Back they went.
They crossed once more through the valley of flesh, stepping over lifeless bodies and the dark, dried remains of blood long surrendered to the air. Around them lay the ritualists of the White Castle, their corpses pinned where they had fallen, jagged swords driven through skull and bone, forcing them into a terrible stillness. In death, they no longer looked like men. They resembled offerings. Relics of war raised upright by cruelty and left behind as though the battlefield itself had wished to preserve them. The land had become sacred in the most blasphemous way, consecrated not by prayer, but by slaughter, its soil thick with torn flesh and ruined devotion.
They passed mountains of corpses piled one over another in mute collapse, and fountains of blood that streamed in narrow runnels through the torn earth, moving with eerie gentleness like calm red rivers. Nothing in that place cried out anymore. The violence had already finished speaking. What remained was only its memory, laid bare beneath the silent sky.
They left by the same path through which they had come.
As they walked, they passed once more through the frozen assembly of figures suspended by time. Butlers stood poised in perfect posture. Nobles in rich garments remained caught in gestures of laughter, conversation, and idle elegance. Their sleeves hung without motion. Their jewelled fingers stayed lifted in unfinished grace. Their painted smiles had not faded, yet neither had they lived. Time had abandoned them without warning, turning an evening of grandeur into a museum of arrested life.
Beyond them stood thousands of statues in different colours, arranged with unnatural precision among tables and chairs set as though awaiting guests who would never arrive. The butlers moved among them with exact and mechanical elegance, each gesture too measured, too flawless, too emptied of soul. It was as though some distant orchestrator, some cold intelligence from another world, had arranged every detail by hand and then breathed into it only the imitation of life.
Laughter still drifted through the air.
It was soft.
Refined.
Completely wrong.
The smiles upon those faces remained hidden behind masks of civility, but there was no comfort in them. They did not feel human. They felt performed. Like disguises worn over something watchful and patient, something that had learned the shape of servants, nobles, and guests without ever understanding the warmth that made such shapes real. They were like elegant machines wrapped in flesh and etiquette, ominous in their stillness, unseen in their intention.
Still, the three continued on.
They crossed the Astral Sea.
They walked upon the surface of its calm waters as though treading across a dream too sacred to break. Beneath their feet, the sea shimmered with a deep and quiet brilliance, its vast expanse holding the pale reflection of the moon as though the heavens themselves had descended to rest within it. Each ripple carried starlight across the water in silver fragments, and the whole sea seemed less like a body of water than a sleeping sky laid gently upon the earth.
They lowered themselves and drank from it.
Its waters were pure beyond mortal comparison, cold and clear and touched by something ancient. To drink from the Astral Sea was not merely to quench thirst, but to feel a strange stillness enter the body, as though some hidden dust within the soul had been washed away. They walked into the fog.
Beyond the Astral Sea, past the Gate of Dust, it waited for them in silence, vast and patient, as though it had known they would return this way. The mist rolled outward in slow, heavy waves, pressing against their lungs with an almost living weight. Each breath felt strained within their chests, as though the air itself had grown older and thinner. Their eyes stung beneath its burden, and for a fleeting moment even their steps seemed less certain, their feet touched by a strange and passing weakness.
Then the sun rose once more.
Its golden light spilled through the veil of mist and transformed it into a field of luminous vapor, rich and mysterious, as though the heavens had poured molten dawn into the breath of some ancient dream. The fog glowed around them in shifting folds, beautiful and oppressive all at once.
Still, they walked on.
They descended the towering spiral.
The golden steps curved endlessly downward, solemn and grand, yet stained by age and memory. White paint dripped along their edges in tired streams, while the rusted rails, darkened by old blood, caught the sunlight and gleamed like lines of hidden fire. Here and there, pale droplets slid from the flaking paint and fell in tiny, quiet taps. Swarms of draconic insects circled the railings in restless clusters, their wings glinting as they moved through the heated air.
El, Leon, and Elias descended in silence, their steps steady, their bearing touched by an unspoken reverence, as though the spiral were not merely a path, but a procession through the remains of something sacred and terrible.
At last, they stepped onto land.
Before them stretched a desolate expanse, bleak and wind-stricken. Jagged crosses rose from the earth in arrogant ranks; their sharpened points thrust toward the heavens as though even in ruin they still wished to challenge the sky. Upon them were fixed the skeletons and shattered heads of the fallen, remnants of the foolish and the damned, preserved in grotesque silence. Dust skittered across the barren ground and gathered into small storms around their feet, while the sun above burned warmer now, its brightness merciless upon the waste.
Without pause, they crossed that dead land.
Soon, they stood before the gigantic Doors of Heaven.
They towered above them in dreadful majesty, vast enough to humble thought itself. Ancient and severe, they seemed less like doors made for passage and more like a boundary placed between one order of existence and another.
Then the doors opened.
And they stepped into darkness.
Inside, there was only blackness.
No whispers moved through it. No words or letters drifted in the air. Nothing stirred. Nothing breathed. There was no disturbance except the perfection of silence and the strange, unnatural noise that silence alone could make when it became too complete, too absolute, too aware of itself.
Through that darkness, they walked.
Then they stepped into the cage and drew shut its iron bars.
At once, it began to rise.
The cage carried them upward, ascending into the heavens so smoothly that the world itself seemed to shift beneath them. What should have been above felt like ground. What should have been below seemed to fall away into distance. It was less like rising and more like being reoriented by some higher law that did not recognize mortal notions of direction.
When at last the ascent ended, they stood within Valereith Citadel, upon the eastern shore near the red waters.
There, luminous figures were already waiting for them.
