The six squads of skeletons begin their pillaging of the village at your order. While your runecarved skeletons lack a fully formed mind as undead no more than a handful of decades old, clear orders and procedures mean that you can rely on them to get the job done for most of the village. They know where to bring any goods they find, they know where to bring any captives they find, and they know how to do a five point room scan and slaughter anyone foolish enough to try waiting in ambush for them.

The one place you don't trust them with is the temple.

Not yet, at any rate.

The seven pointed cathedral that looms over the northwest quarter of the village needs your personal attention, and so you've dragged the commander of the Fourth Company with you. He has a greater presence of mind than his subordinates, not quite breaking past the mindless nature of the ordinary skeleton, but approaching the threshold of becoming a skeletal champion. Though he may well be a one hundred year old weapon of war, you would say that he's certainly the most reliable of your skeletal commanders.

Which is why you feel comfortable bringing him into a nexus of divine energy. The temple is an old and storied place, for the material plane. Civilizations passed it between them, renovations changing the meaning of its seven points and the figures in its stained-glass windows, but the stone of its foundation is older than most of the faiths it played host to.

Seven great kings of man became seven earthly spirits. Seven earthly spirits became seven stars of heaven. Seven stars of heaven became seven faces of a pretender to the Throne of G-d. That pretender's seven faces became seven pretenders themselves, and when came the Dies Irae upon which the Dividers poured into the world and butchered the false gods, those pretenders became seven of the six hundred and sixty six Divider Lords. When the village raised banner of the Seven Archangels in rebellion against the Empire, the statues of those Divider Lords were torn down and broken into a thousand pieces.

Or at least that's what Dormandal told you, when you asked him about the village two nights back. He tends to know these things.

You fingers brush along the baptismal font at the heart of the building, where water drawn from the mountain hotsprings bubbles up. Still warm to the touch despite the distance from the fires at the heart of the mountain, still tainted by your impromptu ritual to desecrate the blessings laid upon the water by the "angels". Angels using that priest Lady Brightspring mentioned, that Brother Anthony who pushed the village into rebellion.

Thoughts cross your mind as you contemplate the unholy water and the way it has stained the fountain's white marble a delightful black. None of the corpses placed upon the pile for processing wore the cassock of a priest or brother. You made the village's liege a toy for the pits, but if she was already a puppet of someone else...