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They were wrong.

The crown collapses first. I hear it before I see it—the scream of iron losing its shape, wire shrieking as it tears free from doctrine. The altar follows, wood splitting along stress lines I memorized years ago, every fracture familiar. Flame races the walls like it’s been waiting for permission, scripture blistering and peeling into smoke.

The hymn breaks.

Not cleanly.

Voices scatter instead of harmonize, prayer losing cadence, belief tripping over itself now that the mouth writing it is gone. Chains fail in stages. One hook tears free with a sound sharp enough to jolt bodies out of reverence. Another snaps and whips loose, catching someone hard enough to drop them screaming.

Faith hesitates.

Physics does not.

I’m aware of Selah before I’m aware of myself.

Her arm is braced around my ribs, her shoulder under my weight, her breathing steady enough to borrow. Blood slicks my side and her hands, mine or hers or both, and I can’t tell where the line is anymore.

I’m upright.

That matters.

My vision swims but holds, then doesn’t, then comes back in pieces.

Fire. Smoke. Selah’s shoulder under my weight. Blood sliding hot down my ribs. The floor tilting beneath me even though I know it isn’t moving.

Pain is everywhere and nowhere at once, muted and screaming, my body unsure which scars are old and which are still being written. The absence in my chest pulses where the Thread was, a hollow burn that keeps reaching for command and finding nothing there.

Nothing to answer.

Nothing to obey.

My knees try to fold.

Not from weakness.

Memory.

The second the hymn fractures, some ruined part of me expects the floor, expects the posture, expects hands in my hair and a voice telling me to lower myself properly. My muscles twitch toward it before I catch them, before I lock my spine so hard the pain whites out at the edges of my sight.

Selah shifts under me.

I don’t reach for her. I don’t thank her. I don’t speak.

If I open my mouth, something might come out that doesn’t belong to me anymore.

The Iron Gospel fractures the way bones do when the break reaches the joint.

Some kneel. Some run. Some keep preaching like sound might still obey them if they force enough belief through their teeth. Their mouths move, but half the words don’t reach me. Sound drops in and out, swallowed by the roar in my skull, by the crack of beams, by the wet drag of my own breathing.

The compound groans as welded seams fail and smoke pours through the maze of trailers stitched together by belief and wire.

Marrow Ridge begins to burn.

That’s when Black Harvest moves.

Not loud. Not righteous. Precise. Efficient. They come through smoke and side doors and places doctrine forgot to guard once it convinced itself it was eternal. I recognize the rhythm immediately, even through the blood pounding behind my eyes.

Extraction.