The ruins of the Lantern Keepers' sanctum still smoldered when Father Marius crowned himself.
The metal came from reliquaries melted in the firestorm, fused with stained glass that had cracked under divine pressure. The result was jagged, sharp, and unstable—more a wound than a crown. Yet Marius wore it proudly, blood seeping from the cuts into his hairline. His followers called it a miracle that he bled without dying, a sign that the One Flame had chosen him to be its mouthpiece.
He stood on the broken steps of the sanctum, framed by smoke and sparks, while the city gathered to listen. They were survivors, scavengers, believers too frightened to choose, and opportunists sniffing power. Some came because their homes had burned. Some because they had lost their priests and needed a new one. Some because the crown, even cracked and bleeding, drew eyes like a magnet.
Marius raised his arms, and silence spread outward like ripples from a thrown stone.
"The Lanterns have fallen," he intoned, voice echoing against blackened walls. "They hoarded the truth and feared its fire. But the Flame is not meant to be hidden. It burns, and I—your servant, your brother—will carry its light into the darkness of this age."
A cheer followed, ragged at first, then swelling as if fear itself demanded volume. A dozen relics glittered in the hands of his closest acolytes: knives pulled from shattered cases, lanterns glowing faintly white, fragments of parchment that whispered when shaken in the air. Every miracle he displayed became another verse in his sermon.
From a shadowed archway, the Seeker watched. Nakamura crouched beside him, pistol loose in his grip, face drawn tight. The agent looked as though he had seen enough coups to recognize one in progress.
"He's consolidating," Nakamura muttered. "Territory, relics, narrative. You realize what this means."
The Seeker did not answer. His eyes were fixed on Marius, and his scar pulsed in rhythm with the preacher's cadence. He could feel it dragging him forward, itching to be seen, to be claimed. He pressed a hand hard against his chest, as though pressure might snuff it out.
Marius's voice rose. "The world trembles because it has too many names for the same fire. But the One Flame cannot be divided. It will not be mocked by fragments. We will end the confusion. One crown. One prophet. One truth."
The Seeker flinched. Those words were his own, stolen, twisted. He remembered nights years ago—half-drunk, half-inspired—scribbling fragments in margins of stolen texts. One flame, many shadows. He had meant it as lament, as question. Marius had turned it into commandment.
Nakamura noticed his tension. "He's using your words, isn't he?"
"Yes." The Seeker's voice was hoarse. "And he's stripping them of their teeth."
The scar flared again. Something in him snapped. Before he knew it, he was out of the shadows, stumbling into the half-circle of light cast by burning rubble.
Gasps rippled through the crowd. A hundred eyes turned toward him, widening. Even beneath his coat, the scar's glow leaked outward. Marius's voice faltered for the first time, then steadied with triumph.
"Behold!" Marius shouted. "The heretic! The doubter! The man marked and abandoned. Proof that the Flame gives two signs: one true, one false. One chosen to lead, one cursed to wander."
The Seeker stopped at the base of the steps. His throat was dry, but his words came bitter and sharp.
"You speak of truth as if it were a blade you could brandish. But truth is shards. It cuts both ways. You crown yourself king of fragments and call it whole. You lie to them."
Murmurs churned through the crowd. Some leaned closer to hear him; others hissed as though blasphemy carried smoke.
Marius descended two steps, crown glinting with firelight. "And what do you offer them? Doubt? Questions? You carry the mark of the Flame, yet you hoard it in bitterness. They need certainty. I give it."
"You give chains," the Seeker spat. "You would rather enslave them to a single story than let them wrestle with many. Certainty is the lie that kills."
Their voices clashed in the air, louder than the crackle of flames. The crowd swayed between them, caught in the gravity of opposites. The Seeker felt the scar burning brighter, pulling him closer to Marius. It was as if the crown and the scar were magnets, two poles destined to clash or fuse.
He remembered the fire that had scarred him years ago—the museum, the smoke, the screams. He had staggered out alone, marked. What if that fire had not chosen him alone? What if it had chosen Marius too?
The thought chilled him deeper than any wound.
Marius saw his hesitation and pressed the attack. "You were spared to bear witness to me. Two flames, yes—but only one is pure. I bleed, and it heals. You burn, and it festers. Tell them, scarred one, what god claims you. Tell them who you serve."
