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The thing about Ash is that he had supposedly once been human.
Ewron found it difficult to imagine what that version of him could have looked like. He had tried, of course, but the gap between then and now felt too vast.
From what he could piece together, the Federation’s scientists had hollowed Ash out piece by piece, stripping away his humanity until nothing of the original remained.
By every theological definition Ewron has ever studied, knelt over, or preached from the pulpit, Ash is blasphemy made flesh.
He is something born entirely outside God’s architecture, a creature that should not exist within the order of creation.
And Ewron was, generally speaking, a man of faith. A man of God, or so he called himself.
He has a church to prove it, a small one, filled on Sundays with the kind of souls that have been wrung out and left to dry, drawn to ritual the way the shipwrecked are drawn to any light on the water.
He understands them. In some sense, he is one of them.
The Federation tore him from a life he can no longer recall with any real clarity and deposited him here, on an island that seems to exist outside of any map worth consulting.
It was a melting pot of the displaced, countless strangers from different cultures speaking different languages, all of them marooned together for reasons the Federation has never felt obliged to explain.
Living among them, Ewron would be lying if he claimed his faith never wavered. He often wondered why the divine had seen fit to abandon him on this godforsaken island.
But questioning God’s plan was a sin, and his hands were already stained with enough sin and blood.
He had tried to leave his old life behind, believing for a time that his exile on the island was punishment enough to settle the debt. But an assassin’s life rarely releases its hold so cleanly.
After all, it was Ewron who killed Ash’s daughter.
It was an accident, a devastating error entirely his own, and a sin that refuses to wash clean no matter how many times he kneels and begs for absolution.
And somehow, Ewron, a man banished to this island as punishment, a man who had every reason to believe he had been abandoned by the divine and left here to rot, accomplished the impossible.
He made her walk again.
Thus Ash, a being with no soul any church would ever recognize, became the sole witness to a resurrection. He watched a dead thing breathe, move, and rise from the dust, simply because Ewron had willed it so.
Since that day, the two had grown unexpectedly close. Ash now attended church, sitting through every mass in silence, though Ewron knew he did not truly believe any of it.
Together, they had even dug into the earth beneath the floorboards, building a hidden altar for Ash’s daughter. Her power had frightened everyone, even her own father, and the church became the only place that felt sacred, or perhaps secure, enough to keep her.
Today was no different.
Ash arrived at the church as he always did, slipping into the back pew like a shadow cast by the afternoon sun, unobtrusive as he waited for the mass to end.
As Ewron delivered the final blessing, his voice faltered ever so slightly. His eyes drifted, almost against his will, toward the back of the room.
Even now, after all this time, Ash never looked like he belonged here. Everyone else made some small concession for the occasion, but Ash arrived in his stark Regime attire every single week, standing out like a sore thumb.
It wasn’t difficult to understand why. He had no interest in the opinions of the faithful. His attention, from the moment he sat down to the moment the last settler filed out, was fixed on one thing only.
Ewron.
The congregation gathered their meager belongings, whispering quiet words of thanks before shuffling out into the heavy, humid island air.
One by one the pews emptied, until the heavy wooden doors swung shut behind the last of them with a dull, final click.
Ash did not move. He remained seated exactly as he had been throughout the entire service, his posture perfectly straight, hands resting flat on his knees.
Then, without turning from the stained glass window, he spoke. “They pray for salvation from a world they do not understand. Yet the only salvation in this room is buried beneath our feet.”
Ewron exhaled through his nose and wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his vestments. He stepped down from the pulpit, the floorboards creaking softly beneath his weight.
“They pray for peace, Ash,” Ewron replied. “For mercy. For God to look upon this island and remember we are still here.”
Ash rose, every movement smooth and deliberate, stripped of the small unconscious imperfections that marked living flesh. “Do you believe in this?” he asked.
Ewron slowed mid-step. “What’s this, Ash?”
“In God,” Ash answered, tilting his head slightly, studying him like a specimen. “Do you believe in God, Ewron?”
Ewron drew a slow breath. His gaze lifted to the window, where fractured light spilled across the chapel floor in shards of red and gold, before settling back on Ash.
“Of course I do,” he said, turning to face him fully. “I believe this island, the Federation, and all our suffering are not acts of random cruelty. I have to believe there is purpose in it.”
