“But here’s the thing about the truth,” Anders said. “It doesn’t care if you run. It’s still there. And mercy isn’t a lie. It’s just… harder. Harder than fire. Harder than judgment. Because mercy means sitting with the guilt and not burning it away. It means saying, ‘I see what you did. And I’m staying anyway.’”

Anders felt a cold hand close around his spine. He knew exactly what she meant.

The man raised his finger. White fire gathered at the tip. The nuns cowered. Sister Agnes crossed herself.

The man’s black eyes flickered. For just a moment, the brass returned, then vanished.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But if he does, I’ll be here.”

“You’re not the Fury,” Anders said. “You’re the grief. And grief doesn’t need to burn the world. It just needs someone to see it.”

He met the man’s empty gaze.

He looked like an accountant. Thin, pale, with wire-rimmed glasses. But his eyes were wrong. They were the color of molten brass, and they were fixed on the altar.

No one could explain what happened. The diocese sent investigators. The police filed a report. Eventually, they called it a gas leak.

But this time, something was different.

The man laughed. It was a terrible sound, like grinding stones. “No. I’m the part God left out. The part that actually does something.”

Anders didn’t need to look it up. He’d been raised Catholic, even if he’d abandoned it. The verse came to him unbidden: “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!”

The first time Anders felt the Fury, he was seven years old, kneeling in the musty back pew of St. Adalbert’s, bored out of his skull. The priest was droning about fire and brimstone. Anders was drawing a stick-figure dragon in the margin of the hymnal.

The video ended.