(Art by Toloma)
The chirping of the nightlife leaves Ragnivanian High Knight Gus Lark in a state of constant distraction, and the cool air does little to calm his nerves.
He draws a gloved hand across his sweat-specked forehead before rotating his hand to brush the scruff of his chin.
“No response,” the woman next to him, prim, composed, but clammy as well, says in a matter-of-fact tone as she shakes the glowing stone in her hand and watches the light die out. With her other hand, she continues to flip through the pages of an old tome filled with brilliant, horrifying, and altogether flat depictions of what seem to be gods and deities.
“What the hell do we do then?!” he asks, his gaze sunk to the bottom of their dark covered wagon. “What am I going to do when they call back and that whole village is just dead?!”
The robed woman pulls away from her book for a moment to glance out of the wagon towards the clearing outside. Her red hair glints in the light of far-off torches.
“Well!?!” Gus snaps with a jolt, looking up to see the poise on her face.
“If they’ve already gotten in, then naturally they wouldn’t respond,” she says.
“Gull, are you kidding me?! We get a ‘lord knight, guaranteed’ and they can’t even bother to tell us where, or when, or if it worked out?”
Gully McGrow, a Kanvanian mage-associate who has done this sort of high stakes thing a few times, gives a casual nod from the side that tells Gus she either knows something he doesn’t, or that her confidence is simply inconceivable. Of course, people like Gus always look at others and say, “How sad for them. At least I’m a realist!” Gully isn’t looking away from the outside, and something about that drives Gus wild with irritation.
His breathing picks up and she forms a short smile.
“I mean, we did put in the call like ten minutes ago,” she says, squinting gently to better make out the silhouettes of the torches on the hill across the valley.
They’re both certain that the cultists on the other side can’t see them from their position along the woodline, but they did clumsily pull their wagon only a few hundred meters away. Their only saving grace was that the torches for the ceremony were already out. If they weren’t, Gus would have rode right into the compound.
“So what?” he sighs, watching her to gauge her expression. “Those stuffy-ass morons could at least have the common bloody courtesy to tell us when they’re doing the job that they agreed to d—”
“Relax,” she says, causing him to scoff.
“Don’t you ‘relax’ me! You’re out of your wits too! No one in the capital was even aware of this! The watch was all in on it!”
“Relax,” she says again.
“Don’t you ‘relax’ me again! This is it! The end of my career! The High Court’s being woken up over this and in ten Rayda-farting minutes they’ll get word that the biggest town in my borough got sacrificed to the very god I said we stamped out!” He turns back to his trembling hands. “They’re going to execute me. They’re going to say I was complacent, that I kne—”
Suddenly, the stone in Gully’s hand alights with an arcane, azure glow. She holds it next to her cheek.
“Mmm,” is all she says at first as the altered chat stone flashes with the faint voice of another person.
Gus stares at her like a noose while she listens to the person with the other part of the stone, some uncertain ways away. Gus watches as Gully’s brow, only slightly tensed from all of this, loses its arch entirely, as if the Buried Star Cult had simply decided to give up and send all the townspeople home with goody bags and little kisses on their foreheads.
“Okay, I’ll let him know,” she says, turning to Gus. “They push summoned a lord knight in. We just need to get the men ready to kill the circle topside.”
Gus leans back with a life-giving breath. “Thanks be! Thanks be… Okay lass… who did they get in?”
Her eyes, now etched with calm, look over to him. “Take a wild guess.”
The Ragnivanian high knight’s eyes widen. “Her? That fast?”
She nods.
He burbles out a sigh of continued relief. “I guess Rayda can pull some miracles, even today, alive or dead.” He leans back up to his proper stature: a huge man with a track record of perfection. “I’ll have the men ready to charge the circle,” he says with a confident nod, just before his left eye twitches. “Right when they start summoning it, right?”
Gully nods with a smile. “That’s right, sir. The lord knight general’s taking responsibility for the rest,” she says as the first of hundreds of moaning townspeople are hauled out from the hillside and laid out upon the grass in a very particular fashion. “All we must do is wa— ah, there it is,” she says, turning her tome over to show him the page.
He rears up. “What?! ‘There’ what i- ooooh.” His voice trails off like a helpless soul thrown to the wind on an impossible task. Eying over the broad strokes of the artist’s depiction, he suddenly looks so tired that a lifetime of sleep couldn’t fix it.
