The cathedral did not return to normal after the darkness receded.
Although the visible leakage of demonic power had stopped, the air remained strained, as if the stone itself remembered what had touched it. The sacred runes along the pillars glowed faintly and unevenly, like a pulse that could not find a steady rhythm. Priests moved carefully across the marble floor, whispering prayers that sounded more like calculations than devotion.
At the center of it all, Kael stood in silence.
He had forced the demonic core back into containment, but the cost of that restraint showed in the pallor of his face and the fine fractures of black that remained faintly visible beneath his skin. He felt no immediate surge of power now. Instead, he felt absence.
That absence unsettled him more than the v
