The cathedral did not burn quickly. It burned with the patience of something ancient, a deliberate ruin, every crack in its stone walls sighing as if centuries of incense and hymns had finally caught flame. Its towers keened in agony, bell tongues clanging once, twice, before falling silent. Stained-glass saints melted into streams of red, blue, and green that looked like blood, rivers, and poison mingling at the steps.
Smoke rolled across the city in thick banners. Beneath it, three choirs competed.
One sang in Latin, hoarse-throated priests dragging the words through ash: Domine, miserere. Their voices scraped raw, convinced they were witnessing the final trumpet.
Another roared in Nahuatl. Young men, bare-chested, their arms cut to drizzle blood onto the cobbles, cried out to the Fifth Sun, promising their flesh as fuel. Their chanting rose and fell like heartbeat drums, their knives flashing with each beat.
A third, smaller but shriller, chanted Old Norse hymns. They carried axes polished to a mirror gleam, lifting them toward the fire as if the flames themselves were their battlefield. Their cries twisted the air, summoning memories of longboats and endless winters.
Each choir drowned out the others for a heartbeat before being swallowed. Faith clashed with faith, like tectonic plates grinding; every second the ground trembled with contradictions.
The Seeker stood among them, mute. He did not sing. He did not kneel. He watched with the precision of an autopsy, as though the cathedral was laying itself bare so he alone could see its entrails. The scar beneath his coat burned until it hurt to breathe, glowing like a coal buried in his chest.
People saw it. They always did.
Not directly—they never saw the scar flare—but something in his posture, the way light bent around him, gave him away. A woman crossing herself glanced at him and froze. A boy clutching his father's robe pointed, whispering, "It's him, it's him." By the time he tugged his coat tighter, it was too late. Murmurs rippled outward: sign, omen, chosen, cursed.
He had hated many things since the fire that made him this way. But he hated whispers most.
A little girl, hair stiff with soot, tugged his sleeve. She could not have been more than seven. "Which god is it?" she asked with the kind of unvarnished hope only children possess.
Her eyes were round, waiting to be told where to kneel, to whom to pray.
The Seeker opened his mouth. The truthful words were cruel, but they were the only ones he had left.
"Not yours," he muttered.
Her face crumpled, confusion and fear spilling across it, before she vanished into the crush of bodies. He hated himself for saying it. He hated himself more for meaning it.
The fire chose that moment to roar louder, catching on the great bells. One fell, bronze cracking as it smashed against the stone steps, releasing a note so deep it vibrated the bones of every listener. All three choirs faltered, silenced by sound rather than doubt. For an instant there was unity—not prayer, not mercy, but shared terror.
That was when the ravens came.
They fell like smoke given wings. First one, then dozens, blotting out what little light pierced the sky. Their eyes glowed ember-red, each beak gleaming like sharpened iron. They circled the burning cathedral once, twice, and then turned as one.
They turned toward him.
The scar seared so fiercely he thought his ribs might split. The crowd parted without knowing why, as if instinct screamed to give him distance. He stumbled backward, boots slipping on ash. The first raven dived, claws extended. He braced—too slow. But just as it should have struck his face, it veered at the last breath, tearing the air beside his ear instead.
A laugh followed, sly and brittle, like twigs cracking in fire.
"Run," whispered a voice only he could hear. "Or don't. It will be funnier if you stay."
Coyote's presence slithered around him like invisible smoke. The Seeker swore aloud, shoved past the crowd, and fled into the alleys.
The city had not waited for him. Fires dotted the skyline like constellations. Smoke hung low, choking. Radios crackled from open windows, each station playing a different prayer. People poured into the streets carrying icons—wooden crucifixes, golden Buddhas, painted suns—screaming invocations over one another until the air itself rang.
He saw one woman kneeling with her rosary, while her neighbor threw marigolds into a gutter, and both cursed each other as blasphemers. He saw two men light candles at the same shrine, then knife each other for choosing the wrong hymn.
Even the rats had chosen sides. He could swear he saw their bodies gathering into patterns, tails weaving sigils, eyes glinting like votive candles.
