The sulfurous blood mist rolled thicker through the narrow corridor as the stone portcullises settled into their grooves with a final, heavy shudder.
Senior Brother Bai looked down at his right hand, where the jagged, snapped hilt of his ancestral law sword remained clamped in his calloused fingers. For ten years, he had polished that steel every morning before dawn in the courtyard of the Law Enforcement Pavilion on Ironwood Street, believing with every fiber of his being that the engraved codes on the crossguard were a sacred covenant meant to shelter the weak.
Now, staring through the haze at the grinning faces of elders wearing red cultist robes and bearing blood moon marks on their chests, the truth sat like a stone in his gut. The codes were never meant to protect the mortal miners
