Ecstacies of Saint Chrisenya the Mad [Warhammer 40k] [Transgender Sororitas] [NSFW]

[dragonsaffron]

Chrisenya still felt the thrumming aftershocks of orgasm when she came back to herself, tucked into her bunk. By the quality of the light she could tell that it was late morning, though not quite late enough that Chrisenya was at risk of missing breakfast. She briefly considered doing so anyway, for the sake of more sleep. In the Abbey, two days out of every ten were given over to recovery and leisure; there was still a couple of hours of religious instruction and prayer, but much of the day was entirely open and unscheduled. Ideal for sleep.

Chrisenya rolled over, and was just beginning to wonder why Sister Regina hadn't forcibly woken her up when Fidelitas started calling for her.

"Saint? You still asleep?"

"No," said Chrisenya. "Unfortunately."

"Sister Regina's reservation for the baths is today, and we're invited," Fidelitas said. "I know you were there when she said that but you seemed kind of out of it."

Chrisenya did remember, though she hadn't a moment before. That explained where Regina was, at least.

"You know how I feel about the existence of that place," Chrisenya said.

"Fair enough," Fidelitas said with a sigh. She took a step towards the door. "You know, I've heard the, er, the hot water… can be good for sore muscles, and soothing injuries, and all that."

A moment's hesitation. "You are an evil woman," Chrisenya groaned. "A temptress, taking the orders with ill intent and seducing your sisters into sin."

"And yet you can't seem to live without me, can you?"

"Who else will be there? Besides Regina and, I assume, yourself."

"Gwynette, I think?" Said Fidelitas. "I'm not sure. Does this mean you're going to come with, then?"

"Does not the liturgy say that 'pain is holy. Yea, for the endurance of pain proves dedication to the Empress, and in scourging the nerves so too is the mind scourged of temptation'?"

"You're not dedicating yourself to the Empress by lying in bed being sore," Fidelitas said, irked. "If they didn't want you to avail yourself of the bloody hot water, they wouldn't have it around."

Chrisenya sighed. "Give me just a few minutes. I'll make myself ready."

Fidelitas agreed, and once she was sure that she wasn't looking, Chrisenya slipped the vial of pills out of the bust of her uniform and took another granule. She had yet to conceive of a hiding place that would work, so for the time being, it laid against her sternum.

A change of clothes and two-thirds of a breakfast later, Chrisenya and Fidelitas made their way across the grounds of the Abbey. There was only one bathhouse, shared by the entire complex, which helped to explain both why they could only be used by reservation and also why they lay near the center of the Abbey. The fact that it was surrounded by high spires and huge basilicas made the unimpressive appearance of the baths all the more noticeable. It was a large, sprawling structure, two floors in height, constructed from ferrocrete and pale stone. High Gothic script sprawled across its walls.

While Fidelitas stepped inside, Chrisenya quickly ducked to the side, hiding the vial of stimm in foliage near the entrance. As soon as she passed within, Chrisenya was struck by a wave of heat and moisture that made the air of the baths feel as thick as seawater. Human sweat and soap and spices and other things that Chrisenya could not identify bypassed rationality and thought entirely, sending her into a thoughtless trance of overstimulation.

"Chrisenya! C'mon, Regina and Gwynette are waiting for us!"

Fidelitas was standing in a doorway arch, an attendant at her side, waving to catch Chrisenya's attention. After a moment to clear her head, Chrisenya ran over, and the attendant led the two of them to their reserved room. While making their way through the complex, she explained the rules. Each bath was a separate chamber with an adjoining changing room. Regina had reserved two hours for the four of them, during which time they would not be disturbed for any reason. Privacy was given a high premium, especially for novitiates who would have little opportunity to find it elsewhere.

Before she knew it, it was just Chrisenya and Fidelitas, standing in the changing room, the door shut behind them and locked from the inside. The changing room was a small rectangular chamber, nooks set into the marble walls for stashing clothing and a single long bench of water-resistant flakboard running down the center.

Fidelitas undressed herself without a moment's hesitation, pragmatically stripping off her uniform one article at a time. The last time that Chrisenya had been able to see her body longer than the briefest glimpse in between showers was back on the Gabriellum. Her eyes were locked on the beauty of Fidelitas's form while she casually removed her mantle and set it to the side. Fidelitas then took one of the towels and wrapped it around her waist, leaving her chest uncovered.

"You having second thoughts? Planning on jumping in fully-clothed? Or am I just distracting you?"

Chrisenya squeezed her eyes shut. "No, none of that. I've just… this is new for me, you must understand."

"Never had anything like this on Aktranis?"

Chrisenya's lips pursed subtly. "I was eleven years old the last time I was there."

Fidelitas shrugged. "Fair enough. Do you want me to turn around, then? You'll have to get naked eventually, but I guess I can see how this part could be difficult."

"I would… appreciate that, yes," said Chrisenya.

In truth, there was another concern beyond just that of Fidelitas's eyes. Over the preceding several days, Chrisenya had grown used to the shape her body took on when wearing the special uniforms with which Maryllis had provided her. It was not until she stepped into the changing room that she remembered that the curve of her breasts was generated entirely by padding, and not at all by the flesh underneath. Fidelitas knew this, of course, but Sister Regina would not. And for reasons which Chrisenya was entirely unprepared to confront, the thought that her nude form might disappoint Sister Regina was terrifying.

Still, there was no time to waste. Chrisenya stripped down and wrapped a towel around herself, letting it cover everything below the collarbone. Then Fidelitas pushed through the door and Chrisenya, dutifully, followed.

"Well, there you have it," said Regina, raising a hand in greeting. "I was hoping you two would accept the invitation."

"Try this water, it's amazing. One dip and you won't even care if you get shot in the head on your first battle, it'll have all been worth it."

The air of the bath was heavy with steam. Regina stood in the center of the bath, water up to her navel, and worked a thick substance into her hair, while Gwynette soaked herself at the edge. Someone had set up a small burner to saturate the air of the chamber with floral smells.

Out of the corner of her eye Chrisenya was made vaguely aware of Gwynette's compact form, her small size belying her wiry athleticism. But that was not where her attention fell. Chrisenya could not have been made to look away from Regina's body by anything short of the Empress herself appearing out of thin air to command it, because Regina was gorgeous. Chrisenya had known she was strong, but seeing her muscular laid bare made it yet more obvious. Every part of her was perfectly formed, hard-edged as though she were carved out of a solid block of carnelian. Chrisenya did not dare look upon her breasts for more than a moment, but even the brief glimpses told her that they were excellently proportioned and beautiful.

Regina existed confidently and naturally within her surroundings, even the wet strands of silver hair pouring down her back looking artfully disarrayed. It was nothing like Misty wearing her appearance, all gaudy and forward. When their eyes met, Chrisenya felt a brief instant of connection, as though her own gaze were being held in Regina's hand and gently, lovingly returned to her.

Fidelitas sank into the water on the far side of the bath and, undoing her braid, began throwing handfuls of water into her hair. "Gwynette's right, you know. The water really is wonderful. I dunno how they do it, must have it matched to your bloody body temperature or something."

Chrisenya edged closer to the rim of the bathing pool, hands clutching the edges of the towel in front of her chest. After an encouraging nod from Fidelitas, she extended one foot, and successfully dipped her toe in it. She was right; the water was just hot enough to burn. Of course, the heat of the water had nothing on the heat rising up behind Chrisenya's cheeks. It should have been easy, to let the towel drop, to join her sisters in their casual undress. But for once in her life, Chrisenya's willpower was failing her.

"Hey. Chris?" Regina said.

"Yes?"

"It's fine. I've seen a lot of people naked. Both kinds. You're not gonna scare me or anything."

Chrisenya's heart accelerated to dizzying speeds, and her face burned. But she let the towel drop, and sat down at the bath's edge, letting her legs acclimate to the heat. Regina, though she tried to be subtle, made sure to take a very long look down the length of Chrisenya's body. It wasn't quite what she would call a comfortable experience, but Chrisenya wasn't going to tell her to look away. After a moment, she slipped into the water and allowed herself to melt.

The heat was a better analgesic than Chrisenya had expected. She sank into it, let herself soak, occasionally even let her face go below the water's surface that she might wet her hair. There was a small stockpile of soap in the corner of the room, but with as much time to spare as they had, Chrisenya was, for the first time in a while, under no pressure. The same could not be said about Fidelitas and Regina, whose large quantities of hair and stringent needs for the care thereof meant that rubbing various oils and salves was an immediate task.

For all that she truly did despise vanity, Chrisenya found the performance of it deeply entrancing to watch. There was a distinct contrast in the way in which the two women went about their routines: Fidelitas knew what to do in what order, but did so casually, stopping to think or joke in between each step. Regina was mechanical in her motions, businesslike, as though the required steps to produce her impressive mane had been drilled into her with the same precision as field-stripping a bolter.