His jaw tightened. “I believe in God because, without Him, we are nothing more than meat and metal left to rot in the sea. And if we are truly here without purpose, then everything we have endured was nothing more than senseless misery.”
It was a beautiful answer. Perfectly shaped, balanced with humility and theological weight, and delivered with the absolute certainty of a saint.
Ash didn’t even blink. “I do not believe you,” he said flatly. “I do not believe you believe what you just said.”
Ewron opened his mouth, but no words followed. He did not know how to answer the accusation.
He wanted to reach for scripture, to raise his voice and drive this artificial blasphemy from his sanctuary. He wanted to feel the righteous fury of a holy man wronged.
But he couldn’t, because Ash was right.
The perfect answer had been nothing but a carefully constructed lie Ewron repeated every morning just to find the strength to put on his robes.
He hadn’t felt God’s grace when he brought that little girl back from the dead. He didn’t feel anything divine when he stood before his congregation, trying to reconnect them to something he himself could no longer touch.
A cold, bitter resentment flared in Ewron’s chest. Ewron hated Ash for it. He hated how something without a soul could look at him and understand him more clearly than any believer ever had.
Unable to hold that piercing, synthetic gaze any longer, Ewron turned away and moved toward the altar. He gripped the edge of the worn wooden table and stayed there, his back to Ash, staring up at the cross mounted on the wall.
“You attend every mass,” Ewron finally said, his voice dropping to a low, rough murmur. “You sit in that pew every week and listen to everything I say. You do not believe a single word of it, yet you keep coming back.”
He tightened his grip on the altar until his knuckles turned white against the dark wood. “And now you come into my church and tell me I do not believe in it.”
“Yes,” Ash replied, without hesitation or any trace of malice.
The wood of the pew creaked softly as Ash stepped out into the aisle and began walking toward the altar. Ewron did not turn. He felt Ash approaching more than he heard him, each step strangely light, as though the room itself resisted acknowledging his presence.
Ash stopped beside him. They stood shoulder to shoulder before the cross, both of them looking up at it in silence.
“You built this place,” he said.
“I did,” Ewron answered, his voice quieter now, stripped of its earlier force, his eyes still fixed forward.
“You did not do that out of obligation.”
Ewron’s fingers loosened slightly on the wood. “A man can build a church,” he murmured, “without being certain God lives in it.”
“Yes,” Ash agreed, his head tilting just a fraction toward the altar. “But he does not build one unless he hopes He might.”
He let the words settle, the silence stretching between them before he spoke again. “Today your voice faltered during the blessing. It has not done so before.”
Ewron let out a breath that was half a laugh, sharp and bitter, though his eyes never left the cross. “I resurrected your daughter, Ash,” he said, his voice dropping into a harsh, defensive whisper.
He finally turned his head, forcing Ash to look at the raw desperation in his eyes. “If pulling a child back from the shadow of death is not proof that I believe in God, that I am connected to something higher, then I do not know what is.”
“You do know,” Ash replied, his voice maintaining that flat, terrifyingly even cadence. “You do not believe it was God who answered you that day. You believe it was you.”
“Listen to me, I don’t possess any power of my own!” Ewron snapped, his composure finally fracturing. “I am a priest. Just a priest.”
“Just a priest,” Ash repeated. “A priest who built a church on an island where God, by your own admission, does not appear to be present. Who buried something extraordinary beneath his own floorboards in order to keep it safe.”
Ewron’s knuckles went bloodless against the edge of the altar, the wood groaning under his weight.
“That is not the behavior of just a priest,” Ash said. “I have no god. I do not have faith. I am not capable of it.”
“But,” he paused, turning back to the cross, and something in the angle of his face shifted in a way Ewron still, after all this time, could not fully read.
“My daughter breathes,” he said softly. “She is beneath this floor, alive, because of you, Ewron, and whatever it is you carry inside you.”
He did not look at him when he said the next words, keeping his gaze fixed on the cross. “If I were capable of faith,” Ash murmured, “I think that would be sufficient evidence.”
Ewron could only stare. The priest in him had nothing left to reach for, the scripture had dried up in his throat.
Slowly, he released his grip on the altar. His fingers were stiff and pale where he had white-knuckled the wood. He looked down at his empty hands for a moment, then at the weathered floorboards beneath their feet.
“That is blasphemy, Ash,” he whispered, though the words lacked the fire of a true believer. They sounded like a script he was reading from memory, something learned so young he had never thought to question whether he believed it.
