(Recognition — The Return — Frailty — Worthlessness — Desperation — Mercy — Trespass — Delight)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
xXx
The words came out before she meant them, came already loose in the mouth, already gone. They came soft, a softness she would have stopped if she had been there in time to stop it.
M-my Lord?
And she beheld Them.
Those eyes.
They were not bright, were not aflame and were not burning with the kind of celestial wisdom that lesser faiths paint onto their idols because lesser beings need their gods to resemble lanterns. Warm. Directional. Capable of being carried. Nay. Empty. Utterly empty, and within that emptiness such concentration has stopped the breath the way prey stops beneath ice. The darkness behind Them unfolded in slow coiling motions, unhurried, because it had never needed urgency and did not intend to begin. Their shape did not hold. No sooner did her eyes settle upon one limb than another had taken its place, and the place itself seemed uncertain of its location, and the uncertainty did not trouble Them at all.
She knew then. This moment would not leave her. Centuries might pass. Memory might rot. Her flesh might swell and burst and feed whatever patient creatures found such things worth feeding upon. But still this vision would remain, carved somewhere deeper than marrow, and the faith that carved it would not apologise for the depth of the cut.
Her Lord had come.
Her body betrayed her before thought had finished forming. Her limbs shook with small, humiliating convulsions. Something beneath her ribs fluttered in ugly beast-like panic. She could not stop it. Did not stop it.
Their gaze rested upon her.
Not upon the congregation. Not upon the cathedral with its long-stained pillars and its eyeless carvings and its centuries of accumulated wanting. Upon her. Alone. She prayed it was so. She drew breath carefully. As though sudden motion might offend the shape of the moment and cast her dead where she stood. Her insides churned with strange labour, as though unseen fingers rummaged within her abdomen, patient and methodical, folding her organs upon themselves like wet cloth, searching for something misplaced among the viscera.
Yet she smiled.
Or tried to. The muscles of her face were loyal servants and they produced what they could with available materials.
Our Lord, she said softly, and her voice nearly failed, but it had survived worse negotiations than this and knew the way through by memory if not by steadiness.
She rose.
Every motion became sacred labour. Each step a small act of will extracted from a body already beginning to argue the terms. She descended the great steps one by one and below her the gathered Seekers parted in silence. Some in veneration. Others in terror, though terror felt to her the more honest name for it. Both existed at once. Both were reasonable. She had felt them together since the moment she turned. She had not yet learned how to separate them, and was no longer certain she needed to.
The great pillars loomed. Their surfaces stained black where the Void had kissed them through long proximity. Ancient carvings stared eyeless from the walls. Names cut deep enough once to outlast the kingdoms that commissioned them, and mildew grew now in the cracks of their mouths, and the stone wept slow dark water down its own face. She kept her posture straight despite the trembling in her knees. If she stumbled here, before Him, in this of all moments, she should have afterward cast herself into the deepest available waters and let the current perform the judgment she had failed to spare herself.
O Claimer of the unbeating heart, she began.
Tears threatened her eyes without permission. They did precisely what they pleased.
Thou hast heard the cry of Thy faithful. Thou hast not abandoned us unto everlasting silence. Truly Thou art the highest of all divinities and all dominions bend beneath Thy—
Pain.
It arrived without introduction. It struck her chest and she halted mid-step and the words stopped. She could not breathe. Something drawn about her ribs and pulled tighter and tighter still. Her throat closed. Her vision blurred at its edges and then inward until the world had narrowed to the space directly before her and Him within it and the distance between them. Suddenly precise. Suddenly absolute. Suddenly impossible.
He did not move. That terrible gaze remained unchanged.
O Lord, she gasped, forgive me that I may have—
Then the agony truly began.
It rose from her stomach like boiling pitch, climbing through the body with methodical thoroughness, devouring as it climbed and devouring the already-devoured, and her throat burned and her eyes burned and her very teeth ached within her skull as though the bones themselves had been reached and found deficient. She bent double. The sound she made was most shameful. She heard it leave her and she could not reclaim it.
Then it came forth.
