He blasted past Cyrus, connecting shoulder to shoulder for good measure. Cyrus flung his hands in the air, cast his eyes to the heavens in a plea for patience, and then hurried after. He meant to ask another question, but Mari and Stasia were both staring by the time they’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Cyrus had a feeling the paragon wouldn’t share while in their presence, so he kept his mouth shut and followed Arn outside.

“Where in blazes are you going?” he asked as Arn pulled his metal gauntlets off the clips to his belt and jammed his hands back into them.

“To the church. I must have dropped it there.”

Cyrus momentarily froze from the sheer audacity of the plan.

“You want to go back?”

His face may have been covered, but Arn’s eyes were visible through the holes in the fox skull, and there was no hiding his absolute impatience with this conversation.

“Yeah? Got a problem with that? Then go inside, make yourself some tea, and stay out of my affairs.”

Cyrus’s brain hiccupped multiple times as he tried to put his thoughts in order.

“Heretic, we just left the church. We killed a magistrate and a half-dozen priests. That whole building is going to be crawling with soldiers, paragons, maybe even the Imperator himself. We can’t just… go back.”

“Who ever said ‘we,’ Vagrant?” Arn called over his shoulder.

Cyrus dashed after the burly man while putting on his skull mask.

“I did, because I’m not letting you go alone.”

The “church” was known as the Twin Sanctuary, or at least it had been before the Uplifted Church claimed it as their own. Now it was the God-Incarnate’s Haven, a name no one on the island used unless forced. From the beginning, the Twin Sanctuary had been built with unity between the gods Endarius and Lycaena in mind. The feathered Lion and floating Butterfly had chased and flown about each other in the original dozen painted windows. Those windows had been smashed out and replaced with transparent glass that didn’t seem to ever fit quite right. Statues of the gods had once loomed above the grand double doors at the top of the steps. Now broken, jagged stone was all that remained, looking like a gaping wound.

Cyrus and Arn lurked at the far end of the street leading to the church, observing the lingering group of soldiers standing at the front steps. No doubt those soldiers were there because of the last attack Thorda’s group had succeeded in earlier tonight, during which they had slain the church’s presiding magistrate.