Old Marel was the priest who kept the small shrine of Hesh-on-the-Stone, on a shoulder of the Skyreach high country, for forty years. He had not raised his voice in any of those years; there had been no one to raise it to. He had carried a knife at his belt and had never drawn it. The shrine was older than the kingdoms. The kingdoms had forgotten the shrine. Marel had not.
On a night the wind had been wrong since noon, a demon came through the door without anyone pushing it. The lamp's flame leaned away. Marel, finding his voice for the first time in forty years, was raising the knife to a thing he could not, by any of his trainings, have stopped — when Kryor was inside the doorway. The Archangel had not opened it. The door had simply permitted him.
What Marel saw next he would, for the rest of his life, only half-tell. Kryor drew Mercy — the soft-hilted of his two swords — and did not draw Judgement. He did not strike the demon. He sent it back. The demon went, very slowly, in the bearing of a creature given a gift it had not asked for and did not understand the cost of. Mercy went back into its scabbard with the same plain sound a workman's tool makes coming out.
Kryor stayed long enough that a small warmth settled, briefly, on the corner of the small altar of the shrine — a greeting, the way an old visitor sets down attention at a friend's table. Marel was on his knees. He has, in the years since, not told the story very often. He told it, at last, when the chronicle came for it.
