The flies landed in perfect formation.
Kael watched them die—twelve silver messengers dissolving into the altar's cracks. Their wings left ghostly afterimages in the dust, spelling a single word:
COME
Orlan's waxen fingers twitched. "They wouldn't send just anyone."
"No." Kael adjusted his crown. The void dripping from it hissed as it hit the stone, forming tiny, screaming faces. "They're sending relics."
He counted the seconds until dawn.
The Saints arrived at the thirteenth.
Act I: The Relics Appear
Three figures materialized from the mist.
Saint Veles stood closest, his bone mask polished to a mirror finish. Kael saw his reflection in it—crowned, hollow-eyed, wrong.
Saint Lyra exhaled frost that crystallized midair, lacing bridges of ice across the rubble.
Saint Caine didn't breathe at all. Blood leaked from his mask's eyeholes in perfect intervals.
Kael's Skill Analyzation flickered.
[Perfected Saints]
• Threat Level: Apocryphal
• Weakness: ???
• Note: Do not let them speak
Lyra's mask tilted. "You will—"
Kael flicked a drop of void at her feet.
The frost shattered like glass.
Act II: The First Sacrament
Veles moved first.
His dagger flashed—not toward Kael, but toward his own wrist. Blood arced through the air, forming a sigil that screamed in a dozen tongues.
The ground birthed silver thorns.
Kael didn't flinch. He'd counted three things before the attack:
1. Veles' left shoulder dipped slightly on the backswing.
2. The blood sigil trembled at the edges.
3. Caine hadn't moved an inch.
He stepped into the thorns.
They turned to smoke against his crown.
"Clever." Kael caught Veles' dagger hand. "But you forgot one thing."
The saint's mask cracked as Kael forced the blade upward—
—into Caine's chest.
Act III: The Hollow Truth
Caine didn't bleed.
He unfolded.
His robes collapsed as something inside him stirred—not flesh, not shadow, but the absence of both. The air where he'd stood itched, vibrating at a frequency that made Orlan's wax melt.
Lyra's frost turned to steam. "What have you—"
The Maw answered.
Lucien's voice poured from the cracks in the stone, warped and layered with something older:
"THEY MADE YOU HOLLOW TOO."
Veles' mask split—not from force, but recognition.
Kael watched as the revelation destroyed him from within.
Final Frame
Some weapons don't need sharpening.
Just the right hand to wield them.