Ryuto had expected to stay in Varkhos longer, binding wounds and lending weight to the Church’s presence there. Instead, after weeks that blurred into one long current of bandaging, blessing, and small mercy, he found himself walking the broad quays of Darkensport with nothing on his schedule but the quiet of a city that knew how to rebuild itself from grain and law.
The air smelled of salt and tar and new timber; port-workers shouted in a human chorus and the wristband platforms winked like small moons as they teleported crates across the city. He took the long way toward the library because movement steadied a man who carried other people’s hurts. It was on that stroll, turning a corner by a tea-house that still kept its doors open to old customers, that he saw a familiar figure waiting beneath a plane-tree: Princess Alisa.
Alisa waved as if the world were a simpler place where friends met in the street. Behind her, a trio moved with the precise step of veterans: Alina and her Blue Seal companions — Thalen, Bren, and Seraine. They had lingered in Darkensport a day longer than Mistwood and Flarewood’s representatives; diplomacy, it seemed, found reasons to spread like stains.
“Ryuto-kun!” Alisa called, the smile easy and unpretentious. “You are back—well. Come meet friends.” She fell into introductions with the easy authority of a princess who had learned that names open doors. “This is Alina, of Silverwood, and these are her Blue Seals. They kept Fellgrade City out of trouble once.” Her laugh was a shorthand for history the two of them shared.
Alina bowed with the measured deference of a soldier. “We have heard of your deeds,” she said. “It is an honor to stand in the same air as the Second Summoned.” There was no false worship in her tone; it was more a compact offered between professionals.
The Blue Seals regarded Ryuto as if appraising an unfamiliar blade. Thalen’s expression was grave, Bren’s attentive, but Seraine—young, quick-eyed, and given to noticing small things—stared as if Ryuto’s presence were an answer to an unasked question. There was a moment when the girl’s eyes softened and she murmured something to Alina: not a prayer but a note about the way Ryuto carried himself, the quiet tempering his aura into something that read, to her, like purity. The word spread in subtle gestures—an intake of breath, a small tilt of head—and the group’s posture relaxed as if meeting a comrade rather than a legend.
“I did not expect to meet you here,” Ryuto said, finding ease in the ordinary politeness of the exchange. “Princess Alisa—thank you for bringing them.”
Alisa’s hand brushed his sleeve briefly. “Keep your training up,” she teased. “And if you ever need a favor in Darkensport—send a letter to us.”
The parting was gentle. The Seals would ride to Silverwood with Alisa; their trade and patrols demanded it. They shook hands; Seraine’s grip was firm and honest, as if she meant the friendship to be a real thing. Ryuto watched them go — their boots striking the pavement like a measured poem — and felt the peculiar lift that companionship brought: small, human, anchor-like.
He walked then to the library, a place that had become his refuge. The stacks smelled of glue and vellum; the clerks knew him by face and footfall. The first days’ reports from Varkhos had been lodged and he found himself pulled, inexorably, toward the old volumes that described myths in the patient voice of historians.
What he found was not neat.
Human annals recorded the First Summoned in one way: a hero called home, a legend who had completed his turn and been returned by the goddess. Demon chronicles told a different story: Nyxarion had been cleverer, darker, betrayed the goddess and remained in Velgrith, walking long centuries since then. The two accounts could not be folded together without the paper creasing and tearing. For the modern cleric — for a man tied to the tidy morality of the Church — the discrepancy felt like a shudder in an otherwise steady world.
Ryuto read, re-read, and felt a tremor he could not place. The rumor he had heard in hushed conflict — that Nyxarion might yet walk the land — gained weight and heft on the parchment. If the demon histories were true, the First Summoned had not been sent back; if the human version was true, the old tales were a cautionary conflation. Either way, there was a man whose past and promise no longer fit simple categories.
He did not let the knowledge sit. He walked to the cathedral and asked for an audience. The request reached higher than he’d expected; by nightfall, a wristband opened a narrow corridor in the Church’s teleports and the great figure he sought stepped through with the slow dignity of a man who had been making decisions for decades: Grand Cardinal Sarion, come from Emberholme City at a summons.
Ryuto waited with the small, raw courage of a soldier who has learned to ask the questions that hollow a man out. He led Sarion into a private study — a room that smelled of incense and the clean paper of officialdom.
“Grand Cardinal,” Ryuto began, the formality sitting heavy for a moment, “I read histories today. They contradict. I have heard — already — that Nyxarion still breathes in Velgrith. Is this true?”
Sarion’s hands folded over a cup of tea. His face, mapped with the careful lines of one who has weighed sin and mercy, did not flicker with surprise. “We have known,” he said simply. “Not all knowledge is for the public square.” His voice had the lay of a man who had long ago learned that truth unmoored can shatter more than it saves.
