The sixth chapter has been rewritten! :D
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(Checkup – Remember – Confidant – Luce – Quick – Celing – Palm)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
'' denotes internal thought
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The latch turned and the door groaned softly upon its hinges as doors do in old places that have heard too much and forgotten nothing.
"Dear Leader?"
Straightway I loosed my grip upon the bedsheets and thrust them aside. Mine aching frame rose upright and I pressed my back against the cold wall behind me as though stone alone might lend the dignity I had spent the last several hours misplacing.
Had they seen?
"…Leader?"
A truth too plain for denial.
The dizziness returned like troubled tides beneath a storm-dark sky and the pressure behind mine eyes swelled harder than before as though invisible hands sought to press my thoughts inward until they cracked and whatever lived beneath them came spilling out where it might be examined and judged and found comprehensively wanting.
And with it came imagination. Curses upon imagination which hath never once offered me anything of practical value during a genuine crisis and hath instead delivered with reliable thoroughness the worst available interpretation of every conceivable situation. I saw them already, my people and my congregation and my beloved and infuriating kin whispering beneath the long pilgrim pillars where shadow mingled with fading gold and their voices threading together in the particular register of persons discussing someone who is not present to defend herself.
"Hazel hath changed."
"The Great Speaker thinketh strangely now."
"Her devotion hath become… peculiar."
My reputation… My authority… All of it carefully forged through long ages of labour and all of it present at the ceremony and all of it witness to what transpired. The mere envisioning made my stomach twist violently whilst bitter emptiness crawled up my throat.
Then imagine it not.
The words emerged within me with dreadful calm from that interior chamber that spoke in my voice yet hath always known considerably more than I choose to know. I shall not permit my destiny to conclude in such a fashion not whilst breath remained and not whilst my appointed hour hath yet to come. Slowly the trembling subsided. What profit came of inward lamentation? None. None had ever come of it in all the previous instances. I, Hazel, Speaker of the Seekers of God, was not fashioned to dissolve against a chamber wall. For I was made to seek and to guide and to stand before the congregation with the full weight of my office upon my shoulders and to bear it as though it were agreeable to me.
'Worship. Yes. Remember thy teachings, Sweet Hazel.'
Worship is the surrendering of the self in silence and the emptying of pride until nothing remained but devotion directed toward that which stood infinitely above one's own accumulated decades of careful self-construction. Worship takes many forms like a prayer uttered at dawn and a hymn sung in weakness and a body dragged across stone toward the thing it loved most. Yet among all sacred virtues there remained one pillar most necessary.
Patience.
'A hand restrained is an eye saved. Ashes build no home.'
Staycalmstaycalmstaycalmstaycalm—
At last I forced the frenzy to slow. Swallow thy pride if need requireth it. Feign composure if thou must.
'Be confident, Hazel.'
"Y—yes?"
Sweet merciful Void.
Why had I stammered? Fresh panic struck immediately behind the stammer like a second wave behind the first which is exactly the manner in which the worst waves arrive—
No. Peace. The visitor could not have heard the full ugliness of it through the door. Surely. Probably.
"May I enter, Great Speaker? I came but to inquire after thy condition."
I let mine aching body sink deeper into the softness of the bed. The bed truly was exceedingly comfortable.
"Yes," I answered whilst laying composure into my tone the way one lays a fresh cloth over a stain, "pray enter."
'O Lord, I thank thee.' This time I had refrained from stammering.
"As thou desirest."
The door opened and there she stood.
Stella. My closest confidant, one with whom I had scarcely spoken in any meaningful sense since preparations for the Lord's return had consumed the entirety of our days and left nothing remaining for ordinary companionship. She had guided the others in their daily labours whilst I oversaw the restoration of our near-extinguished people or rather directed the restoration which is a distinction that mattered to me and which I acknowledge mattered perhaps more than it ought.
She entered and closed the door softly, "Our Great Speaker," she said, "how fareth thee now?"
Formal yet with tenderness beneath the formality the way certain stones carry warmth long after the sun hath left them.
"I believe myself improved," I answered through a lie most transparent which I acknowledged without guilt for I felt utterly dreadful yet the lie served a purpose.
Stella exhaled in visible relief and smiled, small and sincere and the kind that cost something to produce.
"That gladdeneth me greatly," she said.
Her eyes drifted briefly across my features and observed the diminished flow of Void seeping still from mine eyes but her expression carried careful concern yet I did not share it for I had never considered the substance troublesome. Could purity born of darkness truly be counted impurity?
