The Last Pilgrim Chapter 1

Chapter I. Ashes of the Covenant

“The fire remembers.”

The silence did not bring peace.

It came like judgment after the sermon, like the breath held before a soul’s final word. It stretched across the battlefield ruins like a veil torn from heaven, concealing the weeping of stars behind its ash-choked stillness. Stone spires—what remained of the sanctum towers—jutted from the cratered earth like the bones of a dead titan. Their surfaces were inscribed with the shattered psalms of an age that had once known Scripture, now long forgotten.

They whispered as they bled smoke.

Above this holy ruin, the sky moaned. Not with weather—but with something older, something divine and ruptured. Through that iron-shaded firmament, cathedral-ships burned, weeping fire and vox static. Their sacred hulls cracked in orbit, bleeding out processional hymns in dialects never meant to pass mortal lips. A lattice of broken satellites spun like dying angels, their wings aflame. Every note they broadcast was an offense to memory. And every syllable seemed to ask:

Who remains to hear?

Amid the wreckage, one figure stood unmoved.

A black-robed sentinel.

Cloaked in the windless ash, he was still as a tombstone and yet alive with something ancient—something terrible. The cowl shadowed his eyes, but beneath it gleamed the faint etching of a luminous sigil, pulsing faintly from beneath his skin. Scripture—alive. Written not in ink, but in soul.

Reverend Thaddeus Gray, last of the old blood, last of the Word-bearers, stood with the poise of a man who had nothing left to lose but everything to declare. His armor was not born of this era. It bore the fusion of eras—psalmsteel plating welded into 18th-century leather, reinforced with tech-augmented scroll-binders. Grafted scripture curled along the vambrace of his left arm, glowing softly with breath-like cadence. He carried no conventional weapon. He carried the Word.

In his right hand: a codex.

Bound in tanned flesh, rimmed with iron, sealed in wax and blood.

In his left: a lantern.

Its flame did not flicker.

It pulsed with measured cadence—each rhythm a heartbeat of truth remembered against the entropy of blasphemy. The lantern’s flame responded to Scripture, illuminating the path when truth was spoken, dimming when heresy filled the air.

Thaddeus stepped forward and the ash parted before him. Not by wind. But by recognition.

The monoliths knew him. The ruins remembered.

And still the sky wept.

A voice, thin as sorrow and loud as thunder, broke through the decaying clouds above. A voice without breath, yet weighted with authority. It did not speak in words, but in unravelings. A kraken of language breached the veil of heaven—and from it came Akratheon. Not seen. Not touched. But known.

His voice was void made word.

And the Word began to bleed.

Thaddeus staggered but did not fall. He opened the codex.

Ink ran like water down the page, but he read it anyway. Spoke it. Not with his voice, but with the breath of something beyond himself. The first phrase cracked across the ruin like lightning.

“In the beginning…”

The very air convulsed. Dust rose in reverse. A crater at the edge of the sanctum sucked in reality like a draining wound. And from its depth came a sound like uncreation—like a hymn sung in reverse, each note dismantling the meaning of the one before it.

Still, he stood.

Still, he spoke.

“In the beginning was the Word...”

The earth itself bowed under the sound.

In that moment, between syllables, Thaddeus became more than man, but not less. He became a boundary. A covenant made flesh, not by sacrament or steel—but by blood, and ash, and memory.

The lantern flared.

The codex burned at the edges but did not fall apart.

And as the sanctum quaked, as the stars bled, as the Hollow screamed, the last pilgrim raised his voice into the silence and made war with the only weapon that still held shape.

The Word.

The smoke tasted of iron and pine.

It rolled low across the ridge like the breath of some ancient beast, coiling through blackened tree trunks and dragging the scent of powder, blood, and dying men behind it. The ground was soft—soaked not with dew but with what the old hymns once called sacrifice. Above, dawn strained to rise, her golden crown stifled by a veil of smoke and shadow. The sun bled orange, trying to peer through the gunmetal haze of war.

And still the drums pounded.

