The chains were cold. A deep, biting cold that had seeped past his skin, into his muscles, and now was taking up residence in his bones. They were not designed merely to restrain, but to humiliate. To remind the captive, with every slight shift that grated iron against bare wrist, of their complete helplessness. Ethan Ward had lost all track of time. Hours? A day? There was just a sliver of grimy, orange torchlight from the corridor in the windowless cell, and just one measure of its passing: the growing tenderness of his flesh and the dull throbbing in his head where he'd been struck.Yet within the dark, cold silence of his flesh, his mind blazed.They had brought him here after his catastrophic failure of the Prophet's "test." After Amelia had risen, glorious and terrible, and healed the girl. The cult was falling apart, and a wounded beast is most deadly. Silas, his prophecy broken, had chosen to reassert his dominance in the only way he could: through the torment of a captive.He

The stillness that followed Amelia's demonstration of balanced force was more devastating than any scream. The vortex of Fire and Water around her had done more than heal two children; it had rearranged the rules of the combat. The entire theology of the cult had been based upon one dark pillar: that corruption was the ultimate, unbeatable fact. Amelia had just shown that decay was but a phase in a larger cycle, and that the power to renew was as real, as firm, and as natural.Prophet Silas felt the shift in the room as a tangible coldness. The awe on his followers' faces wasn't for him, or for the great Shadow he served. It was for her. The foundations of his power, already cracked, were crumbling to dust. And a man who has built his sense of self on power, when faced with its removal, does not capitulate gracefully. He strikes out.The fear in his eyes coalesced into a pure, searing anger. Reason abandoned him. Strategy evaporated. There was only an ugly, childish urge: if he could

The world below Atheria was a tapestry of deception and existence. The world above was a cauldron of conflicting truths, and the flight from the inferno of the burning temple was the stick which stirred it to the boiling point. News, in a city infested with plague where paranoia held its dreadful sway, did not travel—it mutated. It crawled up through the boarded windows and it rode on the frantic gossip of those who still dared go outside. By the time the sun rose over the smoldering wreckage of the Silent Cathedral quarter, there were a dozen conflicting accounts of what had happened the previous night. The first form, born of the freedom of the captives and the few who had been converted cultists who had managed to escape with Amelia, was that of miracle and emancipation.It was not just a woman with a powerful stone, but a heavenly balancer, a woman who wielded fire and water at her behest to shatter bonds and cleanse a den of utmost evil. This one romanticized her as the "Dawn-Bri

The optimism created by Ethan's Chronicle was a fragile flower in a snowy field. For a couple of days, there had been a very real sense of purpose in the city. Civilians' militias picked up rubble. Secret food supplies, embarrassed into sight by the exposure, were grudgingly handed out. The patrols of the Dawn Guard no longer had the aura of a rebel militia but more the semblance of an actual peacekeeping force. In her hidden attic, Amelia breathed, a moment to wish the tide might reverse on the sheer, unstoppable power of truth.The Prophet's response was not a dismissal in ink. It was a howl written in fever and blood.It began in the Free Haven, a clinic run by a portly, stubborn woman named Marta who was one of the first to fly the grey banner of dedication to Amelia's practice. It was a last refuge, a crowded, chaotic but kindly place where the rejected and the desperate were given an approximation of care.A new patient was admitted at sunset, a dockworker shivering with a famil

The air in the makeshift clinic, a repurposed schoolhouse on the outskirts of the city, was thick with the smell of antiseptic, sweat, and dread. Amelia moved between cots, her hands—now subtly etched with faint, glowing lines only she could see—pressing against fevered brows. A touch was all it took. The Obelisk’s power, a cool, subterranean river flowing through her, did the rest. The raging, unnamed fevers broke. The lesions of the "Stone Pox," a cult-manufactured disease, receded. Hope, fragile as a bird, returned to the eyes of the villagers.But Amelia felt the weight, a leaden fatigue that went deeper than bone. Each healing was a withdrawal of truth from the Obelisk, a rewriting of a small, localised lie—the lie that this person was meant to die. And each withdrawal came with a cost, a psychic toll paid not in coin, but in the echoes of the suffering she absorbed.A young man, his breathing now even, grasped her wrist. “The Angel of the Standing Stone,” he whispered, his voice