NOVEL NEXT [Arc 1] Interlude II – The Holy Torch
Countless distorted screams filled her restless mind as visions of disaster tore through her thoughts: the Mother of Faes, ascending upon the builder of the ziggurat like an omen made flesh. She hovered there, an impossible figure of cold radiance and cruel beauty. Eight vast wings unfurled behind her, their luminous membranes rippling with shifting colors, like shards of the northern lights stitched into living lace.
Her face remained forbidden, hidden behind a thin, ever-shifting veil of fractured light. Behind it, only hints of inhuman grace flickered: the shape of lips, the ghost of distant eyes, just enough to drown the will of any mortal who lingered too long. Yet none below would be blessed with her true visage. To see it unveiled was to break and be remade, or to vanish into the endless dusk between her wings, forfeiting your soul forever. But all would be denied any further blessing of her presence.
Many fell to their knees in delighted prayer, but when the Queen's voice cracked like thunder through the heads of every living thing within sight of the horizon, they understood—too late—that something was terribly wrong. There was no light in her voice, no love; only disdain and fury.
As the accursed words passed her hidden lips, the earth began to shudder. Purple lightning struck the ground, splitting apart the very foundation on which that ancient culture had built its fragile faith. The Queen gave no reason for her displeasure; she simply acted, her judgment final and cold, her wrath an unanswerable decree.
To her, humans were wretched creatures, deserving neither love nor future, tolerated only because the rules—those same ancient rules even the accursed Chimaera obeyed—bound her to do so. Yet rules had exceptions, and this was one of them.
So she acted, and within mere minutes the humans degenerated into wendigos as their ziggurat sank into the depths, dragging them down into eternal darkness. Doomed to be caged and tortured for eternity for their presumptuous attempt to appease the false fae.
And amid all the screams, all the pain and shattered mementos of what was lost and would never be again, a new being rose and watched as her mind plunged deeper into darkness and torment.
The voices plunged Maria into insanity; she simply wasn't ready for them. The System could process divine threads, but not when they were torn and rewoven like that. When Maera forced them together, it triggered protocols no human mind could endure without splintering to an extent.
So what should the System have done when Maera decided to mash the divine energy of two souls together into only one? It wasn't built for this kind of forceful interference, and certainly not for such an overload. So it did what had to be done—it created something new on its own and formed an anomaly, a child to a mother who didn't know she had been blessed with yet another daughter.
But no one could expect Maria to be grateful for her change—no, not in the least. Born to ordinary farmers, the village priest discovered her potential during her first mass, baffling everyone when her prayer to the Goddess temporarily blessed the entire congregation. Of course, the Goddess of Light had no idea who that child was; just another soul in her vast flock, accidentally marked by a divine lottery she had set spinning ages ago in the Holy Kingdom.
Children like Maria could become Saints, holy messengers spreading a gospel riddled with so many contradictions it was a wonder it hadn't collapsed under its own weight. But who would dare question the word of the divine, presented on a silver platter and garnished with power any faithful could obtain?
It wasn't that the Goddess didn't care for humanity; she had grown fond of her little creatures, but they were as unpredictable as a storm elemental. Or their Mother, for that matter.
When Maria entered the Church's Academy in the capital, her young mind was shaped into something the institution could wield. Her faith in the Goddess of Light hardened until she could be called nothing less than a zealot, a fanatic. That changed the day she met the Inquisitor.
No one expected the Inquisitor—ever. He was simply there, like dawn dew over the marsh, like the haunted mist, like the monstrum he was. Some even claimed he had once rewritten his own divine threads and laughed when the System failed to stop him.
Many whispered he was a demi-god, or close enough; some hidden hand behind the Holy Kingdom's true rule. Perhaps the pope might stand a chance against him, but no one really knew how strong the Inquisitor was. There were other unspoken rumors among those who feared him—like whether he was even human or male in the first place.
