Deus Necros

Redd stared at them from the passage, his face twisting in a way he could not hide. ”The doors are open,” he said, not loudly, but enough for the nearest cell to hear. ”You can come out now.”

One of the children looked toward him, then away again.

Ludwig felt Wrath flare inside him. It wanted walls crushed, screams answered with screams, every holy symbol in this buried place smashed until the city above finally heard what it had been built upon. But this time he understood exactly where to direct the anger. The children were not refusing help out of stubbornness. They were not staying because their wounds made walking impossible. Whatever had happened here had taken away the part of them that believed an open door led anywhere better.

”You cannot force them,” Kaiser said quietly.

”I know,” Ludwig replied.

Knowing did not make it easier.

He returned to Maren’s cell and crouched outside the ruined entrance. The boy followed him with his single visible eye, but his body remained unmoving. Ludwig kept his hands where the child could see them. There was already enough terror attached to hands in this place.

”I’m going deeper,” Ludwig said. ”There is something beneath this place holding the dead here. I need to destroy it before I can get any of you out safely.”

Maren swallowed. His voice was barely more than breath when he asked, ”Will they come back?”

”Yes,” Ludwig said, because lying gently would still be lying. ”If I do nothing, they will. If I finish what I came here to do, they will not.”

There was no relief on his face. Relief required belief, and belief had clearly been carved out of him a long time ago.

Ludwig continued, ”Do not follow me. Not because you are prisoners anymore, but because where I am going there will be more blood before there is safety. Stay away from the passage. If someone comes before I return, hide as far from the entrance as you can.”

Maren stared down at the broken restraint hanging loose from his remaining wrist. After a long silence, he gave the faintest nod.

That was all Ludwig could get from him.

It was not enough. It was nowhere near enough. But forcing terrified, broken children into a passage filled with whatever remained of the Sacrosanctum’s hidden filth would not save them. It would only make Ludwig feel better for a few minutes, and right now his feelings had no value compared to the time he was losing.

He stood and turned away.

Neither Kaiser nor Redd said anything when he took the lead again. Redd’s breathing had become rougher, each exhale carrying something close to a growl, but he kept it contained. Kaiser followed with his usual stillness, though Ludwig noticed the lich no longer looked at the holy symbols carved into the catacomb walls with detached curiosity. His empty gaze had become fixed, unpleasantly patient, as though he had already begun deciding how much of this place deserved to remain standing once their objective was complete.

They walked downward.

The passages narrowed at first, the floor damp beneath their feet, the walls lined with old burial recesses and faintly glowing prayer scripts. Those scripts had once been meant to comfort the dead or keep corruption away from consecrated remains. Here, they had been layered over with newer markings, portions scraped off and rewritten into something Ludwig could feel but not fully understand. A prayer turned into a restraint. A blessing rewritten into a lock. Whoever had created the soul-binding formation had not imported foreign magic into this place. They had poisoned the holy magic already here.

As they descended, the cells changed.

The first level had been messy because no one expected the children stored there to last very long. Filth sat in corners, old blood browned the floors, and bodies were left where they died until someone bothered clearing enough space for the next subject. Deeper down, the chambers were more carefully maintained. The floors were swept. The restraints were cleaned. The cells were more crowded, and the people inside them were older.

There were men and women there, all of them scrawny, some covered in prayer seals, others bearing bandaged cuts across their arms, necks, or ribs. A few looked up when Ludwig passed, their eyes widening at the sight of three intruders moving freely through a place where even breathing appeared supervised. Most did not react at all. They sat against the walls with their heads lowered, staring at nothing, alive only in the strictest sense.

A man in one of the cells stumbled toward the bars when Ludwig came into view. He was thin enough that the bones of his fingers looked ready to pierce his skin as he wrapped them around the metal. ”Please,” he rasped. ”Please, let me out. They took my wife. They said I would see her again. I never saw her again. Please.”

Ludwig’s steps slowed.

Redd nearly stopped completely.

Then, from the cell beside the man, a woman let out a quiet sound that did not resemble crying anymore. She sat on a filthy blanket with the corpse of a child clutched against her chest, rocking it slowly as if the boy were merely sleeping. His body had been wrapped in cloth at some point, but most of it had come loose, exposing waxy pale blue skin. The mother whispered something into his hair, over and over again, too soft for Ludwig to make out. Perhaps his name. Perhaps a lullaby. Perhaps an apology for still being alive.

The lantern trembled harder.

Ludwig hated every step he took away from them.

He hated the man pleading through the bars. He hated the mother’s rocking shape in the corner of his vision. He hated Redd’s silence and Kaiser’s restraint because their silence meant they understood why he was continuing. He could tear open these doors too. He could release every breathing prisoner he passed. Then they would have dozens of exhausted, wounded people scattered through enemy territory while hidden clerics sounded alarms and the source of the soul-binding remained intact. The people behind the bars deserved help, but the help they needed was not Ludwig breaking locks one corridor at a time while the architects of this place buried the evidence and carried on with the end of the world.

Worse still, he had already seen what happened if they failed to move quickly enough.

Three months.

That was all it had taken in the dead timeline. Three months for Lufondal to collapse, for Celine and Joana to die, for the Emperor to be captured, for Mot to blot out the sun in a desperate attempt to buy the world a few more breaths. Whatever was being prepared here had to be uprooted before Mot was pushed into making that choice.

Ludwig kept walking.

The man continued pleading until the curve of the corridor swallowed his voice. Redd did not look at Ludwig, and Ludwig was grateful for it. There were no words that would make that decision clean.

