Solara's streets were flawless in a way that felt interesting, a statement rather than just good maintenance.
White cobblestones paved every road, cleaned each morning by workers in plain robes. The buildings were pale marble, their fronts carved with sun symbols and long passages of holy text. Fountains stood at every intersection, running with clear, cold water. The people walking the streets wore clean clothing and carried baskets full of fresh bread and ripe produce.
It was beautiful. Prosperous in a way that radiated outward from every surface and somewhere beneath Lucius's ribs, it made something in him burn.
'All of this here. All of this abundance and blessing, while people outside these walls had nothing. While villages starved and dried out and collapsed into dust. The sun God's chosen city, shining and well fed, while everywhere else beyond its walls, was left to rot.'
He locked the feeling down. He needed information before anything else. Irrational thinking would only lead to his death.
The caravan pulled into a warehouse district near the eastern market. Marcus counted out three silver coins and handed them over without much conversation, and Lucius slipped into the surrounding crowd before anyone thought to ask him more questions.
He found a quiet alley and ran Streetwise again.
[Streetwise (Passive) — Triggered]
[Environmental Analysis:]
• Safest areas: Market districts and temple squares (heavy guard presence deter trouble)
• Dangerous areas: Lower districts after dark, dockside storage areas
• Information sources: Taverns near Temple Square, market vendors, temple servants
• Target Location: Central Palace — HEAVILY FORTIFIED
— Triple-layered outer walls
— Blessed guard rotations every 4 hours
— Divine wards covering all entry points
— Aerial patrols (angels and blessed birds)
He unfolded the scrap of parchment Cophey had pressed into his hand weeks ago in Hancock.
The Hollow Lantern.
An inn somewhere in the lower districts. If the oracle had been right, then Seraphine was still there hiding and alive.
He had until nightfall to find her. After dark, the city shifted, curfews went up, patrols got doubled, and anyone unable to produce residency papers got picked up and held until morning.
Lucius moved through the streets at a steady pace, using Divine Sense to route himself around clusters of strong, blessed signatures.
The lower districts were a different city from the marble and fountains above. The buildings down here were older, built from plain stone rather than polished marble. The people here looked harder, slower to make eye contact, quicker to assess a stranger and decide whether he was worth worrying about or not.
He felt more at home immediately. 'Now this is the kind of feeling I like.'
The Hollow Lantern was pressed between a shuttered smithy and a sagging boarding house, its painted sign bleached nearly to nothing by years of sun and rain, its windows dark.
It looked like a place that had quietly decided to stop being noticed, but his appraisal skill told him it was more than it appeared to be.
[Appraisal activated!]
[Target: Building — The Hollow Lantern]
[Type: Inn / Safe House]
[Status: Operational — deliberately low visibility]
[Notable: Enchanted privacy wards on interior rooms; regular clientele consists of individuals avoiding temple notice]
He pushed through the door.
The interior was lit by a few scattered candles, just enough to see by. A handful of people sat at tables placed well apart from each other, keeping their drinks close and their voices lower. Behind the bar stood an old woman with grey hair cut short and eyes that had been quietly tracking him since the moment the door opened.
He casually crossed to the bar.
"A room for the night?" He asked, keeping it quiet.
The woman looked him over slowly. "We don't take temple people here."
"Then we're in agreement."
Without asking what he wanted, she poured him a cup of thin ale and set it in front of him. "That's five copper, and it comes with a meal."
Lucius put a silver coin on the bar. "I'm looking for someone. A woman to be particular, a former priestess that goes by the name Seraphine."
The old woman's hand kept moving, wiping down the bar surface, but the rhythm of it paused for just a moment. "I don't know anyone by that name."
'Secrecy. It is to be expected due to how things are run in this place.'
"She was thrown out for heresy. She keeps to herself. She has platinum blonde hair with red in it, silver eyes, and she's around this height." he indicated with one hand, just as Cophey explained it to him.
She looked at the silver coin and picked it up. She turned it over once and slid it into her apron pocket.
"She stays in room three, up the stairs. She doesn't like surprises, so knock before you open the door unless you want a blade in your side."
He thanked her and headed for the staircase.
***
The hallway upstairs was narrow enough that his shoulders nearly brushed both walls at once. He stopped at room three and knocked twice, but there was no response.
He knocked again, harder this time. "Seraphine. I'm here about the sun god."
Something moved inside the room. The sound of furniture scraping, like a chair being repositioned or something heavier being picked up and readied.
"Who are you?" The voice from behind the door was female, flat, and gave nothing away.
"Cophey sent me. The oracle operating out of Hancock. She said you could help me get inside the palace."
A pause stretched out long enough to feel deliberate.
"Why would I do that?"
