As Lin Qi wreaked havoc in the Guard Headquarters and turned the entire place upside down, Holy Light I was kneeling in meditation within a secret chamber of Victory Palace.
The walls and floor of the underground chamber, nearly a hundred meters across, were built from evenly sized bricks carved from silver crystal. Intense white light filled the space—white light that tolerated not the slightest impurity. Reflected and refracted again and again by the silver crystals, countless rays converged in the center of the chamber, forming an idol of the Dawn God seated atop a bizarre circular disc, holding the Staff of Light in his left hand and a blazing sun in his right.
In every Dawn Temple of the Church, the Dawn God, chief god of this great pantheon, was portrayed as a kindly old man with a thick, flowing beard, seated upon a throne and radiating gentle divine light over all his believers.
Only before truly devout fanatics would the Dawn God wield his divine power and reveal his true face.
Tall, powerful, and handsome, he sat cross-legged upon the divine artifact disc known as the Wings of Dawn. The Staff of Light in his left hand represented his authority to let the power of dawn envelop the world; the blazing sun in his right represented the Dawn God's terrifying might to destroy the mortal realm.
Lofty and inviolable, permitting no foreign energy to intrude within the domain of his divine power—one slight offense, and utter calamity descended at once. This was the Dawn God's true visage. Within the Church, the Dawn God's true divine name was the God of Light's World Destruction, a terrifying deity whose doctrine was even more extreme than that of the God of Retribution, and even less tolerant of heretics.
Holy Light I