Chapter 1: Ngọn Lửa Không Thiêu RụiThe Flame That Does Not Burn

The bell of the great cathedral tolled in a slow rhythm, broken and heavy. Its sound was dull and low, with no resonance. It had begun at dawn, when the executioner started stacking the firewood, and it kept on, and on... In the central square, the rough wooden stake stood bare and alone, already ringed with bundles of dry kindling and straw. The ground around it was still sticky with old rainwater, mud, and refuse. The crowd had packed the square long before, and the guards had to keep driving the butts of their spears hard into the ground to clear a space around the pyre. Right at the dividing line, a middle-aged man chewed on a half-eaten crust of barley bread, his eyes fixed on the prison gate. A hawker, balancing a wooden tray of cheap earthenware jugs of ale in both arms, called out at the top of his voice: "Barley ale here! Who wants a drink to warm themselves before the Lord's fire rises?" Not far off, a mother was trying to soothe a little girl who was sobbing uncontrollably. Paying the child's crying no mind, the people around them went on talking: "I don't know, but that boy stole a Forbidden Book, didn't he?" "Wasn't that boy supposed to be a good one?" "Maybe his sister's death made him fall?" "Sounds pitiful, doesn't it?" "You pity a man who turned against the Lord? If it hadn't been caught in time, someone might have died." "But how did he manage to steal a Forbidden Book from the Sanctuary?" "I heard they'd grown careless. After such an endless stretch of time, who'd have imagined anyone would be fool enough to steal a Forbidden Book?" A group of monks in dark brown cloaks had taken their places at the…