They didn’t play to rally, not now. They played to remember—to hold off madness. For men who’d forgotten what cause they bled for, the rhythm kept them tethered. But not him.

Reverend Thaddeus Gray knelt in the mud, black cloak soaked through, his hands pressed firmly against a boy’s chest. Blood seeped through his fingers. Warm, fast, unrelenting. The wound had cut deep—too deep. A jagged bayonet slash had opened Elias from navel to sternum. He was no more than sixteen.

The boy’s good eye stared wide and clouding, one side of his face a ruin of blood and bone. He gargled something, but it came out as foam. Still, his hand gripped Thaddeus’ forearm. Not for salvation. For anchoring.

Thaddeus looked into that eye—not as a priest to a sinner, not even as a man to a boy, but as one image-bearer to another. As one who knew that when the breath left the lungs, something unseen broke through.

He did not say, You will be with the Lord.

He did not say, Peace, peace.

He spoke only Scripture.

“God is our refuge and strength… a very present help in trouble…”

The verse left his lips like liturgy spoken through gunfire. Around him, the battle raged in pieces. Redcoats screamed across the tree line. Militiamen—half trained, half starved—returned fire with rattling muskets and shouted names of cities long reduced to ash and tax.

But in that moment, beneath the cannon thunder and the cries of dying men, there was stillness. Not peace. Never peace. But the kind of stillness known in catacombs. The stillness of souls held at the edge of eternity.

“Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed…”

He had memorized every psalm long ago—not for sermons, not even for comfort. For this.

For moments when nothing else could hold.

The boy blinked once. His fingers loosened. A final breath shuddered past his lips, no wider than a whisper. His eyes didn’t close. They simply stopped seeing.

Thaddeus remained kneeling.

He did not weep.

There was no time for that.

He closed the boy’s eyes with fingers still wet with blood and murmured a final line:

“The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.”

Cannon fire shook the ground nearby. A voice bellowed for reinforcements. Another screamed about flanking positions. None of it mattered yet.

He stood slowly. The Bible at his hip felt heavier.

Wind moved through the trees with the scent of pine and something else—burnt flesh, old sorrow. The sun broke through the clouds, briefly. The light kissed his face, and for a moment he looked less like a preacher and more like a tombstone carved into living flesh.

Then the light shifted. Not dimmed—warped.

Something wrong stirred in the sky.

He turned his gaze upward.

And the first whisper came—not from the wind, nor from the cannons, but from the edges of reality itself. A whisper with no voice.

A presence.

Flashback (The Night Before)

The woods whispered long before the wind touched them.

Night did not fall here. It crept—slow, invasive, like a stain on the soul. It pooled in the corners of the camp, slithered through the pine roots, and stretched long shadows from every tent pole and tree trunk. There was a wrongness to it, just faint enough to ignore if you were drunk, tired, or proud.

But Thaddeus Gray had never been any of those things.

The chapel tent stood apart from the others—not by intention, but because even the godliest among the militia found themselves drifting away from it after dark. The lantern inside flickered against the canvas like a heart struggling to beat, casting long, trembling silhouettes that made the chapel seem alive. Like it breathed.

Inside, men sat without speaking. A dozen maybe. Some young. Some old. All looked carved from the same material—flint, pine, and grief. Their boots were wet. Their fingers were calloused. Their prayers were buried under layers of sweat and gunpowder.

Thaddeus did not pace. He did not raise his voice. He stood still, like stone—but when he spoke, the weight of his voice pressed down on the bones. Not because he yelled. But because truth does not need volume. It only needs clarity.

He read from Matthew, the passage about body and soul, about fear and eternal judgment. The fire snapped like a whip behind him, but his voice remained calm—dead calm.

Somewhere outside, a musket cracked in the woods.

No one flinched.

Colonel Bram muttered under his breath again. “If the Almighty wanted us to win this war, He’d send us bullets, not sermons.” He smirked, raising his flask again, daring the preacher to respond.

Thaddeus didn’t look at him. Didn’t need to. The silence that followed was answer enough. The kind of silence that crept up your spine and whispered, You are not ready.

