"Ugh. My head hurts from all this paperwork."
The dark haired man had his temple flat against the desk. Behind him a gust of wind came through the open window and lifted the top four inches off a stack of ledgers.
"Your grace!" someone called from beyond the door.
"What is it now?"
The older man entered carrying another pile and added it to the mountains already drowning the desk. "These just arrived this morning."
The dark haired man lifted his head. His eyes were weary and there were dark circles printed under both of them. He peered over the paperwork at a gentleman in a butler's uniform, and produced a scowl and a groan simultaneously.
"Don't you have other duties, Fredrick, besides bringing me heaps of paperwork every single day?"
Fredrick straightened his black coat.
"Surely you jest, your grace. As a Bloodthrone, it is your duty to ensure the military is funded. And as the current head of the house, the affairs of the estate and every land under the Bloodthrone reign are also your responsibility."
The dark haired man clicked his tongue and put his head back down on the table.
"I never asked for any of this. If my idiot cousin hadn't gone off and died. Or had the decency to father a child before he did. I wouldn't even be here." He turned his face sideways on the wood. "And if my idiot uncle would come back from wherever he's got to, he could take the whole business off my hands tomorrow."
"Well, your grace. There's nothing we can do about that now."
The butler let his eyes travel over the documents, and over the ones that had reached the floor.
"I suppose…"
He said it in a particular tone.
The dark haired man's head came up off the desk.
"You suppose."
The butler drew a black envelope out of his jacket pocket and looked at it for a moment. Then he took a knife off the desk beside him, cut it open, slid the letter out, and held it out.
The head of House Bloodthrone took it and started reading.
"So what? A bank's misplaced a few thousand soulstones. We have millions. What does this pocket change have to do with me? We have a treasury for exactly this sort of thing."
"Your grace." Fredrick clasped his hands behind his back. "If you were to walk into a bank and ask for gold, how might you acquire it?"
"By handing over a slip of exchange and then sign my name in the ledger. How else? Fredrick, I fail to see where you're going with this."
"Correct. Now. If you whished to exchange soulstones for gold, something only a noble could do, And a rather large sum of them, at that. without leaving a name. How would you do it?"
The dark haired man rolled his eyes.
"By showing them my—"
He stopped.
"Oh."
A smile came across his face, unhurried, and kept going.
"Who else knows about this?"
"As of right now," Fredrick tilted his head slightly, "only you, your grace."
The dark haired man giggled under his breath.
"Right!" He shot up out of the chair and put a finger in the air. "Fredrick, my good man, you should have brought this to my attention sooner. We have a thief robbing the Bloodthrone banks! Why, this requires the personal attention of the most important Bloodthrone alive." He struck a pose. "Me. I dare say."
Fredrick bowed slightly. "Yes. I do believe you are correct, your grace. Shall I prepare everything for your immediate departure?"
"Oh, Fredrick. You do know how to tickle a man's fancy."
He skipped to the door.
"Of course your grace. It is my job, after all." Fredrick raised his head to watch him go.
The dark haired man was entirely out of the room except for his head and the hand holding the letter.
"And Fredrick. Stop with the 'your grace' already. Just call me Connor, like I've asked." He shook the letter. "Because by the time I get back, it might not be needed anymore."
He winked, and shut the door.
Fredrick stood alone in the study for a moment.
He looked at the closed door. Then at the desk, drowning.
"Yes. Well." He sighed. "I suppose that leaves me with you."
***
"Third bishop. The archbishop requests your presence."
The man in red robes, with a golden sun worked into the fabric, was addressing a man hanging upside down in a training room.
The hanging man was covered in scars, and sweat ran off his exposed chest and dripped steadily onto the floor beneath him. He opened his eyes, slowly, and his blue gaze went through the priest like a nail through paper.
"What does he want now."
"I believe it concerns the recent incident in Palin, Lord Bishop."
The man dropped, turned an effortless flip on the way down, and landed on his feet without a sound.
"I see." He wiped his face and reached for his shirt. "Let me clean myself up. Then take me to him."
(A brief moment later)
They walked a long corridor lit through stained glass.
Every panel told the same story in a different arrangement. Humans fighting demons. And at the center of each one, a knight standing taller than everything around him, wearing the same emblem. A sun, shining, with a sword through the middle of it.
The third bishop's armor caught the colored light as he passed under it, and the same symbol sat on his chestplate.
They stopped at a grand door thick with gold and silver in the engravings.
"Good day, Lord Bishop." The priest bowed courteously and withdrew.
"Good day, priest. May the god of Light protect."
The third bishop pushed the door open.
"Mark. My son." A voice called out from within the room.
The man spoke from behind a book. He sat in a luxurious chair in white and gold robes. The symbol of the god of Light lay faint across his chest, and the same symbol sat on both shoulders, and like the knights, those had a sword through them. His eyes were a faded blue and there was grey through his hair.
"You called for me, archbishop."
"Yes." He set the book down and stood. "I presume you've heard what happened in Palin, so I won't waste my breath on the details. I need you to find the person who killed all those demon hunters."
The third bishops hand went out in a small, dismissive motion.
"Wasn't he a scarecrow? Given grandmaster despite sitting on the very cusp of it?" He shrugged. "The killer could be any awakened group with decent experince. Why does the Church need to involve itself at all?"
The archbishop put a bookmark in his book and closed it with a sigh.
"Although he was only a scarecrow, demon hunters are seen as part of the Church these days. If the public sees that a man can murder a vassal of the Church and walk away from it, our authority erodes." He set the book down. "To say nothing of the trust the hunters give us so blindly. That we'll stand behind them when we send them out to die."
