The mandalas did not dissipate. They settled, hardening into a permanent, eerily beautiful stain upon the southern sky. From their geometric heart, a road of smoothed air descended, and down it walked the Scriptor Inquisitors.
They were nine. They wore simple robes of undyed hemp, their faces obscured by deep hoods. They carried no visible weapons. The first bore a brass censer from which smoke coiled in perfect, alphabetic shapes. The second held an open scroll that seemed to drink the light around it. The others carried nothing at all, their hands folded into their sleeves. They moved with a unison that was unsettling, each step a silent punctuation mark.
They did not approach the walls. They stopped a thousand paces out, on a flat stretch of tundra. The lead Inquisitor placed the censer on the ground. The smoke shapes intensified, weaving into a shimmering, translucent dome that enclosed the nine figures—a courtroom conjured from incense and will.
A voice issued from the dome, genderless and precise, echoing not in the ears but in the mind.
"Let the entity known as Kaelen, claimant of the Northern Demon Sect, present itself for adjudication. Let the artifact of unmaking be surrendered for annulment. This is the First Edict of Presence."
The words carried weight. Kaelen, watching from the ramparts, felt a subtle pressure, a compulsion to walk down and present himself. It wasn't magic. It was logic. The edict declared that for the proceedings to exist, he must be present. The world itself seemed to agree, making his absence feel increasingly unnatural, an error in need of correction.
He resisted. He focused on the Doctrine of Adaptive Truth—his truth was survival, not submission. The pressure lessened, but did not vanish. It was a constant, draining background hum.
"They're not attacking," Rin murmured beside him. "They're… debating us. And they've made themselves the moderators."
Kaelen nodded. This was the battlefield. "Deploy the First Layer."
Disciples stationed at the base of the plateau activated formations of their own—not of qi, but of intent and misdirection, guided by Kaelen's understanding of the Heartstone. They didn't block the path to the Inquisitors' dome; they complicated it.
An Inquisitor lifted a hand, presumably to issue an edict clearing the way. But the path was no longer a singular concept. Was it the shortest geometric route? The most historically used trail? The path of least resistance? The disciples' work had "unmade" the singular definition of path in that area. The Inquisitor hesitated, his edict faltering, unable to lock onto a coherent target. They were forced to expend energy simply to define the ground they stood on.
A small victory, but costly. Kaelen felt a flicker of a childhood memory—getting lost in a blizzard—dissolve into static. The price of his unmaking.
The lead Inquisitor's hood tilted. The voice echoed again.
"The defendant resists definition. The Court shall define him. Let the one who turned from heresy be brought forth. Let his testimony be entered into the record. This is the Second Edict of Witness."
All eyes turned to Tavin, who was mixing mortar, his face pale. He froze, the compulsion landing on him like a physical yoke. He looked at Kaelen, fear and a desperate need for redemption warring in his eyes.
"This is the gambit," Kaelen said to him, his voice low. "Your will is ours. Your redemption is our truth. Go. But do not answer their questions. Recite the Law."
Tavin swallowed, set down his trowel, and walked through the sect's open gate. He moved like a man heading to the gallows, but his back was straight.
He entered the shimmering dome. The Inquisitors formed a half-circle around him. The one with the scroll unrolled it further; the parchment was blank.
"State your name," the lead Inquisitor intoned.
"Tavin, of the Northern Demon Sect."
"Define your sect."
Tavin's jaw worked. "The pack. The unbroken will. The northern star." He was reciting the tenets, not defining them.
"The artifact. Describe its function."
"It is the master's will. It unmakes lies." Again, a doctrinal statement, not an answer.
"You were a heretic. You plotted betrayal. Explain this contradiction within the 'pack.'"
This was the crux. Tavin flinched. The memory of his unmade treachery was a hollow scar. He had no ideological framework for it anymore, only shame. He opened his mouth, and the words that came out were Kaelen's, drilled into him: "Failure is a lesson. Betrayal was a failure. The lesson has been learned. The will is unbroken. This is the Law."
