As everyone knows, marriage is a manifold commitment—a living promise. For me, that promise included an oath that I would never have a GameStation in the master bedroom; the gaming console had to go in the living room. To my wife’s credit, I must admit, there were few better ways of cultivating moderation in oneself and one’s children than having to set up time-tables for who could use the family video-game console and when they got to use it.
As for video games, I preferred the more tactical bent of turn-based role-playing games (RPGs) to action RPGs that had combat occur in real time. Though, of course, it was not true of all action games, I found that many of them suffered from… sloppiness. In pushing for greater realism and flexibility, games often lost the semblance of control they provided for their players. There was satisfaction to be had in devising a plan and executing it successfully, and you didn’t really get that from randomly mashing buttons in a desperate attempt to avoid Game Over’s dark embrace.
The Time Sea games were some of the rare exceptions: action games—and RPGs, at that!—where everything came together perfectly. (This was one of the reasons why I was so thrilled when I heard that Catamander Brave - Knights Beyond Night would be developed by the same studio that made Time Sea, but I digress.) Time Sea III - Knights of the Fang was, in most people’s opinion—including my own—the series’ best installment to date. Traditionally, Monimega avoided controversy in its games and those of its affiliates, especially those it localized for release in eastern markets like Trenton. But… the Time Sea series bucked the trend.
The formula was simple: take a sensitive, problematic era of history, add fantasy elements, cook it in a pot of action RPG essentials, and release it to massive popular and critical acclaim. The chaser? Make the protagonists of the current game into the antagonists of the next one in the series. The first game depicted the mytho-historic Gokuro War between Mu and the Shwa-Zo Empire of ancient Tchwang. Time Sea II balanced things out by turning to the Munine Colonial occupation and making dragon-riding heroes out of the Trenton freedom fighters who opposed them. Time Sea III, meanwhile, reimagined the disastrous end of the Second Crusade as a dark horror fantasy of apocalyptic proportions where the players only gradually come to realize the cruelty and injustice that too often came hand in hand with the supposed “defense” of the faith.
The faith…
Before Angelfall changed my world forever, my homeland had been ruled by the archaic Trentons, pagan warlords who had yet to know the Angel and his Light. Generations of petty squabbles had led the strongest of the warlords to a rare wisdom. They set down their swords and formed the Pact—or, Pekt, to use the ancient word. The folkdoms of the Pekt banded together in the common defense of the Elpeck of antiquity, to keep any one house from claiming the city for itself.
The city was an elder gem, long antedating the civilization that eventually grew from it. According to the archaeologists, people had inhabited the Elpeck Basin and the shores of Elpeck Bay for tens of thousands of years, first as hunter-gatherers, then as farmers, fishers, and merchants as the temperate climate, the safety of the harbor and the overland routes, and the abundance of cedar wood and salted cod laid the inevitable foundations for a center of trade, culture, and invention. A place of learning and curiosity where the known world came to visit. Then, the Angel Fell, and two blood-soaked centuries later, the Pekt had been converted, the foreigners slaughtered, the libraries raided, and the non-believers ‘cleansed’ in holy fire. The Pekt swore allegiance to the Lassedite, and to their elected emperor and his charge to defend the peace and the faith.
Yes. Defense. That was the word they used for what would come to be known as the First Crusade. It was defense to baptize pagans in the noonday light at the edge of a sword and then slice off their tongues and cut out their eyes to keep them from rejecting the gift of salvation and thereby bring evil into the world. It was defense to “Brighten” Odensk; defense to burn Polovia to the ground rather than let Princess Biluše lead her people to independence and freedom. It was all defense. Centuries later, we gave the Crusades another go, and, in the end, it cost us our First Empire—not that I’m complaining.
While Finn and his friends—and, of course, all the magic and monsters—might not have been real, Eadric Athelmarch, 169th Lassedite—first, and last of his name—was just no less real than the sky and the sunrise. Of all the people who ever lived, the Lass herself was the subject of the most books. The Vanishing Lassedite, Mordwell Verune, was ranked third. Athelmarch came in second. And the things people wrote!
Up until 1237—the first of the three long years of the Second Crusades—history had left us with around as much information about Eadric as any other Lassedite of his period, but then, about halfway through the second year of the Second Crusade, the records… vanished. The details were missing, and not just regarding the Lassedite himself. Aside from a few letters, some logistical reports, and the scattered accounts of the crusaders’ opponents, very little reliable evidence from the Second Crusades had survived, though that all depended on what you counted as “reliable” evidence. Even Eadric’s contemporaries vigorously bickered over which, if any, of the surviving accounts were to be believed, and the controversy continued to burn over the next thousand plus years, all the way to the present.
