Chapter 15

  High Inquisitor Talor was abruptly jolted from a restless sleep. It wasn't a sound that woke him, but a wave of energy that struck his mana-attuned senses like a physical slap to the face. For the second time within the last fourteen days, he had been awakened by a demonic pulse of power so intense and alien that his entire being vibrated for a moment.

  It felt as if an invisible string had been plucked within his very marrow. The impulse was neither hot like fire nor cold like ice; it was heavy. It carried the weight of millennia of suppressed rage, a frequency so far below the audible range that it made the organs tremble. Talor’s heartbeat skipped for a heartbeat's duration, only to resume in a racing rhythm as the afterglow of the wave seeped through the stone foundations of the palace and into his own bones.

  It was the same taste of ozone and decaying power he had already sensed two weeks ago. Back then, it had been a distant rumble, but this time... this time it felt as though the source had drawn closer. Or as if the presence emitting this pulse had grown.

  Gasping, Talor sat up in his massive bed of dark oak. The sweat on his forehead was cold. His dreams, which had haunted him since that first incident, clung to his consciousness like tar. In them, he repeatedly saw a sky set in purple flames and a figure of chitin and shadow sitting upon a throne of broken halos. These visions disturbed him deeply, for they did not feel like the usual temptations of evil—they felt like memories of a future he was desperately trying to prevent.

  With a laborious movement, he swung his legs out of bed and stood up. His bare feet touched the cold marble floor of his holy palace chamber.

  The room was a study in ascetic splendor. The walls were made of flawless white marble, decorated with silver inlays depicting the history of the Great Cleansing. Tall, narrow windows let in the pale light of the moon, which cast long, bony shadows across the floor. In the center of the room stood a massive desk, laden with sealed reports and empty parchments. Incense burners glowed in the corners, their bluish smoke smelling of myrrh and iron—a scent intended to sharpen the mind and keep demons at bay. Yet tonight, the incense seemed powerless against the dread nesting in Talor’s mind.

  Against the north wall of the room stretched a massive shelf of ironwood that reached up to the ceiling. It was the heart of his private sanctuary, filled with writings that were forbidden to ordinary mortals—even to high nobility—on pain of death. Here were stored the secrets of the Inquisition, the forbidden chronicles, and the indexes of the Impure.

  Talor lit a small oil lamp with a brief, magical snap of his fingers, its light dancing golden upon the marble. His shadow on the wall appeared both giant and fragile at the same time as he approached the shelf. His fingers, long and bony, stroked the spines of tanned skin and weathered parchment almost tenderly.

  His breath came shallow as he searched for one very specific work. He ignored the treatises on heretical cults in the Midlands and the reports of unrest in the North. What he sought was older. Much older.

  He had to know what he had sensed. A simple demon, even a lesser prince of the Lower Realms, would not have triggered a pulse of this quality—one that pierced through the protective wards of Neros with ease. This was something archaic. Something often referred to in the records of the Inquisition only as "The Nameless Rot" or "The Hunger of the Primeval."

  His senses, sharpened by decades of hunting the supernatural, guided him. He felt a resonance between the impulse still echoing in his blood and one of the books on the shelf. It was as if the parchment were whispering softly to him, an invitation into the abyss.

  He stopped before a section secured with heavy silver locks. These books were never loaned, never copied, and consulted only by the three highest members of the Council. His hand trembled slightly as he pulled the key from a chain around his neck and opened the lock of the grated door. The metal groaned softly as it swung aside.

  Talor’s gaze wandered over the titles. Finally, his eyes locked onto a slender volume wedged between two massive folios. The spine was black, without lettering, but it felt warm beneath his fingers—almost like living flesh.

  He pulled it out slowly. The material of the binding was not leather; it was a substance resembling the chitin he had seen in his dreams. A faint crackle of static electricity discharged between the book and his skin.

  “Demonology: The Fragments of the First Fallen,” he whispered hoarsely, wiping the dust from the cover.

  A bright place was depicted upon it, known in history books and legends as the Hall of Infallibility. It was a golden, powerful contrast to the rest of the book's exterior, even though the interior shown—with the judicial dais at its center—possessed a tragic feature: it was burning brightly, consumed by the fire-red flames of the Lower Realms. An event known as the Heavenfall, though only the fewest of scholars knew of it. Furthermore, the truth behind it was a hotly debated topic even in the highest circles. It was even uncertain whether the battle between Heaven and Hell had ever taken place at all. Yet one thing was certain: Talor’s feelings and worries had led him exactly to this book.

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  Talor placed the book on the polished surface of his desk, where the golden light of the oil lamp finally brought out the details of the cover. It was a disturbing sight. Embedded within the black, almost organic-looking chitin of the binding was an illustration that, in its fine craftsmanship, acted almost like a window into another world. It depicted a place Talor knew from the deepest archives of Inquisitorial history: The Hall of Infallibility. In legends, it was described as the absolute center of Order, a place of glistening white and eternal gold, where the laws of existence itself were woven.