Even the late Richard, who had often broken bread with him during mass, was never certain of his true nature. Not that Maria would have questioned any of it—until her change, until the countless red System messages that flooded her vision the moment she opened her eyes again, dragged back from the dark momentum of the ziggurat.
The second thing she saw was Anna, watching her with eyes swollen red from crying, clinging to the reformed priestess and refusing to let go.
To Maria, their love had always been something precious—and forbidden in the upper echelons of the Church. Still, they risked it, which had surprised the paladin at first. She'd never expected her feelings to be returned by one of the most infamous zealots, a rising star so close to sainthood.
But something deep inside Maria told her that this love—the love for a woman—was not forbidden. How could it be? The love she poured out for her Goddess was something even deeper: absolute, consuming, ruinous. If one was exalted, why should the other be cursed?
So they kept it an open secret, inspiring younger followers in turn. The two of them rose through the ranks like a fresh wind—though how pure could any wind be when it carried the Church's hidden rot with it?
This, or perhaps the Inquisitor's growing interest, eventually ended with an order to join Richard's team for missions—far from the Holy Kingdom, far from any chance of spreading their 'fresh wind' among aspiring priests and paladins.
And it worked, at first. But the team's success, and perhaps the Inquisitor's quiet propaganda, turned them into gossip among their peers and the common folk alike, much to the despair of the pope faction.
Not that any of those machinations mattered anymore to Maria. Not now. Not as she looked at her Status Sheet, opening before her eyes.
[System Status Sheet]
Name: Maria
[New] Race: Imperial Divine Spirit [Female]
[New] Age: 1 day
[New] Race Level: 1/40
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[Skills]
Race Skills:
● [New] Divine Pyre [Passive] – Lv. Max
● [New] Divine Sanctum – Lv. 1
● [New] Imperial Lanthorn – Lv. 1
● [New] Cradle of Rot – Lv. 1
● [New] Pillar of Salt – Lv. 1
● [New] Transformation – Lv. 1
● [New] Ethereal Form– Lv. 1
General Skills:
● Holy Smite – Lv. 3
● High Heal – Lv. 8
● Banishment – Lv. 3
● Pillar of Light – Lv. 2
● [New] Lightstorm – Lv. 1
● Chain Healing – Lv. 2
● Cleansing – Lv. 4
● [New] Dark Prayer – Lv. 1
● [New] Meditation – Lv. 1
[...]
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[Titles & Afflictions]
● Titles: [New] Holy Torch, [New] Daughter of the Forgotten One
● Blessing: [New] Enemy of the Divine, [New] Touched by the Forgotten One, [New] Fated Lovers
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[Stats]
Remaining Points: 0
Vitality: 100
Endurance: 200
Strength: 50
Dexterity: 50
Intelligence: 300
Wisdom: 150
Health: 200/250
[New] Divine Energy: 920/1000
[New] Divine Regen: [60/1h]
Mana: 1000/1000
Mana Regen: [40/1h]
She blinked, once, twice, praying the truth might vanish—
—but it did not.
Maria began to shiver as her mind splintered under the weight of revelation. Every fiber of her being strained to grasp the impossible: not only had she lost the favor of her Goddess, but she had been marked by something that named her an enemy to the divine. The Forgotten One.
Not once in all her years of prayer and study had she heard that name spoken aloud. It reeked of a pagan god, yet fit no category she could name. She knew, she studied the old scriptures, she knew about the Old Ones, she knew of…
No. That name. It had been mentioned.
A glimpse only, a stray echo from her earliest years, when the Academy had allowed the brightest among them to peer inside the cathedral's inner sanctum. One book, for one day only—a promise of what deeper knowledge might await.
It had been but a single paragraph, nearly lost among brittle pages:
"A lost deity, so ancient, so shrouded in the hush of all forgotten things that no tongue recalls its name. No shrine remains, no relic, no worship to feed its memory. And yet it does not fade. Or so they whisper. Even the Old Ones cannot say whether the Forgotten One ever truly walked this world—yet like dusk bleeding into night, they swear they feel its hush, somewhere, lurking."
