by Scott Hale
He settled into the seat, but never took his eyes off outside. Vermillion veins as thick as sequoias rose and fell along the road or formed archways over it. The growths had a cloudy transparency, and when the afternoon sun hit them just right, red splashes of color were cast from the veins across the land, like massive bloodstains. What was worse, though, were the people who flocked to these pools of light. They would gather underneath that part of the growth with ladders and ropes, scurry up, and tap into the vein. The thick, foam-kissed fluid would sputter out, dousing the swarming crowd below. Those that’d tapped into the vein would quickly seal it off, set up a siphon, and begin filling jars with the fluid. The stained and screaming, who’d had but a taste of God’s blood, were quick to offer up whatever valuables they’d had on hand in exchange for that which had once flowed freely. Felix had figured the crowds would simply knock the ladders down and steal the jars from those who’d tried to sell them, but they didn’t. Instead, they waited as respectfully as they could, the same way his congregation back in Penance would when standing in line, waiting for communion.
Villages and towns came and went. He’d long since given up trying to keep track of where he was, what these places were called. They were all different, and yet all the same in the ways that mattered to him at the moment. The Holy Order churches had been taken down, taken over. Signs had been repainted. Banners had been cast to the dirt. Stained glass windows, what precious few there were along the northern Ribs of the Spine, had been busted out to make way for newer, uglier ones. Statues had been beaten; knees were busted, heads caved-in. More often than not, busts of Felix, the Mother Abbess, and some of the Exemplars lay in shallow puddles, gathering birds while their religion gathered flies. None of this was cleaned, though—the rubble, the destruction. It was proudly on display. Felix knew why. It was something new converts to the Disciples of the Deep could gather around, like a bonfire, and share stories of their hate for their old faith, to impress the old-timers who’d been following King Edgar since the beginning.
No one was threatened by the Holy Order of Penance anymore. Felix didn’t want them to be, but he expected some resistance or fear when he and Narcissus tore through these villages and towns. They got out of the way, and that was about it. The Disciples were so certain of their new God that they didn’t hesitate at all when their old came marching through. To Felix, it felt like a bad breakup, the ones his friends, Avery and Mackenzie, went through and told him about.
“It’s worse when you can’t get them out of your head,” Mackenzie had said two years back, combing Felix’s hair. “You think about them constantly. You go out of your way to find them. And when you do, they don’t recognize you. It’s not pretending, either. It’s like they made themselves move on so fast, they forgot you. All those years… gone. Just because they didn’t want to hurt. People will do anything not to hurt, Felix.” She’d dug the comb in deep, which had caused him to squirm away, smarted. “That doesn’t mean you can’t hurt them.” She’d held out her arms, and he came back to her. “I’ve been with some bad ones, let me tell you.”
“Why’d you stay with them so long?” he’d asked.
“I thought it was the best I could do.”
How did I hurt them, though? he thought, as his legs went numb from sitting in the carriage for so long. I didn’t do anything to them.
Grumbling, he pressed his face to the glass. They were leaving whatever town they were in for the wilds in between. He shoved his head out the window, looked back the way they’d come. To the south, the Vermillion God’s silhouette sat, millions of Its veins writhing about, like the tentacles of an electrified squid. It reminded Felix of a windmill, and thinking that, he wondered what God was pushing into this world. It was hard to say it was different, because other than in reports or gossip, he’d never really known the world. But it was different, in the way his room in Pyra used to feel different after the maids came in and cleaned it. The world felt… filtered. Not cleaned but scoured.
Could that explain the people he’d seen? They’d been in every town they’d gone through. The men and women, old and young, and, sometimes, even kids. The ones with the misshapen bodies. The ones with vermillion veins growing out of their eyes and ears, or their wrists and fingertips. There’d been a lot of them. He’d heard of them, too, back on the Divide. Seeing them in person, he realized they looked a lot like how Ichor looked—victims of heaven ingestion. He couldn’t figure how they were getting their hands on seeds, though, as it didn’t seem like they were all that common. The people around them didn’t seem like they knew how to handle these… mutants… either. They always seemed to be alone, together only with others like them. Did they think they were better than everyone else because they’d been touched by God? Or worse off?
