By the time smoke began to rise from more than chimneys, they were already late.
Azaroth smelled it first. Not hearth smoke. Not baking bread. Something harsher. Pitch. Oil. Wood burning the way it does when it was not meant to be burned yet.
He went very still.
Lumiel stepped out of the cottage, drying her hands on a cloth. Her eyes followed his gaze up the slope, through the trees, toward the direction of the village.
Above the roofs, beyond the distant line of the chapel's steeple, another kind of smoke climbed.
"Stay here," Azaroth said.
Lumiel was already shaking her head. "If there's a fire—"
"The fire is here," he said.
It took her a moment to understand.
Then she heard it: not crackling flames, but voices carried by cold air. Hundreds of boots crunching through snow. The low murmur of many bodies moving with one will.
And beneath it, the bell.
Not a slow, mourning toll. A frantic, repeating peal. An alarm dressed as prayer.
"Basement." Azaroth said.
Eryndor looked from one parent to the other. "What's happening?"
Azaroth knelt in front of him and put both hands on his shoulders.
"Listen," he said. "They are afraid. The priest has given their fear a name. That name is us."
"I'll explain," Lumiel said, dropping to her knees beside them, fingers sliding into Eryndor's hair. "But not now. Now you must hide."
"I can help," Eryndor said. "I can fight."
"Exactly," Azaroth said. "That's why they're coming."
Lumiel cupped his face. "If they find you, you are small. You are tired. You are harmless. Repeat it!"
"I'm small, I'm tired, I'm—"
"Good. Basement. Now."
His jaw trembled, but he obeyed. He ran inside, pulled aside the woven mat, and slipped through the trapdoor into the dark below. The air there tasted of earth and stored vegetables and the faint tang of old iron.
Above, the voices grew Louder. Closer. Angrier.
Azaroth and Lumiel exchanged a look.
"Together." Lumiel said.
"Always." he replied.
They came like a flood.
Torches first, bright and wild between the trees. Then bodies behind them—a wave of wool and leather and rusted mail. Farmers with pitchforks. Hunters with spears. Three men from the lord's road watch, armor misfitting but serviceable. Half a dozen brown-robed brothers from the chapel, each carrying twisted lengths of chain, symbols etched sharp into the metal.
At their head walked the priest, cloak dusted with snow, steps steady.
"Azaroth!" he called before they even reached the clearing. "Lumiel! Come out."
He sounded almost sad.
Azaroth stepped forward and opened the door himself.
"I'm here." he said.
Lumiel stood at his side. They looked utterly human—no horns, no wings, no halo. Just a man with a sword and a woman with her hands empty.
Some of the villagers faltered at that. Hatred burns brightest in the imagination; reality has a way of dimming it. But fear is harder to shake.
"You brought this," someone shouted from the back. "Ever since your boy—"
"Ever since our God ignored us." another spat, until someone else listened.
"Quiet," the priest said. His voice didn't rise. "We speak plain. The dead do not stay where God put them. Sickness licks at our doors. Whatever balance there was has been broken."
His gaze rested on Lumiel, then on Azaroth.
"You are not what you pretend to be. We gave you bread. Shelter. Trade. You answered by reaching into the place where only God may reach."
"Your child would have drowned!" Lumiel said. Her voice shook, not with fear, but with disbelief that the world was this shape. "Weonly..."
"You meddled." he said. "You changed the weight of the scales."
Azaroth's jaw tightened. "Your scales were already crooked," he said. "We didn't tip them. We just kept a child from being crushed under them."
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Agreement. Anger. Doubt. Desperation.
"Please..." Lumiel said. "Let us leave. We will go. You will never see us again."
"And the weight?" the priest asked. "The sickness? The dead already in the ground?"
"You blame a boy for disease?" Azaroth asked. "For winter? For your own fear?"
"I blame you," the priest said softly, and in that softness was the worst of it. "You who bring power without law. You who unmake the order that keeps us crawling through the dirt instead of falling into the sky."
He lifted a hand.
"Bind them."
The first wave moved hesitantly, then with growing surety. Farmers screamed wordless things to fill their own terror. Hunters set their jaws and went where the priest pointed. The road watch advanced with practiced caution; chains clinked as the brothers spread out, a low iron whisper.
Azaroth stepped forward, blade sinking into the snow tip-first.
"Last chance." he said, voice steady. "Go home."
A young man—no older than twenty, eyes red-rimmed—lunged with a spear, grief turning his movement wild.
Azaroth slipped aside and twisted the shaft from his grip, then brought the handle of his own sword around, smashing it into the boy's chest hard enough to drop him into the snow.
He did not kill him. He could have. It would have been kinder.
