Night lay heavy upon the high ridge where the priest and the boy had made their camp. Wind scraped across the graphite stone, carrying the bitter scent of cinder and rust. In the distance—low in the canyon's throat—Scar's Rift burned like a fever: a jagged scar of flickering light in a world that knew only dimness.
The city resembled a cavern set aflame, built into the very bones of the planet itself. Lights blinked in flaring pulses from dwellings, railings, and cages that descended into that great depth along a spiraling path, dimming as they plunged deeper into dirt and dark. The distant sound of engines echoed faintly, flowing upward with the wind like the growl of a slumbering beast.
It was more a cage than a city—and a profound one at that. The only city on MelasOon constructed for labor, it appeared from this distance almost deceased, a mine-city rooting itself deep into the planet.
Ten million slaves were chained there—or prisoners, depending on who you asked—or so Peter had heard repeatedly. The guards uttered those words with a sickening, dry pride. How many men and women had died there, like his mother had? And those were the fortunate ones.
The pretty young lasses who worked in the dim lights were the unfortunate. The elderly, whose muscles had turned stiff, were burned alive in furnaces as fuel in a world that had no lack of it. And the little lads sent alone into the mines—as entertainment—while guards sharpened their ears, waiting for them to scream in the darkness. If they returned from the abyss, there would only be an iteration of truth: the guards laughed harder each time the children came back alive. Scarcely a child would retry after four returns. By then, they learned the futility of seeking comfort in light, for when they stepped into it, soldiers would shoot at them, chase them, scare them back into the dark—until the children no longer bothered to follow the light, until they embraced the abyss.
Peter himself had escaped that wandering fate by virtue of being shy and broken. Soldiers liked playing with those who still nested some resemblance of hope in their hearts. And if Peter had that, it was as dim as the city lights—too little, too far—a flame so faint that even he, sensitive as he was, failed to notice.
Slaves, prisoners; they did not live long, their existence was a cycle of forced steps, broken bones, and bruised skin, most of them perished because they wished to, and Peter's sister… he wasn't even certain she was still alive.
Peter looked at the city as he recalled all this, sudden agonizing vesicles bursting through his mind; he wanted to wish she—Rain—was alive, for a chance to rescue her from that hell, but before he wished her alive, he wished for her comfort—for her to feel well, if not comfortable—and then Peter wondered how she could feel anything at all, was there any possibility for someone to feel something other than tormenting sadness, hopeless, silent anger, and the lingering question that roamed at the back of every mind:
Should I flee from death, or should I flee to die?
"Are you afraid of fire? Those lights that have ensnared you have no heat—and even if they did, it's unlikely it could reach this far," the priest noted.
Peter was sitting closer to the far-off city lights than to the priest and his flame. The cold itched at his bones, softer than before now that he wore proper clothing, yet still capable of biting, and he did not dare approach.
"I don't bite," the priest scoffed.
Peter sensed the change in his composure, a smirk visible even behind his mask of steel. They had spoken little since leaving the burning ship behind, maintaining a distance where their voices would not reach one another; discretion and distrust had alienated them both.
"I'm fine," Peter said in a muted, timid voice.
"And that is why you are shaking," the priest replied, searching his baggage for something that seemed elusive. "You are shaking so violently you might break, boy. Come closer. Let me see your face in the light," he asserted, his words both commanding and concerned.
"I said I'm fine," Peter replied, his voice far less certain than he wished it to be.
The priest approached Peter with slow steps. He smelled different than before, Peter thought—something new, yet distantly familiar, a pungent scent Peter could trace to his right hand. Perhaps he had found what he had been searching for, Peter reasoned.
Peter did not run or even move as the priest approached; this was the limit of his endurance against the cold. Any farther, and he would break—just as the priest had told.
The priest hunkered down near Peter, gazed at him, and then undid his mask. Peter tilted his head toward the ground, averting his gaze before he could see the face hidden behind it. Though it required little effort to meet the priest's unyielding stare, he feared it—that at any moment it could turn into that of a spider, a snake, or a fox. There had to be some truth to his mother's lies about these abominations; he had never known her to lie.
