Then, her friend stood up and turned toward the priest. They began to talk, and Sally expected some sort of procmation to come, but they remained talking.

  Murmurs began to spread outward from the pair, first to the other priests, then carried to the guards, then to the onlookers on the terrace and beyond.

  Eventually, they reached Sally. A vision had been had, and a portent of doom uttered.

  26. Revetions I – September 5, Year 216

  Sally had been standing in front of the Praesidium’s gate for hours now. The sun had set long ago and Sally was fairly certain midnight had passed as well.

  When Lucy said ‘tonight’, I never thought she’d mean at night, Sally compined, but it was more frustration than actual resentment. Something had clearly happened after Lucy had taken the Seventh, and everyone in the city knew it. Many had watched it happen and those that hadn’t had no doubt heard about it, be it by people that were there or through rumors.

  But, in defiance of popur will and to the irritation of all, the gates remained closed. Not just to Sally, but to everyone and anyone, no matter how powerful or well-connected. After the anointment had been hastily and unceremoniously wrapped up, the Praeses and a lot of the priests went inside. None of the Praeses had been seen leaving, and the scant few others that did spilled nothing about what was going on.

  Very quickly after the ceremony, after news had done the rounds in the city, a crowd had formed outside the water treatment facility turned temple. Some had prayed, some shouted, some cried, some demanded answers, waited in silence or stewed in their fears, while others still were there only to enjoy the spectacle. Most of the crowd had thinned after no news came out, returning to their pce of business or their homes. Yet even now, many hours after the fact and stretching deep into the night, there were still a number that lingered, although all were asleep. Save, of course, for Sally.

  But even this deep into the night, the gates remained closed, its rge double doors and smaller single door within them under lock and key and heavy guard. The depiction of the Prophet swathed in simple brown robes, holding out his arms in welcome blessing to those who wished to enter the sacred ground, seemed almost ironic by now. The armed guards standing underneath it, though now rid of their ceremonial garb, certainly added to that perception.

  To their credit, they hadn’t made people disperse despite the cmor they raised. The guards had been much more numerous during the day and fully armed besides with guns, shields and batons. While the gathering outnumbered them more than ten to one, they could’ve broken it up easily enough, but they hadn’t. It wasn’t a real protest, after all, it being more a nervous curiosity rather than anger that motivated the crowd. So, they’d simply stood in front of the building in a half-circle, stoically watching the crowd and only moving when someone got a bit too close, or when someone needed to be allowed through from the other side.

  Now, only a pair of them remained, their eyes pointedly not looking at Sally while Sally’s was pointedly examining them. She imagined what they saw, what they thought when they looked at her. Did they see an outsider, un unbeliever ominously standing silently throughout the night, seemingly untiring? Or did they see someone as anxious as the rest of the crowd, waiting for answers yet to come, albeit one that was a bit more persistent, more enduring than the average onlooker? Did they see her as some-

  The door – the small one within a rger one – opened without warning. The guards didn’t turn to look, but Sally shifted her gaze to the newcomer.

  Lucy looked tired, exhaustion evident on every part of her body. Her eyes drooped, her lips thinned, jaw sck and shoulders heavy. Yet, when she spotted Sally, she gave a smile. A tiny and weary one, yes, but a smile nevertheless. Sally returned it, though she doubted hers was much better.

  They both moved towards the other, meeting halfway. But when Sally moved to speak, Lucy shushed her. “Come, I’ve got us a private altar. We can talk there,” her friend said, grabbing her arm and moving them towards the door. Sally followed.

  The guards let them in without issue, and for the first time Sally saw the insides of a water treatment pnt – even if it was a radically altered one.

  Rusty-looking metal pipes ran across the ceiling, some great while others small, and although there was very little noise coming from them, the quiet of their surroundings allowed Sally to hear the faintest sloshing and gurgling of water coming from within.

  But that was as far as the utilitarian aspect of it went. The walls, whom Sally imagined would’ve once been a monotone grey and smooth in the past, was as decorated inside as outside, all the way up to and including the ceiling. She saw a scene of the familiar brown-robed, veiled figure of the Ante in a cross-legged seated position, surrounded by a bunch of smaller, simirly dressed and shrouded looking people. From each of their cupped hands, real water flowed endlessly into a basin.

