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The knife pauses.

“That was your flaw,” he continues. “And your virtue.”

He gestures, and the blade presses to my chest, right over my heart.

“There’s a woman walking loose in my world,” he says, and the knife rests over my heart. “Rot touches her and fails to write. Hymns reach her and come back wrong.”

Selah.

The name detonates silently behind my eyes.

The blade cuts shallow, but shallow has never meant merciful in the Gospel. It means they want the wound to remember longer than the body does.

“Faith cannot afford what refuses to fit,” he continues. “So we teach it a shape.”

Another cut. Lower this time. Deliberate.

“If it bends, it becomes hymn.” His hand steadies over my skin. “If it doesn’t, it becomes ash.”

There it is. Not the shape of the trap. The shape of their fear.

“And you.” He steps closer until iron and incense fill my throat. “You are the chain she’ll mistake for love.”

The knife leaves.

That should be mercy.

It isn’t.

Something colder replaces it, and the room seems to know before I do. The hymn thins. The men around me go still in that practiced, reverent way they have when pain stops being punishment and starts becoming ceremony.

Iron catches the firelight.

Braided. Deliberate. Wrong.

The Binding Thread.

Recognition hits hard enough to turn my stomach, because I have seen what this thing does when it is laid over scripture. I know what it wakes. I know what it makes flesh answer to.

The High Revelation brings it closer, and every carved mark in my body seems to tighten before the metal ever touches me.

Then he presses it into the open wounds across my chest.

Pain explodes.

White. Absolute. Total.

My scream tears free this time, raw and animal, echoing off metal and concrete and bone. The Choir swells in response, voices rising, cadence tightening, feeding on the sound like it’s oxygen.

“Behold,” the High Revelation intones, “The Crownless Wrath.”

The relic burns as it settles, searing scripture into muscle and nerve and memory, binding pain to purpose, suffering to narrative. I convulse against the chains, vision fracturing, every scar screaming its name back at me.

“This isn’t punishment.” His voice cuts through my scream, calm enough to be obscene. “Punishment is for those we mean to discard.”

The Thread burns deeper, dragging every carved command in me awake at once.

“You were never discarded, Wrath.” His hand steadies over my chest. “You were unfinished.”