"Look at me. At my face. I am human, and a benevolent one at that," the priest said in a warm voice—a voice that reminded Peter of Jaro and his father. He wasn't sure maybe it's nose was a beak or ears were a bat's but something had to be wrong with it Peter couldn't decided the priest was a he or he was an it.
But he was sure this was a monster, as his mother had told him. The smile was human, and the eyes were human, and his teeth were human too—but the face… he hadn't truly seen it. He wasn't sure; maybe its nose was a beak, or its ears were a bat's. Something had to be wrong with it. Peter couldn't decide whether the priest was a he, or whether he was an it.
He sneaked a glimpse from the corner of his eye once the fear subsided, and he heard his own heart beating in rhythm. There was little light, as the priest stood shadowed against the fire, but his face was clear enough. It was human—no beak, no unnatural or unusual features. It looked like a kind human face, a perfect, somewhat effeminate face for a man, a face he could trust. His eyes were black, with a hint of green hidden deep within; his skin a light olive tone that faded into the fire's pale glow.
"You see? Nothing to fear. If I will not bite you now, I will not bite you near the fire either. Come with me, child. Warm yourself," the priest uttered in an assuring tone as he lifted Peter by the shoulders and guided him to the edge of the blazing flame, placing him there.
Peter did little to resist. What part of this man was a monster? He could not determine—but some part must be. He had never known his mother to be a liar.
Peter sat near the fire, but his eyes were glued to the city—Scar's Rift. Slaves called it Scar's Rift, and soldiers, Rift's Scar. Layer after layer, it bored into the planet, coiled into its very heart. It was once a mine; it was once a city with regular people—prospectors searching for gemstones of varying colors and shades, or so he had been told. Now they still mined it—by prisoners, as they liked to name the slaves—but only as a hobby, only as a method of torment. The diamond veins to which the city had been bound had dried up centuries ago, and the prospectors had left it vacant for a century or more. It had remained that way until one Grand Executioner had befit it to reopen—not as a mine or a city, but as the largest cell the world could offer.
The Rifts—the cracks that scarred the planet's skin—all began there. Those rifts were mines too, Peter knew well, since Jaro had blabbered about them many long nights in the tightly packed shed. There were times Peter would rather not listen to his rambling, but Jaro always insisted that to know pain, one must dissect it at the source. Peter had heard half these tales during long sessions with Jaro; the other half he hadn't heard nearly as much as he had felt.
"You are fixated on that hole," the priest said dryly.
Peter didn't react at all. He was mesmerized by the cracks, which looked as though they had been clawed open by the hand of some buried god. It was hard for him to believe they had been dug by men—the ones who had opened those wounds. After all, he was nearly a man himself, and far too weak to do something so grand. Perhaps they could do it because they were not bound by chains, Peter thought, but even then it would still be impossible—only a little less so.
"It's a big hole. The biggest hole I have ever seen, and I've seen many holes," the priest said, following Peter's gaze toward the city.
"What do you want?" Peter asked, his words echoing with sadness and mistrust.
"What do I want? I don't want anything. Why should I want something?" the priest replied.
"Everyone wants something. What are you doing here? And you said it yourself—no help comes without its price," Peter pressed, straightening and fixing the priest with his stare.
"Yes, true," the priest said, "but again—you don't own much to bargain with, do you?" He wisecracked, his lips widening into a smirk as he salted strips of meat and skewered them onto a metallic rod.
Peter could now identify the scent from before. It was meat. Too red to be chicken. After so many years of bland, hard bread, chicken was all he wished to eat—the way Ruk praised it: succulent and salty, mild, soft, and tender. Ruk had even devised recipes while bound in chains, recounting them endlessly in chicken's absence, though he had never had the chance to test them. One began with sugar infused into the meat; the thought alone made Peter's stomach churn, having tasted neither chicken nor sugar in ages. The other recipes were more tolerable, even appealing to his ears—the ones involving spices and lacking sugar. Ruk was as enthused about chicken as Jaro was about freedom from his chains.
This meat was no chicken. But at least it wasn't bread. And as the priest placed it into the fire and gave it a thorough roast, the scent grew sharper.
