Part 1: Blood on the Sanctuary Steps
The sanctuary looked like every other Church outpost.
Small. Clean. Wards laced into the stone like vines painted over with faith. A single bell tower. Courtyard shaped like a prayer wheel. Flowers arranged in divine symmetry—soft colors, silent petals.
But beneath it?
Siora had confirmed it.
Smuggling tunnels.
Buried sanctums.
Ash Doctrine sigils hidden under the altar.
It wasn't a church.
It was a node.
Yuji stood just beyond the trees overlooking the site.
His eyes glowed faintly—not with spelllight.
With purpose.
Sylvia crouched beside him, bow drawn. "Three guards on patrol. No visible spellcasters."
"Six underground," Siora whispered. "But the glyphs are active. It's a protected prayer circle."
Sacha twirled her axe once. "We hit hard. In. Out. Leave a mark."
Amelia stepped behind them all. "Try not to be poetic about it, darling. We're burning a church."
Yuji stepped forward.
"No."
They turned.
"I'm uprooting one."
He raised his hand.
Fertility magic surged—roots shot from the soil beneath the sanctuary walls, not gently. They exploded through marble, cracked the bell tower, shattered stained glass.
The outpost screamed.
Priests ran—some with blades, some with wards.
Yuji didn't wait.
He moved like something planted and bloomed too fast—his aura bursting in all directions. Grass turned to thorns under his feet. Vines wrapped arms, shattered bones. Not killing. Constricting. Holding.
Sacha cleaved a cleric's staff in half.
Sylvia dropped three from the rooftop before they saw her shadow.
Siora cast disruption glyphs to silence alarm calls. Amelia locked the gate with blood-twine, a cruel little smile on her lips.
By the time the last underground sigil was torn from its housing, the priests were gone—or unconscious.
The altar had collapsed into rubble.
Yuji stood before it, breathing hard, magic still coiled around him like heat in a forge.
He raised his hand.
From the shattered earth, a single white lily grew.
Unnatural.
Unholy.
Alive.
And carved into the altar's ruin, he left one glyph:
"Return what you've stolen."
Part 2: The Writ of Fire
The message was delivered by flame.
Not ink.
Not scroll.
A skyfire glyph erupted above the spires of Veilguard, then mirrored across every major city across the continent.
Citadels. Floating islands. Mage towers. Even the hunter posts in the desert flats.
The glyph formed a single phrase in glowing celestial script:
"He who makes life from ruin. The False God has risen."
At the Guild Nexus in Sorinhold, twenty-seven mercenary captains watched the glyph shimmer overhead, then saw the order below it:
"Aid this entity, and you forfeit all divine contracts. Protect his party, and your soul falls with theirs."
– Cardinal Voran
In the Dawn Market of Erndel, a merchant unrolled a new scroll and gasped.
Yuji's face.
Slightly distorted—like drawn from memory.
Underneath, not a bounty number.
A prayer curse.
"Let him be hunted by the hounds of penance, and stripped of the fruit he bears."
At a border outpost in the south, a courier delivered a writ of censure to an old knight captain who once rode beside Yuji.
The knight burned the letter.
But didn't deny it happened.
Back at the safehouse, Amelia leaned over the report scrolls as Siora read them aloud.
"Every neutral guild has stepped back," Siora said. "The Ash Doctrine has moved from covert to sanctioned. Voran's calling it The Cinderpath Mandate."
Yuji stood in silence, eyes fixed on the cursed bounty.
Sylvia stepped beside him. "You're not just a threat now."
Sacha nodded. "You're a symbol."
Yuji's eyes narrowed.
"They've made me their god."
Amelia smirked. "False one."
Yuji didn't blink.
"Then let's see what kind of myth I become."