The Hunter's New Path

The acrid stench of burnt magic still clung to Bishop Dark’s nostrils, a phantom perfume of destruction and regret. He stood in the skeletal remains of what had once been a vibrant valley, the silence now a heavy shroud where the screams of the coven had been. Dust motes danced in the slivers of sunlight that pierced the tattered canopy of the sky, each one a tiny, mocking reminder of the life that had been so brutally extinguished. The Church of Radiant Light, in their infinite wisdom and boundless hypocrisy, had sent him to “cleanse.” And cleanse he had, with the brutal efficiency that had become his hallmark, and the Church’s perpetual, grudging admiration.

His Radiant Blade, Soul Sun, hummed faintly at his hip, its light dimmed, its hunger sated. The wounds he’d inflicted on the witches, on Tygorra herself, still glowed with an internal inferno, a testament to the purity of his faith, or perhaps the sheer, unadulterated violence of his soul. He’d done it. He’d eradicated the coven, or what remained of them after the initial… unpleasantness. The children, the ones Tygorra had supposedly been using, were gone. Vanished. Whether they’d been spirited away by some unseen force, or simply melted into the ether, he didn’t know. And frankly, after the carnage, he didn't much care.

His relationship with the Church. Shattered. A polite way of saying he’d told Abbot Kale precisely where he could shove his sermons and his sanctimonious pronouncements. The Abbot, a man whose piety was as thick and suffocating as his robes, had been apoplectic. Bishop Dark, however, had found a strange sort of peace in the venomous exchange. No longer beholden to their rules, to their twisted sense of divine justice, he was… free. Free to be the monster they’d always suspected him to be, and free to chase the ghosts that haunted his own damned life.