Sundown bled across the churchyard in bands of copper and wine. Daniel stood at the edge of the grass where morning dew had long since burned away, palms damp, heartbeat climbing for no good reason he could name. He'd showered. He'd eaten. He'd tried to nap and failed. Now he waited—sweatshirt, joggers, worn sneakers—feeling like a kid about to be called to the principal's office and the gallows at the same time.
Father Gabriel emerged from the rectory with the steady gait of a man who never rushed and was never late. A black hoodie hung open over a gray T‑shirt, forearms bare, rosary looped around his wrist like a quiet snake. He stopped a few feet from Daniel and searched his face, as if confirming a set of coordinates.
"Nervous?" Gabriel asked.
"A little," Daniel admitted. "What… what's going to happen?"
Gabriel's gaze sharpened, then turned inward, distant—like a radio tuning to a frequency only he knew. When he spoke again, his voice was unchanged, but the air changed with it.
"Be still."
He didn't move his lips for what came next.
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⚜ TEMPLAR DECREE ⚜
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Templar Trial Begins
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The world seemed to lean forward. Daniel swallowed.
"What will happen?" he whispered again, not sure whether he meant the priest or the sky.
The answer struck silently, the way thunder sometimes arrives inside the bones rather than the ears:
A Templar's will must be unshakable.
The yard tilted. Not the grass, not the oaks—the yard itself, as if the night had slipped and caught itself at the last second. Daniel blinked—and everything fell away.
He stood in dust.
Heat pressed from every side. Horns blared. Banners snapped and cracked like whips in a furnace wind. His own breath rasped behind a visor as he lifted a shield bigger than a door and felt the pleasant drag of weight in his right hand: a sword, well-balanced, hilt worn to the shape of fingers that were his and had always been his.
He knew where he was. He had always known where he was. He was a crusader beneath God's sky.
No life before this tugged at him. No subway map. No spreadsheets. No sermons. Only the line of men shoulder to shoulder, the taste of iron and cloth in his mouth, the thunder of the ground as two tides collided.
"Forward, brothers!" a voice roared to his left—the Marshal, steel-bright and terrible. "For Christ and the Temple!"
"For Christ and the Temple!" Daniel roared back, because that was what men like him did with breath that God granted. They raised their shields and moved.
The first enemy came like a hammer and became small beneath his blade. The second would not let go of his spear even when Daniel's shield broke his teeth. The third had eyes wide as coins. Men shouted in languages that didn't matter because fear was its own tongue and steel its own liturgy. Sunlight flashed on edges and vanished in cloth and skin.
And then—there.
A shape stumbled in the chaos: a boy, thin as a reed, stumbling in a tunic too large, a helmet too big for his head. Fifteen, perhaps. Fourteen, more likely. He moved with the dull terror of someone shoved by a hand that could pick him up again. He did not hold his spear so much as his spear held him upright. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world.
A horseman swept down on the boy, blade cocked to harvest. Daniel stepped—faster than thought—and his shield rang with a blow that should have ended two lives but ended none. He turned, cut, drove the rider off with three hard strokes and a blind shove. The boy stared at him through his too-large helm—eyes wet, breath hitching.
"Run," Daniel grunted, already turning.
He didn't get two steps.
An armored forearm barred his chest. Brother Étienne—broad‑cheeked, eyes like flint—shoved him back.
"Leave him," Étienne snarled. "Heathen stock. God desires them cleansed."
The words struck harder than any spear. "He's a child."
"And a blight, same as the rest."
Two more brothers moved in close—Gerard and Isaac, both splashed with dust and zeal. Around them, the battle seemed to draw its circle: not a ring of chalk on a tavern floor but of trampling feet and crashing shields that left a pocket of space like a held breath.
"Out of the way," Étienne said.
"No." Daniel planted his feet. "Children have no fault. They are innocent."
"Listen to him," Gerard scoffed. "A mother's heart in a soldier's mail."
"God desires obedience," Isaac said. "Not excuses."
The boy blinked between them, trapped like a bird that didn't yet know the shape of the cage.
Daniel lifted his shield. He didn't remember deciding to. Decisions in war were like lightning: by the time you heard them, they'd already happened.
Étienne's eyes narrowed. "So you would resist your brothers for a whelp?"
"I will stand between a blade and a child," Daniel said. "If I must stand alone."
"Then you are alone," Étienne spat, and steel leapt.
They came fast, not because they were cruel but because they were sure. Étienne hammered high; Daniel caught it and felt the bone-deep shock. Gerard stabbed low; Daniel kicked, boot to shin, and turned the thrust aside. Isaac feinted, then slashed for the gap—Daniel twisted, the cut scraping mail instead of meat, and answered with a short, hateful hook of his shield boss to the jaw. A tooth flew. Isaac reeled, cursing.
