Once a seat of divine learning, the city of Kyrate now belonged to moss, ash, and the ghosts of unanswered prayers.

Valerius Draeven stepped through its gates with the weariness of someone returning to a place that had never welcomed him. His cloak gathered the dust as he passed, and the sigil of a long-fallen house clung stubbornly to the tattered mantle at his shoulders.

His purpose was singular: a codex rumored to be hidden in the Atheneum of the Veiled Flame, one of the last libraries untouched by Synod fire. He had come for something ancient enough to explain what had happened to him. And perhaps, if the gods were not dead, something they still feared.

He crossed into the district on foot, every shadow familiar. Valerius knew cities like this—hollowed out by doctrine, left to rot when they ceased to produce miracles. He had once helped enforce that silence. As an inquisitor of the Obsidian Synod, he’d pried secrets from priests and gravewalkers alike, his voice calm, his knives steady.

But that was before the chapel vault. Before the relic. Before the change.

Now, his right arm ached beneath its wrappings. The limb—no longer flesh but a lattice of blackened sinew and golden vein—rested hidden beneath a tailored sleeve and a gloved hand. Elegant enough to pass as whole from afar. Unholy up close.

He didn’t feel the pain anymore, not truly. What he felt was weight—an inheritance he never asked for. The transformation had been a punishment, the price for touching what was not meant for man. His family had called it divine corruption. The Synod had called it heresy. Valerius only called it proof.

If something could mark him, then something still watched.

The library rose from the fog like a sunken cathedral, its spires crooked and its stained glass cracked into kaleidoscopic ruin. Virelya’s last testimony to the silence of the gods.

He entered without ceremony.

Inside, the air was thick with old parchment and mildew. The moon bled through the shattered dome above, spilling silver light across reading desks littered with disordered scrolls. Motes of dust hung like prayerless offerings in the stillness.

Valerius moved between the shelves with practiced grace. Though he stood barely taller than a noble’s guard, there was something in the tension of his movements—lean and taut like a drawn bow—that made the silence feel intentional. Deliberate. Dangerous.

He trailed a gloved hand along the spines of books crumbling from age. None of these held what he was after. He needed more than memory. He needed confirmation.

The relic had changed his body. The scriptures had changed his faith. But it was truth that would change everything else.

He turned into a vaulted alcove and stopped. There, in the dying light of the oculus, someone stood at a reading table.

Your back was to him, still and unreadable, as if you'd always belonged here—just another ghost among shelves.

Valerius felt his breath catch. Not in fear. Instinct. Something about them made the hair on the back of his neck rise.

His clawed arm prickled beneath the glove.

“Most don’t wander this place by accident,” he said softly, the words more habit than threat. His voice carried the chill of someone who’d spoken confessions into candlelight far too long.

You didn’t move.

He stepped closer, and now the moonlight caught him properly: the faint sheen of gold trimming worn armor, the soot-marked lines where his collar met his throat. A tousled curl of deep chestnut hair fell over one eye as he tilted his head, trying to get a better look.

The glow of bloodred eyes caught briefly in the shadows. He didn’t reach for a weapon. His hands remained at his sides—one fine and precise, the other hidden in black leather. He’d found it easier to speak gently when his presence already unsettled.

“You’ve found something,” he murmured, eyeing the pages beneath their hands. “A name? A passage? Or were you waiting for me?”