(Healthcare – Remember – Confidant – CRACK – Get Ready – Celing – Palm)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
xXx
The latch turned. The door groaned on its hinges, the sound of old places that had heard too much and forgotten nothing.
Dear Leader?
Hazel released the bedsheets. Her frame rose. She pressed her back to the cold wall.
Had they seen.
…Leader?
A truth too plain for denial.
The dizziness returned and the pressure behind her eyes swelled harder. She saw them already. Her congregation beneath the long pilgrim pillars, shadow mingling with fading gold. Whispering, whispering. The particular register of people discussing someone not present to defend herself.
She knew their faces. She had curated those expressions for years.
She shut the vision down.
What profit came of inward lamentation? None. None had ever come of it. She breathed and settled her hands into their arrangement and laid composure into her posture the way one laid fresh cloth over a stain and called it prepared.
Y-yes?
She heard herself stammer and fresh panic struck immediately behind it—
No.
May I enter, Great Speaker? I came but to inquire after thy condition.
Hazel let herself sink into the softness of the bed. The bed was, she acknowledged again, exceedingly comfortable. Someone had cared unreasonably about this and she was glad of it now in the simple beastly way of bodies that had recently been through something and required not to be reminded of it by hard surfaces.
Yes, she answered, settling the composure into her tone with the practiced hand of long habit, pray enter.
The door opened.
Stella.
Her closest confidant. The woman who had managed the congregation's daily labours through the months of preparation while Hazel oversaw the restoration. The distinction mattered to Hazel. It mattered more than it ought to. She did not pursue that thought further. Some doors, once opened, led to rooms with no good furniture.
Stella was pragmatic. She had always been pragmatic. She reduced complexity to its operative parts and addressed each part in sequence and this quality had occasionally driven Hazel to the quiet edge of irritation and had more often than not saved the congregation from consequences that Hazel's broader vision had not stooped to anticipate.
There was something in this woman, something in the steadiness of her, the particular quality of her competence, that Hazel had never fully named. She did not try to name it now. She only watched her enter and felt the specific species of ease that arrived with someone whose presence required nothing from her, no performance, no management, only the ordinary adjustments of a person among a person they had known long enough that the knowing had become structural.
The sister she had not been given by blood. She had not been given much by blood. She did not dwell on this.
Our Great Speaker, Stella said, how fareth thee now?
Formal, but with warmth beneath it the way certain stones held warmth long after the sun had left them.
I believe myself improved, Hazel answered, and the lie was transparent and she felt no guilt for it. Lies that served a purpose were not waste.
Stella exhaled and smiled. It was small, it was sincere, the kind that cost something to produce. Her eyes moved across Hazel's face. The Void, still seeping in thin dark streams. Her expression held careful concern. Hazel met it with serene neutrality. She had never considered the substance troublesome. She was not about to begin now.
Without second thought, Hazel patted the bed beside her.
Stella's eyes widened slightly before she crossed the room and settled herself at the bed's edge and Hazel filed away the slight widening as information about how she had been conducting herself in recent seasons. She would review it later. She had several things to review later and the list was growing and she was presently not thinking about any of them.
Something troubled Stella. Her shoulders held too carefully and her gaze rested too long upon nothing in particular and Hazel had spent enough years reading the bodies of people who were attempting not to show her things to recognise the posture within a breath of seeing it.
Stella, she said gently, Truly. Speak freely.
Stella gathered herself with one slow breath.
Dear Hazel, she began, I wished to speak concerning what transpired during our Lord's return. Especially when thou were forced to crawl toward Him—on behalf of all our foolishness. That we might be spared.
Hazel's thoughts halted.
Though not visibly. Nothing moved on her face and nothing shifted in her posture and her hands remained where they were and her breath continued at its measured pace. She had spent thirty years ensuring that nothing she did not intend to show would show, and the thirty years held, and she was grateful for them in the way one was grateful for architecture during a storm.
Forced.
The word sat in her chest.
On behalf of their foolishness. As though she had been wrung out by circumstance. As though it had not been hers. As though she had not offered it.
She breathed. She arranged her face.
Then I perceived what thou were truly doing, Stella continued, and reached toward Hazel's hand with that manner of hers that made requests feel like offerings. Hazel granted it. The warmth of Stella's hand was startling in a way she had not anticipated and she let it be startling for precisely one moment before filing it away.
Truly, Mother, Stella whispered. Thy devotion unto God is not of this world.
For one instant Hazel ceased breathing altogether.
Praise.
It was not recoil, it was not judgment, and it was not the quiet evaluation of a woman assessing whether the spectacle she had witnessed had altered her opinion of the one who produced it. It was praise. The realisation moved through her with the specific force of things that arrive at the exact location of one's greatest fear and prove it unfounded. But not gently, not gradually, but complete.
She said nothing. She let the silence stand. Within it, somewhat against her will, the memory arrived.
His tendril. Cold. The sensation of it moving through her arms and into her chest and past her ribs and into the places beneath, those inner chambers she had not known possessed this specific capacity, this specific vulnerability to this specific cold. The gentleness of it. The impossible gentleness of being lifted from the floor and held as though she were at once pitiful and precious and the distinction had not mattered against the fact of the lifting.
Her hand tightened slightly within Stella's. She made herself loosen it.
Oh dear, Stella murmured after a time, glancing toward the door, The others may require my aid presently. Might I take my leave, Mother?
She had not released Hazel's hand. Hazel noted this. A laugh slipped from her before she could stop it. It was small, it was unguarded.
No need remaineth to call me Mother, she said, and meant it entirely, I possess yet far to journey before I deserve such title. But aye. Thou mayest go.
