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I turn away before anyone can pretend this is settled, because it isn’t, and I refuse to let it be named something smaller than what it is.

Whatever comes next will cost us. I can feel that truth settling into my bones already. Whatever road we take will take pieces with it, will leave marks that don’t fade just because we survive.

But it won’t take him quietly, and it won’t take me without a fight.

The fire collapses inward, embers dimming to ash, the last heat bleeding out of it like a body giving up warmth.

Nothing about this is finished, because the road he chose before saying a word is still waiting, and I have no intention of letting it take him whole.

XXXVI

Marrow Ridge Still Sings

The Iron Gospel never built cathedrals. They took places people had already given up on and taught the rot to call itself holy.

Marrow Ridge squats on the hill like a wound that learned how to breathe, trailers welded together wrong, double-wides stitched nose to spine with rebar and wire. Their siding bows outward as if something inside keeps pushing and being told to wait.

My ribs tighten before I tell them to.

That’s the first betrayal.

I walk between them under my own power.

That matters. Because everything in this place remembers how it felt to drag me.

The gravel crunches under my boots—soft, wet, wrong—soaked through with runoff and offerings that never finished becoming dirt. Oil. Blood. Ash. That sweet-metal stench of decay that doesn’t rot clean, just lingers and waits. It crawls up my nose, coats the back of my tongue, and my stomach drops like it recognizes a command my mind refuses to acknowledge.

Breathe shallow. Don’t give them rhythm.

Rusted angel statues line the paths. Cheap lawn trash once. Now scripture. Their faces have melted into expressions that might’ve been joy or terror before heat erased the difference. Barbed wire crowns bite into bowed heads. Someone hammered crosses into the dirt and let them fail upward, steel arms bent and broken like resurrection got tired halfway through.

My hands twitch.

Not to fight.

To brace.

A hymn leaks from somewhere inside the park—not sung, not played. Recited. A dozen voices murmuring the same verse at different speeds, overlapping until language collapses into pressure. Cadence without mercy. My pulse tries to sync before I clamp down on it, teeth grinding as my body remembers exactly how long you have to endure before the pain changes shape.

You don’t listen to the Gospel.

You survive it.

Hands brush my shoulders as I pass. Fingers skim ribs, spine, the base of my neck where they used to press me down to remind me where obedience lived. Not restraining. Measuring. Checking what still fits.

“And The Crowned Wrath returned to the place of his naming,” someone whispers behind me.

My jaw locks hard enough it aches.

Another voice answers, reverent and hungry, “For the blade that cut the mouth free was always meant to finish the sentence.”

The words slide into me like they’ve been waiting. Like they never stopped. My shoulders stay loose by force alone. I don’t give them the satisfaction of tension they can read.

They don’t bind my wrists.

The Gospel only binds what still believes it can be taken.

They take me uphill to the Sanctified Circle, toward the largest double-wide—the one stitched with iron plates and welded doors, its porch collapsed into a permanent bow. The windows are open. Always open. The Gospel likes to hear itself breathe. Likes to remind you that silence is something you earn with blood.