"J-Jayden...?"
The Grand Cleric's voice cracked as golden tears slipped down her blood-streaked cheeks. Her broken body lay sprawled across the cathedral roof, one hand reaching weakly toward the figure standing over her.
"I thought you had died... the council told me..."
"They lied, Grand Cleric."
Jayden's voice was flat, emptied of anything that might have resembled pity. He looked down at the woman who had once been his superior, his mentor, perhaps even something close to a mother, and felt nothing.
"You told them to lie."
"W-What? I-I didn't..."
Her voice faltered again, and her golden eyes widened with something that looked disturbingly like genuine confusion.
Evelina narrowed her eyes and reached out with her mind, brushing the surface of the Grand Cleric's thoughts and sifting through layers of pain and fading divine light.
There was nothing.
No deception. No buried malice. No hidden knowledge of what the council had truly intended.
