They call me many things now: savior, beast, vessel. In the thin hours before dawn they whisper it like prayer, and in the late hours they mutter it like accusation. Both are music to the curse.
Do not mistake that sentence for pride. I do not take comfort in their names. I take comfort in results — in the small arithmetic of survival.
Still, names change men. Stories sharpen edges. The zealots' Covenant of the Emberhand had become a rumor that walked. Maru's voice echoed like a metronome through the ruined arcade: Through the curse we live. Through the flame we endure. The chant was no longer a litany reserved for their own. It hovered at the edge of every campfire. It settled into the mouths of faster, hungrier men we met on the road, men with more teeth than scruples. The doctrine had teeth. They used them.
So when the first of our own disappeared in the night — not taken by Dagon's spawn, not eaten by the street, but gone as if he'd stepped out of his skin — the arithmetic changed. One missing person isn't a tragedy. Two are a tally. Three demand an accounting.
We found the first trace at dawn: a thin ribbon of blood smeared across the inhaled concrete near the tunnel's mouth. Not much — not enough for the city to notice — the kind of small thing zealots used to hide great deeds.
It was Kento. Thin, with more courage than sense. He'd been scavenging at the river and was last seen arguing with a man who promised a "true shelter" beyond a collapsed bridge. Kento had refused to bow to the new order — refused to string the red thread the zealots asked of him — so he walked away. That was the last time I'd seen his shadow.
The survivors found the ribbon and began to whisper. Fear bent its head like a supplicant. Juro watched them with the cold bookkeeping of a man whose ledger filled with other people's mistakes.
"You keep letting this happen," he said to me, quietly, the way surgeons argue about infection rates. "You let culture take root. You let it decide who should live based on superstition."
"You want me to murder them?" My voice came out flat, not a defense but a question. There is a distance between telling a man he is wrong and taking the blade to correct him.
Juro's remaining eye flashed. "No. I want you to make them stop. The doctrine eats people in inches. It's happening under your nose."
"Under my nose?" I turned away. The rune in my arm throbbed, as if to say under your nose sounded like dinner. "You think I don't see the numbers? That I don't understand the math of bodies?"
He stepped closer. "You count bodies like coins, Date. But coins are not people. They're a ledger entry. When the ledger reads death in every margin, it's not survival anymore." He said the last word like a man who'd already prepared a list of betrayals.
It was an argument meant to be patient and moral. It was also useless to the kind of person who only accepted things that did not ask them to lose.
"Keep your sermon," I told him. "Pray it to the rifts. Or write it down and burn the paper. The moment you force me into righteousness we all die."
He was silent, but his jaw worked. That silence was a bargain and a threat in one: speak less, record more.
We tracked Kento's steps to the edge of the zealots' outer ring. They had a way of hiding things under a roof of small kindnesses: they mended a coat here, handed a meager ration there, gave a word in the right ear. Nothing earned trust faster than a quiet gift when you were hungry.
Maru met us with a grin that did not reach his eyes. He looked less like a man than a demonstration. Around him the zealots bowed in a careful choreography of devotion; their hands stained with ash, their fingers raw from knotting ropes and tying offerings. They smelled like boiled fish and burned cloth.
"Brother Date," Maru intoned, as though we had just taken seat in a temple. "Blessed are you who walk the flame."
Juro spat. "We came for Kento. You know where he is."
Maru's grin widened. "Kento found his passing by refusing concordance. It is mercy that he has gone swiftly. Spare us the dirge."
The crowd's murmuring turned to a hum behind him, the sound of a choir that preferred the soft instrument of attrition. You could see it take shape: the small gestures toward the altar, the measured ways someone handed a ration over, the way people learned to lower their eyes and measure their breaths. The doctrine did not demand blood that splattered. It demanded yields that looked like consent.
Genji's hand tightened on his shaft. His voice was a blade of anger held tight. "You took him."
Maru cocked his head. "We guided him."
That word — guided — is the softest of all euphemisms. The world calls a man guided when someone else removes his choices.
"Where is he?" Daigo barked.
Maru tilted his head, that same grin, and gestured toward a narrow alley ringed with twisted shopping carts and the skeleton of a collapsed escalator. "We had to cleanse him. The vessel accepts only the faithful."
