The Crucible Walkers — Plank Right]
They had thought themselves broken.
They had thought the fire of the Crucible was dead, extinguished with Father-Commander Dren's blood.
The surviving Walkers stood scattered in the mud, clutching shattered relic-flamers and broken spears, watching the Red Choir Butcher's rampage with hollow eyes.
Then came the light.
A blinding eruption from beyond the Blessed Hinge, rolling over them like a second sunrise.
One by one, the Walkers lifted their heads.
One by one, their cracked helmets reflected the impossible fire.
One by one, something inside them rekindled.
They dropped to their knees, faces turned toward the blaze, and whispered the only word that mattered:
"Grave."
A sergeant missing half his face began to chant, low and broken, the original Oath of the Crucible:
"Through fire we march...
Through ash we rise...
Through death we burn again."
The others took up the words, louder, faster, until it became a roar that drowned out the guns and screaming.
Saint Grave had risen.
And the Crucible Walkers would rise with him.
[The Redemption Corps — Martyr's Right]
They had lost faith when Aaron fell.
Some had thrown down their weapons.
Some had collapsed into the trenches, sobbing into the blood-slick mud.
But now, Redemption soldiers peered over broken sandbags and shattered reliquaries, shielding their faces against the wave of searing fire that rose from the Blessed Hinge.
The light wasn't just burning, it was singing.
One old corporal, blinded in one eye from a relic explosion two wars ago, wept openly.
"The Saint lives," he whispered, over and over. "The Saint lives. The Saint lives—"
Officers screamed for order. Vox-casters buzzed with confused prayers. But it didn't matter.
The Redemption Corps picked up their relic rifles, grabbed their bayonets, and began to advance.
No orders needed.
They would not let the Saint walk the broken fields alone.
[The Trench Pilgrims — Martyr's Left]
The Pilgrims had fought like madmen already.
Now, seeing the impossible light blazing across the trenches, they became something more.
Veterans who had survived a dozen trench-sieges roared battle-prayers from broken throats.
Young acolytes, too green to understand fear, sprinted toward the glow with relics held high.
The ground itself seemed to lift beneath them, blood and ash boiling into mist as they surged forward.
A dying Trench Pilgrim, pinned under a collapsed scaffold, used his final breath to cry out:
"Saint of Paint, Fire, and Ash!
Guide our broken hands!"
The trenches heaved.
The faithful charged.
And somewhere in the smoke, the old saints whispered their approval.
[The Heretics — Scattered Lines]
Heretic Troopers recoiled from the light as if it burned their unholy flesh.
Some dropped their weapons and ran screaming into the no-man's land, throwing off their armor and relic chains.
Others fired blindly into the smoke, trying to kill what they could not understand.
A Heretic Priest, robes smoldering, stumbled to his knees, clawing at the inverted scripture tattooed across his chest.
"It is not supposed to happen!" he shrieked. "He was broken—he was broken!"
The Goetic Warlocks, sensing the shift in the air, tried to whisper spells of forgetting and silence.
They were devoured by the fire before the first syllable left their mouths.
Even the Anointed Heavy Infantry paused, their engines of heretical faith sputtering under the pressure of a light that refused to die.
The Heretic lines broke, fracturing like dry relic-wood.
[ Saint-Captain Hema — Reliquary Flank]
Far to the east, amid the chaos and ruin of the Reliquary Flank, Saint-Captain Hema fought like a blade swung by forgotten gods.
Her armor was cracked and blackened; her hammer, slick with cursed sound, sang each time it struck. She ducked a shriek of weaponized memory, pivoted, and shattered a Hollow Vox's spectral shell with a single booming impact that lit the ruins in brief, brilliant light.
The vox-casters crackled around her, choked with broken signals and dying prayers.
A single grim message cut through the static, repeated from trench to trench:
"Saint Dren is fallen. Saint Grave is fallen."
For the first time since the siege began, Hema's breath caught in her throat.
Two flames lost. Two pillars shattered.
Her hands tightened around her hammer. She turned to crush another Hollow Vox, and then froze.
The air shifted.
A warm wind rolled over the trenches, thick with the scent of burning parchment and blooded prayer.
Hema turned her helm toward the west, toward the Blessed Hinge, and saw it.
