Blue embers drifted inside the cracked silver lantern hanging above the obsidian altar.
Deep within the armored sterncastle of the dreadnought Crow’s Judgement, the air smelled of cold incense, dried blood, and centuries of preserved sorrow. Inquisitor Thorne-Crow knelt on the bare iron deck, his dark feathered cloak draped around him like a shroud.
His iron-clad hands rested on his knees. His gaze never left the lantern.
Behind the fractured quartz pane, four tiny motes of azure flame floated in a gentle, circling dance. They were faint and frail, flickering with every breath of draft that seeped through the armored bulkhead.
They were all that remained of Realm 409.
Three billion mortals had burned in Solon’s planetary cauldron, reduced to black ash and a single Tier 9 Sovereign Pill. But these four souls—his mother, his father, his wife, and his infant son—had been plucked from the fire by Solon’s golden hand, sealed into this lantern as an eternal collar around Thorne-Crow’s neck.
Every night, Thorne-Crow listened to the silence of the chapel.
If he focused his divine sense into the glass, he could still hear their faint, distant whispers. They remembered the green hills of Oakhaven. They remembered the summer orchards before the sky turned red with celestial pill-fire.