Gwynette noticed Chrisenya's attention. "They're gorgeous, aren't they? The rest of the sex all evolved into angels upon the face of the materium, and here I am looking like a teen boy with a glandular issue." Gwynette shot a sidelong glance in her direction. "Frankly, I'm glad you were invited just so I wouldn't feel too inadequate, if you catch my meaning."

Fidelitas's eyes shot open, and she flashed Gwynette a murderous glare. "Oi! Don't! She's embarrassed enough as is."

"Besides," Regina said, flashing a grin, "I don't think there's much point in comparing sizes in the same building as Fidelitas."

Fidelitas chuckled. She ran her hands down her chest, lasciviously holding one breast in each hand, her fingers spread as wide as possible yet still unable to cover more than a small patch of each one. "Yeah, and don't you both forget it. Hottest pair of tits in this whole Abbey."

This display, on its own, would have normally qualified as merely offensive, perhaps mildly obscene. But for the briefest moment, as Fidelitas moved from her pose back to a normal stance, her eyes flickered partially open, and for the briefest second held Chrisenya's gaze. It was a mere instant of acknowledgement, but in that instant she was made to remember with feverish passion the events of that night in her chamber on the Gabriellum.

"They are quite attractive," Chrisenya said, the words slipping unbidden from between her lips, barely louder than a whisper.

Regina caught the words like a hunting hawk. "Well, well, well, Chris, I didn't even know you were capable of such impure thoughts. Is there, perhaps, an actual human being hidden under all of that piety?"

"Oh, she's capable of quite a lot of things, under the right circumstances," Fidelitas said, a knowing smirk across her face.

Regina's eyes widened a fraction, and she glanced rapidly between Fidelitas's lewd confidence and Chrisenya, who had lowered herself several centimeters deeper into the water, folding one leg over the other just in case. For a moment it looked like she was about to panic, but then she settled, a much calmer expression settling in.

"I guess she isn't as innocent as I'd expected," she said with a shrug.

The memory of her most recent nightmare flashed through Chrisenya's mind unbidden. The aggression she had felt, the desire to dominate and the satisfaction in Misty's body, all of those were foreign emotions, forced upon her by the daemon's psychic influence. But the pleasure was all too real.

Regina was set on exacerbating the issue. She clasped her hands together and reached up as high as she could, bending them back over her head. The motion made every muscle from her forearms down to the sides of her ribcage shift intriguingly, rippling just under her skin. Her breasts stood out proudly, two smooth, perfect curves, and as she let out a contented gasp the hollow of Regina's throat produced the most perfect shapes.

"How's the water treating you? I feel spectacular."

"Still rather sore," said Chrisenya. "Though you are right, I do feel… treated."

Fidelitas's grin had grown even broader, in an attempt to overpower whatever other emotion was making her eyelids twitch ever so slightly. "Show-off."

Sister Gwynette promptly vanished under the surface of the water, leaving her ears covered while exposing only the bare minimum necessary to breathe.

"You would be a show-off, too, if you had this to show off, don't you think?" Regina did a brief bicep flex, which was, admittedly, rather impressive. "Besides. Chris is clearly enjoying the view."

Chrisenya sputtered. She was not a sinner. She was not lustful, she was not vain, and her encounter with Fidelitas had been brought on not by desire, but by the extremity of the moment, before she had discovered that they would not be separated. She was only feeling about Regina the way she felt due to Misty's influence. Eventually, Chrisenya concluded that this was none of her business. If her sisters were choosing to be lewd and forward, it was no different from when the other Prefects had mocked her for her height.

"I will not engage with this absurdity," Chrisenya said. "If you're so obsessed with the flesh, then go suck each other's tongues. It doesn't matter to me."

She glanced hither and thither for some excuse, the insult so entirely out of line that it burned her cheeks as soon as she had said it. Eventually she found what she was looking for: a bar of soap sitting on a small cloth a meter or so away. Chrisenya rose, turning her back on the others for a moment in order to have the reach. But when she turned back, all three of Regina, Fidelitas, and Gwynette were staring at her with blank expressions of horror.

"I'm sorry," Chrisenya said meekly.

"Bloody warp…" Gwynette muttered.

"By the Empress," Regina said. "I knew it was bad, I never realized it was that bad."

Chrisenya frowned, blinking confusion out of her eyes. "What are you talking about?"

"Chrisenya, it's your back." Fidelitas looked like she was about to cry for pity, or rage, or both. "It looks like… like a bloody charnel house."

 

[dragonsaffron]

"It is not so bad," Chrisenya said.

She had seen her back in the mirror. From the base of her neck down to the waist, the mark of Sister-Superior Coriah's whip had left a field of sickly yellow and pale violet. The protection of her uniform meant that the skin was never broken, and there was certainly no blood or great wounds in the way Fidelitas implied.

"Your entire back…!"

Gwynette emerged from the water, just up to chin depth. "That's what happens when you're slow. Natural consequence, really."

"Thank you, Sister Gwynette," Chrisenya said. "It is the price I pay for my physical weakness. It stings, somewhat, but I can bear the pain."

Regina's face twitched. "You shouldn't have to bear it," she said.

Fidelitas folded her arms. "Why didn't you tell me about this?"

"Because I thought it unimportant? You knew I was suffering the cost of my exertions, did you not?"

"I could have done something to help," Fidelitas said with a sigh, "if you had told me."

"You could not have done anything," Chrisenya said sourly.

"I'm sure she could have worked out something, Chris." Regina had moved forward in the pool, her fists placed securely on the sides of her hips. "The fact remains that you are a wounded mess, and you've been keeping it a secret, and for what? Pride?"

Regina, even in her angered state, remained furiously attractive. Her posture was both forceful and utterly unselfconscious, her breasts thrust forward, biceps slightly flexed. Guilt and arousal mingled in Chrisenya's chest.

"And why do you care so much?!" Chrisenya shrieked.

Then, in order to parry any possible retort, Chrisenya dropped fully into the water of the pool, shutting her eyes and letting the liquid heat flow over her, She held herself down as long as she could, the microscopic currents and murmurings beating harmlessly against her ears. As Chrisenya's lungs began to burn for lack of oxygen, she resolved that she was not going to fight any longer, no matter what happened. She burst to the surface.

Fidelitas was standing next to where Regina had been, while the latter had retreated to crouch near the edge of the pool. "Is this another one of your religious quirks? Oh, what was that line from the Book of Saints you find so fascinating…"

Chrisenya knew the one. "'For know that the troubles of a Saint are singular; they suffer the same as other men, but they suffer apart.'"

"And here I thought the 'Saint' thing was just a nickname," said Regina. "Do you really think that about yourself?"

Chrisenya did not think that about herself. She knew it.

"Now, I never claimed to be half as good at liturgical interpretation, but I'm fairly certain there's a difference between commandments and commentaries, isn't there?"

"Of course there is," Chrisenya said.

"So you're definitely not isolating yourself out of some twisted sense of martyrdom? Not even a little bit?"

Chrisenya dunked her head under the water's surface, rubbing it into her scalp.

"You have to let us help you," said Regina. "Please? I want to help however I can."

Chrisenya bit her tongue and blinked emotion out of her eyes. She thought, very slowly and very intensely, about whether accepting the offer of aid would open her up to some exploitation of weakness. It was not vain to seek the dissolution of pain, nor was it avaricious or slothful, so long as seeking relief did not stretch so far as avoiding the root cause. Misty had offered to heal her, but there the sin was in the source, not the cure. Regina was no agent of chaos.

"Just a quick examination," Regina said. "I've dealt with this sort of blunt injury before, I want to make sure nothing's broken."

Chrisenya glared at Regina, interrogating her for any sign of lasciviousness. There was none. "Very well. If you believe it is for my health."

Regina let herself float stomach-down on the surface of the water as she circled the edge of the pool. Gwynette was off taking care of her own close-cropped hair, and Fidelitas had retreated subtly as well, giving the oddest sense of privacy in spite of the two other women in the bath with them.

"Okay, now turn around so I can see your back."

Chrisenya did so, leaning her arms on the bath's edge and pressing her chest into them out of a fruitless desire to keep the lack of her breasts hidden, from the eyes of the Empress if nothing else. A wave lapped against Chrisenya as Regina approached. She made the mistake of looking over her shoulder, discovering Regina close enough to touch Chrisenya's back with her arms still bent.

"Well, it certainly looks to be a mess back here, but bruises often look worse than they are."

Without any further ado, Regina started just above the shoulder blades, using the index and middle finger of each hand to palpate the flesh. It stung, of course, damaged skin and opened capillaries responded to even light touch, but there was no body-deep stab of true injury. Regina, to her credit, moved slowly and with genuine care.

Regina's fingers traced out strange patterns, moving down only to turn at sharp angles toward the outer edge of the body, or stopping to draw a tight circle on some spot of apparent interest. Whenever her fingers were not drawing out pain, the light brushing of touch brought on more delicate sensations, ticklish and good. A fuzzy static encroached upon the edges of Chrisenya's consciousness, drawing her into a trance like that brought on by Sister Doloria's ministrations, but this time she refused it. Such a thing may have been acceptable with a Hospitaller-Superior, but a fellow sister? Absolutely not.

