"Mm. A very moving story."
Anna's voice rang through the deathly still ruins of the church, breaking the weighty silence Lorgar's account had created.
Her tone still held its usual lightness, tinged with detachment, but deep within her azure eyes flickered an exceedingly rare glint of contemplation, the kind belonging to a precision-made construct trying to understand emotion.
She glanced at the mummified corpse on the ground, its expression peaceful, then at the stopped clock. Finally, she turned her gaze to Lorgar and tilted her head.
"And then?"
She was not asking what happened next. Clearly, Chaplain Uriah's martyrdom had been the end. She was asking about what lay beyond the story: Lorgar's deeper purpose in bringing her here and revealing all this, or the larger picture these ruins pointed toward.
"And then..."
Lorgar did not answer directly.
He turned and began walking toward the ancient mantel clock at the center of the ruined altar, incongruously intact. His boots rustled softly across the thick layer of ash and dust covering the ground.
He stopped before the clock and bent slightly, focusing on the motionless hands on the brass dial beneath its transparent glass cover.
The Roman numerals on the dial were still faintly legible. The slender hands seemed frozen by an unseen force at a single moment in eternity.
"3:34 p.m.," Lorgar murmured, reading the time at which the hands had stopped.
His voice was quiet, yet unusually clear in the absolute silence of the ruins.
He studied that moment in time, his bronze face thoughtful.
After a brief silence, he straightened without looking away, as though addressing the clock, or whispering to Anna, to these ruins, to that history consigned to flames.
"There is a legend passed among the very few who know this place exists. Or rather, an