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“I’m ordering you. Take me to my sister.”

He holds my gaze for a long, brutal second.

Then he turns.

And the forest parts for us like it already knows who we are now.

XXVII

What Spoils Is What Remains

The storm sanctifies the ground.

Rain does not cleanse. That’s a lie people tell themselves because they can’t bear the idea that water remembers everything it touches. Rain carries ash. Rain carries blood that’s already dried somewhere else. Rain carries breath. Tonight, it carries sound.

The sanctuary was once a root cellar. You can tell by the walls—packed earth reinforced with boards that never expected to hold scripture. They bow inward slightly, as if the dirt is listening. Mold flowers along the beams in pale, blistered constellations. Someone tried to scrape it away once. They failed. It always grows back thicker where it’s been denied.

Good.

Rot that survives rejection is closer to truth. What decays under pressure was never meant to last.

Cass Crow is kneeling where the stone dips lowest, wrists bound to the iron ring sunk into the floor. The ring is older than the room. Older than the Gospel. Some things don’t need belief to persist. Her blood threads down the rope and into the grooves carved earlier tonight, darkening the scripture until the words look swollen, fevered, alive.

She’s stopped begging.

That matters.

Her breathing rattles, wet and shallow, the sound of lungs learning the cost of staying open. When thunder breaks overhead, dust drifts down from the ceiling and sticks to the blood on her shoulders, forming a paste that smells faintly sweet. Infection always does. The body prepares to surrender before the mind accepts it.

The radio hums.

Not static yet. Not speaking.

Listening. Waiting to be told what it already knows.

I stand with my hands folded inside my sleeves and wait for the moment to arrive properly. Rites fail when rushed. Timing is obedience’s truest test.

An acolyte shifts behind me. His boots stick to the floor when he moves. The rot has reached the boards there—softened them until they weep sap that smells like old sugar and bile. He grimaces without realizing it.

Weak.

The storm leans closer.

Cass lifts her head.

Good.

Her hair hangs in clumps, stiff with drying blood and rainwater carried in on clothes stripped earlier. Her face is mottled—fear and fury fighting for dominance. She has her sister’s eyes not color, but same fire behind them that refuses to smother out. That much is undeniable. Same sharpness. Same refusal to lower her gaze even now, even kneeling, even bound.

Defiance does not vanish.

It ferments.

“Again,” I say.

The acolyte flinches but turns the dial.

The radio crackles—low at first, then sharper, the sound cutting through the chamber like something tearing its way out of skin. The speaker whines. The storm answers. Between them, the signal opens.