What was strange was that Regina seemed to know what she was doing, or at least have an idea of it. There was no hesitancy in her touch, none of the doubling-back or pause that would be expected of a young woman making it all up as she went along. Chrisenya wondered to herself where Regina could have learned such a thing, and a curious fantasy overcame her.

She imagined Regina in fanciful garb, skin-hugging breeches and a buttoned vest, white cloth and gold thread and embroidery. Regina was in a forest, not a dark and wild wood but a garden of trees, open and clear. Next to her lay a lasgun, itself made of only the most elaborate alloys and rare shaped wood, and the carcass of some beast, similar to a canid but stouter and bare of fur. But the center of the fantasy was Regina herself, kneeling over another woman clad in a similarly garish outfit, her coat lifted above her back as Regina examined her for injury. As for whence this image had come, Chrisenya hadn't the faintest idea; and it vanished just as soon as it had arrived.

Regina's fingers continued to drift downwards to just below the place where Chrisenya's ribcage trailed off. There, on the right side, Regina's thumb crossed a spot which stung fiercely. Chrisenya remembered that wound: it was four days old, but the whip had bitten deeply into the flesh, and that spot had continued to ache even compared to its neighbors. She stiffened as Regina touched it, biting down on her lips in order to keep herself from making noise.

Nevertheless, Regina noticed. "You alright, Chris?"

"Yes," she said.

"I'm gonna have to press down a little bit, just to make sure that you don't have anything actually broken there, alright?"

"Are you certain? That injury is days old, I would remember if…"

"Trust me, people can fail to notice all sorts of things. I have to be certain."

Chrisenya could feel the air change as Regina moved very slightly closer to her back, and her voice was very soft as she spoke. Trust made her muscles slack, as did the desperate need to find some sense of connection. There was very little she wanted to deny to Regina when there were fingers tracing the outline of her back.

"Alright," said Chrisenya. "But be quick."

Regina increased the pressure on that spot on Chrisenya's back. The stinging, aching pain increased many times over, a sugary pain running through every blood vessel, down to the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands. There was something awful and paradoxical about it, pain melting into the sensitivity of the skin the way butter soaks into bread, sensation sent resulting in an echo returned. Chrisenya's heart skipped a beat, her lungs hitched, and a throb passed through her core. Through lips opened a fraction of a fraction, a shrill whine of emotion escaped from Chrisenya.

The bath chamber fell completely silent. Regina, Fidelitas, Gwynette, everyone had heard. Their eyes went wide, bodies frozen in place as the implication set in. Regina remained in contact with Chrisenya, but her fingers only barely brushed against the purple and yellow canvas of her skin. Chrisenya's head fell to her chest, her heart hammering against the inside of her ribcage as every instinct of shame and humiliation rose up all at once, coiling around her spinal column.

Chrisenya pressed her thighs together, attempting to quell herself. It worked, if only for an instant, but could not stop the rising tide of horrible, burning shame. At last she reached her limit. With a sob of panic, Chrisenya dashed up the edge of the bath, racing into the changing room in a storm of confused emotions. There, she fell into a nook and let her face fall into her hands. Prayers spilled from her lips haphazardly, vomiting forth like fallen crumbs as she tried to find some relief from her own guilt.

Down the hallway, around the corner, in a small shrine kept for the use of the bath-house attendants, a droplet of blood spilled forth from the eyes of the icon. There was only one woman in attendance, knelt in prayer. She looked up, suddenly shaken from her prayers by a profound sense of wrongness. When she saw the red trail pouring down the image of the Empress's face, she let out a scream, turned, and ran.

Chrisenya hardly registered the sound of the scream through the door, occupied as she was in her own self-flagellation. How was it, after so many years, that she had already been so corrupted? Was this the end? Had Misty broken her will at last, just at the final moment, just when Chrisenya was ready to make herself useful to the faith that had saved her?

She was roused from her terrible state by the soft sound of the connecting door between the changing room and the bath opening, then shutting. It was Fidelitas, a towel wrapped fully around her body, hair spilling down her back.

"Hey. Saint? Everything all right?"

Chrisenya sniffed, clearing the tears from her eyes. "What meaning does that nickname have any longer? I am no saint. I am hardly worthy of being a sister. I have sinned, Fidelitas, the sin of lust pervades me."

"Regina was the one touching you. It's not as though you can blame yourself for reacting to what you feel."

"But I should not have felt to begin with! You are my sisters, this is an Abbey, we are united in service to the Empress! To taint such a place, such a bond, with lewdness is… profane."

Fidelitas approached slowly. "Are we profane, then? Because of what we've done?"

Chrisenya choked audibly. "I don't know. It felt… right. It felt more right than anything I'd ever done. More right than it ever—" She stopped herself on the very precipice of revealing Misty's existence.

"You like Regina, don't you? You care about her?"

"As a sister of the Orders Militant, not as a…" Chrisenya could hardly even summon up the word.

"And when she touched you, to determine whether you had been so severely wounded as to require the attentions of a Hospitaller, you felt…?"

"Pain," said Chrisenya. "But… good pain."

"And would you have felt the same way if it was someone else?"

Chrisenya remembered back to countless nights with Misty, where pleasure and pain were as two twin sisters. Base instincts had been satisfied, an urge invoked and then quelled in the same manner as base hunger or thirst. But she had never felt the gap of her skin be bridged in the same way as Regina had. Chrisenya shook her head.

"And yet, nevertheless, I quiver with unholy want. Why does this keep happening to me?"

"Because you're human," Fidelitas said.

"Humanity is the chiefest of all species," Chrisenya replied by reflex.

"And yet humans feel unholy passions. Interesting, isn't it?"

Fidelitas dropped onto her knees before Chrisenya. Her towel could not cover her body, not fully, and the upper portions of her breasts were now bared for Chrisenya's view. Her heart thumped, and flesh shifted between her legs.

"Are you tempting me?"

"A little bit, yeah. I mean, come on, we haven't been naked around each other since… that night. I can't help but feel nostalgic. And besides… if you feel so aggrieved by those urges of yours, there's a way to take care of it."

Chrisenya ran out of breath. Her skin surged with want, forcing her to clamp together her slender legs. Fidelitas looked up at her with a guileless expression, eyes almost appearing to sparkle, lips turning to a smile. Water dripped from her jaw, and made her all the more beautiful. Chrisenya sucked in a breath and threw her head back against the rear wall of the nook.

"Do it," she said. "Whatever it is you have planned, do it."

Fidelitas let the towel drop. "I saw this in a pamphlet once. Open your legs, Saint."

Chrisenya did as asked, exposing her sensitivity to the warm air of the changing room. Fidelitas lifted her breasts up with both hands, pressing them forward such that they cradled the lower portion of Chrisenya, then slowly brought her head forward. Her tongue stretched out, and made a slow, long, careful lap along the right side. Chrisenya's whole body flinched, another pathetic whine drawn forth.

Regina and Gwynette were still in the next room. Chrisenya needed to suppress her voice, but as Fidelitas went to work with the slow ministrations of her tongue, all speech fled. Chrisenya was caught between two options: either bray like a beast, or seek the depths of her consciousness and dredge forth whatever she could find there.

"Empress protect and Empress guide this pitiful vessel, grant strength beyond this mere shell of humanity by the exertion of thine will…"

Fidelitas pressed her lips against the very tip of Chrisenya's length, now slick with desire, and carefully pulled the smallest portion of it into her mouth. Her tongue made unwholesome circles, encompassing every edge and angle. Chrisenya's voice stuttered as the tightness between her legs increased to extents she thoughts impossible, but she did not cease her muttered prayer. Her legs tensed, locking themselves in around Fidelitas's shoulders.

"Forgive this fallible vessel of all its sins, and continue to grant thy grace in spite of its many failings. O Empress of Humanity…"

A single long stroke, wet and firm, starting at the underside of the tip and traveling down, down, all the way to the very root of Chrisenya's length, made her shudder yet again. Something swirled, all too familiar. Guilt and grace, sin and thanks boiled within Chrisenya's mind. Fidelitas pulled her within, suction and pressure eliciting a full-body seize of muscle and nerve.

"…to defend against the might of chaos. Amen."

Chrisenya's hips twitched, and all the tension of the morning, all that which had been elicited when Regina flexed and posed before her, all that she had thought and hoped when she watched Fidelitas strip before her very eyes, turned to liquid and spewed into Fidelitas's mouth. She recoiled, a look of faint disgust passing over her features before she quickly swallowed. A bit of silvery material had spilled out of the corner of her mouth, and she wiped it away with her towel while looking up at Chrisenya with glad eyes.

"Feel any better?"

Chrisenya nodded, panting with exertion.

"Good. And the best part is, now we get to go clean right up."

