(Preparation — Unclean Intrusions — Recollection — Survey — The Rite — Doom)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background noise
… denotes silence
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I feel… unwell…
She caught the thought before it went further into a pocket not its own. Held it. Crushed it beneath the heel of her attention and turned back to the business of the world.
Away! Away with thee, thou profane and creeping thought!
The plate of her own skull beneath her claws was solid. Ordinary. She counted her breath and let the counting stand in for whatever it was supposed to produce.
Below her station, the other Godseekers moved, slow as breath forgetting it was ever free. Censers on black iron chains. The chains answered every step with a small metallic grief. The dream-incense rose thin and straight, then failed into drift. Mouths moved without sound that could be kept. Heads stayed bowed. Shadows crossed and uncrossed across the stone as the censers swung.
They did not know what she knew. She named each grievance anyway, gave it a shelf and a label and the shape of a conclusion it did not have. The naming did not empty it. It only made it orderly, and order was not the same thing as peace, though it could be made to stand in a peace-shaped space if nothing better arrived to fill it.
All had been prepared for the Most Solemn Occasion. The Attunement.
That the Lord of Shades should not depart again into that silence between worlds, that interval where prayer left the mouth and found no destination, where the faithful died kneeling and were found kneeling and the posture had held long enough that reverence and collapse could no longer be told apart.
The ichor had not ceased since the choosing. Some named it curse. She named it gift. The same wound, read from two directions. Once it had burned, something molten poured in and left to cool by its own design. She had stopped speaking of it. It did not burn now. A scar does not ache forever. The nerve beneath it goes silent, the way all dead things eventually do, and she reminded herself of this on a schedule that had nothing to do with needing reminding.
God forgive me.
The thought returned. She caught it before it travelled far.
Not now, she told it, in the interior chamber where no other voice held authority.
She knew where that corridor led. She had walked it. Each passage took something with it on the way out and returned less than it had carried. She pressed her mandibles shut, tasted the cold trace of her own saliva along the inner ridge of her jaw. A bead of ichor traced the seam of her thorax-plate.
This hour required sanctity. In this body. In this chair.
Above these people, who wove her name and the name of God together as though the two belonged in the same sentence.
They did not. She let it stand uncorrected.
A younger Seeker caught a foot on the hem of an altar cloth. An offering vessel slid and scraped against stone, a long dry sound, caught before it fell. The Seeker looked up, found no gaze fixed on them, lowered their eyes. The ceremony continued.
Theirs was a wound half-cauterised. Seared but not sealed, worsened by the attempt to close it. Her own communion gleamed the same way. The thought offered no pleasure.
She struck her claws together. The sound broke against the pillars and came back altered. She had noticed this once and had not followed it further.
Is all prepared, my dear brothers and sisters?
The cough took the edges off the words. She despised the softness. A groove worn into her by nothing she had chosen, the body announcing itself as condition rather than instrument.
The congregation answered as one body. Yes, O Hazel, our Speaker and Guide. All is made ready to please our Lord.
Their voices arrived together in a way she had never once managed on her own. Varied throats drawn into a single coherence, as if enough proximity could make broken things forget they were separate. It arrested the eye before thought arrived to correct it. She let it stand.
O God Above Gods, we seek Thy mercy.
The litany unfolded as it always had, each phrase set down like a stone over deep water. Prayer had never been conversation. It had always been force applied to quiet. She prayed anyway. It might have been the only part of her that did not require managing.
We who once clung unto lesser truths confess now our folly—
Her gullet tightened. She pushed the words through it.
Thine origin is unknowable. Thine power beyond imitation. By that power shall we follow Thee unto the endless age—
The voices beneath her rose, one current through many bodies, and in it each name ceased to matter. She felt it behind her teeth.
If Thou demand worship, we give it freely. If Thou demand sacrifice, we are Thine already. If Thou demand banquet—
A pause. Small. Beneath it, something opened like how a hairline fracture opens in a dam.
—consume us wholly.
The words hung. The silence pressed against her eardrums like a palm held flat.
Her vision doubled. The ichor pulsed. A pressure built there, thick, close enough to pleasure that the distance between the two had stopped being useful information. Her gullet worked at a dry swallow. A shudder ran the plates of her thorax. The carapace felt tight, something beneath it pressing outward against the chitin the way water presses against a container it has outgrown.
Recognising.
Not the congregation. The other thing. The heat of being found. She bit the soft fold inside her mandible until she tasted copper.