They floated in ordered ranks, radiant and immaculate, their faces bright with ceremonial joy. Trumpets were raised in unerring precision, and when they played, the sound rang out clear and solemn, as though time itself had remembered an ancient song and chosen to breathe it once more into the world. The music was grand, almost holy, yet it carried the peculiar sadness of a ritual repeated too many times, performed for ears that no longer knew how to listen.
And so, the notes rose over the eastern shore, bright against the red waters, while the three returned in silence.
…
They walked past commoners, villagers, and countless others, people burdened with small desires and ordinary wills, each carrying the quiet weight of a life too narrow to notice the vastness moving beyond it.
They passed carriages and horses, servants and children, merchants and laborers, and at last arrived before a church.
It was the Church of the Most High.
The Church of prayer.
The Church of miracles.
Its doors were tall and pale, fashioned with such care that even their stillness seemed reverent. When El pushed them open, the sound was long and low, like the opening of something older than wood, and the three stepped across the threshold into a sanctity that felt almost physical.
The air inside was cooler.
Heavier.
Rows of red seats stretched in solemn order beneath high-vaulted ceilings, all of them occupied by men and women draped in white ceremonial robes. Candlelight trembled along the walls, though no wind moved within. Thin trails of incense curled upward in ghostly spirals, and the mingled scent of wax, ash, and old prayer hung over the hall like a second atmosphere. At the far end stood the altar, white and austere, raised slightly above the congregation as though holiness itself required distance.
Above it loomed the emblem of the Most High.
It watched without eyes.
The entire church was quiet, yet it was not an empty quiet. It was the kind of silence woven from reverence, habit, fear, and longing. The kind of silence that remained after years of bowed heads and folded hands. The kind of silence that seemed to remember every confession ever whispered into it.
A pastor stood near the altar, dressed in black robes with a white cross upon his chest. His face was warm, his bearing measured, and in his hands rested a Bible worn by devotion. He smiled when they entered, yet the moment his gaze settled fully upon El, something subtle shifted in him. His fingers tightened around the book. Not enough to be called fear. Not enough to be named. Merely the faint reaction of instinct before the mind had time to clothe it in reason.
As though something within him had paused and asked, in great quietness, whether fate itself knew what it had allowed to enter such a place.
Still, he stepped forward and bowed slightly.
"Welcome, Apostle of the Other Gods," he said. "Your presence has long been cherished here, daily preacher and philosopher. Your benevolent prayers and miracles have blessed the people of this land. God Himself has surely anointed you."
At once, the congregation turned.
The sound of shifting cloth passed through the hall like a whisper over graves.
Some rose to their feet at once. Some bowed their heads deeply. A few lowered themselves all the way down, pressing their bodies toward the floor in trembling reverence. Their eyes held admiration, fear, gratitude, and that dangerous kind of devotion that made men eager to sanctify what they did not understand.
El smiled.
It was a small smile, light and almost absent, as though none of this belonged to him.
"It is Him, not me," he said.
His voice entered the church gently, yet somehow it carried farther than it should have, touching every ear without ever rising.
Then he gestured toward Leon and Elias.
"I brought my friends with me. Let us pray together."
He exhaled softly and added, with the ease of a man remarking upon rain rather than damage to his soul, "I have recently suffered a slight mishap. My sanity has been rather thoroughly wounded. It requires some time to recover."
The pastor's expression only deepened with reverence.
"Truly," he said, "the work of an Apostle is beyond mortal comprehension."
"Indeed," El replied.
"I have just erased the White Castle organisation from existence, although I had to become a ritualist myself, I had to in order to infiltrate the organisation.
I killed every ritualist there and stacked them as artifacts of war.
Do not be discouraged. Do not be scared. Every organisation that posses a threat to the Order will be erased." El declared to the church.
Leon said nothing.
Churches had once seemed simple to him. Places of prayer. Places of answers. But now, standing beneath that holy ceiling, with incense drifting through candlelight and a congregation bowing around a man who spoke of his own wounded sanity as though it were a minor inconvenience, his thoughts crowded against one another in uneasy confusion. Reverence and discomfort, faith and distance, all of it gathered in him without order. Even the sacredness of the place no longer felt clean. It felt layered. Deep. As though every prayer ever uttered here had remained behind, not answered, not rejected, merely accumulated into something watchful.
Elias remained still.
As always, there was a quiet obscurity to him, a suggestion that one part of him stood in the church while another listened from elsewhere. The candlelight touched his face but did not warm it. His gaze rested upon the altar, calm and unreadable, though there was something in his silence that made the sanctity around him feel uncertain, as though holiness itself was hesitating, unsure whether to embrace him or observe him from a careful distance.
Then the three walked forward.
The church members parted for them, robes shifting softly, heads bowed, eyes lowered. They passed through that human corridor beneath the dim light of candles and the scent of incense, moving toward the altar as though being drawn deeper into the centre of something ancient and unseen.
And there, surrounded by kneeling worshippers and the quiet weight of accumulated faith, they prayed.
No thunder answered.
No voice descended.
No miracle broke across the ceiling in radiant splendour.
And yet the moment felt no less strange for its stillness.
It was as if the church itself were listening.
As if every candle flame had leaned inward.
As if the Most High, wherever He was, had opened one eye and chosen not to interrupt.
When the prayer was finished, they rose.
Without spectacle.
Without farewell.
They left the Church of the Most High as they had entered it, beneath the gaze of the congregation, through the incense-laden air, across the threshold where sanctity ended and the ordinary world resumed.
Then they returned to the Temple.
...
"Welcome back."