Chapter 7

  Twelve years ago…

  Maira Ysera was once part of the Inquisition—more precisely, the Inquisition of Fobos. She was a righteous cleric of the Higher Realms, devoutly believing in the Angels and the Light, her steely conviction surpassed only by her impeccable morality. A woman destined to become something much, much worse.

  Whose fault it was could be debated for centuries. The controllers of the Inquisition—the arrogant High Elves of Neros and the largest, most ambitious houses of men—did not fare well after and during the devastating Dragon Wars. The Inquisition, once the most feared arm of religious and political orthodoxy, was bled dry. Its judgments had lost their impact, its authority was openly questioned. They were no longer a moral authority, but a perforated paper tiger.

  They desperately needed new energy, new power, holy support—or at least a symbol. A symbol that would bring all others to their knees, teach them to fear the Inquisition anew, and unequivocally reaffirm their continuous supremacy.

  For this symbol, the clever Vice-High Inquisitor Aurex Galmon, Keeper of the Third Sigil and a man of dangerous, cold pragmatism, came up with an idea. Aurex was no visionary, but a perfect administrator. His idea was ingenious in its minimization of risk yet catastrophic in its underestimation of cosmic laws: the summoning of one of Ours—a lower-tier Angel, who was to serve as an advisor and symbolic presence.

  The plan sounded unambitious, cautious, and completely harmless on paper. A small Angel for a grand demonstration.

  High Inquisitor Talor, the Eternal Judge, a man whose adherence to rules was his only weakness, reluctantly gave the plan his blessing. The symbolic risk seemed less than the political loss of control.

  And so, twenty powerful priests and clerics, including the righteous but naive Maira Ysera, gathered in a small, artificial chamber beneath the Palace of Virtue, the headquarters of the Inquisition. The chamber was covered with heavy banishment seals and ritual markings intended to protect it from earthly disturbances.

  In the first minutes, the ritual was even relatively successful.

  The cruel, necessary preparation was complete: the souls of the Orc children and their fathers were, as usual, separated from the body. The mana of death—raw, violent, and immense—was immediately channeled into the cosmic matrix. I will spare you the gruesome details of the soul separation, but the efficiency and the purely preserved energy yield were, from the Inquisition's perspective, perfect.

  The twenty priests used the resulting mana and flowed their own cultivated, holy energy into it. The tremendous, combined mana stream was supposed to break through the dimensions. They shaped the energy, opening a very unstable but visually overwhelming portal to Us. The portal pulsed in iridescent, colored swirls, a beautiful-looking but dangerously twitching gateway to the cosmic void. They managed to touch the threshold.

  Well, and then, simply put, it became their undoing.

  The arrogance of the Vice-High Inquisitor, who believed he could subdue cosmic power with earthly cruelty, clashed with the instability of the portal generated by soul sacrifices.

  The backside of the universe pushed back. The rules of creation fought against the violent opening.

  The unstable portal, violently opened through soul-theft and human hubris, could not withstand the cosmic strain for a second longer. The dimensions creaked; the laws of creation struck back with brutal force.

  CRASH!

  There was a gigantic, all-annihilating explosion that consisted not just of heat and pressure, but of uncontrolled, pure mana discharge. The impact was so massive that the entire Palace of Virtue, a structure of solid, centuries-old stone, was shaken. Above the capital, people thought a minor earthquake had hit the foundations. Underground, however, it was the apocalypse.

  The chamber walls burst inward; the banishment seals instantly incinerated. The unstable mana recoil was a deadly stream of superheated, sizzling energy that made no distinction between innocent priests and guilty architects.

  Almost all priests and clerics—their white robes instantly turned to ash and their bodies to charred remains—died on the spot. Their souls were swept away in the shockwaves. Aurex Galmon, the clever Vice-High Inquisitor who believed he had considered everything, was also crushed by cosmic irony. He died first, his brain cooked by the extreme frequency of the dimensional backlash in a moment of horrified understanding.

  Maira Ysera lay in the midst of this inferno. She was not instantly dead. Her powerful mana reservoir as a devout cleric had preserved her core from total dissolution, but her bones were broken, her skin burned. She was dying, her lungs filled with dust and ash, her eyes seeing through the smoke and destruction. The pain was unbearable, yet her dying soul experienced an agonizing clarity.

  In this critical second, in this moment of absolute failure of Light and human order, another voice whispered into her shattering mind. A deep, icy presence that snaked through the ruins where the pure light of the Higher Realms had been struck back.

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  It was Erebos. The God of Disease and the Void.

  “You are dying for their lies. You are dying for the mistakes of the arrogant,” the voice breathed. It was not loud, but it penetrated Maira’s tormented being with absolute coldness.

  “The Light has abandoned you. It has sacrificed you. Just as they sacrificed the Orcs.”

  Maira tried to resist, to invoke her faith, but her body was too weak. The pain was an inseparable veil of reality.

  “I offer you a way out. I offer you no salvation, cleric. I offer you power. I offer you survival.”

  It was an offer perfectly tailored to her broken pride. Erebos demanded that she become his cleric, that she dedicate her dying spirit to the Plagues and carry out his commandments. In return, he would stabilize her body, nourish her soul, and give her the strength to judge the weak and the hypocrites.

  “Become my tool. And survive. Become what you are destined to be—a Judge of Plagues.”