“…Yes,” she says. “That is what it looks like,” she adds with a distant tone. She’s heard of more miraculous beings, but she certainly hasn’t seen one that compares to what the page’s artist is attempting to convey with such extreme colors.
“Gattinar,” Gus reads out like a sentencing. “Crown Preserve those poor people.”
Lemma, six years old and the prior day had just learned how to properly pronounce the word “eucalyptus,” strains every nerve in her body to reach out for something warm.
She wonders if her parents are out there. She doesn’t remember exactly what happened, but the last thing she can recall is that her dad was pulling her up out of bed just a second before one of the…
Yes… one of the strange men burst into her room from the window…
And now she’s out here, in space.
She finds nothing in her search for human warmth, but the more she strains to turn, the more she can see hilly silhouettes around her, some of them moving. At first she assumes it’s herself, but after a moment of observation, she comes to the conclusion that the supposed mountains are moving despite her own shifting.
It’s other people?
Lemma draws in a slow, agonizing breath, like inhaling rubber. It’s all she can do to breathe. She can’t make a single word.
But she can hear something new now.
One person, particularly willed or simply particularly strong against whatever force is crippling them like this, releases a quiet, terrified murmur.
Lemma’s heart begins beating faster. This removed any doubt from her mind: this is a bad place.
Aernan peoples know little of space travel, so the thought of being embraced by space produces a varied response from the mostly paralyzed villagers.
Hundreds of pairs of shocked eyes stare at the stars consuming what seems to be every inch of their world.
The stars begin falling from the sky, and begin landing on people.
One falls close to Lemma on a spot that looks like someone’s wrist, hardly a foot away.
She strains her gaze as she watches the little star writhe, and then she watches it do something that bothers her greatly.
It’s not a star. It’s a worm, and its little star-bright head is already biting hard into the wrist to open up the skin.
Her eyes widen with tears as she successfully releases a murmur with a hundred terrified others.
Yes, the star worms crawl up from the packed dirt of the compound walls, floor, and ceiling. Their black bodies lift up their bioluminescent heads — a beautiful display until one realizes what they are and that they have a very specific diet.
All around Lemma push terrified, pain-stricken mumblings. Men, women, children, elderly, voices conjoin not only in the discomfort of what they’re seeing or feeling, but in the heretofore unspeakable concept that they’re all about to be the food for ravenous worms in some Rayda-forsaken pit.
Little worm heads begin disappearing into people’s skin as they force into the muscular tissue. They reappear as little red, pink, or yellow stars depending on where they’ve slithered in.
Lemma convulses in terror as she watches the wrist of the person next to her jolt in pain, but hardly a yelp is produced— just a slow, muffled whine.
Suddenly, she feels a slight thump on her collarbone. Her neck strains to move her head, and she sees it much sooner than she wanted: a bright glow somewhere next to her cheek, and then the feeling of little legs.
The implications of the moment throw her into panic as the worm crawls across her chin, her cheek, and right up to her lovely blue eye.
She shrieks, but it’s no louder than the demure sigh of embarrassment she made yesterday when her father finally got it through to her that it was pronounced “yoo-kuh-lip-tuhs” rather than “ew-kuh-lip-toos,” as she was saying it.
All she can see next is the light of the head, and then she abruptly feels something cold nip at her just below the eyelid.
Children are not guaranteed an upbringing safe from the horrors of reality, let alone the trillions of realities across the Omniverse. In some realms, this would account for an unfortunate end to an innocent heart in a way that is not fitting for any kind of story.
But in Aerna, it is The Knights of Reinen, King Rayda’s own table of elite dragonslayers, who create good endings, both in bedtime stories and in real life.
A sharp ringing noise pierces Lemma’s hearing as the worm lifts up from her eye with only the merest drop of her blood on its mandibles. She sees better than anyone else how this worm, along with all the others, begins writhing, seizing, and finally falling over dead.
The worms that had dug in now emerge, as if by necessity, only to keel over the second they’re out of the wound.
All around Lemma the stars flicker, waver, and then die out. First a few at a time, and then all at once by the hundreds.
“This is without precedent,” a voice, as cold and deep as space, says from somewhere in what Lemma’s now pieced together is likely some kind of underground room. A new host of stars emerge, but this time it’s from only one place, around the black-gloved hand of an unnervingly tall, hooded man. The stars alight the strange constellation-mask veiling his countenance: black stars crossing a pale, vanilla face.
