The clearing was silent once more.
The banners were gone.
The armies of the Sanctified Church were gone.
Only the blackened ruins of the Nameless Church remained — charred bones of stone jutting from the scorched earth, wrapped in the lingering stench of burned flesh and broken faith.
Corpses lay strewn across the clearing, rotting under the colorless sun.
Priests.
Knights.
Heretics and holy alike — reduced to the same lifeless husks by the unforgiving Rite.
And amidst the devastation, at the shattered altar's heart, a body stirred.
Slowly.
Reluctantly.
The boy's small frame pushed upright, swaying as if the very earth tried to drag him back down.
Froy.
Or what had once been Froy.
He rose — though his head still lay severed at his side.
For a long moment, he simply stood there — a puppet without strings, a corpse defying death.
Then, with a wet, sickening sound, he reached across his chest and wrapped bloodstained fingers around the dagger still buried through his heart.
With a slow, deliberate pull, he tore the blade free.
White mist bled from the wound instead of blood — curling, hissing, coiling around him like living breath.
The mist gathered, thickening with unnatural speed.
It wound around the fallen head, lifting it from the blood-drenched stones, and carried it gently — almost reverently — back to its rightful place.
The head met the broken neck.
Mist surged.
There was a sound — not a crack, not a snap, but a deep, resonant hum — like the tolling of a distant bell in a forgotten cathedral.
And the body knit itself whole once more.
No scar.
No flaw.
As if the violence had never happened.
Only the dagger, still slick with memory, clattered forgotten to the ground.
The boy — the thing that had been Froy — opened his eyes.
But there was no child left within them.
Only a terrible stillness.
A terrible silence.
A price had been paid.
Not in blood.
Not in flesh.
But in soul.
The boy's humanity — his innocence, his dreams, his fragile mortal spirit — had been consumed in the moment of rebirth.
And what remained was something else entirely.
Something ancient.
Something inevitable.
Yet even so —
Even clothed in death's mist, even crowned by the shattered heavens themselves —
He was still only a boy.
A small, fragile creature standing alone in a continent that knew no mercy.
In Umbryss, where the gods had died screaming and monsters still wore human faces, there was no place for weakness.
No path to survival.
No hope.
Not for him.
Not yet.
Above, the black sun pulsed once — a heartbeat of the dying heavens — before falling still again.
The sky had darkened into a starless void, swallowing even the ashes of the day.
Froy tilted his head back, staring into that empty firmament, his hollowed eyes glinting with faint mistlight.
And then — in a voice stripped of certainty, stripped of everything — he asked the night:
"Did I do something wrong?"
"Why does it have to be me?"
The words trembled into the dark, unanswered.
No angels descended.
No gods wept.
There was only the empty, rotting world.
But then — the air rippled.
A distortion, subtle and wrong, like a reflection twisted on black water.
And before him, without warning, the Calix Nihilum appeared.
No longer the sacred vessel it had once seemed.
No longer pure.
It hovered in the air, black and seeping with an oily, pulsing mist. Its surface writhed with alien glyphs that shifted too fast for the mortal mind to grasp.
It was terrible.
It was beautiful.
It was inevitable.
The chalice pulsed once — and Froy felt it.
Not mercy.
Not salvation.
But a whisper from the abyss within himself — from the shard of Sethvyr that now coiled around his soul.
The Calix was not a blessing.
It was a mirror.
It was a command.
And without even thinking, Froy reached toward it — his fingers brushing the mist, feeling the ancient cold seep into his bones.
The world held its breath.
And somewhere far beyond the broken earth, Sethvyr smiled.
Waiting.
Watching.
The chalice trembled as Froy's fingers brushed its misty form.
From its hollow heart, the black liquid rose — thick and shimmering, twisting through impossible colors that gnawed at the mind.
Without hesitation, Froy lifted the Calix Nihilum to his lips.
He drank.
The taste was alien.
The sensation — wrong in every way.
It burned down his throat, seeped into his marrow, hollowed out his soul anew.
And with it came the change.
Not a violent eruption.
Not a screaming agony.
But a slow, creeping certainty.
A presence.
A covenant.
Something old, older than prayer itself, unfolded within him — a pact written in the forgotten tongue of dying gods.
The Blessing of Ruined Divinity.
The ability to call forth miracles — but not from heaven, nor from any mercy.
Miracles born of defiance.
Miracles fueled by sacrilege.
Miracles demanded by the abyss.
He could feel it now — a hollow altar built within his own spirit, silent and patient.
Waiting.
Miracles could be born there.
But they would require offerings.
Sacrifice.
Faith.
Not in light.
Not in salvation.
But in ruin.
In Sethvyr.
And every act of faith, every drop of devotion to the silent god, would weave new threads of power into his frail body — letting him bend the world, if only for a moment.
Froy lowered the empty chalice.
It crumbled into mist, vanishing into the dead wind.
He stood alone in the ruined clearing, his small hands trembling at his sides — not from fear, but from the weight of what he had accepted.
A miracle could save him.
A miracle could destroy his enemies.
A miracle could twist fate itself.
But only if he paid the price.
And somewhere, far beyond mortal hearing, a voice whispered from the black between the stars:
"Bleed for me."
"Believe in me."
"And you will become my will made flesh."
The Son of Ruined had been born.
And the world — though it did not know it yet — had already begun to bleed.