Some of the rewards I saw were a little surprising.

[ Rank Up!

Your Vitality and Spirit Attributes have risen by two Ranks.

Your Power and Agility Attributes have risen by one Rank.

Your Sacrifice and Illumination Aspects have risen by two Ranks.

Your Gravity and Flare Aspects have risen by one Rank.

Your Path of Burning Starlight has risen by one Rank.

Vitality: Silver IV

Spirit: Silver II

Power: Silver IV

Agility: Silver II

Flare: Iron II

Illumination: Iron III

Sacrifice: Silver III

Gravity: Silver IV

Path of Burning Starlight: Silver II ]

One brutal battle had been enough to drive a lot of my Attributes and Aspects nearly halfway to Gold already, minus the new ones. All I had heard so far suggested that reaching Gold from Silver would take a decent amount of time compared to going to Silver from Iron.

The only minor disappointment was the fact that I knew none of my Attributes were in Silver right that moment. I had proof they were all in Gold already. For now, at least.

They were empowered by the Sacrifice. By the way I had offered up Elder Escinca’s heart. My heart stuttered. I had thought trying to focus on the rewards from an uncaring Weave would help me just push aside the gnawing feeling within me, but who was I kidding? It was all interconnected. I could no more ignore what I had done than my own feet carrying me forward.

The scene within the temple’s main hall was pretty much devastation. So much blood everywhere. So many broken chunks of the ceiling littering the whole place, so many spots where the wall was fractured and the floor was shattered, pockmarked where the vampire’s burning blood had eaten away at it.

But it was all eclipsed by the Elder’s body lying in the centre. That was all I really had eyes for.

He was surrounded by the others softly crying. Aurier had knelt next to him, Sreketh leaning against him, while Santoire and Guille stood with their heads bowed and holding back their own tears a respectful distance away. The surviving sprites—with Enrico among them, thankfully—hovered above after having grown dim in their own sorrow.

I didn’t want to take a single step closer to that.

Revayne seemed to sense the precariousness of the situation. She bowed her head in mournful respect but still went about inspecting the scene of carnage.

“This is where you fought him?” she asked. She didn’t apologize for interrogating me at a time like this. Maybe her book told her I preferred that over confronting my actual feelings. “I suppose it makes sense why he decided to strike down the Cult of the Sun first. To his detriment.”

“Yes,” I said. “The Sun Cult poses the greatest threat to Scarseekers and Scarthralls. So eliminating us first made sense.”

“Interesting he didn’t seek to control you through Lord Hamsik Kalnislaw.”

“Hamsik… isn’t very controllable. Especially since he distances himself from his House.”

We walked around and inspected the entire temple. Not just the main hall where I had fought against Glonek, but also the rest of the rooms and the upper floors as well. We were making sure there were no further surprises, nothing else lurking in the rooms hidden away from the scouring light of the miniature sun above us.

Our little checkup trip revealed nothing to worry about. No Thralls hiding away in closets or cupboards, no evidence of any real wrongdoing anywhere.

Even Escinca’s office was almost fully undisturbed. I hesitated at the threshold of crossing into it, partly afraid of what I would see inside, and still unwilling to face the reality of my internal situation.

But there was nothing untoward within. Everything was practically undisturbed. Nothing to suggest that the office’s occupant had been unwillingly converted into a Scarthrall.

When we returned, the others were starting to move. Grief could only consume us for so long before we had to take a stand against it and get shit done. And that was all I was doing. Getting things done. Because with Escinca gone, we all needed to step up and keep things going. Keep the cult moving forward. That’s what he would have wanted.

They had covered Escinca in a pristine white cloth. I had noticed earlier that they had smartly leaned over him so that the shadows of their bodies prevented the sun still burning outside from turning him to ash.

Of course, not a ton of the sunlight was reaching inside in the first place. Still, it was a gesture that I appreciated.

“When are we going to hold a remembrance, Cultist Ross?” Guille asked me as the others gently lifted up the Elder’s body, about to carry it off to a better resting spot. Probably the ritual room with the large altar.

Ah. It was then I realized I didn’t really know the funerary customs of Ephemeroth. Or Zairgon in particular. Or if the cults had a different process compared to everybody else. Hadn’t the Scarseekers mentioned something about both graves and crypts?

I suspected the sum total of how people here treated their dead was more complicated than just a simple burial and elegy.

