[POV High Priest Machias]

  From the obsidian balcony crowning the training wing of the Cathedral, I observed the courtyard below. The morning sun was pale, a worn silver coin that barely managed to warm the icy air of Orestia. Down there, the thirty “gifts” of the Goddess moved in tight formations, executing combat drills under Adalbert’s supervision.

  At first gnce, they looked like disciplined soldiers. However, from my vantage point, I could see the cracks beginning to fracture their wills. They were not in their armor, but deep within their souls.

  A week had passed since what happened in Graywood. A week since the stench of blood and ash seeped into their uniforms and, more importantly, into their consciences. As High Priest, my duty was not only to organize the logistics of faith; I was the architect of their new reality. And I had to admit, the process of demolishing their former humanity was fascinating. It was like watching a crystal structure subjected to constant hydraulic pressure: first the stress lines appeared, then the dull creaking, and finally the total colpse that would allow the material to be rebuilt into something denser, more useful for our purposes.

  "Look at them, Your Holiness," I whispered without turning around when I felt Pope Benedict IV’s presence behind me. "They no longer walk with their chins raised. They no longer demand paces. The weight of Graywood bent their spines in a way fifty years of imaginary training never could."

  Benedict stepped closer to the edge of the balcony; his breathing was a faint wheeze, a sign of his advanced age. "Guilt is a heavy anchor, Machias. But guilt without direction is dangerous. Are they accepting the dogma, or are they merely paralyzed by terror?"

  "They are in the transition phase, Your Holiness. The most delicious phase to observe. They are discovering that the morality of Terra was a luxury this world does not allow them to keep if they wish to survive."

  Below, in the courtyard, the training stopped abruptly. I watched Adalbert walk in front of them, his boot striking the ground rhythmically, marking a martial cadence. He stopped in front of a young woman—the same one who had hesitated in Graywood, the one who held the sword with trembling hands before the woman and child. Her name was Elena in her world, but here we baptized her as the “Heroine of Grace.” A name that, given her current misery, struck me as deeply ironic.

  "Straighten your back, Recruit Elena!" Adalbert roared. His voice was a whip that cracked through the silence of the courtyard. "What are you thinking about? The old woman’s eyes? Or why today’s bread tastes like dirt and remorse?"

  Elena did not answer, but I noticed her lips tremble. I looked at her hands; her fingers clenched tightly around the hilt of her wooden sword. There was a fire of resistance in her, a small spark of independent judgment that refused to die. She was a silent dissident. She, along with three others, had been whispering in the dormitories at night. They believed we could not hear them. They believed the isotion was only physical and that their minds still belonged to them.

  They did not know that the yellow marks on their hands were my ears and my eyes in the darkness of their luxurious cells.

  "Say something, Recruit," Adalbert insisted, bringing his face so close to hers that it almost touched. "Express your doubt. The Church values honesty before the final purification."

  "It wasn’t… it wasn’t necessary," Elena whispered. Her voice barely reached us, but the magical microphone of the balcony amplified it for my ears. "There was another way. They were civilians. They were not demons. You lied to us about what we were going to do there. This is not justice."

  A deathly silence fell over the courtyard. The other heroes held their breath. I observed some of them, like Ulric, who looked at Elena with a mixture of envy for her courage and terror for the consequences he knew would follow. Ulric had already crossed the threshold; he had already convinced himself that the massacre was an act of necessary divine love. But Elena was the st nail refusing to be driven in by the hammer of our faith.

  "You lied?" Adalbert ughed, a dry, dangerous sound that raised goosebumps on the recruits’ skin. "We showed you the path to salvation. Evil is not a career choice, Recruit. It is an infection of the soul. And in Graywood, we cut off the gangrenous limb to save the body of the Kingdom. Are you suggesting that the will of the Goddess, transmitted through our words, is wrong?"

  "I suggest that we are the ones becoming monsters," Elena said, and this time her voice was firm, charged with defiant desperation.

  That was the precise moment. The breaking point I had been waiting for.

  I made a small gesture with my finger over the control crystal embedded in the stone of the balcony. The yellow mark on Elena’s hand fred with a sudden, violent, unnatural light. The young woman let out a harrowing scream that tore through the morning as she fell to her knees, dropping her sword onto the sand. The Faith Synchronizer did not merely monitor mana; it was directly linked to her nervous system. Every rebellious thought, every word of doubt spoken against the doctrine, triggered a physical punishment that mimicked the pain of a thousand red-hot needles coursing through her veins.