Not now. Not while they watched.
Some part of her had already leaned into it before the rest of her objected.
The cadence was true. Rightness moved through her like warmth that moves through buried stone, arriving at an unasked depth. The congregation answered with rising fervour, the air thickening around their voices.
We would be made part of Thee. Thy will is absolute. O Graceful Liberator, we beg Thy acknowledgement—
Something stood at the edge of perception. A presence, foreign and—this she would not revisit later—familiar. Appetite without rite.
It tested the boundary. It did not bite. It tasted. A wet pressure against her eye, sliding the nerve like a thumb sliding along a bruise. Breath against the nape of her neck though nothing stood behind her.
Her body answered before anything in her had agreed to it. Her claw found the arm of the chair and closed on it hard enough that it took the mark and kept it.
Continue, she said to the congregation, and did not move to correct them, though the correcting had already half-formed in her mind.
Hazel.
The chair shuddered under her. The congregation's eyes landed on her at once, with the particular weight of eyes that had expected steadiness.
Are you well, Great Speaker?
Well.
An absurd little word, built for misplaced things and minor discourtesies, offered to her now as though it still applied.
No matter, she said. Continue.
The cough came sharper than before, bending her forward. Her thorax burned. Forelimbs found the armrests again. The congregation stared. She commanded them again. They obeyed, reluctant, bodies obeying a nerve it no longer entirely trusts.
The lesser presence lingered at the edges. A remnant of some abandoned godhood, she decided, scavenging off the residue of holiness. She was likely wrong. She filed the possibility.
Foolish thing, she thought, and scattered it from the walls of the inward kingdom with a gesture that cost her nothing to make and accomplished less.
She had no such dominion in truth. She was not equal with the Lord of Shades. She was His instrument. A distinction that had been made plain to her more than once. Yet she forgot it completely each time. She imagined the correction anyway.
Hazel.
A second Seeker at her elbow.
What troubles you?
Troubles. As though the word had been built to hold this.
I am adjusting, Hazel said. This new state requireth time.
The words came out steady enough to pass. Her claw found the edge of the mask at her jaw and straightened it, though it had not moved. The Seeker's eyes went to the claw before they went to her face. Hazel took the claw away. The Seeker lingered, unconvinced, and left. The chanting had already stopped. The congregation stood frozen in a silence none of them had chosen. Their uncertainty wore her neglect for a face. She had known this before and it had not once changed anything.
Her claws clenched as fury rose, like blood arriving before the cut became pain. Her claws unclenched. Whatever she had been about to do did not happen. The moment for it passed.
Begin again.
She had come to the Lord with a body already damaged. The preparing had taken years. The choosing had taken a moment. The moment had taken the rest. She had not known, at the time, what the taking would cost. Not knowing had been the only mercy extended to her, and it had been extended exactly once.
The congregation resumed, their fervour frantic now, the specific noise of people who have been uncertain and mean to bury it under volume.
We who clung unto lesser truths, her own words returned to her in other mouths. We confess now our folly.
She had written those words. They were correct. They were also incomplete.
A woman may be chosen and wanting at the same time.
She had not written that line anywhere. She carried it until the carrying and the shape of her had become the same fact.
The presence at the edges shifted. Not the lesser intrusion. Something arrived on the far side of the threshold, as though the threshold had simply stopped being consulted.
The censers' smoke bent sideways though no wind moved. A young Seeker near the south altar stopped mid-syllable, mouth open, and did not close it.
Hazel felt it in her sternum, behind her back teeth, behind her eyes where the ichor began.
Weight.
Settling at the joint where head met shell, spreading, bearing down on the membrane beneath. Her setae rose along both forelimbs. She could not blink. The ichor swelled and ran down her cheek. Her mouth went dry, then wet, then dry, mandibles pressed shut.
The Lord of Shades.
The feeling passed through her like a blade finding a seam already there. She resented that it fit. Resented that fitting had never once required her consent. Could not make either resentment do anything about what was already occurring.
A woman can be chosen and wanting at the same time.
The congregation's voices faltered into something the liturgy had no word for, because she had kept this part out on purpose. Hazel heard the faltering and it did not surprise her. The ichor burned fresh tracks down her face.
She straightened in the chair. The air behind her throne had changed. She turned. She already knew what waited. The knowing changed nothing.
The words left her before she had decided. Soft. Softer than she would have permitted, had permission arrived in time to matter.
M-my Lord?