“We’ll need to discuss a date,” I said. Aurier nodded at me mournfully, while Sreketh continue to sniffle, the both of them accompanied by Santoire as they headed off. “Let me think about it for a moment and then we can come up with something together. Why don’t you help lay the Elder to rest on the altar for now?”

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Guille, flushed and teary-eyed, hadn’t been asking for a date specifically. Well, he had but his real intention was asking for a direction. We all needed our ways to deal with the grief.

Like how mine, apparently, was to just ignore the feeling for now. Later. I could deal with it later. There were more important things to handle.

Guille nodded and headed off too.

Revayne had waited patiently, as if seeking to go outside with me tagging along for some reason. I joined her. And then I realized why she was actually not moving yet. It had made me halt too.

The Scarthralls were being captured. They were being dragged back into the light.

With the facsimile of the sun radiant above us with blistering potency, turning night into day, they were all dying. Their bodies were burning, smoking, skin shedding to ash and flesh incinerating under the severe light.

The screams started soon after. They had been struggling from the get-go, but now, with the inevitability of surefire obliteration, they were shrieking out in more horror than agony.

And it wasn’t just them. The scene was starting to devolve into chaos. Several normal people were struggling against the guards too. Hamsik was confronting the guard commander, though the exact words of the disagreement were indecipherable in the cacophony.

I caught one woman tugging desperately on a Scalekin guard’s arm, who was strangling a Thrall in his grip. Difficult though it was to tell, I was pretty sure I heard her yelling at the guard to let her husband go. My mind went blank. Save for the scenes I had seen in Glonek’s memories running riot on repeat.

My voice was a low rumble of thunder. “What in the world are you doing?”

In the chaos, it was too quiet. My words went unheard.

“One of them’s trying to run!” a Rakshasa yelled out before launching herself at a familiar dashing, crying figure.

He got caught pretty easily. The guard was obviously much faster and stronger. The familiarity of the captured Scarthrall resolved into quick recognition. Tural. The guard was almost sadistically holding him away from her, raising his thrashing body up higher until the light truly began burning him away.

I was there in a few mere heartbeats.

“What the—”

I cut off the guard’s words as my hand landed on her wrist. “Let him go, now.”

“Are you insane?” she asked with a scowl. Her deep blue skin was almost azure under the sunlight. “This is a Thrall. We’re going to kill them all.”

She did let go of Tural, for just a second, but only to slam the hand at me to shove me off. Her blow had come fast enough to hurt, but my face didn’t budge an inch. Instead, I heard the telltale crack of bones cracking, of finger joints bending in directions they really weren’t supposed to.

With a shriek, she dropped Tural for good. She whirled around to face me properly, her good hand clutching the one she had just injured on me. “What are—”

I backhanded her. The Rakshasa guard went flying before she could even yell out, smashing into a rickety house across the street, its broken non-wood timbers crashing on top of her with a small cloud of dust.

The brief altercation had turned the whole area a lot quieter as nearly every eye turned to me. Behind me, Tural cowered in the meagre shadow my body provided against the sun.

“Ross,” Hamsik said with a warning look, but he didn’t say anything further when he met my glare.

I didn’t respond either. He had said he would take care of things here, but he had instead let it get out of control entirely.

“That’s enough,” I said. I made sure my voice carried. “Bring the Scarthralls inside the temple. All of them.”

“Who the Pits do you think you are to order us around?” a guard yelled.

“How dare you hit—” started another.

“Are you insane?” yelled another.

“They’re Pits-loving vampires.”

Words weren’t going to change anything in and of themselves. It was annoying, but that was how things were.

Thankfully, the right target presented itself. Or herself, rather.

Revayne wasn’t the only leader the large number of guards had brought along. The guard commander had come too, and now, she was stomping straight for me, her face trying hard not to contort into a heavy scowl.

I could see how things had built up that way. The way I had just blown away one of her guards suggested most of the rest of them wouldn’t stand a chance against me. Several of the guards were still staring at where their comrade had fallen and still hadn’t gotten up yet. So, their commander was coming herself, settling the dispute once and for all.

“What do you think you’re doing, Cultist?” she asked. Her voice was quiet. The quiet of a pebble rolling downhill, foretelling the arrival of the landslide.

“You heard me,” I said. “Stop treating every Scarthrall like they’re all monsters.”