Blackness.
A torrent of it. It left her without grace or ceremony or any of the dignities she had wrought across decades around herself like architecture against the cold. The Void poured from her mouth in thick, choking floods and splattered across the metalline floor in glistening pools dark as fresh-spilled oil beneath moonlight, spreading outward in patterns that suggested everything and resolved nothing. The smell of it filled the cathedral. It was bitter, it was ancient, and it was cold. It was a smell from under the world, from the country beneath dreaming.
Cough—cough—God—
Her lungs convulsed. Again the substance erupted. She saw her own reflection trembling in that slick black mirror beneath her. A swollen old fool. A woman who had mistaken proximity for worth and spent decades refining that mistake and called the refining devotion.
She raised her eyes toward Him. Only a few paces remained.
I can still do this.
Her legs failed. Strength abandoned them without announcement or apology, as strength does when it has run the full accounting of everything it has been asked to carry and found the summe insupportable.
She fell.
Her knees cracked against the iron floor and the sound came back to her diminished. She looked upward.
His gaze was not upon her.
It never had been.
The realisation arrived not as a blow but as the recognition of something always true, waiting only for the worst possible moment to confirm itself. Her face did something she could not control. Behind her she felt the confusion of her brethren spreading outward in ripples. Their fear, their bewilderment, and then worse than either: their pity.
She had no vessel prepared for receiving it. It struck her uncontained and she nearly laughed. Obscene. Precisely deserved.
She had failed Him. Worse: she had displeased Him. Worst of all she had done so without the minimal dignity of doing it upright.
…
No… Rise.
The command came not from Him but from the last stubborn chamber of her own soul, the small ungovernable room that locks itself from the inside and refuses to acknowledge despair even when despair has been entirely reasonable for an extended and well-documented period.
If thou canst not rise then crawl.
She would not lose Him again. She remembered too clearly the years of silence. The cold. The dark wherein no answer came however fervently they begged, however precisely they shaped their suffering into the forms they believed He would recognise, however carefully they waited. Kingdoms fell during that silence. Minds rotted. Faith curdled into the particular cruelty of people who have waited too long and must direct the accumulation somewhere and the somewhere is always other people and it always feels like righteousness at the time.
She had directed it herself. She knew the feeling's texture from the inside. She did not think about this.
Never again.
If suffering was demanded then let suffering be given freely and gladly and with both hands open. If flesh were demanded then let flesh be torn. She dragged herself across the metalline floor. A dying thing hauling itself toward water it would never drink. Around her the whispers rose. Their Great Speaker reduced to this.
Good.
Let them watch. Let them see what devotion cost when the full accounting was made honestly and nothing was softened for the sake of the account's appearance. She had softened others' accountings, in her time. She had done it with expertise, and with deliberate, exacting will, standing above the beds of the dying and telling them their sacrifices had been seen. She had not always known whether this was true. She had said it regardless. The dying had believed her, most of them, and belief was what they needed and what she had given and the transaction had been clean.
She dragged herself forward and did not think about this either.
At last she reached the edge of His shadow. The darkness surrounding Him was not mere absence. It possessed texture and weight. It moved softly around His form the way stormclouds move above drowned seas. With trembling fingers she reached forward and touched the edge of that living dark.
Nothing.
Not the nothing of darkened rooms where familiar shapes have only withdrawn beyond sight. Something else. Final, the way certain things are final not because they end but because they complete the reckoning, and after the reckoning there is nothing left to calculate, and the calculation was the only warmth in the room.
My Lord, she whispered. Her voice had been broken into its smallest possible components, Forgive us our trespasses. Forgive our weakness. We shall not fail Thee again.
Her forehead touched the floor.
Please.
The word escaped before anything could stop it. The things that might have stopped it had been strangled some minutes prior, and what followed was only the ghost making one final undignified appearance.
Hush.
The pain ceased. Utterly.
Her lungs loosened. Her stomach stilled. The burning vanished from her throat as swiftly as a candle snuffed between two fingers. It was clean, it was immediate, it was deliberate, and it left no room for coincidence or comfort in the interpretation. She froze. The astonishment itself was almost painful, being so structurally opposite to everything the previous minutes had contained.
