The climb from the undercroft was neither fast nor clean. 

Aelorian had to burn his way through three wards and two of Seredane’s priests–one begging as blood dripped from his torn hands–and Thorne tore the hinges from the last gate with nothing but brute strength. After that, no one stopped them. 

The path wound upward through half-lit tunnels crawling with cave insects, crumbling scripture etched in poison-thorned vines curling along the walls, and the sickly-sweet scent of old myrrh hanging stubbornly in the stagnant air. With every step, the air thickened, but Thorne did not falter.

When they reached the final archway–the one that led to the chamber of light and judgement, Aelorian paused just long enough to brush the soot off his sleeves. “Should’ve worn heels. Love a dramatic entrance.”

Thorne said nothing, his silence a warning. Then, with the weight of inevitability, he moved.

The ogre slammed through the temple doors, divine retribution wrapped in scarred muscle. The Light hit him—soft at first, then sharp, harsh after decades of dark. And it only made him look more terrifying. His tusks gleamed. His rusted chains rattled behind him like the sound of judgment. The High Council didn't stand a chance. 

"Oh gods," one acolyte gasped from behind a pillar, dropping her censer.

Thorne locked eyes with the Chaplain, ruler of the council, who had turned from his decaying throne with all the grace of a man realizing he was about to be very dead.

Aelorian strode in behind him—if one could call it a stride and not an exhausted, bloodstained glide. His robes clung to his frame, heavy with soot and crimson, but the expression on his face was nothing short of glee. His eyes glittered, and his voice rang off the walls with joy. He was an elf who had nothing left to lose and a very large ogre to back him up.

"Men! Women! Sentient vase!" He called, hands raised like a showman at curtain call. "Fucking pay attention!”

The vase in question—an enchanted ceremonial urn perched nervously on a pedestal—trembled. While the rest of the Council, draped in robes embroidered not with fire, but with tangled roots and creeping moss, sat in their silence, thick and suffocating. They rose slowly from their gilded thrones as Thorne walked into the center of the chamber, the stone beneath his feet cracking like brittle bark underfoot.

“Oh no,” one councilor whispered. “He brought the moonborn.”

“Oh no,” said another. “He brought the ogre.”

Thorne kept walking, big meaty fists clenched at his sides.

He wasn’t running. No, running was for mortal men with guilt in their bones. He moved like the world had already ended and he was just here to take attendance. The great chains were metal vipers slithering behind him with every step. His shoulders seemed broader than they had in the undercroft. Straighter. Forged in the unyielding fire of what they’d done to him–a truth buried so deep it could never be chained away.

The Chaplain raised a single shaking hand.

“Thorne Harrowbranch—”

“Still me, asshole,” Thorne growled. “Still breathing.”

“You were not meant to return—”

“And yet.” He smiled. Not kindly.

Aelorian, who seemed to be momentarily forgotten, peeked out from behind Thorne’s hulking torso, like a cat slipping its head around a doorframe that it fully intended to knock off its hinges.

He looked around at the stunned councilors, gave them a winsome little wave with blood still drying on his fingers, and smiled sweetly.

“Excuse me,” he said, in a voice entirely too soft for the setting. “So sorry to interrupt your impending smiting, but—just wondering—did you all have this enormous smashy ogre chained in your basement for a particular reason?”

His lashes fluttered.

“Or was that just your idea of interior decorating?”

One of the older councilors gasped sharply and turned to flee, slippers slapping on the tile.

Thorne flung out one arm.

A length of chain cracked like lightning, wrapping around the councilor’s legs with inhuman speed. He hit the ground hard, robes billowing, teeth clacking together with a satisfying crunch.

“Sit the fuck down!” Thorne snarled. “I’m not finished breaking you!”

The Council froze—caught between dignity, fear, and the creeping suspicion that no divine authority would save them from what they’d made. One councilwoman had begun praying under her breath. Another was clutching a relic to his chest like it might explode with light and fix everything.