The man approaches something now visible to Lemma from his starlight torch, a sort of pedestal with a glistening orb of some kind floating on the center of it. The sphere, as black as a starless night sky, fluctuates as if attempting to break from its confines.
The man raises his other hand to it and the sphere begins to calm just as Lemma feels the tightening sensation seizing her body again.
“The Marked One will have to be informed immediately,” the man says, restabilizing the enchantment, then feels something grim with him in the dark. He turns and sees what’s coming, but not quickly enough to react.
Lemma’s never seen bloodshed up until this moment. Her eyes widen as the blood catches the light of the dying stars on the man’s hand before all returns to black. All at once, her strength returns with the warmth of her own blood.
It’s dark for a moment, and no one says a thing.
Then, a small mote of light, different in color and spirit from the piercing light of the stars, flushes into existence at the top of the room. The blue glow is bright enough to see the presence of bleeding on clothes and skin, and it’s clear to Lemma that a lot of people are in fact very bloody down here.
“Take care of the wounded. Stay here until someone comes to get you,” another voice says, already at the side of the room still shrouded by the dark. It’s a pretty voice, a woman’s, Lemma supposes, but it’s cold, distant, and professional in a way that tells her that this person’s seen more bloodshed than she ever will.
“W—are you from The Knights?!” a man’s voice cuts out at the silhouette, starting a torrent of inquiry from the recovering villagers.
“Where are we?!”
“Blessed be!”
“The Reinish! We’re saved!”
“Praise the God-King!”
“What are these things?”
Even more blurt things out the moment they regain their ability to run their mouths. A few of them even begin sitting up and reaching for the figure, but she’s already down one of the many packed dirt corridors.
Lemma doesn’t say anything herself. She assumes that, whoever it is who could save them from something like this must be tired of having to tell someone the same things over and over again, like her dad telling her how to pronounce eucalyptus. She’s sure that this woman’s done this so many times that it’s just a regular day for her. Who else would sound so calm?
Down a deep path in the cult’s worship base, a grander ceremony is taking place. Dozens of star-blessed eyes look down on a display of unified suffering.
A family of five lies bound on their stomachs as the needler finishes his work. The constellations across their backs, connecting across the skin starting from the father, crossing over the three children, and ending with the mother, creates an eye-catching five-person tapestry of starlight and elegance.
The bright light from the etcher’s arcane heat illuminates the room with sharp, surgical white flashes in the pitch of the loudest screams.
Something that has become more than a man, not simply unnervingly tall, but unnervingly wide, like stellar gas wearing the robes of a holy officiant, looms over the roaring father, crying children, and wincing mother.
“A perfect representation of the conjoined distances,” he observes in a warm, elder’s tone. “You will be beautiful stars for The Obscured Illuminate.”
As he had at the beginning of these exceptionally long fourteen minutes, the father in this picture rears up to curse at the enormous priest, but the surging pain cuts through his voice leaving his words incomprehensible gutturals.
“Yes. Glorious forms of light for a glorious cause,” the star priest says with a nod as he begins stepping to the other side of the family. “He will be so pleased with the symmetry of this o—”
A masked cultist smashes through the door into the auspicious chamber.
“Light Father! A… witch knight is in the tunnels!”
“Hah!” the father, the town whitesmith, scoffs out in the slight pause he’s granted as the needler flinches at the news.
As the family’s screaming retakes the center of the room’s conversation, the star priest joins his hands together, so thin now that they almost seem to be constellations of light themselves.
“ ‘Witch Knight’ is a layman’s phrase, dear initiate. Please, better define the nature of th—”
“White hair!” the cultist shouts over his superior.
Yes, the star priest understands now.
His underling meant the witch knight, the person the term was coined for in the first place.
Without an ounce of ceremony, the star priest waves his hand across the other cultist’s face, drawing the stars of power and life from him. The cultist drops over dead as the star priest does the same to nearly half the room of other attending cultists. A hundred stars enter the priest from the slain cultists, filling his body with an incomparable light.
“Finish it outside,” he hisses, glancing his constellation-like face over to the needler and the nearby second-in-ceremony.
The right-hand man motions the remaining cultists to pick up the family and escape down a neighboring passage.
“And of you, Father?” the right-hand asks.
The star priest’s stellar bodies flare as if in supernova state. “I will buy you time. Ensure it is used gainfully.”