The Seeker's mouth opened, but no words came. He served none. He belonged to no pantheon, no doctrine. Yet silence in this moment was worse than blasphemy. To the crowd, refusal to claim was proof of guilt.
Nakamura tensed, ready to drag him back, but the Seeker raised a hand to stop him.
He forced words out. "I serve no god. I am scarred, not sanctified. I am broken, not chosen. And that is why you should fear me."
The ground trembled faintly, as if his denial carried weight. Sparks leapt between scar and crown. Some in the crowd gasped, falling to their knees. Others shouted in rage, spitting curses. Lines fractured, splintered.
Marius's face twisted into a smile that was half triumph, half fury. "Even in denial, he proves me right. The false flame must exist for the true to shine. Without shadow, light has no meaning. Without heresy, prophecy has no power."
The Seeker saw it then: silence or speech, doubt or denial, every path led to the same trap. His existence had become fuel for Marius's doctrine. He could not win. His very refusal was a punchline for Marius's sermon.
The scar throbbed painfully, threatening to split his skin. He backed away, step by step, into the shadow of the arch where Nakamura waited.
Coyote's voice came, mocking and clear, from a shard of broken glass at his feet. "Straight man in a prophet's comedy. You should've known better—never interrupt the performance unless you want to be part of the act."
The Seeker did not look down. He clenched his fists and retreated into shadow.
Behind him, the crowd roared, half for Marius, half for the mystery he himself had become. Marius raised his bleeding crown higher, face lit not by madness but by a triumph that looked worse.
The Seeker whispered to himself as he fled, words tasting of ash. "Chosen is not the same as saved. And saved is not the same as true."
⸻
They fled into streets already changing.
Marius's acolytes moved in squads of nine—sacred arithmetic for a creed invented an hour ago. They wore scavenged vestments over riot gear, lantern sigils painted on shields. Each squad carried a relic like a banner.
At a crossroads where four shrines had once coexisted in the delicate peace of neighbors, they erased three. A boy with a paint bucket climbed a ladder and slashed a white flame over every door, neat as an inspector. Those who stepped outside were made to kneel and recite Marius's new litany, a simple call-and-response that fit in the mouth like a coin: One flame / One crown / One prophet. A woman hesitated on the third line. An acolyte lifted a lantern with a shuttered hatch—the light that spilled out made the air hiss. Her hesitation ignited into a brief halo that scorched her hair. She recited perfectly after that, shaking.
On a tram platform, two old men played chess on a board scavenged from a burned café. Marius's patrol demanded the bishop. The old men refused, then compromised with the compromise of the frightened: they offered the knight. The patrol took both pieces and left a pamphlet heavy with certainty in their place. The pamphlet's corners were blessed with ash; the chessboard burned anyway.
In a market where the city's gods had once shared space politely—Lakshmi's garlands beside Saint Anthony's candles beside a bowl of river stones—Marius's herald climbed a crate and declared the stall "normalized." He held up a knife that sang when it tasted air, its hum rising in pitch as it crossed faces. The sound grew brightest over a teenage boy's breath; the herald smiled sorrow, then pressed the blade to the boy's shoulder. Light scorched a mark there shaped like a hatch over a flame. The boy's mother held his face and did not weep until the herald moved on.
A radio tower crackled into obedience. Someone clever in Marius's circle had found the right wires. The broadcast was a choir and a heartbeat, then the voice: "Do not fear the many names. Fear the many lies." The city bent its ear. In apartments where windows had been taped against the last war, people peeled the tape off and stuck on new, this time in the shape of a flame.
At a river shrine to White Buffalo Calf Woman, women had once come to lay out bread and whisper for peace. Marius's men arrived with a brass chalice looted from the sanctum and inverted the ritual. Bread became ash between fingers; the chalice, lifted high, poured a trickle of white fire that did not burn hands but burned decisions. "Drink," they commanded, "and forget your divided prayers." The water turned to something like milk in the cup and tasted of surrender.
Nakamura gritted his teeth through each scene, jaw a hinge about to fail. Twice he moved to intervene, twice the Seeker snagged his sleeve.
"You can shoot one zealot," the Seeker said, voice grated raw. "You'll make a martyr and buy us ninety seconds."
"I don't need ninety seconds," Nakamura said. "I need one to be human."
