Season 1: Awakening the Viliness

  Ch 1: The Final Trial

  The altar bloomed beneath her feet. Roses burst through stone, their petals dripping light. The divine current surged, golden and fierce, a river of devotion drawn through her body and made holy in flesh.

  Fae stood in the sanctum's heart, barefoot and burning. She had become more than Saintess. More than vessel. She was radiance incarnate—her skin ced with sacred script, each line a name, a vow, a prayer once whispered between trembling mouths. Behind her, her trials knelt.

  The Archmage lifted his hand, sigils shimmering like truths too bright to speak. “I give her the truth beyond knowing,” Caithros intoned, voice cracking the air like lightning.

  The Knight held his sword with the bde pnted in the soil, his head bowed so deeply that his soft brown hair brushed the hem of her robes in reverence. “I give her my honour, unbroken,” Gavriel whispered.

  The Priest bled into the basin at her side, the wine-red offering trailing down his bare arms. “I give her my surrender,” said Mireth, and the hymn faltered.

  And the Prince—Darian, her love—pressed his forehead to hers, the delicate crown upon it catching the light between them. It gleamed like a promise made skin to skin, faith to faith. “I give her my kingdom,” he said, “and the name I was born to die for.”

  The sky opened and the altar bzed as the divine current surged into a storm. Fae opened her eyes—not with sight, but with light. She moved, descending the steps not with motion, but with certainty, each footfall weightless, guided by faith alone. The air bent around her like reverence given shape. Roses parted at her passing. And in her hands, power gathered with the slow inevitability of prophecy fulfilled.

  Across the sanctum, he stood. The st trial. The failed one. Luceran. He did not kneel. His eyes—shadowed gold—held her as if he saw something else behind the light. Something fractured. He stepped from the shadows like a memory returning—barefoot, bare-chested, crowned in thorns. Divine light bloomed, but he carried a darkness that did not belong to night. It clung to him like ink in holy water, bleeding silver-bck vines up his arms. No chains. No guards. And still, none dared breathe.

  Luceran—once a Duke, now a ruin—moved with the slow certainty of someone who had already died and kept walking. With every step, roses wilted at his heels, the divine current shivering around him, torn between striking and surrender. He did not look at her first. His gaze went to the altar, where the roses had bloomed too early, as if mourning had preceded the miracle.

  “You were te,” he said softly, and the sanctum leaned in.

  Fae did not falter. Her voice rang high and clear, blessed and hollowed. “You were loved, Luceran. But love unreturned becomes ruin.”

  At that, something in him shifted. Not anger. Not regret. Recognition. “She said that too,” he murmured. “Before she burned.”

  Fae faltered. Gavriel instinctively lifted his shield, Mireth's voice caught mid-hymn, and the divine current itself wavered. But Luceran didn’t look at them. He didn’t need to. A sharp crack split the ground beneath the sanctuary, and from the shadows below, something began to rise.

  She was still beautiful. Even in death, Nysera's body bore the shape of reverence. Coiled in ritual bindings, limbs in sacred geometry, her skin glimmered beneath preserved silk. Sigils pulsed with unholy light. Not pure. Not sanctified. Used.

  Luceran did not reach for her. He didn’t weep. He stood as her corpse floated, suspended like a ruined star. The vines on his arms bloomed, then withered. “She thought herself untouchable,” he said. “A lesson in restraint. A leash made flesh. She never loved. Only drained. But she had power.”

  And then—he took it. The divine current reeled. From Nysera’s body, power surged upward—ritual pain, corrupted sanctity, Luceran’s raw will. It crashed into him like a tide. Her soul, already gone, had left a vessel for wrath.

  Fae screamed as the current struck her like lightning. Her body convulsed, sacred script flickering to dim embers across her skin. Caithros reeled, crying out in pain. Mireth crumpled, the hymn severed mid-breath. Gavriel's shield shook as blood ran from his nose. And Luceran—his eyes glowed silver and red, suffused with divine fire. Not with love. With purpose.

  “Four men,” he said quietly. “Four beautiful fools. And not one of you knows Fae will be your undoing.” He stepped forward. The altar groaned. “She is not salvation. She is bait. She is hypocrisy.” The power fred. Roses burned. The sanctum trembled.

  He lifted his hand.

  Caithros flinched, fingers twitching with spells unshed. Gavriel's grip tightened around his hilt. Mireth, still bleeding, whispered fragments of a hymn through clenched teeth. Darian averted his gaze, jaw set. But Luceran’s eyes never wavered. He looked only at Fae.

  “You wear salvation like a crown, Saintess,” he said, low and sure, “but you don’t even see who you’re trying to save.”

  Fae raised her hands, light coiling in her palms like serpents of glory. The current answered with a roar, crashing through the sanctum in waves of searing brilliance. Luceran stepped forward. The stone beneath his feet cracked. Power smmed into him—sigils fring, light screaming, air fracturing around his body—and still, he walked. Through it. Into it. Roses ignited in his wake. The ground smoked and burned. Light bled from his skin like memory made manifest. And still, he did not stop.

  “This is not love,” he said, voice raw. “This is obedience dressed in finery.”

  Fae did not change. She brought her hands together. Judgment struck.

  For one breathless moment, he glowed like the goddess he defied. His crown of thorns fell to ash.

  His smile was almost gentle.

  “In another life,” he whispered, “I think I loved someone who saw me.”