  Yet the contrast to the rest of the book was not merely aesthetic. The illustration showed the moment of tragic downfall. The magnificent interior, dominated by a massive, central judicial dais made of ivory-colored stone, was engulfed in flames. These were no ordinary fires; they were the fire-red, unnaturally flickering flames of the Lower Realms, which melted the gold and blackened the marble. This event was referred to in the forbidden texts as the Heavenfall.

  Talor traced his fingertip over the burning dais. He knew that even among the High Inquisitors, the truth about this incident was a dangerous, hotly contested subject. Many scholars considered the Heavenfall a mere metaphor, a moral parable about pride. Others even denied that the great battle between the Higher and Lower Realms had ever occurred. According to the official doctrine of the Church, the world in its current form had been created by the gods without a prior, cosmic civil war. But the vibrations within him, that demonic resonance he had now felt for the second time, left no more room for theological doubt. His worries had guided him with the precision of a compass exactly to this book.

  He threw open the heavy cover. The parchment inside was so thin it appeared almost translucent, emitting a faint scent of dry dust and burnt honey. Talor carefully leafed through the first pages, past genealogical tables containing names that had not been spoken aloud for eons. Finally, he paused at a chapter titled "The Great Presumption and the Judgment of Eternity."

  His gaze fell upon a passage written in a strict, angular script. He read the words half-aloud, his voice sounding strangely hollow in the loneliness of the room:

  “And there arose Altron, the firstborn son of Nimrath, the Primal Father of the Deep, and spoke with the tongue of the storm to the hosts of the Outcasts. For the first time in the counting of eons, the demon lords and the fallen gods of the Lower Realms were united under one banner. Altron promised them not only freedom, but the conquest of the Higher Realms and the end of the divine order. For three cycles, the edge of the firmament burned, until the rebellion met its end at the Gates of Infallibility. The Lower Realms were narrowly defeated, beaten by the betrayal of their own ambition, and the judgment of the victors was as relentless as the Light itself.”

  Talor paused and massaged his temples. The texts went on to describe in detail the punishments imposed upon the leaders of the rebellion. It was a catalogue of horrors, a legal treatise on eternal damnation. He found the name Ulthanox, a being who had once been known for his beauty and wisdom. The book recorded:

  “Ulthanox, who sought to wield Death as a weapon against the immortals, was condemned to become the servant of the End himself. To him was assigned the role of Death, so that he might judge the souls of those he once sought to liberate. As an eternal sign of his betrayal and subjugation, he is forced to wear the immovable skull mask, which denies him any expression of mercy or sorrow.”

  Talor turned the pages further, his eyes feverishly searching for a mention that matched what he suspected in the pulses. He searched for a demon of wrath, for an entity so powerful that it could shatter the barriers between realms by its mere presence. He read of lords of envy, rulers of sloth, and generals of greed. He found descriptions of beings who could drive entire worlds into madness, but he found nothing of a specific demon of wrath that fit into the scheme of Altron’s alliance. There were mentions of lesser rage spirits, of bloodthirsty beasts dwelling in the pits of the Lower Realms, but nothing that explained the quality of this specific pulse of power.

  It was a gap in the records that troubled him almost more than the facts themselves. If this being had participated in the rebellion, why was its punishment not recorded? Or had it perhaps been so dangerous that its name and judgment had been erased even from the most secret books of the Inquisition?

  Talor stared for a long time at the empty space at the end of the chapter. The candle in its holder had already burned low, and the flickering light made the shadows in the room dance as if they led a life of their own. The Inquisitor felt mental exhaustion finally taking its toll. The information in this book was overwhelming and raised more questions than it answered. He knew that in this state, he could draw no clear conclusions.

  The concern for the safety of Neros and the entire realm weighed heavily on his shoulders. If Ulthanox or Erebos—Death and the Plague Father personally—were indeed active again, as the reports on mana measurements suggested, then Tirros stood on the eve of a catastrophe for which no army and no Inquisition was prepared.

  Talor closed the book with a dull thud. The sound echoed in the marble room, sounding like the closing of a coffin lid. He rose slowly, his bones clicking softly from tension. He decided to end his research for today. There were other archives, deeper crypts beneath Neros, which he had not entered for years. Down there lay the sealed clay tablets of the first Inquisitors—fragments that were perhaps even older than this book.

  He extinguished the lamp and let the room be bathed in the pale, gray light of dawn. He did not return the book to the shelf; he slid it into a hidden drawer of his desk, secured with a blood rune. He would take no risks.

  Before lying back down on his bed, he stepped to the window once more and looked out over the sleeping city of Neros. The towers of the Inquisition towered into the sky like threatening fingers. Talor knew that the coming days would be decisive. He had to assemble the pieces of the puzzle before the third impulse finally unhinged the world.

  With one last, worried look at the horizon, he closed his eyes, yet he knew that even in the few remaining hours of sleep, he would find no rest. The image of the burning Hall of Infallibility was now firmly seared into his memory—a flaming reminder of the fragility of the order he had sworn to protect.