 

[dragonsaffron]

Regina's fingers dug into Severn's jaw, holding her against the wall as she aggressively ground her crotch against Severn's thigh. Severn was painfully hard, and as Regina withdrew her tongue from her mouth, let out an incoherent moan.

"Yeah. Just like that. That was exactly the noise that came out of Chris's mouth when I touched her just right, because your idiotic interference plan is never going to fucking work."

Severn couldn't hardly think. She could barely even move in the state she was in, her hips jerking forward like a crawler with a broken engine, hands flat against the wall to keep her from sliding down as her legs turned to jelly. Regina had never been this furious before, this radiantly dominant. She was like the alpha grox, breeding rights secured, howling and roaring before the entire herd. It was a disgusting and pathetic display, and against all her better drives, Severn could not help but become drunk on it.

"Do you understand me? Stay the fuck out of my way! Stay the fuck out of my way, leave Sister Chrisenya alone, or…"

Regina's voice dropped into a growl, then when her furious triumph got the better of her into a wordless grunt of anger. She leaned in, getting Severn's ear between her teeth and biting down. The sudden pain and rampant aggression caught Severn off-guard, the jolt flying right between her legs. Climax seized her. Her seed spilled into her underwear, hidden beneath the uniform that she hadn't even begun to remove.

Regina at least seemed to realize what she had done, muscles going slack as she retreated just a fraction. The both of them panted for breath, centimeters apart. Slowly, a look of guilt and regret dawned across Regina's perfect features. Severn, on the other hand, was still grinning languidly in post-orgasmic bliss. After several seconds, she recovered enough coordination to grab Regina by the face and pull her in for another sloppy kiss.

"You touched her bruises, princess," Severn whispered. "That's hardly true love. That's barely even sex."

"I hope you die."

"We're soldiers of the Empress, it's going to happen eventually. I'm honestly just hoping to get a few good memories out of this first. I dunno what you're here for, if you think dying's so bad."

Regina's face suddenly went very serious, almost sad. "Some things are worse than dying."

That made Severn raise an eyebrow. A rare moment of vulnerability on Regina's, or just something she said that she thought would sound interesting? No way to say.

"What are you going to do, anyway, if I don't stop? Your fucked up little martyr girlfriend didn't exactly pledge her undying devotion to you, did she?"

"All you have is power plays and shock value, Severn. I don't have to do anything, because you don't know the first thing about getting Chrisenya to actually care about you as opposed to just turning her on. You'll run into a wall eventually."

Severn shook her head. "You keep believing that, princess."

Chrisenya was rather reclusive for the remainder of that day; Severn only saw her at meals, and then only from a distance. That whole evening, she hardly moved from her chosen spot, that being inside of the warm embrace of Sister Fidelitas, who Severn felt had a much stronger chance of getting up Chrisenya's skirt than either of them, honestly. So it was that Severn only found her next opportunity in the dimness just after dawn, and in the most unexpected of locations: the chapel.

Severn Nodensia did not like to be seen praying. Prayer was such a profound act, a vulnerable one, a personal one, it simply was not right in her opinion that it be made public. Back home, on Notidal, there had been a ruin, a crashed warship of some description, and within that ruin had been a shrine to the Empress left miraculously intact. For the first fourteen years of her life, Severn had crawled into that ruin every other day when nobody was watching, and in absolute stillness prayed for the Empress to hand down to her the most valuable gift she could think of: womanhood.

That particular prayer had never been answered. Realizing that she would have to take the matter into her own hands had damaged Severn's faith on a permanent basis, but never destroyed it entirely. And so it was that, when the sky over Roctaln was halfway between the dark of night and the red of dawn, Severn knelt, and clasped her hands, and spoke the words her father had given her.

"Empress, thou art the slayer of all evils, thy blade the fiery blade that no armor can halt, thy will the will that turns planets to ash. Listen to the prayer of this insignificant supplicant, and if it be within thy will, grant it. Deliver unto me the meanest fragment of thy power, that thy flames might inflame me as well. Deliver unto me th—"

The doors to the chapel creaked open, and someone slipped through. Severn stopped what she was doing, glanced over her shoulder. It was, of all people, the little martyr wannabe. Odd to see her in the chapel so early, considering Severn had only ever seen her waking up before the eighth bell under extreme duress.

Slowly and carefully, Severn got off of her knees and rose into a stealthy crouch. Chrisenya rushed down the aisle, feet making a hurried pitter-patter. Extra odd. Severn decided to follow, just out of curiosity, slinking from pew to pew as Chrisenya ducked into a side passage, one of the ones usually used for spillover on holy days and the like. There she started searching, carefully and methodically running her fingers along edges, behind tapestries, like she was looking for something.

She found that thing in a split, where a flakboard wall panel had broken under the strain of moisture and time. Chrisenya reached down her top—Severn was suddenly glad to be doing this—and produced a little glass vial, just small enough that she could cram it into the crack without it being seen.

What confused Severn the most was that she had seen vials just like that, in Gwynette's illicit supply, and she was nearly certain that they contained highly illegal drugs. And that just didn't add up. Why would holier-than-thou Chrisenya be looking for a place to hide a drugs stash? Severn decided that she was going to ask Gwynette about this later, if only to prove to herself that the obviously absurd solution was absurd. She stayed hidden while Chrisenya dropped to her knees in prayer, not wanting it to be too obvious that she had just seen what she had seen.

Inevitably, though, it came time to make her move. At the same moment as Severn stood up, Chrisenya unexpectedly did as well. "Well, well, aren't we starting off early. Trying to get in some extra credit with the Empress?"

"You dare mock Her in Her own house?"

Severn frowned, sparing a glance for the nearest icon. "Of course not. I'm mocking you."

"And for what, precisely? You are here too, are you not?"

Severn shrugged. "Everybody has to pick some time. I like it when it's quiet. When the Empress whispers to me, I want to hear her back."

"The Empress does not whisper to you," Chrisenya said with vindictive certainty.

"You don't seem the type to let me argue with you," Severn said. "Haven't I seen you praying in the evenings, too, at the icon? And every afternoon during instruction? And at breakfast, lunch, and dinner?"

Chrisenya turned away from Severn, just far enough to make the slightest hint of red that spilled into her pale cheeks all the more obvious. "I will not apologize for my piety. You should be taking me as an example."

Severn started pacing around, seeing how close she could circle before Chrisenya would back away. "I don't think I will. I'm sure I could make my faith as loud and obvious as I pleased, but in the end, it's the thought that counts. 'Succumb thee not to pride, My children,' after all."

Chrisenya was aghast. "You believe your faith is stronger than mine?"

"One might even say I have faith in the fact. 'Faith is the flame that burns in the breast, faith is the awe which arises at the sight of a star piercing through fog, faith is the calm in a dying man's eyes.' Notably none of that is something you can prove by getting down on your hands and knees all day."

Chrisenya had forgotten how to speak. Horror was writ across her face, eyelids trembling as though she was about to cry. "That's… That's the Liber Mysteriorum."

"By Julek. I know, I've read it."

Chrisenya looked like she was about to suffocate on her own tongue. "I didn't know you could read!" Apparently she realized how stupid that sounded, because a couple seconds later she was looking away from Severn again. "I didn't come here to debate theology with you."

"Neither did I." Severn flashed a grin. "But then I saw you and I realized that this was the first time we'd ever been alone in a room together."

It was like Chrisenya hadn't realized that fact until that moment. She glanced over Severn's shoulder, eyes wide with some combination of embarrassment and fear "And so you intended to debate theology with me?" she said softly. "Question my faith?"

Severn decided to press her luck. She gazed into Chrisenya's face, examining it for any change in emotion. Then she took a step forwards. "Well, I can't exactly say what I want to say when there are others around, are there? It's one thing to reveal a girl's secrets to herself, and another thing entirely to reveal them to others."

Chrisenya's throat worked, and her breath pumped through half-open lips. "What secret? I have no secrets."

"Oh, but I think you do. You don't have anything to prove to anybody with all that obsessive prayer you do, which means you're doing it to try to keep suspicion off of yourself."

Chrisenya's reaction was much stronger than Severn anticipated. She backed away several steps, fingernails digging into her palms as though ready to go on the attack. Not that Severn was in any danger, but ite was concerning. "You know nothing about me," she hissed.

"Hey, I'm not accusing you of a crime or anything," Severn said, holding out her hands. "But, er, Regina told me about what happened with you and her, and it got me to thinking." Severn grinned, folding her arms while she waited for Chrisenya's response. It was a curious expression that formed into being upon her features: anticipatory, almost hopeful.

"I think you're constantly trying to let the whole damn galaxy know how much you believe in the Empress, how strong and impenetrable your faith is, because on the inside you're just worried that people will realize that you're a desperate slut."

Chrisenya was utterly nonplussed. She stared straight ahead, seeing straight through Severn.

"You like it when I touch you," Severn said plainly. "You like it when Regina touches you. Clearly you want to engage in some horizontal athletics, and I think that fact is eating away at you."

