[POV Anonymous Heroine]

  My hands won’t stop shaking. No matter how tightly I press them against the rough fabric of my trousers, the tremor persists—an electric spasm born from the yellow mark the High Priest carved into my skin, spreading through my body like icy poison. In the White Void, during those fifty years of mental simution, my hands were always steady. There, I was the mistress of light, the girl who could summon bsts of energy that disintegrated shadows without a single strand of hair falling out of pce. But shadows don’t bleed. Shadows don’t cry.

  Today, the training took a turn none of us had ever imagined in our heroic fantasies. Adalbert—the officer who shattered our pride with a piece of common steel—dragged us out of our luxurious rooms before the sun had fully risen. He didn’t treat us with the cruelty of a jailer, but with the severity of an instructor who expects the best from his new recruits. There was no hot breakfast—only travel rations and an order that forced us to march for hours toward the foothills near the Whirikal border.

  We arrived at a vilge called Greywood. The sight of it made my heart tighten. On Terra, even the poorest neighborhoods I remembered had a dignity completely absent here. The houses were shacks of rotting wood and mud; the children, with weathered skin and sunken eyes, stared at us with a fear that I, in my ignorance, mistook for reverence. The air smelled of manure, dampness, and an ancient hunger that seemed to rise from the very ground.

  "Listen carefully, brothers-in-arms," Adalbert said, halting his horse at the vilge entrance. His voice was no longer that of an enemy, but of a mentor trying to force our eyes open. "The Goddess has given you power. Now we must give you vision. There are rumors of a demon hiding among this filth—a creature that feeds on the lives of the innocent. As new recruits of the Light, your first mission is to cleanse this pce. You will divide into six groups of five. You have until nightfall to identify and bring the demon leader to the central square."

  Adalbert looked at each of us with a seriousness that almost resembled affection—the kind a sergeant has for his soldiers. "Remember: faith is proven through results. Those groups that fail to complete the purification of this nest of shadows will show that they are not yet worthy of the glory of the sacred table. As such, the groups that fail will receive no food for a week. It is a fast of discipline, not punishment. You must learn that a hero who does not protect his territory does not deserve to be fed by the faith of the faithful. Move out!"

  We split up. I ended up in a group with Ulric and three others. We rushed into the vilge, driven by urgency born both from the threat of hunger and from the desperate need to prove we weren’t the useless failures of the day before. We questioned everyone. We entered barns. We searched wells.

  "Ma’am, please," I said to a trembling woman standing before me, trying to use the kind, heroic voice I had practiced in my head. "Tell us where the demon is. We are here to save you."

  The woman looked at me with genuine confusion, her knotted hands clutching an empty basket. "Miss… there are no demons here. The st trouble was a year ago, when a wolf took a little girl. Since the Church raised the taxes, even monsters don’t come through here anymore. We just want to grow our potatoes in peace."

  Hours passed. The sun began to sink, staining the sky blood-red—a color that felt like a dire omen. No group found anything. There were no traces of demonic mana, no suspicious behavior, no strange sounds. Only extremely poor people trying to survive one more miserable day.

  When we returned to the central square, frustration hung thick in the air. All thirty heroes stood there, heads lowered, waiting for our superior’s verdict.

  "Nothing? Not a single lead?" Adalbert asked, walking among us.

  "Officer, we searched every corner," Ulric said, struggling to maintain his composure. "The vilgers say there haven’t been any incidents in a year. We believe the information was incorrect."

  Adalbert let out a dry ugh and looked at us with a mix of pity and disappointment. "You are idiots. Fifty years of training, and your eyes are still those of children staring at reflections in water. You are worthless if you cannot see through the lies of evil. A demon does not announce itself with horns—it hides in the compcency of the humble."

  He gestured to his tempr soldiers. "Come, recruits. Watch and learn how the trail of sin is found when the impious try to hide it."

  Adalbert and his soldiers began entering the houses. They didn’t ask for permission; they simply broke in with the authority of those who believe they own the truth. Families were dragged into the streets, their few belongings thrown into the mud. The vilgers’ screams began to fill the square.

  "Here!" one of the officers shouted from inside a shack belonging to an elderly woman who could barely walk.

  Adalbert entered and emerged dragging the woman by the arm. In his other hand, he held a small, old wooden box. When he opened it before us, the gleam of gold blinded me. Jewelry—a filigree neckce and a ring set with a red gem.

  "Look at this, heroes," Adalbert said, dispying the treasure. "Where would a ragged old woman in a dying vilge obtain something of this value? There is only one expnation: spoils from her victims. She is a demon that feeds on greed and deceit, and this entire vilge protected her because they benefited from her shadows. They told us nothing because they are all accomplices of evil!"

  "No! They were my mother’s keepsakes!" the old woman screamed, her voice torn apart as she knelt in the snow. "They were all I had left of my family before the Church came!"

  "Liar," Adalbert decred without a second’s hesitation. "The Goddess does not tolerate the stain of demons disguised as nostalgia. Listen well, recruits: compassion toward evil is the greatest sin of a savior. All demons—and those who shelter them—do not deserve to live."

  In one fluid motion, Adalbert drew his sword. The steel gleamed under the dying light of dusk, and with a single strike, the old woman’s head rolled across the ground, stopping mere inches from my boots. Her eyes remained open, frozen in an expression of infinite surprise that seemed to judge me.

  My stomach twisted violently. A choked sob escaped my throat.

  "Kill them all!" Adalbert roared at his soldiers. "This vilge has been consumed by shadow! Cleanse this pce so Gaia’s light may shine upon Greywood once more!"

  What followed was not a battle—it was a sughter. The tempr soldiers fell upon the vilgers. I saw a spear pierce the chest of a man who was only trying to shield his wife. I saw soldiers ughing as they chased children fleeing toward the forest. The snow on the road turned a steaming, vivid crimson.

  My fellow heroes were paralyzed. Some vomited. Others stared in horrified fascination, unable to process that this was the “path” the Church spoke of.

  Adalbert approached me, his face spttered with the woman’s blood. He extended a real steel sword toward me—cold and heavy.

  "What are you doing just standing there?" he whispered in my ear, his voice devoid of hatred and filled instead with absolute conviction. "Do you think being a hero is just receiving flowers at a parade? Evil is not only the Demon King. Evil is the seed pnted in vilges like this, the ones that lie to us. If you let this vilge live, their hatred toward us will feed the darkness."

  He pointed to a young woman trying to shield her small child in a corner of the square, surrounded by two soldiers awaiting a signal.

  "They are enemies now as well," Adalbert continued calmly—terrifyingly so. "You are a recruit of the Light. A savior. Then save the future by eradicating the seed of hatred today. Join your brothers. Prove that your fifty years of training prepared you to do what is necessary, not what is easy. We did not bring you here to be tools—we brought you here to learn how to become the judges of this world."

  I looked at the woman. Her eyes met mine. There was no malice in them—only the purest terror a human being can feel before their executioner.

  "I… I can’t…" I stammered, as the yellow mark on my hand began to burn with unbearable intensity, as if the Goddess herself were delivering the final push.

  "It is not a choice. It is your baptism," Adalbert said, shoving me forward. "In the Goddess’s army, you are either the arm that wields justice, or you are part of the weeds that must be cut down. Choose your path, heroes! Eradicate evil with your own hands!"

  I raised the sword with trembling hands as the screams of Greywood became the only sound left in the world. In that moment, I understood that the Church did not see us as inanimate tools—but as something far worse.

  They were turning us into monsters so we would have nowhere left to go except into their arms.