The ceremonial mat’s pitch-black surface glimmered and pulsed with golden, silver, and blood-red reflections tracing patterns that had never been described the same way twice. Its function had never been disclosed to Alcerys or any other Inquisitor, and she wagered she would never learn it regardless. The ceremonial mat, just as the robes and the candles, was entirely a matter of the Confessor.
On the Confessor’s side of the mat were laid out many holy tools - files, knives, chisels, tattooing instruments alongside the sacred ink, all wrought from cold-iron, set with rune-carved jewels, their handles known to hold the partial remains of saints. Fingers and teeth, knucklebones, Azoth-stone fragments. The blades and heads of these instruments were carved with the names of their saints.
On Alcerys’s side lay her sword, her guns, her gas mask, her suit of plate, her armored coat, all covered over by a semi-transparent dark shroud emblazoned in her own blood with runes of judgment. The cuts on her back from which the blood had been drawn screamed and burned, as if the knives were still there. Somehow, the pain from the scar in her side made the cuts hurt less, even though its own pain had subsided since her confrontation with her doppelganger.
“‘This is the final precipice. If you choose to step back from the edge, this all may be forgotten to you, sealed behind a geas, and you may return to your position as an Inquisitor of the Order. Do you still wish to proceed?” the robed figure asked in a serene tone.
The naked inquisitor stared back and shook her head, “This is the path I must walk.”
The robed figure before her gave a solemn nod.
“Then you shall be granted the truth of the Order, that you might be judged justly. It is important for you to know that the High Church of the Omniudex did not dissolve after the so-called Death of Religion, but merely shed the corrupt trappings of theocracy. The ceremony, the grandeur, the sheer scale of it grew to corrupt and distort the mysteries and truths of our faith. The High Priests had forgotten their purpose, and so we exacted His Judgment. He found them guilty, and in doing so brought ruin to the bloated, perverse carcass that the Church had become. The Faith now lives on in its true form, as watchers for watchers. We keep watch over the Inquisitors, the Statehood, the Merchant Caste, and we judge those who warrant it… Such as you. Thou shalt be judged and granted atonement both, whatever the Omniudex deems that to be. Dost thou understand?”
Alcerys nodded. There was no going back now, she felt it in her bones. Like all the blood in her body would just pour from the wounds upon her back if she tried to back out now, like her holy tattoos would rip themselves from her skin and flay her alive in doing so.
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The Confessor returned her nod and held up her hands in a gesture Alcerys had never seen, a strange alteration of the usual prayer gesture used by Inquisitors. Or perhaps the one used by Inquisitors was an alteration of this one. The old woman took a breath, sucking in a long breath of the smoke that dwelt overhead before she exhaled it right into Alcerys’s face.
“By the Geas of Truth, dost thou believe justice demandeth thy renegacy? That thy path is righteous, even if it should lead thee to stray from the Order?” questioned the Confessor, and Alcerys felt inexorably compelled to answer in truth. And she did.
“I do.”
A melancholy smile spread across the Confessor’s wrinkled face, and an unworldly glow suffused her steel-grey eyes. With another nod she began chanting in tongues, speaking words that meant nothing yet were understood. She spoke of justice and judgment, of oaths and law, of the balance necessary in all things. She spoke of the Heretic-Saint who acts against the Church in pursuit of truth, of the necessity for those who would pursue justice even if it brands them as pariahs, of those who act with direct blessings from divinity without the intercession of a corruptible other.
With a voice like thunder the Confessor proclaimed - no, commanded:
“Then be ye judged beneath His Eternal Gaze!”
A flash of lightning found its way into this secluded sepulcher, its brilliant glow shining through as narrow rays that ever-so-briefly illuminated the chamber and made the smoke appear as though true storm clouds. Thunder roared in the heavens, and the Confessor’s eyes rolled into the back of her head as she took a ragged breath. A voice not her own came forth, bubbling up from her throat like the rumbling of an earthquake, the allconsuming howl of an erupting volcano.
“THY WILL BE STRONG. THOU KNOWEST SUFFERING. THOU KNOWEST FORGIVENESS. JUDGED IN THE NAME OF THE OMNIUDEX, YE. NOT. GUILTY.”
Her tattoos began to burn beneath her skin and a bright-blue glow issued from them as the sensation spread - first the wards against scrying upon her scalp, then the oaths on the nape of her neck, going down her spine covering the symbology of the Order, down to the myriad other tattoos on her arms and her legs.
“NO LONGER SHALT THINE ORDER’S CHAINS WEIGH UPON YE.”
All her vows, her holy symbols, the arcane seals meant to channel the Inquisition Arts and protect her from the unholy. She felt the ink bursting from her skin and running down her body, the network of geasa that made her an Inquisitor unwinding. She could pinpoint the exact moment when she lost the ability to perform Inquisition Arts.
The Confessor’s hands shot out in front of her, as if pulled along by unseen puppet-strings. Her sleeves rode up her arms, covered in more ritualistic scarification and tattoos than skin. Blue light flowed down them, pulsing outward through her fingertips as immaterial wisps that flowed into the blood-painted cloth and set the runes upon it ablaze with blue fire. Much of the cloth vanished in a single burst as if it were flash paper, and more still didn’t burn at all, but rather melted onto the things it covered, bubbles of the substance suppurating and bursting open with yet more of it until it covered everything the cloth had covered.