The wind howled between rusted bell towers as three cloaked figures darted across the rooftops. Beneath their boots, Quorva groaned its spires cracked, its cobblestone veins pulsing with rituals long since turned to rot
Capricorn didn't slow.
Neither did Aries.
But the priest lagged behind, coughing violently as he stumbled, robes snagging on broken tiles.
"Unholy elevation," he wheezed. "Heretical drafts this city's cursed, I swear it."
Aries scoffed. "Your bones complain louder than your god."
"Blasphemy," the priest rasped. "Watch your tongue, girl."
Aries adjusted the massive wrapped object slung across her back, shifting its strap with one hand. "If Igniseria wanted me silent, she wouldn't have given me a voice."
Capricorn said nothing. His gaze swept the horizon, calculating wind, arc, and impact radius. Smoke drifted in from the west burned cinnamon, sulfur, and wilted flowers.
The scent of ritual.
The stench of a city pretending to pray.
Suddenly, he stopped.
The others followed, ducking low as they perched atop a slate rooftop.
From here, Quorva unraveled beneath them like a dying beast.
To the west: The Slums bloated with starving souls, rooftops sagging under ash and rot.
To the east: The Plaza statues of
quorix, his worshippers draped across them like refuse.
Below, in a shadowed alley: A lone cloaked figure, kneeling in eerie stillness.
Capricorn's eyes narrowed.
A girl?
His gaze lingered, sharp and searching. Just beneath the edge of her hood, golden curls spilled out thick, untamed, radiant even in shadow. There was something about that hair… something familiar.
She turned.
Almost locking eyes.
Capricorn's heart clenched.
"Move," he said sharply, and they scattered across the rooftop ridge.
But she moved too.
Lilith followed.
Quick-footed, unblinking. Her steps were too precise like a predator certain of her prey.
The trio slipped into a ruined terrace, ducking beneath shattered stained glass. Capricorn threw up a fist halt and hissed:
"Suppress your Soel Now."
All three stilled. Breaths held. Eyes tense.
Footsteps echoed nearby. Slow. Deliberate. Closer.
Below them, the city had begun to unravel.
Screams erupted from the alleys shrieks of confusion, of horror, of sudden, animal panic.
People fought in the streets some to flee, others to pray.
Dozens dropped to their knees before shattered statues, worshipping frantically, begging for forgiveness.
A mother slapped her child's mouth shut and whispered prayers.
A man tore his shirt and bled across an altar.
A gang of zealots chanted half-remembered hymns and set fire to their own hair.
The second bell hadn't even tolled yet.
Then finally Lilith's footsteps faded. She moved on, no longer certain they were the same figures she'd sensed above her.
Capricorn exhaled. Barely.
They emerged again atop another roof shadows in motion.
"She seems shady," Aries muttered. "Want me to light her path?"
"No," Capricorn replied. "We observe. That's all."
It was to late she was already prepping
In one smooth motion, she raised her hand a matchstick between two fingers, glowing faintly, like it remembered every fire it had ever known
Red energy surged to life, spiraling from the air like molten ribbons being twisted by unseen hands. It didn't float it tore through the air in tight rings, each one more vicious, faster, more alive than the last. The pressure dropped in an instant the warmth of the day vanished, replaced by a creeping, unnatural cold like she had taken all the warmth from the world away.
The pressure blew outward.
Her cloak shredded at the seams, hood tearing from her head in a violent whip of wind and power.
There she stood Aries bathed in beauty and firelight.
black hair kinky, wild and untamed, spilled around her face in defiant tendrils, their ends glowing faintly as if fire had kissed each strand. Her skin, brown and smoothed by sweat and war, shimmered with a heat-born sheen. Her black eyes, unfazed, stared ahead with a focused kind of thrill a calm storm on the edge of release.
Etched into the side of her neck like a cursed birthright, it pulsed deep black veins branching outward like roots, stretching down toward her collarbone and up toward her jaw. As her Soel surged, the mark blazed a deep, hellish red, as if something ancient had awakened beneath her skin.
She grinned. Not out of cruelty. Out of love for the eruption.
"Then this one's for fun."
The matchstick snapped between her fingers with a flick clean, deliberate, like a ritual she'd performed a thousand times.
The blast didn't just fire it ripped through space like a spear made of wrath. A curved, screaming beam of red-gold light carved its way through the sky, bending midair like a blade following her command.
The house didn't explode.
It folded in silently, terrifyingly drawn into itself like some invisible hand had crushed its history. Bricks vanished. Beams curled. The roof winked out like a flame in the dark.
a crater sat where the house once was
Flames rose upward in soft spirals, moving like liquid silk, weaving into the night with a beauty that dared you to blink. They licked the air, elegant, rhythmic more like a performance than a punishment.
Capricorn watched, unmoving.
That was Aries.
Unchained. Precise.
And always one flick away from lighting the world ablaze
Screams followed a heartbeat later sharp, pleading, distant.
"The screams of mercy," Aries said softly. "Filthy place. I'm doing it a favor."
The priest gasped. "Be careful not to hit a statue of the gods!"
Aries rolled her eyes. "Your gods, maybe. Mine don't cry over stone."
Capricorn didn't look at her.
His gaze was fixed on the alley below a stuffed bear, charred but whole, spinning in the air. It landed softly near where the golden-haired girl had once stood.
He didn't speak.
But in the stillness of his thoughts, something stirred:
Coincidence is just chaos wearing silence.
Then—
BONG.
The second bell tolled.
Another soul harvested
The entrance to Quorix's sanctum was sealed beneath a forgotten estate its windows long shattered, ivy strangling what was once nobility. Beneath a rotting cellar door and three layers of veiled wards, a silence pulsed, too deliberate to be natural. Only those trained in the arcane glyphcraft of Virelia could undo such divine locks.