The forest swallowed the Holy Order’s procession. The village disappeared behind the trees. He could still hear the thousands of other soldiers marching out of the place. He hoped they’d behaved themselves, now that he couldn’t see them anymore through this overgrowth.
Felix sat back in his seat and thought to himself: I didn’t do anything.
One of the Holy Children in the compartment turned its neck, causing stone to grind on stone. There were two of the statues in here with Felix. He hadn’t forgotten they were there, but they didn’t mean enough to him to really make him care. It wasn’t much different when it came to the Holy Order, he realized. Outside of not wanting harm to come to most of his followers, he didn’t care. They were faceless to him. One animated, no, amorphous (that’s the word) mass who wanted far more than he or Justine or even god could give them. They were never happy, and he never heard from those that were, because they had nothing to complain about. He didn’t do anything for them, because there was nothing he could do for them. The Vermillion God gave them what nothing else in this universe ever could: Closure.
He couldn’t give that to people. His god wasn’t real. The Holy Order was literally the Disciples of the Deep, except with a different coat of paint. He wanted to help people, but when it was actually a good time to do it, he split. He left Pyra to the Exemplars and the endless winter. He left the Divide while the Conscription killed itself trying to defeat the Arachne. And now… now he was running away again. Running away from Cathedra, and the Bloodless that’d burst through Cenotaph’s floors and killed two hundred and god knows how many others. A real aspect of god would’ve stayed, because a real aspect of god would’ve been untouchable. But he wasn’t trying to save Cathedra or the Holy Order. In the end, it was just Justine he was trying to save, like it’d always been.
That night on Pyra’s rooftop, when Justine had revealed herself to him as the White Worm of the Earth, he really truly believed they’d make a difference together. He really truly thought he could stop other kids—anyone, really—from going through the abuse he went through with Samuel Turov. He and Justine had sat down and written a new holy text, a replacement of Helminth’s Way titled The Sinner and the Shadows. Helminth’s Way had been written when Lillian was still alive, before the Trauma. They were going to use The Sinner and the Shadows to help with distancing themselves from the Disciples of the Deep, since both religions shared the same origins.
Felix had come up with the idea for The Sinner and the Shadows from the time he spent with Audra. The story followed two people, the Sinner and the Shadow. At the beginning, neither one knew the other. The Sinner was a faithful and devoted person, but deep down, they did not believe in god. The Shadow was a sad and hateful person, but deep down, they wanted nothing but happiness and love. Over the course of the book, the Sinner and the Shadow endure hardships, and the teachings and commandments of the Holy Order are revealed, until one day, they finally meet. The Sinner and the Shadow are attracted to one another, like magnets. This scares them. They try to run away from one another, but now that they’ve met, they are constantly pulled towards each other. Eventually, they touch. The Sinner and the Shadow become one; each one, at the same time, a sinner a
nd a shadow. When they are complete, god comes down from the heavens, a large ball of light. When god’s light touches the Sinner and the Shadow, the Sinner’s shadow is cast by the millions across the earth, and the Shadow’s Sinner self is split equally throughout the land. Thus, with god’s lifegiving light, humankind is created.
Felix wanted his followers to know that everyone could be flawed and still godly; sinful, and still capable of goodness. He wanted his followers to find the heaven inside them, rather than tearing themselves apart into something ugly in the pursuit of grace. They didn’t have to eat seeds of heaven to mutate their bodies to meet their Maker. Their Maker was inside them all along. And as long as they could take some responsibility, and come together as a species rather than apart, then the Light would shine through.
Unfortunately, very few took The Sinner and the Shadows seriously. The congregation read it as a story, not as a holy text. Helminth’s Way was their bible; it couldn’t be replaced. That was the problem with religion. Once it was written, it was written in stone. The words would be forgotten, misinterpreted, or painted over, but they couldn’t be chiseled into something different. That would be sinful.