Without deliberation I patted the bed beside me and noted the slight widening of her eyes as she approached as even she found the gesture unexpected which told me something about how I had been conducting myself in recent seasons. She settled beside me regardless and I was grateful for it in the way I am grateful for things I did not know I required until they were present. Yet something troubled her. Her shoulders held too carefully and her gaze resting too long upon nothing in particular and I had spent enough years reading the bodies of people who were attempting not to show me things to recognize the posture immediately.
"Stella," I said gently, "Truly, speak freely."
She gathered herself with one slow breath the way a person gathers before stepping off a ledge they have examined thoroughly and decided is navigable.
"Dear Hazel," she began, "I wished to speak concerning what transpired during our Lord's return. Especially when thou were forced to crawl toward our Lord on behalf of all our foolishness."
My thoughts halted entirely and cleanly as though a hand had descended upon the machinery of my mind and stilled every moving part. Forced. As though I had done it reluctantly and as though circumstance had wrung it from me rather than devotion having carried me there in full knowledge of the cost and as though I had been victim of the moment rather than its author.
"There was confusion amongst us at first," she continued. "We understood not thy purpose and we were too astonished to move… yet then I perceived what thou were truly doing."
She reached toward my hand and asked permission wordlessly in that manner of hers that had always made requests feel like offerings. I granted it. She clasped my hand gently and the warmth of it was startling in a way I had not anticipated.
"Truly, Mother," she whispered, "thy devotion unto God is not of this world."
For one terrible instant I ceased breathing altogether. Praise. She was praising me and not recoiling nor judging the spectacle of the Great Speaker on her hands and knees across the cathedral floor and the realization moved through me with the specific force of things that arrive at the exact location of one's greatest fear and prove it unfounded, not gently and not gradually but all at once.
'Thank thee, my Lord.'
"Oh dear," Stella murmured after a time, glancing toward the door, "The others may require my aid presently. Might I take my leave?"
Still she had not released my hand, a fact that escaped me not. A laugh slipped out before I could restrain it, small and unguarded and the kind that escapes when the body hath been holding itself too tightly for too long.
"No need remaineth to call me Mother," I said and found that I meant it entirely. "I possess yet far to journey before I deserve such title. But aye, thou mayest go."
"Then I shall depart," and reluctantly she loosened her grasp and rose.
"Thou ought wash thy hands afterward," I said, as the jest arrived before dignity could stop it. "I am but a sickly and helpless worshipper."
To my genuine delight she laughed softly and with the slight surprise of someone who had not expected levity from this direction.
"Yes," she replied. "I shall not forget, Dear Hazel. I shall pray unto the Lord for thy swift recovery."
Again I nearly laughed and nearly told her such prayers were unnecessary yet another thought intruded and this feeling was… personal.
A sacred matter between devotee and God.
Again thou dreamest overmuch.
"I go now, dear Hazel," she interrupted just when I needed it.
*Yes. Please go. I require solitude and several minutes in which no one can observe whatever my face intendeth to do next.*
"Okay—"
CRACK.
The door flew wide with violent force and struck Stella full upon the side and the echo carved through the chamber and left a silence that was not silence at all but the space between catastrophe and understanding like that particular hollow moment wherein the event hath already completed itself and the mind hath not yet agreed to receive the information.
"O Dear Speaker, forgive me!"
A much smaller Seeker stumbled inward whilst panting and sweat glistening along the edge of her mask and her entire body declaring she had run with reckless haste across a considerable distance and paused to consider neither the geometry of doors nor the people standing immediately behind them. Stella had caught herself against the wall and stared with the expression of someone filing a thorough complaint in silence.
"What trouble is this, Luce?"
Luce was small but not a creature given to panicked sprinting without cause sufficient to warrant it and if she appeared in such a condition then what had placed her there was not ordinary circumstance dressed in dramatic clothing. She braced herself against the doorframe and drew one breath—
"The Lord!"
She drew another—
"HE COMETH!"
The words carved themselves across my mind like burning scripture applied directly to the surface of thought, arriving whole and complete with the full weight of their implication already assembled.
Oh. Oh no.
I did not move nor could I. For precisely two heartbeats I sat within the soft and absurdly comfortable bed and considered the full dimensions of my situation with the comprehensive clarity available only to persons who have no remaining time to be anything other than honest with themselves.