He closed the Bible slowly, reverently. Not like ending a lesson. Like sealing a tomb.

“Some of you will die tomorrow,” he said. “That is certain. What is not certain… is whether you die in vain.”

Bram laughed, but it was dry—forced. The others didn’t move.

“You speak of liberty,” Thaddeus said. “But what liberty is there if men win a nation and lose eternity? What kingdom shall rise from the graves of the damned?”

He walked among them then, not pacing, not provoking—but as one called to walk the edges of conscience.

“Our cause is just,” he said. “But if our swords be stained with sin and our hearts filled with hatred, then even our victories shall become altars to judgment.”

His hand rested on the hilt of the Bible like a general might rest on his blade.

“We are not merely at war with redcoats, brothers. We are at war with powers that have no flag—only appetites.”

A man stirred. “You speak of the devil?”

Thaddeus turned, his eyes hard and ancient. “No,” he said. “I speak of something worse. That which wears the language of heaven but speaks it backward. That which says peace when it means chains. That which sings holy hymns in reverse.”

A breathless stillness overtook the tent.

Elias stepped forward from the back, drawn like a lamb to the altar. He held his tricorn in one hand, trembling. In the other—a dog-eared Bible, spine barely holding. He looked like a boy in uniform, too young to shave, too old to play games.

“Do you think, Reverend,” he said softly, “that God still sends prophets?”

The question broke something.

Not in the tent. In Thaddeus.

He had heard many questions over the years—challenges, confessions, pleas. But this one came with a weight. It didn’t ask about doctrine. It asked if God still acted. If God still broke into time and spoke through the lips of men.

The lantern behind him flared, unbidden.

Thaddeus approached, slow, steady. The others watched him, not like a preacher, but like a man who carried an answer no one wanted to hear.

He placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder and looked not at him, but through him.

“Yes,” he said, voice low. “But they do not come as we expect.”

He looked toward the trees outside the canvas walls, as if something stared back.

“And they do not leave as they came.”

The air turned cold.

The fire snapped.

Outside, the mist thickened. Shapes moved between the pines—perhaps men, perhaps memories. A wolf howled far off. Or maybe it was something else.

Thaddeus remained in the center of the chapel long after the others left. Bram had gone first, muttering blasphemy. The others drifted out in silence. Elias was the last. He looked back once, and the preacher gave a slow, silent nod.

Then he was alone.

The wind howled once, tugging the tent flap open.

And for a moment—just one—Thaddeus thought he heard something whisper.

A phrase.

“Not all scripture is remembered. Some remembers itself.”

He turned quickly. No one there.

Just the pulpit, the Bible, and the lantern, pulsing slowly—like a heartbeat beneath the skin of the world.

The Charge Begins

The ridge held its breath.

Not a sound stirred from the earth—only the measured drumbeat of boot against mud, the rattle of cartwheels bearing iron payloads, and the rasp of men whispering psalms between clenched teeth. Morning had come, but the sun rose like a condemned man—reluctant, pale, and bruised behind a veil of soot-gray clouds.

Thaddeus stood at the front, his black cloak torn and dirt-stained, caught in a wind that moved against the tide of nature. He held no sword. Only the musket strapped across his back and the Bible in his hand. A leather strap bound it to his wrist so it could not fall—not by accident, not by death.

The militia formed behind him—ragged lines of farmers, artisans, and boys turned to soldiers by fear and flame. No uniforms. No banners. Only the torn sleeves of freedom stitched into what they could find. Some bore crucifixes. Others crude verses carved into rifle stocks.

Thaddeus’s voice rang out—not loud, but clear.

“Psalm forty-six.”

The ripple moved through the line like lightning through water. Men straightened. Others closed their eyes, mouthing words buried deep within memory. Some prayed aloud. Some clenched jaws.

He began to walk forward, boots thudding against the wet clay, Bible open, its pages already wrinkling from the cold.

“God is our refuge and strength…”

Shots rang in the distance. The line tensed.