The others took that as the true beginning.
They surged.
The clearing exploded into chaos.
Azaroth moved like he had not since the last war—since the last time the sky burned and gods screamed.
He was limited now, sealed, mortal. But habit and will are also power.
He shifted weight, redirected blows, broke wrists, shattered spear shafts, used the handle of his sword more than its edge until someone's blade slid too close to Lumiel and one of the brothers swung a chain at her face.
Lumiel stepped into the strike, hand cutting through an invisible pattern in the air. The chain hit an unseen surface and froze. Frost crawled from link to link, turning iron white, then brittle. With a flick, she shattered it; fragments rained to the ground like dull, broken stars.
She whispered a word and heat bent away from her. Torches flickered back, flames curving unnaturally, refusing to catch the thatch of the cottage roof. Another word and ice slicked the ground beneath three men, sending them sprawling.
"Stop this!" she cried. "We don't want to hurt you!"
"Too late for that," someone snarled, blood running from a split lip. "You already have."
A hunter thrust at Azaroth's side with a boar spear, aiming for his ribs. Azaroth caught the haft with his palm; the wood should have splintered his fingers, but he channeled the force through his arm and down into the earth, releasing it like lightning into the ground. The spear shook apart; the hunter's hands went numb.
He could feel something inside him wanting to rise—old power, black and hot. It pressed against the seal like a wolf at a door. For a heartbeat, his vision tinged red.
No, he thought. Not that. Not here. Not in front of him.
He fought with human strength and disciplined violence instead, and the snow drank deeply of it.
They did not kill quickly. They killed incidentally.
A man swung for Azaroth and took Lumiel's shoulder when she moved to intercept. She hissed, heat and cold flaring in the same breath. She grabbed his wrist, twisted, and a crack sounded. He dropped to the ground howling.
A brother lunged with a hook, aiming to catch Azaroth's ankle. Lumiel's hand snapped out; light—thin and fierce—flashed from her fingertips and seared a line across his forearm. He dropped the chain, clutching his arm as skin smoked faintly.
For every one they put down alive, another came with less hesitation. Fear had hardened into righteousness.
Torches finally found dry wood. Flame crawled onto the roof, licking up the thatch, trying to spread.
Lumiel cursed in a language the trees half remembered and flung both hands upward. A shield of pale gold blossomed over the roof, turning fire aside, holding it like rain on oiled cloth. It trembled under the strain.
Azaroth felt the pull of it—how much it cost her to maintain and fight at once.
"Drop it," he shouted. "We can't protect everything."
"That's our home!" she snapped.
"That's wood!" he roared. "He is inside!"
She hesitated, then let it thin, redirecting most of her focus to the ground.
Chains struck again.
These were different—etched deeper, soaked in oil and prayer and fear. One landed across Azaroth's chest; its symbols burned against his shirt, hot even through the cloth. Pain flared, not just in flesh, but in something deeper.
He staggered.
Another chain whipped around his leg. A hook bit into his shoulder. Weight and bodies dragged at him.
Lumiel surged toward him, fury at last burning through her restraint. For that moment, she looked like what she had once been—no wings, no halo, but a brightness in her eyes that made the nearest men flinch.
She reached for the chain at his chest, fingers already glowing—
—and three brothers threw their own chains at her.
They snared her wrists, her waist, her thighs. The etched iron bit, and her light flickered, dimming as if pulled inward.
She gasped, dropping to one knee, hands pinned wide.
"Now!" barked a voice.
From behind the crush, the cutter emerged. His apron was stained from a day that had nothing to do with this fight; his eyes were the eyes of someone who had already killed once and was trying to convince himself this was the same.
He did not go for Azaroth. He did not go for Lumiel.
He went for the trapdoor.
Eryndor heard the footsteps above—the scrape of boots on wood, the shifting weight. He knelt in the dark, hugging his arms around himself, trying to breathe small. Dust tickled his nose. The faint light from the cracks trembled.
The trap lifted.
Snow glare stung his eyes. A shadow filled the opening.
"There you are," the cutter said, almost gently.
Eryndor's heart hammered. "Please," he whispered. "Don't hurt them."
The cutter swallowed. "It's you they're afraid of, boy."
"I only helped," Eryndor said.
"I know," the man replied, and the worst part was that he sounded like he did know. "That's the problem."
He reached down and grabbed Eryndor's arm, hauling him up. The world exploded into noise and firelight and shouting.
"Don't!" Lumiel screamed, struggling against her chains. "Please, he's just—"
"Just what?" the priest called, voice frayed. "Just a child? Children die all the time. That is the rule. He broke it."
