We had to prove the system worked. Ideology dies if an offering does not produce fruit. So I staged a small test—a supply run through a Dagon-corrupted quarter where the hull of an old shopping center had become a nest of the city's dead, coiled and pregnant with small minions. We took a small force: Maru's zealot crew, a handful of our leanest fighters, and a line of survivors who had the most to lose. The idea was theater: show the faithful that obedience produced results—food, salvage, clean streets.
The minions came fast, feral and strange. A woman in Maru's group—Aiko—threw herself at the first one with a will that was surprising, wielding a knife like a priest anointing a floor. She died quickly, horribly, in the way zealotry makes heroes of the small. The rest of the zealots did not flinch. They surrounded her body in ritual, chanting that her Passing fed the vessel and cleared their path. I let it happen.
Then something strange occurred: the minions faltered. Not because magic listens to ritual, but because zealots moved like gears, coordinated, not screaming and scattering but compacted and brutal—small units operating like wedges. They bled the enemy through tactics, and the survivors behind them found space to work. We cleared the entryway and took a cache of tins and a small water purifier that clunked and wheezed like a found promise.
They cheered. The zealots chanted the Covenant like hymn and fact; the people believed. The doctrine had proven itself. It had been punished into utility.
But the cost was Aiko. Her disciple sung her name at night, and the song hardened into a moral ledger. We had given them efficiency and taken a life. The math balanced.
Juro frowned when I returned. "You used people like props," he said. "You let the zealot murder be an engine."
"I let coordinated action save the group," I replied. "There is a difference. One leads to control, the other to chaos."
He tapped his pen against his teeth. "The difference is conscience."
"And conscience," I said, "counts less than a working pump. You write the names. I clean the engines."
He watched me and then, in a voice glazed with tired fury, said, "One day the names will be a book. When that book opens, will the city forgive you because the pumps ran?"
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe not. But the pumps will have been turned on while the book sits unread. People eat while others argue."
It's a brutal math. That's the truth of it. If you think about the ledger too long you don't eat. If you ignore it you may live now and be judged later. I prefer to take this world raw and measure later.
—
That night, when the camp slept under the thin roofs of welded car hoods and burned awnings, Juro added Aiko's name to his list. He underlined it and then, in a line below, added my name and the date. He didn't hide it. He rolled the small notebook into the fold of his jacket so it would be next to his skin.
It would be a promise. It would be a record.
I lay awake for a long time with the carving of the fossil rune pulsing faint under my skin. The creed the zealots shouted had entered the city's wind. The doctrine crept into seams and became a habit. People traded cloth and watch hours for a prayer and a bowl, and the sacrifice seemed both reasonable and inevitable. They thought they chose. They had chosen survival; what they hadn't noticed was they'd chosen the shape of that survival.
There is no absolute evil when every act keeps a stomach from knuckling. There is only arithmetic and appetite.
When I finally rose at dawn to walk among the sleeping, I found Maru at the smallest altar, hands folded. He looked up and saw me, and there was no fear in his eyes. Only a kind of small, holy hunger. "We are doing well," he whispered.
"We are doing what we must," I answered.
He smiled. "Blessed be the vessel."
For a moment his eyes flickered, and I saw the old fear in them—subtle, human. I could have used it then. I could have reminded him of the rift-god sleeping under the city, of Dagon's teeth. I could have burned the altar and scattered the faith like ash on the wind.
But instead I did something clever and far crueller: I nodded and said, "Keep the watch steady. We leave for the river tomorrow. Bring the able. Bring the faithful."
He bowed as if the words were a poem. The ritual rolled on as if it had matured a new limb.
Behind me, in the quiet, I felt the rune answer and tighten like a noose of muscle. The sacrifice had cost us a life and bought us a pump. The ledger kept tally in my head and Juro's pocket. Both were dangerous instruments. I kept one and let the other keep track.
The city watched. The doctrine spread. The hunger grew quieter but deeper. We walked forward into the shape of what we had asked for.
Through the curse we live. Through the flame we endure.