Lola's grip on the leather knout tightened as the merchant-demon Squza whimpered in his chains. To look at her now—a cold, calculating weapon of the high-ranking Inquisition—one would never guess she was born at the absolute crossroads of a dying era.
Her childhood had been shaped by the slow, suffocating collapse of the old world order. Once, the name de Alarcón commanded absolute terror in the dark, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the prominent houses of Barbosa, Montferrat and others. They were the aristocracy of the ash, elite hunters who protected humanity from the things lurking in the peripheral shadows of civilization.
But peace is a terrible merchant.
As the centuries ground on, the sheer necessity for independent hunters diminished. The aim of the great families had to shift, drifting away from wandering vigilance and deeper into the structured, political ranks of the Inquisition. The burden of maintaining the Order of Ash became an unsustainable luxury; family after family went bankrupt, unable to keep up with the exorbitant monthly and yearly financial contributions demanded by the central vaults.
Eventually, the Order succumbed to its own internal rot. It ceased to exist as a sovereign shield, fracturing into nationalized, state-sanctioned branches. The Wardens of the different cities had no choice but to cede their properties and bloodlines to the dominant regional faiths—assimilating into Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic institutions.
The collapse was global. The proud Asian branches fell completely, victims of political purges, regional isolation, and a devastating lack of funding. Humanity had won its greatest and most brutal battle against the ultimate enemy—the Devil—but the victory was hollow. Instead of liberating mankind, the raw authority and supernatural powers of the vanquished fiend were instantly absorbed and weaponized by competing factions within the churches and the Inquisition.
At least that's what her father told her. She wasn't completely sure about the defeat of the Devil, but since the Great Battle of Rome, demons and supernatural became less and less active. It was probably for public calmness.
Anyways, if not for the sudden, towering emergence of the new Grandmaster, Azazel Weyer, the lineage of the Lux Tenebris would have vanished into the modern era entirely. Azazel was a myth made flesh, whispered to be even more powerful than his grandfather, who had previously held the title of the strongest hunter to ever live. Yet even a titan could not stop the tide. The hunter markets shrank until only a single bastion remained in the major cities of Europe and one lone outpost survived in the New World.
Lola was a child of this regression, inherited to a legacy of ghosts.
In the de Alarcón family, a daughter was not a token of political marriage; she was the keeper of the steel. The girls bore the sacred responsibility of inheriting the family's complex swordsmanship and undergoing the ritual of Initiation.
By all the fundamental theories and foreseeable calculus of the Order's upper echelons, the power of Initiation—the Huntress—was supposed to compound and grow stronger with every passing cycle. But the universe played a cruel joke on Lola's generation. She was part of the first line to experience a massive, unprecedented stagnation. The ancestral well ran dry, her power regressing significantly, locking her, supposedly, at the baseline level of her legendary ancestor, Isabella.
There was no one left to ask why.
The Order was a memory, and the Grandmaster Azazel had mysteriously disappeared, presumed dead in some forgotten corner of the world.
To make matters worse, Lola's own Initiation had been a catastrophe. The ritualistic wards shattered under the pressure, unleashing an uncontrolled blast of blinding light that permanently claimed her left eye. She had been forced to become an adult overnight, trading her childhood for a heavy leather eyepatch and a rapier.
Now, nearing her thirties, the toll of the hunt was wearing on her. The Church had handed her and a few other high-ranking inquisitors a singular, monumental mission: track down the stolen or hidden ashes of the Order's first grandmaster and founder, Hugues de Payens.
Lola had made a quiet, solemn promise to herself: Finish this task. Secure the ashes. Then, give up the sword, leave the Inquisition forever, and build a normal family. She doesn't want a future for her children as she had. Additionaly, the idea of her body being burnt to ashes didn't sit right in her worldview.
A strange, unbidden image suddenly flashed through her mind, cutting through the bitter memories. A tall, broad-shouldered doctor with a sharp wit and an incredibly dignified posture. He had been a total surprise to her sheltered tastes—not just because of his dark complexion, which she had rarely encountered in her aristocratic circles, but because of the sheer, magnetic weight of his presence. She hadn't spent much of her life exploring romantic relationships, but the heavy, lingering taste of that doctor had left a profound impression on her heart.
Besides, that taste was pretty big.
A genuine, startlingly pure laugh escaped her lips—a sudden burst of humor that felt entirely out of place in the dark, sulfur-choked bilge of a smuggling ship.
"Thinking of a domestic life with a Leiden doctor while standing over a bleeding demon," she mused inwardly, a sharp grin pulling at the corner of her mouth. "I really am my father's daughter."
She shook her head, snapping the red curtain of her focus back to the present. The warmth in her chest vanished, replaced instantly by the cold, biting aura of the Inquisitor.
She stepped closer to the chained monster, the leather handle of her knout creaking in her hand. Her single eye locked onto the demon's central brow.
"Let's try this again, Squza," Lola whispered, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp lilt. "The ashes of the First Grandmaster. Speak, before I let my taste for violence override my patience."