The next day, Aaron woke up to someone staring at him.
Not just any someone. The specific kind of someone who's been sitting there for a while, thinking deeply about whether your breathing pattern constitutes a miracle or a malfunction.
"Aleric," Aaron croaked, rubbing one crusty eye, "if you're watching me sleep again, I'm filing a complaint with... I don't know, Saint HR."
Aleric stood three inches from his face like a solemn altar boy who had just discovered anxiety. He squinted hard, arms behind his back like he was suppressing either reverence or an embarrassing question.
"I wasn't watching you sleep," Aleric said quickly—too quickly. "I was monitoring your... respiratory cadence."
"Creepily," Aaron added.
Aleric ignored that. His expression shifted into the kind of face people made right before either confessing a war crime or proposing marriage.
"You good?" Aaron asked warily.
Aleric hesitated. Glanced over his shoulder. Then back. "You should... look outside."
Aaron blinked. "Why? Are the trench cows doing tricks again? Did the dirt start praying?"
He pushed himself up with a grunt. Still wrapped in his trauma blanket, a patched-together robe made from the holy remains of three dead penitents and at least one recycled communion banner, he shuffled to the trench lip like an elderly prophet at a PTA meeting.
What he saw didn't make sense at first.
It wasn't the scale. It was the silence.
No vox-commands. No shellfire. No screaming. No cultists on fire. Nothing.
Just wind. Ash. Reverence.
Hundreds of soldiers knelt in the soot-marbled trench yard, bowed heads, weapons laid beside them, cloaks folded neatly. No banners. No posturing. No "Saint Selfie" attempts.
The remnants of three broken warbands.
Aaron blinked. Rubbed his eyes again like that would reboot the reality buffer.
"What the actual hell is happening?"
Aleric, now leaning dramatically on his Codex like a prophet with a clipboard, flipped to a page and said with dispassionate pride: "I did a count while you were... drooling in your sacred sleep."
He pointed. "180 Crucible Walkers. 400 Redemption from the 33rd. 80 Pilgrim-Soldiers of the Sanctified Plank."
Aaron stared at the sea of kneeling zealots.
"Why are they positioned like I just downloaded into a holy JPEG?"
Aleric shrugged. "You're their Saint."
"I was their Saint yesterday too," Aaron snapped. "You know, back when I was vomiting relic paste and crying over the flavor."
Movement stirred the ranks.
A slow grinding sound, like a cathedral door being opened with sandpaper.
The Crucible Walkers stepped forward, armor scorched black and trimmed with ember-red. Their helms were scar-branded, soot-sealed. They looked less like people and more like religious trauma given knees.
At their center was a slab of black slag, radiating faint heat like it remembered being fire.
Upon it: Father-Commander Dren.
Still.
Face covered in soot like a final blessing. Hands folded. Chest faintly aglow with the last remnants of burned scripture.
Beside him: his relic-spear, charred but not broken. A weapon that looked like it wanted to be wielded one more time.
Aaron swallowed hard. His throat clicked like a jammed relic-vox.
This wasn't a funeral.
This was a transfer of power.
A promotion by corpse.
The Crucible Walkers knelt in unison, a coordinated crunch of armor that echoed like a cathedral collapsing inward.
Captain-Forgelord Rhest approached, armor pitted and furnace-scarred. He held Dren's melted helm like it was still whispering orders.
"He speaks," Rhest said, holding up the helmet.
From its cracked vox-grille came a rhythmic hiss. Quiet. Mechanical. Too deliberate to be static.
Aaron blinked. "Wait. Is he haunting the helmet?"
"He burned his voice into the steel," Rhest said with unsettling calm. "He whispers still."
The hiss repeated.
To Aaron, it was gibberish.
To the Crucible Walkers, it was gospel.
"Follow the Saint.
Serve the Grave."
The Walkers struck their furnace-chests three times in perfect rhythm, the hollow thump reverberating through the trench like a war-drum.
Rhest raised the relic-spear.
"Our fire is not gone," he said. "It has been given."
"We no longer serve the Crucible alone."
"We serve you, Saint Grave."
Aaron opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
No joke. No snark. No pop culture reference. No weird meme about warband loyalty being patchable content.
Just breath.
Then the Redemption troopers stepped forward. Burned. Bandaged. Blood-slicked. Faces like statues waiting for thunder.
Their leader, a grim woman with a cracked relic-mask and a prosthetic leg forged from bayonets and righteous spite, limped up.
Without flourish, she dropped the banner of the 33rd into the mud.
"We gave our blood at the Blessed Hinge," she said. "We found faith in your fire."
She knelt.
The others followed, chanting in broken unison:
"When the Saint burned, we stayed.
When he rose, we followed.
Now we do not fight alone."
Aaron stood there, brain frantically spinning its wheels like a relic cart in the mud.
Then came the Pilgrim-Soldiers.
They didn't speak. They just moved—slow, deliberate, like each one was peeling off the last layer of old pain.
Their leader was old. Twisted. Bent with years of ash-hauling and flame-walking and bad chow. He was missing an eye, but not direction.
He knelt without a word.
One by one, the Pilgrims stepped to a firepit and dropped in blood-smudged psalm pages. As each page burned, the flame sparked skyward in reply.
Ash curled upward like a blessing.
Then every eye turned to Aaron.
Not with worship.
With expectation.
Like they were handing him the cracked blueprint of a broken cathedral and saying:
"Fix this."
Aaron trembled.
He was a guy who once lost a whole tournament because he misread a relic-card ability. He wasn't built for this.
He was a walking gas leak in a blanket.
And now?
Now he was a living banner. A flaming mascot for a trench army. A Saint.
Then came Holwen.
He moved like a prophet who knew exactly how many of his sermons had been ignored.
His coat was half-burned. His face looked carved from regret. His pauldron was cracked like a fallen halo.
He walked to the center of the silence and turned, letting the moment breathe like a wounded beast.
Then he looked to Aaron.
Expression blank.
Voice flat.
"Well. Seems like a new order's forming...
whether you want it or not."
Aaron blinked.
He looked at the kneeling soldiers.
The smoldering relics.
The ash drifting like snowfall.
And all he could think, in the screaming quiet of his own head, was:
I hope someone brought a clipboard.
Because this was about to be the most chaotic religious bureaucracy in the history of sacred war.