Chrisenya's face went completely red, and she clenched and unclenched her fists while staring down at the floor. "You're completely wrong. And besides, even if I did have any such carnal desires, I would never indulge them, for the sake of my soul."

"Hey, listen," Severn said quietly. "If you're like that, you're like that, and you can't change it, the way I figure. Better to find an outlet with someone you know won't lead you astray than bottle it up until it turns into something chaos can exploit."

Chrisenya suddenly looked up, a genuine pious terror in her eyes. "You really believe that? That it is… suppression, not enactment, that allows for the entry of chaos?"

Severn nodded. "It's a bit unorthodox, I admit, but if you can find a couple hours and a copy of the Liber Mysteriorum I can explain my logic to you. Right now, though… Well, we have this whole chapel to ourselves. Maybe we could make use of the private time?"

Chrisenya took several seconds to get the innuendo, which was a frankly impressive amount of obliviousness even by her standards. As soon as she did, it was like a spring snapping back into place. Her faintly doe-eyed expression slipped around itself, turning into a righteous fury as bad as the worst of the lecturers at Notidal's Schola Progenium.

"You idiot, pig-headed, thick-headed, disgusting, morally bankrupt rake!" Chrisenya screeched. Severn stumbled back. "You don't know a single thing about me! Don't speak to me again! If I never even have to see you again, it will be a blessing handed down by the Empress!"

Severn blinked, shocked by the rapidity of the turn. "Chrisenya, I—"

She had meant to apologize, to smooth things over. But just before she could say anything, there was a heavy thumping from behind them, one that Severn recognized instantly as the sound of someone else entering the chapel. Her mouth slammed shut. Chrisenya glared at her, those huge grey eyes of hers transmogrified into a vox dish transmitting pure spite. After a few seconds of wordless exchange, Chrisenya stormed off to go pray somewhere else.

Severn waited until Chrisenya was out of view. Then she slammed her fist into the center of her chest, hard enough hurt and hard enough to feel the impact reverberate through herself. Then she went to her knees in front of the convenient icon, and started to pray. For forgiveness.

 

[dragonsaffron]

The day that physical training was meant to resume, a rain began to fall which had not been felt over the Abbey of the Twin Orders in nearly a decade. The field once again turned to mud, and rivers spilled through the walkways, and the novitiates relocated themselves to the indoors training arenas for the time being. For hours, then tens of hours, then days, the rain came without pause or cease. Chrisenya could not help but feel guilty, as though it were somehow her fault, as though the sky had opened up entirely for her benefit.

It was not even necessarily the case that the indoors training regimen was all that much easier on her tortured flesh than was the outdoors one. First the body was broken down with hard labor, various athletic feats of running and leaping and climbing across specially-arranged metal bars, or being given massive canisters full of water and told to make it ten steps forward without collapsing. Then would come drills with the Cantus Boltra, followed by more physical work, then lunch, and then into the games of coordination and skill. Those latter activities were the closest Chrisenya ever came to excellence, in the sense that she at least felt as though she could see a path to success, although the severe hampering of exhaustion and weakness always blocked that path.

In between long stretches spent drilling the eighteen guards and seven steps, Sister-Superior Bellara began allowing, on the third day of the interminable rain, for a few brief bouts of sparring. They never lasted longer than a couple of rounds, the novitiates being paired off with each other at random, but Chrisenya always relished the opportunity. Compared to everything else, sparring always felt easy.

Not that she won particularly often. Her limbs were slow and uncoordinated, and her natural instincts of movement clashed awkwardly with the learned motions of guards and steps, while physical exhaustion exacerbated both factors. But the core of sparring, Chrisenya found, lay not in physique, but in prediction, in reading the movements of one's opponent paragraph and line and, through logic, extricating the meanings implied. Subtle motions unfolded in Chrisenya's imagination into full sequences of attack and parry, Fidelitas's awkward flailing or Liniel's feral combinations plain to see. All that Chrisenya had to do was give the correct answer to the question.

And then, inevitably, Chrisenya would be too slow, too weak, her practice blade battered out of her hand or caught before it could find its position, and she would lose. This was particularly the case whenever Bellara felt the need to pair her up against Sister Regina; unlike the others, Regina was a natural with the blade. Her every movement was practiced, fluid, with just the right amount of effort as to be neither overcommitted nor weak. Regina could counter Chrisenya's incoming attack and spin the practice sword right out of her hand in a single, fluid maneuver. She enjoyed sparring with Regina because she felt so utterly outclassed that her defeat wasn't her fault any more.

It also helped that exhaustion felt different than it had before. Previously, exhaustion had been an awful, biting thing, sinking its hooks into Chrisenya's brain and refusing to let go, making her feel sluggish and miserable. With the aid of the glass vial kept secreted away in the chapel, exhaustion simply… was. Chrisenya's body was slower than it should have been, her muscles weaker, but it was almost as though that were the natural state of things.

The whole world had changed, really. Where the first storm felt like everything that she knew had been inverted, this second storm, as endless as it was, felt like it had crushed everything that existed into the flatness of a wall relief. There was a buzz in the air, the never-ending hiss of rain rattling on rooftops and pattering against the pavement being the auditory accompaniment to the constant elevation that Chrisenya felt seep into her very bones. She was pain, and the world was her pain, and she was the world. Time no longer blurred, but clicked together, wrapped around itself like synthleather braids forming a single whip. Chrisenya's prayers had never felt so deep, every second an eternity of fervent faith.

There were exactly three things which could bring Chrisenya down. The first was mealtimes. Food had never felt like more of a base, fleshly distraction from her true purpose than it had during those days. She still ate, of course; she had been ordered to eat by Sister-Superior Doloria, and she took that order just as seriously as the order to arrive at training at the proper time every morning. But while stimms had made that order all the easier to fulfill, they had made eating into an uncomfortable, mechanical chore.

The second thing was Sister Severn. To her credit, the heretic had done as Chrisenya asked and stayed far, far away from her. Unfortunately, there was a maximum distance which could be maintained between two members of the same drill-squad, and it was far shorter a distance than Chrisenya would have liked. They would occasionally end up paired together for spars, or sitting within sight of each other during meals, and Chrisenya would take both as opportunities to let spite motivate her to ever-greater exertions of action. She found herself, entirely against her will, taking pleasure in every one of Severn's misfortunes. When the showers would malfunction and scald her, when her boot would find a crack in the stone streets and send her careening forward, when the lifting canisters would spring leaks all across her clothes, Chrisenya would have to suppress a giggle.

The third thing was Fidelitas's strange sense of concern. Chrisenya really did not know what it was about her that continued to attract gentle questions and sympathetic looks, but her oldest friend had all of a sudden become an unending font of them. Hardly a slow moment would go by when Fidelitas did not at least look like she were sharing room with a sick canid whelp, and it was not an infrequent occasion that, with soft tones, she would ask if Chrisenya had anything to talk to her about. Chrisenya thought it all very rich coming from someone as faithless as her.

And then there were the Empress-damned ravens. Chrisenya could see them everywhere, always sitting quietly and unobtrusively in the branches of trees or upon the edges of roofs or sometimes tottering along the ground level hunting after stray scraps of food. She could not help but feel threatened by their presence, even if—as she often concluded—they were merely some sort of vision. Ravens traditionally symbolized death, after all, but more than that, Chrisenya could not help but suppose that they were watching her, seeking her, trying to hunt her down. The ravens never appeared during her dreams, either, but during the cloud-shrouded daylight hours, no matter the intensity of the rain, the ravens pursued her.

It only made sense that Misty would hold back the ravens during her nightly visits, given that those had changed tack entirely as well. Pain, torment, and mockery were absent from Chrisenya's dreams, as were any direct appearances by Misty herself. They instead took on dramatic proportions, fantastical operas of success and power. Chrisenya stood, clad all about in her saint's armor, bolter in hand, the tip of the spear with a hundred thousand sisters behind her. Her might, both physical prowess with bolter and sword as well as the unimpeachable plasteel of her faith would cause heretics and xenos alike to quail before her and be slaughtered.

Then, only then, when hymns to the Empress rose above the bloodstained battlefield, would Chrisenya be allowed to drink in victory. Captive maidens freed from the clutches of evil would throw themselves at Chrisenya's feet, offering to wash her body with fine cloths. Her sisters would bare their breasts to the sky in rapture of glory, and kiss her gently as they praised her for all she had accomplished. In the name of the Empress, Chrisenya knew sisterhood. It was everything she could have ever wanted, and there were times when waking up to that felt more real than the overlit buzz of reality.

The rain could not hold out forever, of course, though six days without end made for quite an impressive effort. Eventually the novitiates were forced back to field training, and Chrisenya's just-healed back felt the sting of Coriah's whip once again. She bore it as she always had, in silence and in agony. After that day's bolter drills and grenade training, as the drill-squad limped away towards the mess hall, Chrisenya noticed something.

