The candles went out all at once, and the smoke that filled the room vanished into nothingness. The Confessor’s form doubled over, wracking coughs gripping her as she struggled to straighten herself. One by one the candles came alight once more, and neither smoke nor sparks now issued from them, and their flames burned blue more clearly than any lightgem.
As she struggled up off the floor the old woman’s hood fell back, her shoulder-length hair hanging in a loose mess, her prolonged ears poking through it - one touched only by the ravages of age, the other cut off near the tip and healed over. She looked at the ground, the burned-up mess of things laid out on Alcerys’s side of the mat, her gaze slowly rising as she herself raised into an upright sitting position. It climbed up the sword that had once been an Aquila Calibur, now a charred, uneven thing, then to its hilt, then to Alcerys’s own sweat-covered face.
“I know not whgh- what He spoke to you, but I know that you have been judged innocent,” she struggled out, coughing intermittently and trying to catch her breath.
“How?” Alcerys asked, still in a detached stupor, processing the otherworldly contact which had just transpired.
The Confessor let out a brief cackling laugh, picking up the leftmost of her knives and gesturing with it at Alcerys before she said, “No burned-off skin, no bubbling fat, no weeping stigmata, no brambles growing through your flesh. You’re scarcely charred, girl. That was not a mercy afforded your predecessors-to-be.”
She flicked the blade, listening to its ringing tone before she reached into her robe and pulled out a roll of black leather embroidered with golden thread, unrolling it on the ground and sliding the blade into one of its many loops. Something within Alcerys wanted to just be done with the ritual, but she knew that wasn’t how this worked. It would be over when the Confessor said it was…
“...The ritual is complete, by the way. From this point on neither the Statehood nor the Order holds an authority over you, which as you might guess will only make them try to assert it twice as hard,” the old woman’s voice wheezed from inside her form, nearly a whisper like she’d been shouting for a day straight. Another knife was put in its place, having gone unused.
“What happened-” Alcerys began again, only for the Confessor to cut her off by making an actual cutting motion with the third knife.
“-is between you and the Omniudex. You have suffered nothing I would have to treat - looking at you I’d wager that if you so wished, you could just get up and walk out of here. But you won’t, because you have questions, as your kind always do,” said the old one resolutely.
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Alcerys questioned again, “My kind?”
“Oh yes,” the old one nodded. “You’re the Third Renegade, that much is true, but did you truly think there were only three to ever subject themselves to His Judgment? Where do you think all the blind saints throughout history came from? Why do you think so many of those the Old Church accused of witchery disappeared, only for a new, inexplicably masked saint to emerge soon after?”
The third knife went away into its slot on the tool roll. The Confessor picked up a chisel this time, a shriveled finger visible in its transparent handle, severed perfectly above the knuckle. She looked into Alcerys’s eyes with a cold stare and continued, “So many of them ended up horribly burned, or dismembered, or otherwise crippled. Their penance, and divine power dearly paid-for to go along with it. To those He finds guilty he offers such atonement, offers a means to undo that which they had done - and they accept, every time, not knowing the weight of the deal, or perhaps not caring...”
The Confessor stared off into space while she continued putting away blade after blade, her eyes growing cold and empty as the memories of times long gone played out behind them. In the meanwhile, Alcerys looked herself over, confirming what the robed one had claimed. Her skin was charred, the topmost layers peeling off, and where her tattoos once had been the skin was raw and ached like the worst bruise imaginable when touched, but there was not a single substantial burn upon her. Even her hair was untouched, and the ritualistic bloodletting cuts on her back had closed shut with what felt to her fingers like plugs of congealed blood, even though the residue left upon them when she looked was as black as tar.
“Do you know who the First Renegade was?” asked the Confessor as she packed up the rest of her tools.
“I… No,” said Alcerys.
A sad smile spread over the old one’s face, “Few do, for his name was scrubbed from history, his tale erased and replaced by that of the Great Heretic. It was he who brought the Old Church to its knees and ushered in the Reformation, more than three-hundred years before any of this country’s so-called God-Kings were born. The Second… He was a good man. A great man. An unfortunate man, who met an unfortunate end at the hands of False Divinity. His name and his story, too, were scrubbed from history, for the church thought it would lead too many to foolish deaths in hatred of the at-the-time young Divine Empire. These things are yours, and yours alone to know. I shall not foist a geas upon you, for I trust that only a just reason would drive you to reveal them to another.”
Having already finished packing up her tools, the Confessor rolled up the leather container, slipped it into her robe, and rose to her feet to the creaking and cracking of her joints. She looked upon Alcerys and said: “I will pray that the weight which you have taken upon yourself will not crush you. Keep the ceremonial mat, they only work once. Wrap your sword in it or sell it, I care not.”