I had been weeping Void in a recovery chamber whilst my composure had been partially reconstructed but was not yet fully load-bearing and my body ached still in the deep places where the Void had passed through it and rearranged things without consulting me concerning the renovation. My throat yet raw and my limbs yet uncertain and my eyes yet issuing that black and sacred substance in thin persistent streams that no amount of careful dabbing had fully resolved.
He was coming.
Now. Here.
The God Above Gods. The One for whom absence itself maketh room and by whose presence all higher Gods are rendered small. Coming to this chamber with its pale gold walls and its weeping aspersorium and its exceedingly comfortable bed in which His consecrated Speaker sat half-undone in borrowed recovery like a person and not a vessel and like a woman and not an instrument and like something that required rest and soft linens and the occasional unguarded laugh rather than something built for the sole purpose of receiving divinity and channelling it outward.
He was coming.
Here. To me.
The thought struck twice, first as terror and then immediately and ungovernably beneath it as something else entirely which was more warm and more shameful in the same pathways where the memory of His tendril still lingered like the faint imprint of a shadow after the light hath been extinguished. I was already moving before thought had completed the sentence as the bedsheets fell behind me and my feet found the floor and my hands moved with the automatic authority of a body trained through decades to perform its offices regardless of what the rest of the self was doing.
I needed my robes properly fastened and my mask properly tilted. I needed my eyes to cease their weeping or at minimum to weep with dignity. I needed to be standing when He arrived, not sitting and not lying and not in any posture that declared to Him who had already seen me crawl and had raised me from the floor with that cold impossible gentleness and had touched me as though I was something requiring assistance rather than offering worship. I needed to be the Speaker. Not Hazel and especially not the woman in the soft bed with the unguarded laugh and the thoughts she did not name.
The Speaker.
I smoothed my robes. The fabric was wrong for it was not the ceremonial weight nor the proper fall but it would serve. It would have to serve. I straightened my spine with the full force of everything I had ever demanded of it and drew breath and faced the door and started to—
SCREEEECH—KLANG—KRAAAASH—WHOOOOM
The sound did not arrive the way sound arrived for it did not travel through air and enter at the ear and permit the mind its customary moment of translation but it simply was everywhere at once as though inside the bone before the brain had formed the thought to receive it and it split the world at every seam simultaneously as though the world had always been divided thus and only the sound had known it.
The ceiling came apart.
Stone did not fall so much as cease to be where it had been and the architecture surrendering its long argument against gravity not gradually but entirely and the smoke that followed moved through the chamber in one vast and patient exhalation as though the room itself had been holding its breath for years and had at last found occasion to release it.
Fresh Void began to drip. Not from vessels and not from any prepared channel or sacred marking or the careful pathways we had carved with such labour through the stone but from the air itself and from the wound in the ceiling and from the split places where the walls had opened. It ran down every surface in thin deliberate streams and met the floor and spread outward with the unhurried certainty of something that hath nowhere it would rather be and it found me immediately as it always did.
The substance touched the skin above my collar and the irritation spread at once though not burning and not freezing but something precise and specific to each nerve it contacted as though it knew exactly what each part of me was capable of feeling and had arranged itself accordingly. My eyes and my nose and the soft places at the corners of my mouth where the leakage from within was already beginning and the welling up from somewhere deeper than the throat and the tasting of cold iron and the particular darkness at the bottom of old wells where the water hath long since ceased to be water. My organs moved not in the manner of ordinary suffering but in the manner of things being rearranged by a hand that doth not concern itself with the original arrangement.
I looked up.
I looked up through the smoke and the settling debris and the thin black rivers running down every surface and through the ruin of the chamber that had stood unchanged through all our transformations and through all of it I looked up. And distinguished—
Shadow. Vast and patient and absolute it was and it was not falling nor descending in any manner that implied the action might be stopped or redirected or reconsidered but lowering the way night lowered, without urgency and without drama and without the faintest acknowledgment that what lay beneath it had opinions about the matter.
His palm. Open.
I understood several things simultaneously. I understood that He was here and I understood the full dimensions of what here meant and I understood that the chamber floor was against my back and I could not recall when I had come to be upon it or whether I had fallen or been placed or whether the distinction had simply ceased to apply and I understood with the last coherent fragment of thought available to me before the shadow covered everything and before the cold of His presence pressed through my chest and into the places where my name resided and the places where my certainty resided and the places where I had kept all these years the particular thing I had never shown the congregation and never spoken aloud and never offered in any ceremony because I had not known how to offer it without losing it entirely. I understood that He had always been larger than I had imagined and I had imagined very large.
"M-my Lord—"
…
The palm descended.