  Then, they moved past a scene without the Ante present. Instead, a man in purple robes preaching to a crowd in front of a very simir looking, or even the exact same building they now walked through. Then there was a rge scale depiction of seven priests moving towards seven locations marked by a small hut, a castle, a bridge, a wall, a grassy pin, a horse and, most familiar to Sally, a Vil-style bunker.

  Other, smaller scenes passed as they walked through – a woman hovering over a wounded man, another woman giving water to sickly children, and so on – but eventually, her hasty tour through the byrinthine structure of the facility came to a halt. Her quiet guide opened a door and ushered her through.

  Behind it was their destination, a room with a small shrine and altar. The look of it was a blend between the old one in Cardinar and the one in Lovesse, of the old and new. The bowl containing the water was made of simple stone, slightly chipped in pces and with a patina of unknown origin coating where the water once touched and continued to touch the stone. In it, a wooden dle stood ready to scoop the water for the participant. Covering it to the side and over it was a square stone overhang, a gate, that looked as old and worn as the basin it watched over. These two had clearly been here the longest, a remnant from earlier, perhaps simpler days.

  Lining the walls of the room were shelves full of books with decorated spines, all shining gold in the candle-light of the chandelier hanging over them. On both sides of the altar sat two urns den with unlit sticks, reminiscent of the ones Sally saw at Lucy’s anointment. On the alter itself, beside the stone basin, sat numerous lit candles. On a second yer of the altar, slightly higher than the height of the basin, were a great number of ornate, multi-colored gss vases and other gss containers holding water, backlit by even more candles, resulting in a light flow of colors around the room. The effect was subtle, but it made it look as if the room was slightly underwater, with the sun’s light barely breaching its depth.

  Once Lucy closed the door and granted them some privacy, Sally pounced. “What happened? Why did-”

  “A vision, Sally,” Lucy interrupted before she could get further. “Some of it good, but a lot of it bad. Very bad.” Lucy moved past Sally, taking a seat on a cushion to the right of the bowl. Sally moved to the central one, figuring that to be her pce.

  “‘Bad’? Bad, how?” Sally asked, perhaps sharper than she should. Lucy seemed hesitant to expin, biting her lips in quiet consternation. “Lucy, what did you see?” Sally moved her arm to Lucy’s knee, voice shifting to a more comforting tone.

  “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” Lucy pleaded, giving Sally’s hand a squeeze. “The Praesidium’s going to make their own statement soon, but it must be done carefully, and singurly. No other theories, or stories, nothing. Not even the truth.”

  Sally retrieved her hand and mimed locking her lips and throwing away the key in response. Lucy rolled her eyes in response, though there was a faint smile on her lips.

  “You can understand that what the Merkahni did in the Greennds and Lake Majestic has them all up in arms, right?” Lucy said.

  Sally nodded. “And now that whole thing with Cardinar,” Sally responded.

  “Heard about that already, huh? Yes, but it goes even further than that. Goes back to the Erlings and the deal between the Grandies and the Vils, to the Arcanist’s Guilds moving into the Circuits and ter headquartering in Cardinar, the increase of Grandie caravans travelling the roads and traders and businesses establishing a presence here… Many in the Praesidium see all of it as, as a slow escation, as power pys, secret ploys and conspiracies from outsiders seeking to take over the Circuits,” Lucy spat with clear distaste.

  “And you?” Sally asked.

  “I think it is less nefarious, less deliberate than the majority, but that doesn’t mean that changes aren’t coming,” Lucy said. “And that now, they’re coming quicker than ever. But just because it’s challenging or difficult, doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just means we have to channel it, guide it to a pce where it can do good, take what helps and reject what does not.”

  “Like the bone-mending,” Sally replied, to which Lucy smiled and nodded.

  However… “But what does that have to do with your vision?” Sally asked, not quite seeing the connection.