“There was no divine intervention from the sky, Ewron,” Ash said, shattering the final illusion. “There was only you, bleeding your own life into her until she woke.”
He turned his head slightly, watching the priest the way a man watches a guttering candle, waiting to see if the flame will go out. “If there truly is a God who rules over this island, He is indifferent. But you are not.”
Ewron felt a cold shiver run down his spine.
If his faith was a lie, if the miracle hadn’t been an act of divine mercy but an eruption of something dark and untamed within himself, then what did that make him?
He was an anomaly. A monster of a different kind, masquerading in a priest’s collar. The words almost clawed their way out of his throat. Instead, he forced his gaze back to Ash.
“If what you're saying is true,” Ewron said, the words dragging out of him heavily, “then I have been standing here preaching about grace and divine mercy, when the most powerful thing in this building is something that came out of me.”
He exhaled sharply through his nose, his chest tightening.“What does that make my congregation, Ash? What does it make the people who come here to kneel and ask God for comfort? Are they kneeling to me?”
Ash remained still for a moment. “Do you want them to?”
At the front of the church, the candles had burned down into shallow pools of wax, their flames thinning and wavering against the cold stone. Ewron watched the light flicker across the walls, uneven and restless.
He let out a long, shuddering breath. “Would it scare you,” he whispered finally, “if I said I do?”
Ewron heard himself say it and did not immediately reach to take it back, which was perhaps the most damning part. A better man would have recoiled from the thought. A true priest would have been horrified.
Ewron just felt a hollow, aching emptiness.
“What kind of priest,” he continued, his voice dropping lower, “stands over a congregation and secretly wonders if they are kneeling in the wrong direction?”
Ash did not flinch. He showed none of the visceral disgust a human might display when witnessing the birth of a blasphemer’s pride.
“Humans have always built gods in their own image,” he said evenly. “Why should you not allow them to worship the one standing right in front of them?”
“Because I–” Ewron snapped, the word fracturing under the sudden, suffocating weight of his own honesty. “I gave life back to one girl, and it nearly tore my soul out of my chest to do it. There was nothing divine about it, Ash. I was a monster. I was covered in her blood.”
“I think you looked beautiful in it.”
Ewron stared at Ash, searching his face for any flicker of malice, mockery, or provocation. He found nothing but sincerity.
“That is a strange thing to say,” Ewron whispered, exhaling slowly as he looked back down at his hands.
They were ordinary hands. Calloused at the palms, ink-stained at two fingers from the ledger he kept, and slightly swollen at the right knuckle where an old fracture had never set cleanly.
He had never considered them capable of anything extraordinary until the day they were.
“Do you remember our promise?” Ash asked, his voice dropping an octave.
Ewron looked up from his calluses. “The promise to kill everyone on this island?”
“Yes,” Ash said softly.
Ewron let out a short, humorless sound that was not quite a laugh, more like a breath caught in the throat of a dying man. “I remember.”
“I used to be an assassin,” he said at last, his voice steady but distant, as if he were describing a ghost. “That is how I introduced myself before building this church.”
“I remember that, yes,” Ash said. “You wore white, and you carried three knives. None of them were for prayer.”
A faint, tired smile touched the corner of Ewron’s mouth, though it failed to reach his eyes. “Funny thing,” he murmured, “to go from that to this.”
He gestured vaguely with a scarred hand toward the polished oak of the altar, the empty pews, and the stained glass catching the bleeding fragments of the afternoon light.
“Most people on this island do not know who you were,” Ash said.
“No,” Ewron replied, his shoulders sinking as the heavy wool of his vestments settled against his chest. “They don’t. They know me only as the priest.”
He tilted his head, forcing his gaze upward until he locked eyes with Ash. “Do you think that’s why the power came through me?” he asked, his voice dropping to a harsh, raw whisper.
“Whatever it was that brought her back. Because I know how to take a life, I know the precise weight of it,” he stopped, the thought catching on something sharp inside him before he could finish it.
He swallowed hard. “And so perhaps I understand the precise weight of returning one.”
Ash considered the theory. “Balance,” he murmured, his gaze drifting from Ewron’s calloused, ink-stained hands to the cross beyond him.
“An eye for an eye. A life for a life. Who better to stitch a soul back into its flesh than the man who spent a lifetime tearing them out?”
