Holwen lifted a sealed parchment scroll, edges reinforced with reliquary wax and marked with three sigils: the Psalm Host, the Ecclesiastic Flame, and the broken seal of Sector Theta-Seven.
He cracked it without flourish. No ceremony. Just a man opening a divine tax form.
"Congratulations again," he muttered. "You've been recognized under Doctrine Seven."
Aaron blinked. "Cool. That sounds important. What's that mean?"
Holwen glanced up over the scroll, deadpan. "Means you're not a heretic. Means I get to officiate instead of execute."
Aaron gave him a slow, nervous thumbs-up. "Love that journey for me."
Holwen began to read.
His voice, usually gravel-thick and half-cursed, softened—not reverent, but heavy with the weight of too many years, too many declarations, too many saints who didn't make it.
"In the name of the Third Psalm Host, under Ecclesiastical Mandate 441-Theta-7, I formally acknowledge the divine appointment of Saint Grave the Undimmed, Flame-Bound of the Fallen Depths."
Aaron sighed quietly. Still not over that name.
Holwen gestured to the soldiers kneeling in the churned mud. "These troops have chosen you. Your fire has called them. Doctrine allows a Saint to form a Holy Order once their following is proven in flame."
He stepped forward now, boots splashing into a shallow wash of red rain like the world was sweating blood and didn't know how to stop.
"Your witnesses are present. Your relics lie before us. You fulfill the conditions. No Cardinal can contest it. No rival Saint can claim them."
He stopped just a foot from Aaron, ash curling from his coat like smoke from a tired forge.
"So," Holwen said. "What shall they be called?"
Aaron looked out across the trench-yard.
The Crucible Walkers, grim and silent like statues that bled when no one was watching.
The Redemption soldiers, bloodied and blinking like they were waiting for the catch.
The Pilgrim-Soldiers, still feeding fire with the last scraps of their old lives.
He felt something stir in his chest.
Not divine.
Just… responsibility. And maybe indigestion.
He took a long breath. A holy sigh.
"The Ashborn," he said. "They'll be called the Ashborn."
There was no cheer.
Just a shift in the wind, the groan of trench walls settling, and somewhere distant, a bird made entirely of ash exploded in the sky.
Aleric muttered from beside him, "Dramatic timing: confirmed."
📜 OATH OF ORDER-BINDING
Filed under: Liturgical Archives / Sector Theta-Seven / Lower Sancta Patria
Name of Order: The Ashborn Choir of Saint Grave
Founded: 1540th Year of the Sanctified Trench
Saint: Grave the Undimmed, Flame-Bound of the Fallen Depths, Paint, Fire, and Ash
Witnesses: Confessor-General Holwen, Third Psalm Host
Sanctified Units:
180 Crucible Walkers (Remnant of the Crucible Flame, oath-sworn in Dren's ashes)
400 Redemption Soldiers of the 33rd (Bloodied Vanguard, Survivors of the Blessed Hinge)
80 Pilgrim-Soldiers of the Sanctified Plank (Flagellants, Wayfarers, Ash-Carriers)
Let it be written: That in fire, they stood. In ash, they spoke.
And in the shadow of a Saint's rising, they did not weep.
These soldiers, whose names are burned into war itself,
Have risen not as strays, but as an Order.
I have seen the Saint. I have heard the whisper in Dren's helm.
And I do not doubt. They are his. They are His.
🕭 Signed in ash and seal,
Holwen, Confessor-General of the Third Psalm Host
That night, dusk fell like mourning.
The trenchline, once a slaughterhouse of mud and screams, became something else.
Not a battlefield.
Not a chapel.
A cathedral made of exhaustion and firelight.
In a ring just beyond the firepits, they knelt.
Not as remnants.
Not as survivors.
But as something new.
A banner rose in the center.
It was awful, But beautiful.
Half-melted cuirass from Father Dren.
Burned relic-wrapping from Aaron.
A shredded flag soaked in miracle-paste and battlefield glue.
Scraps of leather. Singing cloth. Bayonet string.
Across it, scrawled in pale ash by someone with zero handwriting skill:
We Burn Again
Aaron stared at it and muttered, "Great, now I'm a merch."
At the center, Confessor-General Holwen stood before a makeshift altar—just a prayer crate flattened by God's own bad mood.
One hand on the Book of Foundings, the other on a still-glowing relic-brand that smelled like blessed barbecue.
Beside him, a firepit hissed with sacred oil. The smell was part holy incense, part trench sock, part "is something dying?"
"Bring the Saint forward," Holwen intoned.
Aaron stepped out of the firelight, draped in relic robes, dusted in ash, hair doing whatever it wanted.
Every inch of him whispered: what the hell am I doing.
He walked anyway.
Holwen turned to the kneeling ranks. His voice like gravel rolled over scripture:
"Speak."
And six hundred sixty voices answered.
THE TRENCH VOW OF THE ASHBORN
(Recited at dusk. Inscribed in blood and soot. Smelled faintly of rat grease.)
We are ash. We are not done.
We buried our names beneath broken steel.
We walked into the pit and did not return.
We are the heat that stays after fire dies.
We are the smoke that chokes the heretic sun.
In the name of Father Dren, who burned so we would rise,
In the name of Saint Grave, who calls us from the end,
We give our breath, our marrow, our second death.
We take the vow that does not forgive.
We take the wound that never heals.
We are Ashborn. We burn again.
....
And then, the dignitaries arrived.
First, High Cruciger Lueth, looking like a half-burned pope with war crimes in his beard.
He raised his Iron Lantern like someone announcing judgment or pie.
"The Light has chosen a new one," he said.
Aaron gave him a little finger wave. "Hi. Still not used to this."
Then came Saint-Captain Hema, still scorched, still armored, still walking like she'd headbutted death and won.
Her warhammer still dripped. It might've been bone. Or soup. No one asked.
She stopped, tilted her head at Aaron, and said:
"If I'd known sainthood looked like this much ash and bad posture, I might've applied sooner."
A few Pilgrims chuckled.
Even Holwen cracked a hint of a grin. He might've smiled once in 1303. No one was sure.
Then Hema straightened, pounded her hammer into the dirt, and spoke with grim clarity.
"Saint Grave has walked through fire and did not break. The Order of the Ashborn stands before the fireline not as flame's victims, but its memory."
She raised her hand in salute.
"I, Saint-Captain Hema of the Gloried Dust, witness this oath in the name of all who died too far from saints to speak."
Then Lueth stepped up, his Iron Lantern now held low, bathing them all in golden firelight.
"And I, High Cruciger Lueth of the Iron Lantern, accept this name, this banner, this vow, as it was given:
in ash, not ivory.
In fire, not marble."
Holwen raised the Book of Foundings.
"Let it be written."
A nearby scribe-priest, face smeared with soot and caffeine addiction, began scribbling furiously on a wax psalm-scroll with a stylus made from saint-bone.
"Let it be kept."
The Codex was stamped in blood.
The brand plunged into flame.
Then seared into the altar, sealing the vow.
"Let it burn."
And across the trenches, the newly named order rose.