Felix kicked his feet. His heels hit the books beneath his seat. Right heel into Helminth’s way, left into The Sinner and the Shadows. Holy texts that were guides to live by, and here they were, under the seat, probably covered in mud and torn apart; only here, really, because Helminth’s was shoved into any place the Holy Order touched, and The Sinner and the Shadows, well, because the Mother Abbess had decreed the two be packaged together. Neither of them meant anything, did they? Had they ever? How long did people in the Old World read the words written in stone, before turning their backs, swearing they already knew them by heart?
When The Sinner and the Shadows didn’t catch his people’s interest, Felix lost interest in the people. Everything since then—the Divide and Cathedra, especially—was… well, what was it? He didn’t know. He didn’t know much about anything. He’d been able to fake it, but once the Vermillion God woke, what chance did the Holy Order have? He wasn’t protecting the people. He didn’t know how to protect the people. There was the church and there was war; there were politics, and there were maps, in his mind and on tables, where pieces were moved towards some grand goal. None of it really meant anything to him. He was too young; too young to take over for Justine. And maybe he’d never be old enough. There’d always been someone older than him, who knew more than him. There’d always been a Hex scheming, or a Sloane compelling. There’d always be a Samuel Turov raping the children they’d swore to protect. Even if Felix managed to beat the Disciples of the Deep and the Vermillion God, it would only get worse. God was a kid’s toy, and kids always cried when you took their toys away.
Felix’s face twisted into ugly sadness. He drove the heels of his palms into his eyes. Taking short, deep breaths, he cried. God, he cried so much these days. But god, there was so much to cry about. It wasn’t hormones. It was this hell they were in. He took his hands away, foolishly hoping one or both of the Holy Children in here would try to comfort him. They did not. Instead, they stared at him blankly, their star-shaped heads casting streamers of sunlight into the compartment. Why should they comfort him, anyway? The Mother Abbess had petrified these Holy Children that came before him. Between Felix and them, who really had it worse?
The carriage jumped as it hit a hole in the road. Outside, the numbing constant of marching feet and clapping hooves was broken up by someone shouting at the driver to watch where they were going. These wilds had probably been pretty peaceful before they came here. Felix wondered how much damage Narcissus would do in passing through, how long it would take for nature to recover. How much hurt would have to happen until everything was alright.
There was a hole inside Felix. It whistled coldly when stray thoughts passed through, like an open doorway in the dead of night. The sound put him on edge and made the scars on his thighs want for more scars on his thighs. There was one thought, though, that was big enough to fill the hole. It was like a rolling boulder, and he’d been outrunning it for so long. But he was coming up on the hole. The jump across was too big. He’d never make it, or if he did, not all of him would. If he stood aside, though, and let the thought pass, it might fill the hole. If he were brave enough, strong enough, he could stand on the thought and let it take him across.
But first, he’d have to turn around and face the thought. And it was this: Save Justine and leave the rest behind.
He could do that, save her. That was easy. He was the Holy Child. He was on his way to Eldrus. He knew he could find a way to Edgar’s side and set back the Disciples of the Deep enough to stop Lillian from taking Justine over. But he had no idea how to save the rest. He didn’t know if war would do it, or if having the Conscription beat back the growing Nameless Forest would help. Maybe Justine was right. Maybe the Holy Order could absorb the Disciples and everything would be better after that, and they could take advantage of the Vermillion God again, like the Holy Order had when Justine decided to work against It. Maybe. Maybe not. Felix couldn’t say. It wasn’t something he’d ever figure out. Things like this took lifetimes. Justine had many lives. He just had one. And the idea of devoting his entire life to a religion that was a lie, that, after so much death and bloodshed, still might do more harm than good didn’t sit right with him anymore.
They’d call him a coward, he figured, but he was thirteen years old, and no one had ever given him a choice between this and a normal life. Screw ‘em.
The hole inside had been filled, and now that it was, he could breathe, really breathe, again.
