The strike team descended from Redgate before the second sun rose.
They moved quickly, shadows flickering across the broken hills, cutting through scrub valleys and ruined orchard groves scorched by Tribunal fire. The plan was simple:
Disrupt the Tribunal vanguard.
Delay their march.
Force them to believe Redgate still held the main force.
Give the others time to vanish.
But even simple plans feel heavy when every footstep echoes with death.
By midmorning, Zaiya signaled from the outcrop.
A dozen Tribunal soldiers marched in tight formation below, their armor glowing faintly with script runes, four-barrelled prayer cannons, massive shoulder-mounted relics that fed directly from the Writ. One knight led the front with a two-handed blade that shimmered like flame trapped behind glass.
Jorran squinted. "These aren't regular troops."
Vaelen nodded. "No. They're Litany Guard. Chosen. Oath-bound."
"They don't break."
"We'll make them."
They attacked from three angles.
Zaiya leapt from the rocks first, her glyph-daggers spinning from her hands in perfect arcs. Each landed where armor was weakest between plates, under helms, behind knees.
Jorran invoked a fractured psalm, half holy, half broken. The sky cracked slightly, and lightning struck without any accompanying thunder.
Elya struck next, the blade sliding through scripture light with cold efficiency.
Vaelen entered last, his halberd sweeping with force that shattered the front knight's blade.
Within seconds, the patrol broke. Four dead. Two dying. One fled until Zaiya's throwing blade silenced him.
But one remained.
Pinned beneath the rubble, his arm crushed, the Guard captain grinned as Vaelen approached.
"You think this matters?" he rasped.
Vaelen knelt. "Tell me what powers your relics."
The man spat blood. "The Writ. The light. The Song Eternal."
"No," Vaelen said softly. "That's the lie."
He looked to Jorran. "Strip it."
Jorran hesitated. "I… I was trained in this. But it's forbidden."
Vaelen: "You're already exiled."
Jorran whispered a prayer in reverse. The glyphs on the man's armor peeled away.
And underneath, they saw it.
A soul-thread.
Not metaphorical.
A glowing strand of another person's spirit burned into the metal.
Elya recoiled. "That's a bound soul," Jorran whispered. "A sacrifice."
The Guard captain laughed, choking on blood.
"You finally see. Our blades shine because we feed them. Every Writ-bound relic is paid for in soul-coin. Children. Prisoners. Apostates."
He grinned with cracked teeth.
"And one day, your face will light one too."
Vaelen didn't flinch.
He drove the halberd through the man's throat.
That night, the strike team camped in a ruined bell tower. Zaiya drew silent sigils in the dust while Jorran sat staring at his hands as if they were alien.
Elya approached Vaelen, who stood at the broken archway.
"You okay?" she asked.
"No."
"You remembered something, didn't you?"
He nodded.
"There was a time," he said slowly, "when I signed the orders for those sacrifices. When I authorized soul-thread forging."
Elya froze.
"I didn't know what it meant back then. I thought it was… poetry. Metaphor."
"Do you know now?"
"Yes."
He looked at her.
"And I'm going to burn the machine that does it."
Miles away, in a chamber of bone beneath the Tribunal's mobile sanctum, The Pale Censor knelt before a pool of mirrored blood.
She whispered a spell of erasure.
And across the land, children forgot the names of their dead.
The next morning, a thin mist clung to the ruins, whispering over stone like breath between dying gods.
The strike team pressed onward, weaving through the forest and old road like a blade through silk. The map drawn by Liris warned of a ruined chapel ahead, once a minor shrine to the Tribunal's 6th Order, which had long since been desecrated by both war and time.
It was supposed to be a waystation.
Instead, it was a trap.
They found the corpses first.
Hung upside down from shattered pews, Writ-priests whose tongues had been sewn shut with prayer thread. Glyphs burned across their skin in reversed scripture, forbidden counter-spells meant to keep spirits from returning.
Then came the sound.
A dragging.
A scraping.
Metallic breathing.
Vaelen raised his halberd, senses flaring. "We're not alone."
Then, it stepped into the light.
Ten feet tall. No visible skin. Just a framework of plated flesh and radiant steel dripping with unholy oil. It wore a Tribunal mask, but the shape behind it wasn't human. Its voice came not from a throat—but from a speaker rune embedded in its chest.
"ASCENDANT-CLASS AGENT: TYRMN-0X REPORTING. ERROR: HERALD UNIT VAELEN-0X DETECTED. LEVEL-5 ANOMALY."
"DELETION PROTOCOL ENGAGED."
The Ascendant charged.
Elya shouted, diving left. Jorran tried to invoke a barrier glyph too slowly. The thing was faster than it looked. It warped forward, moving between moments.
Zaiya hurled a useless knife. It bounced off its chest with a shriek of bent steel.
Vaelen blocked the first strike with his halberd, but the impact threw him back through a pillar, his ribs screaming.
The Ascendant didn't follow.
Instead, it looked at Zaiya.
