The opera house in the New English Kingdom was one of the grandest buildings in the Mortal Anchor where the wealthy came dressed like they were attending a royal consecration instead of a performance.
Its ceiling had an arch structure painted in gold and midnight blue with crystal chandeliers hanging over velvet seats and balconies. On nights like this, the kingdom liked to pretend it was refined enough to forget it sat inside the Timeless Realm.
The woman on stage sang with a voice that made the entire hall seem weightless. She stood beneath the spotlight in a gown of silver and dark blue.
Among the audience sat a woman in a medieval dress that looked almost too plain for a hall this decadent. She held a pair of fancy binoculars in her hands. It was the sort used by nobles to inspect distant performances. Her face was half obscured by the angle of the balcony and the shadow of her hair but she looked perfectly still as the singer continued. No one around her noticed anything unusual. Why would they? She looked like a lady who cared about music. She looked harmless.
Through the binoculars, she had seen something the others had not. Shadows kept running along the upper gallery and behind the decorative columns at a speed far too fast for the human eye to see properly. No one else in the audience noticed them because no one else was looking for them.
The woman in the medieval dress lowered the binoculars. She stood up. One clap of her hands was loud enough to interrupt the performance.
The chandeliers flickered and the lights in the entire hall went dark at once. A second later, a single spotlight shone above her while the rest of the opera house vanished into shadow. The singer stopped mid-note. The orchestra froze on the edge of the next phrase. Every instrument went quiet in the same instant.
The people were confused until someone in the upper rows shouted the name in a voice edged with fear.
"It is a member of the Trope of Mutes!"
People began to rise from their seats and in the same motion several of them screamed when they realized the woman on the balcony was not normal. The air around her shifted under the weight of her Divine Presence. To mortals, a Divine Presence pressed down on their bodies with hundredfold intensity, pinning weaker beings in place before they could even understand what was happening.
Nobles in embroidered coats and masks dropped to the floor with sudden, terrible helplessness. People tried to crawl but failed. Some never made it out of their seats. Their bodies simply gave in beneath the impossible weight. The hall was filled with the sound of choking, cracking and terror.
Within seconds, most of the audience was dead.
The singer on stage remained standing because the spotlight had not turned on her and the orchestra, for reasons that became horrifyingly clear a moment later, remained alive as well. The rest of the hall had become a field of crushed bodies and overturned velvet chairs. Wine glasses shattered. Fans dropped to the floor. Jewelry spilled and glittered uselessly in the dark. The singer stared up at the balcony in silence.
The woman in the balcony looked equally shocked for a fraction of a second, as if even she had not expected the entire audience to die so quickly. She reached in her inventory, produced a mask and put it on. It was black and faceless. The surviving orchestra members saw her do it and one by one they reached for their own masks as well.
The orchestra members were still standing in their places, but their bodies had changed. The living flesh and human warmth were gone, replaced by puppet-like forms that looked nearly identical to the musicians they had impersonated only moments ago. They simply remained in position while the corpses of the real audience lay scattered around them.
The woman in the balcony glanced at the stage. By the time the singer blinked, she was gone.
The singer's throat tightened. She had no idea where the woman had gone, only that she was no longer in the hall. One second she had been under the spotlight, and the next the spotlight shone on empty air. The orchestra members, now fully masked and fully revealed as part of something much darker, turned toward the singer as if they had been waiting for this exact moment.
One of them spoke in a voice that was too calm to belong in a room full of dead nobles.
"Our master has personally done our task for us. We are to proceed with the destruction of the city."
Another masked assassin tilted its head.
"The New English Kingdom is one of the five largest kingdoms in the Mortal Anchor. That makes this convenient."
The singer stumbled backward a step.
"What are you talking about?"
No one answered her directly. They did not need to. In the distance beyond the opera house, bells had already begun ringing. Guards had noticed the disturbance. Alarm had begun moving through the streets. The assassins could hear it through the walls. The woman in the balcony had left them with instructions and now they had a city to erase.
