“Darkness breeds perversion, and the light brings purity. We will bask in his Holy Radiance and be forever pure, all as one, and one to light the path for all. You, who have fallen to criminality and vice. You who have fled from the embrace of the light. You who have sinned against our Eternal Lord and against your fellow man. We do not cast you out. We do not damn you to darkness. Always, the light will welcome and receive. Always will you be held within the fold. And on this day, will your sins be forgiven, your darkness washed away, and your place in the Holy Light secured, now and forevermore.”

– Executioner Three Seven reciting the Litany of the Kindling to a group of ten Bugbears who the patrollers had brought in for ‘Crimes: unspecified’.

Brawls were the kind of thing I ran from at best possible speed. Nothing good ever came out of them, unless you counted how often they wound up with the violent types getting tossed into the flames as Kindling.

I didn’t even have to look around as Oolgoo landed the first hit of the melee. I already knew where my exits were. 

Behind me there was a sewer grating. Not a good option, but a close one. Getting the grate off would take maybe ten seconds? Normally a complete mark against it, but there were enough of us here that the patrollers wouldn’t be paying attention to a little thing like me that was running away from them.

Better than the sewer though was the abandoned building across the street from where Lucky’s place was. It was a longer run but the door was missing so it would take no time at all to break line of sight and put something between me and the patrollers. Something that, critically, could block a Death Mark.

That wasn’t viable either though. The path to it was out in the open and plainly visible. If one of the patrollers did see me running for it, he might think I was going for reinforcements, and that would get me shot dead well before I could make it to the open door.

Which left a straight run away from the brawl. I’d have to get to the far end of the block before I’d find anything that could meaningfully be called cover, but it wouldn’t be hard to communicate with body language that I was not a combatant. As long as the patrollers had to contend with the rest of us, the most they would do with me was remember that a small Ratkin girl had been at the scene and had gotten away.

It would take them zero effort to tie that to the report of a Ratkin girl who murdered one of their fellow patrollers and they’d be out for me in force and with Death Marks ready to shoot first and ask questions never. A lot of small Ratkin girls would die before they decided they’d probably gotten their target, but none of them would have to be me if I was fast and clever enough.

And I could be.

They didn’t know what they were dealing with.

I could hide in places no one had ever even thought about hiding thanks to what Sola could let me do.

A straight run was perfect, and it was right there before me.

So why in all the flame scorched hells were my feet not moving?

It wasn’t Sola.

She was quiet.

And watching.

I could run.

I was really good at running.

And I had every reason to.

“Get out of here!” Lucky said, a single stride carrying her from behind me to five feet in front of me.

So, there! I even had permission to run! Someone who knew me wanted me to leave. Wanted me to live.

Because no one here was going to.

And they knew that.

Oh, the melee was decidedly in their favor. Oolgoo’s hit was only barely the first one and far from the hardest. 

The patrollers and the Inquisitor had better weapons, better training, and better armor. They were practiced at fighting, in theory, though the sort of fighting they were used to tended to involve more kicking unresisting victims as close to death as they could without rendering them ineligible to use as Kindling. That fact revealed itself in glorious splendor as they were met with a hoard of people who’d passed the breaking point. 

The patroller who’d been in the second floor was the first to fall, literally, as a group of elderly residents grabbed him from behind and hurled him to the street.

Ratkin and Kobolds can survive falls from second story balconies and human’s can too, unless they land head first. I couldn’t hear the impact over the yelling and screaming of the fray but I saw it clearly enough to imagine the the shattering crack as skull met stone. The patroller twitched a few times but I’m not sure if that was any sort of living response.

The death of one of their own would have driven the patrollers into a frenzied rage, except for the small detail that they were already in a frenzied rage and it wasn’t enough against the sheer numbers against them.

Punches and kicks had limited impact on the patrollers, but sheer weight dragged each of them off their feet a whole lot faster than they’d been expecting.

The Inquisitor was more of a problem. In part, he seemed to have a supernatural amount of strength, and in part even touching was burning the people who were trying to keep him under control.

Since physical contact wasn’t working out so well though, more than a few turned to simply hurling stones at him. His enchanted robes protected him from most of those attacks as well, but ‘most’ is not ‘all’ and getting clobbered by half a dozen stones every time he tried to speak was disrupting his spellcasting quite effectively.

All of if which made it look like we were winning.

But there wasn’t any winning this. We could make the patrollers and the Inquisitor surrender and they would be back with an army twenty times the size. We could kill them and the army would kill not only those responsible, but everyone in the precinct.

And if we could somehow stop that from happening?

If we pushed back the small army of Inquisitors and patrollers they would send against us? 

In that case, Vaingloth would show up.