And then he stopped breathing altogether, because from the wilds, he’d heard something come screaming at the procession. He had but a second to react, and he didn’t.
“God is the greatest!” a man cried.
An explosion, but not like when the Bloodless erupted through Cenotaph’s floors. It was somehow louder, yet softer. Like when someone drops a potted plant that’d just been watered. It was a wet, earthy clap.
“Stop!”
“… into formation!”
“There, on the…”
“… another one!”
The horses whinnied; in their panic, the carriages they towed creaked from their bucking.
“There, right there!”
“Put an arrow…”
“Back, you heathens!”
Felix tried to get to the window to see what was going on, but the Holy Children were on top of him, pinning him to the seat. He gasped, crushed beneath their weight. Did they know how much they were hurting him?
“Heaven take me!” a woman hollered.
Another soundwave, like a handful of chucked soil, scattered against the carriage. Leaves were ripped from canopies. Branches snapped from trunks.
What’s going on? He took one of the children by their star-shaped heads and cried into their vacant faces, “Get the hell off me! I can’t breathe.”
The stone child looked back. For a moment, it seemed as if it was thinking about what Felix had said. It moved off him.
Felix gasped for air as he kicked his way free of his guards. He went to the window. At that moment, Commander Millicent was riding up to it, her sword drawn, her steely face streaked with gore.
“Suicide bombers,” she said. “Stay inside.” She rode down the line, shouting incomprehensible orders.
As soon as he was back on his seat, he was off it again and out the door. He still had a part to play. If he didn’t, he’d never get to Eldrus.
The two Holy Children started after him. Their hands closed around his robes, but he slipped free. He hurried up the procession. Soldiers, who’d broken rank, quickly went into formation when they saw him. Wave after wave of “Your Holiness” crashed into him. He nodded, made holy gestures with his hands, and kept going. The bombers had attacked farther ahead, where Justine’s carriage was stopped.
Relief mixed with revulsion. Justine’s carriage was untou
ched. Not far from it, off to the side of the road, where the wilds glazed over into wetlands, sharp, stabbing stalks of vermillion veins ten or fifteen feet long and thick as bricks had attached themselves like burrs to the land. Streaming from the stalks were shredded bodies and spools of innards. Limbs, like ornaments, decorated the sick fractal. Already, flies had taken to the corpses, and mucks, gray oozes that fed on carrion, had come up from the wetlands to eat the piles of gore and feces.
Felix covered his nose to escape the bitter, burning stench. He braced himself against Justine’s white carriage, waiting for his stomach to stop turning.
“Felix?” Justine’s muffled voice called from within the carriage.
He backed away, nose still covered. Voice just as muffled, he said, “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said.
Felix went to open the door to make sure but stopped. He already knew it was locked several times over from the inside. Justine’s transformations were happening more frequently these days. The last time Felix had seen her, which was earlier in the week, it’d been through a crack in the door. Justine’s entire body had ballooned into a pool of flesh that’d filled the whole carriage.
“Were you going to say something to the soldiers?” she asked.
“I am.”
“Good. Good. Thank you for taking care of our Church.”
Felix backed away. Guilt stung him like a bee, and he rubbed the back of his neck where it hurt. Turning around towards his carriage, he saw the two stone Holy Children closing on him, and from farther down the line, Commander Millicent as well. He only had a few seconds at best before he was ushered back into isolation.
“My people!” Felix cried at the top of his lungs.
Soldiers for as far as he could see stopped what they were doing—talking, panicking; wiping blood off their armor—and stood at attention.
“The heretics who committed this grievous act will spend the rest of eternity in damnation. To see but one child of god fall wounds god in ways we will never understand. Heaven awaits those who die in service to our cause, but we should not greet death so readily. Cherish your lives. Be vigilant. Many of the Disciples of the Deep are but members of the Holy Order who’ve strayed from the flock. Remember this, as Narcissus continues to divide as we make our march to Eldrus. To prevent acts such as this from happening in the future, god needs your faith in our mission.”
