Chapter 29: Wailstone

The reaction from the crowd was immediate. Every guest gathered on the altar rose to their feet as one, voices breaking into open protest, directed straight at the Order officials leading Miyu forward in chains.

The Cardinals didn’t so much as glance their way, marching on as though the outcry meant nothing at all.

Then, from behind Miyu, a figure stepped forward, face hidden behind the white cloth that marked an Archbishop. He raised a hand toward the crowd, his voice pitched low and measured, the practiced calm of someone used to being obeyed.

"People of Selena, please, remain calm."

A woman’s voice cut through his before he’d even finished, sharp enough to silence the murmurs around her.

"Calm? Have you lost your mind, Archbishop Zoria? You’ve hurt the Moonmaiden, how are we supposed to stay calm? What if Goddess Selena curses us for this? Do you think you can stand against her wrath?"

There was no reverence left in her tone, none of the deference someone might expect toward an Archbishop of the Order. And she wasn’t alone. Voice after voice rose up around her, carrying the same edge, the same barely restrained fury.

It wasn’t only about Miyu, either. Beneath the anger simmered months, maybe years, of grievances the people of Loupulan had swallowed in silence: taxes pushed higher with each passing season, the cost of healing driven so steep that most families could no longer afford it, and worst of all, a decree binding every resident to the city itself.

Anyone who tried to leave condemned whatever family remained behind to punishment in their place, and that alone had been enough to keep even the boldest young people rooted where they stood.

Miyu’s presence had given them something to hold onto through all of it. Her warmth, her patience, the plain fact that she seemed to care, had worked its way into the city’s heart over time, one small kindness at a time. It made sense, in a way.

She’d been raised by two former Cardinals, both gone now, and the staff resting beside that ornate chair had belonged to them before it ever belonged to her.

Those two Cardinals had carried a different reputation entirely from the ones who held power now, remembered fondly, trusted, and it was their teachings, faithful to Selena’s original word, that still shaped everything Miyu did.

With them gone, she’d become the only one left who still seemed to care what happened to the people of this city. And now, in front of everyone who loved her for exactly that, she stood in chains. Of course they couldn’t hold their anger back.

Archbishop Zoria’s expression didn’t so much as flicker. If anything, something close to amusement settled into his voice as he spoke over them.

"You’d rather trust a cursed thing than your own Archbishop?"

"Cursed?" The word rippled back through the crowd, confused, uncertain.

He let the silence stretch before continuing, his tone shifting into something almost gentle, almost regretful.

"I understand how much you love your Moonmaiden. Her parents were Cardinals you all cherished as well. But did you know she’s been hiding her true Awakening from every one of you?"

He let that settle before pressing on. "That’s why I intend to prove it, here, tonight. We’ll test her Awakening again, at the Obelisk, so you can see exactly what she really is."

Disbelief rippled through the crowd, voices rising in confused protest, an Awakening couldn’t simply be faked, and certainly not tested over and over at will. The Obelisk, as far as anyone understood it, answered only to the gods themselves.

Through all of it, Miyu said nothing. She stood with her head bowed, offering no argument, no denial, nothing at all to defend herself against Zoria’s claim.

At his signal, the paladins flanking her began guiding her up toward the altar, toward the Obelisk waiting at its center.

Miyu came to stand before the towering stone, and for a moment her gaze drifted sideways, toward the ornate chair and the staff resting beside it, her staff, crowned with its yellow crystal.

Zoria stepped into her line of sight before she could reach for it, his voice cutting sharp and final.

"You’ll do this without that sacred relic, cursed creature."

The paladins forced her hand forward, pressing her palm flat against the Obelisk’s surface.

The moment contact was made, the ground beneath them trembled, a low shudder that seemed to run through the entire tower like something grieving.

Light spilled from the Obelisk in erratic pulses, flickering, uneven, and panic rippled through the guests as they realized something about this wasn’t right.

It didn’t take long for the answer to arrive. Black light tore free from the Obelisk’s surface, blazing outward, unmistakable.

No ordinary person wanted to see that color. It marked a density of dark mana so severe that anyone bearing it was branded, almost universally, as demon-blooded.

Zoria’s hand rose slowly, deliberately, closing around the staff Miyu had left behind.

"People of Loupulan, look closely. This is the true face of the Moonmaiden you’ve loved so dearly. She and her Cardinals deceived every one of us, using this crystal to hide what she really was."

He went on to explain it plainly: Miyu’s earlier Awakening had never been real. The Obelisk, he claimed, had only been reading the density of Sacred mana radiating from the crystal itself, mana strong enough to register as a white Awakening on its own, while her true nature stayed buried beneath it.

Her adoptive Cardinals, he said, had orchestrated the entire deception from the very beginning.

The same people who’d been shouting in Miyu’s defense only moments earlier fell silent, one by one. Doubt spread through them like a stain, the sense of having been fooled settling into every face turned toward the altar.

Then an old man in threadbare clothes hurled his sandal at her without warning.

"Cursed thing. This city’s ruin is your doing. No wonder Goddess Selena’s turned her back on people like us."

He wasn’t alone for long. The sentiment spread through the crowd like fire catching dry grass, the city’s decline, their suffering, all of it laid at the feet of one cursed girl who’d dared call herself their Moonmaiden.

A gash opened above Miyu’s brow, blood tracing down the side of her face from whatever had struck her, the crowd’s mood having turned as sharply as a blade. She said nothing in response. Not one word, even as she stood there bleeding.

Miyu, a demon?

And they said they saw a black light? Was that black light the exact same thing as the one I had seen in the Cardinal before?

Lucian’s breath caught hard in his chest at the sight unfolding in front of him.

The scrape of chain links and the wet, ugly sound of things striking flesh dragged at something raw inside him.

He couldn’t see any of it, not directly, but he didn’t need to. He understood exactly what it meant for someone to be forced into iron heavy enough to bow their neck, exactly what it meant to stand there and take blow after blow without flinching.

Something hot surged up through Lucian’s chest and into his skull. His hand closed around the hilt of his sword without conscious thought, gripping it as though he meant to cut through those chains himself, memory or not.

He knew this was only a memory playing out in front of him. He understood that. And still, the strange pull he’d felt the very first time he’d met Miyu hadn’t faded at all, that quiet, inexplicable sense of already being bound to her somehow.

The memory of speaking with her in that impossible white room, in a kitchen that gave way to falling through open sky, none of it felt distant. It felt so real for him

"Nothing you do here will change the past, Lucian."

He knew that. Of course he knew that. But it did nothing to quiet the question burning through him now, how could Miyu, of all people, be a demon?

"Lumina. You already know what’s really going on here, don’t you? And what happens after this."

Lucian spoke to her plainly this time, no more circling around it. Too many strange threads had already tangled themselves around his life, and this, whatever this was, felt like one more knot in the same rope.

There was no version of this where Lumina didn’t already understand the Order of Selenea down to its finer details, not if she’d been bold enough to drag him into this memory alongside her, chasing something, or someone, she wanted found.

A slow breath left her, audible even without sight to confirm it.

"Well, I suppose there’s no harm in you knowing what happened here. Besides, I’ve already found what I came looking for."

The moment those words left her, Lucian understood exactly what they meant: whoever she’d been hunting had finally surfaced.

But where? He turned his senses out across every corner of the space he could reach, and found nothing out of place, nothing beyond the Order’s own deranged leadership standing over Miyu.

"They’re here."

They?