“…a very present help in trouble.”

The forest erupted with musket fire. Redcoats emerged in disciplined phalanx—scarlet coats bright against the black trees. Their line advanced, drums pounding, bayonets leveled.

Thaddeus did not break stride.

“Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed…”

The militia surged forward, cries of defiance and Scripture mingling in the air. Smoke swallowed the trees. The first volley slammed into them, splitting bark and bone. A boy to Thaddeus’ left fell, a hole clean through his chest—his dying cry not a scream, but “though the mountains be carried…”

Thaddeus leapt over him.

A second volley came. Bark exploded from a tree beside him. The air reeked of sulfur and death. A man behind him screamed—his leg shredded. Another collapsed, clutching a locket and weeping the name of his daughter.

The redcoats reloaded. Discipline. Precision. A machine of empire.

But Thaddeus kept moving. Not charging—advancing.

His cloak caught fire from a nearby blast. He tore it from his back and let it fall. Beneath, he wore the black preaching vestments of the Black Robe Regiment, now stained red at the seams. He held the Bible aloft.

The enemy line began to falter—not from bullets. From something else.

From the way the preacher did not fall.

He shouted above the gunfire.

“There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God!”

The words struck the air like thunder.

And something—something—responded.

A sound cracked across the battlefield that did not come from any musket. A ringing hum, deep and pulsing, like a bell being struck beneath the skin of the world. The trees trembled. The smoke twisted.

Thaddeus froze. His breath caught.

From the sky, a single line of unnatural fire began to descend.

Not lightning. Not sunbeam.

A line—a tear—in the air itself.

It was beginning.

The line shattered.

A bayonet charge tore across the front like a living wall of iron teeth. Redcoats screamed through clenched jaws, their rifles fixed with polished steel, feet pounding the soaked ridge with mechanical fury. Militiamen met them with blades, muskets, axes—anything they could hold.

And Thaddeus stood in the middle.

He caught a rifle-butt to the ribs, the impact jolting the air from his lungs. Another soldier lunged with a bayonet—aiming straight for his throat. Thaddeus ducked, slammed the edge of his Bible against the man’s jaw with a crack of splintered teeth, then rolled to the side as another came screaming with a sabre.

There was no time to think. Only react. Only survive.

Mud churned beneath his boots. Blood sprayed across his sleeves. Around him, men screamed—not all in pain. Some in prayer. Others in panic.

The enemy was better trained.

But the Word was louder.

A shot rang past his head—he turned in time to see a redcoat grappling Elias to the ground, bayonet raised. Thaddeus roared, barreled forward, and tackled the soldier sideways. The boy scrambled away as the preacher slammed his fist into the redcoat’s skull again and again until the man stopped moving.

His knuckles bled. His breath heaved.

And then—it hit him.

A pulse of sound—not sound exactly, but memory.

The battlefield slowed. Smoke froze in the air. The ash held still, suspended like a veil between worlds.

And Thaddeus fell—inward.

—

He stood again—but not on the ridge.

The wind was warmer. The air smelled of pine tar and waxed pews. And the only thunder came from a summer storm beyond the steeple window.

The congregation sat packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the old timber-framed meetinghouse of Bethany Hollow. Men with wide-brimmed hats and sun-reddened faces, women in white caps and linen dresses, children squirming beside them—all silent now.

They were not silent out of politeness.

They were silent because fire was falling from the pulpit.

Thaddeus stood there, black robe immaculate, eyes aflame—not with madness, but conviction. His Bible was open. His voice trembled not from fear, but from the echo of something ancient moving through him.

“Do not believe,” he thundered, “that peace will preserve us while sin is nursed at our breast like a child!”

His finger jabbed the air as if pointing to the hidden rot behind their walls.

“America may break her chains—but what of the chains in your soul? What of the chains forged from secret lust, from hidden bitterness, from your confidence in gold and not in God?”

He paced now, each step slow and deliberate.

“The men of Nineveh repented when they heard Jonah preach. Will we? Or will we bargain for another day of comfort while the fire builds beneath our feet?”

