The mortal world had long forgotten how to scream.
Not because it lacked pain, but because pain had become normalized, codified, justified, and buried beneath ritual and bureaucracy. The Vatic Lords had spent centuries engineering a silence so profound that even Truth itself feared to echo within it.
And now, in the oldest part of the Earth beneath the ruins of Babel stood the Court of Blood and Silence, the human answer to divine rebellion.
Lucien arrived alone, as demanded. No halo. No sword. No shield of flame.
Only the black robes of an Advocate and the Mark of Amendment seared into his back.
He descended the obsidian steps, each one echoing with whispers of past martyrs.
Inside the Chamber
The court was not a building, it was a wound.
A colossal underground chamber shaped like an inverted cathedral. Instead of altars, there were altars shackled. Instead of light, there was the memory of light, devoured by veils of scripture-ash and the hum of nullifying prayers.
In the center stood the tribunal bench with three figures in blood-red robes. Their faces were blank masks etched with Roman numerals: I, II, and III.
Behind them stood Lex Nocturna, the Silent Prosecutor. It did not speak. It did not move. But the moment Lucien entered, it was written with a quill made from a martyr's femur and ink drawn from condemned veins.
Each stroke of the quill was a charge.
Each word is binding.
The Charges
Lucien's voice rang out as he approached the bench.
"State your grounds."
The Tribunal of Silence did not answer with voices.
Instead, a scroll unrolled from the rafters long enough to scrape against the bone-tiled floor.
Charges against the Advocate:
1. Subversion of Divine Order.
2. Harboring of Echoes deemed unclean.
3. Amendment of Law without full Tribunal consensus.
4. Weaponizing compassion as a destabilizing force.
5. Granting speech to the silenced without price.
Lucien read them all. Then calmly said:
"Only five? I must be losing my edge."
A hiss of disapproval moved through the silent gallery, witnesses veiled in chains, monks, inquisitors, exorcists, and corrupted saints.
Then the Silent Prosecutor raised its hand.
Time froze.
Trial Begins
Within a blink, Lucien found himself bound not by force, but by narrative.
Chains of precedent wrapped around his limbs, rules forged from centuries of belief, tradition, and theological manipulation. It was not power that trapped him. It was history.
He stood in a new chamber, one shaped like a courtroom and a nightmare combined.
A soul approached the witness stand dragged from the River of Echoes by the Prosecutor.
A girl.
Saphira.
She looked at Lucien with terrified eyes… but her voice was not hers. It had been rewritten.
"The Advocate rewrote me. He made me believe I was innocent. I... I am not. I asked forbidden questions. I doubted the Church."
Lucien's breath caught.
This was not her echo. This was a forgery.
Gabriel's voice, distant but furious, echoed in his mind: "They're using Echoes against you!"
Lucien stepped forward.
"This is perjury of the soul."
But the Prosecutor raised its quill.
"Objection. The Echo is admissible under Canonical Reflection Clause 33."
Lucien's voice became fire.
"That clause was repealed in the Trial of Saint Ceyla!"
"Only in Heaven," the Tribunal intoned. "Here, the Law is what we say it is."
Reversal
Lucien closed his eyes, centering himself.
The Advocate's power did not lie in brute force. It lay in rhetoric, reason, and a blade sharper than any sword: discernment.
"You've made a mockery of Echo. You've stolen her voice and rewritten her pain. But even forged words carry the scent of their maker."
He raised his hand and the Mark of Amendment on his back flared.
The illusion cracked.
Saphira gasped and suddenly her true echo burst free, wailing through the chamber.
"I never meant to sin! I only wanted answers… I was seven…"
The chamber trembled. The chains on Lucien's arms groaned. Witnesses shuddered as truth seeped back in like firelight into a tomb.
One of the Tribunal members II staggered.
"He's unraveling the seal…"
The Strike
Suddenly, the Lex Nocturna lunged.
In a blur of black flame and blood-wrought law, it struck at Lucien not physically, but symbolically, aiming to erase his right to Advocate status.
But Lucien, now burning with truth, countered.
He didn't raise a weapon.
He raised a soul.
Behind him, the Realm of Echoes opened and thousands of voices surged into the court, each one raw, grieving, innocent.
"We speak. We remember. We were judged wrongly."
The Silent Prosecutor faltered.
Lucien's robes turned to wings, his Advocate sigil blazing anew.
"You want silence? Then hear everything at once."
Judgment Shattered
The Court of Blood and Silence, thought to be eternal, began to fracture.
The cries of the Echoes roared louder than any gavel. Pillars of ancient dogma split. Tapestries woven with martyr's tongues caught flame not of Hellfire, but of remembrance. The souls Lucien had defended abandoned children, wrongfully executed heretics, silenced prophets rose behind him, their whispers coalescing into a storm.
Lucien stood at the eye of it all.
"You built this place on injustice," he said coldly, facing the Tribunal. "Now you'll drown in the voices you buried."
Tribunal Member II collapsed first. The rune mask shattered as a tide of Echoes poured into his chest, dragging out what remained of his conscience.
I and III stood trembling, barely holding form. The Lex Nocturna once a towering monolith of divine silence now shrieked. Not in fear. In rage.
It drew a sword not made of steel, but of erasure, a weapon meant to undo Lucien from history itself.
"Your name will not be remembered," it hissed, speaking for the first time in centuries. "Your soul will be rendered null."
Lucien stepped forward, wings unraveling into flame.
"Then let memory burn with me."
The Ultimatum
At that moment, time fractured.
The chamber split between moments past, present, and potential futures flowing like blood across broken tiles.
A voice surged within Lucien's mind. Not Gabriel. Not any angel.
But the First Echo is the soul of humanity's original rebellion.
"You have two choices, Advocate. Reform the court… or end it."
"If you reform it, you must sit upon its throne binding yourself to mortal law. You will never leave Earth. You will never fly again."
"If you end it… thousands will die. The chaos of unjudged sin will flood into the mortal world. Heaven will declare open war. You will be hunted."
Lucien's fingers curled into fists. Fire licked at his heels. The Echoes waited.
And then… he looked at Saphira.
The girl whose voice had been stolen. Who now wept freely among the dead.
He knew his answer.
Rewriting the Law
Lucien raised his hand, and the Mark of Amendment bloomed with searing radiance.
He stepped into the central dais, where the Lex Nocturna had first stood. The Tribunal recoiled. The Echoes grew quiet, watching.
"I will not crown myself," he said, voice steady. "But I will not leave this court to poison another soul."
The scroll of charges unfurled before him, ancient and cursed.
Lucien reached into the parchment and rewrote it.
Words burned away. New ones emerged.
"Justice is not obedience."
"Truth is not silence."
"A soul is not a sin."
The court began to morph its structure breaking, reforming.
No longer a dungeon, but an open sanctuary.
The chains vanished. The veils lifted.
For the first time in a thousand years… the Court of Blood and Silence listened.
The Cost
Lucien fell to his knees, trembling. The Mark on his back dimmed, its power spent.
He had not ended the court. But he had bound himself to it.
He would never leave Earth again.
Gabriel's voice came through one last time, fractured and distant.
"You did it, brother. But they will come now… The Thrones. The ones I fear."
Lucien looked up, eyes blazing with pain and purpose.
"Let them."
And from the shadows beyond the court deep beneath Babel a new door opened.
Beyond it stood three figures cloaked in robes of starlight and void.
The Thrones had arrived.