(Blankets — The Speaker — Whore — True Devotion — Dimmed World — Gone)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
-x-X-x-
~~~
The corridor rang beneath her tread and the blankets shifted in her arms with every step like reluctant beasts refusing the direction of travel.
She had gathered too many. She had known this the moment she accepted them and accepted them regardless.
The smell of the cathedral clung to the fur now. The Void. It rose from the folds—a faint, undeniable sour tang, acrid with bile and the stale reek of a fouled stomach, that tightened the base of her gullet.
She shifted her grip, claw-tips digging into the fabric, and for a second the corridor was gone. She was on the floor again. The air thick and oily. She could still see the black pool spreading beneath Hazel's knees. She could still see how Hazel's hands had closed around the tendril with… hunger.
Sera had watched it happen. She had felt a flush move up through her thorax, and had made no attempt to name what the flush belonged to.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
Her feet echoed down the old passages and came back changed. Everything came back changed here. Voices came back thinner. Laughter came back sorrowful. Silence came back deepened after brushing the metalline walls, that converted whatever entered into them into whatever they preferred.
The confidant. Hazel's confidant.
Too pragmatic, she thought, as though pragmatism explained anything about what moved beneath events rather than what sat comfortably on top of them. She set the thought down.
Hazel. Crawling.
The image sat in her the way a stone sits in standing water. The ichor had come from Hazel's mouth in floods, black as… the Void, spreading across the metalline floor in pools. Hazel had dragged herself through her own voided substance, head bent, trembling from the proximity of a thing too large for the vessel receiving it.
Sera had watched.
She had stood in the congregation and felt something with no clean name and had not tried to force one onto it. It was not pity. It was not the open, sufficient awe the younger Seekers wore.
She was braver than most. This she held as fact without needing it admired.
She had walked into dark that stopped others at the threshold. She had performed offices that emptied rooms before they began, not all who left doing so willingly, not all of them whole after. She was not large. She had been called short more often than she had been called by name, and each time it landed like a boot placed on a bad ankle, and each time she had looked at whoever said it and gone back to what she had been doing.
She was not Hazel. The distance between them was appetite.
Hazel had eaten God. Or God had eaten her.
Sera had stood at the edge of the pool, being dry and intact. She hated the dryness. She had wanted to step into the ichor. She had wanted the taste of it.
She adjusted her grip on the blankets, hiding her claws in the fur.
…
Well, she said, to no one.
The memory had been lodged the way a blade is lodged in cartilage.
She shifted the blankets higher.
Hazel had not crawled because she could not stand. She had crawled because she meant to reach Him regardless. Sera recognized the courage from the outside. She had her own kind and required no one watching to exercise it. The Void did not care whether you had an audience when you walked into it.
She thought of Hazel's face turned up toward the shape above her. The expression on it.
She stopped thinking of it on purpose. Some things were not for looking at directly and she had already spent enough of the Still Light doing exactly that.
Hazel was beloved of Him.
This was fact, and she held no argument with facts. But there was a species of belovedness Hazel cultivated with the attention of something that had long since ceased distinguishing devotion from appetite, called the cessation holy, and made the congregation recite its holiness in unison beneath her black-weeping eyes.
Sera had recited along with the rest—
She stumbled.
Her toe caught on a ledge and the world tilted a degree. The blankets slipped and she caught them—gasping, pulse hammering the plates of her thorax. She stood breathing hard, staring at a pool of shadow in the corner of the corridor. She could almost feel the Void, the tendril against her hands.
She shook her head and straightened. She adjusted the blankets. She walked on.
She had taken the Void into herself. Also a fact. Less of it than Hazel, at a lower cost, but the coldness was real and the ichor ran sometimes and the sensation of it moving through her during rituals was not something she had made peace with.
The corridor's cold moved through her feet now, ordinary cold. She hated the shiver it produced, a reminder of how much of her let things in. Hazel had let the Void move through her. Sera kept her walls standing. She kept the blankets close. She kept her mouth shut.
But she carried Hazel's face with her: ichor tracking her plating like rivers on a map, eyes widening at something found after a long search; and she carried what it had awakened low in her gut, an emptiness that said only… more.
She tightened her grip on the blankets until the joints whitened. She put the word down under the fur.
She was not Hazel.
She gripped the blankets and moved.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
The corridor opened into one of the long outer galleries and her gaze went toward the dreamscape beyond the arches.
The world had gone dim.
Once these halls had shone gold beneath soft, unseen heavens, their pillars bright with the devotion of bugs whose names had long since vanished from every tongue still spoken. Now the light was grey and thin, and the great chambers looked exhausted by the act of continuing to endure. Dust lay thick across ancient stone. Chains hung motionless from heights swallowed by darkness. Bells stood silent in their frames, and distant platforms seemed suspended between nowhere and nowhere.
There was still beauty in it, like how there is always beauty in a dying thing for anyone willing to keep looking. The dim light caught upon worn metal and faded stone, making distant towers tender in a way their grandeur never had been. Even the vast darkness between the pillars seemed almost gentle.
Decline carried its own grace.
She preferred honest ruin to dishonest splendour.
Hazel would assign her scripture for the thought, if she knew it. Dangerously poetic, she would say, and produce a text meant to redirect the tendency.
Sera had received such assignments before. They had not cured the tendency but given her a working knowledge of the material, which she suspected was the actual point.
*Tap. Tap—*
She stopped.
Every muscle stopped before her mind understood why. The blankets lurched. One nearly went and instinct caught it against her thorax.
Someone stood in the corridor. Not someone.
The Lord of Shades.
He stood before her. Silent.