“You knew and you did not say?” Ryuto’s words were not accusation as much as disbelief. The Church was meant to be a beacon of truth.
Sarion put his cup down slowly. “We knew because we have watchers,” he said. “We have people who murmur in the cracks of the world and bring us what they hear. Nyxarion has remained — or returned — by means we do not fully understand. He has changed, as men who live long do. He is older, and he has power. We did not make the knowledge public because the Church knows what panic does. We feared that the Crown, the people, and the Church might turn upon itself if we planted such a wound in the public mind.”
Ryuto felt the ground tilt. “But if he is dangerous—if he is a threat—who will stop him?” The question came from a place of duty, not self-centered ambition. He was a summoned hero; he had a blade and a faith. The thought that a man could exist beyond his ability to act ate at him.
Sarion’s eyes, old and careful, met his. “That is the crux,” he said. “The first summoned is not as he was when song-makers wrote him into haloes. He is a man long-lived and long-corrupted in rumor and power. We have measured him; he is older than a mortal thing comfortably can be. We have counsels, and we have watchers.” He spoke slowly, then in a smaller voice: “We do not believe there is a single answer. If Nyxarion must be confronted, it will take men of power and men who can bend fate in hands we do not yet hold.”
Ryuto heard the implication and its shape: even the Church did not believe it could simply send a single party and cut the knot. The name of another—less spoken, more savored with fear—rose in his mind: the Darkness Lord Shujin. He had met Blade Lunaria briefly in the field, and the memory of that red-glinted presence folded into the conversation like a shadow.
“You think Shujin could do it,” Ryuto asked, unable to keep the thought folded. “Blade Lunaria — he wields darkness that is not common. Could the Darkness Lord eliminate Nyxarion?”
Sarion steepled his fingers. “We have no proofs to offer,” he said cautiously. “There are things in Velgrith that do not align with our scripture. There are those who say the Darkness Lord’s nature is not wholly aligned to fate as the Book would define it. But saying so aloud would be to place many souls in unnecessary danger. We do not cast prophecy as a weapon lightly.”
The meeting moved into policy and risk. Ryuto told them he had met Aethelred, and Sarion listened, the steeple of his authority holding a thousand quiet judgments. The Grand Cardinal admitted that the Church had kept counsel with few: those among the high cardinals who understood the world’s darker seams. They had not made pronouncements. They had weighed and feared.
“We are not cowards,” Sarion insisted. “We are custodians. The truth is like embers: left cold, it can smolder and set a house to ruin. We decided to watch where needed, to keep the public’s trust intact while the real plans could be built. But I will not lie—this is a burden we feel.” He spoke as if that burden had a weight in his bones and not merely on his shoulders.
Ryuto left the meeting with more questions than answers and a tightness that settled in his chest like a winter hush. The Church would not make a public announcement; such knowledge would cause panic, splinter alliances, and give Nyxarion the chance to make legend into terror. Only the highest cardinals knew the truth, and they kept it like a prayer guarded by lip and hand.
That secrecy troubled Ryuto — and it grounded him, too. He could feel the thin line between faith and fear. He had come to the Church to protect people; now he realized some protections required keeping truths close lest the truth itself be used as a weapon.
Before he left Emberholme’s envoy chambers, Sarion placed a hand on Ryuto’s shoulder. “Watch the king,” he said softly. “And watch those close to him. Not because we suspect treason but because the world often moves at those hearts. And if you find the path that must be walked, do not walk it alone.”
Ryuto bowed. He felt, for the first time, the weight of a knowledge that was not yet a command. He had met heroes, kings, and a darkness that pulsed at the edge of his sight. He had also made friends who would stand where he stood. The Blue Seals had been kind; Princess Alisa had been unapologetically human; Alina had shown the kind of sharp comfort that comes from shared purpose.
That night, as Darkensport’s lamps burned low and the wristbands blinked like small stars, Ryuto walked the pier again. He looked at the horizon where the demon island lay like a dark promise between river and sea, and thought about the world’s histories—human pages told one story, demon scrolls another. He understood that the truth was a thing that must be guarded and shaped carefully. For now, the Church would watch, the king and the generals would march, and one man in the dark might hold the key to stopping a first summoned myth that had not died when the bards first said he had.
Ryuto closed his hand around the hilt of his cane-sword as if to hold thought steady. He did not yet know who would carry the blade to face Nyxarion, should that time come. He only knew that secrecy and truth now shared bed with duty—and that the world of Velgrith had grown a shade more complicated than any psalter or sermon could promise.
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✦ To be continued...