  "Grace of the Goddess!" Adalbert shouted as the tempr soldiers surrounded her like wolves. "The pain you feel is not ours, Recruit Elena. It is the weight of your own impurity manifesting. Your soul is rejecting the light because it clings to the shadow of doubt. Pray! Pray until the pain turns into relief!"

  Elena writhed on the stone floor, sobbing in an inhuman way, while the other heroes watched. This was the most crucial part of the psychological development I had pnned. It was not just the punishment of the dissident; it was the terror that took root in the spectators. I looked at Conrad, the giant, who averted his gaze to the ground, his face flushed. I looked at Aris, who squeezed his own yellow mark so hard his knuckles turned white, terrified that his own heart might betray him and grant him the same torment.

  They were learning, the hard way, that their minds were no longer a safe refuge. There was no private corner left in their thoughts where they could hate us without being instantly punished.

  "They are breaking nicely, Machias," Pope Benedict commented, a cold satisfaction reflected in his pale pupils. "Look at them. Elena’s resistance is being devoured by the others’ instinct for self-preservation. Soon, she herself will beg for forgiveness—not out of conviction, but out of the visceral desire for the pain to stop. And when that happens, we will have won her will forever."

  "Exactly, Your Holiness. Faith does not always enter through the heart; sometimes it must be injected through the suffering of the body."

  Below, the punishment ceased at my command. Elena y sprawled, gasping and drenched in sweat, her face pressed against the cold stone of the courtyard. Adalbert roughly hauled her up by the colr and forced her to look at her companions, who stood rigid.

  "Does anyone else have an opinion on the purification strategy of the Church of Gaia?" the officer asked with icy calm.

  No one spoke. The silence was absolute, broken only by the wind whistling between the columns. The heroes—those “chosen ones” who a week ago demanded sves and gold with arrogance—now looked like shadows of their former selves. Their pride had been repced by constant vigince, an inner paranoia. They gnced at one another with deep mistrust, wondering who would be the next to speak too much or harbor an “impure” thought that would activate the mark.

  We were succeeding in making them hate themselves for their own weakness. We taught them that everything they brought from Terra—their human rights ws, their empathy, their concept of justice—were merely shackles that had to be broken to achieve true greatness. We sold them the idea that their only salvation was blind obedience, because only through it did the pain disappear and the sacred “purpose” begin to make sense.

  "I pointed out Ulric," I told the Pope as I extended my hand toward the blond youth. "He is the model I sought. He no longer doubts. He has decided that to avoid suffering, he must be the most fervent of all. Last night I watched him training until he bled, repeating Gaia’s psalms with manic intensity. Not because he loved her, but because he decided that the only way to recim his sense of power was to be the most faithful dog of our Church."

  "A useful leader for our puppets," the Pope said. "Give him more responsibilities. Let him be the one to denounce those who doubt in the darkness of the dormitories. Let mutual betrayal be the glue that binds them irreversibly to us."

  I withdrew from the balcony as I heard Adalbert order the training to resume. The heroes cshed their swords again, but the sound was different now. There was no longer the competitive joy of practice; it was a mechanical, desperate noise, the sound of men and women striking metal to drown out their own consciences.

  Walking through the cathedral’s corridors, I felt deeply satisfied. The psychology of a summoned hero is malleable if one knows where to apply pressure. It only took isoting them from their world, showing them the brutality of Lyre’s reality, and then offering the Church’s “light” as the only refuge against that same brutality we ourselves orchestrated. We were creating weapons with nowhere to return. If Whirikal or the demons defeated them, they would die as useful martyrs. If they survived, they would be our puppet rulers.

  I entered my private study and opened a map of Whirikal on the table. My fingers traced the location of the Royal Academy, where I knew the anomaly was hiding.

  "Soon, Liselotte. Soon, Leah," I whispered to the empty walls. "Your ice magic and your royal fire will be nothing against thirty youths who lost their fear of killing because they learned to fear their own Goddess even more. The Church does not need kind heroes who save cats from trees. It needs reapers. And your kingdom is the field we are going to harvest."

  I sat at my desk and began drafting the next step of the “training.” Next time, it would not be a vilge of poor, unarmed humans. Next time, I would take them to the borders, where the enemy would be monstrous enough to justify their violence to themselves, but weak enough for them to feel powerful again. I needed them to savor victory after so much trauma. I needed them to start enjoying the power we had given them.

  Because a frightened soldier is a useful tool, but a soldier who fervently believes his cruelty is divine justice is an unstoppable force.

  And the heroes of Terra, under my guidance and the blessing of the yellow mark, would become the most beautiful and lethal monsters Lyre had ever seen.