The light.
A fire not made by mortals, rising to the heavens, defying the ash-choked sky.
For a heartbeat, the battle around her ceased to exist.
She stood still, bloody and broken, staring.
And then she smiled, a hard, terrible thing.
"One flame still burns."
Her vox crackled again.
The impossible message, low and stunned:
"One Saint stands."
She lifted her hammer, pointing it toward the light, and roared loud enough to shake the reliquary ruins:
"FOR THE GRAVE!"
The Pilgrims around her, hearing her voice and seeing the impossible blaze, rallied with wild, weeping cries, and charged.
[High Cruciger Lueth — Saint's Reach]
At the crumbling edges of Saint's Reach, where relics bled rust and men bled faith, High Cruciger Lueth knelt beside the ancient Iron Lantern, head bowed in exhaustion.
The fronts were buckling. The Heretic storm was winning.
And through the battered vox, like a death knell, came the words:
"Saint Dren is fallen. Saint Grave is fallen. Prepare for fallback."
Lueth clenched his teeth, whispering the last of his prayers not to be heard, but to be remembered.
When the pressure shifted, he felt it in his bones first.
The Iron Lantern in his arms, dead for three campaigns, flared to life, golden, pure, holy.
He raised his head and saw it.
The Blessed Hinge, alight with fire that no heresy could explain, no death could extinguish.
A towering flame, a signal against despair.
Lueth wept openly, uncaring if his soldiers saw.
"Not all relics are dead," he rasped.
"Some walk.
Some burn."
The vox crackled again—new, raw with disbelief:
"Correction. One Saint stands. One Saint rises."
Lueth rose, lifting the Iron Lantern high overhead, casting its light over his broken trenches.
"March! March to the Fire!"
And battered though they were, bloodied though they staggered, the survivors obeyed.
[Confessor-General Holwen — Ember Line]
The Ember Line smoldered in ruin.
Artillery Witches had gouged the trenches into bloody ravines.
Anointed Heavy Infantry marched with crushing inevitability.
The faithful held, but only barely, threaded together by terror and stubborn prayer.
Confessor-General Holwen stood atop a vox tower riddled with bullet holes, the broken sermon-banner limp in his hand, relic-pistol empty.
The vox coughed static, then delivered its grim verdict:
"Confirmed: Saint Dren extinguished. Saint Grave extinguished. Ember Line isolated. Hold if able."
Holwen said nothing.
He merely closed his eyes, breathing the smoke and ash of the dying trench.
And then—
The sky above the western front split with fire.
It was not artillery.
It was not heresy.
It was not anything crafted by human hands.
The fire licked the heavens, searing the black clouds into fleeing wisps.
The ground itself trembled with the song of rebirth.
Holwen turned toward the light, mouth dry, the weight in his chest lifting for the first time in endless weeks.
The vox crackled again—new, disbelieving, breathless:
"Correction: One Saint persists. One fire yet lives."
Holwen dropped the broken banner into the mud.
He turned to the scattered faithful still fighting in the trenches.
"The Ash Saint stands.
This ground will not fall.
Not while he breathes.
Not while we burn."
And the broken Ember Line, dying, battered, yet unbowed, rose.
*****
Across shattered fronts, through broken trenches and fields soaked in mud, blood, and holy ash, the light of Saint Grave poured outward.
It was not a fire that consumed, it was a fire that forged.
It swept through the Pilgrims like a second heart.
It lifted the broken Redemption soldiers from despair.
It pulled the scattered Crucible Walkers back into grim, burning ranks.
It rattled the Heretic lines to their rotting bones.
Faith that had been choked in blood, drowned in ash, trampled into mud, stood up.
Saint Grave, the Saint of Paint, Fire, and Ash, marched across no-man's-land, barefoot, haloed in burning breath, silent as the grave, unstoppable as prophecy.
He did not sing.
He did not shout.
He simply walked.
And the faithful, broken and burning, followed.
And behind them, beyond the trenches, beyond the no-man's-land, beyond the reach of any corrupted prayer—the Heretic lines trembled.
Because fire had been tried.
Because faith had been scorned.
Because hope had been slain.
And now it had risen again.
And now it walked.