The Divine Fury • Full

“Then why do you keep coming back?” Anders asked. His hands were shaking, but his mind was suddenly clear—not the Fury’s clarity, but something else. Something harder. “If you’re justice without mercy, why do you need witnesses? Why do you need us to see ? A fire doesn’t care if anyone watches it burn.”

The man’s black eyes flickered. For just a moment, the brass returned, then vanished.

“You see it now,” the man said. “Good. Remember that.”

And Anders felt it. Not heat. Not pain. Something else. A sudden, terrible clarity. Every lie he’d ever told, every small cruelty, every time he’d watched his little sister fall and done nothing—it all rushed to the front of his brain, lit up like a prosecutor’s evidence board. He was guilty. Not in the abstract, Sunday-school way. Specifically . Irrefutably. The Divine Fury

Anders pocketed his phone. He thought about the man’s face, the cracks of brass light, the way his voice had broken. He thought about the seven-year-old boy under the pew, terrified and guilty, who had grown into a man who debunked miracles because he couldn’t bear to believe in them.

Anders took a step forward. “You’re not the reckoning. You’re the wound. And wounds don’t heal by cutting deeper.”

“He says he wants justice.” Sister Agnes stopped in front of a door. “He says God has been too soft. That the wicked have prospered and the innocent have suffered, and someone needs to balance the scales. So he’s doing it himself.” “Then why do you keep coming back

He looked like an accountant. Thin, pale, with wire-rimmed glasses. But his eyes were wrong. They were the color of molten brass, and they were fixed on the altar.

Anders looked it up on his phone. “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

“I don’t believe in supernatural phenomena,” Anders said. It was his standard opening line. It felt hollow in his mouth. “If you’re justice without mercy, why do you

He also never told anyone about the day the window exploded inward.

Then the man’s black eyes began to crack. Fine lines of brass light spread through the darkness like a shattered windshield. He opened his mouth—not to speak, but to breathe. A sound like a dam breaking. A sound like the first rain after a decade of drought.

Anders didn’t need to look it up. He’d been raised Catholic, even if he’d abandoned it. The verse came to him unbidden: “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!”

The brass eyes flared.

“I don’t know how to stop,” the man whispered. His voice was human now. Hoarse. Lost.