The Crystal Cathedral - Danie Ware
Page 3
The information sinks in slowly. Canoness Elivia. Like so many of my Order, she was far from Ophelia VII when the Rift opened and the darkness descended.
Very far.
Dread settles over me like a shroud.
‘How long have I been here?’ I ask.
‘You have been under our care for six weeks,’ Lourette says. ‘We kept you dreaming so that you could heal.’
I take a breath that hurts. Six weeks of slumber, as my world burned beneath me. Six. Weeks.
‘Then, the cardinal world?’
I say the cardinal world but I think my home. I steel myself, expecting Lourette to tell me that it is gone. Burned and broken to nothing, like my Sisters. But she doesn’t. Instead, Lourette smiles a small smile.
‘It was spared at the final hour,’ she says.
I remember the thunderclaps. The golden light that I mistook for the God-Emperor’s final mercy. ‘By who?’ I ask.
Lourette stops in her work and makes the sign of the aquila. Her bloody hands begin to shake, and the moment before she speaks seems long and charged, like the quiet before a storm breaks.
‘By Roboute Guilliman,’ she says softly. ‘The God-Emperor’s son is arisen.’
I feel blinded all over again at her words. Unable to catch my breath. My skin begins to burn as though I have a fever. I start to shake, too. From my core outwards.
The God-Emperor’s son.
‘Arisen,’ I say, because it is all that I can say.
Lourette nods. She does not try to prevent me when I pull away to make the sign of the aquila, too.
‘The primarch came from Terra, and brought with him a new crusade to wrest back what has been taken from us by flame and by sword. Countless warriors follow with him. The Adeptus Astartes. The Silent Sisterhood and the God-Emperor’s own Custodian Guard.’ Lourette takes a breath. Another awestruck smile pulls at her scarred face. ‘And our Sainted Sister.’
Her words settle slowly on me. The God-Emperor’s son arisen. The Silent Sisters and the God-Emperor’s watchmen treading the stars. Saint Celestine, returned.
‘It is a miracle,’ I say.
Lourette goes back to removing the bindings around my arms. She still has not looked at me directly. Another long moment passes before she speaks again.
‘I have heard the same word whispered about you, now and then,’ she says.
I blink. My eyelids are still sticking. ‘Why?’
‘Because of how they found you. Ablaze, but alive.’ Lourette finishes unwinding the bandage from my left arm and lets it drop onto a silvered tray in loops. ‘I have never known a soul to be burned the way you were and live, much less heal.’
I look down and see where my skin has run and set again from the touch of the warpfire. In places, I am patchworked to stark white, all of the pigment gone. There is no blood, though.
No pain.
‘And then there is the matter of the mark,’ Lourette says.
‘Which mark?’ I ask, because there are so many.
Lourette finally looks at me, then, and the expression on her face makes me wish she hadn’t. Her limpid eyes are wide with fervour.
‘You do not know,’ she says. ‘Of course you do not know.’
She stops her work and goes to fetch a mirror-glass from one of the equipment trays. She holds it up in front of my face, and I notice that her hands are trembling now too.
‘Do you see?’ Lourette asks.
I take the mirror-glass from her and look at my reflection, and the patchwork that the warpfire has made of my face. All of the pigment is gone from around my eyes and across my cheeks, leaving bright white streaks against my skin that almost look like wings.
‘It is the God-Emperor’s mark,’ Lourette says. ‘A blessing.’
I stare at my reflection. At the shape of the eagle, so clearly writ into my skin. It is the God-Emperor’s mark, just as Lourette says. A blessing.
‘Do you see it?’ she asks.
I nod, because I cannot speak. Because I can see the mark, but I cannot feel it. I cannot feel anything. I am nothing, and no one.
Just a heartbeat, in a hollow shell.
I realise that Lourette is still speaking, her words hurried by zeal.
‘The God-Emperor saw you, Evangeline,’ she says. ‘He sent His son to spare you. Graced you with His mark and His favour.’
I put the mirror-glass face down on the cot and ask Lourette the only question I can think to ask. The only one that matters.
‘And my Sisters?’
Lourette frowns, taken aback by my words, and the implied dismissal in them. ‘They were lost,’ she says. ‘All save for one.’
My thoughts slow to a crawl once more. It is all that I can do to ask her who survived, and Lourette’s frown only deepens when she says the name.
‘Ashava,’ she says.
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