Eventually the architecture shifted again. The crude cells and rewritten prayer marks gave way to smoother stone, wider halls, and reinforced doors set at deliberate intervals. The air smelled less like sickness and more like incense, polished metal, and alchemical reagents. Whoever worked in this portion of the catacombs cared about organization. Lamps burned steadily along the walls, each flame pale and nearly smokeless, casting enough light for Redd to see the first cluster of guards before they reached the next intersection.

There were more guards here than Ludwig expected. Six stood in front of a broad section of wall where a single door had been built between two carved pillars. Two wore conventional Holy Order armor. The others were dressed in the cleaner ceremonial mail of inner wardens, their cloaks bearing a symbol Ludwig had already seen etched onto several of the sealed corpses: a sunburst wrapped in chains.

Strangely, the door they protected was wooden.

Everything else down here had been iron, stone, bars, locks, and suppressing seals. That door was made of dark polished wood, carefully maintained, fitted with a silver handle instead of a lock heavy enough to hold a prisoner. It looked less like the entrance to a cell and more like the door to a private chamber.

Ludwig held out a hand before Redd could move.

Kaiser understood without being asked. The lich stepped forward by half a pace and raised two skeletal fingers, the movement almost lazy compared to the effect it produced. The guards nearest the door stiffened first. One reached for his throat as his breath suddenly failed him, while the others turned in confusion only to find their own lungs refusing to obey. There was no flash of dark magic, no attack loud enough to bring reinforcements running. Their bodies simply betrayed them. Steel gauntlets scraped against stone as they tried to remain standing, then one by one the guards sagged to their knees and collapsed, unconscious before any managed to draw a weapon.

Redd watched the last of them fall and gave Kaiser a sideways glance. ”You make that look insultingly easy.”

”It is third-circle magic,” Kaiser replied, his tone as flat as the stone under their feet. ”It is easy...”

Redd could only stare at the proud Lich, though even proud the lich didn’t feel like the joke he said was funny.

On another day Ludwig might have enjoyed the exchange. Here, it barely registered. His attention was fixed on the wooden door. The compass vestige beneath the lantern had not pointed directly at it, but the pin was trembling now, flicking repeatedly between the continuing passage and the chamber before them. Whatever was behind that door might not be the source of the seal, but it mattered.

He stepped over the first unconscious guard and placed one hand on the silver handle.

Redd moved to his side, his sword already drawn. Kaiser remained just behind them, dark magic gathered close enough to his fingers that he could cast before anything inside finished turning around.

Ludwig expected another laboratory. Perhaps a ritual chamber kept cleaner than the ones above, or a private interrogation room where the Order questioned people too valuable to discard. At best, he expected someone important enough to force answers from. At worst, some creature wearing the body of a holy man while feeding on everything happening below.

He opened the door.

Warm light spilled into the corridor.

For a second, Ludwig did not understand what he was seeing. The chamber on the other side was not a cell in any recognizable sense. It was clean. Properly clean. Shelves lined one wall, filled with books and carefully arranged bundles of parchment. A small desk had ink, loose pages, and a half-burned candle upon it. A wash basin sat in one corner beside folded linen. The floor had an actual carpet, soft enough that no prisoner from the upper cells would have believed it existed within the same damned structure.

A broad bed occupied the far side of the room.

On it lay a woman wrapped in a faint golden veil of light.

The veil covered her from shoulder to foot, delicate as silk and radiant enough to make the air near the bed feel cleaner than anything Ludwig had encountered since stepping into the catacombs. Heavy chains pinned her arms and legs to the frame beneath that golden glow. The restraints were not crude iron shackles like those used on the children. They were immaculate, made of pale metal and inscribed so thoroughly with holy seals that Ludwig felt the pressure of them from the doorway.

His eyes moved from the chains to the woman’s face, and recognition settled in with a sense of absolute wrongness.

The Holy Saintess Titania was chained to a bed beneath the Sacrosanctum.

Beside her sat a young nun in simple white robes, her sleeves rolled above her forearms. She had been carefully polishing the enormous anchor propped upright near her chair, the weapon so large and absurdly heavy that it looked capable of smashing through the chamber wall rather than being wielded by someone her size. At the sound of the door opening, her hand froze against the metal.

Misty lifted her head.

Her eyes went first to Ludwig, then to Redd, and finally to Kaiser standing behind them in the corridor among six collapsed Holy Order guards. For a moment, none of the shock on her face found words. It was not the expression of someone discovered in the middle of wrongdoing. It was the stunned, immediate alarm of a person who had been hiding something desperately important and had just watched the worst possible visitors open the door.

Ludwig was no less surprised.

Of every person he had prepared himself to find beneath the Sacrosanctum, Titania and her right hand nun were not remotely close to the list.

Misty’s fingers tightened around the handle of the anchor. The shift was small, but the room changed with it. A dense pressure began spreading from the weapon, holy power gathering within its metal in slow, dangerous waves. Redd immediately adjusted his stance, sword angled forward, while Kaiser’s skeletal hand lifted by a fraction.

Ludwig raised his palm before either side could make the next mistake.

”I’m going to assume,” he said slowly, his gaze fixed on the chains holding Titania down, ”that you are not the one responsible for what is happening in the cells above.”

Misty stared at him as if the statement itself made no sense. Then her eyes moved beyond him, perhaps catching the blood on his hands, perhaps feeling the death magic rolling from Kaiser, perhaps noticing the black lantern at Ludwig’s side.

Her grip on the anchor did not loosen.

”What are you doing here? Are you really Ludwig? And how did you even get here in the first place?” she asked, her voice shaking only slightly despite the pressure in the chamber.

Ludwig looked once more at Titania’s chained wrists. The Saintess had not opened her eyes, but the golden veil around her body pulsed faintly, like something inside it was fighting to remain whole.

”That,” Ludwig said, ”is going to be a very long explanation. I suggest you begin by telling me why the Holy Saintess is being kept as a prisoner underneath her own church.”