The Crack in the Sacred Tomb

The forest was silent.

There was nothing remarkable about that silence, for this forest—Caelum—was a sanctuary suffused with divine power. On this mountain, where densely clustered birch trees were the only thing to be found, not even a bird's wingbeat could be heard, let alone the cry of a beast. The majesty of God pressed down upon the entire forest, making it a place ordinary people could scarcely enter at all.

And that meant even the smallest change would stand out, large and unmistakable.

"Nothing unusual to report."

"Are you certain?"

The man had been staring steadily past the birch trunks all this while, and he frowned at the scout's report. Another knight, standing at his side and watching his expression, offered his opinion under his breath.

"Bran doesn't make mistakes. Could the tip-off itself have been wrong?"

"Calman's right. Plenty of fools claim to have heard the voice of God after losing themselves a little too deeply in prayer. This is clearly another case of the same."

Bran, who had scouted the perimeter of the sanctuary and returned leading the soldiers, was renowned even within the order for his reconnaissance skill. If he had judged there to be nothing amiss, then that was the truth of it.

Even after his adjutants Calman and Ixion had spoken, the man could not tear his eyes from the forest for a long while. He too, upon arriving here just as Bran's report had indicated, had sensed no anomaly whatsoever.

Besides, reports from believers claiming to have experienced a miracle of God were in fact quite common. The more fervent the faithful, the more firmly they believed themselves connected to the divine, and they would mistake some trivial natural phenomenon for an answer from God, then excitedly report it to the Order.

Of course, those things were neither answers from God nor gracious revelations. They themselves simply couldn't be persuaded to accept it.

Just as Ixion had said, this report too was most likely the same. If it wasn't, then what?

This was a region civilians couldn't even approach. A claim that the ground had suddenly shaken and a great roar had sounded from the heart of the sanctuary lacked all plausibility. It was far more reasonable to assume that someone worn down by their duties, exhausted, had heard a phantom sound.

Yet having reached that conclusion, the man—Asselin—somehow could not look away from the forest. And at last, he made his decision.

"Vice-Captain, you intend to go yourself?"

"Hold the perimeter. Wait until I signal."

He would inspect the interior of the forest in person.

It wasn't merely to settle this uneasy feeling. The person who had given him the task of surveying the sanctuary of Caelum was a singular one, and so he would do the very best that was in his power to do.

At Asselin's words, Bran muttered to himself, his face sour with displeasure.

"As if we weren't busy enough already, handing the Vice-Captain a task like this. Isn't the Captain going too far?"

At Bran's grumbling, Ixion hastily hushed him.

"Mind your tongue. It's not from the Captain—it's a mission from someone far above him."

"The Lux, herself?"

Asselin let the shock in Bran's voice pass him by without a thought. There was nothing to hide about the fact that this mission had been given personally—Asterion, chief prelate and supreme pontiff of the Order, summoning Asselin directly to issue it. If it had been some operation to be carried out in secret, he would never have brought his subordinates here in the first place.

Lately, Asselin had been busy handling unremarkable tasks in a conspicuously public manner. He knew as well that beneath it all, a struggle over the Order's influence lurked, but he paid it no particular mind. Asselin's sword, useful as it was for defending doctrine, was of little use in exercising political power. It was enough for him to faithfully carry out the duties assigned to him and devote himself to spreading God's teachings.

In that sense, guarding a sanctuary was one of the symbolic duties of the holy knights. For Asselin to appear here in person, leading his men to survey the grounds, would serve as a reaffirmation of what the Order stood for.

"It's a tour of the sanctuary, after all."

At Calman's words, Ixion murmured with a note of pride.

"Only someone of our Vice-Captain's caliber would even be permitted entry by God."

Leaving the murmurs of his subordinates behind him, Asselin strode up the mountain.

Where he stood now was the sanctuary. Designating the area within a fixed radius of the shrine as sacred ground and barring entry to it was purely a matter of managing the Order's relics. Naturally, only a handful of high-ranking figures within the Order were permitted to come and go from a sanctuary at all.

After word spread of a few intruders who had forced their way into a sanctuary and died for reasons unknown, the restrictions grew stricter still. People whispered that the trespassers had incurred the wrath of God, and in turn they came to revere the few members of the Order allowed inside.

