Faith, Gorm the Witchfinder has found, does not shatter. Not at first. In fact, should a person’s faith remain solid, the most brutal assaults only prompt the most resolute belief. After all, the old creed says: if the Good King did not stand behind me, would his foes so stridently approach?

Faith doesn’t shatter – it fractures, a bit at a time. Cracks will lurch and twist and snarl their way into tangled starbursts along the surface; eventually, they will reach deeper. Only when the foundation is truly rotted through, held together more by pressure than anything resembling sincerity, will a decisive strike smash the whole affair apart.

It has, in Gorm’s experience, happened to lots of people: little cracks, little fissures in the fervor, little moments of doubt that begin to reverberate in the quiet bedroom dark where prayers had been. He wasn’t the first man to abandon the Witchfinders proper. He was, perhaps, the first man to abscond with the name itself – and the mission, modified as it was. But there had plenty of them before him who simply left: gentle souls with bloody hands all a-tremble, whose desperate prayers of surety had become pleas for absolution.

He wondered what their first moment of doubt had been. He knew his own: a young man, younger even than Gorm at the time, thanking him for the fire, thanking him for the end, bright-eyed and screaming straight through.

—

It was, perhaps, the young inquisitor’s fifth proper excursion since he graduated from neophyte to apprentice. Neophytes in the Witchfinder order were largely appointed simple tasks – heating knives, cleaning wounds, fetching tools. Apprentices had swords and axes shoved in their hands to support veteran hunters in the field. Gorm, big lad that he was, was given a greatsword by the quartermaster, with only the briefest instructions on how to use it. He quicky proved capable with the weapon, and thus his inclusion on these expeditions became more frequent.

This latest investigation brought the Witchfinders to Volk’s End, a village on the easternmost coast of the country. Prior to their arrival, their understanding was that a scholar arrived by hurried boat some weeks prior, and had taken to sharing arcana with the local fisherfolk and their children. Fisherfolk were an agricultural pillar in that part of the country – they could not be corrupted by outsiders.

It was meant to be a simple arrest: find the scholar in question, bring him to the Hellguard, the Witchfinders’ northern garrison. The group – a captain named Harven, a corporal named Mortimer, and three apprentices, including Gorm – were prepared for a fight if the scholar resisted.

They were not prepared for the man to have entrenched himself so bloody firmly.

—

The sin proved deep. It hadn’t taken long for the scholar’s lessons – treatises on the nature of the world, foul heresy on the birth of gods – to catch proverbial fire, especially not in a beleagured place like this, where you were either staving off pirates or vicious wildlife or both. The investigation culminated in a brief and bloody melee in the center of Volk’s End, killing one of the apprentices, the scholar in question, and six villagers.

Gorm was responsible for two of those. He remembers standing on the cloudy beach the morning after, still trying to calm the quiver in his arms, telling himself it was the ache of using the sword and not the taste of blood in his mouth. He remembers the salty chill sweeping in from over the sea, the way gray light poured and coiled and tangled its way through stormclouds burgeoning on the horizon.

He remembers, more than anything, the men and women tied up on the pyres, most of them staring hatefully at the remaining Witchfinders as the latter went about the almost rote business of setting heretics on fire.

There were eight such heretics, all told – conspirators who were discovered with copies of the scholar’s teachings in their quarters. Seven of them were doing their best to remain stoic, no doubt thinking of themselves as martyrs. Gorm remembers that thought catching in his skull the way detritus in a pipe might catch on a grate. He cannot remember why.

But the last of them was a young man, no more than sixteen, whose bravery had all but failed him. As the Witchfinders worked, the young man begged and pleaded and prayed, trying to assure anyone who would listen that he learned his lesson, could he please come down, could he please come down, his mother will miss him, his sisters still need him, he made a mistake.

Gorm remembers meeting the young man’s eyes. He remembers the moment, clear and sharp, that the boy realized he would burn with his comrades, as the first crackling embers began to catch at the pyre’s base. He remembers thinking: now, now he’ll show the same defiance as all the others. Now he’ll prove himself a heretic. Now he’ll reveal that there is no faith left in his heart.

The thoughts felt sour, cruel. Then they disappeared as the young man, the fire licking at his clothes, stretched a pained, grateful smile across his face, half-obscured by the smoke. He trained his hazy stare directly at Gorm, and he choked out:

“Thank you for saving my soul, Witchfinder.”

The gratitude dissolved shortly into screaming prayers, attestations of faith, promises of rightful behavior in the afterlife, all shredded by pain, all scarred by smoke, right up until the fire silenced the boy at last.

It had been sincere. Even as the world went up in flames, the boy’s faith, only temporarily dissuaded, had been sincere, and his last earthly act had been to thank a group of stern-faced zealots for burning him alive.

Gorm remembers standing transfixed as the first fracture ran along his faith, and the foundation began to tremble.

If he was wrong about the boy, what else had he been wrong about?

What had he just done?