The dawn that broke over the majestic stone dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was pale and bitterly cold. Deep beneath the public tourist pathways, hidden behind walls of reinforced medieval stone and centuries of secret ecclesiastical wards, the primary archives of The Holy Inquisition of the Sacred Cross sat in a state of suffocating, institutional horror. The grand, marble-lined inner sanctum—where the church's highest cardinals and alchemical researchers had monitored the global supernatural spectrum for half a millennium—was completely frozen in a dead, paralyzed silence.
The ancient silver scrying bowls and seismic kinetic mirrors, which had successfully documented every magical war since The Ancient Cleansing, were now displaying a reality that defied their entire historical the