Capricorn stepped forward. His gloved hand hovered above the ancient seals, fingers precise, reverent.
"Order is authority. Authority is Law."
The glyphs trembled at his voice, lines of light folding inward like dying stars. One by one, they unraveled in threads of blue fire. The sanctum's mouth creaked open, stale with divine judgment.
They descended into the dark.
The chamber beneath was cavernous, shaped like a courtroom crucified into a crypt. Glyphs of judgment danced along the stone walls in flickering cerulean flame. Obsidian pillars loomed like unmoving bailiffs, carved with names no mortal could pronounce. In the center where a throne might sit stood a god.
To look upon Quorix was to witness the stillness of order given form.
He did not wear clothes he was draped in doctrine.
Black and white ceremonial robes hung from him like an unspoken verdict, each hem traced in shifting mathematical sigils that rearranged themselves in fractal logic. The sleeves dragged long, not out of carelessness, but because he had no need to lift a hand to enforce judgment. His very presence dictated.
His hair, sleek and shoulder-length, was parted with surgical precision black strands cut like blades of ink.
His silver eyes gleamed like pools of mercury, never blinking, only processing. Every glance weighed. Every expression calculated in probabilities he'd already solved.
There was no warmth in him. No scent of flesh or sweat. Just a silence that suffocated, a presence that thinned the air. He did not walk. He arrived a verdict made flesh.
Quorix.
A being not of blood, but of principle. A cold philosopher-king clad in priestly minimalism.
You're late," Quorix said not aloud, but inside their minds. His gaze lingered on Aries. "And you've brought foreign help."
"I'm not thrilled to be here either," she said, flopping into a nearby chair
Capricorn did not flinch. "We arrived as soon as we got the message." he said kneeling
No response. Not praise. Not rebuke. The air simply thickened.
With a motion, Quorix summoned a divine mirror its surface shifting with a looped vision of the desecrated church. Glyphs circled it like judgmental vultures.
The cloaked figure emerged.
shadow walker . Bloodied hands. Forbidden fruit clutched like a declaration of war.
The glyphs surrounding the mirror glitched, their rhythm distorted his presence an affront to divine categorization.
Then, in one frame, a glint just a breath of motion.
Golden hair caught the dim light, curled like flame through shadow.
Aries groaned. "We've seen this damn loop four times"
But Capricorn leaned in, eyes sharpening.
"I know that hair…" he thought
The words hung incomplete. A flash in his mind: smoke. Screams. A child pulled through fire. A city lost to judgment.
Before he could speak further, the air stiffened again. The god's will pressed down like a sentence passed.
"Your orders," Quorix intoned, gaze unseen but weight undeniable. "You will divide."
He turned.
.To Aries,Smoke out the intruders. Drive them to desperation."
"Shadow Walker, Shadow Walker," she chanted, grinning from ear to ear.
"To the priest: descend to the site. Catalog the damage. Report the corruption."
Then to Capricorn.
"You hunt the mark. Burn it out. The one who leaves the 'X'. The one who mocks judgment."
Capricorn clenched his gauntlet, its embedded glyphs glowing faintly with latent fury. The sigils danced across the metal like a prayer chiseled into wrath.
He did not speak.
But his silence was loud with promise
They moved in silence, crossing lesser alleys until they reached the half-collapsed edge of the church district. Smoke drifted lazily across cracked mosaics. The ground here had the texture of soot and memory ash clinging to sacred ruin.
Aries balancing on fallen beams a few feet away
The priest finally spoke.
"You saw the symbol. The X."
"I saw it," Aries said, her voice low but sharp. "Branded deep. like a declaration of war."
"Then you know who it is," the priest replied, scanning the skyline with narrowed eyes. "Only Apostles dare mock divine ground. The one who left it is one of them."
Capricorn didn't answer.
He stepped toward a nearby wall where the heat still clung to brick, studying a scorched surface. The faint, ghostlike remnant of an X, smeared in something darker than soot, lingered at chest height.
His hand hovered near it, trembling but didn't touch.
This wasn't sanctioned rebellion, he thought. It wasn't a tactical glyph, or a factional signature. This was something worse.
Personal. Raw. A primal act of defiance without structure, goal, or doctrine.
The kind of mark that spreads faster than truth. Like rot. Like myth.
Behind them, a breeze picked up carrying voices that weren't speaking.
The priest broke the moment.
"What if the thief is still here?"
Capricorn turned. His gaze was iron.
"Then we'll bury the city."
aries turned around shocked from these words "Cap usually kept a leveled head" she thought
someone bumped into Aries from behind. A child. Thin, fast, and gone before her hand could react. A blur of rags and breathless laughter.
Capricorn watched the figure vanish into the smoke but something glinted in the child's hand.
"Wait—" Aries stepped forward, then froze.
Her eyes flicked up.
Across the alley wall beside them, painted in slick, iridescent black, a new symbol had been marked.
Not the X.
It spiraled.
A perfect circle ruptured at the top, with seven jagged lines descending like fractured thorns, piercing downward. At the center, where a star might sit in other symbols, was a gaping hollow, not a shape but an absence, a wound in the paint itself. Like something had eaten through the wall from the inside out.
Capricorn's breath hitched.
From recognition.
"…This is fucking great."
Aries stepped closer. "What….what is this?"
He didn't speak at first. The priest did.
"It's a warning," he whispered. "A judgment mark."
Capricorn's voice was lower than the wind.
"No. Worse."
He faced the symbol. His jaw tightened.
"It's a harbinger."