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“You cannot unwrite blood!” he roars. “You cannot cut a son from his maker!”

I step over Malek’s body, and the room opens for me without anyone telling it to. No one reaches for me. No one moves quickly enough to remember they’re supposed to be faithful instead of afraid.

They only watch as I cross the floor with the Binding Thread burning in my blood-slick hand, and for the first time, their faith looks less like worship and more like fear.

I don’t look at them.

I look at him.

“This is what happens,” I tell him, lifting the burning Thread in my blood-slick hand, “when scripture gets tired of the hand holding the knife.”

I wrap the Thread once around his throat, not to choke him, but to anchor the command to the body that spent a lifetime pretending it came from God.

He claws at it immediately.

That is the first honest thing I have seen him do.

His fingernails split against the braid. His robes tear at the collar. The sermon falls apart in his mouth, all spit and panic now, no cadence, no hymn, no God left inside the sound of him.

“You were meant to sing—” he gasps.

I drag him toward the fire pit they prepared for coronation, his knees hitting every stone on the way down. Ahead of us, the crown waits in the heat, all iron and wire and bone, prepared for a body it never expected to refuse.

I force his head down toward the heat and press the Binding Thread into the crown just as the flame catches with a small, sharp sound, like the room itself has taken a breath.

The Thread does what it was made to do. It carries command. It carries claim. Only this time, there is no scripture left between his throat and the crown to protect him from the meaning he built.

Fire answers, hungry and eager and honest in a way he never was.

The crown catches first along the wire, then deeper, where old blood and rust have made a home of each other. Heat crawls through the iron. The barbs glow. Something inside the metal gives a thin, terrible shriek as it starts to lose its shape.

His voice dissolves with it, breaking apart into something that isn’t language anymore, not sermon, not command, not even prayer. He claws at the Thread around his throat, but the thing he spent a lifetime using to claim other bodies holds him exactly where he put himself.

I keep one hand at the back of his skull and hold him there, steady and relentless, until the fire finishes what he started. Until the crown bends. Until the song dies in his throat. Until there is nothing left that can preach itself holy or write its name into someone else’s flesh.

When I let go, the crown collapses inward, burning and buckling, shedding scripture like dead skin.

The hymn ends.

I stand there with my breath even and my hands bloodied, watching doctrine melt into ash like it always should have. Like maybe every holy thing built from suffering was only ever waiting for someone to stop being afraid of the fire.

Behind me, Malek breathes.

Cass is still standing.

And Marrow Ridge finally learns what silence sounds like when no one is left to command it.

The broken hymn doesn’t sing.

She ends the goddamn song.

XLI

Scripture Without God

The fire reaches me before the noise does.

The Iron Gospel always believed fire was obedient. That if you fed it the right words, the right bodies, it would burn where told and stop when commanded.