The right-hand nods and sprints out, leaving the dozens of dead cultists and the priest. Assuming a nebulous form through the tight dirt tunnels, he phases through his fellows and takes to the front of the line.
Turning toward the door from where the now-dead cultist had arrived to give the news, the star priest stands like an active cosmic reaction, ready to direct a formidable expression of his cult’s cosmic power.
He is the only source of light now in the carved earthen room. The miserable blood-splattered hall, however severe-looking, is intended as a holy and safe place for Children of the Buried Star, but in this moment, the peaceful underground silence gains a foreboding, breathless anticipation, like a chamber of death and sacrifice, rather than glorification of the Illuminate.
The stars making up the priest’s body brighten with explosive ferocity as he feels something get nearer—silent, but running faster than any horse, drake, or otherwise. She’s seconds away.
“Come here, Legend,” he hisses out like gas from a dying star. “Let us see how sharp his teeth can b—”
An abrupt explosion rattles the dirt tunnels leading out into the open air.
The right-hand looks behind the running line carrying the family, just long enough to see a final, abrupt pulse of light explode from several passages back. He does not slow down in awe of a star priest’s passing, it cannot be afforded. He redoubles his sprint forward out into the open air where the most auspicious of ceremonies is taking place.
“Out! Out with them!” he shouts the second he exits from the hidden opening of the compound.
The remaining cultists dash out with the family on their backs into the laying crowd of pre-etched lesser links—hundreds and hundreds of people who are neither to be marked by the worms for service, or to be honored as the central piece in the Greater Relief.
With singular streaks of what creates an enormous constellation of hastily tattooed stars, the formation of motionless villagers moan in a constant hum of pain as the cultists bring in the family. They’re laid down in the center, where the greatest complexity lies on their bared backs in black ink, dappled with stray tears of blood.
“Finish the stars!” The right-hand shouts, cuing other star priests who have been contacting their deity to glance over in curiosity.
The needler gets to work immediately, but the moment’s gotten to him.
“Your aim is wavering!” the right-hand shouts. “Complete the stars!”
He gives him a few seconds, and then slaps him aside to complete the work himself.
In a truly unprecedented departure from tradition, one of the star priests turns away from the contacting ring to approach the right-hand.
“…The constellation is not done?” he asks, his nebulous form doing little to conceal the irritation in his voice.
“We were attacked, Father! Acael is dead! They’ve sent their wicked knights!” he says, his gaze still down upon his work.
The star priest looks up to the remaining cultists, immediately makes note of those missing, and joins his hands together under his robe’s sleeves. “It is of no consequence, my son. Let their grand knights meet with the Auspicious One and attain illumination themselves.”
The right-hand has not paused for anything yet but this. He turns and looks up from his work to the sky.
All the stars are gone but two, and they are small ones, hovering in front of the deep gray clouds like a pair of eternal eyes.
The right-hand suppresses a chill in the parts of him that are still human, and he returns to his work.
“I shall make it a beautiful constellation for you, my lord,” he says with a renewed calm. “Not even their white-haired witch knight can stand against—”
It has grown so dark that only the stars can be seen reliably, and as such the right-hand can see the hand constellation of the star father twitch at his words.
“Irritating. How could it be that they sent something so cruel so immediately?” the priest asks outwardly. “That is how Acael had died, it is of no doubt.”
There’s a pause as the star priest turns to the underground entrance.
“…No matter. Finish the work to glorify him. He is already here,” he adds.
The place darkens more and more as the eyes become brighter and brighter. It is as though a smog has descended on the countryside, drowning the gentle pastures in strange, uncanny starlight—stars from a place that is not the sky.
The right-hand etches the final strokes of sacred deep blue ink into the family as the star father steps off to meet with their incoming enemy.
“Let us just see how this little white hair will fare against a true maintainer of the creed,” the star priest says as an array of calls, whinnies, and roars explode from the side of the woodline.
“Charge!” orders Knight Gus of Ragnivan, swinging his glowing blade as a ward against the stellar blackness.
The eyes of the buried god have been increasing in number, and now over three dozen stars outline his form in their world.
All of a sudden, the formation of stars shifts to form the enormous visage of Gattinar, staring down on the humans like the unfortunate but necessary greens on a dinner plate.
