Behind the Veil of Faith

Some nights don't end. They just change shape and keep living inside you, over and over, until you can't remember what your life sounded like before them. That night is the only clock I trust anymore. Everything I am now is measured from it — before, and after. There is no in-between. The Order made sure of that. My name is Kaya. I was seventeen the last time I believed the world was safe, and I haven't made that mistake since. We weren't rich. We weren't important. My father sold what little he could, my mother prayed to a god she'd never once seen answer anything, and Eli — my brother, sixteen months younger, all elbows and terrible jokes — spent his evenings sketching birds he swore he'd see one day beyond the Order's walls. I used to tease him for it. Birds don't care about your freedom, Eli. Draw something useful, like dinner. He'd just grin and keep sketching anyway. That was Eli. Stubborn about the wrong things, brave about the right ones. I didn't know yet how much I'd give to hear him say something stupid one more time. I have replayed the sound of our door breaking so many times I can summon it without trying — wood splitting like something alive being gutted, cold air rushing in ahead of men who moved like they'd been carved from obedience itself. Gray robes. Faces arranged into that serene, practiced stillness the Order teaches its soldiers, the kind of calm that only exists in men who've stopped believing the people in front of them are people at all. They didn't ask for Eli. They didn't need to. His name was already written somewhere in their ledgers of the damned, in ink none of us had ever been allowed to read. I remember screaming until my throat felt scraped raw, clawing at a stranger's arm as he dragged my brother past the table where we'd eaten dinner not an hour before, past the small clay bird he'd carved for me on my last birthday, past every ordinary, unremarkable thing that had made up the whole of our small, unguarded life. Eli's eyes found mine in the doorway — not afraid yet, not really, just confused, the particular confusion of someone who still believes, right up until the last second, that the people who love him are about to make this stop. I didn't make it stop. I have never forgiven myself for that, and I don't expect I ever will. A gauntleted hand caught me across the skull hard enough to fracture something more than bone. The room didn't go dark. It went white — violent, total, a white that tore behind my eyes like something ancient clawing its way out of a cage it had been sealed inside since before I was born. And in that white, I saw. Not a memory. Not a dream fevered into being by pain. A vision, cold and exact: an iron door I'd never stood before. A sigil scorched black into stone, still smoking, like it had just been branded there. My brother's face, unmoving, lit gold by candlelight that hadn't been lit yet — light from a moment that hadn't happened, that some broken new part of me already knew was coming. When the white finally let me go, I was on the floor of a house that no longer held my brother in it. Blood ran warm down the side of my face. My mother was screaming somewhere that sounded very far away. And somewhere behind my own eyes, something continued to burn — quiet, patient, permanent — like a coal the Order had spent generations trying to smother out of every bloodline reckless enough to carry it. They have a word for what they do to people like me. Purification. A soft word, built to make murder sound like mercy. I have my own word for what happened that night. Beginning. I didn't cry again after that. Not once, not in all the years since, though I have wanted to more times than I could count. I knelt instead in the wreckage of the only home I'd ever known, my brother's blood-warm absence still hanging in the air like smoke that refused to clear, and I made a single vow to whatever god had let this happen and done nothing to stop it. I would find the door from my vision. I would find whatever waited behind it. And I would burn the Order down to the last stone of its lying cathedrals, one purification at a time — starting with whoever had given the order to walk through mine. I just didn't know yet that I wouldn't be doing it alone. Or that the man who would end up fighting beside me had, not so long ago, worn the very same gray robes I now swore to destroy.