The cathedral had become mostly a shell. Light came through broken glass in sharp, honest lines. Dust and ash lay in the corners where people once knelt. Edran Vael moved over the ruined floor with careful steps. Rain had made the air smell like wet stone and old prayer. He kept his sword low but ready. He was looking for the figure the Sanctum had said he would find.
He had been raised to believe. The Sanctum of Radiance taught him that belief like a drill, until certain motions were automatic. The world, they said, was ordered: the faithful here, the damned there, and the Church in the middle keeping the balance. They gave him a name that people could shout without thinking. They called him Hero. They called him Savior. Those names settled over him like armor. They made choices simpler when the road looked like a straight line.
His hands shook slightly, not from fear but from the memory of what his hands had done while wearing that armor. There were villages that no longer rose in his memory, faces that blurred into a single ache. He had not believed himself cruel. He had believed he was necessary.
At the nave, where the altar had once stood high and certain, a man sat on a pile of broken stone. He did not look like the giant that songs warned of. He looked too human for the picture Edran had been raised to hate: thin, with soot-dark skin and plain, worn robes. A crown lay crooked on his head, more metal and scars than ornament. His eyes were calm and old.
Edran stopped. His sword caught a sliver of light and sent it away like a small promise.
"You are the Demon lord?" Edran asked. The question felt ridiculous in his mouth, shaped by sermons and the songs children hummed on market days. It also felt like the only honest question left for a man who had learned to answer everything else with steel.
The man laughed, but it was tired rather than triumphant. "Names are comfortable lies," he said. His voice had a weight like someone who kept ledger books for souls. "Call me Malach if you must. Call me Demon lord if that steadies your hand. I will answer to what is useful for the living."
Edran's body wanted to move. He steadied himself and the training that lived in his bones made his voice even. "You hold lands where men die and monsters claim blood. The Sanctum sent me to end you. Lay down your arms and confess, and the world can be healed."
Malach looked at him as if trying to read a book he had read many times. "Confession belongs to those who know the questions are asked," he said. "You come to cut the head from a story. You come with sanctified hands. But what if the story you carry is not the whole story?"
Edran tightened his grip. "Is this a trick? You speak like a scholar and not like a killer. When people talk like that, they try to plant doubt where there was faith."
"It is no trick," Malach said. "It is history you have not been allowed to read. You were taught a tale that needed a villain. So a villain was given to it."
The words landed like stones. Edran adjusted his stance by the width of a breath, the sword inching closer. "Who would teach such a tale? The Church? The priests? You smear them with accusations and give nothing but words. Why should I believe you over the rites and the certainty I grew into?"
Malach did not lean forward. He spoke with a tiredness that matched someone who had carried more than his share of sorrow. "I do not ask you to believe me straight away," he said. "I ask you to listen. Some accept a story because it feels like home. Others accept evidence no matter who holds it. Which are you, Edran Vael?"
The use of his name hit him. He had been called Hero and Savior so often that his given name had gone soft in public mouths. He swallowed. Up close, the title felt fragile, as if anyone could pull at it and it might come loose.
He had come here prepared to fight. He had expected a chance to strike, and he was also not foolish. He had fought through long campaigns and knew what a ruined body felt like. Sitting here, listening, was also a way to let his breath settle, to find a moment of rest and bring his heart and limbs back to their peak. If the man lied, he told himself, he would use that moment and the man's slow words to find an opening and end him.
"So show me proof," Edran said. "Do not speak in riddles. If this is deception, I will finish it now."
Malach reached into his robe and brought out a roll of vellum. He was careful. His hands did not shake from fear. They trembled from weariness. He unrolled the parchment on a slab of stone between them.
Edran leaned in without meaning to. The sight of the parchment made the ruined cathedral feel smaller, like a stage for one very dangerous reading. If this paper could undo the reasons his sword had fallen, then nothing in him would be easy again.
"You will not like what you read at first," Malach said. "It is a plain thing. No roars. It only names. Names can be dangerous when they are used to order slaughter."
Edran thought of the thousands of times he had chosen the simple answer. For years, certainty had been the shortest path between action and peace. He was not a child. He had doubts sometimes, but they had always bent back toward the Sanctum. Listening now was part curiosity and part calculation. He was buying time to steady himself as much as he was buying a chance to learn.
Malach tapped the parchment in a way that made Edran look closer. There were marks on it that made Edran's chest tighten.
First, a strip of sealing wax had been pressed and then broken. The wax was the dark red used only for the highest offices of the Sanctum. In it, faint but clear, someone had stamped the Radiant Mitre, the three-pointed crown of the high cardinals. Second, along the margin there were small notes written in a cramped hand Edran recognized from the bookkeeping scrolls he had seen in the great hall of the Sanctum. The ink had a blue tint, a pigment used only in the Sanctum's scriptoria because the priests commissioned it. Third, when Malach tilted the parchment to the light, Edran saw a fine watermark of concentric suns pressed into the vellum itself, the sort the Church had used for documents meant only for the pope and the high cardinals.
Those details were not poetic tricks. They were the kind of proof that cut in a different way. The red wax, the private marginalia, the watermark. They all said the paper had once belonged to the Sanctum and had been removed without permission.
"You stole this," Edran said before he could stop himself. The word came out sharp. He had expected proof and now proof stared him in the face.
Malach closed his eyes for a moment and opened them again. "I took it from a reinforced cart leaving the Sanctum," he said quietly. "It was meant for the inner chamber. I have carried it a long time. I have paid for it in other ways than paper. If that makes my hands less honest, judge me for that when you must. For now, read it."
Edran felt a new weight settle over him. The evidence was not perfect, but it was the kind of marks only those who had spent time inside the Church would notice. His plan to use the listening time to recover had been sound. Now, as the storm outside pressed on the roofs, he watched the parchment and wondered which would break first: the words or his certainty.