"Because we want the same outcome. We want the gods to answer for what they've done."
Another long silence, then the door opened a crack. A single silver eye looked through the gap, moving over him with methodical intensity that felt less like being looked at and more like being measured.
[Divine Sense (Passive) — Detection!]
[Divine signature detected: Corrupted blessing — formerly holy, now heavily degraded]
[Target carries residual divine energy — previously blessed by the gods; that blessing has since decayed]
"You're carrying corruption," the voice said. "And a blessing at the same time. How does that happen?"
"It's a long story. Are you going to let me in, or should we keep doing this through the door?"
There was a slight frown on her face, and the door opened the rest of the way.
Seraphine stood in the opening wearing robes that had probably once been white and were now the grey of old dishwater, stained through and torn at the hem.
Her platinum blonde hair had streaks of dark red running through it like old wounds. Her silver eyes were laced through with hair like vines of faint gold light.
She looked like someone who had not slept properly in months, worn hollow by something she was still carrying, but the danger in her right hand was held with the kind of steady, practised grip that made it clear she knew exactly how and when to use it.
"You have two minutes," she said flatly. "To convince me not to use this."
Lucius stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind him. The room was small and empty with a bed, a table covered in dense handwritten notes, a diagram sketched, and re-sketched over each other.
"The sun god withdrew from this region when the drought hit," he said, skipping any introduction.
"Left thousands of people without aid, and they died for it. I want to make sure he doesn't get to do that again."
"He's barely seven years old, you know that. You're describing the murder of a child."
"I'm describing the execution of a god," Lucius corrected.
"The body he's wearing doesn't change what he is, or what he did, or how many people died because of it. The children of Fallen Crest Village didn't get to plead their case."
Something moved behind Seraphine's eyes, a slight recognition.
"You understand what follows if you actually pull this off, right? Heaven doesn't let something like that go unanswered. They will send everything they have after you for the rest of your life."
"I've already got heaven's hunters on me. I killed three of their scouting groups on the road here."
Her eyes shifted, and something clicked into place behind them.
"You. You're the one they've been tracking? The one the corruption trail belongs to. The said anomaly they've been trying to pin down, the one killing blessed warriors?."
"Every team they send adds to what I can do. I absorb them, their blessings, their skills, their powers. All of it becomes mine."
Seraphine moved slowly around him, her dagger still in hand, reading him from different angles. "Show me, don't just tell me."
Lucius raised his right hand and golden streaks of light gathered around his fingers, not flames, but clean divine energy, the same variety thatobed through the bodies of blessed warriors. The same kind that had no business being inside someone like him.
Her breath stopped for a moment. "You're genuinely doing it. You're wielding absorbed blessings!. That….that should be impossible!."
"And yet, I do it so casually." He let the light go out.
"So, are you helping me out, or do I have to figure out another route into the palace on my own?"
Seraphine stood still and looked at him for a long time. Then something in her face shifted and she let out a laugh, short and jagged, the sound of something that had been held tight for a long time finally releasing under too much pressure.
"They left us. Let everything I loved die. Branded me a heretic when I had the nerve to ask them why." She slid the dagger back into its sheath.
"If you're genuinely going to kill one of them, then I'm in."
She moved to the table and spread her papers out into a rough order, a hand drawn map of the palace, written schedules, diagrams marking ward positions throughout the complex.
"Prince Aurelius stays in the central tower," she said, tapping the map.
"Third floor, eastern wing. Twelve paladins are assigned to him at all times, rotating in pairs. In four days the city holds the festival of Radiant Dawn, the guards usually get redistributed to public crowd management. That's the window you're looking for."
Lucius leaned over the map, tracing the routes carefully. "What about the wards on the palace entrances?"
Seraphine reached into her robes and came back with a small vial of dark liquid. "Nullification serum. Brewed from corrupted divine essences."
"Apply it directly to a ward seal and the ward burns out, yoh get roughly thirty seconds before it reasserts itself. Long enough to move through if you're not hesitating."
"Where did you get it?"
"I made it using methods the temple taught me back when I was still one of theirs." The smile that crossed her face had no happiness anywhere in it.
"I always liked how that worked out."
Lucius straightened and looked at the map again, at the schedules, then at the woman on the other side of the table who had just agreed to help him do what he had crossed two hundred kilometres to do.
He had four days. Four days to work through every detail, to prepare for every point of failure, and to get himself ready for the moment that had been building since the day he stood in Fallen Crest Village and understood what had been taken from the people there.
Prince Aurelius. The Sun God, born small and new into a child's body, carrying no memory of the drought and no knowledge of the corpses it had left behind.
But Lucius remembered every one of them.
And in four days, the god who had turned his back on them was going to find out that someone else had been keeping count.