Everything after the Hallowed Voice raised his hand and declared victory felt like a blur.

The Citadel had sustained tremendous damage across the day, and the true cost of it revealed itself in the hours that followed as Paladins moved through the sections of the white walls where Barbatos and the other Demon Dukes had been housed.

What they found there was not the aftermath of battle but the aftermath of feeding. Bones picked clean and arranged with the casual indifference of something that had no concept of the sanctity of a life. Half-eaten humans, Dross and Sworn who had been smuggled into the capital and kept alive until the demons wanted them, their faces still carrying the final expressions of people who had understood exactly what was happening to them and had no power to prevent it.

Damian looked at the remnants and felt a cold disgust settle into him that rage couldn’t touch. Rage was too loud for what he was feeling. What he felt was quieter and heavier, the kind of revulsion that came from understanding that this had been happening while the Dominion forces stood guard outside and the treacherous Saints gave speeches about the Hallowed Voice’s corruption.

The demons had been eating people within the walls of the Covenant, and the humans who had invited them in had known, and had kept the gates closed anyway.

He filed it away alongside everything else he was carrying, and he kept moving.

The Hallowed Voice ushered him and Serala into the Cathedral of the First Dawn not long after, guiding them through corridors of white stone while Paladins and Holy Women lined the passages with expressions that couldn’t decide between reverence and pure curiosity.

Most of the gazes landed on Serala. The Holy Daughter who had left as a girl and returned as something the Lands of Stone had not produced in seventeen generations, her frame doubled, her bearing transformed, the Wings of the Radiant Dawn blazing through her with a sacred energy so dense it made the air around her shimmer.

The Holy Women who recognized what they were seeing went still when she passed. The younger ones simply stared with open mouths and bright eyes, tracking the verdant tattoos spiraling down her arms.

Damian and Serala left the gazes behind as she led him deeper into the Cathedral, through passages marked with symbols that narrowed the permitted traffic to almost none, until they arrived at a chamber that announced itself through the quality of its silence before they were close enough to read the inscription above its entrance.

The Sacred Hall of Truth.

It was a long room with a high ceiling, its walls lined with objects arranged with the care of someone who had placed each one deliberately and visited each one regularly. Carved stones of various sizes sat in niches with offerings of dried flowers beside them. Bone instruments hung from pegs, their surfaces inscribed with Old Tongue phrases too small to read from a distance. Mats of woven fiber occupied the floor at intervals, each one showing the particular flattening that came from years of the same body settling into the same position in the same spot.

Serala moved through the space like someone relearning a language she had grown up speaking.

She went to the carved stones first, pressing her fingers against each one with a touch so light it was barely contact, her expression carrying something private and fond that Damian didn’t feel he had the right to interrupt.

She moved to the hung instruments next, letting her fingertips rest against the bone for a moment before releasing. She went to the offerings of dried flowers and looked at them for a breath that stretched into several breaths, and then she crossed the room to the mat nearest the far wall and lowered herself onto it with the deliberate care of someone who had sat on this exact spot countless times and was remembering all of them simultaneously.

She stroked the woven fiber with her palm.

"I remember the Saint of Stone with fondness," she said, and her voice had taken on the quality of the room itself, quiet and unhurried and meant for this space alone.

"After we had spent the day among the dying and the destitute, offering what small comfort we could to those whose lives are but a passing shadow, she would bring me back to the stillness of the gardens."

Damian leaned against the wall near the entrance and listened.

"She taught me that existence is not the stone that endures, but the water that carves it. We often believe that to be is to be static, to hold our position against the turning of the Lands of Stone." Serala’s hand continued its slow motion across the mat, and her eyes were somewhere other than the room.

"Yet the greatest lesson she gave me was this: true existence is the friction of being. It is the grace with which a soul chooses to hold its color even when the Lands of Stone grow dark. We are not defined by the weight we carry, but by the will to keep walking."

BOOM!

Damian blinked.

He hadn’t expected that. He had heard her declare judgment upon the corrupt with a voice that shook the white walls, had watched her descend from the clouds like a force of nature wearing the face of a Holy Daughter. He had not expected her to sit on a worn mat in a quiet room and speak with the depth of a Sangoma who had spent a lifetime in contemplation.

He looked at her now, genuinely looked, and what he found looking back at him was something he hadn’t been looking for. She was oddly serene in this space. Her wing-shaped pupils caught the soft light of the Sacred Hall, and her transformed face carried a beauty that had nothing to do with the scale of her evolution and everything to do with the expression she wore when she thought no one was studying it.

He remembered the taste of her lips. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

The thought arrived without invitation, and his eyes moved to her mouth without asking his permission first. He tracked the shape of it, and the memory of that fierce kiss above the Covenant’s walls replayed itself with the perfect clarity his Primeval mind refused to leave alone.

He was still having such thoughts when the doors at the far end of the Sacred Hall opened.

The Hallowed Voice walked in with the energy of a man who had been fully healed and was currently performing the opposite of that for everyone except the two people in this room. Behind him came four Paladins and three Holy Women, each of them carrying stacks of books and grimoires that they moved with the careful reverence of people transporting something that had once set a room on fire simply by being opened in the wrong atmospheric conditions.

The stacks were large, varied, bound in materials ranging from treated hide to stone plates to something that appeared to be pressed bark covered in a resin that had hardened across what looked like centuries of aging.

The Hallowed Voice looked across the Sacred Hall at Damian and Serala with the bright eyes of a man who was genuinely delighted to be useful, and his smile was warm and broad and thoroughly inconsistent with the blood still drying on his performed-injury robes.

"Alright, sorry to keep you waiting, younguns," he said, and gestured at the stacks being arranged across every flat surface in the room by the Paladins and Holy Women who were already organizing them by what appeared to be a cataloging system only the Hallowed Voice fully understood.

"You wanted knowledge of demons?"

He spread his hands wide, encompassing the growing collection of texts filling the Sacred Hall of Truth.

"Here is everything we have, and more."

...!