(Recognition — The Return — Frailty — Worthlessness — Desperation — Mercy — Trespass — Delight)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
-x-X-x-
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?
And she beheld Him.
Those eyes held no celestial fire, none of the warm directional light lesser faiths paint onto their lanterns. Empty. Utterly empty. He did not look at her. He looked through the plate of her cheek into the wet dark beneath her shell and found what waited there. The breath left her lungs the way air leaves a punctured hull, unhurried, complete. The dark behind Him coiled slow. His shape did not hold. No sooner did her eyes settle on one limb than another occupied its place.
She knew, without deciding to know it, that this would not leave her. Centuries might pass. Memory might rot. Her flesh might swell and burst and feed whatever patient things found such matter worth the feeding. The vision would remain regardless, cut somewhere below marrow.
Her Lord had come.
Her limbs shook before thought arrived. Her hindlegs knocked against the throne's arms, a soft rhythmic percussion with no etiquette behind it. Her stomach turned, slow and liquid, a thing turning to make room for something it has not agreed to hold.
His gaze rested on her.
Not the congregation or the environment of Godhome with its stained pillars, its eyeless carvings, its centuries of accumulated wanting.
Her. Alone.
She hoped this was so and did not examine it. She drew breath carefully, like how a person moves near something that might mistake sudden motion for provocation. Her insides worked at some private labour, as if fingers not her own moved through her abdomen, folding what they found there like folding wet cloth. Searching.
Yet she smiled. Or the muscles produced what could be produced from the materials at hand.
Our Lord, she said, and the voice nearly failed.
She rose. Not a standing. An uncoiling, weighted, each step down the dais a small negotiation with gravity. The stone was cold through her claws, a familiar and useful pain. She walked, a thing walking toward a verdict it has already agreed to.
The Seekers parted below her without a sound. Two hundred lungs drawn in and kept there. There had been more, in her mother's time. They did not look at her. They looked past her, at the gap between her shoulder blades and where the dark stood coiled, waiting to see what might spill from that seam.
The pillars loomed, stained black where the Void had kissed them through long proximity. She held her posture though her knees had begun their private argument against her. If she fell here, before Him, there would be no correction available afterward.
O Claimer of the unbeating heart, she began.
Thou hast heard the cry of Thy faithful. Thou hast not abandoned us unto everlasting silence. Truly, truly Thou art the highest of all divinities and all dominions bend beneath Thy—
Pain.
It struck her thorax and the words stopped where they stood. Something drew tight across the plates of her chest and continued drawing. Her gullet closed. Her vision narrowed until only the space directly ahead remained, Him at the far end of it.
He did not move. The gaze held its shape.
O Lord, she managed, forgive me that I may have—
Then the true weight of it began.
It rose from her stomach like how pitch rises when set to boil. Her throat burned. Her eyes burned. Even the chitin of her mandibles ached, as though it too had been searched and found wanting. She folded at the middle. The wet sound she made left her before she could stop it.
Then it came forth.
Blackness. A rope of it.
It was the ichor, thicker now, carrying the grit of thirty of carrying salt swallowed in rooms where no one had been watching. It struck the metalline floor and spread in patterns. It smelled of a sharp metallic tang beneath the sour reek of stomach acid.
Godhome filled with the smell of her.
Cough—cough—oh God—
Her lungs convulsed again. She saw her reflection shaking in the black pool beneath her and did not linger on it.
Only a few paces remained.
She told her legs this. Her legs did not agree, and gave out. She fell. Her leg-joints struck the floor. She looked up, waiting for Him to turn from what she had made of the floor beneath Him.
He did not turn.
He looked through the black pools, through her body, like how a thing looks through an obstruction that happens to occupy the path.
His gaze was not upon her.
It never had been.
The realization of this arrived like a fact arriving that has been waiting for the worst moment to announce itself in. Behind her she felt the congregation's confusion move outward in rings, then something under the confusion. Their pity.
She had failed Him. She refused to look at Him. Worse, she had displeased Him. She clenched her head. Worse still, she had done it on the ground. The world started to shut around her.
…
Rise.
The order came from the last locked room in whatever she was.
If thou canst not rise, then crawl.
She would not lose Him again. She remembered the years of silence—the asking that returned nothing, however precisely it was shaped, however long it was held in position. Kingdoms had gone down in that silence. Minds had rotted in it. Faith had curdled.
She knew its shape from the inside. She set the knowledge aside.
Never again.
If suffering was the price, let it be paid without counting.
She dragged herself across the floor, the motion of a thing hauling itself toward water it would not live to drink. The whispers rose around her. Their Great Speaker, reduced to this.
Good.
Let them see the full accounting, unsoftened.
