Kenzo Shadowblade came to kill a demon, and the demon kept a schedule he could not read. He crouched in the temple rafters, twin blades strapped to his back, watching the empty prayer hall below. The new moon was coming. On that night, the thing beneath this temple would rise and eat another worshipper, as it had for years. Kenzo meant to strike first. But a demon this old only weakens right after it feeds. Strike too early, and his blades would break on its hide. Strike too late, and someone died. He did not know when it had last fed. Without that, all his training was useless. The monks would not tell him. They bowed and lit candles and said nothing of the deaths. So Kenzo climbed down and went to find the one monk who never spoke at all. Nino Karith was kneeling in the shrine, arranging small bones on a cloth. The old monk was said to have lived hundreds of lifetimes. Kenzo believed it. Nino's eyes were too clear, too calm, for someone counting years like other people. When Kenzo entered, Nino did not look up. The old monk simply pushed one bone aside, as if it had been waiting for him. "You know when it feeds," Kenzo said. "You keep its calendar." Nino's hand stilled. Slowly, the monk lifted three fingers, then folded them one by one. Three days ago. Kenzo's stomach dropped. The demon had fed three nights past. That meant it was full now, sluggish, weak. This was the window. Not the new moon at all. But Nino was not finished. The monk turned the cloth toward him. On it lay a child's tooth, small and white among the older bones. Kenzo understood then how Nino knew the schedule so well. The mute monk had been laying out the demon's meals for a very long time. "You serve it," Kenzo whispered. Nino met his eyes without shame. Then the old monk pointed at Kenzo, at the blades on his back, and pressed both palms flat to the floor. A bow. Permission. Nino wanted the demon dead too, and had waited lifetimes for a blade sharp enough to try. Kenzo took the tooth and closed his fist around it. "Then I go tonight." He did not wait for the new moon. He ran for the stairs beneath the shrine, blades drawn, while the demon still slept off its meal. Behind him, Nino struck the great bell once. The sound rolled through the temple like a warning, or a farewell. By the time Kenzo reached the bottom step, the whole clergy knew he was coming. And so did the thing waiting in the dark.

Kenzo followed the demon's blood down a narrow tunnel. The trail led into a chamber deeper than the temple's roots. The wounded thing pressed itself into a far corner, breathing wet and slow. Its wounds had already begun to close. Kenzo raised both blades and struck for the throat. The steel bit, then slid off dark hide like a knife on ice. The demon barely flinched. Its skin had turned hard where the blood ran black. He struck again. Same result. The cuts he had made when it was full were healing over into armor. Plain steel would not finish this. Nino had known its schedule, its weakness, everything. Now Nino was under the stone, and Kenzo stood alone with useless blades. Light rose behind him. Not the blue glow of the dead monk's beads. This light was white and cold, a bright cross burning at a man's chest. A short man in strange white armor stepped from the dark, older than his size suggested, jaw set hard. His boots made no sound on the stone. "You're cutting a thing that heals faster than you swing," the man said. "I watched this fight fail a hundred times." He spoke like he already knew the ending. Kenzo kept his blades up. "Who are you?" "Father Talious. I came a long way to reach this exact minute." He touched the cross at his chest. It flared brighter. "Your steel is clean. That's the problem. This creature only bleeds under its own kind of fire." The demon lunged. Kenzo shoved Talious aside and took the blow on his shoulder. He rolled, came up, and saw the priest press one palm flat toward him. "Your blades," Talious said. "Hold them out." Kenzo had no better plan. He thrust both blades forward. The cross-light poured down the steel and sank into it. The edges turned white-hot but did not burn his hands. The metal hummed. "Now," Talious said. "Before it closes again." Kenzo charged. The demon swung a heavy arm. He ducked under it and drove both burning blades up into the soft place beneath its jaw, the one wound that had not sealed. This time the steel did not slide. It sank deep. White fire spread through the demon from the inside. It screamed, thrashed once, and split apart in a burst of ash and black smoke. Then the smoke pulled together. It did not die. It funneled down through a crack in the floor, fleeing deeper still, wounded far worse than before but whole. The white light drained from Kenzo's blades. They cooled to ordinary steel in his hands. Talious lowered his palm, breathing hard. "That was one charge. I can't give you another for days." Kenzo stared at the crack where the demon had gone. He had hurt it badly. He had not killed it. And the only man who could arm his blades stood spent beside him, useless until the light returned.

Kenzo knew what waited below. The eyeless serpent drank the blessing and grew stronger with every light he raised. To starve it, he had to go down into the dark. But he could not see there, and his blades needed the blessing's water to fight. The one thing that fed his weapons also fed his enemy. He knelt by the crack and felt the cold breath rise from below. Nino came and knelt beside him. The monk pressed a dead-quiet hand against Kenzo's arm and shook his bald head. He pointed at the twin blades resting in the spring, at the faint blue water still clinging to their steel. Then he pointed down into the black. The meaning was plain. Take the water down there, and you feed the thing. "I know," Kenzo said. "But I can't fight blind." Water rose from the pool and took shape. Naznorith formed from it, hooded, robe streaming into the dark. The hidden figure had freed Kenzo's hands before and bound them when they died. Now it lifted one black hand over the twin blades. "Light draws it," Naznorith said. "So carry no light. The water alone will bind your swords. It gives no glow the mouth can drink." Kenzo dipped his dead hands in the pool. The water climbed the steel and set the twin blades shivering with living tension. They gave no light. Just cold pull and thirst. He could feel their weight through the water, not through fingers he no longer owned. "Then how do I find it in the dark?" he asked. A new voice answered from the altar. Father Talious stepped from a door of pale blue fire. The priest had been lost across the sealed portal, trapped in his future world. Now he stood here, jaw set, his robe glowing with holy white light at the chest. "You don't find it with your eyes," Talious said. He knelt and pressed his palm to the stone. "I've seen you fail this a hundred times, Kenzo. Every time you brought a torch. Listen instead. The mouth breathes. Follow the sound." "You crossed back," Kenzo said. "The door was sealed." "Not this one." Talious touched the blue fire behind him. "It closes when I go. I have one crossing. I spend it here." Kenzo gripped nothing and held everything. The twin blades hummed in the water's grip. He lowered himself into the crack. The dark closed over his head. No light. Only the cold, and far below, a wet seam of a mouth opening and closing on the black. He let go of the last handhold and dropped into the deep. Behind him the blue fire winked out as Talious spent his crossing to guard the surface. Below, the breathing grew louder. Kenzo fell toward it, blind, his blades thirsting, ready to starve the thing that ate his temple's soul.