And spoke her name.
"ZAIYA OF THE MEMORY FOLD. STATUS: VOICELESS. CATEGORIZATION: LIVING ARCHIVE. THREAT LEVEL: HIGH."
She froze.
It wasn't the machine's words that stopped her.
It was the fact that it knew her.
Zaiya moved fast, almost impossibly so.
She struck the ground with a palm rune, flipping backward behind a fallen altar. Her hand blurred across the hilt of another dagger, this one glowing with a silenced glyph, a spell designed to destroy recorded information.
But she didn't throw it.
She turned to Elya and pressed the dagger into her hand.
Then she scrawled one word on the ground:
"If I'm taken, burn this."
Elya shook her head. "Zaiya, don't."
Zaiya nodded once, eyes filled with sorrow.
Then she charged the Ascendant alone.
She moved like a memory flashes of speed, blade, and misdirection.
The Ascendant stumbled. Once. Twice.
Its mask cracked.
Vaelen, rising from the rubble, seized his moment.
He drove his halberd low, aiming not for the machine's core but its shadow.
The aetheric anchor point.
Where its soul was held.
The halberd struck.
The Ascendant shrieked a piercing, digital sound that shattered the altar stone and turned nearby glyphs to dust.
Its body collapsed in on itself, folding like a house of cards in a fire.
Zaiya dropped to her knees, breathing hard, eyes still locked on the space where it fell.
Later, they burned the chapel.
They buried the priests.
And Vaelen sat beside Zaiya in the ashes.
"You knew it would know you," he said.
She nodded.
He looked at her. "Why haven't you ever spoken?"
Zaiya hesitated.
Then she took a piece of charcoal and wrote:
"Because the Writ listens."
Vaelen didn't respond.
There was nothing to say.
Just a fire to stoke.
And a war to finish.
Far across the craglands, through forests long silent and fields still burning with holy fire, the Pale Censor moved without rest.
Where she passed, names faded from memory. Whole towns forgot their founders. Graves were erased. The songs became silent.
She did not lead armies.
She erased them.
Her mask glowed faintly, runes bleeding blue. At her side, a chained scribe recorded each moment in a tongue long dead, scribbling notes not on parchment but into the air, inscribing her story into reality itself.
She paused atop a ridge and turned her gaze southward.
Where the wind changed direction.
Where a soul she had once cast from the Circle now rose again unwritten, reformed, reclaimed.
Her voice, soft as snowfall, cut through the world:
"Vaelen Sol Draeth… the gods have remembered you."
Meanwhile, Ryven led the main rebel force through the Echo Canyons.
They moved in tight silence, eyes ever scanning the cliffs above. So far, they had managed to avoid detection. Liris remained near the rear, whispering to the stones, drawing veiled runes to hide their trail.
But their progress slowed at the Shatterspire.
A half-collapsed bridge marked the pass's exit, and standing at its edge was a man cloaked in rags, leaning on a long staff shaped like a shepherd's crook.
His face was hidden beneath a cracked mask.
Ryven approached carefully, hand on her sword. "You blocking the way?"
The man chuckled.
"No. I'm watching it."
"Who are you?"
The stranger lifted his mask, and Ryven staggered back.
Not in fear.
In recognition.
He had Vaelen's face.
Older. Scarred. But unmistakable.
"I am his echo," he said. "I was left behind when he was cast out. A fragment of what he could have been."
Ryven narrowed her eyes. "A memory?"
"More than that."
Liris stepped forward, her breath shallow.
"You're from the First Breach, aren't you?"
The stranger nodded. "It is awakening."
He unrolled a map not on paper, but in light.
"This is where your war ends. And begins again."
That night, the Ashlight Accord reassembled in a hidden hollow, deep in the stonewoods north of the shattered chapel.
Liris laid the luminous map upon the earth.
"The First Breach," she said, "is not a gate. It is a wound in the divine web. It predates the Tribunal. Predates even the Writ."
Vaelen stepped closer, watching ancient paths illuminate in the dirt.
"Where does it lead?"
Liris met his gaze.
"To the part of the world they tried to forget."
Elya looked around at the others. "If we go there, we abandon Redgate."
Ryven, who had arrived hours earlier with news of the masked stranger, spoke up. "Redgate is already gone. The Tribunal's next wave will fall on the Ember Reaches. The Accord needs to survive to matter."
Jorran shifted. "And if the Breach is a trap?"
Vaelen's voice cut clean.
"Then I'll spring it."
Zaiya touched the map, her fingertip tracing one glowing line.
At the end of it sat a symbol older than any Writ.
A flame inside an eye.
Liris whispered its name.
"Aethermire."
The Accord agreed.
They would split.
Ryven, Jorran, and half the Concord rebels would head west to rally resistance in the Reaches.
Vaelen, Elya, Zaiya, Liris, and the soulglass halberd would march east to the Breach.
Their war would fracture like the world itself.
But in the fracture, there would be truth and fire.