The Purge Pit smelled like the inside of a decision no one wanted to make.
Han had spent three years learning its layers. The top note was always the alchemical brine—sharp, medicinal, the kind of clean that existed specifically to suggest the absence of something worse. Beneath that: charred bone from the reduction furnace in the eastern alcove, where material deemed theologically hazardous was rendered into ash and the ash was sealed in lead-lined boxes that Han had never seen anyone collect. And beneath that, the base note, the one that no solution could touch—the smell of bodies that had held enormous power and were now holding nothing at all.
It was a smell like extinguished fire. Like a room where something had been, recently, and wasn't anymore.
Han worked without hurrying. Hurry was for men who believed someone was watching. In three years below the Cathedral, he had established with clinical precision that no one watched the Purge Pit with any genuine attention. The Purifiers who delivered the bodies wanted to leave quickly. The Executors who occasionally inspected wanted to leave even faster. The work itself—the cleaning, the preserving, the careful documentation of wounds that the Church's records would later describe in terms bearing no resemblance to what Han's own eyes recorded—this work was assigned to people the Cathedral had evaluated as beneath noticing.
Han had been evaluated correctly, in every way that mattered.
He pulled back the canvas.
He had expected the Demon Duke to look like the tapestries.
The Cathedral's weavers had spent sixty years perfecting Asmodai's image: towering, burning, a figure whose very silhouette communicated the specific flavor of existential threat that kept congregations grateful and tithes consistent. Han had grown up with those tapestries. Every orphan processed through the Church's care facilities had grown up with them.
What lay on the stone table was a man.
Large—Han extended the table's lower section to accommodate the height. Skin carrying the deep, over-worked pigmentation of someone who had channeled Authority well past the body's designed tolerances for decades. Old scars laminated over newer ones, a geological record of a life that had never been careful about its own continuation.
His face was tired.
Not monstrous. Not burning. The face of someone who had understood something, toward the end, and found the understanding more exhausting than the fighting.
His hands had been folded across his chest.
Han noted this without letting himself think about it. Folded hands meant someone had done the folding. Someone had stood over this body after it stopped being a threat and made a choice about how it should be positioned. That choice was data. Han filed it and reached for his tools.
The wound in the center of the chest stopped him.
Circular, deep—the signature geometry of a Holy Light strike channeled to lethal density. Han had documented seventeen of these over three years. He knew the type precisely. But the edges of this one were wrong. They were dark in a way that wasn't bruising, wasn't necrotic spread, wasn't any category he had a word for. A darkness that moved in the periphery of his attention and became still when he looked directly at it.
He reached for the thoracic instruments.
His hand drifted. Made contact with the Demon Duke's heart.
It wasn't pain.
The word he would have needed didn't exist in any language the Church had taught him. Pain was the body's alarm system—a signal transmitted from wound site to mind, a message that said this is damage, correct course. What entered through his palm sent no such message. It wasn't corrective. It wasn't a warning. It was an arrival—vast, cold, and absolutely certain of its destination, traveling up his arm with the specific inevitability of water finding the lowest point in a sealed room.
His vision disappeared.
In its place: memory. Not his.
A boy in a mountain fortress, seven years old, learning that the people who are supposed to protect you have a capacity for betrayal that scales directly with how much they fear what you're becoming. The boy noted this without weeping. He filed it. He decided, with the calm that sometimes lives in the eye of early childhood trauma, to become something that didn't need protecting.
The boy became a young man standing before a court. Han watched through borrowed eyes as the young man scanned the faces of the judges and identified, with the precision of someone who has learned to read rooms, the exact moment when each face stopped processing him as a person and started processing him as a predetermined outcome. That moment had come early—before the first witness had finished speaking. The young man had noted it without surprise.
The young man became a man standing at the edge of a city he had not burned.
He had, in fact, spent four years preventing it from burning—had rerouted supply chains, had negotiated between factions whose hatred of each other was older than anyone present, had lost more sleep over the city's continued existence than any of its citizens would ever know. He watched the Church's heralds arrive in the valley below and begin their work: the careful arrangement of evidence, the selection of witnesses, the construction of a narrative that had been architecturally complete before he had ever set foot in the region.
He was the villain they had needed.
He had simply been standing in the correct location.
The memory cracked and dissolved. In the void it left behind, something else moved in. Not a memory. Not a thought. A weight—the distilled essence of every room Asmodai had walked into for sixty years and caused the air pressure to change. Every moment when the space around him had reorganized itself in acknowledgment of what he was. Every instance of a man twice his size taking an involuntary step backward and not being able to explain why.
It recognized the shape of Han's body.
It began learning his dimensions.
The darkness reached his chest. His heartbeat did not accelerate. It deepened—each pulse deliberate, authoritative, carrying something new through his blood that catalogued his infrastructure and found it acceptable. Found it, in fact, promising.
Han became aware that he was standing upright with the preservative brush on the floor at his feet. He did not remember the moment of dropping it. He picked it up.
"You."
The voice came from the stairwell. Heavy boots on stone—the deliberate cadence of someone who had learned to walk in a way that announced their arrival. Han turned.
