~ ALDRIC ~
Aldric had known, in some abstract way, that word would spread. The Conclave hearing had been public. The manifestation had been witnessed by dozens of people, half of whom had spent the last month telling the story to anyone who'd listen, with the kind of embellishment that grew a little with each retelling. By now, Aldric suspected, there were at least three versions of events in which Kael had personally wrestled the Void Mother into submission, which was both inaccurate and, Aldric thought, exactly the kind of thing his order would find easier to handle than the truth.
The truth was harder. The truth required updating three years of careful liturgy, and liturgy, Aldric had learned over the past month, did not update gracefully.
The temple's upper sanctuary was full — fuller than Aldric had ever seen it, every senior cleric and ranking devotee crowded into a room meant for half their number, and the air had the particular charged quality of a room full of people who had, individually, already made up their minds and were attending mainly to confirm it.
High Curate Ressa stood at the central dais — elderly, formidable, and, Aldric knew, deeply unhappy. Not at him, particularly. At the situation, which refused to fit into any of the categories three centuries of doctrine had prepared her for.
"Brother Voss," she said, without preamble. "You've submitted seven pages on 'expressions of presence.' I've read them. Twice. I want to be clear that I find them theologically sound."
"Thank you, Curate."
"I also want to be clear," she continued, "that being theologically sound has not stopped half this room from forming opinions that have nothing to do with theology."
— ✶ —
~ KAEL ~
Kael heard about the meeting from Aldric that evening, over dinner — Aldric arriving late, looking like a man who'd spent several hours being diplomatically shouted at and had not entirely succeeded at remaining diplomatic himself.
"There are," Aldric said, sitting down heavily, "roughly three camps. I'll do you the courtesy of summarizing them in order of how reasonable I find them, which is also, regrettably, the reverse order of how loud they are."
"I'm listening," Kael said, pouring him a drink he looked like he needed.
"Camp one — smallest, quietest — thinks this is simply wonderful. A confirmed, witnessed expression of genuine divine presence, after centuries of more… abstract worship. They're thrilled. Several of them want to interview you. At length. About everything."
"That sounds exhausting but harmless."
"It is. Camp two is larger, and more complicated." Aldric took a long drink. "They're not against what happened, exactly. But they've started referring to you as…" he winced, "'the Accountant Prophet.'"
Kael set down the bottle. "The what."
"The Accountant Prophet," Aldric repeated, with the air of a man who had also tried and failed to talk people out of it. "The argument, as I understand it, is that you're the first mortal in seventeen thousand years to anchor a genuine expression of the Void Mother — which, theologically, makes you… significant. Special. They want to formalize that. Build something around it. A new rite, possibly. A feast day."
"Oh no," Nyxara said quietly.
"My reaction exactly," Aldric agreed, apparently able to hear the tone even without the words. "I tried explaining that you didn't do anything special, in the sense they mean — you were just sincere, at the right moment, in a way anyone could theoretically be. They found this explanation extremely encouraging and immediately wanted to know how to replicate it. There may now be people in this city attempting to write sincere poetry on purpose, specifically in the hope that a god will notice."
"That… actually sounds like it might just be nice? People being sincere?"
"It's nice until someone writes a sincere poem specifically because they want something," Nyxara said. "Which rather defeats the point, but try explaining that to someone who's already decided sincerity is a technique."
— ✶ —
~ ALDRIC ~
"And camp three?" Kael asked, with the particular caution of a man who suspected the answer wouldn't be funny.
Aldric was quiet for a moment, turning his glass slowly.
"Camp three is smaller than camp two, but considerably louder, and considerably more senior," he said. "They don't see what happened as wonderful, or even neutral. They see it as… a problem. A precedent."
"Explain," Kael said — and Aldric noted, with some private amusement, how thoroughly Kael had absorbed Pale's vocabulary over the last month.
"For three centuries, this order has been the recognized, sanctioned conduit to the Void Mother. Every prayer, every rite, every tithe — it all flowed through structures this order controls. That's not cynicism, by the way — most of the people who built those structures genuinely believed they were the only way devotion could reach her safely. Camp three looks at what happened with you and sees… a second conduit. One that doesn't go through them. One that, by the Conclave's own ruling, is not just legitimate but — by their own admission — stronger, in some ways, than anything they've built in three hundred years."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"They're not wrong about the facts," Aldric said, more quietly. "That's what makes it difficult. They're not heretics, or villains, or anything so simple. They're people who've spent their whole lives believing their structures were necessary — and now there's evidence that maybe they weren't. Not that the structures were wrong, exactly. Just… not the whole story. People don't always handle 'not the whole story' gracefully, even when they're otherwise decent."
— ✶ —
~ KAEL ~
Kael sat with that for a long moment, thinking about Olen — about a man whose entire structure had also turned out to be 'not the whole story,' and how badly that had gone, even though camp three was, by every account, nothing like Olen at all.
"What do they want?" he asked. "Specifically. If they're not villains — what's the actual ask?"
"I don't think they know, yet," Aldric admitted. "That's rather the problem. They're afraid, and fear without a clear target tends to look for one. Right now, that target is… you. Not because you've done anything wrong. Just because you're the only part of this that has a face."
Nyxara was quiet for a moment — the kind of quiet Kael had learned to recognize as her thinking through something carefully, the way she had before telling him the truth in the alley.
"Kael," she said slowly. "I think… I think this might be something we can't just be sincere our way out of. Not this time. This isn't a tribunal, or a conspiracy with a clear villain. It's… people. Scared, reasonable people, who need something from us that isn't a poem."
"What do they need?" Kael asked quietly.
"I don't know yet," Nyxara said. "But I think, this time, we should find out before we decide what to offer."