A Knight Who Eternally Regresses

Audin examined his inner self to check the restraints placed upon his body.

Soon, an image rose to mind—golden chains tightly wrapped around his entire body. Because he’d drawn slightly upon divinity of late, the thin veils that had once covered those chains appeared to have frayed and vanished, yet the chains themselves remained intact.

The chains were his own doing. The veils covering them had been placed by others.

As he checked his restraints for the first time in a long while, memories from the past came rushing in like a flood.

Moments he’d deliberately ignored.

“To defend heresy—is that what you believe an inquisitor should do?!”

The first to shout was the corrupted bishop.

“I trusted you because you worshipped the God of War. Ha!”

Another priest’s voice echoed in memory.

“What will you do?”

There had also been the one who taught him and guided him to this place.

The former pope, who was said to see people’s futures even though he himself was blind.

He stepped down from the papal seat just ten days after taking it.

“This is not the place I belong, my brothers and sisters.”

He cast off the mantle of authority and later spoke to Audin in private.

“I just had a feeling I wouldn’t live long in that position.”

It was an absurd reason, but he added that it was a conclusion he’d reached after glimpsing his own future.

The memories tangled together, but in the end, when the man who’d shown fatherly affection to an orphan like him had asked—

Audin had been unable to answer easily.

It had been right after he’d become a criminal for failing to fulfill his duty as an inquisitor.

“You don’t know what to do?”

“Yes, I’ve lost my way.”

Audin replied, kneeling.

“A shepherd who has lost his way has only one place to go.”

The former pope, a man he regarded as a father, spoke sternly.

“To the place shrouded in darkness below the earth.”

Audin responded again.

It was doctrine—the god who governed sun and moon would weigh one’s sins.

Sinners would be sent to the God of War and judged.

Those found guilty by the God of War would be imprisoned in the underworld.

All of it written in the sacred scriptures.

Audin had served the God of War. The former pope had served a god with two faces.

One of those faces was the warden of the prison crafted by the divine and the god of love; the other was the god of radiance and holy light, who judged the wicked.

Two aspects that appeared to be opposites, yet were in truth one and the same.

A god who descended deep into the underworld to offer love.

He left behind the light within his body to illuminate the world above.

Thus, one god became the warden of the underworld prison—an embodiment of darkness and love who embraced sinners.

The other became the punisher of sin with holy light and radiance.

“You are someone who will carry the light of radiance.”