Halder Reed had lived many days; 19,027 days, to be precise. But in all fifty-three of his years of living, only five of those days truly mattered, and, Angel willing, today—tonight—would be the sixth.
Holding his chamber door ajar, Brother Halder Reed poked his head out into the hallway and looked left and right, searching for signs of movement.
He saw none.
For the first time in the better part of a week, Reed was able to venture out from his quarters, and—more than simply missing the feeling of strolling through the Melted Palace’s sacred halls, he was spurred on by the call of duty.
The first of Reed’s great days was the day of his birth, though it was included on the list only on a technicality. Everyone was born; that was nothing special. The rest of Reed’s great days, however, were filled with portent—to use the word in its archaic sense. The second of Reed’s great days—or, if you prefer, the first of his really great days—was the day he’d found the Godhead’s truth. That was the day—a vacation day—when he’d first laid eyes on Melted Palace, the greatest of Lassedicy’s temples.
You couldn’t have found a more perfect name for the grand cathedral at Elpeck’s heart. It was the faith’s ancient glory, reborn in a memory of Empire. The stonework was smoothed and indented, like a waterfall’s edge or a mound of melted wax. Halder remembered the awe he felt as he’d drunk in the sight, thinking he was face to face with the Angel’s paradisal throne. It even looked like a throne, but with the back in the middle, and was decorated in piercing spires and glass windows as thin as arrow-slits, with the tall, enclosing basilica bowing at its feet.
And he’d felt all that before he’d even set foot in the place.
But then he did enter, and, Break the Tablets, that was the moment Halder found his life’s purpose. He felt the Godhead’s power seep into him: the Beast’s Might, Moonlight’s Wisdom, and the Angel’s boundless Love.
It was a transformative experience, through and through. The Halder Reed that had entered the Melted Palace—a young, rough-shod atheist, fresh out of college—had grown up in spiritual poverty. With only a quick wit and a quicker pen, he’d pulled himself up out of his ‘Demptist upbringing in the suburbs of Fourthbright, at the butt-southern end of Trueshore, securing for himself a scholarship to Seasweep—York University, no less!
Like most atheists, Halder figured his younger self’s atheism was just a coping mechanism, meant to paper over the void of existential dread that churned in his chest in the long hours of the Night. But the Melted Palace changed all that. He’d left it humbled and awe-struck, drunk on that special kind of wonder that was a new convert’s greatest treasure, and not just any convert, but a convert of the true faith—the one true faith. And, over the years, beliefs he’d once thought foolish and unreasonable had grown to become the deepest truths he’d ever known.
Truly, The Angel worked in mysterious ways.
Quietly closing the door behind him, Reed hurried down the hall, passing, one by one, the minor fluted columns that supported the slender arches that dotted the way forward. Sculpted vines and ivy leaves clambered across the stone in a dream of ruin that never was. The soft claps of Brother Reed’s habituary slippers on the marble floor echoed like water. His robes fluttered with his movements—the Mallard Robe: green skullcap; brown cassock. He even wore the gray sulpice, normally reserved for services. Nothing less would suffice—not when he was to meet Lassedite Bishop, face-to-face.
From a distance or a sideway glance, the patterns on the sulpice made it look like a coat of wings. He’d washed them by hand, in the sink in his quarters, drying them by hanging them from a string above the heating vent in the wall. Actions like these were rituals in miniature. The rituals would continue, so long as he had the strength to perform them. They channeled the deeper truths buried in creation, and it was the duty of the faithful to remember those truths, and revere them, and keep them holy.
Even if the world was at its end, eternity would endure. Man was made for eternity. This life, though sacred and vital, was but a passing phase.
The third of Reed’s great days was the day he’d been ordained to the priesthood, born anew as a Brother in the Angel.
The fourth was the day he’d been chosen as one of blessèd few who served in the Melted Palace. That had been the greatest honor of his life, eclipsed only by Reed’s fifth and greatest day: the day when Marlon Bishop, 278th Lassedite, had asked Reed to serve as his personal secretary.