Most of the “unreliable” documents were difficult to believe, and, all the way to the present, doubts remained as to whether or not the writings were to be treated as chronicles of fact, or as visionary documents or religious apocrypha. One of the few points of universal agreement was that, after several months of promising successes, the crusader armies became mired in southern Polovia. Even though the Polovians had been fully converted during the First Crusades, some older, pagan traditions persisted among the people, often in the form of heterodox sects, and Eadric was adamant about bringing the Polovians back into the fold. Scholars of all affiliations agreed that, frustrated by the Polovians’ recalcitrance and stymied by the woodland peoples’ guerrilla tactics, Eadric returned to Elpeck and took the Sword with him, to use its powers to bring the heretics and infidels to heel. According to legend, the forces of nature joined forces with the crusaders, and Eadric’s forces proceeded to advance unopposed, marching south to the Strait of Edrùg, and from there to Zid, across the sea.
The latest semi-reliable accounts state that the Sword was present when the crusaders lay siege to the city of Bazkatla, led by Lassedite Athelmarch and his elite corps of hand-picked warriors, the Knights of the Fang. After that, the only certainty was that something went horribly wrong, and the siege ended with the near-total annihilation of its belligerents. Bazkatla and its Empire fell to ruin, and the armies of the Second Crusade were scattered to the winds. The “unreliable” documents spoke of Eadric having abused the Sword’s powers, thereby angering the Angel and provoking Him to open the gates of Hell and bring forth “monstrous ruin upon the world.” Whatever actually happened, the repercussions were severe enough that the Angelical movement in Trenton succeeded in toppling the First Empire and plunging it into bloody civil war, and to the victor went the future of the Church and the one true faith. Thus began the Interregnum, one-hundred seventy-eight years of petty kings, defiant principalities, religious persecution, and sectarian violence—and not just in Trenton, but Polovia and Odensk, too—ending only when Uminokami landed in Lightsbreath and ushered in the Munine Colonial era. It took until 1622 before my ancestors finally learned how to stop killing one another and work together to oust the Munine; though it took them four long, bloody years to see it through to completion. As for religious matters, the Angelicals won the long game against the Old Believers and the Irredemptists, implementing Church reforms (it “Resurrected” itself, as the theologians came to say), and the people of Trenton earned themselves a fancy new Empire. Even then, many—the Neangelicals—were left unsatisfied, desiring for greater, more radical change, or simply pretending the changes had never happened.
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It almost went without saying that my wife wasn’t exactly thrilled by the frank darkness of TS3’s narrative. It weighed on her even then, as she prepared for Unction. Though Pel had been raised in the most rigid strain of orthodox Angelical Lassedicy, her father was an Old Believer at heart, and had been from the day he was born to the day he died. Old Man Revenel had been one of the many Old Believers who had abandoned their centuries-long refusal to accept the Resurrected Church for the “greater good” of putting the LumiNATION Party into power and ushering in the Prelatory. Though “don’t psychoanalyze your family members” was generally good advice—as was the follow-up, “and if you do, don’t let them find out”—I’d long felt the quiet tumult that had played out in Pel’s psyche throughout her life had its origins in the tension between her father’s beliefs and her own, especially with the knowledge of how malleable those beliefs had been in the face of the Prelatory’s authoritarianism. Rale’s death only made things worse. Of course, Rale’s death made everything worse.
For people like my wife, believers held their beliefs because they gave them hope, structure, and purpose. Still, I wondered and worried that Pel’s beliefs were rooted in a wish that faith would show her how to reconcile her life’s many unwanted contradictions: a father who outright opposed the Church he nevertheless attended without fail, and who readily let his convictions get bent out of shape for the sake of wealth, prestige, and influence; a mother who made impossible, exacting demands of everyone except herself; falling in love with a man whose constant struggle with his faith provoked seemingly every doubt Pel sought to quell within herself; and then, a Godhead who’d taken her son from her, despite the fact that it had barely let her have him in the first place.
At the moment, Pelbrum sat on our living room’s soft, pale blue, wall-to-wall shag carpeting. Sunlight dripped down through the ceiling eye, growing stronger and broader as the hour tick-tocked toward solar noon. Where Pel sat, only a couple inches away from the edge of the light, she had a direct line of sight to the wide-screen console that served as the family television. Our TV console was set into a wall of rustic flagstones—a radius of our circular, rotunda-capped living room.
Ceiling eyes were the quintessential feature of Trenton architecture. The purpose of putting a circular opening in the middle of the ceiling of the main room of any building was to let in the light at high noon. It had been that way for millennia. The ceiling eye could be covered in glass or plastic—any transparent, non-tinted substance would do—either in a pane or a dome, or—if you were desperate—with shutters or a trapdoor, though it had long been considered bad luck to have anything other than a transparent covering. To quote Olwen I, 45th Lassedite, as written in the Elder Voices:
A hall is not fit for man to wake without an eye to the firmament, with which he might behold noontide’s crown in all its glory.