Azaroth surged up, chains grating, blood running from cuts he barely felt. He dragged three men with him, teeth bared.
"Touch him!" he snarled, "and I will—"
The priest made a sign with his hand. The brothers yanked their chains tight. Azaroth's flesh and the old power inside him howled, colliding with the seal. For a moment he thought his own bones would snap.
He dropped back to one knee, vision swimming.
The cutter moved behind Eryndor.
"I'm sorry." he said again. "I hope… if there is a God here… he understands better than we do."
He lifted the iron spike—thin, cruel, honed for piercing bones and panels and skulls. He set its tip at the base of Eryndor's skull, just above the nape.
Eryndor's eyes found his mother's. They were very wide. Very red. Very alive.
"Mother—" he started.
The cutter drove the spike in.
The sound was small. A dull, wrong click. Eryndor's body twitched once, then went slack.
Very little blood. Just a slow, dark trickle at the nape, soaking into the collar of his shirt.
For an instant, the world went utterly still.
Lumiel broke first.
Her scream was not like anything human. It ripped up from somewhere that had existed long before this world had been named. Chains cracked, light exploded around her hands, and for a heartbeat all the snow in the clearing turned to steam.
Azaroth tore three links from his chest chain and stood in a single, brutal motion. The seal inside him screamed, shattering in places.
He could have reached the cutter then. He could have reached the priest. He could have reached everyone.
But ten men were already on him. Hooks dug into shoulders, legs, ribs. Chains wrapped his throat. Iron bit not just flesh but soul.
He fell again, this time unable to rise.
Lumiel stumbled, blinded by grief, and one of the brothers swung a weighted chain into her temple. Pain shattered her concentration. Her knees hit the snow.
The priest watched, chest rising and falling too fast.
"Take the child," he said, voice thin. "Before what's left of them remembers what it used to be."
They wrapped Eryndor's body in linen—carefully, reverently, as if some part of them still believed they were doing a holy thing. They hauled him into the wagon amidst the groans of the wounded and the silence of the dead.
They did not bother finishing Lumiel and Azaroth cleanly. Chains and blows and fire did the work clumsily instead.
The cottage burned slow and low, smoke hugging the snow.
By the time the wagon reached the village, eighty of those who had marched up that hill would never walk back down again.
The survivors would call it righteousness. They had to. The alternative was unbearable.
The crypt beneath the chapel did not care about any of that.
It had no windows. No view of burning cottages or bent-backed men digging emergency graves. No sound of children crying into their mothers' skirts.
It had only stone and dark and iron.
Lanterns cast yellow pools along the carved walls, making the saints in relief look like they were sweating. The air smelled of lime, damp, and old incense.
They laid Eryndor on a slab of slate in the center of the room, under a ring of iron braziers. The linen around his head was stained a small, cruel circle of brown.
The priest stared for a long time before moving.
"Remove the cloth." he said at last.
The cutter obeyed, unwinding the wrapping from the boy's pale face. Eryndor looked peaceful in the way only the dead do: utterly still, utterly wrong.
The iron spike remained lodged at the base of his skull.
The scholar from the keep arrived then, boots echoing on the stairs. His cloak was dusted with snow; his ink-stained fingers clutched a leather-bound journal.
"So," he said, eyes bright. "This is the one."
"This is a child," the priest said without looking at him.
The scholar made a noncommittal noise. "Child, anomaly, subject. We will see which word remains."
He set his things on a nearby table and opened his ink pot.
"State your observation," he said to the room, as if this were a lecture and not a crypt.
"Boy," the cutter muttered. "Still. Cold. Spike in his head."
The priest pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose.
The scholar sighed. "Very well. Subject: male, apparent age between 5 and 7 years. Cause of death: cranial penetration via iron implement. Witness accounts: multiple preceding resuscitations without external aid. Objective: investigate the revival the subject caused in another person."
"Say 'miracle' if you want," the priest said. "Say 'abomination.' But stop pretending this is carpentry."
"We are building something," the scholar murmured. "We simply don't yet know what it is."
He nodded to the cutter. "Remove the implement."
The cutter swallowed, stepped close, and wrapped his fingers around the bone handle of the spike. It was slick with dried blood; his grip slipped twice before he cursed under his breath and adjusted.
He pulled.
The spike slid out with a wet, sucking sound. A thin line of darkness welled up, then stopped.
Eryndor did not move.
No one breathed.
The braziers hissed softly. Somewhere higher up in the church, a choir of women began a low hymn, unaware of what was happening beneath their feet.
The scholar leaned closer, eyes narrowed. "No reaction," he said. "No breath. No muscular response."
The priest stepped forward. His hand shook as he reached out and rested two fingers against Eryndor's brow.