At the doors to the opera house, guards were already arriving. Shouts echoed down the corridor as men tried to form a barrier before they knew what they were facing.
The masked assassins moved first.
They did not use concert weapons. They did not use anything polite. They took out assassin blades, segmented cords, hooked hilts, hidden needles, folded steel knives and compact weapons from their inventories. One of them snapped a wrist and sent a thin wire blade slicing through the throat of the first guard through the doorway. Another moved across the stage so fast that the singer barely saw them before two guards in the front aisle collapsed with clean openings across the chest and neck.
The first line of guards tried to push in with shields raised but they were cut down in seconds.
A blade slid under the rim of one shield and opened the guard's throat so neatly that he dropped without a sound. Another assassin stepped onto the balcony rail, turned sideways, and threw a cluster of needle darts that punched through visors and eye sockets. The white floor was slick with blood.
The singer backed away from the stage, trembling, as the surviving orchestra puppets split into smaller groups. Some moved to the exits. Others began dismantling the instruments themselves, pulling apart the polished frames to reveal concealed weapon shafts and curved daggers hidden inside the wood and brass. The opera had become a battlefield in less than a minute. The people who had come to listen to a beautiful voice were now dead on the floor and the city beyond the walls was about to learn that the concert had been only the opening strike.
One of the assassins passed the singer and paused just long enough to glance at her.
"Stay out of the way. You are not the target. I suggest hiding in the basement of the hall of you want to live."
The assassin vanished down the side corridor, leaving the singer standing alone on the stage among dead bodies and fake corpses where the orchestra was.
Outside, the New English Kingdom had begun to burn.
-----
A cathedral in another section of London City was overflowing long before the first scream ever reached its doors. It was one of the oldest sanctuaries in the district. The wealthy had their mansions, their private guards, their hidden vaults and their escape routes.
The people packed inside this cathedral had none of that.
They were the forgotten, the half-hungry, the homeless, the workers whose wages never lasted, the widows with no family left to return to and the children whose parents had vanished into debt or sickness or war. A few had once come from respectable families before poverty stripped the title off their names and left them with nothing but faith. The cathedral gave them shelter and in the Timeless Realm, shelter was often enough to become sacred.
Outside, the assassins were already moving through the city like a quiet disease.
They did not go house to house. That would have taken too long. Also, these killers were not interested in wasting time on private lives when the streets offered easier prey. Anyone still outside at the wrong hour was cut down on sight. Merchants trying to close their stalls were dragged into alleyways. Laborers running home with bread under their arms were struck down before they reached their doors. Travelers, beggars, children, drunkards, messengers and late-night wanderers all suffered the same fate.
Inside the cathedral, the Priestesses of Incurvious moved among the gathered worshippers. Their robes were white and sapphire. They spoke in calm voices and touched foreheads, shoulders, hands and shoulders again, guiding the crowd deeper into the cathedral where the hidden runic floor could be activated once the prayer sequence began.
Their followers clutched one another in fear but they listened. There was no riot or chaos. The priestesses were not promising safety in the ordinary sense. They were promising movement to go somewhere the assassins would not follow easily.
"The time has come," one of the priestesses said as she ushered a family toward the central chamber. "You must prepare yourselves."
One woman, thin and shaking, asked the question everyone else was afraid to ask.
"Is it really happening?"
"Yes. Tonight."
A child clung to her mother's sleeve and stared up at the altar where the light from the stained glass painted the floor in broken colors.
"Are we going to the promised land?"
"Yes," the priestess said. There was no hesitation in it. "All of you who came in faith will go."
Some of the worshippers began to cry immediately. Others lowered their heads and started praying at once. In that cathedral, devotion was not a decorative habit. It was the last structure standing in the lives of people who had nothing left to lose. They were not rich enough to buy Archivist Stones. They were not noble enough to negotiate with power but they had faith and in the Timeless Realm, faith could still become a weapon if enough people believed hard enough for long enough.