Light was bread for the soul. Light was the proof of the promise of paradise. Light leavened nations into empires. Or so the sayings went—and in this case, I believed them.
The soft, slow polyphony of a pipe organ began to play, resounding through the living room’s acoustics. Pel stiffened her posture, fixing her eyes upon the wide-screen console, tuned to LAS Network. The channel had one purpose: to broadcast the living faith every hour of every day. All across the country, every week, churches vied for the honor of having their Mass be the one to air for all the world to see. This week’s church was more understated than most. It was probably from a rural community, maybe near the Riscolts or the northeastern coast. Even so, the presiding priest was clothed in the fullness of sacred garments—the mallard robe: green skullcap, and brown cassock, embroidered with a holy sigil. As this was a service, the priest wore the customary gray sulpice, embroidered with decorative patterns to give the appearance of a mallard’s feathery wings. The iridescent fibers of the priest’s green skullcap glistened as he approached the altar. The altar sat behind the cone of light that shone through the church’s ceiling eye. As he stepped into the nave, the priest removed his sandals and came to stand on the sand pit beside the altar. A lower-ranked priest—or maybe a novitiate—approached, to wash the priest’s feet in sand in a ritual cleansing, so as to prepare the priest to step into the Eye’s light, much as the Lass herself stood barefoot at Angelfall. And nothing less would suffice: Light was the heart of the faith, and the Rite of Unction was its zenith.
Our living room might have had some pretty good acoustics, but they didn’t do the service justice, least of all Holy Moon on the Hill’s magisterial pipe organ. As the organ settled into silence, Pel could hear coughs rippling through the nave, like holy sand crunching underfoot. Right on cue, the worshippers trickled out from the pews, forming a line in front of the rim of the ceiling eye’s light. One by one, the faithful knelt down, bowing their heads into the eye’s light, and then slowly raising their faces to the sun, closing their eyes as the touch of the Angel’s warmth caressed them. Spouses and families knelt together; unwed adults knelt alone. But all of them spoke the same words. The Bondwords.
“To truth, I pledge; to one God in three; to Angel, Beast, and Queen. O Holy Angel, I kneel before your Light. See me, for I am thine.”
They made the Bondsign as they spoke, stroking their fingers across their foreheads four times: across, down, across and up. The first stroke was the Night-tarnished world, stained by mankind’s primeval defiance. The second stroke was Angelfall, where the third Person of the Triun made an offering of Himself to the Godhead in an appeal on mankind’s behalf. The third stroke was the world renewed, invigorated by the hope and truth of the Bond the Angel had revealed—our holy Covenant—the Bond of Light. The final stroke was the future yet to come: the Ascent to Paradise that awaited those who kept to the covenant.
Now the Sun reached its apex. Through the Eye overhead, light flooded down into the living room. Bowing her head into the Light, Pel closed her eyes and raised her face toward the holy Sun, to receive its sacred anointment.
It embraced her.
The sunlight’s touch sent shivers down Pel’s spine. It brushed through her hair, bathing her in tenderness and comfort. Photonic lips blessed her skin with their trillion kisses. Warmth unfolded. A flower bloomed in her heart.
“To truth, I pledge; to one God in three; to Angel, Beast, and Queen,” she said. “O Holy Angel, I kneel before your Light. See me, for I am thine.”
In her heart of hearts, she prayed for her children, for herself, for the world… and even for me.
“Please…” Pel whispered, “Bring us back together. Heal us. Heal us.”
Tears trickled down her sweltering cheeks, heat and cold burned in their sunlight-glistening trails.
Are you there, Rale? Sweetheart? Can you hear me?
The Sun was our window to Paradise. It was the reminder of our lost, primeval sanctity, as well as a promise of the world to come. That was why a naked stare at the Sun’s brilliance turned men blind: there were some sights man was not meant to see.
As Pel knelt in the light, in the throes of agony and ecstasy, Rale’s voice spoke to her heart in ways beyond words.
I want to forgive him, Pel begged, but I don’t know how. I’m afraid. I’m so afraid. Help me. Please, help me.
I miss you, momma, Rale said. I love you. I love you all.
Pray for us, Rale, Pel begged, please… pray for us.
While my wife communed with Light and Love, the worshiper kneeling on the TV screen was wracked by coughs. He toppled forward, landing on the church’s polished floor with an ugly smack that slapped black slime out of his mouth—black slime speckled in green. Panicked movements from the surrounding parishioners kicked and scattered the specks into the air, whisking the speckles aloft onto clothes and into breaths. The man did not get back up. And Pel saw none of it, for her eyes were closed in ecstasy.