The destruction of the 12th floor of Brassalo Hospital was still settling into the city's bones when the party made their way to the riverfront. Tucked between two warehouse walls near the water, something impossible was happening: people were being kind to each other. A market without prices. Food passed hand to hand without ledger or debt. The doors were thrown wide open — which nobody did in St. Petersgrad, not anymore — and from inside came the sound of a piano.
The man at the piano wasn't playing anything joyful. The songs he knew were sad. He played them anyway, and something in the room refused to let them land as sorrow. People were dancing. A woman moved alone near the wall with an expression on her face like something long-calcified was finally coming loose. Two women on the far side of the warehouse were laughing — not politely, not carefully, but with their whole bodies, the kind of laughter that hasn't been safe to make in years.
At an intersection outside, between the open warehouse doors, Tomas Brek and his son Milo stood on literal soapboxes and addressed whoever would listen. My friends, we were not meant to live in such agony. There is a better life for us. I have seen it. It has walked these streets. He was shouting at the mountaintops. The crowd around him was enthralled in a way that went beyond words — something more than just listening was happening.
The party moved through it separately, quietly, like people who recognized something rare and didn't want to disturb it.
Carl slipped into the warehouse and found the piano player lost entirely in his own world. He laid something on the music without the man knowing — and the pianist's back straightened, his fingers quickened, and what had been almost a dirge became something genuinely joyful. The man started singing. The people who hadn't been dancing before started dancing.
Bogdan followed and added his own thread to the pianist's performance, deepening what Carl had started. Then he made his way toward Tomas.
Thorun went straight for the food cart, manned by a grizzled dock worker who smelled of the ocean and wore the finest mutton chops he had ever seen — the kind of facial hair that communicates a life of considered decisions. The man was eating a tomato sandwich with the expression of someone experiencing genuine luxury. He looked over at Thorun with an old man's smile and said, Pretty great, isn't it. Viktor shared a sandwich and heard him talk about what it felt like to not be afraid for one evening.
The party did not discuss what they were about to do. It assembled itself between them the way decisions sometimes do when everyone in a room is thinking the same thing.
Bogdan climbed the soapbox. He began orating about finding the tome in the monastery. He talked about hearing an otherworldly voice that gave him hope the world could be different. He kept returning to a phrase: Nadine is the light that pushes back the dark. He told the crowd that she did not have one messenger — that she could manifest within all of them, that each person standing there was capable of carrying that candle forward through their own actions. He gestured to Tomas and told the crowd that this man had been her voice before any of them had names for what they were feeling. The old man wept openly. People pressed their hands to their hearts.
When Bogdan reached the crescendo of the sermon, the air itself began to draw in the daylight and form — just at the edge of visibility, in just the right light — the shape of spread wings. Everyone standing in that courtyard saw it. When Bogdan stepped off the soapbox and turned back to look, it was still there. She was present. She was listening. She was unquestionably pleased with what she saw.
Lusat pressed his hands to the cobblestones of the courtyard floor and shaped them. The stone rose and formed itself — slowly, then with gathering confidence — into the figure of the angel they had named. While the crowd chanted the phrase Bogdan had given them, Bogdan pressed a chip of refined Shardisite into the statue's chest and performed a Ceremony of dedication. Lusat felt control of the magic leave him, taking on a presence of its own. The statue did not collapse. Instead it solidified, Loose cobblestone fused into shaped stone. It took on details of the face of Nadine that hadn't been there before. The cobblestone construction became a permanent effigy. The air around it became charged with radiance, like dust drawn by a magnetic field, channeling into the figure. When it was finished, the statue was a conduit to a divine magic and an otherworldly presence, as though the stone had become a gap between here and wherever Nadine existed. The crowd was enthralled by it.
Bogdan stepped back to Tomas and suggested it might be time to invite people forward to share their own troubles and their hope. The old man's face lit up. “Of course. Of course. Why didn't I think of that. I have a few people in mind.” He motioned to his son Milo to help him. The evening had arrived at that particular fullness where nobody wanted to leave and the conversation and laughter flowed freely.
The old man with the mutton chops was at his post near the entrance, deep in conversation with another man, two sandwiches still in hand. Tomas Brek was mid-sentence, rallying the crowd toward open testimony, Milo already moving to round up volunteers. Then the sound of heavy bootsteps filled the gateways to the alley.
Eighteen Viroc soldiers, six at each gate and one officer — clean-cut, badged, wearing the full pomp of institutional authority — holding in each hand the leash of a shard-enhanced Doberman pinscher. Their fangs dripped and glowed faintly. Their eyes caught the light wrong. They were a little too muscular, a little too aware, the enhancement visible in every inch of them without needing to be announced. The official touched his throat — a small gesture, nearly bureaucratic — and his next words carried through the warehouse at a volume that ended every other sound in it.