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That was all. If there were deeper secrets hidden in those forbidden shelves, Maria did not know. She doubted it. Even the divine made room for the Old Ones, but the Church of Light did not kneel to pagan shadows.
Nonetheless, seeing that name on her sheet meant only one thing: it was real. Worse, she had become part of its family, bound to a new race entirely.
Maria had never heard of this race, even if its name sounded eerily close to a fae. Not being human felt… wrong. She had always believed humans were the pinnacle of this world, second only to her beloved Goddess, of course. Becoming something not human made her feel sick—deep down, it just felt icky in a way she couldn't explain.
And yet the word 'divine' in her new race stirred a poison seed inside her— a creeping rush of superiority
'NO!' her mind screamed, every shred of faith clawing back at the thought. This wasn't right. This was utterly wrong. This was blasphemy. A priestess shouldn't think like that. She had one Goddess, one faith.
This was the pagan devil's doing—the thing at the ziggurat. It did something to her, twisting her body, trying to fiddle with her mind to make her do its bidding. Maybe this was a trial, sent by her true Goddess—a secret test before sainthood. Such trials were never spoken of aloud, but every saintess must prove her worth somehow.
She clung to this single belief: this was only the first step of what her Goddess had planned for her, and she would do her best to live up to it.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Maria wept in the arms of her lover, hot tears streaming down her unblemished face. She simply couldn't take it anymore. When she first confessed to Anna what had changed and what she feared it meant, they both had vowed to face this trial together. Neither of them could have imagined just how cruel it would become.
It began when the village children ran to greet them—only to burst into flames right before their eyes. They didn't even have time to scream. First their eyes combusted in divine fire, as if merely seeing Maria was a sin they had to pay for. Then the rest of their bodies followed: hair, skin, voices all swallowed in white flame.
She tried to close her eyes, to look away—yet she felt them burn anyway.
But the horror that unfolded after was worse still. Like a siren's wail, the children's screams drew in their parents, the elders, the entire village. One by one—a pyre that leapt from flesh to flesh—they burned in holy fire. Punished for laying eyes upon something forbidden, something holy.
This was the true curse of the ziggurat; the stain that passed to Maria when she looked upon the Mother of Origin in that cursed memory plane.
It only ended once everything close enough to matter had burned to ash, until only scorched earth remained.
And Anna—poor Anna—her heart and her faith cracked as she held her beloved in the ruin, watching her break apart, unable to offer the comfort Maria needed. She could feel the heat dancing on her own skin, but it never took hold; the flame refused her flesh. That she still lived was nothing short of a miracle, or perhaps the blessing of the Fated Lovers: no harm shall befall the other, save by the other's own willing hand.
A cryptic promise, yet the only thing Maria could cling to. If she ever harmed Anna too…
And as the rain came, washing away the stink of charred flesh and smothering the last flames in sizzling darkness, they fled towards the capital. Perhaps Alicia would know what to do. Yet deep down, Maria feared even Alicia might not be able to smother what had been lit inside her.
Far from the road, they moved through the forest, keeping to burned shadows and branches—leaving a trail of charcoal and smoldering roots in their wake.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Anna was skinning a freshly caught rabbit a few minutes' walk from her partner—her only way to get something into her growling belly, since getting too close to Maria was impossible. Sure, she'd gotten a bit better at controlling the passive skill that burned everything nearby, but not enough. Thankfully, with her new—and rather hot body (a pun Anna hated herself for)—food wasn't really needed anymore.
Their only hope now was Alicia, a saintess and a somewhat insufferable person. If Maria was a zealot, Alicia felt like an angel carved solely for divine duty. At least that was how it seemed most days.
Any wrongdoing she saw, she twisted into a greater divine purpose, a hidden test or cosmic lesson, whether for herself or for others. The perfect nutcase definition of a saintess.