"That's where you are going—Scar's Rift, right?" Peter asked as he wiped the water dripping from his jawline with a shrug, his hands tightly bound inside the jacket. The jacket was too big for him; its sleeves whipped loosely in the air, and the wind whirled inside their empty frame. The boots and the pants, however, were a strange fit. The dress as a whole bore an indigo hue. Unlike his old clothes, which were well accustomed to ash, these left no black mark or bitter taste on his lips.
"Why should I go anywhere?" the priest asked, rotating the skewer in the fire.
"Everyone goes somewhere, wants something," Peter answered, staring with all his might at the dancing stick floating in the flames.
"Is it something you want that makes you ask these questions about wanting and going? Perhaps it is you who wishes to go there," the priest said, taking a sip from the silvery flask he had fetched from his pocket.
"Why should I want anything?" Peter shrugged dismissively as he warmed his hands inside the jacket, rubbing them together.
"Everybody wants something—you said it yourself, right?" Peter looked back at the city. He was still in awe of being free and alive; he had little time to think of what he wanted. He had no time to want anything at all.
"You've been there, right? The city. The hole?" the priest asked.
Peter gave a simple nod without meeting his stare.
"Bad memories, ha?" the priest pressed.
Peter couldn't forget his mother's last stare—a dead stare, with no sob, no frown, no emotion. When the soldiers had ordered him to journey into the night, she had offered herself instead as tribute. She had given him a deep smile then, one devoid of emotion, reeking of love—a cold, hard love, one that neither broke nor bent, one that could be trusted without test.
She hadn't been like that when they were free—when he lived in green fields beneath tall trees that shadowed their house on the hill, beside the mountain stream he often visited on his way home from school. He himself had smiled back then. But now all those smiles were gone. They had left with his mother—or perhaps even before, Peter thought.
Maybe that was what he wanted. He wanted to smile—not a forced or fake smile, but a real one, a happy one, rooted in joy, not one meant to drown sadness or announce sacrifice.
"I lost my mother there," Peter said, his voice too low to carry far. "I have lost everything. There is nothing left for me to find."
"The world is dead, and we walk in its ashes—is that what troubles your mind?" the priest asked as he set his mask near his feet.
"You believe otherwise?" Peter cracked a joyless smile—not a childish one, but the kind adults wore when they wished to wear down each other's resolve.
"The world isn't dead. That's what I believe. That's what I deduce," the priest said kindly. He removed the skewer from the fire and placed it on a plate Peter hadn't noticed until now. "The world lives because we are alive, and as long as we are, we must live."
"And live to do what?" Peter demanded at once.
"Well," the priest said, "I live for revenge. And you must live for your mother—for what she wished for you. You owe her a life that must be lived. Am I wrong?"
The priest's knowledge of a past Peter had never shared sparked a deep unease in him. He was aghast at the insight. In all his apprehension, he couldn't explain how the priest had sensed the very pain that haunted him—yet the priest's casual tone made it feel like a guess, a precise arrow loosed in the dark.
The priest turned toward him, the firelight catching one of his mask's golden horns where it leaned against his leg. "Have you been in the mines?"
"Have you been in the mines?"
Peter shook his head.
"Then you can take me to that city," the priest said, checking the meat resting on the plate.
"If you want to go there, you can follow the cracks," Peter uttered.
"What if I follow the wrong cracks?" the priest asked.
"There are no wrong cracks. They all go there—to the city. Like a river, they twist and turn, merge and spread, but they all have the same end," Peter said, recalling words Jaro had told him.
The priest sat back and took a glance at his mask before gazing at Peter again. "How do you know of Myther?"
Peter hesitated, then recited the only chant he ever remembered in its completion, without flaw, addition, or subtraction.
"Be kind to all… and all will be kind to you."
The priest studied Peter, his voice smooth as worn stone. "Who taught you that chant?"
"My mother," Peter replied.
A slow, narrow smile crept across the priest's lips. "Ah. So she has spoken of us."
"Yes." Peter's fingers knotted together inside the jacket of their own volition. "She said you never forgive. That you never forget. That when you give, you always take something back."
