Guilt is something living. A mold of realization grows rapidly until its wet, grasping spores finally suffocate their victim. Mycosis took me in the middle of a sunny Harthin street, the wet stone beneath me suddenly far too hot, a thick press of bodies boxing me in until I could do nothing but stand still and let it fill my lungs with mildew. When salt and sea became too much to bear, that was the first time I visited the Temple of Sahr.

  Bug had told me where to find it, and how to identify members of the order, to look for clinking gold necklaces. The temple was arching up between a tavern and a brothel; it didn't look very religious to my hazy eyes. A tall, spindly little thing like an old terrier tilting its head to howl for the last time. Chipped, salt-weathered limestone had yellowed the once beautiful structure into something far more decrepit. It was shaped like a grasping hand, reaching up for heaven. Judging by the cleanly snapped pinky and ring fingers, I don’t believe it found anything like that. Spikes jutted out from the dusty facade like a dozen sun rays, a piece of parchment hanging off of each, painted a red deeper than I thought possible here. Pale, washed steps led up the wrist into a pair of wrought iron doors, rusted to near dysfunction. Two robed figures hunched on the stairs, their clothes a flaxen yellow laced with cherry red embroidery. Each wore a crown of golden lines framing their head, hands working quickly with some kind of chalk, drawing out intricate symbols across the steps. Neither rose to my approach.

  “We do not venerate the Fás; if it is charity you seek, you cannot find it here.” The figure on the left spoke in a reedy, nasally voice. She couldn’t have been more than twenty.

  “I killed someone. I hear this is where you come to repent for that sort of thing.” With a small twitch, she paused in her writing, though she kept her head bowed.

  “Did you vanquish them in battle?” She glanced up with narrowed, rat grey eyes.

  “No.”

  “Stop them from committing a great evil?” Standing hesitantly, she stepped down to meet me. Her rough, nail-bitten hands curled with a newfound apprehension.

  “Certainly not.”

  “...Prevent calamity through their sacrifice by your hand?” Her brow scrunched, small shoulders bunching. She knew why I was here. She knew what I had done.

  “Most likely caused it.”

  The acolyte puffed out a lungful of air before turning to the other figure on the steps. She hissed out a few quick words I couldn’t quite catch, the other figure looking up at me in a flash of pale skin and big, auburn hair before turning to scamper lithely up the steps.

  “Step quickly, abomination. The Protector will find you and judge you clean, Sólkorr willing.” I blinked at that, but she was already at the ornate entrance to the temple, forcing me to drag leaden legs up with her. Walking into the temple felt like entering the mouth of some new tropical hell, Harthin’s already hot climate transitioning into something altogether more intense. My body became wax under flame as I leaned against a decorated banister for support. Something sweet had rotted nearby, maybe me. My eyes watered with the taste of something musky and fettered. I could feel gorge in the back of my throat fighting its way up. Appropriate. The thought was bitter but genuine.

  Cardamom candles of various warm shades lined the short, round room. Packed so tightly that the spiced scent was made into a different beast entirely, perhaps trying to mask whatever it was that decayed somewhere in the temple. They cast a flickering light across scenes carved directly into the walls. A figure of light stood, their bastard sword aimed to take some great, horrible beast straight through the heart, its multiple heads and gnashing teeth somehow conveying fear, or maybe rage. Similar iconography lined the walls, that of the sun and light vanquishing dark in various gruesome ways.

  The acolytes had gone, so I staggered to a faux velvet chair, collapsing in wait. Beside me stood a shoddy mangrove side table just barely supporting the weight of a fruit bowl atop it. The fruit was nearing overripe, growing blacker by the moment. I leaned back and clutched my hair, feeling the onset of a deep pounding in my head. I don’t know how long I sat in that damnable chair in that damnable room, with its horrible smells and low flickering light and the swirling knowledge in my head that I had done something so unforgivable I was finding fucking religion for the first time in my life. The mold spores began to germinate in the recesses of my head, leaking into my stomach and sliding down the tips of my toes.

  It had been three days since I’d left the dripping body of Thorne Tyr hanging from the gallows. I hadn’t been the one to slide his head through the noose, but I might as well have tied the knot and handed it over to the executioner in a sweet little bow.

  I had killed people before. I had vanquished foes in battle, stopped them from committing great evils, prevented calamity through sacrifice by my hand, and I had come to terms with the idea that sometimes violence was a necessary step towards liberation. Thorne was no monster. He was a father, blacksmith, and brother. An honest man working to keep his family afloat, trying to help me. And in return for his kindness, I left him cooling in a shallow grave.

  My body curled in on itself like a dead spider, twitching and heaving. I clamped a hand over my mouth to keep the vomit in.

  “Oh my son, we can see why you’ve come. What a sorry state you have found yourself in.” I hadn’t heard the door open, yet there he stood backlit in jumping shadow. He was middle-aged, wearing draped orange robes over a white silken vest with offset bone buttons. He was a big man, large stomach obscured by a pair of soft yellow sashes. Even his hair sprouted in tangled vines of carmine, a crooked yellow crown nestled deep within its depths. The priest’s voice was light and smooth, words curling lovingly into each other as if they had been predestined to lie exactly where he put them. When I said nothing, in an attempt to keep all of my insides in, he gave a gap-toothed grin and extended a hand.

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  “Come here, son, let us perform the ordinance, and you may tell us what ails you.” The man grabbed my forearm in one soft hand and firmly pulled me to my feet, dusting the clinging sand from my shoulders and back. It was odd, being treated like a blubbering child at my age, but he felt some kind of authority over me, and I was in no place to challenge it.