All around us, now that the momentary silence was past, the other Thralls were crying out for release. For mercy. They were still burning away.

The guard commander’s scowl deepened at my words, because now I wasn’t just ordering them with zero authority. I was giving them a good reminder. “These Thralls attacked us. Attacked the guards, attacked Rings Three and Four, attacked and killed my own. Your own. And here you are, offering them mercy?” Her eyes flickered upwards for a brief second. “After starting the culling process yourself?”

This wasn’t a battle of pure power. I did wonder if I could kick the belligerent Ogre’s ass while still under the effects of my last Sacrifice’s boost. A part of me was rather tempted to do so. After all, I had to be about as strong as a Gold now. The more I looked at her, the more I was sure I could take her.

But she was starting to recognize that too, which was why she had smartly decided to engage me on a different field of battle. Bullish she might be, but she wasn’t dumb.

“I can turn it off if you’d prefer.” I couldn’t, but they didn’t need to know that. “Shut down the sun, let the Thralls grow back to their full strength, and then…” I looked almost lazily over her guards, over at how the one I had hit was finally rising out of the crashed house. “If your guards are so weak, I shudder to think what a real, desperate fray would lead to.”

She called my bluff. “We both know you wouldn’t dare, Cultist. We’ve finally caught them all. We’ve—”

“Nearly all. I’m sure there are some enterprising ones that managed to escape.” She tried to interrupt me the way I had just talked over her, but I went on faster. “And ones like my friend behind me who had never intended to become Scarthralls in the first place. Who were forcefully turned, converted into monsters by a man who didn’t care for their real wishes.”

“Innocents?” The Ogre scoffed. “Don’t be an idiot, cultist. There are no innocents among these filthy vampires. Show mercy to parasites and they will ruin your life through their infestation.”

Well, there we had it. The impasse I had been a little afraid of reaching, because that solidified our position.

If the Ogre’s rage blinded her so much that she failed to see the nuance of the situation, then convincing her wasn’t going to work. I had thought of bringing up the Scarthrall who had infiltrated the guards, but maybe they had turned out to be a fanatic.

That would explain why the commander so incensed. Betrayal was hard to digest.

But I did have some help. The others were speaking up, their voices screaming out, demanding to be heard.

“My husband never wanted this!” said the poor woman I had seen earlier. She was still struggling against the Rakshasa, who was, thankfully, weakening. “His so-called friend tricked him! He hasn’t even hurt a fly yet, much less any real people.”

“Let go of my mother!” a little girl cried.

“My sister—”

“I can’t live without—”

“Please! I’m not—”

“Silence!”

The Ogre’s heavy yell sliced through the rising clamour. The problem was that the Thralls who obviously weren’t innocent were trying to take advantage of the situation too, proclaiming they had all been tricked as well, deluded and forced into the mess that apparently only Glonek wanted.

Nuance went both ways. Sure, there was something to be said for Glonek probably having used Ensorcellment on a lot of the Thralls. But that didn’t mean there weren’t any of them who hadn’t gleefully gone along with it all.

I had killed some of them myself.

That was when Revayne popped in. Her voice was a careful balance of convincing and apologetic, though her face was still in the book.

“Commander,” she said. “Cultist Ross has a point. I have myself noted several Scarthralls who were being forced to participate in their brethren’s destruction. It would perhaps be better if we could differential between the ones who are innocent and the ones more… criminally inclined.”

“I poked into Glonek’s head,” I said, adding onto what Revayne said now that her words had actually had an effect on the stupid Ogre. “I was able to look through his memories. I know there are Thralls situated secretly all over Ring Three, people who you might actually respect. People who aren’t just humans. Are you going to tear them apart the same way too?”

The commander had initially looked very sceptical of the idea that I could look into anyone’s memories. But the mention of the Thralls in the guards’ ranks made her expression close up entirely.

Her face twisted for a few moments, before she finally turned back to the rest of the guards, to the Scarthralls trying to cower away from the light even as parts of them had continued to burn away.

“Fine,” she shouted. “Take them all inside the temple. We’ll sort the innocent from the culpable. But make sure you don’t let a single one escape.”

With grumbles and grunts, the guards complied, starting to pull everyone inside the temple and away from the burning sun. The Ogre spared me the briefest scathing look before following inside too. Revayne nodded at me, and I did nod back, grateful for her assistance.