“She was sacrificed!” Ibai’s voice ripped through the lingering phantom of Amaia’s despair, sharp and sudden. The bronze bell, still clutched in Eneko’s hand, clattered against the damp earth. Eneko remained sprawled, half-buried in the mud and fallen leaves, his face a tableau of dawning horror, eyes fixed on Lide. She stood by her loom, a shimmer of sorrow, her form wavering, as if the raw revelation had caused her own essence to tremble. “No,” Eneko whispered, a pathetic sound devoid of his usual bluster. “The Order… they would know. They would have detected…” His voice trailed off, lost in the chasm of his crumbling convictions. He scrambled back a pace, away from the cottage’s threshold, as if the truth itself might scorch him. “It’s impossible. Ritualists cleanse blight. They do not… enable…” Ibai strode forward, crossing the invisible boundary of the counter-ward. The air still tasted of ozone and churned loam from their clash. He knelt, not in supplication, but with a fierce, quiet resolve. “The Lumin Cordis sees only what it wants to see, Eneko. Or what it is permitted to see. What you felt from this threshold, what you saw just now… it was not taint. It was pain. A binding forged in desperation, not malice.” Lide, her features a study in fragile grief, turned her translucent gaze towards Eneko. Her lips moved, though no sound emerged, a silent plea that seemed to vibrate in the very air. Ibai, reading the tilt of her chin, placed a hand on the cold, dew-kissed stone of the doorframe. “She remembers the blight, Eneko. The one creeping through the lowland basin. Blackening the roots, poisoning the spring. Amaia believed this rite, binding Lide’s heart to her loom, was the only ward strong enough to stop it.” Eneko pushed himself upright, wiping mud from his cheek with a shaking hand. His gaze drifted to the ancient, gnarled oak that dominated the distant skyline, its upper branches already skeletal against the grey sky. A shudder passed through him, a tremor of understanding replacing his former zeal. “The *Corrupted Scourge*,” he murmured, the name a hushed admission. “It’s real. The elders… they’ve been receiving reports. Suppressing them. Claiming it’s localized plant decay, not a true spiritual corrosion.” His eyes, usually sharp with judgment, were now haunted. “They sent me here, to this remote section, because the local wellsprings are showing anomalous readings. Not just this *aintzin* well. Others, deeper in the folds of the *Errekaren* mountains.” Ibai felt a jolt of cold realization. “Then this wasn’t just a simple cleansing assignment. They sent you because they suspected something greater was at play. Something they didn’t want known.” Eneko nodded slowly, his former self-righteousness dissolving like mist in the morning sun. “They’re trying to contain it, quietly. To prevent panic. To prevent… questions. If the populace knew the *Corrupted Scourge* had breached the outer reaches of the *Errekaren* territory, that our ‘cleansings’ were failing…” He looked at Lide, then at Ibai, a new, unsettling clarity in his gaze. “They’d lose faith. In us. In the entire *Lumin Cordis* doctrine.” Lide’s form flickered again, a golden strand on her loom snapping with a faint *thwip*. Ibai felt a pang of raw fear. “We have to act,” he said, his voice urgent. “Lide is fading. Her essence is tied to that woven cloth. Every memory she regains, every truth we uncover, unravels a part of her. If we don’t fulfill her regret, if we don’t find Amaia, she will be gone forever. Not just cleansed, but utterly unmade.” Eneko’s gaze hardened, but this time, it wasn’t with condemnation. It was with a nascent defiance. “The elders call any interaction with a *laru* an impurity. Any deviation, heresy. Yet you… you performed a counter-ward. You preserved a spirit. You *fought* the Order’s will.” He rose, a new resolve setting his jaw. “And I… I saw a vision of a desperate sister, sacrificing her own blood to save a village. An offering the *Lumin Cordis* pretends isn’t happening.” “The Order has abandoned this basin,” Ibai stated, his voice quiet but firm. “They’ve abandoned Amaia to face the consequences of a ritual she performed out of terror. And they’ve abandoned Lide to a slow, agonizing erasure.” Eneko looked at the withered plants in the garden, the almost imperceptible black veins on some of the leaves. He looked at Lide, a ghost of a weaver, clinging to existence by the thinnest of connections. He looked at Ibai, a junior ritualist who had defied everything he believed in. A slow, grim smile touched Eneko’s lips, devoid of humor. “Then perhaps the Order needs a new voice. A new truth. One woven from the forbidden.” “Will you help?” Ibai asked, the question hanging heavy in the charged air. Eneko stared at the loom, a complex mix of fear, guilt, and burgeoning rebellion in his expression. “I cannot stay here. If I am found, the implications for both of us would be… severe. But the village… it’s only a half-day’s walk to *Zidarrezka*. Amaia would have returned there. It’s where she collected the *aintzin lore* for her dyes. If she is still alive, if she has faced the consequences, I will find her. And I will bring her back.” A rush of relief, so profound it nearly buckled Ibai’s knees, washed over him. A precious window of time. A chance. “Thank you, Eneko,” he managed, the words thick with gratitude. Eneko retrieved his athame and the bronze bell, carefully cleaning the mud from them. He paused, then reached into the inner pocket of his tunic, pulling out a small, folded piece of parchment. It was brittle and discolored, clearly very old. “This was given to me by Master Oriol, a high-ranking ritualist and an old family friend. He was investigating the decay, discreetly. Said it was found among his grandfather’s effects, a journal entry from when this settlement was first founded. He told me it contained a cipher he couldn’t decode, hinting at something ‘deeper than roots’ in this region. He vanished a cycle ago. The Order said he was ‘reassigned’.” Eneko pressed the parchment into Ibai’s hand. “It’s gibberish to me. But you… you read the forbidden texts. Perhaps you will see what we cannot. The Order is hiding something more about this valley, Ibai. Something ancient.” With that, Eneko turned, his strides purposeful. He didn’t look back at the stone house, at Lide, or at Ibai. He simply walked, a figure of a man fundamentally changed, towards the distant, mist-shrouded path leading to the village. Ibai watched him go, the parchment a strange warmth in his palm. He unfolded it, revealing a series of symbols and geometric patterns that meant nothing to him. Yet. Lide drifted closer, her translucent form a sorrowful beacon. He looked at the obscure script, then at the golden thread that had just snapped on the loom. A chilling thought, cold and sharp, pierced through him: if the Order was hiding something ancient about this valley, what else had Amaia, in her desperate fear, truly unleashed? What other forgotten secrets was Lide’s sacrifice tied to, beyond the dying rot? He traced the strange symbols, mindful of unraveling history and the fragility of Lide’s very existence, wondering if he was now just another pawn in a game far older and darker than he could ever comprehend.

An Alliance of Heretics