Gillium rushed forward and swung down at the creature’s massive arm: yellow aura — the signature of the Father’s Paladins, wrapped around his blade like a golden serpent. The blessed blade seared the creature’s flesh and repelled it a step. Its body collided against the wall of the smithy behind it. Half the building collapsed under the creature’s weight.

  “Aelior, Source of All...”The prayer began. The light of the evening flowed into the alley as the Five that followed after Gillium into that alley held up their pendants.

  The sound of the prayer beginning drew out the wrath of the demon. It turned its massive body towards the sound of the nearest priest. Leith forward and slammed his shield into the knee of the creature, and Gillium swung his sword upward. An arc of glimmering gold shot out as if an extension of his blade and caught it in the gut. It wasn’t enough to cut very deeply, but it staggered him further.

  “Light from Light, Beginning without end,” The prayer continued. “Your presence fills the world You spoke into being.”

  Orange light, like that of a flame, began to emit from each of the pendants, as the dying light of day began to glow all the brighter. The demon swung its arm like a giant mallet toward the priest once more. Leith leapt up with his shield and caught the

  blow. The golden orb shimmered once more as it repelled the strike, but the force flung Leith into the roof. The thatch collapsed underneath him, and the floor beneath bowed and sank. The daub cracked from top to bottom, and part of the wall fell off into the alleyway in large chunks of wood and mud.

  “I seek Your Face.”

  The prayer echoed down the alley. A pillar of light shot out from each of the pendants and into the skies, dying as it collided against the setting citrine. Leith uttered a prayer of his own, and light, in the shape of a ram’s head, spat out from the front of his shield and staggered the Demonic monster. Gillium uttered his own, and the serpent coiling his blade became a bird and struck the creature in the chest. Demonic blood flowed from its wounds and seared the ground as it oozed out of its fur colored chest and splattered against the ground.

  “By the mark upon my back…” Each of the backs began to take on the same glow. Their voices steadied and were calm. Not a hint of hesitation moved through them. “By the destiny You have written; by the blood of Your giving, let me be a spear against the Void that hungers…”

  The light surrounded them as a pillar, as it did once before when they first had their destinies written upon their backs. The demon looked to the heavens and let out a growling howl. The sound shook Gillium to his core. All his muscles flexed and siezed and cramped all at once, and his heart began to quake.

  Death. This thing exuded death. Every movement was the movement of the end coming for them all; indeed, for all the citizens of Astaire. Once this Demon killed the lot of them in that small alley, he would go on to kill all of the city, and it would be his fault. It would be his fault for being so weak. His knees trembled, and his mind blackened.

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  “Brother! Snap out of it!”

  Leith’s golden aura wrapped around the Advent. That mortal terror fled his body as a screaming shade, and Gillium took up arms again. Leith’s strength lay in his Body, and his Presence. Presence, was perhaps the most subtle of those gifts given to the world. In the hands of a warrior, it allowed them to force focus on themselves. In the hands of a merchant, it allowed them to get better prices. In the hands of a con-artist, itallowed them to persuade people more easily.

  “You WILL focus on me, monster!” Leith yelled.

  An explosion of aura comes out from the man with the shield, on the second story of the burning building. The gold was painted with a reddish tint as Leith projected his Presence upon the demonic being in a taunt. Try as the creature might, it couldn’t pull its attention from the Paladin that stood before it. IT swung down with all of its might upon the man. The floor cracked, as did the dome of light, as he was pushed through the second floor and into the first. Half the building caved in.

  “Let no demon stand before Your light.” The orange light shifted towards blinding white. “Let no apostate twist what You have made.” Their chanting became melodic. “Let no shadow claim what bears Your name.”

  Leith pushed himself out of the rubble and rushed forward, slamming the head of his kite shield into the monster. It staggered back and fell upon the burning apothecary. Rubble half buried the creature’s head. Noxious fumes of burning nightshade, snowdrop, and fox’s glove billowed to the skies in black plumes as it was released by the thatch roof’s collapse. Gillium, the younger brother, stepped forward and slashed at the creature’s leg to further unbalance it.

  “By the mark upon the faithful.” The melodic chant became a vociferous demand. “Void, return to Void. Demon, return to judgment. Shadow, flee from the Light.”

  The pillars of white light joined together around one of the faithful five. Five voices became four.

  “Aelior, hear us.”

  The demon tried to push itself out of the rubble. Lithe stumbled out of the rubble. His body was purple and black.

  “Aelior, defend us.”

  It uttered another guttural growl, and Lithe countered it with a shout of his own.

  “Aelior, be our beginning, and our end.”

  The white pillar lifted up from the man, leaving behind a withered husk that turned to dust. The pillar slammed into the Demon. It screeched and screamed as the Father’s Light descended upon it with all of his fury. Fur turned to ash. Horns cracked, and the force of the pillar of life snuffed out the smoke and flame.

  By the time that the demon had been banished, the fighting within the streets had died down. Those guards who remained, and the remaining 9 of the twenty clergy that went out to confront the Carrolians, helped one another tend to their injuries.

  This was the first major escalation of the war between the Seven Kingdoms and the Demonic Realms that the world had seen in a score of years. That tentative malaise of small border skirmishes and miasmic disruptions was shaken by the introduction of a single Boy with the unusually high Depth. No one there, however, save for Gillium and Leith, knew this. If the widower, and newly orphaned, who were left then in grief, knew that those fifty deaths in that clustered city block were put in action to protect the life of one boy, how would they react? How would the world react, once the machines of war began to slowly grind to life in Camareth for the first time in half a century, that they would do so in defense of a singular child from the slums?