The priest tilted his head. "What else?"
Peter swallowed. "She said you're bad people. That you kill instead of heal."
Silence pooled between them. Then the priest gestured, as if brushing dust from the air. "Go on."
"She said—" Peter's voice dropped to a frightened whisper, "—you eat the flesh of children."
The priest laughed—a sound like dry sticks breaking. "Now that is a lie if I've ever heard one. I have never tasted a child's meat. Nor do I know any who have."
Peter's eyes widened. "Then… you do eat human flesh?"
"No!" The priest recoiled, then caught himself, amused. "Gods, no. We eat what all men eat: beasts, plants, spices. Though…" He paused, stroking his chin. "I have eaten a baby goat."
Peter went as still as a rock. "Isn't a baby goat… a child?"
The priest waved a hand. "Many eat young goats. It is not sacred to my faith."
"But shouldn't your faith forbid it?"
For the first time, the priest hesitated. "A sharp question," he murmured. "One I cannot answer."
The priest turned back to the fire, then spoke low. "To be kind to all and have them be kind to you… your mother must have lived by those words." He lifted a piece of meat from the fire, smoke curling from its crisped edges. "And were the enforcers kind to you? To her? To your sister? Did they hold the same compunction you extend to them?"
Peter flinched.
He hadn't spoken of his sister—not once. Not aloud, not that he could recall. He had dismissed the priest's earlier insight into his past as coincidence. This was no coincidence anymore.
Peter felt his heart beating—expanding rapidly, forcefully, in all directions, then shrinking faintly, failing to return to the point from which it had surged. He felt a sudden numbness in his fingers and traced its origin back to his toes. His lips parted, but no words came—only a soundless breath as the wind howled between them.
The priest turned to Peter, his voice measured yet piercing.
"What shall become of those who enslaved you, who murdered your father, who cast your mother into the abyss to perish? Those who made you an orphan and called it just—can you forgive them without a second thought?"
Peter hesitated, then answered, "I desire justice, not vengeance."
"And what is the difference?" the priest pressed.
"Justice is fair," Peter replied. "Vengeance is not."
The priest considered before responding. "If a murderer is hanged—whether by the grieving family of his victims or by a hangman acting under the law—what difference does it make to the dead? The rope still tightens. The life is still taken."
"But the law must judge him," Peter insisted.
"And who enforces this law of yours?" the priest challenged.
"The people," Peter declared.
"The people here are slaves—you call them that yourself," the priest countered, his voice edged with sorrow. "They are bound by chains that restrain their wrists, their feet—chains that restrict their thoughts and contain their hearts. They cannot even break their own chains, yet you expect them to drag Kenta to his grave?"
He leaned closer, his gaze unyielding. "If I were to slay Kenta tonight, would you mourn him?"
"Who is Kenta?" Peter asked, eyes wide with confusion.
"He is the man who owns everyone here. He is the tormentor of your pain," the priest answered firmly.
Peter had never heard of Kenta. He knew only the Grand Executioner as the evil he had learned to hate—not this man, whose name bore no weight in his memory. Perhaps he was only another crony, another cog in the Executioner's twisted thumb. In the words his father had spoken—the words that had cost him his life—there had been no mention of Kenta at all.
He tested the memory once more, silently: Grand Executioner sucks flaccid cock.
No. There was no Kenta there.
Then Peter whispered, "No. But he must have loved ones who would."
"Perhaps," the priest conceded. "Yet he is a man devoid of love. Should he die, this entire dungeon would rejoice—even his own soldiers. A handful might weep at his grave, but if a man has harmed a hundred souls, and his death brings a hundred sighs of relief—is it truly wrong? Do tyrants, slavers, and creatures of such foul evil even deserve the right to live?"
Peter had no answer.
The truth within him was clear: no, they did not. They had no right to breathe, to see, to feel. It was the answer the priest sought—the answer Peter himself refused to accept or deny.
