The Grieving Coast did not have ports. It had scars.
What passed for a harbor was a deep, jagged inlet where the oily black sea smashed against weeping cliffs. Fortitude's End, the fortress that served as the Aegis Sanctum's spearhead into the Unexplored Zone, was carved directly into this unforgiving rock.
It was a monument of grim necessity. A single, massive wall, hundreds of feet high and stained black by the weeping stone and the ichor of a thousand battles, cordoned off the fortress from the desolate plains beyond. Below this bulwark, huddled in its shadow, were three small, perpetually grey settlements that existed for the sole purpose of supplying the knights and priests within.
As they disembarked The Iron Gull, Kaelen's heavy boots were the first to strike the stone quay. "Breathe it in, squires," he grunted, his voice a low rumble. "This is the sourest Aether in the world. Get used to it."
Asterion did. The air was thin, cold, and carried a psychic "taste" like spoiled milk. It felt fundamentally wrong.
Their first weeks were a disorienting blur of integration. Fortitude's End was not the Sanctum. It was a high-functioning military machine. The "knights" here were not the wandering patrols of the heartlands; they were organized into legions, and their eyes were hard. And the priests... the priests were terrifying.
On their third day, Kaelen took them to the central courtyard to observe the "Changing of the Spear." A legion of Holy Knights, clad in heavy, soot-grey plate, was returning from a two-week patrol. At their head was not a knight, but a man in priest's robes. He looked to be in his late twenties—the same as Asterion's 22-year-old mind—but his file, which Asterion had memorized, listed his age as seventy-four.
A Tainted "Shrieker" broke from the plains, a remnant of a larger pack. It moved like a blur of mismatched limbs. Before the knights could even form a line, the Priest acted. He didn't chant or pray. He slammed his armored boot into the stone, and the ground erupted. A spear of pure, white Faith—so bright it hurt to look at—lanced from his outstretched hand and vaporized the creature.
Asterion and Elian stood motionless, analyzing.
"Forget your Sanctum-born ideas," Kaelen said, not looking at them. "You think a priest is a man of books? You think Father Gregor is the norm?"
He jabbed a thumb at the powerful priest. "To even be a priest, one must first complete the full knight training regiment. They must awaken their spiritual attribute and master it. Then they must pass the Church's trials. They are trained from infancy, same as us. They are warriors first, healers second. That man is a High Priest. He has not only mastered his attribute, he has broken his spiritual barrier, unlocking a new tier. He could melt half this legion if he wished."
This, Asterion realized, was the truth of the Church's power. It was a perfectly integrated system of military might.
Kaelen drilled the new hierarchy into them as they walked the fortress perimeter.
* Priests: The base. Trained in the knight's "Inner Crucible" and their own spiritual attribute. They run the churches in the settlements, acting as spiritual and military anchors.
* High Priests: The commanders, like the man they just saw.
* Arch Priests: The true power. They command entire legions and, as Kaelen put it, "can level cities." They answer only to the Pope, the strongest of them all.
The Knights had a parallel path.
* Wandering Knights: The ones they knew. Still slowly refining their Faith into liquid, bit by bit, over years of patrol.
* Holy Knights: The legionnaires. The "Inner Crucible" is complete. They form the crusades.
* Great Knights: Like Kaelen. Rare. They lead squads of hundreds and are trusted to take squires, cultivating them into the next generation of leaders.
* Holy Swords: "The Pope's own hand," Kaelen had grunted, his tone bordering on reverence. "Only twenty-six exist. They are the peak. They have become so powerful they have forcibly created their own spiritual attribute. A full-power strike from one can change the terrain for miles."
Kaelen was a Great Knight. The man who had trained them, who had seemed merely like a brutal taskmaster, was one of the rarest, most powerful assets of the Church. It re-contextualized every lesson, every blow they had ever taken from him.
"The next Tainted Wave is predicted in four years," Kaelen told them, his voice echoing in the stone armory. "That is when the Great Ones' 'Whisper' is strongest. Until then, the 'chatter'—the hordes of weak Echoes—is constant. Your training is over. Your experience begins now."
Their first mission was a simple "culling." A horde of Grave-kin had been spotted moving toward one of the farming settlements.
The three of them stood on a rocky hill overlooking a grey valley. Below, a hundred Tainted milled aimlessly. They were the weakest of the "Echoes," bodies broken and animated by the barest fragment of the Great Ones' will.
"You know the method. You know the foe," Kaelen said. "Go."
For the ten-year-old bodies of Asterion and Elian, it should have been suicide.
It was a slaughter.
