It's green.
They breach the entrance at a run, and the interior of the Cathedral is a battlefield.
Templars are fighting in the nave. A dozen of them, maybe more, locked in desperate combat with undead that are pouring from small rifts that have torn open throughout the space. In the floor between the pews, in the walls near the transept, in the vaulted ceiling where green-black tears weep darkness. The rifts are small, maybe two or three feet each, but there are dozens of them, and the cumulative effect is a storm of death energy and emerging undead that has turned the Cathedral's sacred interior into a charnel house.
The Templars are holding. Barely. Their blessed weapons carve through the undead with practiced efficiency, and several blessing circles have been hastily erected around clusters of the wounded, but they're being pushed back. For every skeleton they shatter, two more drag themselves from the rifts. The holy energy of the Cathedral itself is fighting the incursion. Vale can feel it in the walls, in the floor, the building's centuries of consecration pushing back against the death magic. But it's not enough. The rifts are too numerous, the energy too concentrated.
"Knox, Cassidy, support the Templars here!" Vale commands. "August and I are going for the vault."
Knox doesn't hesitate. His mace is already blazing as he wades into the nearest cluster of undead, his grey coat flaring behind him, his strikes precise and devastating. Cassidy's longsword ignites with holy fire, and she charges the left flank, cutting a line through the advancing dead with a ferocity that clears the way for the embattled Templars to regroup.
Vale grabs August's arm and pulls him toward the transept, toward the staircase that leads down into the Cathedral's lower levels. The crypt. The catacombs. And below those, the vault.
The staircase is narrow, spiraling, carved from the Cathedral's original stone. The air thickens as they descend. Not the clean, ambient death energy of a rift site but something fouler, something that mixes with the residual holiness of the Cathedral in a way that makes Vale's stomach turn. The walls are scorched. Blessing symbols carved into the stone centuries ago are cracked and smoking, their holy light flickering as the death magic overwhelms them.
They reach the crypt.
The dead are here too. Not just the undead emerging from rifts. The Cathedral's own dead, the Templars interred in the crypt's niches and sarcophagi, pulled from their resting places by the death magic saturating the building. They shamble through the catacomb corridors in their burial vestments, ancient warriors reanimated by a power they spent their lives fighting, and the wrongness of it, Templars raised as undead, the Order's honored dead turned against itself, makes bile rise in Vale's throat.
And between the risen dead, crumpled against walls and sprawled across the stone floor, are the bodies of fallen Templars. Living ones. The vault guard, overwhelmed by the sheer number of undead that Voss unleashed from below. Some are wounded, dragging themselves toward the stairs. Some aren't moving at all.
Vale counts three dead in the first corridor alone. People he knew. People who served beside him.
His hand tightens on his sword until his knuckles ache.
"Stay close," he tells August, and his voice sounds as though it belongs to someone else. Cold, flat, the voice of the weapon the Order built him to be. "Watch the alcoves. The risen Templarsare stronger than standard undead. They retain muscle memory from their training."
August nods. His face is pale but set, his eyes tracking the shadows with the focused intensity that means his death magic is at full alert. He doesn't speak. He doesn't need to.
They move through the catacombs in careful formation. Vale leading with his sword, August covering the rear. The risen Templars are a horror, but they're slow, confused, their ancient bodies struggling against the binding magic that has dragged them from rest. August deals with most of them. His death magic reaching out in gentle, firm commands that ease them back to stillness, returning them to the sleep they were stolen from. It's not combat. It's compassion. And the difference between what August does and what Voss has done to these honored dead is a gulf so vast that Vale can't look at it without something in his chest cracking.
They turn a corner and a shape lunges from the shadows.
This one is different. Fresh. Recently dead, the body of a young Templar in modern tactical gear, holy rings still glowing faintly on her fingers. She's been raised minutes ago, her eyes clouded but her body still remembering how to fight, and she comes at them with a blessed mace that swings with trained precision.
Vale parries. Steel meets blessed steel with a shower of sparks, and the impact drives him back a step. The risen Templar is strong, fueled by Voss's magic, burning with an energy that her living body never possessed, and she presses the attack with a speed that speaks to years of training twisted into something monstrous.
Knox appears behind her.
He'd followed them down. Of course he had, because Knox has never once in forty years stayed where Vale told him to. His mace connects with the risen Templar's weapon arm, shattering the binding magic at the joint. She staggers. Knox steps betweenher and Vale with the smooth efficiency of a man who has been covering his partner's blind spots for decades.
"Go," Knox says, already engaging the risen Templar. His face is grim, his jaw set, and Vale can see the horror of it in his eyes. Fighting the reanimated body of a colleague, someone who might have been alive an hour ago. "I'll handle the catacombs. You get to the vault."
Vale wants to argue. Wants to tell Knox to fall back, to stay safe, to not fight alone in these corridors where the dead are rising around them. But Knox meets his eyes with a look that saysI can do this, trust me,and there's something behind it. Something that speaks to the conversation in the stairwell, to the secret shared and accepted, that tells Vale Knox has reasons to be confident that go beyond standard Templar capability.
Vale nods. Grabs August. Keeps moving.
The vault corridor is straight and long and leads to a door that should not be open. It is. The massive iron-and-stone seal that protects the Order's most dangerous artifacts has been forced from within. Not breached from outside, as they'd expected, but pushed open from the vault's interior. Voss didn't break in. He was already inside. Had been inside, perhaps, since before the rifts began. Hiding in the one place no one would think to look, behind the very defenses everyone assumed would keep him out.
Vale and Cassidy, who'd followed them down after Knox's arrival and refused to be separated from the objective, push through the broken seal and into the vault.
And there is Maren Voss.
***
The vault is a cathedral within the Cathedral. A vast underground chamber with a vaulted ceiling supported bypillars carved with every protective symbol the Order has devised over a thousand years. Display cases and containment vessels line the walls, housing artifacts that radiate power even from across the room. The Binding Chains. The Soul Lens. Relics from the Order's earliest days, weapons taken from enemies, objects too dangerous to destroy and too powerful to leave unguarded.
At the center of the chamber, on a raised stone dais, sits the Mortis Crown.
