The great Catholic Church of the Iron Dome Nation was a testament to stone and shadow, a cavernous space where the smoke of a thousand votive candles could not quite reach the vaulted ceilings lost in gloom. It was a place designed to make humanity feel its own smallness, a deliberate architecture of awe and submission.
On this day, the day of the Anointing, the air thrummed with a silence more profound than any noise. The usual flow of the faithful had been dammed, replaced by a select audience of the grim and the glorious: Cardinals in robes of blood-red, officials of the Imperial Court in stiff brocade, and the ever-present, silent observers of the Emperor's Eyes. They were all spectators to a single figure at the heart of the vast nave.
His name was Uriel, twenty-three winters old, and he stood within a great circle painted upon the floor in gold leaf, its form that of a radiant sun. The light from the high, stained-glass windows caught the pigment, setting it ablaze, so that he seemed to be standing not on stone, but within a captive star. Beside him, a marble statue of a weeping saint provided a cold, unmoving witness. Uriel's hands, pale and steady, held a single chaplet bead, worn smooth by generations of unknowable fingers.
The High Confessor's voice, a dry rasp that echoed in the sacred space, had just fallen silent. The prayers of consecration were complete. The title of Kingnt, a blade and a shield bestowed only once in a generation, now hung in the air before settling upon Uriel's shoulders. Its weight was immense, a mantle of expectations and duties he could not yet fathom.
The final step was the Converse.
It was a formality, the elders said. A moment of quiet prayer to seal the covenant between the new Kingnt and the Divine. A symbolic gesture. No one truly heard a reply. Not for centuries.
Uriel's thumb passed over the smooth, cold surface of the bead. His lips formed the ancient words, the Prayer of Opening, a simple plea for guidance and strength. He expected nothing. A moment of peace, perhaps. A sense of completion.
He received an annihilation.
There was no sound, yet it was deafening. There was no movement, yet he was hurtled through dimensions. The solid stone beneath his feet, the cold air in his lungs, the weight of the gazes upon his back—it all ceased to be.
He was elsewhere.
It was a place that defied the logic his mind was built upon. It was small, a space no larger than a coffin, yet it was infinite, stretching into a forever that had no horizon. It was filled with a light that was not light, a substance that was both pure energy and a profound, aching sadness. It pressed upon him, not with force, but with a presence, an age so vast that the millennia of the Iron Dome were less than a single grain of sand on an endless shore.
In that moment, Uriel felt a sensation so primal, so utterly stripping, that every memory of his life prior was rendered a pale, meaningless dream. He felt the severing of an umbilical cord he never knew was there. He felt the raw, terrifying exposure of true existence for the first time.
He had not been summoned. He had been born.
And in the heart of that impossible, silent, luminous infinity, something turned its attention toward him. It was not a shape, not a voice. It was a focus, a consciousness so immense that Uriel's own mind was a flickering candle before a sun. It was a focus weighted down by an exhaustion that could curdle stars, a grief that had drowned galaxies.
From this presence, a thought formed, not in his ear, but in the very fabric of his being, a truth that etched itself directly onto his soul:
"You have come. I have carried the weight of all sin, all prayer, all hope, and all despair for an eternity beyond your comprehension. I am tired, Uriel. I have suffered enough. I wish for an end."
The concept, the sheer blasphemous, world-ending reality of it, should have unmade him. Yet, in this place, cradled in the very heart of the existence he was sworn to defend, it felt like the only true thing he had ever known.
And from the depths of his newborn soul, a question formed, not of duty, not of faith, but of a desperate, human need to understand the terms of this impossible bargain.
"Why me?"