  Lucy bit her lips. “I saw… war, is the best way to put it. Not a war between peoples, but an existential one,” Lucy said, clearly unsure of how to word it. “It wasn’t just buildings destroyed, people killed or cities burned – I saw all the hearts of man filled with worms, people’s eyes eaten by emerging volcanic gss. I saw monsters purge fmes from their mouths into the ears, the soul of people, and these dead husks march to a doom-beat,” Lucy said, pale and shaky. “It was all so vague, so unclear on what exactly was happening. Armies moving across the Circuits were there to, but they were the least of it. The timeless roads unearthed and evil spilling from the bloated corpse it contained. Dark miasma swallowing the sun, water hot enough to melt sand and boil mountains, or crawling horrors speak the words that ate away at the root of all things…” Lucy trailed off, tearing up from reliving the horror.

  Sally gave her a moment and Lucy gathered herself, taking a deep breath and wiping her eyes clean. “Part of the Praesidium sees this as further proof of outsiders causing a mess of things, that we should expel them once and for all. Others are milder, but only because they support or are supported by some of those very outsiders. They still use it push against those they dislike, while favoring those they do, as if my visions are some tool for them to py their game! Then, a number of them just seem to not believe it at all! It’s just…!” Now, rather than horror, it was frustration and anger that caused the woman to tear up.

  Sally leaned to give Lucy a hug and Sally felt her friend lean into it.

  “It’s just so frustrating,” Lucy continue, voice almost whispering. “We’re about to be attacked by something, something evil, something so clearly demonic and yet all they see is foreigners causing trouble, or worse, they start causing trouble themselves! Why? Why can’t they see what our Prophet shows us, what he has warned us about centuries ago…” Sally felt Lucy tighten her grip, tensing her muscles and shaking in anger.

  “I’m sorry Lucy,” Sally said, mouth starting to quiver. “I-I… I wish I knew how to help.”

  She heard Lucy sniffle at her words, then pushed to create some distance, leaving her hands on Sally’s shoulders. “Don’t be, you being here and doing this-” Lucy gestured towards the room, then Sally herself “-is enough. The Prophet gives the burden to those shoulder that can endure its weight. And I, I can and will endure it.” Sally saw the determination in her friend’s eyes and shot Lucy a smile.

  They stared at each other for a while, a comfortable atmosphere emerging from the silence, before Sally scraped her throat.

  “So,” she said. “How does this work?”

  Sally had seen it before, of course, most recently on one of their rest-days during their time in Keringa, but Sally didn’t know if that was what she wanted. Those she witnessed were wrapped in religious significance, bearing a cultural burden she wasn’t familiar with, and a duty that Sally wasn’t willing to accept. She wasn’t a Dekantist, after all, and even if she wanted to take the first step through the First Sip, she didn’t intend to join.

  “How do you want it to work? Do you want a whole initiation, me just saying a few words or just, well, ‘do it’?” Lucy asked, some energy coming back to her as the excitement of it chased away the darkness.

  Sally thought for a moment, considering. The easiest would be to just ‘do it’, as Lucy put it, since it seemed to carry the least burden. But looking at Lucy and seeing her so eager, well…

  “Can you, uh, say something before?” Sally asked hesitantly, not quite sure how to put it. “Not, like, an initiation thing, but just… whatever comes to mind, really.”

  It seemed she made the right choice from the way Lucy’s smile brightened up the room and her eyes sparkled with joy.

  “Of course!” Lucy said, before clearing her throat.

  Sally prepared herself, shoulders tense as anxiety took hold. Lucy began, voice solemn. “In the Binder’s sacred presence, with the Prophet as our guide, we are gathered here today-” Lucy said, saying the beginning words of a marriage vow.

  Sally almost choked on her own breath at the words, gasping for air while Lucy colpsed in ughter. Sally, once she caught her breath, joined in. “Lucy!” She yelled, feigning indignation. “I shouldn’t be the one to tell you to take this seriously!”

  “Sorry, sorry, couldn’t resist!” Lucy replied, ughter calming. “‘Sides, it worked, didn’t it?” she asked, smiling cheekily. This time, it was Sally’s turn to roll her eyes.

  “Anyway,” Lucy once again cleared her throat, looking Sally straight in the eye with regained seriousness.

  “The words I say – that every priest says – for people’s First Sip are the words the Ante spoke to the disciples of his disciples, but not his direct disciples, his apostles. The people we now think of as the first Dekantist were not followers to a faith, but to a person. One that gave them no blessings, had yet to construct the first filter, had performed no miracles and had yet to unmake the hidden word beneath Lake Prior. In those days, Lake Prior was not blessed and thus, his apostles received no initiation to the religion, for the religion was yet to form,” Lucy said.

