The knock came soft as a bird's beak on stone.
Noah had been waiting for it, even if his body refused to admit it. He and Abel sat in silence, the protective ward still prickling faintly in the back of his mind, like the faint aftertaste of metal. When the door creaked open, the glow of a lantern framed the small figure standing there — one of the Kindled. A boy no older than twelve, expression beatific and empty all at once.
"The Saint requests your presence," the child said in a sing-song voice. Not a command. Not even a demand. Just a fact.
Noah rose slowly, pulse climbing. Abel stood as well, tense enough to reach for his sword, but Noah gave him the smallest shake of his head.
"I'll be fine," Noah said, though the words cracked halfway out. "Stay here. If this works… I'll know."
Abel's gaze lingered on him, the kind of look that wanted to say a thousand things at once and couldn't risk speaking any of them. Finally, with a quiet breath, he nodded.
The Kindled turned without waiting and padded into the corridor. Noah followed.
The walk was longer than he remembered. Or maybe it was only longer because his heartbeat counted every step, dragging time out like stretched sinew. The passages were quiet — not silent, but muffled, as though sound itself had learned fear in this place. Even the torch flames wavered too slowly, smoke curling in sluggish spirals.
They passed other children in the shadows. Some stood statue-still against the walls, their eyes tracking him with faint curiosity, others hummed soft chants under their breath. None spoke. None smiled.
When the corridor finally opened, Noah was led into the chamber.
The Saint's audience hall was as overwhelming as always: a vast dome lined with murals of fire, blood, and triumph. The false sun blazed above the altar, its light falling like liquid gold on the figure seated beneath it.
The Saint.
He looked as if he had not moved since Noah had last seen him, sitting with the poise of a monarch and the serenity of a god, hands folded on his lap. His eyes — those dreadful, gleaming eyes — regarded Noah not as a visitor, not as an enemy, but as something already known, already weighed, already measured.
Noah's breath snagged in his chest. He forced himself forward. The boy who had guided him bowed and slipped away.
For a moment, silence stretched.
Then the Saint spoke. His voice was calm, warm, almost paternal.
"You've kept me waiting."
Noah swallowed. "I—things have been… complicated."
A faint smile curved the Saint's mouth, but he didn't answer. Instead, he leaned back in his throne, and — almost casually — murmured something under his breath.
It wasn't even a full incantation. Just a word, half-lazily spoken, as though it cost him nothing at all.
And then Noah's world split open.
The first rush hit like a hammer: memories surging back in jagged, burning fragments. His knees almost buckled, vision splintering as voices overlapped inside his skull.
— Sitting across from the Saint, speaking of Earth, of betrayal, of sins. The Saint listening, nodding, every question meant to dig deeper.
— Noah asking about ascension. The Saint replying smoothly, "Your path is bound to faith. Elusive. You are unlucky — the world does not believe in what it cannot define."
— The Saint explaining how most candidates were told their next steps directly. How Noah's lack of guidance was not accident, but fate.
Noah gasped, clutching his head. The ward he had set shivered, cracked, and dissolved like glass under a hammer.
More memories cascaded in, raw and merciless.
— Noah leaning forward, voice low, asking: "And the sun? The sacrifices? Why the family?"
— The Saint smiling faintly, almost indulgent. "Most assume my domain is fire. It is not. Fire is merely the tool. My domain is sacrifice."
— The Saint's voice growing colder: "My dagger was my divine item. Blood and flame are its nature. The sun burns because I will it so. And it is fed by what is given — flesh, blood, spirit. Sacrifices, few or many. All that matters is that they are willing. Or that they believe they are."
The words echoed, carved into Noah's skull.
He stumbled back a step, chest heaving. His vision blurred between present and past, the Saint before him, the Saint in memory, the lines bleeding into each other until he could no longer tell which was which.
And then, as the tide of memories ebbed, Noah found himself standing once more in the present, sweat slick on his brow, stomach lurching.
He looked at the Saint — waiting for mockery, for gloating, for some acknowledgment.
