Chapter 12 · free to read
They had built galleries. That was how the sect thought of its own front door — not a wall, a duelling ground, with seats.
He had run from a burning market screaming for an elder. They had given him one gate and a splint, and told him to stand in it.
No stance. No form. A joint, a weight, a fall — the same three thoughts he had used on the block every morning for eleven years.
The galleries had come to see a devil. What they got was a man who put a blade in the floor, and it frightened them a great deal more.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.