  Sally wasn’t surprised by the reveal, really, since in order to be surprised she would’ve needed to care about the ‘apostles’ in the first pce. But she was intrigued to see where this was going.

  “So, when Lake Prior was cleansed and its water started carrying the blessings we are now familiar with, they partook of it not as believers, but as simple people, individuals that held no special belief or reverence for the blessed water. Nor did they hold the Ante as the Prophet, experienced the divine as self-evident and omnipresent, and knew of water as something intrinsically holy. No, unlike how I love, follow and listen to my Prophet, they loved the Ante like one would family, followed him like one would a leader, and listened to his words like one would a friend.

  “Neither the words the Ante said to them nor the blessing they received when they took the First Sip were never recorded. Some believe the Ante and his apostles did this on purpose, as some form of lesson or because the knowledge was to be kept secret, never to be relearned. However, I believe they were never passed down for a simpler reason: because they were private. They weren’t a special lesson, a sermon or an imposition of duty like we do today. They were simply words, an experience shared between friends during a special moment.”

  Sally smiled at the message.

  “So, what I want to say is, this isn’t you becoming a Dekantist. I don’t need you to become a follower, or a believer, or anything else like that. I’ve done this with others only as a duty, and they did it because it was their duty too. Now, I do this with you not as a duty, but because I’m your friend I wanted to be here, to share in this special moment. So, basically, I admire that your willing to do this, even if you do not believe the same things I believe in. And I want you to know that whatever happens next, I won’t share what happens here with anyone, and whether you become a Dekantist or not, we’ll always be friends,” Sally finished, releasing a shaky breath. Apparently, she’d been nervous to, which oddly helped Sally’s own calm down.

  While Lucy grabbed the wooden dle from the bowl and filled it with water, Sally thought on what Lucy said for a moment, mulling over the words and their meaning, the emotion she felt when hearing them and Lucy portrayed when saying them. But she found herself speechless by the sincerity and, almost on reflex, reverted to banter.

  “So, you think I’m your follower?” Sally joked, waggling her eyebrows.

  Lucy rolled her eyes, holding the dle towards her. “Just drink the damn water.”

  Sally accepted and looked at the puddle in her hand, then looked to Lucy one more time. There’d been no anger or disappointment in her friend’s reply to the banter, but nevertheless, Sally felt she’d needed to say something more.

  “Thank you. You’ll always be my friend too, no matter what,” she said with all the sincerity she could muster. Before Lucy could say something in response, Sally drank the water.

  X

  Sally was in an unfamiliar field. It was covered endlessly roiling, low-cut grass. It reminded her of some of the Merkahni gardens she saw in Keringa, though here it was occasionally interrupted with a taller variant bearing fluffy, beige and feather-like plumes. The weather was clear and the sun hung high in the sky. It should’ve been hot, yet Sally felt cold. She had heard that, outside of Circuits, especially the further south you travelled, the colder it got to the point that ice would naturally start to form.

  Thankfully, the cold wasn’t that bad. It was more like she was back bathing in Lake Majestic again, except that here it was the air itself that seemed to try and sap her heat. A fun experience, Sally though, but where the hell am I?

  Despite the instantaneous transition and the sudden change in surroundings, it wasn’t as if Sally didn’t know exactly what had happened prior to coming here. This wasn’t like entering a dream, where there was no confusion and everything intuitively made sense, even when nothing truly did. Nor was there the opposite feeling, that of waking up from a dream and instantly forgetting what happened during it, no matter how important or strange the dream had been.

  A vision, then. But from everything Sally had heard, this wasn’t what visions were usually like. They were vague things, sometimes visual and sometimes not, leaving someone with more of an idea on what they needed to or a mess of nigh-uninterpretable, emotionally-den scenes like an old childhood memory. Then again, Sally was currently experiencing the vision. Maybe when she woke back up, the crity would fade and be repced something more in line with the common experience.

  For now though, Sally had nothing else to do but look around. But no matter where she turned, the only thing she saw was the same unending field of unfamiliar grass. So, she started walking, preparing to make her way through the field to destinations unknown.

