The capital lay under a sky the colour of old bruises.
Smoke still rose from the plaza in thin, exhausted columns. The Grand Cathedral's broken silhouette loomed against the eastern horizon like a cracked tooth. Bodies—angelic and mortal—had already been cleared by dawn patrols, but scorch marks and shattered stone remained as silent witnesses. The air tasted of ash and spent divinity.
Elias stood on the highest intact balcony of a half-collapsed noble house overlooking the plaza. His cloak was torn; blood had dried in dark streaks across his cheek and neck. The golden cracks on his right side and the black veins on his left had both dimmed to faint scars, but they still itched—two opposing poisons sharing the same skin.
Below, the survivors moved like ghosts.
Some carried the wounded. Some salvaged what little remained of market stalls. A few knelt in small circles, praying to a Light that had tried to kill them only hours before. Others simply stared—at the cathedral, at the sky, at nothing.
Elara climbed the crumbling stairs to join him. Her face was smudged with soot; one sleeve had been torn away to bind a gash on her forearm. She leaned on the balustrade beside him without speaking for a long time.
Finally she said, "He's still breathing."
Elias nodded once.
They had carried Lucian to a hidden cellar beneath the old merchant quarter—Behemoth guarding the entrance like living bedrock, Liora weaving shadows thick enough to swallow sound and sight. The boy had not woken since collapsing in the crossing. His pulse was steady but weak; his skin burned with low fever. Every few hours he murmured—half-prayers, half-pleas—no one could tell which voice was winning inside him.
"He asked me to kill him," Elias said quietly.
Elara looked sideways at him. "And you didn't."
"I couldn't."
She exhaled through her nose. "Then we keep him alive. We keep all of us alive. For now."
Behemoth's heavy tread sounded on the stairs. The giant ducked through the doorway—stone skin still cracked in places, but already knitting itself back together.
"Scouts report," he rumbled. "Church remnants are regrouping at the northern citadel. Small force—perhaps two hundred. Mostly loyalists. No angels. No… him."
Liora slipped out of shadow behind them—silent as ever since the betrayal attempt. Her storm-cloud eyes were duller now, almost subdued.
"They're waiting," she said. "For orders. For him to speak again. They don't know what to do without the saint."
Elias looked out over the city.
The purge had paused—confusion and horror spreading faster than any army could march. Villages that had burned their own kin now sheltered the survivors. Hidden pagans emerged from cellars and forests, carrying the stories of Ironwatch, of the broken cathedral, of a boy who had stopped the end of the world with nothing but his own refusal.
But the pause would not last.
Abaddon spoke inside him—calm, patient, inevitable.
The first seal is broken. The heavens bleed. The Entity allowed it. Now the rest follow.
Elias closed his eyes.
He could still feel the moment he had stopped the black flames from consuming Lucian. The moment he had chosen mercy over ending. The moment Abaddon had let him—because refusal was more interesting than obedience.
You bought them time, the demon murmured, echoing Lucifer's words from the night before. But time is expensive. And the bill is coming due.
Elias opened his eyes.
The sky above Sanctum had changed.
Not dramatically—not yet.
But the blue was wrong—too pale at the edges, too dark at the center. Stars that should not have been visible in daylight flickered at the zenith like dying embers.
The world itself was beginning to notice.
Elara followed his gaze.
"It's starting," she said. Not a question.
Elias nodded.
He turned away from the balcony.
"We move tonight," he said. "We find somewhere safe—somewhere hidden. We keep Lucian breathing. We keep ourselves breathing. And we wait."
"For what?" Liora asked—voice small for the first time.
"For him to wake up," Elias answered. "For Lucifer to make his next move. For Abaddon to decide how much longer he lets me stay in control."
Behemoth grunted. "And then?"
Elias looked at each of them—Elara's guarded hope, Behemoth's immovable patience, Liora's quiet shame, and the unconscious boy they all carried like a shared wound.
"Then we see how much of the world we can still save," he said. "Before it all ends anyway."
They descended the stairs together—four vessels and one broken saint—into a city that no longer knew what it worshipped.
Behind them, the scar in the cathedral ceiling pulsed once—faint golden light flickering like a dying heartbeat.
Far above, beyond the wrong-coloured sky, an indifferent eye watched.
The game had not ended.
It had only changed boards.
And the pieces—scarred, bleeding, still moving—continued forward into the fractured dawn.
End of Chapter 25