They burned the monastery twice: once with fire, once with prayer.
Kael felt both before he saw the ruins. Heat lay in the stone like a fever that never cooled, and the air tasted of old incense turned bitter. The Mark beneath his skin prickled, tasting oaths broken and remade over the same ground.
Serah moved at his shoulder, cloak drawn tight against the dawn chill. "If the Inquisition is here—"
"They are," Kael said quietly. "They left a watcher."
He pointed. On the fractured arch that had once led into the cloister, a figure knelt with hands bound in iron, head bowed. A prisoner. No—bait. The sigils carved into the arch shimmered with white fire, a lattice meant to snare shadows.
"That's Voidsteel," Serah whispered. "If we break it—"
"It will scream," Kael finished.
They didn't have time for subtlety. The Stones of Veyra had led them here with their litany of dead names, and beneath the monastery the Rift tugged like tide. Somewhere in the cellars, something remembered Kael's blood and called to it.
He stepped into the broken nave. Light fell in shattered panes through the collapsed roof, painting the floor in fractured saints. He felt the watcher's eyes on him before the man looked up. Not a prisoner, then. An Inquisitor, stripped of his white tabard, penitent robes hanging in tatters, iron binding his wrists as if he had submitted to his own chains.
"Shadowborn," the man said, voice raw. "I have a message."
Serah's hand went to her knife. Kael lifted a palm. "From whom?"
"The Prelate of Embers." He smiled, and Kael hated how young he was. "He says: 'You are an answer to a question we should not have asked.' He says: 'Come and be forgiven.'"
The Mark coiled coldly. Forgiveness, from those who had carved the world to fit their fear.
Kael stepped closer. The Voidsteel sigils hummed. "And you? Do you believe we can be forgiven?"
The young man swallowed. "I believe I cannot." His eyes flicked to Serah, then back to Kael. "But I can choose what I die for."
Before Kael could move, the Inquisitor threw himself forward, letting the iron bite deeper. The sigils flared, white fire climbing his arms, and the scream that tore loose wasn't human. It was the trap calling to its creators, a flare in the aether.
"Down!" Kael grabbed Serah and pulled her behind a fallen column as a circle of light slammed into the nave, resolving into armored figures. Eight. Ten. The Prelate's hounds.
The penitent sagged, smoke rising from his skin. He met Kael's eyes and mouthed a single word: Run.
Kael did not run.
Shadows burst from him like crows from a burning field. They tore across the nave, swallowed light, turned the sigils' geometry inside out. The nearest Inquisitor's white fire guttered, coughing ash.
Serah moved as if the world owed her a path. She cut low, fast, precise, her blade drinking the gaps the shadows made. An Inquisitor fell, gurgling.
The Prelate's voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once. "Prodigy," it murmured. "Or calamity."
Kael laughed, a sound he did not recognize. "Both."
He pulled. The Mark bent the world, and the cracked floor gave, dropping into a dark stairwell that exhaled a cold older than the monastery. The Rift breathed there. It smelled like secrets and stars.
"Go!" Serah shouted.
They went. Down into the dark, the Inquisition's light spitting and chasing, the sound of armored boots like hail above. The penitent's ruined breathing faded.
At the last step, Kael looked back, just once. The nave was a wound of fire and shadow. The young Inquisitor looked small within it, yet his eyes held something like peace.
Kael knew then the shape of the oath he would make in the dark.
He would not be forgiven. He would not ask. But he would choose what this darkness in him served.
Below, something vast woke and smiled toward him through the stone.
"Welcome home," it said. And the stair went black.