Out on the very edge of the field, far away from any structure or other thing which could have explained its presence, lay a black, still figure. It was a raven, and it was dead. It had been years since the last time Chrisenya had seen a dead animal, and normally such a sight would have filled her with melancholy; but as it was a raven, the natural sadness of a memento mori went to war with a sort of evil, primal triumph within her. The two conflicting feelings overwhelmed every other impulse, and Chrisenya froze where she stood.

"What are you looking at?"

It was the ever-quiet Sister Liniel. Chrisenya wordlessly pointed to the dead raven.

"I wonder what did that," Liniel said softly, gently. "Maybe it flew into the storm, and nobody noticed the body to get rid of it?"

"I don't know," said Chrisenya. She clenched her jaw, and started speaking out of self-justification. "Liniel, do you know what the name is for a group of ravens?"

"I don't," Liniel said, sounding rather confused.

"It's a c— an unkindness. An unkindness of ravens. Rather appropriate for such awful creatures, don't you think?"

"What?"

Chrisenya found herself speaking with more anger than she had been prepared for, though she hadn't the faintest idea why. "They're simply nasty little scavengers, always sneaking about, always creeping, always taking advantage. You can never be sure if there's a raven about, if you're safe or if one is just going to swoop down on you when you aren't looking."

Fidelitas had been walking by at that moment, and stopped just long enough to say, "Chrisenya, what the fuck are you talking about?"

"Nothing," Chrisenya said, suddenly shrinking down on herself.

Fidelitas wrinkled her nose, almost embarrassed for Chrisenya's sake, but although she looked as though she wanted to say something, she did not. She moved on, as did most of the others. But as Chrisenya herself made to follow them, Liniel suddenly spoke up.

"Wait, please."

Chrisenya turned around. Liniel looked like a penitent pilgrim, head lowered, body all covered up in cloth.

"Severn told me about what happened," she said.

"Oh," Chrisenya said with a scowl. "And she told you the truth?"

"The way she said it made her sound like a fool, so I imagine the answer is 'yes'. Severn is honest with me in a way she rarely is with others."

There was something in Liniel's tone that raised Chrisenya's eyebrow. "Do you know her, then?"

Liniel nodded. "We've known each other for years. There was a time when I was… it doesn't matter. What I wanted to tell you was that she means well."

Chrisenya's mouth fell open, and her eyes widened as a pious anger rose up within her. "She means well? Sister Liniel, she offered to… defile the chapel with me. I assume she never made you that offer?"

Liniel chuckled softly. "As a matter of fact she did, once. A few years ago, before she knew me quite as well as she does now."

"And you still trust her? Liniel, I thought you were a woman of faith."

"I am," Liniel said with a nod. "And so is she."

"You cannot expect me to believe that," said Chrisenya.

"She is certainly not the heretic you no doubt expect her to be. Her faith is… different. Very different. But I assure you it is no less deep. And she knows she made a mistake."

Chrisenya took a step back, and spoke even more quietly. "Why are you trying to tell me all this?"

"Because Severn can't say it for herself. And I would hate to see our drill-squad shattered so early by a misunderstanding."

Chrisenya didn't know what to say. Her mind could not reconcile the image of the deeply pious Liniel and the rakish Severn as being friends, let alone what could drive the former to defend the actions of the latter. There was a haze over her thoughts, dark and ugly, pushing her away from any serious consideration. She needed to be eating food, not trying to understand what dwelt in the hearts of her sisters. Chrisenya retreated in the direction of the mess hall.

 

[dragonsaffron]

Chrisenya tossed and turned, fitfully trying to force her unruly mind into the calm of sleep. She had been here before, on countless nights across her life, the fear of an impending visit from Misty keeping her awake. But ever since she had taken Gwynette's offer some twelve days before, the problem had only grown worse. Sleep was an evasive thing, impossible to grasp and even more difficult to keep.

While Chrisenya forced her eyes to shut against the light, a thin mist crept under the bunk room doorway. It started ephemeral, almost invisible, the slightest change in the midnight hues of the chamber floor. Then it began to gather and pool by the entrance, growing thicker and thicker until one might almost be forgiven for mistaking it for a material object. Though there was little light to fall upon it, it had a slight inherent color, a purplish-pink, and tiny dots like distant stars sparkled within the mass of it.

Then it started to move, slithering across the floor like some low-slung creature of shapeless violet flesh, slipping under beds and over covers, examining each sleeping novitiate in turn. It was not long at all before the mist found what it was looking for, high up in the farthest corner, just under the roof, where Sister Chrisenya lay restlessly.

She shivered at the cool touch of the mist on her skin, but did not rouse, as its touch brought with it a bone-deep calm. The mist surrounded her in a great cloud, piling on top of itself higher and higher, spreading across the ceiling and coiling in great masses around the edges of the bed. Then, all at once, it descended. Chrisenya's chest rose, and mist poured into her nostrils. She coughed, and mist slipped through her open lips. Mist poured slowly and softly under her blankets, slipping under the hem of her nightclothes, seeking the warm flesh underneath.

Chrisenya writhed and clenched, muscles twitching out of her control, stomach roiling. She was limp, stretched, stuffed, hardly able to control herself and unable to comprehend why. Her skin was too tight and too loose, her brain suddenly full of strange and foreign impulses. Finally, Chrisenya's eyes jolted open, just in time to see the last of the mist vanishing from sight: it was too late.

For several breathless seconds, Chrisenya sat upright in bed, desperately trying to convince herself that it was another hallucination, another side effect of whatever it was that had been addling her mind. It was a fruitless hope. The mist was already inside, she could feel it roiling within, a strange sense of vertigo accompanying the impossible sensation of organs shifting inside her body. Then it began to lash out. The first stabbing pain struck in her forehead, like a whip striking the front surface of her skull from within. Bone bulged at twin points above her eyes, pale material piercing the skin from within and rapidly growing outwards. Chrisenya clutched at them, biting her tongue to stop from crying out, but as her hands reached up to her brow she could feel them changing as well, claws like daggers pressing out through her nails, palms lengthening as the bones underneath stretched.

Chrisenya could hear the whispers in her ears, a dozen different voices new and old all encouraging her to give in, to feel the power of chaos surge through her. But they were all the same voice, that much she knew, Misty's voice speaking to her through a dozen mouths. She began to pray to the Empress, begging her for salvation in broken words and half-forgotten formulae. There was no salvation to be found; the Empress had no mind nor mercy for the corrupted.

Chrisenya shrank into her covers, hiding herself from the world as her stomach churned and her breath continued to hitch. The horns atop her brow grew like reaching tendrils, overlapping themselves with new layers of pale bone. All across her back, a cool numbness began to spread, encroaching steadily upon her pale skin like rust. Twin points of pain throbbed into being on either side of her midsection. Tentatively, as though prodding at a wound, Chrisenya felt at herself, first at the pain in her sides and then at her back. The spreading numbness turned her skin into smooth, chill scales.

She continued to pray and pray, but it was not long before she couldn't hear herself speak over the voices. Misty sang songs of torment into her ears, songs of pleasure and conquest, songs of sadness and eternal longing, and although they existed only in Chrisenya's pathetic mind, they echoed across the dome of her skull with ever-growing omnipresence. Chrisenya was forgetting herself, bit by bit. She slammed her eyes shut, even as her pupils narrowed into slits and her irises turned an unwholesome purple, and redoubled her prayers.

"Empress see me in this, my moment of trial. Cast thy strength upon me, that I might repay thy kindness with my future endeavors. Though I am but one human, Empress, I know that I am thy d—glrk."

Chrisenya lost control of her mouth. Her tongue ballooned awfully, a long and tapered limb spilling forth from still-human lips, sticky saliva dripping across her mattress. She tried to cover up that shameful loss of control, stuff it back in, but her hands had turned to awful claws, not quite human and not quite beast, and the transformation was spreading up her arms as they too grew impossibly long.

A moment later, Chrisenya's jaw began to shift to accommodate the grotesquery of her tongue, bones grinding as they were pushed out from within. The expanding scales raced across her face, swallowing up her chin, dissolving her nose into naught but a pair of slits at the end of a reptilian snout. There was an awful pressure that threatened to tear her skull in two as the tips of her horns ran up against the bed. With her prayer disrupted and all control lost, Chrisenya writhed, tossing her blanket over the side of the bunk. All across her form her flesh moved like it was alive and trying desperately to escape.

Her thoughts shifted, and it grew difficult for Chrisenya to distinguish that which was being whispered into the dagger-points of her ears from that which was coming from within. She wanted… something. Safety? Respite? No. She wanted to feel flesh tear beneath her claws, she wanted to rut and destroy and consume. And then, in the very center of her chest, just beneath Chrisenya's heart, a spark of alien power burst into life.

She seized, every muscle going as tight as plasteel springs, bending her spine almost to the breaking point. Her body grew her outline roiling and bubbling under scaly skin, ribcage warping, forcing a wordless gurgle up her throat. The horns lengthened further and further, curving around the sides of her head until they threatened to meet in the back. Then she twitched again, folding inwards, feet kicking against the bed as her toes melted together. The thrashing was so powerful that it threatened to shatter the very material of the bunk, and under her own power Chrisenya hurled herself over the edge, crashing down onto the floor with a heavy slam. All at once, the stillness of the chamber was distorted, bodies shifted in their beds with mumbling noises of confusion.