Reed quickly reached the walkway on the balcony over the ambulatory beside the Melted Palace’s Great Nave. Its beauty made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. To Reed, the Melted Palace transcended architecture, inside and out. It was a living thing; a holy grove; a vision of eternity, captured in sanctified stone. The temple’s fluted columns split into twining boughs whose leafless branches wove together to form the ceiling. The clerestory windows were paned by shards of stolen rainbows; their light painted every sight with its reveries.
The sight brought tears to his eyes. Reed hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it, nor how much it pained him to see these hallowed grounds silent and void. The missals had been muzzled; the Sacraments starved and forgotten. No Convocations murmured in the halls. No one to bid greetings to the Hallowed Beast at dusk and dawn. No one to light the candles or sing the hymns.
“And they say we were the lucky ones,” he whispered.
As the seat of the head of the Lassedicy—even of the misguided schismatics—the Melted Palace was a citadel of the faith, for the faith, by the faith. Here dwelled the most sacred of the sacred offices—the Lassedite himself, the College of the Archluminers, the seat of the Templars—along with a small army of priests and unordained clergymen to attend to daily rites and the laity’s needs. It was also in perpetual disarray. As the old joke went, predicting the weather was easier than knowing whether or not the Melted Palace would be open to the public come the morrow. Granted, meteorological science made the weather actually quite easy to predict, but Reed still felt the joke held water.
It was hard to believe it had been only four days since DAISHU had formally declared a state of emergency over the NFP-20 pandemic. Since then, the Melted Palace had been closed to visitors. Anyone with personal chambers on the premises had gotten shoved into them; everyone else was driven out.
Lassedite Bishop’s health and safety was paramount.
Reed had spent much of his isolation in prayer and in contemplation of scripture. It felt like a lifetime had passed before his eyes. He remembered the awful crash he’d heard on the evening of the second day. Rushing to his window, he’d found the body of a priest splattered on the pavé below. Shards of broken glass clung to the dead priest’s Mallard robes like brambles and their thorns.
Reed kept away from the windows after that. He just wished the sounds of the jumpers hitting the pavement could be blocked that easily.
Thinking back to those horrors left Reed breathing deeply, fighting to center himself. For all things, there was a season. He could mourn the lost once his duties were complete.
Walking down the length of the Great Nave and its heartbreaking emptiness, he turned down a hall at the far end, and from there came to a grand stairwell. It was dark and dreary there, with only the warm light of the chandelier up above painting the stairwell in gold and shadow. But soon, dawn would come, and the brightness of the Sunrise would stream through the windows’ chevron stained-glass panes and flood the stairwell with painted light. As Reed looked up, a power surge flared through the Melted Palace’s wiring. For a moment, the chandelier overhead buzzed, glowing painfully bright, forcing Reed to shield his eyes with his hand.
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But then, he realized: it was a sign.
The Angel was watching him.
An electric sensation danced down the priest’s face. The hairs of his short, brushy beard stuck out like pins and needles.
“The Angel is watching!” he called, his words echoing up and down the grand stairwell.
He rushed up the stairs.
The person Reed had been decades ago, before he’d found his faith, might have asked the priest he’d become why he couldn’t just tell Lassedite Bishop the urgent news via console. Reed knew exactly the answer he would have given his younger self, and his younger self would not have understood it.
There was an order to the world.
Specifically—not that Reed was aware of it—the “order to the world” in this case was the fact that Archluminer Umberridge had, for years, used Brother Reed as one in a long chain of intermediaries meant to ensure that any potential fallout from his political activities could not be used as the basis for indicting the clerical hierarchy as co-conspirators. If he ever found out, I imagine Reed would have probably abandoned Angelical Lassedicy, just like his younger self had abandoned Eastern ‘Demptism. Really, though, it was Reed’s fault. It was his conscious choice not to do a perspicacious intellectual exploration of the Angelical Church’s history precisely because he feared doing so would break his faith all over again.