It wouldn't surprise Anna if Alicia stood before the One Evil itself and argued it was just another trial to test her faith. And that worried Anna more than she wanted to admit. Because Maria still clung to the same idea—that all this horror was just a trial, a flame to purify her worth. But Anna… Anna had long let that belief rot. After everything she had seen, she could no longer even call herself a paladin. And her status proved it.
She had become an oath-breaker.
There was no gentle way to put it. The moment she refused the System's silent request to kill her girlfriend, her blessing vanished—twisted into something else: Blessing of Oblivion. And her new title? Paladin of the Forgotten One.
Believing in Maria—who had become something like an apostle of that ancient creature—had done this. How could she ever confess that truth? To tell Maria she was the reason Anna fell from grace too? It would shatter her completely. So she kept it secret, hoping blindly that somehow this would all resolve itself.
When she came back after eating her fill, wiping blood from her fingers, they spoke softly about what came next, now that they were so close to the capital. But then something impossible unfurled before them:
[System Notification: Error // "&"?"!§!$/" Secret Quest Triggered: Survive the Seraphim.]
Their eyes locked instantly; both had received the same message. Neither had ever heard of such a thing—it was unheard of. The System gave notifications for dungeons, quests, status changes—never this. Never raw words and broken syntax.
But neither had time to process it. Two hooded figures stepped through a seam in the air. For a heartbeat, one might have mistaken them for travelers inspecting the charred path the women left behind. But their six pure white wings and the thick radiance of divinity betrayed them at once.
"Messengers of the Goddess," breathed Maria, recognizing them from scripture. Her words felt fragile on her tongue. With the System's message still flickering in her vision, neither of them could deny it.
The seraphim's golden eyes swept over them with cold contempt. Something twisted in Maria's gut as she forced out the question that had lived inside her dread for days.
"Are you part of the Goddess' trial?" she whispered.
Azmael and Oryl looked at each other—confused at first—then stared blankly back at her. When they spoke, their voices merged, toneless and heavy, booming across the meadow.
"No."
Maria laughed. A thin, broken sound that frayed at the edges, as if laughing could somehow make it untrue. But the truth closed in anyway. The laugh turned hollow—desperate. She looked to Anna, her love, her partner, searching for any spark that might keep the darkness from swallowing her whole.
But Anna looked away, ashamed.
'Ah. So that was it. She knew, she knew all along,' thought Maria, her mind already tipping into the abyss.
Defeated, her voice a ghost, she asked, "Why?"
"Because you are an anomaly. You should not exist," Oryl said.
"So do us a favor and die quietly," Azmael finished.
"Nonononono, I served the Goddess! I deserve to live, I deserve to—"
But her plea was cut short by a spear that tore past her face, so close the air beside her cheek split and hissed like burning metal.
"Naw, you missed!" cooed Oryl.
"She moved!" grumbled Azmael.
"And here I'd hoped to do this quickly. What do we do with the human?"
Oryl shrugged. "We're not here for her. So long as she stays out of our way, let her live."
Their golden eyes flicked to Anna, who lowered into a fighter's stance without a word. She knew she could not win, but she would stand between Maria and oblivion anyway.
The seraphim sighed, divine light gathering in their hands, shaping itself into weapons—a spear and two swords.
Maria barely managed to react as Azmael lunged, light gathering at their fingertips like a comet's tail. She flung her hand forward, raw instinct and dread shaping her breath into a single command—"[Pillar of Salt]".
A deafening crack split the meadow as the conjured spear slammed into the pillar. White salt hissed and flaked away, but the barrier held. The spear burrowed halfway in before freezing solid, trapped like an insect in amber.
Azmael glared at the sudden wall of gleaming mineral, now shielding both Maria and Anna behind its broad bulk.
"That's why anomalies suck—what kind of skill is this?!" Azmael spat, striking the half-buried spear with their palm.
"[Pillar of Salt], according to the System," Oryl replied dryly, flicking their fingers to pull up a half-frozen status window. The script jittered and glitched where Maria's name appeared. "It doesn't even give me a proper readout. Her stats are scrambled. This whole corrupted temple is messing with it. I'd rather not risk another mana cascade, but..."