Executor Silas was broad across the shoulders in the way that Holy Light cultivation sometimes produced—not the breadth of physical training but of internal pressure expressing itself outward, the body expanding to accommodate what was being channeled through it. His vestments were new. He wore them with the specific self-consciousness of someone who had recently been promoted and had not yet stopped noticing the promotion.
The Holy Light came off him in low, constant radiation—not deployed, just ambient, the way a furnace radiates heat without intending to. For a baseline worker in the Pit, the proximity was unpleasant in the way that a sound slightly above comfortable volume was unpleasant: not painful, precisely, but impossible to ignore.
"They told me the Duke's body came down here." Silas moved into the room. He looked at the stone table, then at Han, then at the room in general, in the manner of someone establishing ownership through visual sweep. "I gave specific instructions about the pace of processing. The theological consultation is at dawn."
"Understood," Han said. Level, calibrated.
"I don't think you do." Silas crossed to the table. He looked down at Asmodai's face with an expression that Han had seen before—contempt doing the work that more complex emotions were not available to perform. "Three years you've been down here. Three years of taking up space." His attention swung back to Han. "Look at this workspace. You work like an animal because you think like one."
Han looked at the workspace. It was clean. Instruments arranged in proper sequence. Documentation current. He said nothing, because the content of what was said here was irrelevant.
What was relevant: Silas had his weight on his right leg. His left shoulder rotated slightly inward when he spoke, which suggested an old injury, healed improperly, that shortened the extension of his left arm under load. His throat was unarmored. The gap between his pauldron and gorget on the right side was approximately four fingers wide—Han had measured it in the first ten seconds. The Holy Light he was channeling moved through his hands, which meant a disruption to grip would interrupt deployment.
Silas's right hand closed on Han's collar and shoved him sideways into the instrument shelf.
Metal clattered. Han caught the shelf's edge, remained upright, said nothing. He was aware of the weight in his chest. He was aware, with some clinical detachment, that it had noticed the contact.
"Clean this up." Silas moved back toward the table. "You have two hours. If the Duke isn't fully prepared—"
He reached out and shoved Han's shoulder as punctuation.
The weight uncoiled.
It left Han the way pressure leaves a sealed container when the seal is removed—not a choice, not an activation, simply the cessation of the force that had been containing it. It expanded outward from his sternum and it was heavy in a way that had nothing to do with physical mass. It was the weight of a category of existence pressing down on a lower one. The weight of sixty years of rooms that had reorganized themselves. The weight of an authority that did not negotiate.
Silas's Holy Light went out.
Not suppressed. Outranked. The light didn't fight the pressure. It simply recognized a hierarchy it had no mechanism for contesting and withdrew.
Silas bent at the knees.
Not buckled—bent, with the mechanical failure of a load-bearing structure encountering a force it was not designed to distribute. His legs accepted the weight of something invisible pressing down through his entire vertical axis and made the only accommodation available to them. He went to the floor in sections: knees first, then hands, the posture of a man bowing before something his body had recognized before his mind had formed any opinion on the matter.
The sound he made was not a scream. It was smaller than a scream—a compressed, involuntary exhalation, the sound of a man discovering that the distance between authority and its absence was not a line but a drop.
He was on his hands and knees. His arms were shaking with the effort of remaining that far off the floor. His eyes found Han's feet, traveled upward with what appeared to be considerable reluctance, and stopped before reaching Han's face.
Han crouched down. Unhurried.
"The preparation will be complete before dawn," he said. "I'll have everything secured for the consultation."
He stood, retrieved his instruments, and returned to work.
Behind him, Silas remained on the floor for a long time. When he eventually left—crawling to the stairs, finding his feet somewhere on the third step, not looking back—he did not speak.
Above the Purge Pit, through four floors of consecrated stone, the Bells of Sin began to ring.
They were pre-Founding bells, which meant they predated the current theology's capacity to fully explain them. The official doctrine was simple: the bells rang in response to great evil. This had satisfied congregations for a very long time, because great evil was a category that the Church controlled the definition of, which meant the bells rang when the Church needed them to ring and did not ring when the Church needed them not to.
They had not rung in one hundred and twelve years.
They rang seven times.
Saintess Seraphina was asleep when they began and not asleep when they ended. She stood at her chamber window in the upper spire, her hand flat against the cold glass, her breath making small clouds that obscured and cleared and obscured again.
She was twenty-three years old. She had been told, her entire life, exactly what the bells meant and exactly what would be required of her when they rang. She had accepted this the way she had accepted every other piece of her ordained purpose—completely, without resistance, with the particular serenity of someone who had never been offered an alternative.
She watched the darkness below the Cathedral walls.
Seven rings. The restoration of a power that was meant to die.
The doctrine continued: Such power must be found. Must be judged. Must be returned to silence.
Seraphina had memorized this at age nine. She had never had cause to think about what it felt like from the inside—the certainty, the clarity of purpose, the clean simplicity of a direction given by something larger than herself.
She stood at the window for a long time.
The certainty was there. The clarity was there.
Underneath both of them, quiet and new and uninvited, was a question she didn't yet have the language for—something about folded hands, and narratives built before anyone had arrived to contest them, and the specific texture of a story that had been written before the person inside it had been given a chance to read it.
She pressed her hand harder against the glass.
Below, the Cathedral was waking up.
End of Chapter 1