Kallum dragged himself through the violated gates of Ildaren.
His stride aimed for steady, but the weight of memory bore down, rendering the city he once called home utterly alien in its suffocating shadows.
The alleys pulsed with furtive prayers and hostile stares, the air thick with the stench of damp stone and old rain. Street lamps bled a sickly amber onto the cobblestones, illuminating only rot and neglect.
Beneath his tattered cloak, raw scars writhed across his forearms like living brands—marks of a communion forced upon him, a testament to truths he wished he'd never learned.
The Abyss had claimed a piece of him, its song a relentless, grinding hum behind his eyes, an echo of horrors witnessed and loyalties shattered.
He kept his hood low, a shroud against the Market Row's judging eyes. Faded banners of the Order of Quiet Light hung like rotting shrouds, flapping weakly in the stale air.
Seeing them—the symbols Father Solen had taught him to revere—sent a visceral throb through the marks on his arm, tightening his chest with the ice-cold grip of betrayal.
Every flicker of torchlight felt like an interrogation, exposing not just the grime, but the profound lie coiled beneath the Order's luminous promises.
He'd believed once, served faithfully, convinced by the man who raised him that they were a shield against the dark. But the light, he'd discovered, merely cast the deepest, most monstrous shadows.
Kallum pushed onward, a grim pilgrimage towards an unmarked chapel tucked between decaying tenements. Its threshold, once a place of quiet contemplation under Solen's tutelage, now gaped like a festering wound, vomiting darkness into the alley – a sickeningly perfect mirror, he thought, for the Order's hidden heart.
Inside, the cloying sweetness of incense choked against the sharper, metallic tang of blood – old stains mingling with something fresher, fouler.
The floor bore sigils in fading chalk, bindings meant to control, to contain... bindings he now knew were profane experiments. They lay broken, violated, like shattered promises.
He knelt, ignoring the filth embedding itself in his cloak, and traced one intricate symbol. Not with reverence. With fury.
His fingertips trembled, rage warring with a deeper ache as memories assaulted him: this very chapel used for rites Solen denied, an altar drenched in shadow and sacrifice, screams swallowed by sanctimonious silence, the cold, appraising eyes of priests—his priests—watching...
"Returned..." A brittle voice cracked the gloom, laced with disbelief and a tremor of something that might have been fear. "Kallum?"
He rose and turned slowly. Father Solen materialized from the shadows, and the sight struck Kallum with the force of a physical blow. Months had ravaged the man who had been his anchor, his teacher. Years of hidden guilt had collapsed his features, leaving his eyes hollowed pits of grief and terror.
Kallum knew, with chilling certainty, that Solen mourned not just the Order's path, but the boy he'd lost to it.
"Is there anywhere left," Kallum began, his voice a low, ragged rasp, thick with disuse and the corrosive acid of disillusionment, "that you haven't corrupted, Father?"
He met the priest's gaze, pinning him with the weight of shared history and present horror. "You know what I found down there. What I saw."
Solen flinched violently, recoiling as if struck. His hand spasmed around a heavy brass censer, gripping it like a drowning man clutches debris. He couldn't hold Kallum's gaze.
"They... they whispered... that the Abyss marked you. That you..." He swallowed hard, shame and fear warring in his eyes. "...answered its call."
"It sings to all of us," Kallum retorted, the words scalding. He yanked back his sleeve with deliberate, almost violent force, exposing the raw, intricate scar marring his flesh—crimson spirals that pulsed faintly, throbbing with contained agony. A brand forged in the Order's secret furnace.
"Didn't you teach me it's verses, Father? Or only the parts fit for children?" He pushed the marked arm forward slightly. "Some are just forced to bear the full, agonizing hymn."
The scar seemed to pulse brighter under Solen's horrified stare.
Solen staggered back, eyes wide, fixed on the undeniable proof of Abyssal power. Horror was there, but beneath it, a dawning, sickening recognition of his own complicity. "By the Light... what... what is this?"
"Ask your Order," Kallum's voice was bleak, fierce, resonating with the chilling undertone of the power now bound to him. He advanced a step, forcing Solen back further.
"This mark wasn't chosen. It latched onto me. Down there. In your sacred laboratories. Under your watch."
The accusation hung between them, heavy and suffocating. The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the distant, mournful chanting from the city streets—prayers for salvation that now sounded utterly hollow.
"They will hunt you," Solen whispered finally, his voice strained, desperate. It wasn't just a warning; it sounded like a plea, or perhaps an admission of impotence. "The Order... Kallum, I... I cannot protect you from this."
"Protect me?" The laugh that escaped Kallum was harsh, devoid of humor. "You couldn't even protect your own soul, Solen. Let them hunt."
His voice turned diamond-hard, infused with an energy that felt both intrinsic and terrifyingly alien. "Their hypocrisy is a finer fuel than any prayer."
He reached into his satchel. "And I brought back a truth they cannot bury."
He withdrew the shard of crystalline obsidian. Its surface roiled with captured darkness, absorbing the meager light, radiating a cold that had nothing to do with temperature. It pulsed faintly, whispering secrets that felt like shards of ice against the soul, a silent voice promising annihilation and revelation.
"Vestige…" Solen choked out the word, mesmerized, appalled. He knew the legends, the forbidden texts. "Madness! You unleash forces you cannot comprehend! You would unravel everything?"
"It sings," Kallum said, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. He held the shard aloft, its darkness painting Solen's face in lines of terror.
"It sings of the lies choking this city. Of beginnings... and the righteous end the Order has earned."
"You seek to burn it all down!" Realization struck Solen, not just of the Vestige's power, but of the righteous fury driving the boy he once knew.
"Perhaps," Kallum replied, his eyes reflecting the Vestige's cold light. "Before the rot consumes us all from within."
Solen shrank back, eyes darting between Kallum and the shard, utterly broken. "I cannot help you," he breathed, the words a final, pathetic surrender.
"You already helped me, Solen," Kallum said, the words flat, final, severing the last frayed thread of their past. He turned towards the gaping doorway, the night outside a welcoming void.
He paused, looking back one last time at the trembling priest, the man who had been his father in all but blood.
"Just try to remember who I was... before you and your Order taught me that true darkness wears the mask of light. Remember that... when you pray for your hollow salvation."
He stepped into the shadows, letting them claim him. Pulled forward by the Vestige's silent, demanding song and the burning brand of betrayal.
The Abyss pulsed within him, a threnody of grief, fury, and terrible purpose.
This time, it wasn't just calling. It was demanding an answer.
And he was ready to give it.