The screaming from the villagers reaches a fever pitch as the cultists fall down in worship, offering up their stars immediately and falling dead to be accepted into the whole.
The tattoo formation etched across the agonizing whole of the townspeople glows to match the color and shine of Gattinar’s own constellations, attempting to meet with him and join his eternal secret sky hidden from all eyes but the honored.
Gattinar looks at the charging Gus and his fifty men, those he could rally in time among the garrison to creep just shy of the confirmed location of the cultist base.
The Star God sees nothing that looks like him in all of the formation, and so he raises his hand.
All at once the horses and drakes flinch, throwing all but the most hunched riders from their backs, and before the dismounted men can recover, a surge overtakes them.
Gus froths at the mouth alongside his steed as he runs the horse past the jilted riders and into the base.
With his sword ready, he goes straight for the long, dense line of occult salt, the mystical catalyst that allows Gattinar to manifest within a limited arcane space across the ritual site. He does not make it.
He freezes, along with his horse a second after, as both are suspended into the air, and begin seeing things that simply cannot be.
“No… I…” is all he can push out as his pupils appear as though they’re splitting into separate, but connected, stars of sight.
The chanting and ritual suicide continues as even the star fathers, those who must hold the pain of the faith beyond all question, release their weary stars for Gattinar’s continual lighting. One by one they drop, mythic figures among the Buried Illuminate dying on this one holiest of nights: Gattinar, in a world filled with new life, filled with new stars to be lit for eternity.
He takes on the stars of his children as the new constellation, the one that shall bind him to this world for good and establish his base of operations upon this plane of existence, begins glowing white hot in the bodies of the weeping, screaming masses of men, women, and children.
The right-hand laughs triumphantly as he lifts his needle from the completed work, just as he hears an abrupt crash from the underground. He turns in time to see what’s coming, but like prior victims, far too slow to react.
Gattinar turns to see her. He sees the white mane, flowing wild in a moment of abandon despite the hair-splitting bun it’s been thrown into.
“You,” he says, recognizing her as she looks back with blood-red eyes that shine like those of a feral wolf from another age.
“Me,” she says, not missing a beat as she runs up like a gust of wind and casts an abrupt, ear-splittingly loud healing incantation over the first dozen villagers in front of her.
By immediately removing the injury of the tattoo, the ink dissipates with no anchor, causing Gattinar’s stars to flicker in painful limbo.
Just before the final star priest releases his life, he sees something that plants a seed of doubt so deep into his soul that his faith is crushed in an instant:
Gattinar flinches.
“…What is this?” the star priest murmurs as Gattinar slings a ray of cosmic energy at the small woman, who barrels forward into, and then along the side of the bolt of power, much the way a leaf might flow over a rock in a stream—instant, undeterred, effortless.
The constellation of the remaining star priest, Solun, dims as Gattinar screams a screeching, explosive hiss of light a moment before the woman reaches to her waist, wrung with a dimensional sheath, and draws a blade that looks to be of pure starlight.
It is a sword imbued with the power of a higher plane of existence: Monument, and it cries loud to burn falsehoods from the fabric of their world.
She cuts. It is as if the day has arrived, and just as quickly, it disappears. An arc of divine solar energy cuts Gattinar and spills his stellar blood out into the blackened sky, splattering his cosmic mass into the neighboring mile of forest, igniting it all in a purple-blue flame.
Solon falls to his knees and simply watches as the townspeople recover, the Ragnivanian warriors storm in, and the white-haired Witch Knight spares one final look at the convulsing from of Gattinar before he evaporates back to his realm of buried starlight.
He bows his head in shame and lets the knights take him in their useless chains—one does not need to break the body so long as one has broken the spirit first.
The father in the center recoups his nerves quickly enough to sit up and witness a petite silhouette disappear into a speed-coalesced gate made of a similar looking starlight to what the cult had been using, but for an entirely different function. He knows who it is, everyone does by this point, but to see her is something that fewer and fewer have the honor of claiming.
“H-hey!” he coughs out just as the gate finishes and floats in mid-air like a portal into unknowable blackness.
The savior looks back.
“Thank you! Thank you!”
He forces his numb body to at least lift an arm in recognition.
“Reinen lives on in its people,” is all she says before turning back to enter the portal.
“Glory!” one person shouts.
“Glory to the Crown!” roars an old woman.
“Glory! Glory! Glory!” cries young man.