"Brothers!" Étienne shouted to the fray around them. "A traitor among us!"
Voices rose. The circle tightened.
Daniel moved the way water moves around rocks—the way a taught body does what it was born to do, without counting. He parried and stepped, cut and shoved, used their weight against them. Every time his blade sang, something inside him ached—not because of them, but because it was them. The men who had eaten beside him, prayed beside him, bled beside him.
"Yield," Gerard grunted, breath hot behind his visor. "Yield and we will forget this madness."
"It is not madness to keep a child alive," Daniel said, and drove him back.
A spearhead flashed out of nowhere—some nameless man drawn by the scent of a kill—and Daniel pivoted and took it on the thick rim of his shield. The wood splintered, but the point glanced away. He smashed the spear with his sword and heard the boy whimper behind him.
"Run!" he barked again. "Find—"
Pain bloomed before the word finished.
It came like winter through a door: a cold, wide pressure at his side that became heat, then became the world. He looked down. The iron head of a lance had found the seam where plates kissed rings, where mail trusted leather, where inches turned to error. It had slipped between him and not him and planted a flag in his flesh.
The ground swayed. Someone shouted his name, or a name that meant his name once. Étienne's eyes were wide now, not with zeal but with something like regret.
Daniel sank to one knee. The boy hovered in front of him—helmet too big, eyes too young—fingers shaking on a spear he didn't want to hold.
"Why?" the boy blurted, voice breaking. "Why did you try to save me? I'm your enemy."
Daniel searched for air and found a taste of iron instead. He set his palm on the broken ground, felt the stutter of his heart, and looked up at the child.
"Children," he said, and the word steadied him. "Children are God's blessing. And I am His steward."
For one heartbeat, the battlefield went silent.
Not quieter. Silent. The banners stalled in mid‑flap. The dust froze between sky and earth like motes trapped in honey. A rider hung in the air with his sword halfway through a scream. Étienne stood carved in the posture of a man who has just realized he spoke too quickly and cannot take it back.
Only the boy moved.
He straightened. The helm sat right on his head now, as if it had been made for him from the first. The fear pulled back from his face the way a tide pulls off a rock. He looked at Daniel, and his voice—when it came—rang clear as a bell above a city.
"Then you shall lead the flock," he said. "And protect it well."
The words put a weight on the world. The frozen banners dropped, finishing their snap. The dust fell. The horse completed its scream.
Daniel's vision tunneled, then exploded into light—golden, searing, pure. He fell forward into it, or it fell forward into him. He did not know which of them moved.
He gasped awake on the churchyard grass with the sky gone full night above him, and a bar of fire wrapped around his left forearm from wrist to elbow.
He rolled to his side, teeth clenched, and dragged air into his lungs. The pain wasn't sharp. It was instructional—like letters being taught to the body with heat instead of ink. Through the blur he saw the shape of a cross traced in the glow, bound by a circle, flanked by a pair of lines like pillars. It pulsed once, twice, then settled to a banked ember under his skin.
Hands caught him before he pitched back. Gabriel's, steady and iron.
The priest eased him to sitting. The world tilted again, but this time gravity came with it. Daniel's chest hitched. He blinked and found the priest's face—sweatless now, calm, the lines at his eyes carved deep with relief.
"Easy," Gabriel said quietly, as if soothing a horse after a hard run. "Easy."
Daniel swallowed. His throat was raw. "What… what was—"
Gabriel's mouth tugged into a rare smile that showed the smallest piece of pride and the larger piece of inevitability.
"Finally," he murmured, almost to himself, "a worthy knight."
Daniel blinked, the words landing like a hand on his shoulder. He looked down at the glowing brand again, at the symbol etched into skin and something deeper.
Somewhere in the edge of his hearing, something rang—faint and clean, like a chalice touched with a fingernail.
He didn't remember the trial.
He remembered heat. Dust. The certainty of a stand.
And a boy's voice, clear as a city bell.
Gabriel's arm stayed under his shoulders as Daniel's head lolled, exhaustion shearing him thin. The priest shifted his weight, ready to pick him up if sleep dragged him under.
Above them, stars took back their posts. The oaks creaked like old doors. The night breathed.
When the decree finally came, it came quiet as a candle lit in a vault:
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⚜ TEMPLAR DECREE ⚜
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Trial Completed
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And Daniel, branded and burning and strangely at peace, let the darkness carry him just far enough to rest.