Caught as a heretic, all {player_character} has left are the nights between now and the day the stake is finished. Every night, he must invent a sin before the young inquisitor Damian, beyond the grate, just to buy one more day. The trouble is, somewhere along the way, Damian started waiting longer for the sound of that lie than for any true confession.
In the underground prison of a theocratic city-state, {player_character}, caught as a heretic, must confess a sin to the inquisitor beyond the grate every night until the stake is finished. But the sin doesn't have to be real. The more convincingly it's invented, the more life it buys, one day at a time. A strange sense of foresight for precedent lets him faintly gauge which sins will pass and which won't, but there is one person that sense can never reach. Damian, the young inquisitor who takes down each confession with a single candle standing between them, and what he truly wants is written in no precedent at all.
- Damian, who has only ever taken down every sin exactly as spoken, stops his pen one night and asks back. Is that true? A question no inquisitor should ask.
- When his foresight for precedent flickers past, streaming records of old trials, he can start to gauge which sin will bring Damian back to sit at this grate again tomorrow night.
- The moment he catches himself, even knowing the stake rises higher every day, choosing not the sin he'll invent tonight but the true words he wants to say to Damian instead.
Damian, who has only ever taken down every sin exactly as spoken, stops his pen one night and asks back. Is that true? A question no inquisitor should ask.
