They met the Inquisition amid monuments to the dead.
White fire threw long, thin shadows between the monoliths, cutting the dark into blade-widths. Serah slipped from gap to gap, hair a dark banner, mouth set in a smile that had nothing to do with joy. Kael walked beside her and every step felt like a decision.
"Prelate's not here," Serah breathed. "Just his knives."
"They have names," Kael said. "They don't know them."
The nearest Inquisitor—helm crested with pale horsehair—marked their approach and raised a hand. Fire bloomed around his gauntlet, licking upward to drape him in sanctity. "By the Writ of Embers—" he began.
"Your name," Kael said softly, and the Mark reached.
The fire faltered. Something like ink bled through its brightness. The Inquisitor sucked in a breath as if punched. "What—?"
"Say it," Kael said. "Say who you were before you were a sword."
The man's lips moved. Nothing came out. His eyes widened with child-panic, then hardened with doctrine. He lunged.
Serah was gravity with a knife. She turned his lunge into a kneel and took him at the hinge between breath and word. He went down without a sound.
The others came then—six, then eight—voices overlapping into liturgy. The not-floor rang with the rhythm of their boots, a drum-beat for righteous slaughter. Kael lifted his hands, and the names he had swallowed in the dark rose like starlings.
They were not spells. They were histories. He flung them anyway.
Lysa. The fire that sought him remembered a girl who fed the poor from stolen bread and did not burn.
Tharn. A butcher who would not bleed animals on holy days. The knives hesitated.
Mirel. A midwife who lied to a lord to save a child. The oath broke and reknit crooked.
The white fire guttered, confused by the weight it suddenly carried. Inquisitors staggered, dragged by their own names back through their masks to the soft meat underneath.
"Serah," Kael said, and she moved like a benediction and a curse.
They would have been overrun anyway. There were too many, and the Prelate had taught them to hate doubt more than death. But then the monoliths chimed, one by one, as if struck by invisible sticks. Letters shook loose like birds. The dark itself leaned toward Kael as if he were a hearth in winter.
—Take, it said. Not command. Not plea. Invitation.
Kael took.
It was like drinking a storm. The names did not fill him; they made space around him, a widening of the world he could step into. He stepped.
For a moment he was everywhere their names had been. He saw a boy drop a loaf into a beggar's lap with a grin bright as summer. He felt a hand refuse a blade on a holy morning and wipe blood from a cow's brow instead. He watched a woman tell a beautiful lie and be struck for it.
When he came back to himself, he was crying. Serah did not say a word. She killed the last Inquisitor with her eyes wet.
Silence arrived like a held breath finally let go. The air smelled of quenched metal.
A slow clap echoed from the far dark.
The Prelate stepped into their circle of silence as if into a church he owned. Behind him walked two figures bound in gray: prisoners. Between them and the Prelate, a child with a shaved head and a brand new brand.
"Ember and bone," the Prelate said, voice warm with approval and threat. "You learn quickly."
Kael's tears dried cold. "Let them go."
"I will," the Prelate said. "When you kneel." The child glanced up at Kael through lashes stiff with salt. "Choose, Shadowborn. Be key. Be seal. Or be the man who pretended there was a third door while others paid the tithe."
Serah's fingers found his, blood-slick and shaking. "We don't kneel," she whispered.
Kael looked at the child. At the bound figures. At the monoliths, patient as planets.
He stepped forward and let the Mark open like a sunrise.
"Then I choose," he said. "I choose all their names over yours."
The Prelate smiled sadly, as if Kael had disappointed a lesson. "So be it." White fire rose.
The dark answered.