Or one of his Champions.

Vaingloth had been able to imprison a god.

There wasn’t any fighting him.

I had to run.

So I did.

Into the fray.

Yeah, I know.

One of the patrollers had managed to pull his Death Mark from his belt though. I don’t know who he was aiming it at. I’d like to say Lucky, or Smiles, of Mumora. Or anyone I should care about. The reality was though that I didn’t know who he was trying to take out before the mob crushed him, except that it wasn’t me.

It wasn’t me, but it should have been. That might have saved him from me biting his wrist hard enough to break bone.

I’m not strong enough to wrestle things out of the hands of any patroller really, except if said hand is no longer functional and producing blinding amounts of pain.

Which gave me a Death Mark.

People holding Death Mark’s are a priority kill target. 

But I didn’t throw it away.

Through Sola I could feel the power in it.

It wasn’t divine, but it should have been

This…this is wrong. This should be a Sacred Relic but no part of Death’s dominion is here. This is an idol to a lie. Sola was freaked out. I was freaked out to be holding a Death Mark, but Sola was freaked out by something far more profound.

I don’t think this one is special, I told her, looking it over quickly to see if there was anything about that seemed custom or unique.

The creator of this has fashioned a replica of the Divinity of Death, Sola said. They’ve created the shell of a false god to steal the power of Death without bearing any of the responsibility of Death’s divine realm.

That made sense on a surface level, but I could tell there was an awful lot more to unpack from Sola’s words than ‘somebody set themselves up as the new god of death and is being a loser about it.’

“Stop!” Lucky’s voice was loud enough to carry over the sound of the melee and held enough authority that people listened to her.

“You will all die for this sin,” the Inquisitor said, his arms pinned to the ground by a dozen or so people with heavy boots stepping on them. Can’t burn flesh through a good thick layer of leather.

“This city is better served if it does not lose a Inquisitor and any more patrollers today,” Lucky said. “This was a misfortune. Nothing more. Let it pass and you will see or hear of none of us again.”

“You will not escape judgment so lightly.” For a guy who was pinned face down on the ground, the Inquisitor didn’t seem to be able to see how precarious his personal position had become. 

Or maybe he could.

Would Vaingloth let an Inquisitor live who’d been defeated by the masses and then bowed his head to their whims?

“Our home is gone,” Lucky said. “We know you’ll be back to burn it down, but we will not be here by then. Let that be enough to slake your vengeance.”

“What about Ferrow?” one of the patroller’s screamed. Not the one whose hand I’d broken. “You killed him!”

“He fell. It was an accident. An accident that will keep the rest of you alive. Or he was pushed. Do you want that to be the story you believe? Do you want us to have to act as though one of us has murdered a patroller?”

I probably should have felt a twinge of guilt at that.

I didn’t, but I probably should have.

“Fine. He slipped.” The patroller was not happy but even the dimmest of bulbs are sometimes bright enough to see when there was only one option which led to him taking more than a four or five more breaths.

“Good. Then we can all walk away from here,” Lucky said. “You’ll chase us. We know that. Consider that another part of your vengeance, or do you not know what it’s like having to live outside the light?”

The patrollers grunted, which wasn’t quite an acceptance of Lucky’s argument but it wasn’t a denial of it either.

“No.”

I didn’t want to hear that word.

Not from the Inquisitor.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t from the Inquisitor.

The words came out of his mouth, but he wasn’t the one speaking them.

The people who were holding the Inquisitor collapsed, felled in an instant by a wordless spell.

Abomination. Sola was absolutely certain of that.

“No. There will be no negotiations. Not today,” Vaingloth the Eternal said, rising in the body of the Inquisitor to stand with an aura of dread might which drove everyone to their knees.

Abomination. Sola was not supposed to be a cold god, and I noted that all too clearly.

I hadn’t been overwhelmed by Vaingloth’s power.

I could still run.

Sola would protect me.

Instead, I saw that Vaingloth was right and I rose to stand.

He didn’t see me.

Didn’t notice or care, that I stood when everyone else was being shattered under the weight of his power manifested.

Vaingloth was right though.

There would be no negotiations today.

ABOMINATION.

Vaingloth’s power was overwhelming. He held more force that the entire mass of Mount Gloria, gathered over centuries.

But only so much of it was given to the Inquisitor. Only so much was he willing to risk on this trivial skirmish.

There was only so much protection his offered the Inquisitor and against Sola, it was far from enough.

I didn’t speak a word. I didn’t make a gesture. I didn’t give him any warning at all.

I simple incinerated them.

The Inquisitor, the patrollers, and every trace of Vaingloth I could reach to send the rage and hate that had built up since the day of my birth.