(Graceful Rest — Void Woven — Nursery — Godseeker's Baffling — Sudden Call)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
-x-X-x-
~~~
Her eyes unclouded themselves.
Thought returned in fragments and each fragment brought pain with it like hooks bringing flesh.
The chamber ceiling swam above her in pale gold and fractured candlelight. She lay unmoving.
The ache had withdrawn from its former savagery into something persistent and deep.
She breathed. Steadier. Then she noticed the softness of her own shell.
A wrongness. A dampness. The carapace, ordinarily hard and gold against the world, gave beneath her own claw where she pressed it, as though the touch of God had not passed through her so much as cured her.
Her forelimbs twitched. The sacred bindings at her waist hung loose, the linen frayed. The thorax-plate had gone thin, translucent in places, the dark fluid beneath it visible through the gaps. Air moved directly against her spiracles. Her antennae stood stiff with dried ichor.
On the desk lay her sacred mask, beside folded cloths stained black from what had poured out of her. She looked at the cloths. Her claw found the edge of the desk and closed on it.
This chitin was consecrated.
Hers to keep open.
Before her there had been a Mother, and before that Mother another, back through a line of gold shells emptied one at a time. One body among the many stayed unlocked, decade after decade. She had been told this as a child. She had grown into it.
These joints had carried Him. These channels had run cold with what did not leave a body the way it found it. Every Seeker sleeping below owed the length of their line to the fact that hers had not closed.
There was another reason she had never spoken: If she was the door, she could not be replaced.
They had touched her.
They had wiped the ichor from her compound eyes with rough cloth, handled the soft joints of her elbows, spoken to each other over her prone body in the low voices used for the injured and the dying.
None of them had understood what they were handling.
She was the last open door her people had.
If it closed, He would have nowhere left to come. And there would be nothing after that worth calling worship.
She reached for the mask. Her claws scraped the gold leaf, missed the edge, caught it on the second attempt. Her balance failed and the room tilted and she braced against the desk, foreclaws in the grain, hind legs splayed, until the tilting stopped.
She put the mask on.
The gold was cool against the plates of her face. It hid the tremor in her mandibles, hid the way her eyes kept refocusing on the broken light. She arranged her limbs into their proper posture as though the previous three seconds had not occurred, and then she was still.
…
The tendril.
She let herself think of it now. Nothing. No temperature category held it. Not the cold of graves. It had been precise in a way that made the precision itself the worst part, as the precision had made it clear it was not uncertain of her.
The sensation had settled into the hinges of her limbs—the joints, oiled somehow, seeped into the gaps between plates, into the places she kept covered, breathing Void directly into her lungs by a route that answered to neither mouth nor mind.
Her claw moved to the underbelly, to the place the tendril had held. She pressed her claw flat against the chitin, trying to feel the shape of the Void through her own skin. She twisted her joint, flexing her antennae until they ached, biting down hard until the ichor ran metallic across her tongue. She was offering herself to the memory, worshipping the empty space.
Nothing came of any of it.
It was just noise. It was her, and the Void was not her. The Void was the specific absence of her. And no amount of her own hands would produce that absence again.
She stopped. Opened her eyes. Her claws had left faint crescents in her own thorax. She pulled them away.
The word came, flat, and she pushed it down through herself like how a nail is driven into resistant wood.
Later.
She turned to the stained cloths.
She had misreckoned. This sat under every other fact in the room and did not soften on inspection. The Void had been building in her for months and she had read the building as evidence of her own increasing capacity rather than as a threshold arriving.
She pressed two fingers to her own breastbone and felt the emptiness there where the Void no longer sat.
Lighter. Also less.
She had not taken her own measure. She had stopped believing measure applied to her some years back, and nothing had arrived in the meantime to argue otherwise. Yet at last, the thing had arrived instead on the floor of Godhome, in front of everyone she governed.
The ichor on her face had dried, or the tears had. She left it where it was.
…
He had taken notice of her.