The scar glowed so brightly it leaked light through his coat. He pressed his arm to his chest, but that only drew more stares. He needed somewhere empty, somewhere dark, somewhere his body could stop being a beacon. He shoved into a narrow passage, ducked into shadow—and found himself on a bridge.
The river below churned black with smoke. The reflection of fire turned it into molten copper. The ravens circled tighter overhead, dozens now, their cries echoing words more than caws.
"Gift."
"Burden."
"Mine."
On one side of the bridge, a mob surged with crucifixes and holy water, faces set with conviction. On the other, men and women wielding obsidian knives chanted in Nahuatl, their skin streaked with ash. Both groups saw him at once. Both paused, as though recognizing prey. Then they surged forward—toward each other, toward him, toward anyone who was not them.
The scar pulsed, and suddenly he was drowning—not in water but in faith. It pressed into him, overwhelming: Odin's hunger for knowledge, Christ's open palms, Xiuhtecuhtli's desperate thirst for flame. He could feel their claims tugging at his blood, his bones, as if each wanted to graft him into their myth.
He staggered, wanting to tear the scar from his chest with his own hands. Hatred flooded him—of gods, of stories, of himself.
Then Coyote whispered again.
"Step left."
He obeyed without knowing why. A raven streaked past, its talons slicing air where his throat had been. Behind him, the two mobs collided. Crucifixes cracked against obsidian blades, blood mingling on the stones. Their chants broke into screams.
The Seeker pressed against the railing, boots slipping on soot, ravens wheeling overhead. He saw no path forward, no path back. So he did the one thing left. He leapt.
The river struck him like stone. Cold sliced every nerve raw. For a heartbeat he felt peace—water pressed over his head, smoke dimming, the scar muffled. He let himself sink, waiting for lungs to fail.
But the scar refused.
It burned, forcing breath back into his chest, dragging him upward like a hook lodged under his ribs. He broke the surface, coughing smoke and river water, gagging as if he'd swallowed flame. The current carried him downstream, spitting him onto a muddy bank. He lay there, shivering, listening to the city burn.
When he looked down, the scar glowed steadily. No flare, no fading. Just there. Sometimes knotwork, sometimes glyph, sometimes hieroglyph, as though it couldn't decide who owned it. He wanted to scream, but his throat offered only silence.
"Not bad," said a voice.
He turned. A man sat cross-legged on the bank, eating fried dough from a paper bag. Grease stained his fingers. Coyote's grin was wide enough to split his face, his eyes never quite focused on the same place.
"You lived," Coyote said around a mouthful. "Most don't. That's progress."
"Why do they want me?" the Seeker croaked. "Why all of them?"
"Because you shine," Coyote replied. "Like a torch. Everyone wants to claim light. But light doesn't belong."
The Seeker spat blood into the river. "Do you ever stop finding this funny?"
"I'd be out of work if I did." Coyote tossed him the half-eaten dough. He let it fall into the mud. "You're the punchline, Seeker. The joke is on you. You're the only one who doesn't laugh."
The Seeker looked back at the city. Flames climbed towers. Prayers clawed the sky. Faith had become tinder, and the world would burn until nothing was left but ash.
"Chosen," he whispered, "is not the same as saved."
Coyote laughed so loud the ravens scattered like black confetti.
⸻
That night, the Seeker hid under a ruined archway, water dripping on his head. He did not sleep. He listened to screams and hymns rise and fall, indistinguishable in the dark. His dreams were no safer: gods pressed into him, their faces stitched by firelight, demanding his mark as proof. He woke clawing at his chest, nails bloodied from trying to rip the scar out.
At dawn—though dawn was a pale bruise behind smoke—he walked back through the ruins. The cathedral still smoldered, its spires bent like broken fingers. On the steps, someone had scrawled with chalk: HE WALKS AMONG US.
Perhaps they meant Marius. Perhaps they meant him. It no longer mattered. Names shifted like shadows. Certainty was ash.
He ground the words away with his boot. The chalk smeared, pale against the soot. The act felt meaningless. For every denial, there would be a hundred affirmations. For every fire quenched, another ignited.
The Seeker tightened his coat and moved on, scar burning beneath, light leaking like betrayal. He knew—cold and clear—that this was only the beginning.