A murmur moved through the room. Some wept. Some clenched fists.

“I tell you now: the Lord is not mocked.”

His hand slammed the pulpit.

“If we take up arms without taking up the Cross, then we trade one tyrant for another. And the second shall be more cruel than the first.”

He paused. Let the silence weigh.

And then he spoke again—but softer now. Gentler. Like a surgeon before the cut.

“But if we go to war with clean hearts and clear eyes… if we walk in repentance and sing Psalms with bayonets drawn… then let the kings of the earth rage.”

He looked out upon the people as if seeing them for the last time.

“For the Lord of Hosts shall ride with us.”

The vision cracked.

And the ridge returned.

—

Thaddeus came to in the middle of the melee. His breath ragged. His mouth dry with dirt and blood. A soldier lunged at him—he barely dodged, drawing his hunting knife and driving it deep into the man’s side. The scream was short. Final.

He turned, arm shaking, and caught sight of Elias again—cornered.

Thaddeus ran. No plan. Just instinct.

But then—

The sky screamed.

Not thunder.

Not cannon.

Something else.

A ribbon of fire tore itself across the clouds, descending like a blade. A pressure hit the earth—not physical, but real, like the soul of the world convulsing.

Men dropped their weapons and clutched their ears.

Thaddeus fell to one knee.

The Bible at his side fluttered open on its own.

The pages turned—faster than the wind could move them. And then stopped.

Isaiah 6.

He could barely read it.

The ink glowed.

And something said—not with voice but with certainty—

“Now.”

Before the fire fell.  Before the sky tore.  Before the preacher screamed the heavens open—there was her.

Sarah.

The house was still that morning. The kind of stillness that doesn't come from peace, but from dread that hasn’t yet announced itself. The only sounds were the creak of old pine boards beneath worn boots and the soft clink of ceramic against wood as Sarah laid out two cups of coffee, knowing neither would be drunk.

Thaddeus sat at the edge of their table, shoulders stiff beneath his homespun shirt, calloused fingers wrapped around a letter that had already changed everything.

The summons was official—signed by the state. It asked nothing.

It commanded.

But Sarah didn’t look at the parchment. She looked at him.

His jaw clenched like he was still chewing on the verse he’d just read that morning. Psalm 94. “Who will rise up for me against the evildoers?” It echoed in him like a psalm carved into marrow.

She placed a hand over his.

And spoke first.

“You’ve already said yes, haven’t you.”

It wasn’t a question. And he didn’t deny it.

His eyes finally lifted to meet hers—storm-gray and steady. And for a moment, the resolve wavered. Not because he doubted the call. But because he hated what it would cost her.

“I didn’t ask your blessing,” he said, voice cracked like a branch under too much snow.

Sarah’s hand didn’t move. “No,” she said softly. “You didn’t.”

Thaddeus opened his mouth. Closed it again. The fire in his gut warred with the stone in his throat. But then—then the words came.

“I baptized them, Sarah,” he said, and his voice broke clean down the middle. “I catechized them. I married some of them to their sweethearts with tears on their cheeks and Bibles in their hands.”

He stood now, suddenly—violently—pushing back the chair.

“And tomorrow, they’ll bleed in mud and ash beneath redcoats who’d burn their Bibles for firewood—and I’d be here? Sitting? While the boys I led to the Lord scream alone in a ditch?”

He turned away, fist pressed hard against his temple.

“How could I not go?”

Sarah rose without a sound.

She stepped behind him and rested her hands on his back. Not gently. Firmly. The way a covenant is held. The way a widow already trains her soul to remain whole after the shattering.

“You go,” she whispered. “You go because you must. Because if you don’t, the pulpit turns into a tomb.”

Thaddeus nodded, still facing away.

“But hear me,” she said, firmer now, stepping to face him. “You carry more than your musket and your Bible. You carry the eyes of every soul you’ve shepherded. And mine.”

He met her gaze. And saw no fear. Only fire.