Every moment of every life in every corner of place or act or thought participated in a drama whose scale the individual mind could scarcely grasp. Even now, faith’s lessons echoed in him.
Life is the journey by which we become. Faith gives us the wisdom to find the road ahead. We are players in the story the Godhead has chosen to tell. Our purpose is to find our place within it, to discover what the Angel has willed for us, and to live in harmony with that will. That is what it means to be human.
The omen of the blazing chandelier filled Brother Reed with joy beyond joy. Any terrors he’d felt were routed and banished. The Angel’s hand was guiding him. It guided him onto the landing one flight up, then down the hallway, up to a grand doorway: the Moon Door. Beneath his feet, behind the Great Nave, the Sun Door barred the way to the Sword Chamber and the Rock of the Lass. Above that, in front of him, the Moon Door barred the way to the Lassidite’s Audience Chamber. This was the room where the Lassedites addressed the convention of Archluminers, where the Emperors were crowned, where destiny showed its hand, and Halder Reed was one of the select few people alive who’d enjoyed the privilege of standing within its walls.
Since time immemorial, armed guards—the Watchers—had stood watch by the doors of the Sun and the Moon. This responsibility was given to the Templar Corps’ greatest, most pious warriors; always men—always celibate, unsullied virgins—dressed in gleaming plate armor inlaid with opal and silver. Their helms were trident crowns, one prong for each Person of the Triun. One Watcher wielded a greatsword; the other, a halberd. Their duty? To kill any who would dare defile the Audience Chamber with their unauthorized presence. Only once had the Watchers failed in their duties—the day the Second Empire fell, when the Blueshirts stormed the Melted Palace and blasphemed against the Godhead by taking the Lasseditic succession into their own hands.
At the outset of the Prelatory, as per the divine revelation of Duncan III—267th Lassedite—guards in simple black uniforms were to be stationed beside the Watchers, armed to the teeth with the latest in munitions technology, to assist the Watchers in defending the Doors. Rumor had it, the so-called Silent Watchers were currently armed with some kind of heat laser.
Obviously, Reed had no intention of crossing them.
The priest approached the door with caution, raising his arms in the traditional gesture of supplication, with his palms facing outward, toward the guards.
With nervous grace, he sank down to one knee, his head lowered.
“I am Brother Halder Reed,” he said, “Secretary to Marlon Bishop—278th Lassedite. I have a message for the Lightbearer, and humbly request his audience.”
“The Lassedite reposes in his chambers,” the sword-bearer replied. His lips and eyes moved, but nothing else.
Reed looked up at the Watcher. “Do you know why?”
The halberd-bearer coughed quietly, barely moving as he did so.“I believe he is in some kind of meeting,” he answered. His voice was scratchy.
“In his personal chambers?” Reed asked.
The halberd-bearer’s face looked pale from within his helm.
The shorter of the two Silent Watchers spoke next: “It’s a videophone conference,” he said.
“I see.” Rising to his feet, Reed bowed and said, “Thank you,” before darting off down the hall. His slippered footsteps echoed on the marble as he went.
The Lassedite’s chambers were up a special flight of stairs around and behind the Audience Chamber. As Reed climbed the marble stairs, the walls and ceiling grew thick with ornamentation—the splendors of Paradise, rendered in sculpted gold.
Per tradition and a good deal of common sense, the Lassedite was supposed to leave his chamber door ajar by a width of five thumbnails. However, when Brother Reed arrived, he found the door was firmly shut. The Priest-Secretary furrowed his brow for a moment, adjusting his glasses while trying to recall the right way to proceed in this situation.
There was a ritual for everything.
Fortunately, he remembered it quickly enough. Using the inner knuckles on his left hand, he knocked on the door nine times, loudly calling out, “Your Holiness!” every three knocks.
No response.