  “You’re him then? ‘The Protector’?” I asked, fiddling with the brass clasp of my cloak. In two quick strides, he was pulling us through a heavy door twice my size, curved at the top and nailed with a small sign reading ‘Prayer Chamber’ in Skiran.

  He laughed at that, a low, baritone thing. “No! Nothing like that. We are but a lowly servant, hardly above the most menial of ants. You may call us Father Durian, a humble follower of the Sólkorr and of local tale. The acolytes wished for The Protector to see to you personally, but when we heard of a strange white haired man with a glowing stone in his neck, we jumped at the opportunity to meet you!”

  The other side of the staircase was akin to another world, roiling cold air sent my nose running. It was much darker, with no candelabra adorning the walls; it looked as if we were about to descend into a black hole step by grinding step. I could not see the bottom.

  “What do you mean by meet me? I’m just here to, well, confess. It can’t be that special.” I had been under the impression that was part of this particular temple’s draw, the chance to explain myself under complete and total confidence. The door behind us shut. Something was pushed into its bottom crack, swallowing up the last light leaking in. The steps were carved from stone, each movement letting out a dull thud. The sweat on my brow had cooled to ice, crawling down my cheek. I pressed a hand to the rough-hewn wall, steadying myself.

  “You are Lev Raemos. The only sotver in all of Harthin, maybe even in all of the west. Pardon us saying, but you have made yourself quite a spectacle these past few weeks. I have been fascinated, to say the least.” Father Durian halted in place. “And, here we are, the chamber of the Long Quiet. Do you know why we call it that, son?” I nearly shook my head, so caught up I was in his knowing me. Instead, I said that no, I did not. Further, I knew very little about the religion of the Sólkorr. He didn’t seem perturbed, hand resuming its place on my shoulder as he guided me through the entirely dark room like a little girl with her doll.

  “It is a place devoid of Their touch, of warmth. Entirely of this world and not of the gods. Heaven cannot listen here, so we might sort out our mortal business. This chamber is entirely underground and closed off, so no one from this plane can eavesdrop upon the ordinance either. It should be…” He shuffled, hip bumping something solid before he pulled us both forward, turning me around and making the back of my knees press against marble, sitting me atop it. The cold seeped into my thighs; it went bone deep.

  “...Here. You go here, and I, we, will sit opposite you.” The father’s voice lowered, as if he were sitting on the rough floor in front of me. “Now, why have you come here?”

  “Excuse me, Father, but that’s it? No things I need to say or ritual we need to perform?” He took a moment to respond. I worried I had offended him.

  “This is a place for us to quietly relieve ourselves of sin. They do not require an… Ordeal for it. Tell us what happened, son. That is all. We handle our humble dues to The Smile when we rise.” His voice was more breathy than before, higher-pitched. Excited. I supposed there was a reason he chose the path of a priest. Slaking a thirst for redemption of some kind.

  So I told Father Durian everything. I told him of our trip to the Fulcrum, or at least some piece of it. Of the winding, twisted path to meeting Adelar and Thorne Tyr. Of starvation and pain and the look of hate in Charles’ eyes when I told him what we had done to his home. There was blood on my hands. That of my loved ones is more than anyone. I wondered if, when my time came, the scales would balance. Or if God would realize I had crushed far more than I had built. I felt my throat tighten, going silent for a few moments as my voice collapsed in on itself. Thorne Tyr was one hundred and forty-eight seasons old, I finally told him, that’s thirty-seven years. Every morning with the rise of the sun he would go around his house opening curtains and poking the hearth back to life. He woke his wife with a kiss and his son with the bang of pots and pans. He was deep in the drink a few too many nights, but he never brought it into the home with him. A workman saving up for a trip to the coasts, the real coasts he said. Harthin’s rocky beaches are small in comparison to the farther edges of Skira. He would take his family to see them as he did when he was young. Relive the feeling of laying eyes on a stretch of water so colossal you could do nothing but sit down and realize your size in comparison to the enormity of the world. His body bloated and hanging in the middle of town to all the world like a butcher’s deer on it’s gambrel hook.

  I don’t know when tears began rolling down my face in fat droplets. Durian did not mention the muted drip drip drip.

  In fact, he listened in silence through the beginning. Though he began interjecting more and more as time passed. Have you killed before this? When neccesarry. Sometimes not. I’m not proud of what I’ve done. Nobody was like… Like him, though. Nothing so horrible. A woman scared of holy texts, you say? Yes, yes she refused to enter the library’s second floor just in case. An abnormally pale body? How so? It was an ashy grey, looking almost ensanguinated. I’ve never seen anything like it. Would you say the bruises across the dripping corpse of Thorne Tyr, son of Victor, looked more purpled or red? I tried not to stare Father, when I kill a man I don’t make a spectacle of watching him decompose. Are you good at it? At what, Father? At killing.

  I stared at him, at the silhouette of where the priest sat in that horribly dark room.

  “Am I what?”

  “Good at killing, Raemos. You said you’ve done it before. I’ve heard tale of your exploits. Quite impressive, graphic tale.” I didn’t respond. I didn’t respond because I remember what Bug had said about priests and rank and the Sólkorr. My fists clenched, blood dripping from sharpened nails digging into soft meat. The man shifted uncomfortably in place.

  “Of course,” He added quickly, “It is an absolute tragedy what you did to that man, rest his soul. I just… I was curious, is all.” He braced one strong leg beneath himself to stand, quietly. His neck was entirely bare.

  “You’re not a priest.”