The third bishop rolled his eyes. "Then send a holy knight. Why me?"
"You know," and the archbishop's voice slid down into a growl, "if you weren't my son, I'd have had your head off by now for questioning the orders of your archbishop."
"Yes. You remind me constantly, father."
The archbishop clicked his tongue.
" Mark, If you ever hope to hold my position, you would learn to mind that mouth."
He reached for a pigeon scroll.
"What's that?"
"The answer to your question."
He turned it over in his fingers.
"Shortly before that estranged hunter died, he sent us a message, using the old encrypted system, which nobody has used in a decade. Why, I don't know."
He let the pause sit exactly as long as he wanted it to.
"It said: I've found her."
Mark went still.
"The one condition on granting that man his rank that he begged for was that he hunt down the Moon Witch. The demon whom only a select few know to have been the previous demon queen." The archbishop's mouth moved into something not quite a smile. "It was intended as a wild goose chase, you understand. A way of disposing of him if you will. Her trail had gone cold years ago."
He handed over a thin stack of paper.
"It's all in his file. My informants tell me he had gone somewhat deranged toward the end. That he most likely picked a fight with the wrong group, and sent that message because he felt the Church had forgotten him."
He sat back down.
"However. I think he really did find something out there. So I need someone I can trust to go and look. Because either the person who killed him was the Moon Witch herself, or it was organized by a group who knows where she is."
Mark read the file.
His face changed as he went down the page.
"Why would you allow a man like this to be associated with the Church at all?" He turned a page and stopped. "Rape. Killing human children for the crime of being born with red eyes. Torturing demons who were here legally." He looked up. "The list goes on. Much less grant this creature the rank of grandmaster."
The archbishop put his feet up on the desk.
"It is as you said. On the surface, a scarecrow. But when we needed the dirty work done, he never once questioned an order." He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. "Unlike someone else I could name."
"Fine." Mark closed the file. "But if I'm going to waste my time on this, I want something in return."
The archbishop tapped a finger on the desk. "Oh? And what's that?"
"You know my ambition, father. To replace you. To take this broken, corrupt church and return it to what it was." He tossed the file down on the desk between them. "If I do this for you, I want the first bishop's seat."
The tapping stopped.
A wicked smile spread across the archbishop's face.
"My dearest son." He laughed. "If you bring the person who did this back to me alive, I will not only grant you the title of first bishop. I will name you my successor before the whole assembly."
Mark drew his sword.
He turned it flat, pointed it upward, brought it down to the base of his torso. Then a subtle lift of the blade and a stomp of one foot.
"The light be my guide."
He sheathed it and looked his father in his weary blue eyes.
"Do not come to regret those words later on."
He turned to go.
"No, my dearest son."
The archbishop had already reopened his book.
"I believe it is you who will come to regret coveting my position. When you find out how ambitious your dream truly is."
***
Water dripped from the stalactites in a torchlit cave.
At the far end, a single giant wooden door. Two guards in bandit gear with rusted weapons stood on either side of it, and each man had a red snake tattooed on his forearm.
The boy who had run into Lucian in the woods was being walked down the tunnel by a giant demon. Two horns out of his forehead, a two sided axe across his back, eyes a deep flat black, skin dark blue. His birthmark ran the entire width of his throat.
He wore the red snake as well.
As they came up on the door, the boy heard something from the other side of it, a man screaming in agony, not from torture or the fear of death, but from something else. He looked down at the floor and kept looking at the floor as he walked.
The giant demon approached the door and pounded on the wood. The two guards stepped aside.
The noise beyond the door stopped at once except the muffled whimpering of a man.
A few seconds later it creaked open onto pitch black. Nothing at all could be seen through it.
"What is it."
The voice came out of the darkness, cold and deep.
"Your little brother's returned boss." The demon pushed the boy forward. "He's got something I figured you'd want to hear personally."
"The. The. The raid party you sent me with. They're all dead."
"So what."
The growl came back impatient.
"It was his soulflame." The boy got it out fast. "It was unlike anything I'd ever seen. It was grey, and it had to be at least a grandmaster by the volume of it." He swallowed. "Like yours, brother."
A human hand came out of the darkness, took the boy by the throat, and lifted him clean off the ground.
"What does a little twerp like you know about a soulflame."
The boy kicked. He scratched at the fingers trying to pry them open. His face went purple slowly.
"He also said—" it came out squeezed thin, "—that if you ever come looking for him again, he'd wipe out everything you love."
The hand opened.
The boy dropped to the stone and stayed there, gasping.
"Did he now."
From somewhere in the dark came the sound of a man licking his lips, unhurried, as the hand withdrew back to the darkness.
"Oryx."
"Yes, boss?"
"Find this man and bring him to me. Alive."
He snickered, and the door came fully open.
The end of a chain was thrown out of the darkness and landed ringing on the stone.
"And take this deserter and hang him up with the others."
"Understood."
Oryx picked up the chain and started back down the tunnel, hauling.
The boy watched it slide past him, link by link, while he rubbed his throat.
Then the man came out of the doorway.
He was naked, and the chain went to a collar around his neck, and he whimpered and shook as his bare back dragged over the stone. His eyes had been gouged out leaving behind two holes. His fingers were cut off. His feet had been cut into triangles.
Oryx pulled him away down the tunnel and he left a wet trail behind him the whole length of it.
The boy felt a chill go up his spine and settle at the base of his skull.
"Little brother."
The voice again, from the dark, entirely casual.
"Make yourself useful and fetch me that bunny beastgirl we snatched up the other day."
The door began to swing shut.
The boy looked at the trail of blood going away down the tunnel.
"Yes, brother," he said.
And followed it.