The survivors pushed closer, and the air thickened. I watched the faces: the woman who'd lost three nails scavenging the day before; the boy whose teeth had been caving in from malnutrition; the old man who still clutched a rusted watch. Their eyes were hungry for a miracle and frightened by an answer.
I followed Maru, because it was faster to be there when the knife cut. We reached the alley and found nothing spectacular. No altar of bones, no circus of blood. Kento's jacket lay on a pile of damp cardboard. Beside it, a small note with ink smeared, only two words legible: Balance paid.
Maru recited the doctrine like scripture. "Passing must be quiet so the heart does not harden. If we made a sound, doubt would bloom. Doubt kills the vessel's work."
Juro stepped forward, hands clenched. "You mean you murdered him and called it mercy."
Maru's pupils narrowed and, for a terrifying second, the man looked like a predator in a well-fed mask. "He would have become a worn hinge. Better to remove the hinge than to lose the door." He smiled, and the smile carried the sediment of a man who had built a ritual around convenience.
"Then you will answer to us," Genji said, voice low. "You will give his corpse back."
Maru's grin melted into patience. "His passage is complete."
There is a certain moral moment where men expect a man to do something unrehearsed: to scream, to plead, to be human. The zealot performed none of it. They were ceremonies and soft-stepping rules. Their lack of drama made them efficient.
I could have burned them then. I could have taken their leader, tied him to a lamp post and lit him like a warning bell. But I did not. Why? Because some lessons do not require fire to be effective. They require permanence: a witness left to count. I wanted them afraid to look up. I wanted them to know I understood both the math and the morality, and I would bend either to the equation when necessary.
Instead I said, "Bury him. Quiet. Outside the ring. Leave enough for the river."
A muttered obedience; Maru bowed. The zealots moved like an organ, smooth and methodical. They prepared a small bundle, wrapped it in a jacket, and set it in a shallow grave. No hymn — the passing was not public — but half a dozen zealots knelt and whispered the cadence under their breath like a lullaby.
We left with our mouths dry. The survivors walked behind us in a range of emotions — shame, newly minted devotion, or the old practical hunger. Juro did not speak until we'd gone a fair distance, far enough that the zealot chants were like insects under glass.
"You let them bury a man you claim to care about," he said, voice flat and cold.
I didn't defend myself. The truth is simpler than pretense. "He was weak."
"You said that about others," he said. "Different name, same reasoning. At what point does hunger become murder? At what point does necessity become your religion?"
I kept walking. The rune in my arm hummed in a way that suggested the world's answers did not care for our moral arithmetic. Then, because words make the ledger true, I told him, "When men stop counting coffins in a ledger and start counting them as people. When men stop pretending to be surprised."
He said nothing for a long while. Then, in a voice too small for the wounds he wore, Juro said, "Record it. Write what you saw. One day there will be names to call. People will ask why they didn't know." He tapped his temple, like a grim promise. "I will keep a list."
A list. A ledger. The words were his religion now. He would write and remember. Good. Memory can catch up with cruelty.
That night the doctrine showed its second face: seduction. The zealots coaxed new followers not by martyrdom but by offering the smallest of comforts and teaching them to trade it for silence.
We had to cross a market square that had been retaken by the tide of Dagon's influence. The rain had scoured the place and left it glossy with slick slime. Dagon's minions hammered at the periphery, daughters of water and rust. The zealots offered us a way through: a detour that ran under their watch. In exchange — a token. One ration. One blanket. One word of praise when asked.
Men took it, because hunger bargained better in the ears than in the stomach. I watched them hand over the last of their cloth and felt the math settle like sediment.
A boy — the same who'd once offered me the bone carving — came to me with a question. His voice was small. "Do you think the vessel eats us because he likes it?" He asked with the horrible pureness of a question that had to be answered to be useful.
"How does he feed, boy?" I asked instead.
"He is the flame. He needs us."
"Then be useful," I said. "Do not let the flame be the only thing that eats." The words were meant to shake him awake. Instead they were a lesson in another direction: to take responsibility, not to give it.