  And then he fell.

  The current recoiled with a sound like torn breath. The altar sang with the echo of ending and beginning. Fae stood above him, crowned in living fme, untouched and terrible. The final trial had ended. And the world, trembling, believed it had been saved.

  Luceran y where the altar had split, his body wreathed in ash and roses, as if the sanctum mourned him. Smoke curled from his skin in thin, whispering tendrils. The silver-bck vines that had marked him with divine defiance were now charred, retreating into the scorched earth. Above him, Fae remained untouched. Her robes stirred not with wind, but with presence, luminous with the remnants of judgment. Her breath came slow, deliberate. She no longer stood as Saintess. She stood as something born of myth—anointed, ascended, divine.

  One by one, her lovers knelt. Gavriel kissed her hem. Caithros folded his hands. Mireth’s eyes brimmed. Darian id his crown at her feet. They did not touch her. They only knelt.

  The altar reformed with blinding light, and within it moved a figure—woman-shaped, fme-bound, faceless. Whether it was the Goddess herself or belief incarnate, none could say. Fae’s body split with radiance, glowing lines threading across her limbs and face. She smiled—not with joy, but with peace, as if she had already stepped beyond them. Her feet lifted from the stone. Petals rose with her, caught in a windless spiral of light. The divine current wrapped around her like fire spun into silk, drawing her higher, unraveling her into something more than flesh.

  There was no scream. No final words. Only a breath. Only light. And then—she was gone.

  The sky split. Temples bloomed. Children cried in joy. The current surged. Above the sanctum, a new temple rose, its spires unfurling in air and gold. In the square below, the crowd wept and cheered as one.

  The Saintess had saved them.

  The train stank of cheap deodorant and a man coughing wetly into a Tesco bag two seats down. Mira didn’t flinch. Not when the lights flickered. Not when someone’s tinny headphones spat out the worst remix of a love song she’d ever heard. Not even when the drunk banker in a loosened tie sneezed directly onto the pole she was leaning against.

  She’d had worse commutes. Hell, she’d had worse Tuesdays.

  She shifted her weight, wedged between a chipped advert for ser hair removal and a woman audibly crying into a Pret sandwich, and turned the page. One hand curled around the steel pole for bance, the other held her copy of To Ruin You Tenderly, already softened at the spine, corners bent, margin notes smudged from rereads and regret.

  The Saintess had just ascended. Again.

  And so, with her final breath, the world was remade in love’s image. The Goddess smiled once more.

  Mira snorted.

  “Sure she did,” she muttered, and flipped the book closed with a sigh that fogged the gss beside her. “Right after letting the hottest man in the story die like a divine chew toy.”

  She tilted her head back against the window. The underground rattled past in ghostly smears of orange and grey. The fluorescent lights above her buzzed in time with her pulse.

  “I’m just saying,” she continued to no one, voice low, dry, “if I’d spent ten chapters watching a broken death-god in a crown of thorns try to survive the world’s horniest church, and this was the ending? I’d burn the altar too.”

  No one on the train cared. Which was probably for the best.

  Mira stared down at the book in her hand. The cover was cracked where the title curled, the rose motif faded from too many hours of being stuffed in bags and under pillows. But it was still hers. Still the one constant thing in a life of too many fluorescent-lit offices, forgotten birthdays, and managers who thought ‘we’re a family’ meant they could call her at midnight on a weekend.

  Luceran had deserved better. He wasn’t perfect. Gods, no. He was terrifying. Violent. Starving in ways she didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to unpack. But he’d been real. Twisted and reverent and aching for someone to choose him without a script.

  Instead, he’d died on his knees in front of a girl who glowed when she cried.

  “Saintess Fae,” Mira muttered, rolling her eyes. “Because nothing says romance like turning into a floating lightbulb and abandoning your hot, mentally unstable harem.”

  The train lurched. So did her stomach. The lights blinked once, then twice.

  Then everything went dark.

  The train kept moving—just long enough for the dark to feel alive. Just long enough for Mira to lift her head and frown. And then it all shattered.

  There was no screech, no cinematic moment of screaming metal. Just a shudder, deep and wet, like the train had hit something it couldn’t chew through. Bodies shifted. A bottle rolled. Someone yelped.

  And then—

  Weightlessness.

  The pole ripped out of her hand. Her bag shot forward. Something hit her shoulder—sharp, sudden, hot. The floor tilted. Time folded. The Pret sandwich dy screamed, or maybe Mira did. Her book flew past her face, pages fluttering open like wings.

  Then came the sound.

  A hollow, thunderous crunch. Metal sobbing against itself. A pop—like bone. Light returned just long enough to show a spray of gss, a shape in midair, the banker’s tie curled around a neck that wasn’t his anymore.

  Everything went sideways. Then it didn’t.

  She expected beeping. The sterile tang of antiseptic. A nurse muttering about paperwork.

  Instead, she woke to silk.

  Warmth cradled her from below—plush, yielding, too luxurious to be practical. Her fingers sank into fabric softer than anything she could afford, and the air didn’t smell like disinfectant. It smelled like roses. Like old incense. Like something ancient pretending to be comfort.

  Her eyes blinked open, slow. No fluorescent ceiling. No white tiles.

  A canopy. Wine-red. Edged in silver embroidery.

  She frowned.

  Hospitals didn’t have canopies.