The path to the Cathedral was a straight line.
Elya walked it like he owned it.
His coat drifted behind him in the salt-heavy wind, his hands loose at his sides, his golden eyes scanning the treeline, the rooftops, the spaces between torchlight where shadows pooled too thick to be natural. He wasn't rushing. Rushing was for people who were afraid of what was waiting for them.
The soldier came from the left.
A young man, barely trained, his hands shaking around a short-barrel dart gun — the kind Vaelcrest's ground forces used to subdue targets without killing them. He probably thought the darkness gave him cover.
Elya's hand moved before the soldier's finger found the trigger.
One step. A pivot. His fingers closed around the barrel and twisted. The gun changed hands in under a second, and then the soldier was on the ground, a single shot through the temple, the sound swallowed by the wind before it could echo.
Elya didn't break stride,then chain attacked.
It erupted from the shadow of a stone wall to his right — a thick, black-iron links trailing green rune-light, screaming through the air like something alive. Elya shot it without looking. The bullet struck the lead link and the chain recoiled, sparking against the cobblestones.
Then three more came.
He was already moving. A sidestep, a drop to one knee, the gun barking twice in quick succession — two chains shattered mid-air, the third he let pass close enough to feel the displaced air against his cheek. He rose and kept walking.
They came faster now.
A barrage of black iron and rune-fire pouring from every shadow on the street, from rooftop gutters, from between the cathedral's outer fence posts. Elya moved through them like water finding gaps in stone — ducking under one, twisting his body sideways as two crossed in the space he'd just occupied, shooting another clean out of the air as it angled for his throat.
He caught one with his free hand, yanked, and used the momentum to spin himself clear of a chain coming from behind before releasing it and putting a bullet through the origin point in the dark.
Silence swallowed the area for a few seconds.
Then Elya stopped walking.
He let one come. A single chain, slow and deliberate, sliding out from the shadow ahead of him like a predator finally showing itself. He didn't dodge. He stood still and watched it close the distance, watched it arc toward his face — and let it come so close the runed iron kissed the air beside his cheek. Close enough to feel the cold radiating off the metal. Close enough to see the glyphs etched into each link, burning faint amber in the dark.
He tilted his head. Studied it for one full second then stepped aside.
"Rune Stones", he thought.
He turned the stolen pistol over in his hand once, then lowered it.
Drawing his Spada right now would be useless. The rune-etched chains would negate the arcanum energy before it could form. He'd be spending power to generate attacks that dissolved on contact.
He'd have to do this differently.
A slow exhale left him.
Then a figure stepped out of the shadows at the end of the street.
Matte-black uniform. Perfectly fitted. A single Rune Stone embedded in the chest plate, glowing like a cold amber eye. The figure moved with the unhurried confidence of someone who had been watching the whole time — waiting for the chains to tire him, for the frustration to crack his composure.
They stopped ten paces away.
"Long time no see, Ghost."
Elya looked at him the way you look at something you've already forgotten once.
"Zaziel."
The Black Pursuer tilted his head, and the corner of his mouth pulled into something between a smile and a scar.
"You remembered." He spread his arms slightly, chains rising from the dark around him like the petals of a black flower opening. Dozens of them. Enough to fill the entire street. "I wasn't sure you would. You left so quickly last time."
Elya said nothing. He rolled his shoulder once, shifted his weight onto his back foot, and raised the stolen pistol.
The chains screamed forward all at once.
Two miles away, inside the Cathedral, the candles were still burning.
Vaelcrest had not raised his voice once.
He'd simply looked at the nearest surviving guard — a broad-shouldered man named Ferro who had the misfortune of being the tallest person in the room — and said, "Take off your helmet. Stand at the altar. Read what I tell you to read."
Ferro had obeyed. He always obeyed.
Now the man stood stiffly behind the stone altar in his black uniform, a leather-bound book open in front of him that he clearly didn't understand, reading the words Vaelcrest had marked with two thin lines of ink. His voice was flat and military, completely wrong for the occasion, but Vaelcrest didn't seem to care about the atmosphere.
He cared about the outcome.
Nana stood beside him in the white dress that had been chosen for her, by someone she'd never met, for a day she'd never agreed to. The fabric was beautiful. She hated it.
She pulled her wrist.
Vaelcrest's hand tightened.
She pulled again, harder, twisting her arm and dropping her weight to one side the way she'd once seen a woman escape a grab in the market district of the capital. She'd remembered it for years without knowing why.
His grip didn't shift. Not even slightly. It was like pulling against a shackle.
She looked down at her wrist and saw the skin there going pale, then darkening at the edges where the pressure concentrated. A bruise forming in real time, purple-red against her skin.
"You're hurting me," she said.
"Yes," Vaelcrest replied. He wasn't looking at her. He was watching Ferro stumble through the reading with the mild dissatisfaction of a man reviewing an underperforming report. "That is what happens when you resist something inevitable."
"This isn't—"
"Inevitable?" He finally turned his head to look at her. His eyes were calm in a way that was worse than anger. "Every kingdom has a price, Nana. Your father's kingdom included. I don't conquer with armies. I conquer with architecture. And you—" he glanced back at the altar, "—are the final cornerstone."
Ferro cleared his throat and continued reading.
Nana stared at the candle flames on the altar and thought about Elya. About the man who had torn her out of her own bedroom and dragged her into a war she didn't choose, and how right now, impossibly, that felt like the safer memory.
"Where are you," she thought, "you arrogant ghost.
Vaelcrest's thumb pressed into the bruise on her wrist, just slightly.
"Eyes forward," he said quietly.