Flustered, Reed performed the knock once more.
He spent a moment wondering what he was supposed to do. Eventually, much to Reed’s dismay, he realized he had no other choice, and so, gently—with the utmost caution—he opened the door, and stepped inside.
The Lassedite’s personal chambers were a place of fearful symmetry. Every room bore the same scheme: from the doorways’ imposing heights to the wall’s slit-like windows, verticality reigned supreme. Billowing, maroon curtains interwoven with golden thread spilled down the walls, pooling on the floor. The ceiling was adorned in honeycomb vaulting, like liquid, frozen-mid-drip, with chrome scales and cerulean tile encrusting its niches and crannies. Carpets sat like islands on the marble floor, tessellated with quasicrystals of stylized suns, fringed in blue skies. The patterns twinkled in the chrome vaulting. Slender, columnar chandeliers lit the room, hanging at the end of long cables that dangled from the ceiling. The chandeliers’ hexagonal cross-sections tinted their light in the oranges of sunset. A faint, pleasing herbal scent lingered in the air.
But it was the voices that caught Reed’s attention, and triggered his astonishment.
He couldn’t tell who they were, though if they were talking with Bishop, they had to be important, so, feeling more than a bit of trepidation, Reed approached quietly, and with plenty of tact. He didn’t want to obtrude.
Stepping forward, Brother Reed turned to the right, toward the source of the noise, and then walked underneath one of the tall, angled archways at the side of the room. Through the arch was a short hallway, which opened up into the Lassedite’s study. The 278th Lassedite sat in front of his lune-shaped desk, with his back to the doorless entryway. Bishop wore the Dove robe, even simpler than Reed’s own, though that wasn’t surprising. The leader of the one true faith was a profoundly humble soul. Unlike his predecessor, he only wore the Hummingbird Robe when ceremony demanded it, preferring to leave it in the closet.
At the moment, Lassedite Bishop hunkered over the console built into the top of the desk. The extravagant piece of technology was nearly four feet long, and, with its adjustable mount set at a 45° angle, it bathed the Lassedite’s face in its secular light. Like nearly every piece of furniture in the Lassedite’s chambers, the desk in the Lightbringer’s study was a mass of darkest mahogany, rounded into a stark, unadorned geometry. Every edge and angle was sanded soft and smooth. The lacquered wood gleamed like a gemstone, but pitch-black, with a glossy sheen that seemed to soak up all the light.
Brother Reed kept silent as he approached, until he was standing beneath the archway at the edge of Bishop’s study. Biting his lip, Reed had almost found the courage to interrupt the proceeding, only to stop and stare as he realized what was going on, and—more importantly—who was involved.
Politicians.
Over half-dozen had gathered for a teleconference with Lassedite Bishop, with the console screen divided up into squares, one for each participant. Reed recognized some of them, though not all in the same way. He recognized Chief Minister Gant by his gleaming baldness. He also recognized Mayor Joleston, as well as what could only be generals of the highest rank, judging by the medals and commendations that encrusted their breast-pockets.
The current speaker wore a prim, formal suit with a flawlessly pressed collar. The man had a strong nose, but the rest of his face was like a sea-cliff, eroded by stress, acrimony, and sheer frustration. His skin was pale and chalky, his voice scratchy and sore, and his battered hair was as gray as his suit.
Reed recognized him from broadcasts on the news: Dr. Stephen Thone. He looked and sounded even worse than he did on the news. All signs pointed to him being at, or beyond, his breaking point.
“Sir,” Dr. Thone said, “as the National Director for Public Health, I’m telling you, you have to—”
But someone cut him off—and not just any someone, but John Henrichy himself.
“—I’ll have to interrupt you there, Dr. Thone,” Henrichy said. “The country is falling apart, and you’re not helping. You have no place here.”
Goosebumps trickled over Reed’s skin. To think that Trenton’s greatest living journalist was trying to set Gant on the right path.
Maybe there was hope for the world, after all.