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That is when the room changes.

Not around me.

Around him.

“And through him,” he continues, “you’ll learn where your voice belongs.”

I move before the last word finishes settling.

Not fast enough to look desperate. Not violently enough to give them the reaction they built this room to receive.

Just certain.

The kind of certain that makes men step back before they understand why.

“You still don’t understand.” My voice stays quiet, steady enough to make the room listen. “A broken hymn doesn’t prove the crown survives.”

I step into the space he thought belonged to him.

“It proves the crown was never untouchable,” I tell him, “and I’m done letting you mistake rust for glory.”

For the first time, something flickers across his face, not fear, but calculation.

Above us, iron groans, metal strained past patience, and the sound moves through the room like the whole world has leaned too far forward and decided it is done holding its breath. The truth settles in me quietly, completely, without ceremony or mercy.

He expects me to come for him. He built this room for that exact moment, for my rage to make me easy, for grief to put my hands around his throat while the Gospel watched me become the thing he named me.

So, I don’t give him that.

I don’t move toward him.

I move toward Malek.

The room reacts before anyone understands why—voices breaking, bodies surging, prayer rising sharp and frantic like it might still bargain with gravity. Someone lunges. Someone shouts my name like it’s a command. Someone calls on a God who’s already failed them.

Too late.

They let me close because faith like theirs mistakes witnesses for worshipers.

My hand closes around the exposed end of the Binding Thread, and the pain hits before I have time to brace for it.

It doesn’t stay in my hand. It climbs up my wrist, through my arm, into the bones of my shoulder and straight down my spine, bright and vicious and wrong. Malek makes a sound I have never heard from him before, something torn out of a place deeper than pain, and that is what almost makes me let go.

Almost.

The hymn stutters, and for one breath, every voice in the room loses its place.

So, I pull hard.

The Thread tears free with a wet, ugly sound, and blood spills hot over my fingers. Malek drops like the thing holding him upright has been cut from inside his body. There is no graceful collapse, no fight left in his knees. One second, he is standing because they made him, and the next he is on the floor.

I move too late to catch him.

His chest rises once, then again.

The Binding Thread burns in my palm like it is furious I touched it and lived. It still wants a command. That is the mistake he made.

For the first time, the High Revelation makes a sound that is not sermon.