of Masked Penitents and died three days before the eclipse, spared by fate or divine comedy from witnessing what his creation would become.
The figure wore robes that had once been white but were now the color of old bone. Her back was to him, hunched, trembling. Her hands moved in repetitive motions scraping, clawing at the stone slab sealing the Cardinal's tomb.
"The door won't open," she said without turning around. Her voice was thick, choked. "I've tried. For so long I've tried. He has to be inside. He has to answer. He promised he would answer."
He said nothing. Couldn't. His throat felt welded shut, whether from disuse or something deeper he couldn't tell.
The figure turned slowly, and he saw her face.
No. Not a face. A mask but not porcelain. This was something organic, something that had melted and fused and half healed wrong. Wax features frozen mid scream, one eye socket weeping a constant stream of clear fluid that left tracks through the grime on her robes. The other eye was whole, blue, fixed on him with desperate recognition.
"You," she whispered. "You're one of them. One of the Thousand." Her working eye widened. "But you're… you're still alive. How are you still alive?"
He took a step forward, and she flinched but didn't flee. Up close he could see the Brand on her visible skin spreading across her collarbone like black frost, the Mark of Original Ash that every human born after the eclipse carried from birth. Hers was advanced. Soon it would reach her heart.
"Sister Eudoxia," she said, touching her chest with trembling fingers. "I was… I am Sister Eudoxia. I was here when it happened. When the sun…" She couldn't finish. Her hand went to her ruined face. "We thought if we prayed hard enough, if we showed enough devotion, He would spare us. We were wrong."
He wanted to tell her that God hadn't spared anyone. That mercy had burned with the rest of them. But his voice remained locked behind his teeth, behind the mask, in the place where his humanity used to be.
Eudoxia's gaze dropped to the sword in his hand. "Lament Edge," she breathed. "The execution blade. You're… which one were you? Which mask did you wear?"
He didn't answer. Couldn't answer. But she saw it anyway the smile carved into the porcelain, serene and empty and eternally calm.
"The Smiling Mask," she said, something like wonder mixing with her fear. "You were the one who smiled for the children. I remember. I was there. I saw you standing with the others, and I thought… I thought at least the little ones would see kindness in their last moments."
She started laughing. It was a broken sound, closer to choking than joy.
"God mistook it for mockery. For pride. That you would dare smile while performing His judgment. That you would dare offer comfort when He demanded fear." Her laughter died. "So He burned you. He burned all of you. And somehow… somehow you're still here."
The weeping returned, echoing from deeper in the crypt. Eudoxia's head snapped toward the sound, her body going rigid.
"They're waking up," she whispered. "The children. They've been sleeping for so long, but they're waking up now. And they're so hungry."
From the darkness between the burial niches, small shapes began to emerge. Children. Or what children had become after 333 years of death refusing to claim them.
Their faces were gone. Not masks. Not melted. Simply absent smooth expanses of skin where eyes and mouths and noses should have been. They moved in perfect synchronization, dozens of them, filing out of impossible spaces, their blank faces turning toward him with eyeless precision.
And then they opened their mouths mouths that shouldn't exist on faces that had none and began to sing.
The sound was backwards. Hymns reversed. Words that crawled into his ears and tried to nest in his skull. Eudoxia clapped her hands over her ears, screaming, but he stood perfectly still.
Because he recognized the song.
It was the Hymn of Final Mercy. The one the Order had sung while marching the condemned to their deaths.
These were the children they'd executed. The ones too young to understand sin but old enough to be marked by it. The ones he'd smiled at while the blade fell.
And they hadn't forgotten.
One of them stepped forward, small hands outstretched. Its blank face tilted, questioning. Waiting.
For what? Forgiveness? Vengeance? An answer he didn't have?
He raised Lament Edge slowly. The blade hummed its bell-song, and the children stopped singing. The silence returned absolute, crushing, divine in its absence.
Eudoxia was sobbing behind him. "Don't," she begged. "Please don't. They're just children. They're just-"
He said nothing. There was nothing to say. Words had died with the sun.
The child took another step forward. Then another. Its blank face lifted toward his mask, toward the smile carved into porcelain. Its mouth opened wider, impossibly wide, a black void where a throat should be.
And from that void came a single word, spoken in his own voice:
"Mercy."
The word he'd never spoken. The word the condemned had begged for. The word God had refused to give.
The children began to scream.