“If that is true,” Ewron whispered, his fingers trembling slightly as they rose to trace the stiff, clean edge of his clerical collar, “then this linen is not a symbol of my devotion to God. It is penance. A mask to hide the monster from the flock.”
“Does it matter what you call it?” Ash asked, stepping closer. “We will keep our promise, Ewron. When the time comes to purge this island, your hands will know exactly what to do. Until then, lead your mass. They need their God, even if He is only sitting in the pew beside them, dripping in their sins.”
“Ash.”
“Yes?” Ash asked, his gaze lifting, as though pulled back from some distant current of thought.
“Why do you keep coming back here?” Ewron asked, searching the dim edges of his face as if the answer might be written there. “To the church. To me.”
The silence that followed was absolute, heavy enough to press against the air itself.
“Father,” Ash said.
Ewron froze, his breath hitching. Ash never called him Father. In his mouth, the title lost its sanctity entirely. It did not sound holy so much as quietly intimate, in a way that unsettled him more than it should have.
“Yes?” Ewron managed, his voice quieter now, his heart striking hard against his ribs.
“Can I confess something to you?” Ash asked, his gaze drifting toward the far corner of the nave where the confessional stood in carved oak shadow. “In the confessional?”
Ewron swallowed hard, the collar around his throat suddenly feeling like a noose.
“Of course,” he said. Stepping down from the altar, his boots clicking softly against the stone floor, he gestured toward the dark structure. “Proceed.”
The confessional was small enough that the world outside ceased to exist the moment you stepped inside it.
Ewron pulled the door shut behind him and settled onto the narrow bench, the familiar scent of cedar and candle smoke closing around him like a second skin.
A moment later, the latch on the opposite side clicked. The wood creaked faintly as Ash settled into the sinner’s side of the booth. Through the perforated screen, they were reduced to fractured silhouettes.
“Bless me, Father,” Ash’s voice murmured through the screen, “for I have sinned.”
Ewron’s hands folded in his lap, an automatic, deeply practiced movement born of a lifetime behind the screen. “How long has it been since your last confession?”
“I have never confessed,” Ash said, his voice flat, steady, and near enough to feel like a whisper in Ewron’s ear. “This is my first.”
Ewron closed his eyes briefly, leaning back against the narrow cedar wall. “Then speak,” he said quietly, exhaling a slow breath. “God is listening.”
“I am not confessing to God,” Ash’s voice returned through the perforated screen, subdued but certain. “I am confessing to you.”
Ewron did not correct him.
“I have committed blasphemy,” Ash said.
Ewron waited for him to elaborate. In his years behind the screen, he had learned that silence was the only instrument worth wielding in a confessional. People filled silence eventually. They could not help themselves.
Ash, it seemed, was no different.
“I have fallen in love with a God,” Ash said, his voice steady, without the tremor or heat of human shame.
Through the pierced squares of the lattice, his silhouette did not move. It remained fixed, like a statue carved from shadow and held in place by something deliberate rather than alive.
“Do not play games with me,” Ewron said. The soft, performative warmth of his pastoral voice dropped away, leaving something colder underneath.
A subtle, mechanical click resonated through the cedar as Ash shifted a fraction of an inch closer to the partition. “I am not, Father. I do not care about the ghost in the sky your flock weeps for. My blasphemy is that I look upon my creator, and I covet him.”
Ewron’s heart hammered violently against his ribs, a frantic, wild thing trapped in his chest.
For years, he had feared he was utterly alone, abandoned by the heavens and left to rot beneath the weight of his own sins.
And now, something born outside God’s design knelt on the other side of the screen, offering him what he had never permitted himself to want so openly.
Absolute, undivided devotion.
“If you told me to burn this world, I would do it,” Ash said, the steady hum of his core vibrating faintly through the wood. “Not for a reward in heaven, but simply because it is you who asked.”
“A priest is supposed to demand penance for blasphemy,” Ewron murmured into the dark, his voice dangerously low. “He is supposed to cast out the heretic.”
“And will you cast me out, Father?”
The title slipped through the lattice, an intimate provocation that made Ewron’s chest tighten. He let out a sharp, breathless sound that was half a laugh and half a sob.
He had spent his whole life preaching a script, but there was no script for this.
“No,” Ewron whispered at last, the word heavy with a sudden, absolute surrender. “No, I couldn’t.”
He pressed his forehead hard against the wood of the partition. The cool, rigid grain was a stark contrast to the feverish heat burning beneath his skin.
