Kaelis stood before yet another door. His blood — golden and shadowy — flowed from his wounds, faintly illuminating the floor with each step.
He was no longer entirely human. He felt everything at once… yet expressed nothing.
He loved everything. He hated everything.
He was like a broken machine — driven only by the memory of a desire that now escaped him.
But what was his desire, again?
He couldn't say. He felt like there was something he was fighting for… but he couldn't remember. Nor feel it.
Guided only by the sliver of humanity that still resisted in his shattered soul, Kaelis moved forward.
The door opened with a rough, stifled sound — as if the Cathedral itself hesitated to let him in.
And he entered.
He then beheld the most profane beauty he had ever witnessed.
The chamber was vast, domed like an inverted cathedral. Its pillars curved downward, like twisted ribs made of polished bone and cracked glass. From the ceiling hung living tapestries, stitched from flesh and veils of whispers — they murmured prayers in forgotten tongues, crying out to the heart.
At the center stood an altar of marble too white to be pure.
Above it, a colossal stained-glass window of a heart suspended between two wings:
One made of feathers black as guilt.
The other, of virginal whiteness — like condemned hope.
The heart glowed with a pulsing red. Though sculpted from glass, it… beat. As if it were alive. As if it were waiting.
Before the altar, someone awaited him.
White robes, a ceremonial tunic with a hood. His face, pale as wax. His feet, without shadow — as if he did not belong to the physical world.
It was him.
The priest who had shaped every torment of his journey.
"Welcome to the end of the beginning, Hadriel,"
The Priest said, with a gentle voice, almost tender… but laced with poison.
"Your parents loved you… but not enough to stop us."
"They didn't sacrifice themselves for you, their son? No. They were sacrificed by us to refine your soul."
The priest extended his hands, as if to touch Kaelis. In that instant, the stained glass above shone, pouring red light like freshly spilled blood.
"You are our masterpiece. The perfect vessel for divinity."
And then Kaelis saw.
No veils. No lies.
The ritual.
The circle of blood.
The silver dagger with the ruby on its hilt — the same he had carried at the beginning of the journey.
He saw his mother, holding hands with his father. Surrounded by clerics. Chains of prayer bound her. She looked to the sky… As if praying for something already lost.
He saw the blade slice through her neck.
He saw his father dragged days later to the underground chambers, tortured to death.
He saw a soulless child push his sister from a bridge into the Lower Heaven, from where she never returned.
The prayers of the Church were false.
They did not wish to serve the divinity.
They wanted to use it.
And even with false prayers… the power was real. Somehow, the divinity had already been imprisoned by the Church, trapped in this cursed Cathedral.
Hadriel's soul, like Kaelis's, had been sealed with pain.
His values, shaped by suffering.
His hope, cultivated like fertile soil to germinate a divine seed.
And then… something broke inside him.
A muffled, internal sound.
It was not a scream.
It was not a tear.
It was the exact moment when the human dies — and the divine begins to be born.
The chains of previous trials burned in his blood.
The memory of pain, of hunger, of love denied.
Everything boiled.
Everything burned.
And then—
Wings tore through his flesh in a grotesque concerto of cracks and bone screams.
Feathers black as the night of loss.
Made of raw light and pale flames, the wings were beautiful in their imperfection. A sacred heresy.
The altar trembled.
The entire cathedral shuddered.
And throughout the city… something awoke.
The priest stepped back — for the first time, uncertain.
Kaelis rose.
His face expressed no sadness.
Nor anger.
Only… judgment.
"If this is what it means to be a god…"
"Then let all profane bodies and souls burn."
"And let all false gods burn with me."
And Heart God… heard the call of its vessel.
As if Kaelis's cry echoed beyond the world, into the bowels of the divinity
"If your will is to judge… then judge."
"Choose your face, vessel…"
"And receive…"
"Your true name."