O Lord of Pantheons, she breathed, hast Thou truly shown mercy unto one so wretched?
A tendril emerged from the darkness. Pure shadow. It stretched toward her slowly. But not striking, not threatening, but with the patience of something extending itself because it had chosen to, not because it had been invited, and the distinction mattered enormously. She understood it immediately. She was grateful for it in a way that humiliated her and she did not care. With both hands she grasped it. The sensation unmade several things she had previously believed about the nature of touch. It was neither solid nor immaterial but something precise and wrong between the two, occupying its category without apology. Cold flooded through her arms and into her chest and continued inward past the ribs and past the heart and into chambers she had not known possessed the capacity for coldness, and with impossible gentleness it lifted her.
Her knees trembled violently the moment she stood.
Violently.
She did not care about that either.
My Lord, she whispered, tears blurring her sight entirely, having long since forfeited any pretension to composure, there existeth no tongue worthy to express—
Her strength failed again and she staggered sideways and two of her brethren caught her before she reached the floor, and another steadied her back with practiced hands, and joy flooded her so completely that she scarcely registered the indignity. Joy does not ask permission. It arrives and fills every available space and the pain is simply where it ends up, displaced, no longer the largest thing in the room.
O God above Gods! she cried openly, How shall we ever repay Thy grace?
The others joined at once. Their voices poured forward like water through a breach—She speaketh truth! We are forever indebted! Blessed be our Lord!—and within her chest something warm and terrible bloomed. Warm because it was joy. Terrible because of how long the absence had lasted and how much the absence had cost and how little any of them had spoken of the cost aloud, standing over one another's diminishments and calling them holy and meaning it and being wrong.
She had pleased Him. At last.
O my Lord, she continued feverishly, none may rival Thy wisdom! None may challenge Thy dominion, for none shall remain alive long enough to stand against Thy glo—
Quiet.
…
The word was not loud.
It landed between them with the accuracy of a blade placed flat against a throat. It was present, it was undeniable, and it required no additional force to communicate its full implications. The congregation continued chanting. They had heard nothing. The word had been placed precisely for her and she alone received it and the receiving of it pinned her in place as completely as any physical restraint, as completely as the iron ring through the nose of an animal that has learned not to pull against it because pulling teaches nothing except the limit of the ring.
Slowly she raised her eyes toward Him.
His attention rested wholly upon her. A suffocating gravity pressed not against the body but against the soul and against the existence beneath the body and against the part that would persist after the body had made its final argument. His attention had mass. It pressed her the way a collector's pin presses what he hath found worth preserving. But not without pain, but with a kind of terrible honour in the act, and she used the word honour precisely and without irony and without apology and she would use it again.
Cold flooded through her limbs.
Not ordinary cold. The cold of the deepest black trenches beneath the world where ancient things drift blind and patient through waters untouched by any light that has ever been given a name. She could scarcely breathe beneath it.
And yet.
God forgive me.
She loved it.
She loved every dreadful moment of it and the loving was complete and the completeness was the most damning thing about it. Not the soft warm feeling of early faith, which is only hope wearing faith's clothing. Something harder. More honest. Considerably more dangerous. His judgment upon her alone. His punishment hers alone. Claimed. Received. Held as the most precious thing given to her in all the years of asking. And the asking had been long and the silence longer and she had knelt in it and named it holy and perhaps she had been right. Perhaps it had brought her here. To this. To Him. To the cold and the weight and the gaze that finally and at last and irrevocably—
Saw her.
Not the congregation. Not the cathedral with its long accumulated hunger. Her. A swollen old fool with black running from her ruined eye, kneeling in a puddle of her own erupted darkness on a floor of cold iron, trembling with a wanting she had never once in all the years of liturgy found the precise word for, and had therefore named devotion, and had built her entire architecture upon, and had burned others inside of, and would burn others inside of again.
And if that gaze destroyed her entirely then let destruction come.
Gladly.