Langley led his newest penitent into the Cathedral Undercroft, both of them concealed by the last vestiges of darkness still draped over the city outside.

  The Undercroft of Kaedmon’s Cathedral was a dust-caked chamber that ran right underneath the foundations of the building. The air was heavy with damp, the scent of mildew mingling with something sharper—the faint tang of rusted iron, or perhaps dried blood long forgotten.

  Fallen candles leaned against their sconces, their wax dripped into hardened stalactites that gleamed like bone in the dim torchlight. Cracked tombs jutted from alcoves in the walls, their effigies worn faceless by time, hands outstretched as if pleading for release. Above, the ribbed vaulting disappeared into shadow, where cobwebs wove a lace of neglect across the once-hallowed arches.

  Every sound was amplified there: the drip of water from a cracked cistern, the scurry of unseen vermin, the echo of a single footstep that rang far longer than it should. The Undercroft seemed alive in its silence, breathing slowly through the drafts, listening, waiting. A meeting in such a place was more than clandestine—it felt sacrilegious, as though the stone itself held memory and judgment.

  But the most important fact about this place – where history was soon to be made – was the fact that its center was situated right underneath the rear chamber of the Cathedral.

  Directly below where the Conclave was currently being held.

  Langley could hear the conversation between the High Cardinal and his newest charges quite clearly. The rumbles and vibrations of the floorboards spoke of horrors that the Greycloaks had brought with them – exactly what Langley feared. Yet, after a few minutes of heated discussion between monsters and men, the proceedings seemed to have calmed down, and the High Cardinal was delivering his final solution to the problem of the Archon.

  That thought brought Langley’s attention right back to the hooded man standing beside him.

  His features were not remarkable. He was garbed in simple beige flaxen robes and carried a crooked staff that he used to walk. To look at him in the dim lights of the Undercroft was to look upon the most typical looking [Shepard] in all of Eastmarch. One could be forgiven for thinking him nothing more than a weary man come to the capital to trade for domesticated animals.

  But one only had to look a little closer to understand that there was more to this man than simple appearances. Langley saw him unveil his hood as they got into position directly underneath where the Conclave table would be able, and the glowing crimson eyes marred the man’s otherwise pure features.

  Those eyes lighted on Langley with sudden intensity, and he spoke in a voice that was far too confident and powerful to belong to him:

  “You’re afraid.”

  Langley gulped. “Of course I am.”

  “Good,” the old Shepard replied. “Means you aren’t just some idiot kid.”

  “Aren’t we all fools in your eyes?”

  The Shepard gave Langley a brief, wrinkled smile.

  “Anyone who’s ever doubted their beliefs is no fool, Langley.”

  “I – yes.”

  The two of them listened in to the conversation above, dust swirling round their ankles. As the voices of each member of the Conclave echoed down around them, the Shephard’s smile only seemed to grow.

  “There is a cancer gnawing at the heart of our world,” the High Cardinal said. “And it is time to see it ripped out.”

  Now, Langley noticed that his companion’s yellowed teeth were showing.

  “Quite a thing, isn’t it?” The Shepard asked him. “To let fear control not only your life, but the lives of those around you. I wonder, Langley, when I first came to you…were you afraid, then?”

  The priest answered without looking back at his companion.

  “Couldn’t you simply possess me and find the answer to that question yourself?”

  He knew that reply would sound antagonistic. But the Shepard did not rise to it.

  “I could, sure,” he said. “But that wouldn’t mean anything. I’m much more interested in what you choose to tell me.”

  Langley gave a brief sigh while Remiel droned on about the importance of protecting Argwyll from the threat the Archon represented.

  “…no,” he said. “I wasn’t afraid. Because for the first time in my life, it felt like someone was actually listening to me.”

  “You’re a famous preacher in these parts. You can’t really believe nobody listened to you all these years.”

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  “They heard my voice, but it was Kaedmon’s words I spoke,” Langley replied. “For a while, I thought those were the only words I could speak. The only words I’d ever be able to speak. Then, well, you arrived.”

  Langley recalled then the first time the Archon had come to him. He’d lain down on his simple four-poster bed after a long, arduous day of his reforms being blocked again by the Council. He’d gone to bed that night tired, frustrated, and feeling completely alone – knowing that he needed to do more for this world, knowing that he was destined to be a protector. Knowing, too, that he was failing his Path that Kaedmon had set for him.

  And that’s when he saw the angel – corrupted by the Archon’s power, just like they all said. He knew this, and yet, he wasn’t afraid.

  It had been a strange feeling. The dream had been so lucid, so real, and the Archon’s eyes were oddly comforting.

  In that first meeting, he’d said nothing at all. They’d both simply looked at each other – holy man and demon – across a torn landscape that stretched out far into the distance of Langley’s dream. In the moment, the priest wasn’t sure if the scarred world of the dream was simply an illusion cooked up by his mind, or the Archon’s, or that it represented some distant future fraught with images of desolation – abandoned, torn buildings, crumbling walls and people flayed alive, their flesh burning against an odd, evil green sun high above.

  He had felt his own flesh burn in the dream, and had began to struggle towards the Archon as the ground quivered open, revealing a gaping abyss between the two of them.

