The dark did not roar when it answered. It spoke in bargains.
White fire met shadow halfway between Kael and the Prelate, and where they touched the air turned to glass that sang with strain. The child flinched, the bound prisoners bowed their heads, and Serah stood like a wall that had learned to walk.
"Every name you carry is a debt," the Prelate said, voice calm amid the breaking. "Do you know who pays it?"
Kael did. He felt the pull already—threads tugging from the edges of him toward the monoliths, toward graves without bodies. Power was never free. The names were not coins; they were promises.
"I do," he said. "And I don't spend what I won't repay."
The Prelate's mouth curved. "Then you will break."
He lifted a hand. The glass-song became a scream. White fire gathered into a blade that was all edges and no mercy. It came for Kael's throat.
Serah moved and was there between blade and boy. The knife in her hand was a small, rude thing next to the Prelate's theology, but it met the strike anyway. The shock ran up her arm and into Kael's teeth.
"Name me," Serah snarled.
He didn't speak. He remembered.
Serah of Graywater. Street-kin. Sister to a city that ate its children and called it piety. She had learned her letters on debt notices and her blade-work from a mother who refused to die owing anyone anything. She had once broken into a church to steal bread and left with a chapel's worth of fear instead.
"Serah," Kael said, and the dark said it with him, and the monoliths answered like bells.
Her knife stopped being small. It became every knife she had ever held and every refusal she had ever made. It bit the Prelate's blade and left teeth.
The child cried out. The bound figures gasped. The Prelate's eyes flared with something that might have been respect or might have been hunger.
"You forge well," he said. "So let us test the metal."
The ground—whatever served as ground—split in a perfect circle around them. The monoliths slid back as if on tracks hidden under the world. A pit yawned, and from it rose steps and, at the center, an altar that had been a table for sacrifices and feasts in alternating seasons.
The Prelate gestured. "The old law. We place a name on the stone. We weigh it. We see if it buys what is asked." He looked at the child. "I put this one. Buy me your surrender."
Serah hissed. "You'll kill them either way."
"Yes," the Prelate said simply. "But I prefer the world honest."
Kael stepped to the altar and laid his palm on cold stone. The Mark flared, eager and afraid. "I put Serah," he said.
She went still. "Kael—"
"I ask for her life bought ten times over," he said. "I ask for her freedom from your Writ. I ask for her name to be hers."
The dark leaned in. The white fire brightened. The altar drank both and demanded blood.
"Price," it said, in a voice that was not a voice at all but the turning of an axle that had not turned in centuries.
Kael did not cut his palm. He spoke. He spoke every name he had learned, one after another, a litany of small mercies and stubborn refusals. He stacked them like bricks. He built a house and put Serah's name at the door.
The altar shook. The pit rang like a bell struck too hard. Something in the Prelate's blade flickered.
"Not enough," the law said.
Kael took a breath that tasted like smoke and winter. "Then take mine," he said. "Not my life. My forgetting. Take my right to be remembered gently. Leave me with the hard truth and let the soft lies go."
Serah grabbed his wrist. "No."
He met her eyes. "We trade what we can live without."
The altar considered. The monoliths counted. The world held still.
"Paid," the law said at last, satisfied and cruel.
Light snapped. The child blinked free of the brand's haze. The gray-bound prisoners' chains fell like bad prayers. The Prelate did not move.
"Interesting," he murmured. "You have a talent for losing the right things." He lowered his blade. "Run. I am old and I am not done teaching."
Serah hauled Kael away by the collar. "We don't run," she said through her teeth. "We leave."
They left, the monoliths watching, the altar humming, the dark tasting Kael's new lack and seeming to approve.
At the edge of the not-world, a stair unrolled like a tongue.
Serah took the first step. Kael followed, lighter by a weight he would only notice when it hurt.
Behind them, the Prelate's laugh followed like a blessing and a threat.
"Next time," he said. "Bring better names."