“By Viroc mandate, I order you to disperse.”
The dogs growled. Unphased, the old man turned to greet the soldiers. He still had the sandwiches in hand. He had been handing them out for an hour and the gesture was so thoroughly part of him now that he carried it forward without thinking. Walking toward the officer with the easy openness of someone who believes that any conflict could be diffused with a hearty meal. “Hey, this is a happy time. Come on. Come in. Join us. My wife grew these tomatoes.”
The official drew his sidearm and leveled it at the old man's head. He had already given his warning. That was all the old man would get. He pulled the trigger sending a ball straight at the man who offered only welcome.
Viktor was fifteen feet away and was already moving before the hammer dropped. His Aura of the Guardian reached across the space between himself and the old man and took what had been meant for him. The gun discharged. Black powder smoke bloomed. The old man's magnificent mutton chops were blackened with gun smoke and singed at the edges from the muzzle flash. Viktor stumbled where he stood, the bullet shattering in his chest plate instead. The sandwich vendor was still standing, now with a black burn on his forehead. The old man coughing and blinking, neither the officer nor he fully understood what had just happened.
The official did not wait to find out. He dropped both leashes. A soldier in the line, already jumpy from the shot, raised his repeater and fired a second round at the old man before the echo of the first had faded. The music had already stopped. Now the room understood. Mothers grabbed children. A father grabbed his daughter. The horses outside screamed. Bedlam arrived in the span of a single breath, and the party moved.
Bogdan reacted to the second shot by invoking the Wings of the Savior — feathered light tearing from his back and carrying him across the warehouse in an instant, folding himself and his wings around the vendor and his family, getting them clear before the soldiers could reacquire a target.
Lusat stood near the podium where Tomas had been preaching minutes ago. He felt the rage — white-hot, entirely justified. He took a breath instead. He looked at what they had built in this room and thought about what these people needed to see. He brought out the Radiant Transmuter, pointed it at the statue, and summoned the Lesser Angel.
The stone chipped away in all directions. Light beamed outward from the figure at once, flooding the entire courtyard as the perfectly carved cobblestone Nadine crumbled like an eggshell and left behind something else — a faceless aspect of Nadine herself, not the statue's features, not Nadine's face as it had manifested, but something that had used the statue as a doorway. The crowd gasped in the middle of their panic. Some of them stopped running.
Lusat, emboldened by the presence of his new patron, cast Fireball through the angel's aura, scooping as much of her presence as he could to infuse into his arcane devastation.
The spell changed in transit. What arrived among the Viroc riflemen was not fire — it was pure radiance, collapsed into a single terrible moment of fury. From behind Lusat, Tomas Brek had seen his new patron form and began to actively channel her might in a clumsy and unpracticed effort to confront the soldiers. He had already begun to chant as Lusat cast his fireball. Nobody had asked him to. Nobody had told him what words to use. The chanting came out of him unbidden, and it layered something onto the blast — like silvery barbs threading through the radiance — and the soldiers in its path discovered that the people of this warehouse had opinions about what was permitted inside it.
Viktor, still seething from the attempt of the sandwich vendor, singled out the officer with righteous precision. The divine smite that followed was not a controlled thing. It was the accumulated weight of the entire evening; the piano, the tomato sandwiches, the woman dancing alone with sorrow of a lifetime melting off her face, the statue rising from cobblestone, the wings in the daylight air, the old man who had only wanted to offer someone a seat at the table, all of it discharged through the point of a cutlass into this man's chest. The outburst of of divine energy could not be contained by the body it was intended for. It couldn't even be contained by the walls that surrounded them. It sent a forceful shockwave through the entire neighborhood. Every single person within a quarter mile radius on their feet was forced to the ground. Not hurt outright, but abjectly humbled by a new force in this world claiming its followers and their home for its own. Anyone who could get up did. Most ran. The officer and most of his detachment remained lifeless on the ground.
The representatives of Viroc were dead. On the bodies: a weapons, some pocket money, and a Sending Stone stamped with the insignia of the Department of Continental Affairs. Harold's department. The raid had not been a rogue patrol stumbling across an unauthorized gathering. It had been an intentional directive.
Lusat told the angel to return to the statue. It acquiesced but it lingered for a few moments first, moving through the warehouse and alleyways, passing from person to person among the shaken survivors releasing, with each pass, a wave of serene light that did not heal wounds but addressed something underneath them. Witnesses would later reach for different words to describe how it uplifted them after such a harrowing attack. The joyful mood of the gathering was gone, but the conviction that replaced it was quieter, heavier, and built to last.
Tomas Brek picked up a pitchfork from the warehouse floor. He looked at Bogdan, and with calm but unwavering conviction he said: “I will never let this happen again.” It wasn't a wish. It was a fact about the future of this new congregation. The party took a short rest in what remained of the evening and began to think seriously about the future of Viroc Industries.