She touched the edge of his jaw. “Don’t die for nothing, Thaddeus Gray. Die for truth. Die for Christ. And if you live…”

“I will return in ashes or in glory,” he said. “But I will return.”

She smiled, finally. Not wide. But real. Fierce.

“Then let the devil himself break his teeth on your bones.”

He kissed her then—not like a goodbye. But like a covenant.

And when he turned to walk out, neither of them wept.

They had already given everything up long ago—when they first gave it to the Lord.

The vision tore away.

And the battlefield roared back into being.

Thaddeus was suspended in flame, eyes scorched with the memory of Sarah’s touch. The Word was burning in his chest. The rift widened.

And Heaven itself held its breath.

Between the Ages, Beneath the Word

Reality screamed.

Not in pitch, but in principle—its very fabric howled as the rift widened above the battlefield like a divine indictment torn from a sealed scroll. Men clutched their ears, but sound had already abandoned logic. Trees bent toward the breach. Smoke froze mid-air like a painting desecrated by fire. Even time trembled, like a servant forced to watch its master devoured.

Thaddeus Gray was no longer a soldier.

He was an offering.

Lifted from the blood-soaked mud not by hands, nor angels, but by sentence—a divine decree echoing through the dimensions, not in syllables, but in structure. Every covenant. Every martyr’s cry. Every spoken Word from Sinai to Patmos was now converging, converging upon him.

The battlefield was gone. So was sky. So was gravity.

And in its place—patternless light. Not white, not dark. Just raw being.  A furnace of unfiltered presence, as if he had stumbled behind the veil into the holy of holies, not as priest but as sacrifice.

His bones shook—not from fear, but from pressure. The weight of foreordination.

The Bible at his side thrashed as though alive. Its pages whipped open violently, resisting the warp. Some caught fire. Others bled. Ink poured upward into the rift like incense. Yet some verses refused to burn. They pulsed, glowing dimly—remnants of incorruptible memory.

He could not breathe, but breath was still given him.

He could not speak, but the Word still spoke through him.

And then it began—the visions.

Vision One: The Hollow Choir

A sanctum cathedral of twisted steel and bone, orbiting a dead sun. Inside: choirboys whose throats had been replaced by vox-modulators, their lungs wired to keep rhythm instead of breath. They sang Scripture—but not to the Lord. At Him.  The tone was mocking. Mechanical. Hollow.

The priest overseeing them floated above the pulpit on an anti-gravitic throne. His mitre bore the triple crown of the Mechanarch. A burning scepter pulsed with rewritten scripture:

“Blessed are those who forget, for they shall be freed from contradiction.”

The congregation wept oil.

Vision Two: The Baptismal Processor

A baptismal chamber. Stainless. Cold. Children lined up, wearing neural-veils. A mechanical arm stamped each with a sigil—the Trinity re-rendered in machine logic: three intersecting rings with an eye in the center. When water touched their foreheads, their names were replaced.

Above them: a stained-glass window of Christ with no face.

Vision Three: The Scrollborn Flame

A cave beneath a dead cathedral. Shadows moved. Hooded scribes sat around a single flickering torch, transcribing Scripture by hand. Every time they finished a verse, the candle flared.

A child read aloud: Isaiah 30:20.

“And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed…”

Outside, boots pounded. Nullborn. The door was breaking.

One of the scribes whispered: “It must live in you. Hide it in the marrow.”

He handed the scroll to someone just out of sight. A man. A preacher. Blood-stained hands.

Thaddeus.

And then—

The light spoke.

Not in English. Not in Latin. Not even in tongues.

In meaning.

And Thaddeus understood.

You are not here to preach peace.

You are here to ignite war.

Not of nation against nation.

But of Word against Word.

He opened his mouth—but no scream came.

Only a verse.

“Is not my word like as a fire? Saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?”

The void responded.

And for the first time—the void recoiled.

Something within it shrieked. Pulled back.

But not defeated.

It whispered, before it fled.

He walks.

Seal the Hollow.

And then everything collapsed.

