The morning of the Grand Rite arrived cloaked in a suffocating mist.
The Nameless Church stood silent, abandoned, its stone corridors echoing only with the memories of old oaths and older betrayals.
Beyond it — deep within the heart of the Blasted Grove — a clearing had been prepared.
It was no common clearing.
The soil was black with centuries of spilled blood. The trees, twisted and dead, clawed at the sky like broken fingers. The air reeked of decay and ash.
In the center of the clearing stood a colossal altar of dark stone, carved with glyphs so ancient that even gods had forgotten their meanings.
And around it, heaped like offerings to an absent heaven, lay the bodies.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
Creatures of every shape — humans, elves, beastkin, dwarves — all bound, slaughtered, and stacked like cordwood.
Their blood pooled in dark rivers, drawn by unseen hands into spiraling, pulsating sigils that covered the earth.
Above them, the black sun of Umbryss hung heavy and low, casting no warmth — only a sickly, colorless light.
Froy stood at the altar's heart.
Small. Still. Radiant with a hollow, terrifying calm.
The priests — the last remnants of the Nameless Church — knelt in a wide circle around him, their black robes soaked in blood, their faces hidden behind cracked masks.
And yet... among the faithful, there was a growing sense of unease.
Where was Pope Caeron? Where was Sinclaire?
The leaders of the Rite were absent — vanished without a trace.
But none dared to speak. None dared to halt the momentum that had been set into motion.
For the sigils burned now, alive with ancient hunger.
The air shook as the first chant rose.
Not words — but sounds older than language. Vibrations that rattled the teeth and curdled the blood.
Froy lifted his gaze.
Above him, the black sky trembled — and split.
A crack tore through the heavens, a bleeding wound that wept stars like falling embers.
The ground shook. The trees screamed.
And from that sundered sky, something vast and formless began to seep through — a mist that shimmered with impossible colors, a weight that crushed the soul without touching the skin.
Sethvyr.
Or at least, a shard of it.
The mist coiled downward like a lover's embrace, reaching for the boy who waited, unflinching.
Froy closed his eyes.
And accepted it.
The mist slammed into him like a tidal wave.
Pain. Ecstasy. A hollow shudder that tore through bone and thought alike.
The glyphs on the ground flared — not red, not gold, but a deep, screaming violet — and the corpses burst into ash, feeding the ritual.
The Outer God touched the world.
And the world screamed.
For a moment — just a moment — Froy stood between worlds.
A conduit.
A vessel.
A whisper of the thing-that-should-not-be.
The altar cracked beneath his feet.
The sky wept black tears.
And then — silence.
The mist faded.
The sigils died.
Froy collapsed to one knee, his small hands digging into the blood-drenched stone, his body trembling with forces he could no longer name.
It was done.
The Grand Rite was complete.
And yet, deep within him, the power he had touched did not awaken fully.
It coiled instead, patient, slumbering — waiting for the true moment to strike.
He was not ready yet.
Not yet.
And then—
A thunderous roar shattered the silence.
Horns.
Marching.
Steel upon stone.
From the treeline, banners unfurled — white and gold, marked with the sigil of the Sanctified Church.
More than a thousand armored knights poured into the clearing.
Five hundred cavalry, banners whipping in the dead wind.
Three hundred archers, black arrows nocked and ready.
An army vast enough to crush kingdoms — gathered here, all to wipe out a single, heretic sect.
And yet, this was but a fraction of the true might of the Sanctified Empire.
At their head —
Pope Caeron.
Sinclaire, riding beside him, clad in white and gold, her silver-blue hair gleaming like a blade drawn against the heavens.
Their faces wore expressions of grim triumph.
Betrayal had never looked so holy.
The priests of the Nameless Church — no more than a handful — rose in desperation, summoning forbidden sorcery, blood-magic, and dying curses.
They fought like cornered beasts.
Dark rites howled.
Blood danced.
And though outnumbered, they dragged down their foes with them.
When the clearing finally fell silent, more than thirty Sanctified Knights lay broken among the dead — a price far heavier than the Church had expected to pay.
Yet they prevailed.
The sacred banners still flew.
The clearing belonged to them.
Froy rose to his feet slowly.
The Pawn — the broken angel — opened his eyes once more.
And what stared back at the invading army was not a boy.
It was the cold, radiant thing they had unwittingly summoned into being.
The world held its breath.
The soldiers, knights, and priests alike hesitated — as if sensing, dimly, that they had unleashed something they could not hope to understand, let alone control.
And from the trees, Sinclaire approached him.
Her small hands were hidden behind her back. Her silver-blue hair fluttered as she walked with almost a dancer's grace across the field of corpses.
She stopped before Froy — smiling sweetly.
In one swift motion, she plunged a dagger straight through his chest.
Froy gasped — not from pain, but from the shock of how familiar the betrayal felt.
Sinclaire leaned in close, her breath warm against his ear, and whispered:
"May the Gods guide you, little one."
Then, with a practiced, almost tender motion, she drew the blade free and raised her gleaming sword high.
Without hesitation, she brought it down.
Steel flashed.
And Froy's head tumbled from his shoulders.
The Pawn fell.
And the board was wiped clean once more.
The banners of the Sanctified Church fluttered triumphantly in the dying wind.
The army — bloodied but victorious — began to withdraw.
Pope Caeron gave a final look at the ruined grove, then turned away without a word.
Sinclaire wiped her blade, her silver-blue eyes dancing with unreadable emotion, and followed him.
They left the battlefield without hesitation, abandoning the altar, the corpses, the broken remnants of the Rite — and the boy they had slain.
The clearing grew still.
The blood seeped deeper into the soil.
The black sun wept overhead.
And then—
A twitch.
A twitch in the hand of the fallen boy.
Barely perceptible.
But there.
Alive.
And from the ruined stones, a truth whispered through the broken air:
"The Pawn had fallen, but the board had merely begun to bleed.
The King still stood —
and the shattered soul of sovereignty now stirred within the broken Pawn."