The transformation did not arrive as a sudden erasure of thought but as something far more insidious: a corruption of feeling. It came in layers, weaving itself through the psyche so seamlessly that it felt less like being brainwashed and more like being understood.
In the plaza, the Aethelgard soldiers who had been standing with their heads bowed in shame and horror slowly raised them.
Their faces were still streaked with tears; the salt from their grief was still wet on their cheeks, but the quality of those tears had shifted.
The sorrow was gone, replaced by an overflowing, terrifying gladness. Their eyes didn't hold the clarity of Evelyn's truth anymore; they held the ecstatic madness of the devout.
An old baker in a narrow back lane, mid-prayer for a city in ruin, sank to his knees in the middle of the cobblestones.