Thaddeus fell—not down, not forward—just away. Through fire, through ink, through memory. Through every psalm ever sung on a battlefield. Through every soul that had prayed in chains. Through the voice of Sarah, crying out behind him. Through the gaze of Elias as the light fell.

Through himself.

Through the very name God had written on him before he was born.

He landed—somewhere. Somewhen.

But the world was not yet ready to show itself.

Not yet.

Not until the final flash of who he had been.

The Baptized, the Wedded, the Fallen

Before the fire. Before the hymn reversed. Before the scream of the void.

There was Matthew.

The boy had come to Thaddeus’ church at fifteen. Ragged, sharp-eyed, curious but cautious. He’d stood at the back of the sanctuary every Sunday for months before approaching the pulpit one day after service, eyes red, voice trembling.

“I don’t want to burn like my father.”

That was how it began.

Thaddeus had baptized him in the cold river that fall, the congregation standing along the bank as the leaves burned crimson in the trees above. He’d read from Romans 6. Matthew had wept as the water poured over his face. Not out of fear—but relief.

He became a fixture in the congregation. First in every catechism class. Last to leave every prayer meeting. When he met Clara, a candle-maker’s daughter, Thaddeus had performed the wedding under the oaks behind the church, with Psalm 128 sung by every voice. They had laughed, cried, promised.

Thaddeus remembered blessing them. Touching Matthew’s shoulder. Whispering:

“Keep the Word between you and the world.”

That had been a year ago.

The smoke on the battlefield was thick. Too thick to see who screamed.

Thaddeus stumbled through it, knees aching, blood in his eyes. He had lost his musket. His Bible was torn and soaked but still in his belt. The Word felt heavy now—like it knew.

And then he heard the voice.

“Rev… Rev…!”

The smoke split.

And he saw him.

Matthew lay curled on his side, clutching his gut, a jagged bayonet wound torn through his lower stomach. Blood pulsed between his fingers. His face was white. His breath came fast. Too fast. The kind that runs out quick.

Thaddeus fell beside him, dropping to his knees in the mud, gripping the boy’s shoulders.

“No—no, son—stay with me—”

Matthew smiled, barely. “Told Clara I’d come home with honor…”

Thaddeus tore a strip from his robe and pressed it against the wound. Pointless. The blood wouldn’t stop. The fabric soaked instantly.

“You’re going to see her,” he said. “You will. But not like this. Hold on, Matthew. You hold.”

The boy’s eyes blinked, slow.

Then he spoke.

Not to Thaddeus. To the sky.

“I remember... the river... cold... you said... we rise with Him.”

Tears hit the boy’s chest—but they weren’t his.

They were Thaddeus’.

“Tell Clara… she was always... the candle... even in the smoke...”

Thaddeus leaned in, trembling.

Matthew looked into his eyes.

“I heard the Word... I heard it…”

He gripped the preacher’s hand one last time.

Then let go.

And was still.

Thaddeus did not move.

The battlefield raged around him—screams, gunfire, iron boots stomping blood into clay.

He held the boy’s body.

The same arms that had lifted him from the river.  The same voice that had blessed his wedding.  Now, only silence.

And then—something broke inside him.

Not faith.

But containment.

He stood slowly, eyes hollow, face streaked with ash and grief.  His cloak tore in the wind. His hand fell to the Word.

And fire moved behind his eyes.

And the Word Weeps in Silence

The blood would not leave his hands.

Even as he rose, even as the battlefield swallowed him again, the boy’s blood clung to his fingers—warm, wet, accusing. It soaked the folds of his robe, stained the cuff where once he held the baptismal bowl. He did not wipe it away.

It was a mark.

The sky above him thundered, but not with weather. The rift still loomed—half-closed now, as if mocking his delay. Men screamed across the ridge, muskets cracking, blades clashing, cries of “For liberty!” and “Hold the line!” clashing like dissonant hymns. But in Thaddeus’ ears, there was only one sound.

The sound of Matthew’s last breath.

He bent down—not to pray.

But to pick up the boy’s musket.