  His feet felt the edge of the ground, and yet, still, he trundled on. Even though he knew he would fall.

  And that was when the Archon had reached out to him.

  When Langley woke the next day, he awoke as a new man. He didn’t even think what he’d seen suggested heresy on his part at all. It wasn’t a devil he’d seen in that dream.

  Instead, it was the solution to the great, all-consuming problem of his life.

  “Doubt,” High Cardinal Remiel said above them both. “Doubt is the enemy of our realm. It has spread among those of us who are left like a disease. It is what will kill us, in the end. Thus, together, it is our duty to root it out and cure it once and for all.”

  “How do we do that, priest?” a rumbling voice echoed above.

  “We display a final, decisive show of force against our enemy. We let Argwyll know that we are not finished yet.”

  Langley saw the Shepard’s smile grow wider.

  “That’s exactly why he never suspected you of doing anything like this,” he said. “Because in the end, he’s so sure that all [Priests] must think the same way.”

  Langley met the steel Shepard’s gaze. “I’m doing nothing but paving the way.”

  “You’re doing more than you think. Without you, that barrier would’ve really held me up.”

  “And the people of this city would starve to death,” Langley sighed in response, slumping against a corner pillar of the dusty Undercroft. He was thinking of all the conversations he and this frail old man in the room with him had had up to this point. Of how he’d made this whole infiltration possible through his contacts in the city and a fair bit of luck. He was thinking of how much he’d divulged, and how much he’d been trusted with the task that, he knew, he was born to complete.

  “I still think that, perhaps, Kaedmon ordained that I bring you here,” he said. “Maybe its wishful thinking, but I get a sense that He might realize His time on this earth is gone. Perhaps it is only we humans who carry on the fight in his name.”

  The Shepard listened to him with a bittersweet grin, one ear always tuned to the ceiling lest he miss the key part of this meeting he was here for.

  “Gods can’t slay themselves, eh?” he then said. “It’s a nice thought – thrusting the old deity into a much-needed retirement. But if that was true, wouldn’t old Kaedmon just take all your Systems away from you and send out a message? If I can do it, I doubt he’d have an issue communicating his desires to you.”

  Langley’s sigh grew deeper. “Some say Kaedmon’s power wanes as the Archon’s waxes. Maybe He is cursed to simply watch his doom creep towards him, while his children die.”

  “Because of you, more of those children will live. The alternative would have been far less pretty”

  Langley wanted to scoff. He was a traitor to his kind, no matter what the Shepard told him. But it was true – the Hybrids of Westerweald laying siege to the city and its barrier would have meant months – perhaps years – of warfare. And it was a war that humanity couldn’t win. Langley had been sure of that since he’d first set eyes on the Archon himself.

  He’d done the only thing that made any sense – he’d taken steps to reduce the suffering that was to come. Because that was his job.

  As Remiel kept droning on above, Langley suddenly found himself thinking about the last few months. About the darkness. About the despair. And about how relaxed he suddenly felt now that the final moment of everything had come.

  “Do you know why so many believe in Kaedmon?” he asked.

  “I have my theories,” the Shepard replied, eyes now focused on the ceiling. “Chief among them is the fact that he’s a human supremacist. Makes sense to follow him if you’re born in the right body.”

  Langley closed his eyes for a moment, letting himself feel the comforting onyx metal of the Undercroft’s floor for what he knew would be the last time.

  “Certainty,” he said. “It’s that simple. People want to have a purpose. A Path to walk. A Path that’s their Path. Humans, we – we want to feel that our lives have value. If nothing else, it’s a reason to get up in the morning. We want someone to tell us that our lives are significant, even if we know that we’re all just leaves fluttering in the storm of time. It gives us our own sense of power, in a way.”

  “Power cannot be given or taken. It comes from the self, or it does not come at all.”

  Langley’s eyes jerked open to see the Shepard gazing at him again, a strange melancholy having overtaken his gruff features.

  “Sorry,” he chuckled. “I can’t take the credit for that one. Someone else said it. Someone who’s long gone now, swallowed up by the storm that we’re here to end. I think she’d like you, in a sense. You two could probably debate the merits of your own beliefs long into the Argwlian nights.”

  “…and that is why, we must end it. Here and now. Tonight!”

  Hearing Remiel say this, the Shepard’s smile abruptly vanished.

  “But the time for debates is long gone,” he said.

  “There is something we have that the Archon does not,” the High Cardinal echoed above them. “Together, we shall employ it in a last assault on our enemy before he can throw the balance of Argwyll into eternal chaos.”

  Langley’s eyes flew to the roof, where the chatter above instantly went quiet.

  “You choose your own purpose now, Langley,” the Shepard whispered in the darkness of the Undercroft. “But I’ll tell you this, just to give you an idea: Eastmarch will need a new Shepard, soon.”

  Langley bolted upright, lips quivering as the High Cardinal’s voice rose above.

  “Behold!” he said. “The ultimate weapon against this abomination!”

  Before Langley could say a thing, the Shepard placed a skinny finger to his mouth.

  “Here it comes,” Ethan said.