“I do not care about a distant creator who demands blind obedience,” Ash’s voice continued, cutting through the heavy silence of the cedar box.
“I care about you, and the divinity I have witnessed with you resurrecting my daughter. Why should I look for God anywhere else?”
Ewron opened his eyes, staring directly into the dark, geometric squares of the screen. He could see the faint, unnatural gleam of Ash’s eyes on the other side.
“What you are describing,” Ewron said, choosing his words with a careful, trembling precision, “is not love. You know that.”
“Tell me what it is, then,” Ash replied. “I have been trying to name it for some time. I have attended your mass every week, and all I can think about is you.”
He continued, quieter now. “I do not believe in the existence of God because of your existence, Ewron.”
“It is–” Ewron stopped. He stared at the lattice for a long moment before finishing, “it is complicated.” The words fell flat as soon as he spoke them.
It was, perhaps, the most dishonest thing he had said all evening.
“I watched you bleed for my daughter,” Ash said softly. “I watched you kneel on stone until you shook, then stand, pull your robes back into place, and go speak to others about grace. I do not think it is complicated.”
Ewron closed his eyes. He had heard confessions for years. He had held the worst things people carried and given them words to set it down. He had always been the one on this side of the screen, the one absorbing, containing, pronouncing.
He had never once considered what it would feel like to be the one confessed to.
“Do you love me too, God?”
The word God left Ash’s lips and hung in the cramped, cedar-scented dark of the confessional, heavy enough to distort the air between them.
“You are a terrible penitent, Ash,” Ewron whispered. “And I am a terrible priest.”
“You have not answered the question,” Ash murmured.
“You want a confession from a deity?” Ewron let out a low, breathless sound that held no humor at all. “Very well. Listen closely.”
He pressed his palm against the wooden partition, right over the small carved squares, as if he might feel something beyond it.
“I have spent every day on this island believing I was hollowed out,” Ewron said, his voice barely above breath. “That whatever I once was had been stripped away by exile.”
He paused, his palm still pressed to the wood as if it could steady him. “And then you came into my church,” he continued. “You sat in my pew and listened to every beautiful lie I told, and you looked at me afterward the way no one ever has.”
A soft sound came through the screen. “You saw me raise your daughter from the dead and you did not look at the sky to thank God. You looked at me.”
“You are my God, Ewron,” Ash said softly.
“Then you already know my answer,” Ewron replied.
Outside, somewhere far beyond stone and stained glass, the wind moved through the trees, a sound like the turning of pages.
“Say it,” Ash said.
“I love you,” Ewron said into the dark, into cedar and candle smoke, into the small enclosed space that had heard every lie and every prayer he had ever spoken. “God help me. God help us both.”
“He will not,” Ash said. “But I will.”
A laugh broke from Ewron then, sudden and unguarded, stripped of control, as if something inside him had finally given up pretending it could endure.
“Step out of the confessional,” Ewron said, his voice still trembling but lighter now, almost disbelieving in its own freedom.
The wooden door of Ewron’s side of the confessional creaked as he pushed it open, stepping back out into the sanctuary.
A second later, the latch on the opposite door clicked. Ash stepped into the aisle.
He was undeniably taller than Ewron, his dark curls falling loosely around his face and catching the faint violet glow of the evening. A rare smile lingered on his lips as he looked down at the priest.
Ewron looked up at him, the last pieces of his pastoral armor melting away into the dark. The distance between them felt sudden and unbearable.
“Would you kiss me?” Ewron asked.
Ash tilted his head slightly, the smile sharpening just a fraction. “Right now?”
Ewron let out a sharp, breathy huff, a flicker of his old, impatient self breaking through the solemnity of the cloth. “No, tomorrow.”
“Oh,” Ash said, momentarily, softly confused.
“Yes, right now. Kurwa, Ash.”
Ash did not hesitate. He crossed the space in a single, fluid movement, closing it completely until Ewron had to lift his chin to meet him.
When Ash’s hands rose to cradle his face, they were warm, charged with the steady, pulsing energy of his internal core.
As their lips met, the world outside the church walls ceased to exist.
For months, Ewron had tried to imagine what the human version of Ash looked like before the Federation’s scientists hollowed him out piece by piece.
Now he no longer needed to. It had always been there.
In Ash’s heart, the one that belonged entirely to Ewron.