(High View — Character — Display — Roof — Trial — Futility)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
xXx
~~~
There.
The Knight found her the way a stone finds the bottom of a well. Weight and direction. The absence of anything fit enough to interrupt the falling.
There was no triumph in it.
Discovery had never been a joy to them. It was only the confirmation of an angle already calculated in the long silence before the descent. The Shade Lord was somewhere above and behind and inside the space the Knight occupied.
The Nursery endures, it said.
This was true. Amid the ruin of the realm drowned beneath the Void's black inundation, the Nursery alone had not wholly yielded. Its pillars were cracked and bowed and their gilded surfaces eaten through with creeping dark, yet they stood. Something else dwelt within those walls. It was not holiness, it was not the pale benedictions the Seekers muttered with their dry mouths and their bent backs. Something else. Something that pressed against the Void the way bone pressed against the edge of a blade, not defeating it. Only refusing.
The Knight regarded it from above.
The Shade Lord's eight pale eyes moved across the structure with the patience of something that had accounted for every outcome and found them all acceptable.
We know this scent, it said, Sweet as marrow split beneath stone. Foul as the breath of graves long sealed. It calleth unto hunger and unto memory alike. And though it resembleth our own nature, it remaineth separate. Therefore it offends.
The Knight said nothing.
What thing fashioned of darkness willingly suffereth another darkness beside itself?
Below, on the broad platforms of the Proving Grounds, the goldwork had been corrupted and blackened. Long roots of Void had burst through the sacred metals and wrapped themselves around the old architecture and thin rivulets of water descended from shattered heights and pooled in stagnant basins where pale reflections trembled and went still and trembled again. And gathered beneath it all: hundreds of them.
Hundreds.
The congregation. Dense. Shoulder to shoulder in the manner of beasts before a storm. They had abandoned their solitary wanderings, their meditations, their rites. Now they stood clustered on the Void-stained stone. Whispering, whispering. Their voices moved through the air like dry parchment rustling in a sealed room.
The Knight looked down at them.
They had masks. Under the masks they had faces and under the faces they had whatever it was that drove shapes to gather in dark places and give their bodies to things larger than themselves. The Knight had seen this before in one form or another. It did not change much across its variations.
The Shade Lord moved above the crowd, and its voice came from the space around the Knight's shoulders.
Godseekers, it said, Mark the word. Not Godworshippers. Not Godkeepers. Seekers. The title itself is the confession. Reaching is a hunger without satisfaction and they have built an entire architecture of devotion upon the act of reaching and called the architecture faith. They sought gods not to adore but to possess. We understand hunger.
The Knight did not respond.
We invented it.
…
The congregation below had noticed them.
But not with terror first. Terror came second. First came that other thing, that wide-eyed fever that the Knight had seen in the faces of the hollow servants in the deep, the expression of creatures in the presence of something so far beyond their category that the mind's first response was not flight but an awful transfixed wanting. Their limbs trembled and yet they strained toward rather than away. Their horror and their reverence had mixed into something that no liturgy they had ever written had prepared them to manage.
They knew anyway. They had always known. They had built this place in the image of exactly this.
Then fear arrived and arrived completely and they went down. All of them. Foreheads to the Void-stained floor. Hands spread wide. Limbs bent beneath them. From their throats poured frantic recitations. Prayer heaped upon prayer. The individual words dissolved into each other. What remained was only sound. The sound of many bodies in the grip of something too large for the body to hold, and not one of them believed it would save them.
They prayed regardless.
The Knight watched this without particular feeling. There was something in it that was not contempt and was not pity but was perhaps the recognition of a fact, that what these creatures were doing was the most honest thing they had ever done, here at the end of the doing of it, on their faces on the cold floor with the Void running through the cracks around their splayed hands.
Useful, the Shade Lord said, or they were. There shall come others to guide them. Others who shall indulge their thirst and lead them unto fresh calamities. We need not concern ourselves.
…?
The chamber, the Shade Lord said, and its voice had sharpened at its edge the way a stone sharpened at the edge when the grinding was finished, She is within.
The Knight descended.
It folded its vastness inward, the horns of its shell catching no light as it moved, the bright eyes dim and fixed. The air around its passage made a sound that was not quite screaming and not quite silence. Something the ear received before the mind could name it. Below, the congregation recoiled. Black motes scattered from the Knight's body and fell upon them like soot from a funeral pyre and those who had been prostrate pressed themselves flatter still and those who had been standing went down.
The Knight came to rest above the Nursery.
It looked at the roof. It placed its hands upon the stone.
And tore.