He was not testifying. He was performing a rite. The Inquisitors' power relied on parsing testimony, on creating a coherent narrative of guilt and correction. Tavin gave them only liturgy. The blank scroll remained blank. No heresy could be transcribed.
The lead Inquisitor made a subtle gesture of irritation. "The witness is obstinate. The Court shall extract the testimony. Let the memory of transgression be made manifest. This is the Edict of Revelation."
The air within the dome thickened. Tavin cried out, clutching his head. The Inquisitors were trying to forcefully reconstruct the concept of his betrayal, to make it real and therefore judgeable.
On the wall, Kaelen acted. He couldn't attack the dome directly—that would be playing their game. Instead, he focused on Tavin, and through the link of shared doctrine and the Heartstone's awful power, he reinforced the concept of the Unbroken Will. He didn't shield Tavin from the pain. He made the pain part of the rite.
Inside the dome, Tavin screamed, but the scream turned into a ragged, bellowed recitation: "THE… WILL… IS… UNBROKEN!" With each word, the invasive pressure of the edict lessened, transformed from an attack into a trial of endurance, which was itself a core tenet of their sect.
The Inquisitors recoiled, their unison broken for the first time. Their edict was not being resisted; it was being assimilated into the very heresy they sought to erase. This was a logical impossibility in their worldview.
The lead Inquisitor's voice lost its precision, sharpening with a cold, scholarly fury. "The anomaly persists. The defendant's doctrine is a recursive fallacy. It must be simplified. Let all complex thought within the designated zone be reduced to first principles. Let doubt be clarified. Let ambiguity be resolved. This is the Edict of Simplification."
The dome's glow intensified, shifting from translucent to a blinding, sterile white. This was no longer about Tavin. This was an area-of-effect attack on the very nature of the Demon Sect's adaptive, fluid ideology.
Kaelen felt it immediately. His own thoughts, rich with strategy, nuance, and layered intent, began to flatten. Protect the sect simplified to fight. Adaptive Truth crumbled into a brittle must win. It was a mental erosion, a stripping away of complexity that would reduce them to predictable, brute-force reactions—easy prey for the next edict.
This was the true horror of their power. They didn't kill the body. They assassinated possibility.
Gritting his teeth, Kaelen drew the Heartstone. He couldn't unmake the edict itself—it was too vast, too woven into the local reality by the combined will of nine powerful fanatics. But he could unmake the medium through which it propagated.
He didn't target the Inquisitors. He didn't target the dome.
He focused on the air molecules within the dome, on the vibrational patterns that carried sound, on the light particles that carried the edict's compelling glow. He gave the Heartstone a savage, focused command, paying for it with the sudden, total loss of his memory of his father's voice.
"UNMAKE THE COHERENCE OF TRANSMISSION!"
Inside the dome, chaos erupted.
The Edict of Simplification didn't vanish. It scrambled. The sterile white light fractured into a dizzying prismatic storm. The compelling voice of the edict broke apart into a cacophony of overlapping, meaningless syllables—a thousand contradictory "first principles" screamed at once. The Inquisitors, whose power relied on absolute clarity of intent, were bombarded with the noise of their own broken commandment.
They stumbled, clutching their hooded heads. Their perfect unison shattered. The scroll-carrying Inquisitor shrieked as alien, chaotic symbols burned themselves across his precious parchment.
Tavin, released from the direct pressure, collapsed.
The dome flickered, unstable.
On the wall, Kaelen swayed, blood streaming from his nose and ears, a whole wing of his personal history now a silent, empty hall. He had not defeated the Inquisitors. He had given their perfect, logical weapon a stroke.
The lead Inquisitor straightened, its hood now singed and smoking. The genderless voice, when it came, was no longer precise. It was raw, laced with a terrifying, academic wrath.
"Recalibration required. The anomaly employs meta-contradiction. The Court will escalate. The defendant has proven its nature: a cancer upon causality. The cleansing will now commence via direct ontological revision."
The nine figures turned as one, not toward the plateau, but toward the sky. Their hands rose in unison. They were no longer interested in testimony or correction.
They were going to rewrite the rules of the fight. Permanently.