Regina was the quickest to awaken. She sat up, realizing immediately that something had fallen. "Chrisenya? Shit, Chrisenya, Are you alright?"

Chrisenya tried to stand, but her feet were shifting under her, and her torso had grown too long, chest a heavy convex bulge of bone and muscle. As she rose up on her hands, back an arch, Regina's words of concern turned into screams of fear and aggression. She had been found out. A burning hot lust for carnage spilled through the beast's blood.

And Regina was more than willing to sate that lust. She lurched out of bed, charging the monster that had broken into her room. There was a knife in her hand, though none could say where she had found it, and she plunged that knife into Chrisenya's ribs, thrusting it into the skin and digging deep into the warm, wet flesh beneath. Pain pulsed through the body of the mutant, but the pain brought with it clarity and a rush of energy. Chrisenya moved faster than she had ever moved before; her hind legs had stretched into digitigrade springs, propelling her forward as she turned around in a tight spiral.

As she did, where the wound had been, the tight pain in her side finally exploded open, revealing a new limb halfway between arm and leg. So it was with three sets of mighty claws that Chrisenya, having knocked Regina off of her back, fell upon her. The knife flickered and flashed with all of the acuity one might expect from so fine a duelist, but with the spark burning away inside of her, Chrisenya held the edge in speed.

Her claws were a blur of motion, striking again and again and again, digging deep into muscle and bone and relishing every instant of the sweet resistance. This was play, not battle, flesh turned into stimulation for the senses. Tainted violet daemon ichor mixed with red human blood, filling the air with the sweetest scents. In a matter of seconds, Regina stopped moving, torn to shreds, a red mass at the center of a spreading pool on the floor. Chrisenya needed more. She twitched, kicking her hooves against the flakboard as the pain on the other side burst open into a fourth set of rending claws.

The others were all in a messy rush, some still in their beds unsure of what was happening, others sprinting from the room in the full flush of mortal terror. Chrisenya could barely distinguish between them any longer, the scent of blood muddled her mind, but she could sense movement in the dark, and hear the rushing of blood in their veins. She charged at whoever was nearest, a skinny little thing that had frozen in terror upon seeing her.

When that prey animal proved to put up even less resistance than Regina had, the mutant moved on to the next, then the next. Moments slipped into each other, memories of past revels and wishes for future ones blending with the present-tense feeling of flesh tearing under her claws and blood warming her skin. She wanted more, she wanted more, she wanted it all! Every sense was drowned in violence, even her forked tongue lapped up the salt of sweat and blood. When there were no more living humans in the bunk room, she rushed ahead, bursting through the door with whiplash speed.

There was someone waiting for her. Six someones, as it so happened. But these creatures had thick red shells, and claws of their own, claws of black metal held in both of their hands. A moment after she burst into the hallway, Chrisenya was showered with bolter fire. The barking of their reports filled the air with harsh noise, and as the shells showered the hallway, wall ceiling and floor were cratered by bursts of explosive force. Chrisenya tried to avoid them as best she could, crashing from left to right as she charged down the hallway, but there was nowhere to go, every cubic centimeter of the air was full of concussive blasts. Bone shattered and flesh bruised, and Chrisenya skidded to a stop only a few paces before the line of fire.

As one, the Sororitas reloaded. Chrisenya had a few seconds of safety with which to strike, and even in her beaten and wounded state, she knew exactly how it could be done. The spark of alien power yet burned within her. Instinctively she knew that all she would have to do would be to invoke it, draw upon the strength of the Queen, and all her wounds would be healed. She could fight on and on forever.

But to what end? Chrisenya breathed rapidly through a fanged mouth, her head held off the ground by a pair of horns like crescent moons on either side of her skull. Half her drill-squad lay brutalized behind her, and she had so severely lost herself to the thrill of murder that she could not even recall which half it was. She could survive this battle, tear her way out of the Abbey… and every moment which was not spent in the midst of carnage she would be hounded by guilt forevermore. Better to end her life at the extremes than drag it out.

One battle-sister stepped forward, the obvious leader of the group. She held her boltgun with one hand, using the other to remove the helmet from her head. It clattered to the ground. Out of a suit of power armor emerged the pale, oval face of Lady Fredrika Thannetch. And in the eyes of that face were the viperous eyes of Misty herself.

Misty sighed, rolling her eyes. "It was worth a shot, I suppose. Wake up, Chrisenya. This is embarrassing for the both of us."

The sound of the boltgun going off was louder than a hundred shuttlecraft taking off at once, and after a moment of awful darkness, Chrisenya opened her eyes to the ceiling of the squad's bunkroom once again. She clapped a hand over her mouth to stop from screaming. It had been years since Misty had devised a dream that could make Chrisenya cry, and tears streamed down her cheeks without a hope of slowing them. She could remember the scent of her sisters' blood in perfect detail, remember the feeling of their flesh being rent by her claws. She ran her fingers across her face again and again to make sure they were gone, but the reassurance did nothing to quell her terror.

She climbed down to the floor with all haste, collapsing in front of the icon to the Empress. It was still the middle of the night, the deep dark well before the arrival of dawn, and so Chrisenya dared not pray at any volume louder than a whisper. By the time she was certain that this was no dream, when prayers had returned her mind to some semblance of stability, her legs had started to go numb.

But she was not done. In a flurry of spite, Chrisenya snuck out the door, heedless of the punishment that would be incurred if she broke curfew. She evaded the night guards with ease, making her way to the chapel, then slipping through the door. Misty had gone too far. But what she had failed to realize was that Chrisenya had a new weapon in their war of wills, one that would prove an inviolable defense against Misty's depredations. It was hidden in a tiny glass vial wedged into a crack between two flakboard slabs in the chapel walls. Chrisenya opened up the vial, measured out three tiny pills of stimm, and swallowed them down one at a time. How could Misty curse her with nightmares if Chrisenya refused to fall victim to sleep?

 

[dragonsaffron]

Chrisenya quickly decided that there was a sort of beauty to a life without sleep. Night and day, life and death, past and future, the importance of these things fell away like a serpent shedding its skin, leaving her to feel the pure, throbbing lifeblood of the galaxy course through her. One pill a day had been life-altering, but three was transformative.

Her body was barely even a consideration any more, not really. Chrisenya could, theoretically, still feel things. Pain, roiling nausea, cold sweat, the overexcited hammering of her heart, on a purely cognitive level she was aware of such things, but they felt as though they were happening to someone else. The sting of Sister Coriah's whip, though she could do nothing to reduce its incidence upon her, nonetheless had a hold over her no longer. She could run, eat, stumble, dance as much as she wished to, riding a boundless wave of energy.

The night, too, unfolded its mysteries to Chrisenya. The dark which had before been occupied entirely by sleep and the transition into or out of that vile theft of time was now free to be spent however she wished. The first night Chrisenya waited until the others were asleep so that she could silently mouth every prayer she knew into the appreciative eyes of the icon. The Empress gazed kindly down upon her, the stern and perfect mouth gaining a new warmth to its arch, all her sons arrayed around her in a welcoming arc. When morning came, she felt more energized than she had in the evening, and charged off to face the new day with the innocence and verve of a child, knowing that the golden light of the Empress shone upon her specifically.

Though spending each and every night in hours of fervent prayer would have been an ideal calling, Chrisenya knew that she was capable of more than that. Starting the second night, and several nights after, she began to slip out of the bunkroom altogether. It was only sometimes that she even remembered to avoid the curfew patrols, but whether she did or not, their fetters could not stop her from slipping out into the night and exploring.

The Abbey was a very different creature at night as opposed to during the day. During the day, she was official, tightly buttoned into her jacket, her cap squarely placed upon her head, the very symbol of authority and piety alike. She was always busy during the day, always moving from one place to the next with only brief spots of rest that felt less like proper relaxation and more like required maintenance. There was an elegance to her, but that was the end of it. At night, though, the Abbey let her hair down. All the same accoutrements which gave her her diurnal beauty were still there, but the shadows made their beauty wild and sublime. Every angle felt unfamiliar, every corner begging to be explored, every crack and every passage.

Chrisenya followed that invitation without hesitation. Were it not for the curfew patrols, she might have screamed and laughed aloud into the night. She slipped from place to place at barely below a sprint, stopping to press herself against the walls. Sometimes this was to avoid a patrol; sometimes it was not. There were nights when Chrisenya found an expanse of grass upon which to lay down and spent hours staring directly up at the stars. If she squinted she thought she could see Holy Terra, though even in her addled state she was faintly aware that that was merely a fantasy.