Stone shrieked. Marble split. Gold screamed against itself as the roof came free. Not peeled. Not crumbled. Removed. Removed the way a lid is removed the way anything is opened that has been keeping something from the air. Great fragments crashed downward in clouds of dust and black motes and the sound moved across the platform and across the realm beyond and returned from the far walls diminished and returned again from further still and eventually stopped returning.
…
Then, below: The Godseeker.
She stood within the ruined chamber with her mask crooked upon her face and her garments thrown hastily about her and her eyes still issuing that thin black substance that the Knight's presence had called back into motion. She gazed upward. Her hand was moving toward the folds of her garment.
The Knight's hand descended before the movement completed itself.
It came through the chamber without ceremony. The walls cracked. The stone burst where the palm connected and the Godseeker went down beneath it, the sound of a body pressed against a hard surface by something considerably more substantial. The Knight's hand covered most of her torso. Its edges, not claws exactly, not anything with a clean name, found cloth and found the flesh beneath it and found the floor beneath that and the stone indented under the combined weight.
She writhed.
The Knight pressed its finger against her throat. But not to crush, but to stop the sound she was making. The sound ceased and became something that did not carry.
The Shade Lord watched. Its fog-like lower body spread across the floor, its eight pale eyes arrayed across face and shoulders and wrists. It caught no light. It produced no reflection. It looked at the scene below with the expression of something watching water find its own level.
She knew we were coming, it said, She dressed herself in haste. Had we arrived sooner we might have seen what she kept from her followers. The face beneath the face beneath the mask.
The Knight increased the pressure incrementally.
Beneath its palm the Godseeker's bones registered the change. Tendons stretched. The blood vessels at the surface of her skin swelled and darkened. Her breath came in thin damaged intervals. Her hands spread flat against the floor on either side of the Knight's wrist. Pressing, pressing. The Knight did not move.
The condemned must survive long enough to hear judgment, the Shade Lord said.
The Knight held its pressure at the point just before the point of no return. This was a precise place. It knew this place well, had always known it the way some things know the edge of what they are without being told. It was the place where the material of a thing was still intact but had been made to understand that intact was conditional and recent and not guaranteed to remain.
The Void continued through the broken chamber. It ran down every cracked surface and spread across the floor and found the Godseeker's edges and found the two others. The one bleeding quietly from her temple against the far wall, the one pressed into the doorframe with her mask still straight and her breathing visible from across the room. The Void moved into them all with the same unhurried precision. It did not distinguish, it did not prefer. It entered where entry was available and continued inward and what it found there it rearranged without apology and without leaving any record of the original arrangement.
The Knight did not look at the others. Then from within the chamber there came sound.
Song.
Not from the congregation. From within. One Seeker near the wall had begun to sing, trembling-voiced, the notes coming apart at their edges but holding their shape nonetheless. Then a second voice joined from the doorway, the smaller one, pressed against the frame, singing with her eyes fixed on the Knight's hand and the thing beneath it. Their hymn wound through the broken space in thin defiance. A funeral chorus delivered before the corpse had stopped moving.
Beneath the Knight's palm the Godseeker added her own accompaniment. Choking breath. Muffled and rhythmic. Together the three made something that could not have been composed and could not have been intended and was more honest than anything they had ever rehearsed.
The Shade Lord was quiet for a moment.
Still they love her, it said finally, but not with contempt, but with the quality of a naturalist noting the behaviour of a species, They risk themselves for her sake though the outcome stands certain. This is not faith. This is the specific madness of creatures who have chosen a centre for themselves and will not allow the centre to be removed even when the centre is already gone.
The Knight looked at the two singers. It looked at them the way it looked at most things without conclusion, without the next step already built into the looking.
They are not wrong to love, the Knight said.
The Shade Lord made no immediate response to this. Its eight pale eyes moved from the singers to the Knight and remained there.
No, it said at last, They are not wrong. They are only too late. Love correctly timed is navigation. Love too late is only weight.
The Knight returned its attention to the woman beneath its hand.
She had stopped writhing.
Her hands were flat on the floor. The pressing had stopped. Her breathing had settled into the damaged regularity of something that had accepted the terms of its situation. Her eyes were open. Looking upward. But not afraid the way beasts were afraid, but afraid the way someone is afraid who has arrived precisely where they intended and found the arrival more than they had prepared for, and would not for anything leave.
The Knight knew this expression.
It had no name for what it felt in response to it. The Shade Lord would have said that was the point, that the things without names were the things worth attending to. It had no name for what it felt in response to it.
It tightened its grip.
A single sharp report from within the body beneath its palm.
Crack.
The singing ceased.