It was still warm from the last shot. The strap was worn from where Clara had embroidered a psalm—Psalm 27. “Though an host should encamp against me…”

He threw it over his shoulder. And then he walked.

Not ran. Not charged. Walked.

Down the slope.

Into the meat of the battle.

A redcoat turned to meet him, shouting for surrender. Thaddeus said nothing. His bayonet met the soldier’s throat in silence. Another came from the left—Thaddeus pivoted, drove the butt of the musket into the man’s face with a crack that sent teeth flying into the mud.

He didn’t speak.

He couldn’t.

The grief burned too hot behind his tongue.

A third came—a young one, maybe seventeen. Thaddeus hesitated.

The boy lunged.

And Thaddeus responded like a shepherd whose flock had just been slaughtered.

He slammed the boy to the ground and pressed the rifle against his chest. The bayonet hovered.

For a heartbeat, Thaddeus froze.

Then he whispered—not to the soldier.

But to God.

“I’m still Yours.”

Then he brought the rifle down.

Around him, the battle surged.

He moved through it like a man baptized in fire, but not yet sanctified by it. He did not pray aloud. He did not sing. He fought.

For every boy he catechized.

For every couple he wed.

For every soul he failed to protect.

For Matthew.

He was a pastor in hell.

And hell bled.

The line broke.  Not because Thaddeus led a charge.  But because men saw something they could not explain.

A preacher, soaked in blood and scripture, dragging wounded friends from the field while burying bayonets in enemies who mocked his collar.

A man who whispered Scripture not for power—but for memory.

As he drove the last redcoat back into the trees, his legs finally gave.

He fell to his knees beside a fallen log, clutching the musket like a relic.

The Word was still at his side. Heavy. Cold.

And the question finally slipped from his soul:

“O Lord… how can I carry peace into a world that kills what You sanctify?”

He waited for an answer.

None came.

Only silence.

Only smoke.

Only the distant whisper of something old, watching him from the place where time was already broken.

Exile Begins in Ash

Thaddeus hit the ground like a crucifix dropped from heaven.

The impact drove the breath from his lungs, his spine shrieking in protest as he slammed into earth not his own. Ash plumed up around him—fine, weightless, and wrong. It didn’t smell like firewood or flesh. It smelled like scorched data. Like a library burned so thoroughly its books wept vapor.

He coughed violently, curling into himself, bile and blood rising in his throat. The fall had scoured his coat to tatters. His musket was gone. The strap had snapped. Only the Bible remained, lashed to his side by what looked more like vine than leather now—twisted, living parchment, pulsing faintly.

He rolled onto his back, eyes barely able to open.

Above him, there was no sky. Only a ceiling of cloud-metal—massive, rust-veined panels fitted together with the precision of a machine built to mimic heaven. And above that, the faintest silhouette of a floating edifice—a cathedral that had forgotten what holy meant.

His head throbbed. His vision blurred.

He tried to stand. Failed.

So he crawled—fingers digging into ash that shifted like silt. His breath came in shallow gasps. Each movement of his limbs a new negotiation with pain.

Then the wind spoke.

No, not wind.

A speaker.

Somewhere in the distance, a voice crackled through the air like a corrupted hymn:

“...and so the blessed shall conform, and the faithful shall submit, and all shall be renewed in the Vox.”

Thaddeus froze.

That voice. It used Scripture.

But the verses were wrong.

Bent.

Hollowed.

He pulled himself behind a chunk of collapsed masonry—what had once been an archway, now half-buried in the dust. A broken stained-glass panel jutted from the dirt like a gravestone. The figure in it—Christ, perhaps—wore not a crown of thorns, but a neural circlet wired into his skull.

Thaddeus coughed again. This time he spat blood.  Not much. But enough to taste the cost.

He gripped the Bible.

Not because he felt strong.

But because it was the only thing that still belonged to him.

From the dust beyond the ruin, footsteps echoed—too precise to be human.  Heavy. Metallic. In rhythm with a psalm.

A psalm he had never heard.