The front doors opened with a heavy creak.
A hush moved through the cathedral as the High Priestess emerged from the side chamber.
She wore a white faceless mask with golden patterns etched across it. The mask erased her features completely but no one in the room seemed bothered by that. In fact, many looked relieved to see it. They had heard the stories for decades. Some said the Deity she served had blessed her with beauty so overwhelming that no ordinary worshipper could bear to look upon her face without feeling small.
Others claimed the mask was a sign of her rank, that only someone truly touched by the divine could conceal so much and still be worshipped openly. The exact truth mattered less than the devotion built around it. In places like this, mystery was part of authority.
A few worshippers immediately bowed. Others reached out as if they wanted to touch the hem of her robe and dared not.
"High Priestess," one man whispered. "You came."
"Of course I came."
Another woman asked the question that had probably been asked a hundred times before.
"Why do you keep the mask on?"
For a moment, the High Priestess did not answer. She stood beneath the cathedral vaults with perfect stillness while the candles around the altar flickered in the draft. She then spoke in a calm tone.
"Because the form beneath it is not for common sight. The Deity I serve has blessed me with a beauty that belongs to the sacred, not the curious. It is easier this way. Reverence is sacred when people do not mistake wonder for possession."
That satisfied them, or at least it silenced them. In a room full of hungry people, reverence often looked a lot like hunger redirected. She turned at the gathered worshippers and lifted her hands.
"The promised land is waiting. All the cathedrals in London have devout followers of the Incurvious Religion. Tonight, they will all be gathered and moved together. But before the runes can be activated, we require the proper energy. Divine Energy does not come from empty words. It comes from belief. It comes from a soul deciding that something greater than itself is worth reaching."
A murmur of assent passed through the crowd. The poor and the desperate were not fools. They knew exactly how much power their belief could produce when enough of them offered it all at once. That was how the pantheons worked in the Immortal Anchor.
Faith was currency. Devotion was fuel. Prayer was the ignition.
Incurvious had not become strong by accident. It had been built the hard way that the realm respected more than anyone liked to admit: believe enough, and you shall receive.
The High Priestess stepped aside and allowed the worshippers to gather in lines before the central altar. One by one, more people moved into the open chamber, many with soot-stained clothes, worn shoes and faces that had seen too much disappointment to be naïve about miracles. They still prayed.
People who had nothing else often became the most dangerous believers in the world because their hope was focused on survival. A noble might pray for good weather but a poor woman prayed for food. A lost child prayed for a room that was warm. A man who had watched his city eat itself prayed simply to be taken somewhere that did not smell like death.
They began to kneel.
The first voice rose in the cathedral until the whole room became a living chorus of devotion. The incantation was simple enough that even the children could learn it, but the simplicity was deceptive. It was the repeated collective belief that powered the runes beneath the cathedral floor and linked the congregation to the transport network hidden within the Incurvious Pantheon's old architecture. The High Priestess listened as the prayer spread.
She smiled beneath the mask. No one could see it.
It had taken her four centuries to get here. She took four centuries of building the cathedral network, binding the faithful, guiding the desperate, surviving backlash, reorganizing the doctrine and turning a scattered belief system into an operational religion with real power behind it. She had done all of it in the name of her master, Vastarael.
She had made a religion out of devotion to him and the result was this cathedral, this crowd and this network of cathedrals across London, all packed with people who believed hard enough to move an entire city's worth of people if needed.
"It took four centuries but I finally achieved my goal."
One of the priestesses glanced at her, uncertain whether to respond.
The prayer rose louder.
Outside, screams echoed through London City as more people died in the streets. Inside, the cathedral began to glow faintly at the base of the altar. The Nepenthes Runes were waking up under the pressure of collective devotion. The High Priestess raised one hand and the priestesses moved to guide the worshippers into the activation circle.