  In that millisecond of decision, Maira Ysera abandoned her righteous faith. She accepted. It was not a joyful conversion, but a cold, pragmatic bargain with the face of Death.

  An icy current of dark, Tainted Mana shot through her body. It was pure agony, a cosmic rewriting of her inner matrix. The golden energy of the Higher Realms was ripped out and replaced by the black, cold essence of the Lower Realms. Her broken bones began to stabilize agonizingly fast; her burns immediately scabbed over.

  She survived. But Maira Ysera was no longer who she once was.

  As the smoke and dust slowly settled and the first alarmed guards pushed into the shattered chamber—cautious of the unstable mana residue—they found a scene of horror.

  Charred remains and broken marble lay everywhere. Maira lay motionless among the debris, her once white robe now blood-stained and blackened. Beside her, unmistakably identifiable by the remnants of his signet ring, lay the corpse of Vice-High Inquisitor Aurex Galmon—his face frozen in a silent scream of cosmic understanding.

  The guards and the surviving high inquisitors, led by a horrified Talor, were fixated on the scale of the catastrophe. They saw no threat in the dying cleric, only a survivor who would soon die.

  But the moment the first healer reached out her hand to examine Maira's injuries, the new Cleric of Erebos awoke.

  With inhuman speed and a new, dark power that no human or angel knew, Maira tore herself free. Her eyes, now streaked with a cold, almost black sheen, saw the hypocrites of the Inquisition. She used the confusion over the disaster and the guards' momentary inability to detect the mana signature of her new power.

  Maira barely managed to escape. She vanished into the underground passages of the palace, hunted by the organization she had once served with a pure soul. The Inquisition had not summoned an angel. They had created something far worse: a Cleric of Disease, unleashed upon the world with a new, dark purpose.

  -

  “Subsequently, she spent years building a cult. A cult made up of species of all kinds, as well as broken mothers and abandoned children—the perfect victims and tools of the Plague Father,” Ragiel recounted toward the end of his explanation. He casually played with his spear, whose golden light now seemed to illuminate the entire story.

  “Then it was destroyed by the Inquisition. A necessary, but bloody end, in which hundreds, some innocent—but misguided—died. Following this, the servant of the Plague Father began a journey with no destination until she ended up at the White Ox. From then on,” the Messenger of Light concluded. A final, faint projection appeared: Luken, Vin, Simon, and Maira at a shabby bar, the improbable alliance was complete. “…we know the story.”

  The Hall of Infallibility sank into silence. The complex chain of moral desperation was now fully laid out: Golem disgrace led to theft; ritual failure led to dark cleric; both desperations led to the Fateful Group.

  Metatron folded his hands on the podium, his eyes narrow and understanding.

  “And thus,” he said, finally grasping that the cosmic order was shaken by the smallest human errors, “the first God came into play: Erebos, the Plague Father.”

  Ragiel nodded in confirmation. “Correct. A little later, Ulthanox came into play when he scolded to Erebos to restore balance. But that is another story.”

  Ragiel coughed ironically. He shamelessly exploited the authority he had just gained. “My voice is a bit strained, could someone get me a glass of—”

  “Be silent!” Metatron snarled, brutally interrupting his brother. Control was completely lost. Understanding the cause had not lessened his anger, but amplified it.

  “You may not have started the conflict, but you exacerbated it! Your heroic interference was superfluous! Reyn would have won the battle even without Luken's death! But because of you, the Paladin was able to destroy the crystal and a. Shard. Of. Altron. Was. FREED!!”

  His voice thundered through the Hall, the echo whipping back from the golden walls. As the sound subsided, Metatron realized what he had done. The shocked expression on his face mirrored total panic.

  The Hall of Infallibility immediately descended into a chaos of voices, discussions, and outrage.

  “ALTRON IS FREE?!”

  “The guy who plunged the cosmos into war!?”

  “What happens now?!”

  “We are all dead!”

  “HELP!!!”

  The Higher Beings, who had been unshakeable for millennia, succumbed to panic. The name Altron was the sound of total apocalypse, the primal fear of cosmic order.

  “NO!” Metatron retorted, his voice now sharper and more urgent than the thunderclap. The discussions silenced under the force of his desperate authority.

  “To all Angels: We are neither defeated nor in danger! Stop speculating! It is a shard! One of a thousand! His true form is still trapped deep in the dungeons! He and his Chosen One can at most threaten Tirros! Nothing. Will. Happen. To. Us!”

  Metatron was right, but the confirmation that the source of chaos was now active on Tirros calmed almost no one. The conversations subsided, however, replaced by hushed, anxious murmurs.

  Finally, he turned to his brother one last time. His decision was made.

  “You will be punished, Ragiel,” he announced. The sternness of his voice was inevitable. “But not in chains or captivity, no…”

  Ragiel looked curious. His eyes sparkled at the prospect of an unusual task.

  “Instead… you will receive a new mission.”

  The Hall held its breath. Metatron spoke the final words of the Celestial Tribunal, a calculated but painful irony.

  “You will…” he began and sighed deeply—a sound of pain and resignation—“help the mortals defeat Altron’s Chosen One. Without. Personal. Intervention.”

  Ragiel, the lover of direct action, was sentenced to watch and advise. The perfect, unbearable punishment for the disobedient Angel.

  If you have thoughts, theories, or reactions to this celestial mess (or Ragiel’s behavior…), I’d love to hear your feedback.