I was dying.
Blood fell from the sky, warm and heavy, splattering against my skin and sinking into the torn earth beneath me.
Whether it came from above or from the bodies strewn across the clearing no longer mattered, because all of it belonged to the same end.
The moon hung low over the forests of Anstalionah, its pale light threading through blackened branches that arched overhead like ribs stripped bare.
I had been driven into the center of the clearing, surrounded by steel and fire and chanting voices, trapped in a space shaped perfectly for my death.
I forced myself upright and raised my sword.
The blade was cracked and dull, its edge chipped down to little more than a memory of sharpness, trembling in my grip as blood ran along its length.
I had carried it across too many roads for something so small, and yet it had never once failed me until now.
Armored figures advanced in a tightening ring. Black plate. Golden seals. Holy symbols stamped into shields that had broken bodies without hesitation.
They shouted my name like an accusation.
Nicholas Anstalionah.
Demon. Heretic. Abomination.
I tried to laugh, but blood flooded my mouth and turned the sound into a wet, broken cough.
Perhaps they were right, because I no longer knew where the lie ended and the truth began.
Pain exploded through my back as steel drove into me, and the force folded my body forward before my knees struck the ground hard enough to steal what little breath I had left.
The grass beneath me darkened as it drank what spilled from my wounds, warm and thick and final.
I pushed myself up on shaking arms, refusing to remain there even as my strength bled out into the soil.
I waited a heartbeat too long before moving, the same way I always had, measuring the cost of action until the moment passed and left me scrambling to recover.
Even now, with my blood soaking into the ground, some part of me hesitated, searching for a better time, a cleaner moment, as though the world had ever rewarded patience instead of resolve.
That pause cost me, as it always did, and steel found flesh before I could commit fully to the strike.
I lunged, slashing wildly, and felt my blade strike armor with a useless burst of sparks. Someone screamed.
Someone fell. I did not know who, and I did not have the clarity left to care.
Momentum carried me forward for a single step before another blade struck home, and this time my body collapsed beneath me.
The world spun as sound stretched thin and distant, footsteps pounding around me while steel rang like bells tolling something inevitable.
My sword slipped from my hand, and instinct drove me to claw through the dirt until my fingers closed around the hilt just in time to twist aside another descending strike.
Sparks burst across my vision as steel met steel, and I rolled through mud and blood to drag myself upright once more.
Each breath rasped shallow and uneven, my lungs burning as my body failed faster than I could command it.
I had seen that look in the eyes of dying men before, and now I felt it wearing my own skin.
I recognized some of the bodies scattered through the clearing, not by their faces, but by the way they lay.
One had fallen clutching his shield too tightly, fingers locked around the rim even in death, while another lay twisted at an unnatural angle where his armor had failed him.
I had put men down like this before, had left them cooling in fields and streets and forests no different from this one.
I knew with sick certainty that some of these corpses existed because I had learned how to kill without hesitation.
The knowledge settled heavy in my chest, not as regret, but as weight, the kind that never leaves once it has been earned.
Death lingered close enough that I could sense its patience.
Then a voice cut through the chaos, clear and cold and merciless.
"Falter, and come to the end of your means."
The battlefield fell silent.
Even my heart stuttered, as though it feared continuing without permission.
The soldiers halted in unison, their weapons lowering as hatred collapsed into trembling stillness, because a man was walking through them.
His steps were slow and deliberate, each one pressing the world flatter beneath his feet.
He wore black armor shaped to perfection, with a golden lamb resting over his chest, polished and immaculate and raised above the blood it sanctioned.
Silver-blue hair was cropped and parted with care, a small cross glowing faintly beneath his lower lip.
His skin was untouched by filth, and his gold eyes found me with a weight that pain had never managed to achieve.
I felt small.
This was a Saint, the strongest Saint, the greatest, most holy man in this world.
St. Griffin
"Nicholas Anstalionah," he said calmly, "do you know what I despise most in this world?"
I tried to speak, but blood drowned the words before they could form.
"Nothing," he continued softly. "It is the act of doing nothing that I despise most."
He lifted his sword, and the blade was so dark it seemed to consume the light around it.
The air recoiled from its edge, and my breath caught as though the weapon itself had reached into my chest.
"You had power," Griffin said as he stepped closer. "Enough to matter, and you chose to waste it."
He stopped before me.
"You are the worst kind of monster," he said. "A man pretending to be a hero."
The blade pressed against my throat, cold and absolute.
"Heaven will never accept you."
A faint smile tugged at my lips as my breath trembled. "Maybe it shouldn't."
Something flickered in his eyes, something that might have been hesitation.
"Nicholas," he said more quietly, "Mirabel would have wanted better."
Her name struck deeper than any blade ever could.
My chest tightened until it hurt more than my wounds, and I forced the words out through the pain.
"Do not speak her name. I wish not for it to be stained by my presence."
Griffin did not answer, and the pressure at my throat increased.
This was the end.
And still I reached inward, not for mercy and not for forgiveness, but for the will to change.
The world collapsed into darkness.
A voice rose from it, ancient and familiar, vast enough to crack the edges of my mind.
[He would soon come to realize he was nothing.]
I drifted in the void between breath and oblivion, and within that nothingness something took shape in my grasp.
A black rose rested in my hand, its petals dry and cold, their edges sharp as broken glass, pulsing faintly as though the world itself were holding its breath.
I closed my hand around it.
[Wake, O beacon of nothing. Your dream is over.]
I crushed the rose, and its petals scattered like ash, dissolving into the dark as the void screamed in protest.
Pain returned first, sacred and searing, followed by breath and form.
My body burned as it changed, skin hardening into bronze and bark while veins glowed faintly beneath the surface as though molten light flowed through them.
My hair darkened with streaks of white, and wings tore free from my back, black and smoldering and alive.
I rose as light split the skies and the world struggled to reform around me.
Then the darkness gave way to a room, warm and still, centered around a massive black bed fit for a prince.
A woman sat cross-legged atop it, tying her scarlet hair into a bun with gentle, practiced movements.
Ruby eyes lifted when she sensed my gaze, and she smiled as though nothing else existed.
"Nicky," she said, "instead of staring, do you not want to help me?"
My breath caught as memory crashed over me.
This was my beloved, my precious, my causation, Mirabel.
This was the day I pushed her away, the day I chose idleness over purpose, the day she asked me to be more and I refused.
A month later, war would come, and she would ride out in my place and never return.
I laughed softly, bitterness threading through the sound. "A second chance wrapped in tragedy."
Mirabel tilted her head, amused. "Nicholas, you really are a fool."
Her words felt like both absolution and punishment.