She would give the whole of herself and count it cheap. Let the husk go to the floor like a coin spent. Let Him weigh what remained and find it worthy. She had knelt before lesser altars and called it enough; this was not enough; nothing had ever been enough. Only the last measure bought anything, and she meant to pay it entire, down to the marrow.
Her children would stand after in whatever light He chose to leave them. That was the whole of the transaction, and she had never asked to understand it. She had only asked to be spent.
She was the Mother.
She reached the edge of His shadow. It had weight, and moved the way storm cloud moves above water. She touched the edge of it with a trembling claw. It felt like—
Nothing. Nothing available to comparison.
My Lord, she said, in a voice broken down to its smallest working parts, forgive us our trespasses. Forgive our weakness. We shall not fail Thee again.
Her head-shell touched the floor.
Please.
The word got out before whatever might have stopped it. What had once stopped such words had been strangled some minutes prior. Did not answer either.
Hush.
The pain stopped.
Her lungs loosened. Her stomach settled. The burn left her throat the way a flame leaves a wick pinched between two fingers. She went still. The stillness itself was close to unbearable.
O Lord of Pantheons, she breathed, hast Thou truly shown mercy unto one so wretched?
A tendril came out of the dark. Pure shadow and unhurried, reaching. She took it with both forelimbs. What followed unmade several things she had believed about the nature of touch.
It held no temperature.
An absence that pulled the heat straight out of her palms and left the chitin there feeling thick and strangely light. It was not solid. Her claws did not sink into anything. They passed through something closer to a vibration, fine enough to hum against the nerve. There was no pressure and no squeeze in return.
It held her upright.
The pain in her ribs did not fade. It was removed. A wave of nausea moved through her. She closed her eyes. The dark behind them matched the dark in her hands. For one moment she could not locate the border between herself and the Void, and did not go looking for it.
Her knees shook once she stood, violently, and she let them.
My Lord, she said, tears past any pretense of restraint now, there existeth no tongue worthy to express—
Her strength gave out again and two of her brethren caught her before the floor could, another steadying her back with practiced limbs, and something warm moved through her chest fast enough that the indignity of being caught barely registered. It filled what was empty and the pain simply ended up displaced somewhere smaller.
O God above Gods! she called out. How shall we ever repay Thy grace?
The others took it up at once, their voices pouring through the breach — She speaketh truth! We are forever indebted! Blessed be our Lord! — and something warm and terrible opened in her chest to receive it. She thought of the years before this, hands laid on shoulders that never answered, and how she had called that silence holy and had believed it and had been wrong.
She had pleased Him. At last.
Or the meal had simply not yet concluded.
The thought sat where it landed, a small hard fact inside a great deal of liquid gratitude, and she did not investigate whether it mattered. She did not know if anything mattered now that the cold had entered the plates of her thorax and taken up permanent tenancy there.
She looked at her forelimbs, still black with residue. The tendril had withdrawn. The memory of its touch had not. A phantom pressure at the claw-tips, evidence that she had been held by a thing under no obligation to hold her.
The congregation went on crying out, still believing the silence had broken because a voice had spoken, rather than because a hand had reached out to close the mouths of bugs.
Hazel closed her eyes and let them carry her. Let the joy burn through her, desperate. She was still here.
O my Lord, she went on, feverish, none may rival Thy wisdom! None may challenge Thy dominion, for none shall remain alive long enough to stand against Thy glo—
Quiet.
…
The word carried no volume. It landed with the accuracy of a blade laid flat against a throat. The congregation went on chanting. They had heard nothing. The word had been placed for her alone.
And she alone received it.
It held her in place as completely as any restraint, the way a ring through the nose holds a beast.
She raised her eyes toward Him.
His attention rested on her whole. It rested not against the body but against whatever stood beneath the body. The attention had mass, pressing like a pin pressing whatever a collector has decided is worth keeping. She would go on calling it honour, and would use the word more than once.
Cold moved through her limbs. The cold of trenches below the reach of any light.
And yet.
God forgive me.
She loved it.
Her mandibles had locked. The ridge of her back had gone rigid, then, past rigid, had begun to lean. Her throat bared itself to the gaze. And she did not correct the angle.
His judgment on her, alone. His punishment, hers, alone. Held as the most precious object handed to her across every year of asking. The asking had been long. The silence longer. She had knelt through it and called it holy.
And perhaps it was. To this. To the cold. The weight. The gaze that had finally, irrevocably—
He saw her.
Not the Speaker. Not the Prophetess. Not the instrument.
The scar. The rot. The black tracking down the seams of her face-plate like rivers scored into the map of a dead kingdom. The trembling in her claws. The shame lodged in her lungs. The hunger of a beast that had cast her on the floor, dragging, dragging her toward blood.
He did not look away.
The indifference offered nothing to reject. It only showed what she was. Small and consumed.
The relief moved through her like a second death. If the gaze meant to finish her, let it finish her.
Gladly.