Their bodies, forged by the "Inner Crucible" for two years, were inhumanly dense. They moved with a weight and speed that no child should possess. Asterion, his 29-year-old mind guiding his blade, was a creature of perfect, cold analysis. His Curse was his shield; his rage was his fuel. He didn't fight; he dissected, his sword severing limbs and heads with an efficiency that was terrifying to behold.
Elian was worse. He was a "void" of pure, lethal grace. Where Asterion was a storm of focused hate, Elian was the cold vacuum that followed. He killed without a flicker of emotion, his blade a silver whisper that left only silence in its wake.
In ten minutes, the horde was gone.
"Sloppy," Kaelen's voice boomed.
A shadow detached itself from the rocks. It was a "Formed" Tainted, a Greater Husk. It was twelve feet tall, a cancerous mass of black-plated bone and twitching muscle, its human origin long since erased. It swatted Asterion aside, sending him skidding twenty feet, his dense body barely absorbing the impact.
Elian's blade glanced off its arm with a sound like striking an anvil.
Kaelen stepped between them. He didn't draw his greatsword. He simply raised a gauntleted fist.
Asterion felt it before he saw it. The pressure.
"Watch closely, squires," Kaelen said.
His liquid Faith flared, but it wasn't like theirs. Theirs was water—dense, powerful, and flowing. Kaelen's Faith was... viscous. It was like mercury, like semi-molten steel. It was so dense it seemed to suck in the light around it.
He punched.
There was no sound, just a compression of the air. The punch connected with the monster's chest. For a second, nothing happened.
Then the Tainted imploded.
The creature's entire torso collapsed inward, disintegrating into black dust and ichor. The shockwave of the blow cracked the very stone they stood on, sending fissures spreading ten yards in every direction.
Kaelen flexed his gauntlet, the residual power fading. He turned to his two wide-eyed, silent squires.
"Your 'Inner Crucible' is complete," he said on the walk back. "Your Faith is liquid. It is the start. It makes you an anchor. It makes you strong. What I have is the next step."
"It's denser," Asterion stated, his mind racing, replaying that moment of impact over and over.
"Aye." Kaelen nodded. "I have begun to condense the liquid. To forge it, compress it, fold it back on itself until it becomes a 'Singularity' of Faith in my Font. It is almost solid. That is the power of a Great Knight."
Elian spoke, his voice quiet. "Teach us."
Kaelen stopped and fixed them both with a stare that rooted them to the spot.
"No."
His voice was flat and absolute. "You will not attempt this. Your bodies are forged, but your minds are not. You are ten. The mental pressure of containing a Singularity, even for a second, would annihilate your consciousness. Your anchors are strong, but they are not that strong. I will teach you when you are twenty, when your minds have matured enough to handle the strain. Not before."
"Until then," he continued, gesturing to the black wall of the fortress, "you will fight. You will grow. And you will wait."
The next four years were a blur of steel, blood, and the sour taste of the Grieving Coast.
Asterion and Elian became legends in the fortress. The "Iron Bastion's Monsters." Two fourteen-year-old boys who fought with the skill, and ruthlessness, of hundred-year-old veterans. They went on countless patrols, culling hordes, fighting alongside Holy Knights, and learning from the warrior-priests.
Their power grew tremendously.
But a divergence had begun.
Asterion, with his 33-year-old mind and Perfect Memory, had mastered the liquid Faith. His control was absolute. His techniques were flawless. He was, by every metric, at the absolute peak of what a Holy Knight could be.
And he was stuck.
He had hit a barrier. He could not make his Faith denser. No matter how much he analyzed, how much he meditated, how much he "used the hate," the final compression eluded him. His analytical mind, his Curse, the very trauma that forged him... something was preventing him from taking the next step.
Elian was not stuck.
Elian, the void, the boy of perfect, terrifying calm, was progressing. His Faith was not solid like Kaelen's, but it was no longer water. It was becoming viscous. It was thicker than Asterion's. Where Asterion had hit a wall, Elian had found a path.
Asterion stood on the black wall, now fourteen. His mind felt ancient. He looked out over the weeping plains, at the Unexplored Zone, his frustration a cold, familiar knot in his chest.
Kaelen's heavy boots stopped beside him. "You feel it, don't you? The barrier."
Asterion didn't look at him. "Yes."
"Good," Kaelen said. "It means you're ready to learn why you can't pass it."
Before he could elaborate, a sound split the air. It was not a trumpet. It was a deep, resonating groan that came from the fortress itself—a horn carved from the bone of some long-dead leviathan.
It was the sound of the Wave.
Kaelen looked out at the horizon, which was darkening not with clouds, but with a moving mass of corruption.
"The four-year wait is over, squires," he said, a grim smile touching his lips. "The Welcoming party is coming to the Grieving Coast."