Dawnlight Calendar, Year 1319.
A wind blew in at summer’s end—cool, dry, and sharp with the kind of change you couldn’t ignore—announcing that a full year had passed since Metasim fell.
In a town far from the place where Metasim had once stood, a lone girl knelt in the quiet cemetery beside a church. Her beautiful brown hair stirred in the breeze as she set down a bouquet, then reached out and brushed her fingertips gently over the vast, silent gravestone.
“Morning, everyone. It’s been a whole year since that fateful day…” She closed her eyes, a pained crease forming between her brows as memory dragged her back to the day of tragedy.
The number dead from the collapse of Metasim and Daskel had exceeded ten thousand. There were too many bodies, too many names, too much loss, so those taken in the twin assaults were memorialized together. The long stone stretched wide, packed tight with every confirmed name carved in relentless rows.
There were precious few remains sleeping beneath it.
No bodies were ever recovered from Metasim. The town had been completely taken over, its residents swallowed up so thoroughly that there was nothing left to bring home.
They’d barely managed to pull some corpses from Daskel. But what they found was unbearable. Bodies crushed under Aros’s shadow. Bodies so mangled they couldn’t be identified. Bodies burned down to fragments by Stella’s magic, leaving only scattered pieces like ash and broken bone.
Either way, the people left behind hadn’t healed. Not from Metasim. Not from Daskel. Not from the gaping wound those names had torn into the world.
The brown-haired girl traced the letters carved on the back of the gravestone. ALFIE JUDGMENT. Her face tightened into something complicated, grief braided with a bitterness she couldn’t fully speak.
“I really thought we’d grow old together. But now it’s like I’m a year ahead of you, Alfie.”
Her name was Marietta Vallières. Her eyes were a deep crimson, chestnut-brown hair cut to a semi-long length, sharp brows that usually suited a bright, lively expression.
But today, that liveliness was nowhere to be found. Her back looked too small for the sorrow it carried, as if the weight might snap her in two at any moment. Even her posture, her very presence, seemed fragile, unreliable, on the edge of breaking.
In the shade of a nearby tree stood Pomette Yoster, fourth rank among the Orthodoxy’s executives. Watching the girl’s trembling silhouette, she lowered her gaze, eyelids falling shut as if she couldn’t bear to keep looking.
Alfie Judgment’s end had been horrific.
With a horde of zombies surging in and the world around him swallowed by flame, he’d shielded his childhood friend. Fire wrapped around his small body like a living thing, and he burned to death protecting her.
Pomette leaned against the tree, one hand pressed over her mouth as if she could physically hold back the ache rising in her throat. To force a child into an end like that… There was something obscene about it.
The only mercy, perhaps, was that he hadn’t risen again as one of Pawk’s zombies.
Pawk Tedlotus. Pomette’s jaw tightened. In her hands, even an ordinary death starts to feel like a luxury. Enough that people who understand what she can do end up saying things like “at least they died normally.”
Her brow creased, and her fist clenched until her knuckles ached.
Marietta’s life was too brutal. She’d been made to watch her parents eaten alive. And then she’d lost the boy she loved most, her oldest friend, right in front of her.
She was still so young. No child should be made to carry that kind of history. The helplessness struck Pomette like a blow, and with it came something darker, a pitch-black intent that burned through her chest.
And the worst of it was what happened afterward.
So many of the dead ordinary citizens had been turned into puppets by Pawk’s poison. If Pomette had been able to truly honor the grief of the bereaved, Pawk should have been the first target, killed before anything else. But Pawk wasn’t someone who could be cut down easily. Pomette had never hated an enemy’s cruelty this much.
And Pawk’s depravity hadn’t stopped at the battlefield. It reached even those who tried to recover the bodies.
There was a story people told, a story that captured Pawk’s nature perfectly.
A couple who’d lost their child in the Battle of Daskel came to the ruined city, desperate to retrieve his remains—if nothing else, to bring him home.
After days of searching, they finally found him.
Their son’s body had changed, and yet the parents trembled with relief through their tears, whispering, “Thank goodness… We found you.”
Then they witnessed something impossible.
Their boy, cold, lifeless just moments ago, opened his eyes and rasped, “Dad… Mom…”
For a heartbeat, they could only stare. Confusion flickered across their faces before collapsing into desperate joy. They clapped their hands, crying, laughing, refusing to acknowledge the chill of his skin, refusing to accept what their senses were screaming at them. They took him back to the nearest town, clinging to the hope that he’d survived.
That night, a corner of that town had been devastated.
A massive fire. A sudden outbreak—zombies spreading through the streets, born from Pawk’s poison. The panic started from the couple’s temporary lodging.
They hadn’t known what Pawk Tedlotus could do.
Pomette Yoster, an Orthodoxy executive who happened to be staying in the town, managed to contain the blaze and halt the spread, but the incident sent shockwaves through the upper ranks of the church.
The road to Daskel was sealed immediately. Recovery efforts were canceled indefinitely. And as the abandoned ruins of Daskel turned into a breeding ground for outlaws, security collapsed so badly that the city slipped entirely from orthodox control.
Rumor said Aros and his people had lured those criminals there on purpose, but no one could prove it.
The Aros Temple Cult… You stole Celestia, and then you toyed with innocent lives like they were nothing.
She didn’t let any of it show. Not with Marietta so close, speaking softly to her dead friend as if he could still hear. But the more Pomette thought about it, the more her anger threatened to tip into delirium.
If only she’d managed to bring down an executive from the heretics that day Daskel was attacked.
If only she’d stopped Celestia, who’d pushed too hard, demanded results too fast.
If either of those things had happened, the Kenneth Orthodoxy wouldn’t be trapped in such a painful position now.
“Marietta,” Pomette said gently. “It’s about time…”
“Oh, yes.” Marietta gave the gravestone one last look, forcing a small smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Then… Alfie. Everyone. I’ll see you later, okay…?”
Pomette turned. Her blonde hair, tied back in a single bundle, lifted in the breeze as she left the cemetery.
Marietta followed at a quick trot, hurrying to keep up.
A year ago, the shockwave from Celestia Hothound’s disappearance had rattled the orthodox leadership to its core.
It wasn’t only the raw loss of strength, though that alone was severe. The deeper blow was psychological.
Celestia had been a pillar, the kind that held people up without them realizing how much they leaned on her. Her nosy, meddlesome streak and her almost maternal kindness were famous even inside the organization. Losing her left an emptiness that spread through the ranks like cold.