The priest moved a step, then crouched and reached out. His gloved hand extended toward Peter's shackles, pressed against the jacket, and sank into its fabric. At the moment of contact, they hissed—a faint, flickering shimmer—as Peter sensed around his wrists a metallic swarm, guided with a purpose he could not see. His hands were trapped in the warmth of the jacket, but he felt the cold touches of their microscopic limbs as they crept along his skin and crawled toward the chains. From touch alone, he compared their texture to ash and steel.
In seconds, the chains shattered like glass struck by lightning, falling into dust. Peter felt an ease at his wrists, a burden lifting. The priest did not speak of it. With his other hand, he offered Peter the cooked meat—wordless, casual—as though he had not just undone years of bondage with a gesture, not even a that flick.
Peter saw the shattered chains fall. He moved his hands inside the jacket, stretching them farther than they had ever gone while bound. He felt strength surge in his heart—not in his hands. In his hands he felt weakness instead, which he attributed to stiffness. He pushed harder, opening them higher, pressing against the jacket. He could see their shape and could not believe it. He could have slipped his hands into the empty sleeves and seen them emerge unchained through the cuffs—but he did not.
Instead, he unbuttoned the shirt from the inside, opening the first four buttons below his collar, creating a narrow gap. From that gap he thrust his hands out and saw them—bare, unshackled. He pulled them back inside the jacket at once, as though the chains might return if they lingered. He breathed a few unsteady gasps, then steadied himself and slid his hands fully through the sleeves.
Peter looked at the priest, then at the meat he offered. He took it slowly, staring—not at the food, but at the priest. He chewed in silence, the taste foreign after so many years of bland sustenance and ash.
Across the fire, the priest sat still.
Peter could not help watching him. His face was not monstrous, inhuman, or divine; it was the face of a man—a simple man, with features that resembled a woman's.
"To be kind to some is to be cruel to all others," the priest said, his voice stronger now, clearer, as though unmasking had given it weight. "And to be cruel to them is a kindness to the rest. This world must be cleansed of all evil before one can afford kindness for its own sake."
He took a piece of meat himself, eating without hesitation.
"There are two Mythers. One you know." He looked up—one eye burning red, the other gold like dusk. "Myther, the changing constant. Of the shared fate Verbatim. And Myter—God of change, more specifically constant of change. Myther is the absentee god who represents the stillness of Verbatim, and Myter the ceaseless motion that guarantees that stillness."
Peter's eyes widened.
"Your Myther," the priest continued evenly, "and mine, are different. But they are the same." He leaned forward slightly, firelight catching the sharp lines of his features—his long neck, oval jawline, shifting eyes, broad forehead. "For Myther is Myter. Light and shadow dancing in unison, separated by a fine line."
He paused. "So whom do you wish to serve? Myther, or Myter?"
"But you said they are one," Peter pressed.
"Yes," the priest replied. "They are the same." A slow, knowing smile curled across his lips—the smile of a teacher who has found a pupil sharper than his years. "I do not ask you to choose one god over the other. I ask how you will serve Him."
Peter frowned. "Why? If God is almighty, can He not do as He pleases? Why does He need our service?"
"A fair question," the priest conceded. "But we are not mere servants. We are part of Him. When we serve God, we serve ourselves. How will you serve yourself? That is what I ask."
"How can we be part of God?" Peter challenged.
"How can your eye know it is part of you?" the priest replied smoothly. "It understands only its function—to see. It has no knowledge of the whole that is you."
Peter knit his brow, fingers tightening around the hem of his tunic. "But I eat. I think. I walk. My eye does none of these things."
A knowing smile touched the priest's lips—the smile of an elder correcting a youth. "Your eye might say the same of the cells that compose it."
The fire cracked.
In the fragile space between question and answer, Peter felt the weight of a world settle on the breath between those two names.
The priest finished his meal methodically, tearing through the meat with near-ritual focus—bite, chew, swallow—never breaking the cycle. He did not look up, only at the food, as though eating were duty rather than desire.
"Eat," the priest said softly. "We move at dawn."
Peter glanced at the half-eaten meat in his hand. He had little appetite, his mind clouded with Myther, Myter, and his mother's fate. Still, he obeyed, forcing himself to chew. The meat tasted bitter—though not as bitter as the doubts inside him.
