(Health – Remember – Confidant – Door – Dress – Celing – Palm)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
-x-X-x-
The latch turned. The door groaned on its hinges.
Dear Leader?
Hazel released the bedsheets. Her frame rose. She pressed her back to the cold wall.
Had they seen.
…Leader?
She shut the vision of the pillars and the whispering down. She breathed and settled her hands into their arrangement and laid composure over her posture.
Y-yes?
The stammer came out before she could catch it.
May I enter, Great Speaker? I came but to inquire after thy condition.
Yes, she said, the tone arriving steady this time. Pray enter.
The door opened.
Stella.
The woman who had run the congregation's daily labour through the months of restoration while Hazel oversaw the rest. Hazel let the distinction sit where it was and did not follow it any further.
Stella crossed the room and climbed onto the bed, settling her carapace into the depressions Hazel had already left, and arranged her limbs without asking.
Hazel watched the click of Stella's joints as she settled, the faint hum of her spiracles, the fractured candlelight caught in the facets of her eyes.
There was no mask needed here. Stella looked at the Void still leaking from Hazel's thorax like how one looks at a leak in a roof that wants patching.
The leak is slowing, Stella said, and reached out to adjust the sheet of fur at Hazel's waist. Her claws moved precise and gentle and entirely without veneration.
Good, Hazel said, she meant it.
Stella's shoulders sat too carefully. Her gaze rested a beat too long on nothing.
Stella. Truly. Speak freely.
Stella gathered one slow breath.
Dear Hazel. 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 hands did not move on the sheet. Her breath did not change its measure. Thirty years had gone into ensuring nothing showed that she had not decided to show.
Forced.
On behalf of their foolishness. As though it had been taken from her rather than given.
Then I perceived what thou were truly doing, Stella went on, and reached for Hazel's hand in a way that made a request feel like an offering. Hazel let her take it.
Truly, Mother. Thy devotion unto God is not of this world.
Hazel's breath stopped for the length of one heartbeat and did not resume until the second. She let the silence stand where the response should have gone. Inside it, the tendril returned—cold and moving through her arms and into her chest and past the ribs into rooms she had not known were there to enter.
Her hand tightened around Stella's. She made it loosen again.
Oh dear, Stella murmured, glancing toward the door. The others may require my aid presently. Might I take my leave, Mother?
She had not let go of Hazel's hand while saying it.
No need remaineth to call me Mother, Hazel said. I possess yet far to journey before I deserve such title. But aye. Thou mayest go.
Stella rose slowly.
Thou ought wash thy hands afterward, Hazel said. I am but a sickly and helpless worshipper.
Stella laughed, short, surprised from this direction.
Yes. I shall not forget, Dear Hazel. I shall pray unto the Lord for thy swift recovery.
Yes. Do.
Hazel watched her cross toward the door and did not say the thing that sat behind the watching. Some matters stayed sacred by staying unsaid. She had held this one that way for a long time and saw no occasion, now, to stop.
I go now, dear—
CRACK.
The door flew wide. Its edge caught Stella full along the side of the head and the sound of it was flat and immediate, and the silence after had the particular quality of a room still thinking what had just happened to it.
Stella struck the wall. Her claw went to her temple. Yellow blood came between her claw-tips, a thin line below the mask, along the mandibles. She did not go down.
In the doorway stood Sera, panting, sweat bright along the mask's edge, every line of her the record of someone who had run at reckless speed across a considerable distance and had not paused to think about doors or whoever stood behind them. Stella looked at her in a silence with an entire complaint folded inside it.
What trouble is this, Sera?
Sera braced against the frame and took one breath.
The Lord!
Another.
HE COMETH!
…
Hazel sat inside the two heartbeats accessible to her and took the full measure of the room. The recovery chamber. Composure not yet load-bearing. Throat raw. Limbs uncertain. The Void still running from her eyes. Bindings wrong for whatever was arriving.
He was coming.
The thought struck twice—first as fear, then as something deeper, moving her before she could resist. The sheets fell away. Her feet found the floor. Her hands went to the bindings, the mask, the angle of her spine, with the automatic authority of a body trained for decades to perform its office, regardless of who occupied it.
She smoothed the fabric. Wrong. It would serve. It would have to serve. She straightened and drew breath and faced the door.
Sound.
It travelled through the gold of Godhome itself, beginning in the floor, a low groan climbing up through the soles of her feet, through the joints of her legs, into the emptiness behind her sternum. A frequency, precise enough that it found the exact pitch her own hollowness was built to answer.
Her mask hummed. Her carapace took up a high thin whine only she could hear. The candle on the desk guttered without wind.
Then the ceiling came apart. At once.
A claw moved through it and it simply stopped being where it had been. Removed. A cloth being drawn off a table in one motion. What fell came down in heavy pieces, struck the floor. Dust rose and the Void took it before it could settle. The room exhaled smoke like something exhaling after holding its breath for years.
Then the Void itself came.
Falling through the wound in the ceiling in thin dark streams, running down every surface it touched, finding the floor's edges and spreading. It came through the seams the tearing had opened in the walls too, seams the chamber had been keeping to itself since it was built.
It found her first. It always found her first.
The Void touched the skin above her collar and produced neither burn nor freeze, only a precision specific to each nerve it reached, moving into her through the routes it had always used and through others she had not known were open. Corners of the eyes. The passage behind them. The seams of the lips. The throat. Down into the thorax, and past it, into rooms she had never once shown the congregation.
She heard Stella make a sound. She heard Sera. She did not turn toward either.
There.
Another single word fell through the open ceiling, placed with the precision of a finger aimed at one thing among many.
Her gaze went up on its own, through the drifting black, through the settling stone, and found it.
Silhouette. Vast. Unhurried, never once needed to reconsider its own approach. It lowered, like how night lowers.
A claw. Open.
Her knees went before she registered that they had bent. She lay on the metalline floor, limbs splayed like a flipped beetle's limbs splay, carapace slick with black under the drifting Void, underbelly bared and turned upward toward Him. Her spiracles worked hard. Her antennae read the pressure drop and reported the approach of something with no comparable scale in the room.
He was larger than she had prepared for, and she had prepared for a great deal.
The Void pressed into her chest and did not stop pressing. Her pulse slowed under it. Her limbs went loose, then simply stopped answering, strength leaving them the way rope runs out hand over hand.
For the first time in years, she felt her weight. Dead weight. Nothing more.
She tried for the litany. For her own name. The Void had already taken the throat it would have travelled through, filled it with dark silken weight before the first word could form. She was not being touched but taken in.
M-my Lord—
Hazel looked up.