And for one interval every thought she owned emptied out at once, comprehension stripped from her like hide is stripped from a carcass.
She was not a Godseeker in that moment. Not braver than most. She was a small body standing in front of a larger one. The blankets fell. They struck the floor with a muffled, undignified collapse.
His head turned toward the sound.
It was low, sub-audible, starting at the base of her head-shell and driving down the ridge of her back, shaking the mandibles loose in their sockets. Her leg-joints buckled from resonance. The frequency matched something native in her own bones, and for a second her chitin seemed to be tuning itself toward the pitch of something it had not been built to answer. She pressed her head-shell to the wall, claws whitened on the blanket.
The sound did not stop.
It filled the corridor and the space between her ribs. It had no interest in her, none in the blankets or anything but the fact of its own occurring.
God forgive me for that noise.
The wall held her up. She was grateful for a fixed point. The sound faded.
Then the gaze arrived, settling on her until it had filled the whole of her seeing.
He was merely noticing, and under that notice her sensible life dissolved. She was a small woman holding a collapsed pile of fur in a hallway, and He had taken note of exactly that.
She was braver than most. This was, apparently, what that looked like at the moment it was tested. She did not have time to be ashamed of it.
She stepped away from the wall like a body moving when the position it had been holding has stopped being tenable. Her forelimbs twisted in the cords of her bindings. She became aware, all at once, of every flaw currently on display: the bindings, the claws, the smell of incense and honest labor, the blankets on the floor like evidence against her.
She made herself stop cataloguing it. She looked at Him.
Those eyes.
She had been told about them. She did not look away.
The dark moved around Him. It was no shadow, but something with its own motion, unfolding in long slow tendrils that curled and drew back with no particular hurry. The corridor felt narrower for holding Him, the walls drawn subtly inward.
Something moved through her. It arrived already inside, and spread from the thorax outward into places she had not known could hold a sensation like it.
She swallowed.
A-anything—I mean—
She stopped. Tried again.
Do you seek aught of me, my Lord?
The air thickened.
Where.
…
One word, set directly into the structure of her thought, bypassing ear and air, using both only as a courtesy.
She blinked.
My Lord, she said, forgive me, I did not wholly understand—
The gaze stayed on her. It measured.
Judgment requires a standard. The Void kept none.
She felt the depth testing her. Every small vanity, every private uncharitable thought spent, lay bare under the gaze the way instruments are laid out on a tray.
Her face heated. The heat was the smaller fact. The larger one sat in her hands. Her claw-tips, which had been twisting the cords of her bindings, had gone still, and they were trembling with recognition.
He was locating her.
She had built walls and called them prudence, courage and truth. The Void did not deal in names. It dealt in substance, and hers ran thin, stretched over a frame built from ambition and the need to be seen as competent.
The gaze passed through the competence and strength without slowing. It arrived at the same hunger Hazel carried. Sera's spiracles fluttered. The word Where moved through her thorax looking for a corner to sit in. There were no corners. The corridor was narrow. He was everywhere in it.
She opened her mouth for a defense that did not come. The measuring was done. She had come up short. Short in her calling.
For the first time in her life, she did not argue with the finding. Then understanding arrived, late as ever.
The Speaker! She heard her own voice come out too loud. O Hazel—she resteth within the Nursery Chamber, northeast, above—
The dark around Him shifted, a slow adjustment like weather reconsidering direction.
SHE RESTETH ABOVE, MY LORD!
…
She stood quiet and breathed.
Shall I, she then asked carefully, bring her unto Thee, my Lord?
He moved.
He rose to His full height and the corridor's air went with the motion as completely as if it had been drawn out by hand, the dark unfolding from Him in sheets, and for one instant the corridor itself seemed to consider giving way before settling against the idea—
Gone.
Between one heartbeat and the next. Only metalline remained where He had stood, and the cold displacement of air, and above through the gallery arches a dark fracture crossed the grey sky briefly, as if something had passed through it at a speed it had not been built to survive.
The fracture closed. The grey returned. No further evidence remained.
She stood alone with the collapsed blankets.
Zounds.
She said it to the empty corridor. Then she was moving. She left the blankets where they lay. She gathered what was left of herself into the shape of a direction and ran.
Hazel. He had sought Hazel.
Through all of Godhome, its chambers, its centuries of worship, through and past all of it, God had come for one name, and the name was not hers.
Of course it was Hazel.
Every question, followed back far enough, arrived at her—composed and black-weeping and raised above the rest, touched by the Lord in ways none of the others were touched—
She ran.
Past the old arches, past the incense chambers, past the sleeping alcoves where lesser Seekers murmured half-dreaming prayers, unaware of what had moved through the corridors above.
The envy was not clean. It sat sticky against the back of her tongue. She swallowed it, tasted copper, and ran on.
Hazel had her excellence. Sera had her own. They were not the same, and comparison was an exercise for creatures with nothing pressing to occupy them. She had something pressing: to reach a woman who had spent a lifetime preparing for this arrival and tell her it had come—a service she suspected was either the most useful thing she had ever done or entirely redundant.
She ran.
She wanted to see Hazel broken. She wanted to see Hazel shine. She did not know which outcome she was running toward, and the not-knowing did not slow her down.
The corridors blurred. The metalline floor swallowed the sound of her feet and returned it thinner, faster, belonging to someone more desperate than she meant to appear. Above, the grey sky held its color. The world went on with its long, patient dying.
She was small inside it. Running. And none of it required reconciling.
The Lord had spoken one word to her. It had not been her name. That was all that had happened.
God had come seeking His Speaker.
She ran faster.