wheels turning in her head, over and over. A wraith, trapped forever in this Athenaeum. The Dark Mother’s chronicler, a Hearthless soul, held for an eternity in the Church of the Lady of Blessed Murder. Helping Mia along her way. A battered journal here. A word of advice there.
“They don’t tell stories about Red Church disciples, Chronicler,” Mia had said. “No songs sung for us. No ballads or poems. People live and die in the shadows, here.”
“Well, maybe here’s not where you’re supposed to be.”
“You’re him, aren’t you?”
Mia peered into those pale blue eyes, realization slowly dawning.
“You’re the babe she brought into the world,” she said. “You’re Cleo’s son.”
The chronicler smiled. “Not just a pretty face and a shitty attitude, are you?”
She looked around them, bewildered.
“So what the fuck are you doing here?”
“Fathers and daughters. Mothers and sons.” The chronicler shrugged. “You’re more familiar with the complexities of familia than most. My mother raised me, there at the Crown. The shadows were my only companions. I could have lived my whole life there, never knowing another soul. But as I grew older, Niah began speaking to me.
“It happened at truedark mostly. She started sending me dreams. Whispering as I slept. She told me of her husband’s betrayal. Her son’s murder. And over the years, she convinced me that we all have a purpose in this life, and that my mother’s was to bring balance back to the skies. The Moon was inside my mother when she bore me, and that made me the Night’s grandson—at least in my eyes. So I tried to convince my mother of the selfishness in what she’d done. That Aa had been wrong when he punished his bride, slew his boy. That the skies deserved some kind of harmony, and Niah, some kind of justice. But the years in solitude had only compounded my mother’s delirium. There was no seeing reason for her.
“And so, after years … I left. Seeking another way the Night might regain her rightful place in the sky. Worship of the Black Mother had been outlawed in the years after her banishment. But I thought if I could revive faith in Niah, the power she’d glean from our devotion might be enough to break the bonds of her prison alone. And so slowly, painstakingly, I founded a church in her name.”
“You were the first Blade,” Mia realized.
Aelius shrugged. “It started very small. But we truly believed back then. There was no killing, no offerings, none of that. We operated out of a little chapel on the north coast of Ashkah. The legends of the Night and the Moon etched in the walls.”
“The temple Duomo sent us to,” Ash breathed. “The place I found the map.”
“Aye,” Aelius said. “Our first altar, carved out of stone with our own hands.”
“Red stone,” Ash said.
“Red Church,” Mia murmured.
“It was all going well,” Aelius said. “The faith was building. People still wanted to believe in the Mother of Night, despite the lies Aa’s church had begun telling about her. After perhaps a decade of devotion, when truedark fell and the Mother was closest to the earth, she was strong enough to lead us to this Mountain. A place where the walls between Night and Day were thinnest. And here, we truly began to flourish. But there’s a saying about all good things…”
Aelius dragged deep on his cigarillo and sighed smoke.
“There were those among the flock who saw differently than I, you see. Who didn’t worship Niah in her guise as the Mother of Night, but instead as Our Lady of Blessed Murder. They saw a new way to run the Church. A way that might turn our devotion to hard coin and our piety into a means to earthly power.”
Aelius shrugged.
“And they murdered me.”
Mia blinked. “You were killed by your own followers?”
“Aye.” The old man nodded, his face twisting. “Cunts.”
“Goddess…,” Mia breathed.
“It all went to shit after that. The Church I’d begun became a cult of assassins. It grew infamous and powerful, but Niah’s budding strength waned as the rot set in. Aa grew stronger as his faith spread in the wake of the Great Unifier’s conquering armies. Divinities are like that, you see—they really only have the power we grant them. The Black Mother had spent so much of her strength making this place, very little remained. And as the Church became more about murder and profit, less about true devotion, she grew weaker and weaker still.
“By the time she’d gathered enough strength to bring