Stella rose, slowly with the reluctance of someone who had checked the ledge twice and was still not fully persuaded.
Thou ought wash thy hands afterward, Hazel said, and the jest arrived before dignity could halt it, I am but a sickly and helpless worshipper.
Stella laughed, softly with the slight surprise of someone who had not expected this from this direction.
Yes, she said, I shall not forget, Dear Hazel. I shall pray unto the Lord for thy swift recovery.
Yes, Hazel said, Do.
She watched Stella move toward the door and felt the specific warmth of someone she trusted and knew and had never quite told and was not going to tell now. Some matters were sacred by virtue of being unspoken. She held them that way carefully and with both hands and she would continue holding them.
I go now, dear Hazel.
Yes, Hazel said, Go—
CRACK.
The door flew wide.
The edge of it caught Stella full on the side of her head and the sound of the impact was flat and immediate and the silence after it was the kind that followed events before the full dimensions of the event had been processed.
Stella struck the wall. Her hand went to her temple. Blood came between her fingers.
A thin line. Below the mask, along the jaw.
She stayed upright.
In the doorway stood Sera. She was panting, panting. Sweat bright along the edge of her mask, her entire body the declaration of someone who had run with reckless speed across a considerable distance and had paused to consider neither the geometry of doors nor the bugs immediately behind them. Stella stared at her in a silence that contained an entire structured complaint.
What trouble is this, Sera?
Sera braced against the doorframe and drew one breath.
The Lord!
Drew another.
HE COMETH!
…
Hazel did not move. For precisely two heartbeats she sat within the soft and absurdly comfortable bed and held the full dimensions of her situation with the comprehensive clarity available only to bugs who have no remaining time to be anything other than honest with themselves.
She was in a recovery chamber. Her composure was not yet load-bearing. Her throat was raw. Her limbs uncertain. The Void still seeped from her eyes. Her robes were wrong for this.
He was coming.
The thought struck twice.
First as terror, then beneath it was immediate and ungovernable, in the exact pathways where the memory of His tendril still resided like a shadow persisting after the light had moved. Something else. Something warm and unasked-for and she was already moving before the second thought had completed itself. The bedsheets fell behind her. Her feet found the floor. Her hands moved with the automatic authority of a body trained through decades to perform its offices regardless of the condition of the person operating it.
Her robes.
Her mask.
The angle of her spine.
She smoothed the fabric. It was wrong. It would serve. She straightened with the full force of everything she had ever demanded of herself and drew breath and faced the door and—
The sound did not travel through air.
It did not enter at the ear and permit the mind its customary moment of translation. It simply was, it was everywhere, simultaneously, as though it had always been present within the bone and had only now chosen to be known. It split the world at every seam. But not crack by crack. All of them. At once.
The ceiling came apart.
But not gradually. The Lord's hand moved through it and the stone simply ceased to be where it had been. But not shattered. Removed the way a hand removes a cloth from a table. What fell came down in slow heavy pieces. It struck the floor without manners. Dust rose. The Void swallowed it immediately. The smoke that followed moved through the chamber in one vast exhalation, patient, as though the room had been holding its breath for years and had at last found occasion to release it.
Then the Void came.
It fell from the open sky above the wound in the ceiling in thin dark streams, drifting as particles drift, finding the surfaces and running down them and pooling along the floor's edges and spreading outward. It came also through the split places in the walls where the force of the tearing had opened seams the chamber had been hiding since it was built. It ran down every surface in thin careful currents and met the floor and spread and it found her immediately.
It always found her immediately.
The substance touched the skin above her collar and what followed was not burning and was not freezing but something precise and specific to each nerve it contacted.
It moved into her through the routes it had always moved through, and through others she had not known were available to it.
Through the corners of her eyes. Into the passages behind them. Through the seams of her lips. Into her throat. Into the soft spaces of her chest. Down, further, into the chambers where she kept the things she had never shown the congregation. Never spoken aloud. Never offered in any rite.
She heard Stella make a sound.
She heard Sera.
She did not look.
There.
One word. Again. Dropped through the open ceiling with the precision of something placed rather than spoken. It was not loud, it was not directed at the room. It was directed at her, the way a finger pointed at a specific thing among many things, and the many things were not the point, and had never been the point, and the word confirmed this without apology.
Her gaze was already upward, through the drifting black and the settling debris and the thin dark rivers running down every surface, through the ruin of the chamber that had stood unchanged through all their transformations and all their labour and all the years—she looked upward and she distinguished, through all of it:
Silhouette.
It was vast, it was patient, and to her, it was absolute. It was not falling, it was not descending in any manner that implied the action might be stopped or redirected or reconsidered. It was lowering, the way night lowered without urgency and without drama and without the faintest acknowledgment that what lay beneath it held any opinion about the matter.
His palm. Open.
She was on her back. She could not recall when she had come to be there or whether she had fallen or been placed or whether the distinction had simply ceased to apply. The cold of His presence pressed through her chest and into the places where her name resided and the places where her certainty resided and the places where she had kept all these years the particular thing she would not name, not here, not now, not ever, and He had always been larger than she had imagined and she had imagined very large.
M-my Lord—
The Void moved through her in slow relentless tides and the chamber gave what remained of itself to the dark and Stella was at the wall and Sera had gone still in the doorway, pressed flat against the frame, and the shadows moved around all of them with the thoroughness of water finding every crack in stone and filling each one without preference and without haste and without the smallest acknowledgment that the cracks had ever belonged to anyone.
Hazel looked up. Only up.
…
The palm descended.