The priest cleaned the fire, scattering coals into embers. Flames hissed and crackled, casting long, restless shadows across the canyon walls.
He extracted a metallic rod from the baggage, no taller than his knee, and placed it horizontally on a bed of soft coal. Then he pulled a lever on it. Promptly, the rod roared to life. Something inside it churned—clink, clink, clink—then a sharp ping, followed by a dull thud-crunch from the bed of coal as something pried at it and cracked. Peter felt the vibration beneath his feet and saw little fissures form in the ground.
The rod extended into the air, rising as high as the priest's shoulders, and opened like an umbrella. Then Peter heard eight continuous chinks. He observed the rod and now knew it to be an automatic tent.
An indigo-blue logo lay on the bed of its gray fabric. The logo appeared metallic: a parallelogram triangle, its three bisectors given depth by grooved channels that met at a single junction. At that point, Peter could see letters in metallic gold—I.N.D.S—an ellipsis to Industrum.
Peter had no need to read the letters. He was familiar with the logo—and who wasn't intimate with Industrum? To see its mark, all one needed to do was look: on clothes, on screens, on everything that came to light. From socks to spaceships, Industrum made it all.
The priest pointed at the tent. "This is where you will rest for the night," he commanded.
Peter obeyed.
He entered the tent, and once his knees touched the floor, he saw three red lines on the rod ignite, focused directly on him. He felt a concentrated, bearable warmth.
He recalled the time his father had taken him fishing at night with his sister and mother. Their tent had been larger than this one—a makeshift structure that had taken his father two solid hours to set up. It had not been an automatic tent like this, nor had it been equipped with an integrated smart heating system. They had brought their own charged electric heater, pillows, and blankets.
That night, Peter had stayed awake, listening to the sounds: night owls, foxes, wolves, deer, and the restless purl of the river. Gripped by that sense of nostalgia now, he tried to force himself into insomnia.
For a long time, the only sounds were the fire and the distant howls of unseen creatures roaming the canyon. Then came the eerie, broken screams echoing from Scar's Rift.
Peter's gaze drifted to the priest, who sat vigilantly on a lump of coal outside, curiosity gnawing at him.
"Why do you stay awake?" Peter asked, his voice barely more than a whisper.
The screams grew louder, closer, filling the night with raw suffering and dread as they synchronized, harmonized, and resonated off the bottom and walls of the vast, man-carved sinkhole.
The priest remained still, his gaze fixed on the fire. For a moment there was silence. Then he spoke, his voice cold and distant.
"The night is not safe here. The city is filled with noise. No one sleeps peacefully in Scar's Rift. The echoes of the damned reach into every corner. Once they travel far and land on listening ears, they stir shadows—and shadows leap at the light."
The priest breathed deeply, his posture unchanged.
The night wore on, thick with sorrow, the lights of Scar's Rift burning invisible wounds into the darkness.
"Sleep," the priest commanded softly. "Tomorrow, your journey begins anew."
Peter hesitated, but the priest's voice left no room for argument. Slowly, he lay down inside the tent, gazing at the dying fire, pulling his cloak tighter around his small frame. The air outside was bitter cold, but the tent's lingering warmth shielded him from the worst of it.
His eyes fluttered shut, but true sleep did not come. The cries of the city haunted his thoughts, and fear twisted in his chest at what awaited them in that accursed place.
Worse still, he wondered what kind of man he would become if he continued to follow this priest—a follower of Karina's Myterism, a man who saw salvation in vendetta.
What was left of the fire crackled once more before the night swallowed the sound completely, leaving Peter to drift into a restless, uneasy slumber. Right before he succumbed to the short sleep, he queried himself with the long question that echoed in his mind: should I flee from death, or should I flee to die?
He chose the former, telling himself that now that he was alive and free, he might try to live this life.
He asked the same question for his sister—and dared not answer, nor choose for her what she might have denied.
A deafening shriek rose from the canyon walls not far away. Half-asleep, Peter heard the priest whisper,
"I am the cutting edge of light, before which all shadows are held at bay."
A nervous chill prickled his hackles, pulsing through his neck before settling in his shoulders.
He kept his eyes shut.