It didn’t.

Thorne stepped closer to the dais, every footfall deliberate. “You made me kill for you.”

“That was your birthright,” spat the Chaplain, eyes flashing. “The Harrowbranch line was born of flame and oath—your people were forged for sacrifice. We gave you life, and we gave it purpose.”

“You gave him nothing!” Aelorian interrupted, stepping into the light like it was a stage and he’d been waiting for his cue. “You broke him. Like you tried to break me.”

He walked toward the throne now, slower, his hands glowing faintly—moonlight curling around his fingers like smoke. “You sold me to Seredane to save your own pathetic skins. Told me it was an honor. A divine union. As if I were nothing more than a show pony. Groomed, gilded, and sold off for prestige.”

The Chaplain lifted his scepter with brittle ceremony, a faded bone carved with ancient runes, yellowed and fragile as death. In the center, a cracked, obsidian orb sat, swallowing hope.

“You forget yourself, Ithrienel,” the old man spat, voice cracking like a whip. “You are moon-touched, not a god.”

Aelorian laughed–low in his chest–rich, cruel, delicious. Like a villain in the third act of a tragedy who just realized he won’t die quietly. It echoed off the vaulted ceiling, a cursed song no one was supposed to hear.

“Not a god?” he repeated, stepping forward with the kind of grace that makes nobles flinch and relics blink awake. “Sweetheart, I’m not trying to be a god. Gods beg for the kind of fear I already own.”

The light flared around him, the celestial runes pulsing heartbeats in his palms.

“I don’t need worship,” he said, voice slipping from silk to ice in the space between breaths. “I need your suffering.” He stepped up to the dais, closer than should’ve been allowed. Closer than safe. Inches from the Chaplain now, and glowing—burning—with that soft, merciless light that didn’t belong to this world anymore. “I want your pain as you remember the people you burned. Remember the children you erased. All the names you buried in ash and called ‘peace.’ Every life you made a commodity to buy you comfort.” 

The celestial runes on his hands blazed like mourning stars, and ancient relics shook as moonlight surged upwards from the ground beneath Aelorian’s feet.

“You call me moonborn like it’s a curse,” Aelorian said, voice low as a funeral bell. “But I am not the one afraid of the dark.”

The moment the words left his lips, the chamber reacted as if it had been waiting the entire time.

The marble beneath the Chaplain’s feet cracked–hairline at first, then fracturing out in a web of betrayal. The golden mosaics above shuddered. The relics, the icons, even the holy fire in the sconces—they all shrank, the temple itself knowing its gods had no power here.

The Chaplain took a step back, eyes wide, the bone scepter trembling in his grip.

“Heretic,” he breathed, but there was no strength in it. Just cold awe and fear. “Blasphemer.”

“No,” Aelorian said. “I am a reckoning.”

Then the obsidian orb exploded. Light pierced through the room in a burst of silver and screaming heat—sacred and furious. The dais split. A pillar groaned. The ceiling gave its first true shudder, then cracked down the middle, loud as judgment. Sacred marble split like brittle bone.

Aelorian looked up just in time to see a slab of stone break free—massive and faster than breath.

There was no time for magic. No time for poetry or rebellion or last words. There was only—

Thorne Harrowbranch, the ogre. 

Thorne moved. 

Not because he cared, or because he idolized the arrogant, blood-soaked little moonborn with his sharp tongue and wilder eyes. But because he saw someone small in the path of something terrible.

And he remembered, just for a breath, what it was like before they carved the kindness out of him.

He threw himself between Aelorian and the falling sky. He caught the stone with a grunt—caught it, as if he were a titan and it was a promise to the gods he'd sworn not to break. His knees buckled, his shoulder ripped from its socket with a sickening crunch. But he didn’t waver. 

Aelorian stared up at him—chest heaving, hair wild, lips parted in a breathless what the fuck.

Thorne didn’t look down at him. He just held the ceiling, teeth gritted, blood running down one temple.