But the Saint only gazed at him, steady, patient. As though this was normal. As though Noah should have already known all of it.
The silence pressed heavier than words.
Noah opened his mouth to speak — but before he could form a word, another tremor hit. Another memory clawing its way to the surface, darker this time, sharper. He reeled, vision already spinning as the Saint sat in perfect stillness, unblinking.
Noah's skull throbbed with the weight of voices, images, and the Saint's unblinking stare. He could hardly steady his breath before the world cracked open again — another memory dragging him down.
The chamber around him dissolved. His knees bent beneath an older exhaustion, one he had already lived.
They were sitting closer this time, the Saint cross-legged on the dais, Noah on the floor before him like some kind of disciple. A small flame hovered between them, unnatural in its steadiness.
The conversation had started casually enough. Noah had been speaking — rambling, really — about the settlement, about the hunts. About the boy.
"He was twelve, maybe thirteen," Noah's voice had said, thick with anger even in recollection. "They left him bleeding in the mud. Said he'd slow them down. That it was a mercy to abandon him."
The Saint tilted his head, eyes sharp as razors in the firelight. "And did you carry him?"
Noah froze.
The Saint's tone sharpened, each word like a thorn. "You're quick to condemn. But if it troubled you so deeply, why did you not act? Why did you not lift him onto your own back? Why did you walk away with the others?"
Noah's memory-self stiffened, a hundred justifications clawing to the surface — fear of exposure, the weight of secrecy, the risk of Abel being punished too. But none of it mattered. The Saint's words hollowed all excuses into nothing.
The Saint smiled faintly, cruelly. "You see? Even you know the truth. Uselessness should be culled. Mercy is a lie we tell to hide our cowardice."
The flame between them flared higher, shadows slicing across the Saint's face.
Noah's stomach turned. He heard his own voice, sharp with fury, rising before he could stop it:
"Oh please. Don't act like you're better than me. Don't act like you've climbed higher."
The Saint blinked once, slow, like a predator humoring prey.
"I know exactly what you are," Noah spat. "You didn't succeed. You didn't ascend. If you had, you wouldn't be rotting in a cave under a false sun. If you had, you'd be a god. A real one. Not this."
The silence that followed was suffocating.
And then, like a struck match in oil, the Saint's control snapped.
The chamber convulsed in fire. Heat tore through the air, the flame between them exploding outward in a corona of white-hot light. Shadows elongated, walls groaned, the false sun above flickered blood-red. Noah was thrown back, barely shielding his face.
The Saint rose in a single motion, his presence swelling, the sheer weight of him pressing on Noah's lungs. His voice, once calm, thundered with venom:
"I succeeded."
Flames licked up the pillars. The dome quaked with his fury.
"I bled for this. I burned for this. Every inch of me was given!" His hands clenched, fire curling around his knuckles like serpents. "Only because the system rejected me, because it dared to call it wrong, does the world believe I failed. But look at me."
His hands went to his veil. For the first time, he tore it aside.
Noah's breath caught.
The Saint's face was a ruin. Skin melted and seared into ridges of scar tissue. One half of his jaw glistened raw, teeth exposed where flesh had been scoured away. His right eye burned molten in its socket, the lid fused to the bone around it.
"This," the Saint hissed, voice breaking with both agony and pride, "is sacrifice. This is what divinity demands. My sacrifice. My offering to power itself."
He leaned forward, fire curling from his breath. "And no one—no one—will ever tell me I did not fulfill the requirements. Not the system. Not the gods. Not you."
Noah staggered, the memory's weight shattering against him. Fire still burned in his vision as the scene collapsed inward.
When he blinked again, he was back. The dome above, the throne before him, the Saint sitting in perfect stillness as if nothing had happened. His veil was once more intact, his expression serene.
But Noah's heart pounded like a drum. He knew what he had just seen was real.
The last memory. The last meeting.
And the Saint had given it back to him with all the calm of someone pouring a glass of water.