Azmael's jaw tensed. The mere thought of endless divine paperwork—pages they'd never so much as touch themselves—was torture enough to kill any appetite for subtlety. If they were to drown in reports and reprimands later, they would at least gorge themselves on ruin now. After all, it wasn't every day they had the excuse.
And before anyone, even Oryl, could react, Azmael had fabricated another spear of light, this time imbued with their very soul, and hurled it forwards.
Salt exploded in a blinding wave. Maria threw herself back, dragging Anna with her. The spearhead came so close the heat singed her lashes—and then the world snapped sideways.
Azmael's arm fell as they squinted through the salt mist. "Where did they go?!"
A drifting, sing-song lilt curled through the air:
"Oryl and Azmael, bound in skin,
stuck on ground, sniff for cracks where old sins…
—Mhm, no, that doesn't sound right—
Hunt them high, hunt them low,
angels fly where mortals go,
your wings won't lift where the rot winds blow~"
"Aurora!" Oryl snarled. "Where did you put them?!"
The witch giggled, her laughter rippling like glass chimes as she flickered into view behind Azmael. "I decided I still need them, dearie."
Azmael spun to grab her—but Aurora was already several feet above, legs paddling lazily as if she swung on air, then she tipped backward, hanging upside down like a child on a branch, her hair brushing the seraph's hood.
"Where. Did. You. Bring. The. Anomaly?!" Azmael's voice cracked.
"Hey! Such rude words for an old friend," pouted the 'Riftwalker', twirling midair like a lazy cat. "You two always forget your manners."
"We are not friends, you wretched mother of—" Oryl hissed, wings flaring.
Her words cut off as obsidian flashed. An edge of impossible black pressed cold and steady to Oryl's throat from behind. Aurora's happy-go-lucky facade vanished. "Mind that tongue, sweet seraph—lest it run you into ruin. Mishaps do happen. How should I explain to your lovely Goddess that two of her precious messengers slipped through the cracks—lost to the mortal plane forever?"
Azmael clenched their teeth. "F-Fine. I still need to know where the anomaly is and what you want from her."
Aurora blinked. The blade vanished—and in the same breath she reappeared a few feet away, drifting cross-legged in the air as if nothing had happened. "Don't be ridiculous. I don't want her. It's the circumstances around her that forced my hand. But I do invite you—please, come into the city. Maybe you'll see how generous I am. I might have found a way to patch your… buggy temple. Wouldn't that be nice?"
Oryl and Azmael exchanged a look—bitter suspicion gnawing at reluctant hope. A chance to erase the corruption, seal the breach, and slip back into the divine plane where they belonged.
"The anomaly won't interfere again?" Azmael demanded.
Aurora smiled, "Oh, they won't become a problem~."
"What do you want from us, witch?!" yelled Maria.
One moment they had been in a meadow facing the Seraphim; the next, they were in a strange living room filled with furniture that looked like magi-tech but carried no trace of magic at all.
One of those objects was a blaring flat screen that seemed similar to the System's, except this one showed moving people—some kind of visual magic, Maria guessed.
The witch, Aurora, was lounging in some kind of bag filled with hard, crackling stuff, wearing a single piece of strange wool clothing that covered her completely and had a hood attached, making her look absurdly fluffy. It fit the insanity of a witch perfectly; no normal person would wear such a thing… even if it did look rather comfortable.
The witch giggled. "I want to give you a chance to turn back how you were. I just need something from you, inside the Capital."
"Why should we listen to any of your words, vile witch?! Every word out of the likes of you is a lie!" spat Anna.
"Because the person who did this to you is there right now. And she's about to do something I'd really rather not have happen. Sadly, I can't interfere myself, you know—rules are rules, after all."
Maria was skeptical, but she was desperate. And yet again, her faith failed to help her make the right decision:
"Explain what we have to do."
Aurora's face lit up. "With pleasure~"