The praise floods the night over the bodies of the cultists as the white-haired knight disappears through the aperture, which closes just a second behind her.
Some twenty minutes later, Ragnivanian High Knight Gus Lark maintains an erect posture atop his charger, who is not concealing her discomfort from being thrown about by an ancient star god nearly as well. At his left, Liaison Mage Gully McGrow waits quaintly on her drake, popping a teacup and drink container from her saddlebag.
She pours herself an earthy-scented cup as a man approaches from the side.
“Sir, no casualties,” he reports.
Gus, now back on with his famed composure, takes a moment to think about how he will respond. He’s seen a few good leaders take their time, so surely he can try the same thing so long as he doesn’t make a weird face while doing it. “As to be expected,” he says, winning a side-glance from Gully.
A set of horse drawn carriages pulls up.
“All horses,” Gully notes. “They used to be banned, you know.”
Gus pats his steed. “Better than a bunch of scales. Comfier fellows, no sharp teeth.”
She smirks. “Call me a traditionalist, but I wouldn’t trust one of those ponies with biting off something’s head.”
The high knight says nothing, but waves his head about mockingly.
The red and white Ragnivanian crests on the carriages shine with an authoritative streak of gold, the broadsword representing the first king’s service to Rayda so long ago, and the designator of the royal family. With a rumbling swing they pull up on them, and an accompaniment of guards with swords, wands, staves, and even a few firearms hidden under their traditional uniforms, emerges from a few of the carriages.
A few seconds pass before the guard captain is satisfied with security and gives a hand signal to the center carriage.
The carriage door opens towards Gus as a crier comes out and begins unfurling his scroll.
“For the notice of the valorous Ragnivanian Guard and second to the People of the Greater Republic: I present to thee Prince Ericson Redford of the Redford ruling li—”
“Yes, yes, wonderful,” Ericson snips as he pushes the crier aside as he struggles past all the various baubles, books, and ledgers in his large carriage. “Gus! What the f***?”
High Knight Lark produces the traditional “diagonal nod,” a sign of courtly respect. “Your Princely Lordship. I’m—”
“Out with it, Gus! Shit!”
“No casualties, sir,” Gus delivers quickly, winning another smile from Gully as she keeps her eyes to her notes.
“There!” the prince says with a whine before turning back to the crier and row of peeping advisors and guards. “Upfront. To the point. Done.” He turns back. “So! Some star god shithead thought he could run into my country and set up shop, eh?!”
Gus clears his throat.
The conversation is stilted, intense, but generally positive. The prince is displeased to hear of his mighty Ragnivanian Knights outshined by a Reinish Knight, but he seems to understand right away that if they show up, they’re going to steal the show as they always do, and politically that’s preferable to a few hundred dead villagers scattered in the rough shape of a constellation from another universe.
Prince Ericson exchanges final pleasantries, fires off a snide glance to Gully, and claps his hands as a signal to leave the moment he’s returned to his carriage.
The convoy lead snaps his crop and the horses take off, leaving a man on a horse and a woman on a drake.
“Interesting notes, as always,” Gully says with a poorly concealed smirk.
Gus sighs in relief. “I hate my job.”
“Just imagine doing it for thousands of years like the real knights.”
He winces and turns over to her. He was just about to call her out on the slight, but the more the words stew in his brain, the clearer they become.
He turns back to a neutral stance before scratching the neck of his horse.
“Yeah… couldn’t imagine what we’d do without ‘em,” he says, thinking back to the white-haired shadow that single-handedly obliterated the cult.
“Some skills can’t be paid for,” Gully notes with a raised brow, as if impressed by Gus’ sudden introspection. “I guess we’re particularly lucky that way.”
He sighs. “For how proud and great we are… how often it comes down to a Reinish gating in and cleaning up the mess… I wonder if we would have kept order at all without them.”
She chuckles. “Well, no, I suppose she’d go with them too—”
“You know what I meant,” he snips. “A king’s guess why she went with a title that’s used interchangeably with what she’s supposed to bring. Stupid-bloody idea if you ask me.”
Gully shrugs. “I think ‘Order’ is a fitting title even so, don’t you? Who else would be best deserving?”
He sighs, rolls his eyes, and finally comes to a nod. “Sure… more applicable than, say, ‘Harmony’ at least.”
For the first time, they both share in a chuckle.
-the end-
Order uncovers the designs of an even fiercer cult in Woodcastle…