They compromised with the cowardice of survival. At a side street, they found a kneeling line of men with their hands out, palms up, waiting to be marked with ash. A boy—too small for the line, too stubborn for safety—had slipped free and was running. An acolyte raised the singing knife; Nakamura stepped between blade and boy as if stepping between raindrops. He did not raise his pistol. He looked at the acolyte with the furious, exhausted pity of a man who has lost arguments with history before.
"Wrong line," Nakamura said, and his voice carried the absolute authority of bureaucracy. "The child goes to the catechumens. Orders from the Basilica of Records."
The acolyte balked, knife's pitch sliding in confusion. Bureaucracy is one of the few spells zealots obey reflexively. "We don't report to—"
"Then report to your conscience," Nakamura snapped. "The Basilica sends spot checks." He leaned in, as if to share a secret. "They love catching errors."
The acolyte glanced around, suddenly aware of imagined supervisors. The knife lowered. "Be quick, then."
Nakamura walked the boy out by the scruff, murmuring nothing that sounded like comfort and everything that sounded like instruction. At the alley mouth, he put the boy behind a dumpster and said, "Run east until the chimneys end. Then keep running."
The boy's mouth worked. Words failed. He ran.
"Basilica of Records?" the Seeker asked, when they were moving again.
"I made it up," Nakamura said without pride. "But record-keeping is a god they all fear."
By the time dusk bled into a dull, stubborn twilight, Marius's sigil had spread across whole districts. Doors wore flames like talismans. Shrines without the mark had been seized or sealed. In one square, the cult had staged a public catechism: questions shouted from a balcony, answers roared back by a crowd whose unity was more terror than belief. An old man who answered off-cadence was given a second chance. When he failed again, the lantern light kissed his tongue and set it trembling until his words aligned.
A woman selling incense had hidden a small Amaterasu mirror under her stall. When an acolyte found it, he lifted it toward the sky. The mirror did what mirrors do: reflected light. But the sky had very little to give. The reflected dusk looked like a bruise that would never heal. The acolyte smashed the mirror and salted the shards, just to be safe. Salt hissed; the bruise held.
Coyote tracked them like a rumor. They saw him in the gloss of a car hood, in a puddle anxious to become a reflection, in the glint of a bottle rolling underfoot. "He's good," Coyote said conversationally as they ducked down another alley. "Your rival. He understands the first rule of jokes and empires: keep it simple and repeat it until it is true."
"I didn't laugh," the Seeker said.
"You don't have to," Coyote replied, and vanished into the waver of heat above a barrel fire.
⸻
That night, they hid in the carcass of a burned-out theatre. The ceiling had collapsed in a ragged oval that revealed a square of sickly sky. The stage was a blackened mouth. Seats held the shapes of ghosts impolitely absent.
Nakamura paced, furious. "You can't face him in public again. Every time you open your mouth, he twists it into his doctrine. You're his perfect foil."
The Seeker sat slumped, scar still glowing faintly beneath cloth. "He doesn't need me to speak. My silence is enough. My existence is enough."
"Then we erase you," Nakamura snapped. "Disappear again. Make him fight shadows."
The Seeker shook his head slowly. "Shadows don't disappear. They just shift. He'll use even that."
He thought of Xuemei—her sarcasm, her fragments of wisdom—and wondered if she still lived. He thought of the Lantern Keepers, split between preservation and purge, and realized Marius had found a simpler answer: burn everything but himself, and call it revelation.
Sleep came reluctantly, and with it a vision. The scar opened like an eye in his chest, looking outward, and saw Marius crowned in blood, speaking words that bent reality. The crowd bent with him, kneeling, chanting. Patrols painted flames over doors until the city looked like a field of controlled burns. In a school gymnasium pressed into service as a chapel, a dozen children were lined up for "baptism"—ash rubbed into foreheads in the shape of tiny hatches. The ash glowed faintly when they lied, and the adults cheered the honesty.
Above, the gods themselves seemed to pause, as though curious which prophet would define them. The Seeker felt the scaffolding again—those tense beams of meaning—and saw Marius hammer nails into them, not to fix but to claim.
He woke gasping.
Outside, the iron chimes of Marius's new cult rang through the city—steady, martial, inexorable. Each strike was another brick in his theocracy. Each echo another thread binding the faithful.
The Seeker pressed a hand to his scar, hating its heat, fearing its silence. He whispered into the dark: "You are not mine. And I am not his."
But the scar glowed anyway.