50 Reclaiming Hope (VII, 13)

The most important thing was, how far could you walk through fire?

Kael closed the book and slowly made his way to a porthole.

There were forty-two steps from the Grand Inquisitor's Throne to the porthole he had chosen. He walked slowly, but his strides were long, and his boots made almost no sound against the floor.

Yet no matter how he darted and shifted through this iron-gray expanse, employing the instinctive techniques of movement he possessed, a cluster of scarlet flowers remained twined around his feet.

Their color was vividly, unnaturally bright, like a thicket of flowers growing from the shadows. Countless eyes flickered in and out among them, black as ink, while behind them, some ravenous beast waited.

Yes, the daemon called Laerhe had lately been making twice the effort to assert its presence. In the past, this would never have been permitted.

But now, its circumstances had changed somewhat. Thus, all its actions had effectively received one person's silent consent—though only in such private settings.

Elsewhere, it still had to obediently play the part of a coat.

Ra made an effort to stop looking at it. He knew exactly what this thing was; one could even say he was quite familiar with it. That familiarity, however, likely traced back to a cave somewhere beneath Terra long ago.

Kael Lohars had sat there in withered stillness for a long time, trying to resist the power of sacrifices from across the entire galaxy.

And this thing had already existed back then.

At the time, Ra and his brothers had an extremely important duty, one that had to be carried out every five hours—they had to plunge a replica of the Apollonian Spear into Kael Lohars's body again and again, calling back his humanity and preventing him from sinking too