Before Kyoto burned, before Father Asher lit a cigarette and challenged heaven, there was silence.
And in that silence, Sister Marrow walked alone.
She left the Communion not with a fight, not with a scream — but with a kiss to her rosary and a folded note on Asher's altar.
"If we are a cult, then I will be the heretic."
No one knew where she went.
Not even Asher.
But she didn't go to hide.She went to the source.
Beneath Vatican City, in the deepest sublevels of the exorcist archives, there are rooms even God forgot. Places where scripture twists into curse, where holy men weep in chains, and where failed miracles are kept in jars.
Sister Marrow broke in.
Not alone — she had an old connection.A black-robed archivist who once called her "The Last Saint Worth Saving."
His name was Father Octavius. He had no eyes. Only a book embedded in his skull.
"Marrow," he rasped as she entered, stained in soot and grief. "You seek forbidden text."
"No," she replied. "I seek the god they sealed away."
His book flipped pages — not by hand, but by windless will.
"You mean the Word Below."
She spent months there — reading, praying, unlearning.She saw diagrams of The God of Doctrine — a divine entity that once enforced spiritual obedience across dimensions… until it began rewriting reality for "perfect holiness."
It was sealed not for rebellion, but for obedience so pure it consumed free will.
"The Monk worships it," she whispered, horrified.
"No," said Octavius. "The Monk wants to become it."
She clenched her rosary until her fingers bled.
They found her in the eighth month.
A Vatican kill team, cloaked in gold-stitched black, armed with blessed chains and null scriptures. They didn't knock.
They came with absolution by force.
"You are charged with heresy," the lead paladin declared. "Sister Marrow of the Broken Order."
She did not flinch.
Instead, she pulled a double-barrel curse-infused shotgun from under her habit and muttered:
"I brought holy water."
The fight wasn't fair.
She won anyway.
But that battle left her cracked.Wounded.Changed.
She couldn't return yet.Not until she found something stronger than the Monk's Word.Not until she believed her faith again — not the one given to her, but the one she chose.
She's standing in a black chapel somewhere in Eastern Europe.She holds a cursed phone in her hand. It glows with a single ping from a sealed Asher line.
A message reads:
"Monk's here. Doctrine's waking. The kids are fighting. I'm stalling. If you still got faith—bring it."
She stares at the phone.Then at the stained-glass window — fractured, beautiful, bleeding light.
Sister Marrow loads her shotgun.
"Forgive me, Father."
She shoulders her bag.
"I'm bringing hell to church."