Asselin was one of them. And so everyone revered and admired Asselin—the Vice-Captain of Radilion's Central Holy Knights, trusted by the chief prelate, the next Captain-in-waiting, Asselin Frixus.

Though the man receiving all that expectation and respect did not, in truth, feel quite as devout as they imagined him to be.

It was a great blessing to be permitted within a sanctuary, and yet….

But what of it? Inside the sanctuary, inside Caelum, there was nothing but birch trees. A scene like this could be found anywhere at all, in any common wood that was no sanctuary whatsoever.

To be sure, if one went all the way to the forest's heart, there existed the shrine that held the Saintess's tomb. But it was, after all, merely a tomb. Its entrance lay sealed, and the dense birch forest ringed the shrine as if to protect it.

According to what was handed down, the Saintess of old had been the sole human being granted God's power, and with it she had annihilated every evil upon the land. Lightning was said to strike at a single gesture of her hand; mountains of monster corpses were said to pile up in her wake—but the records were so thoroughly embellished that the truth was impossible to know.

In any case, even that belonged to the past. Whether or not the Saintess had truly channeled the power of God, no one now wielded any such miracle-working might. Asterion, the Order's supreme leader, had chosen not to chase after a divine power that might never have existed and might never appear again; instead she led the Order with strict and righteous discipline and pure, upright faith. Asselin, agreeing with her philosophy, devoted himself wholeheartedly to supporting it.

In the end, all that remained here was a tomb for the dead, and corpses.

Asselin had toured the interior of the sanctuary before, for one reason or another, and as he compared the forest before him with what he remembered, his expression went blank with indifference. Nothing had changed in the slightest. As he had expected, no other stirring could be felt in the wood. Only the lenticels of the birch trees stared out at him from every direction, like sentinels watching an intruder who had violated the sanctuary.

What difference would going any further make? It was the instant Asselin's steps began to slow.

Tap.

His keen hearing caught the sound of something dropping—a small, distinct tap. In this windless moment, when no other movement could possibly exist in the forest.

Asselin, who had been turning away without a thought, felt his face harden. Resting his hand on the hilt at his waist, he advanced slowly, his footsteps deadened to nothing. A rapid sweep of his surroundings showed him the same unbroken stretch of birch as before. But he did not relax his guard, pressing forward with his presence smothered as far as it would go.

Beyond the thick undergrowth, a black rock came into view. The boulder that sealed away the Saintess's tomb. Asselin's eyes narrowed.

The massive rock blocking the cave's entrance had been shaped by human hands. Across its smooth surface, carvings had been etched in intaglio—murals honoring the Saintess who had battled a wicked evil. Beneath them were engraved the name of the tomb's occupant and a brief account of her life. It was thanks to that stone that the Order had come to know the cave was the Saintess's tomb.

And in this moment, Asselin saw it: a crack he had never seen before had opened in the upper portion of the boulder that commemorated the Saintess's deeds. Too high up, if it had been the work of someone striking it deliberately.

Had it formed naturally, simply through the passage of time?

But this was a sanctuary, and that cave was the Saintess's tomb. Would a shrine that had stood undisturbed for five hundred years suddenly start falling apart now?

The surroundings were still quiet. The only difference was the crack in the rock. No doubt the sound Asselin had heard had been a shard of stone breaking loose along that fracture.

Should he go back and report to the Order? Keep watching a while longer? Or else—

His deliberation did not last long. With his hand still resting on the hilt of his sword, Asselin strode without hesitation up to the tomb.

There was no fear. He knew objectively how formidable his own skill was, and he knew that the living creatures on this land who could best him could be counted on one hand.

Whatever appeared, he would meet it with force, and he would never lose.

And if it proved to be an unknown power—then he would become the first of God's creations to witness a miracle of God, and that too would be a holy thing. Though Asselin, naturally, did not believe for a moment that he would be the one to experience such a miracle.

And so, the instant Asselin drew near the boulder, the crack ran further downward, as though it had only been waiting for him.

Kuuung!

The fissure deepened in the space of a breath, and the boulder began to split nearly in two. Once the balance of its weight started to give way, the crack widened rapidly. And through the yawning gap, the blackness of the interior began to flicker into view. Asselin gripped his sword hilt tight and glared into the widening crevice. Then, as the crack reached the middle of the boulder—

From the black seam, a white hand burst out.