The tendril had been exact—the soft joint under her left forelimb, the seam where plate met pale flesh, gripped with a clamp's certainty, and she had felt the air leave her spiracles in one sharp motion.
It had held her to find out whether she would come apart. She had not. She had creaked, once, and the creaking had been noted.
He had seen her.
Not the Speaker.
The Scarab—gold, empty, leaking, dragging herself forward with her mandibles clamped against the taste of what she had already lost.
He had not looked away from that, and the not-looking-away sat in her chest. Then the other memory arrived:
Quiet.
One word.
Placed flat against the gullet the way a blade is laid rather than swung. It had not been cruel, and it had been aimed at her voice specifically.
He had not silenced her voice. He had silenced her frequency.
One instant her mandibles clicked in rapid grateful rhythm; the next, the click went out of the air around her specifically. A hole cut exactly her shape and no wider.
The congregation heard the litany continue. They did not hear the silence fitted over her alone. In it she could hear her own blood moving through her spiracles. It had not been correction. It had been excision. She had been too loud. Too much. Overflowing with more than Void.
He had heard her, and found her excessive.
She had not displeased Him by failing to believe, but displeased Him by believing loudly enough to be heard doing it. The warmth in her sternum stayed. Cold moved in under it anyway.
God forgive me.
Her teeth found the edge of the bedsheet. She bit down. Then harder. The linen gave between her teeth, fiber compressing against fiber, and she held it there and breathed through her nose. The halls below were full of sleeping Seekers, and she had already given them everything else today.
She released the sheet. The wet print of her teeth stayed in the linen, already beginning to smooth itself out. She watched it go.
…
They had touched her.
She returned to this last.
This body had been remade toward one use, and one use only: to remain the place He entered when He chose to enter anything at all. Upkeep on the one working door left to a species that had otherwise given up on doors. Kept the way a blade is kept sheathed against the hour of its use, except a blade could be replaced, and she had spent decades making certain she could not be.
Not only that she loved Him, though she told herself she did, but that she had built herself into the one hinge her people's continuance swung on—and built it so thoroughly that even God, silencing her before the altar, had not been able to look past her to reach anyone else.
He had not looked away. Whatever else the tendril had meant, it had meant that.
She had never required her brethren to understand the condition. She required only that they leave it uninvestigated. Arguments had never been theirs to make.
They had unwrapped her anyway. Hands, concern, sincere and entirely uninstructed care.
She pressed her claws flat to the mattress.
She would correct them. Not with volume; volume was for the uninitiated.
She would correct with a voice drawn thin across the throat of their competence. She knew which syllables to weigh, which precedents to cite, until their kindness felt like trespass and their concern a slight she would graciously overlook, publicly, at length.
Wasteful. She would polish them down until they carried the dull obedient shine of things that finally understood where they stood.
She was good at this. It was, in practice, most of what she did. Taking the raw material of other bodies and pressing it into a shape that could bear the Void.
She had built this congregation out of scattered and half-ruined remnants. She had written what they recited until their mouths went dry. She had led rites that burned several of them past any easy point of return, and had watched with steadiness.
She had done all of that. And she had still lost herself in the one moment that counted as she gone on speaking after speaking had stopped being wanted—
How shall we ever repay Thy grace.
She heard the pitch of it again, the congregation answering in chorus behind her while she went on compounding, unable to stop herself in time—
None may rival Thy wisdom. None may challenge Thy dominion, for none shall remain alive long enough to stand against Thy glo—
Quiet.
She had been corrected.
A child being corrected.
Her eyes burned. She shut them, pressed two claw-tips against the face beneath the mask, and held the pressure there.
Outside the high windows the dreamscape lay dim and grey and patient. Now is Still Light. Everything in this realm had been failing for years, which was more discipline than her in one morning.
She was the Speaker.
She had been marked.
She had been silenced.
The three facts sat beside each other and she understood already that she would carry all three. Visible to none.
Behind her the chamber door had not yet opened. The air said it was about to. Beneath her mask, her mandibles closed with a small audible click.
She drew breath.
Y-yes?