"If there is light in you," he whispered, barely more than breath, "may it find its way."
He did not expect an answer.
He got one.
It was small. Almost nothing. A shallow, stuttering inhale.
Then another.
Then Eryndor's chest rose in a smoother arc and fell again, as if his lungs had just remembered what they were for.
The cutter flinched backward so violently he knocked into a brazier. Hot coals spilled; a brother cursed and kicked them aside, boots scuffing the stone.
The scholar froze.
"Did you see—" he started.
"Of course I saw." the priest snapped, voice cracking. "I'm not blind."
Eryndor's eyes flickered beneath his lids, then opened.
They were not blazing or glowing. They were simply red. Deep, clear, and full of bewilderment that cut through the room more sharply than any knife.
He looked… tired. Confused. Alive.
His gaze roved over the ceiling, then the lanterns, then the faces staring down at him. He swallowed once, throat working.
"Where…" His voice rasped. "Where are my mother and father?"
No one spoke.
The scholar found his voice first. "He's conscious. Memory intact, at least partially. This—this is—"
"Chain him," the priest said.
The scholar blinked. "Surely we could—"
"Chain him," the priest repeated, louder. "You saw the storm this brought to our door. You saw how many we buried today. You think this will calm the fear out there, or feed it?"
The scholar pressed his lips together and stepped back.
The brothers moved forward, hands already reaching for iron.
Eryndor flinched as the first cold ring closed around his wrist. He tried to pull away, but his muscles felt wrong—sluggish, like he had slept too long. The second cuff snapped shut on his other wrist. Then his ankles.
Chains dragged across the stone, links clinking, heavy as judgment.
"Stop," he said, voice rising. "Why are you—? I didn't—"
A collar settled about his throat. A broad chain lay across his chest, pinning him to the slab, etched with prayers small enough to look like scratches until one leaned close.
"We have to understand," the scholar was saying, more to himself than anyone else. "If this can be taught, controlled—"
"He is not a tool," the priest said, though he didn't stop them. "He is—"
"Dangerous," one of the brothers whispered. "Father, you saw how he came back. No priest, no rite. Just breath. Like he reached up and grabbed life for himself."
Eryndor's fingers curled into fists as far as the cuffs allowed.
The iron above his heart vibrated faintly.
"Please..." he said. "Just tell me—where are they? My mother. My father."
The priest looked at him, and for a moment he was not a shepherd of souls, not a voice of God, not a leader of frightened men.
He was simply a man who had helped burn a house with two people inside.
"They're gone." he said quietly.
It landed without drama. No thunder. No tremor. Just a piece of truth placed on the table.
Something in Eryndor went very still.
He stopped struggling. Stopped asking. He lay there, feeling the weight of metal on his limbs, the bite of the etched prayers on his skin, the way each breath now came with a faint ache at the back of his skull.
The scholar cleared his throat.
"We'll need to test limits," he said. "How much damage he can take. How fast he recovers. Whether he can… come back… more than once."
"More than once." the priest repeated, as if tasting poison.
If Azaroth had been there, he might have ripped the scholar's head from his shoulders. If Lumiel had been there, she might have burned that place to glass.
They were not there.
Only Eryndor was. Pinned like an insect, breathing quietly.
The cutter stood at the edge of the lantern light, hands hanging at his sides.
"I drove the spike through his head," he murmured to no one in particular. "I felt the bone give. He shouldn't…"
He trailed off.
Eryndor turned his head, the movement slow, dragging against the stone. His eyes met the cutter's.
For a heartbeat, neither looked away.
"I remember you." Eryndor said softly.
The man swallowed.
"So do I." he whispered.
Iron creaked as Eryndor's fists tightened once more.
"I will remember all of you." he said. His voice held no threat. No heat. It was worse that way.
The priest shivered.
"Add more chains." he said abruptly. "Elbows. Knees. If his strength grows, they may not be enough as they are."
Metal clanked. More rings snapped shut. Shorter chains pulled limbs tighter to the stone. Eryndor's movement narrowed to tiny increments—breath, eyelids, fingertips flexing against cold iron.
Lantern light swayed. Above, inside the chapel, the bell gave a single, long toll for the dead of the day.
Down below, no one prayed.
The scholar dipped his quill, ink pooling at the tip.
"Observation," he muttered as he wrote. "Subject exhibits post-mortem revival upon removal of foreign object. Consciousness preserved. Potential for repeat…"
His voice faded into scratching sounds.
The priest gripped his rosary so tightly the beads left indentations in his palm.
The cutter stared at his empty hands.
Eryndor stared at the ceiling.
He did not speak again. He did not cry. He did not sleep.