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I arrived on Elythros beneath a rain of fragrant ash, the air thick with the perfume of endless incense. The entire world is a reliquary to Saint Drusus—its mountains quarried into chapels, its rivers winding like rosaries of tarnished silver. Pilgrims knelt on every step of the grand basilica, their whispers a ceaseless tide against the marble.
Confessor Alaric greeted me with the stiff courtesy of one who lives beneath constant scrutiny. He was a man of lined cheeks and sharpened vowels, veteran of countless vigils. Yet his eyes wandered, not toward heaven, but toward the throngs that gathered each dusk for the sermons of a younger priest, Father Merovan. The boy’s voice, bright and unscarred, drew crowds like moths to a lantern.
Alaric’s words to me were quiet but bitter. “They come for spectacle, not devotion. A child sings prettily and they mistake it for revelation.” His hand trembled as he traced a warding sign. “The flock forgets its elder shepherd.”
I cautioned him, sensing the ache beneath his tone. “The Emperor’s light shines through many windows. Do not shutter yours for fear of another’s glow.”
But envy is a slow venom. Soon whispers coursed through the cloisters: doubts about Merovan’s birth, hints of apostasy. The pilgrims’ joy turned uneasy; the air of the basilica thickened not with incense but suspicion. I followed the rumours as one follows smoke to flame, and found beneath the great reliquary a deeper darkness.
There, in a vault of cracked stone and guttering candles, a Chaos cult had rooted itself like mould behind gilt icons. Their sigils were etched in the very dust of Saint Drusus’s bones. They had entered not by siege, but by invitation—slipping through the rift of mistrust Alaric’s envy had carved.
I confronted him as the first tremors shook the reliquary. Shadows writhed in the incense haze, forming obscene parodies of angels. His face was grey as candlewax. “I only wished… to be seen,” he whispered, the words breaking like old mortar.
“Then see yourself,” I answered, as the daemonic howls rose. “The Eye of Terror peers through jealousy more keenly than any open gate.”
Alaric fell to his knees, striking his brow to the cold stone until blood mingled with the scented ash. His confession was not to me but to the Emperor, and it came like a bell struck in a storm—clear, desperate, final. The cultists screamed as sanctified fire roared through the vault, and the daemons’ laughter died beneath it.
When dawn bled across Elythros, the basilica still stood, smoke-wreathed and sorrowful. Alaric survived, scarred and silent, a penitent among the faithful he once envied.
I left him to his prayers and wrote these lines upon a scrap of incense-stained vellum: Envy is a door left unbarred, a quiet invitation to the abyss. Guard your heart, pilgrim, for the warp needs only the width of a whispered slight to enter.