  Before she could so much as walk ten steps, however, she began to feel a growing sense of unease, a building sense of dread. It wasn’t the unfamiliar surroundings, the unending field of grass or the unfamiliar temperature that made her feel this way. No, there was something else, something in the air or in the…

  Sally looked skyward, towards the sun. It seemed normal, but an instinct made her keep looking, her subconscious telling her something was wrong with it. But it didn’t crify and soon, she needed to look away. Sunspots were already forming and though she doubted any damage to her eyes would carry over-

  Those aren’t sunspots. She’d looked away, but the sunspots remained in the same pce – not in the sense that they stayed in the same pce within her field of vision, no, these sunspots hovered in the sky itself.

  The area around the sun seemed to be as if it were thinning, crumpling in on itself like a piece of wet paper drying in the sun. The discoloration slowly spread, affecting neighboring sky, and the spots closer to the sun even seemed to purple or bcken as time marched on.

  The worst of the affected sky-boils began to slowly bubble like water on a stove, until they broke and small sunbursts appeared in their pce. Blindingly white spots, brighter than the sun itself yet oddly shining no light, spread along the diseased sky-seam, first small dots of them until they linked together to form greater gashes of whiteness. Sally looked away from them, their appearance disquieting despite, or because of, their featurelessness.

  As these things progressed, so did the world itself begin to change. There was an odd vibration flowing through everything, though seemingly without physically affecting anything. The grasses didn’t begin to sway out of nowhere, the wind didn’t pick up suddenly and Sally herself felt no different. Instead, it seemed as if something deeper, something behind and supporting it all was starting to move up and down, left and right, moving in all directions as if trying to escape from itself.

  Then, the world’s colors began to weep, drops of it falling down from woundless cerations. Sally watched color of the sky slowly fall into the color of the grass, leaving a line like wet paint as it did. The colors, however, didn’t mix properly, and seemed to coexist in a way that made her head start to throb. Likewise, the colors of grass bled into the brown of the ground, creating another headache inducing mess and as Sally looked at her own arms, she saw her skin color being blended with the bright sky above and the grasses below her arm, dripping down to the ground below.

  Sally felt her stomach twist and turn, her vision flow like water, her headache worse and nausea and dizziness threatening to knock her on the ground or out entirely. She tried to close her eyes, to shut off the vision but no matter how hard she tried, nothing happened. Her eyelids wouldn’t move, wouldn’t close properly. So, instead she looked at the sky, hoping it would be better than the sickening mass the earth had become.

  It was not. The sky-seam had burst or ripped wide open. The white non-light of the elongated not-sun dominated the sky, an unnatural rift blurring the boundaries between the immacute heavens and profane earth. In this wound, she saw things moving about, things without proper form but made of unfiltered benevolence, a kindness that burned retina and mind alike. These yet-to-form figures were flitting about in agony as their unform tried to materialize in a new reality, only to begin ripping itself apart.

  Sally began weeping in horror, gratitude and incomprehension. A deep sense of loss and loathing mixed with love and reverence as she saw these angels twist in mourning of their newfound existential pain. Some of them tried to help others in a way that, in heaven, must’ve been some form of support, a form of love and healing transformed from one to another while shouldering the other’s pain, but here it turned cannibalistic. In their haste to help their fellow angel, they only served to devour what they had left, transforming love to hate, kindness to malevolence. Some, before they could transform completely into their own anathema, chose instead to turn upon themselves, preferring a horrible death over a horrible life.

  These newly malevolent forms, hollowed out and half-shattered, some alive and some dead, fell to the earth while releasing poisons of all kind: miasmic, demonic, death and undeath, gluttony and starvation, gas, liquid and in infinite other forms. But, in their efforts, some of the benevolent ones had manifested themselves fully, and began to weep blessings of all kinds in their sorrow: air, light, water, curative liquids and vital essences, love and beauty, protection, excellence, bliss and infinite other kindnesses.

  Amidst the horror and the beauty, Sally realized she was watching the apocalypse unfold before her eyes in all its awful splendor. Demons and angels, blessings and curses, all the forms of magic entering a once stable world, ending it the instance it did. And just as that realization hit her-

  Like a woman drowning, Sally woke up.