She would find herself thinking quite often as well. If machines could have spirits, she wondered, then could not a building have one as well? A complex of buildings? Could it be that Chrisenya's extended metaphor about the Abbey held some level of accuracy? Also, what was Misty doing now that Chrisenya had escaped from her? What did daemons spend their time doing. Such things were not mentioned in the liturgy, of course, but perhaps that was merely for lack of value? Daemons were the equal and opposite of the soldiers of the Empress, so Chrisenya wondered if they spent day in and day out training for their battles against the forces of goodness. So on and so forth, Chrisenya's thoughts turned and spun.

When the first, earliest fingers of dawn began to touch the horizon, Chrisenya knew to return to the bunkroom, ensuring that none would notice her absence. It was a difficult task, considering everything else that thrust itself upon Chrisenya's attention, but she managed it every time. Sister Regina no longer needed to jostle Chrisenya awake; indeed, the flawless lady of Notidal would roll out of bed to find Chrisenya always chipper and active.

There were, of course, some limits to Chrisenya's newfound capability. She soon found that, roughly every third night, she would grow so exhausted that not even stimm could keep her awake. Then, for the crime of fighting against her, Misty would ensure that she faced an awful torment indeed. But this was a small price to pay, and not even Misty could make one truly awful nightmare as bad as three terrible ones. Chrisenya was still winning.

Where she was not winning was in the matter of her appearance. With each day that passed, the looks from the other members of her drill-squad grew more and more pitying, verging even upon disgust. When Chrisenya could bring herself to look in at the mirror in the morning, the face she saw looking back appeared almost corpselike. Her huge eyes had turned red with burst vessels, her skin sat uncomfortably upon the bones of her skull with a strange, undefinable tint to it. Her lips were always cracked and dry. A nervous jitter in her hands made it quite difficult indeed to apply cosmetic as she always had. There were some mornings where it would bring Chrisenya to the brink of tears. On others, she thanked the Empress that she had at last been cleared of the crime of vanity.

But Fidelitas did not think so positively of all this. It was one of the later mornings, one which had been preceded by a long night of silent exploration and contemplation, when Fidelitas broke into the bathroom while Chrisenya was inside, shut the door behind her, and locked it.

"We need to talk."

"Do we? Why do we? I don't think we do."

"Yes, Chrisenya, we do."

Chrisenya quickly finished applying the Atramentum around her eyes, put the paper between her lips, and only when she was complete did she turn to face Fidelitas directly. "What did you want to talk about? Or did you say already?"

"What the hell have you been doing to yourself?" Fidelitas said softly.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You bloody well do," Fidelitas said. The angrier she got, the more quietly she spoke, and the more her voice sounded like broken plascrete. "You haven't been acting yourself. You barely even look yourself. What the fuck have you been up to?"

Guilt welled up in Chrisenya's throat, and for a moment she felt as though she were about to cry. But that feeling was rapidly smothered by anger. "Why is it any of your business, then?"

"Because I've been your best friend for the last six years, maybe? And because you look like you're about to die and I'm frankly terrified about whatever is doing this to you."

"It's none of your concern," said Chrisenya. "I'm doing better than I've ever been! I'm not tired any longer, I don't become useless halfway into training exercises any more."

"And you look just like some of the girls I knew back on Gabrielle, two days before they dropped dead of a disease."

"So? Do appearances matter so much to you? I feel quite good."

"It's not just about appearances, Chrisenya! We haven't talked to each other in days! You hardly seem to know where you are half the time! It's not… whatever it is you're doing, it's not right."

There was, very far in the back of Chrisenya's skull, a distant sense of fear. But the pulsating feeling of spite that swelled in her brain drowned it out like salt in the sea. "Are you of all people really going to judge me on what's right, Fidelitas? You, who joined the Sororitas because you couldn't stand the idea of not being able to grope me again?"

Fidelitas clenched both of her fists so tightly that her entire body began to shake. Her breathing hitched, then failed. She glared at Chrisenya with a hate that she had never seen from her best friend before. Then, finally, Fidelitas screamed.

"Fuck you! If whatever this is kills you, then die ashamed! Again and again, you need me by your side, you let me touch you, you say you hate me, you say I'm a sinner, and then without ever apologizing—because apologizing would be too fucking good for you I bet—you crawl back to me the next time you need some. Fuck off. Don't fucking talk to me again."

Fidelitas stormed off, slamming into the door when she forgot that she had left it locked. She then unlocked it, opening it directly into the face of Sister Severn, who along with the entire rest of the drill-squad had crowded around the bathroom door to hear what was going on. Chrisenya's ears were still ringing from the volume of Fidelitas's voice reverberating off of the walls.

"Good," Chrisenya said to an empty bathroom. "Let it be that way. I never needed you regardless."

That small difficulty aside, Chrisenya's life had never been better. The Empress loved her personally, Misty was on the back foot, and her newfound energy meant that she was well along the way to overcoming her physical shortcomings and proving herself as a proper Sororitas. Even the ravens, which she had begun to see in ever-increasing numbers, did not bother her quite so much anymore.

Her visions of ravens had begun to diverge more and more from what was proper for a medium-sized carrion bird to do. Sometimes they would only appear as they normally did, in great flocks that squawked and cawed and generally made a nuisance of themselves. Other times they would blot out the sky entirely, dark swarms of ravens casting shadows across the surface. Yet other times they would suddenly multiply, single ravens bulging out beyond the boundaries of their flesh to form great masses of Raven just in the corners of Chrisenya's vision. Seeing these things didn't bother her much.

But there were other things. The distant sound of bolter fire was a common thing to hear in the Abbey, what with sisters practicing their aim in various ranges throughout. But the noise of boltguns had never been so loud as it was during those days, nor quite so insistent. The sounds of shells being fired had the tendency to overlap in the strangest ways, sounding like resonant thunder and human screams. This didn't bother Chrisenya much, either.

She was flourishing, Chrisenya reminded herself. How could she not be, given the circumstances? Did she need to be eating all that much, if the concept of exhaustion was nothing but a distant memory? Of course not! And did she need to have the friendship of Fidelitas, when her relationship with the Empress had never burned so bright? Fidelitas was nothing but a base sinner, slipping into the Adepta Sororitas through subversive means. The only reason that she was litigating these arguments over and over and over again in her mind, obsessing over them for hours while holding the vial of stimm as though it were a holy symbol, was that she had no idea why she was doing that and could not force herself to stop.

It was mid-morning, some sixteen days since she had first tasted stimm upon her tongue, though Chrisenya herself could not have remembered that number if asked, and Chrisenya was sprinting back and forth with a practice bolter in her arms. In spite of everything, Chrisenya had never quite managed to escape Sister-Superior Coriah's whip. Though she was not tired, she was rather sore, and her limbs simply would not move quickly enough to keep pace with the other sisters when the extra weight of the boltgun was accounted for. And yet she could feel it in her very skeleton that victory was immanent. If she just pushed herself slightly further, she concluded, truly exercising the boundless energy within her, then she might make it.

So she did. Chrisenya had never run so quickly in her entire life, never leaned so far into the run. The air whistled past her ears. She was flying. It hardly mattered anymore that she was in pain, or that her heart felt about ready to burst, not when every cell and organ was moving in perfect concert. She started to gain on the others, one sister falling behind her, then another. Chrisenya could see the line between those who would face the whip and those who would not, see it written black across the ground, and she tried to push herself yet harder in order to cross it.

There was a raven preening itself on the field. It wasn't in Chrisenya's way, indeed she saw it only sidelong. But the flicker of fear rose up anyways. She flinched microscopically to the side, deep-seated instinct driving her away from the symbol of impending death. That fear was extinguished in a moment, rational impulses taking control once more, but by then it was far too late: Chrisenya's feet were out from under her, and she was careening forwards.

She dropped the boltgun, throwing out her hands to catch herself when she inevitably struck the ground. But Chrisenya's momentum was more than she could account for, and she began to turn to the side. The boltgun flew forward as well, landing in the mud with a heavy noise, followed an instant later as Chrisenya's hip landed at full speed directly on top of the nine-kilogram block of plasteel.

The next second of time was something that Chrisenya would never remember, an empty spot in her record that would remain for the rest of her life.

When Chrisenya's memories picked up once more, she was screaming. Stimm could do nothing to block out pain, and Chrisenya was nothing but pain from head to toe. She could not move her left leg except but weakly, and her other limbs were spasmodic with agony. Just as Chrisenya had struck and exceeded her limit of speed, she did the same in the field of screaming, her throat scratching raw and her vocal cords feeling as though they were being torn to shreds.

Up ahead, a scuffle. Someone had stopped, someone had noticed. Someone slowed to a jog and started moving back to where she had fallen.

"Novitiate! Keep moving!"

"She's injured herself, can't you see that?" The voice was a member of the drill-squad, and even in her state of agony Chrisenya could recognize it. But she refused to believe that she was correct in her identification.

"I can see it perfectly, novitiate. Resume the run, that is a direct order!"

Someone fell to their knees at Chrisenya's side. Carefully, she tucked both of Chrisenya's legs into one arm, the other one held Chrisenya's torso against her chest. With a grunt, Chrisenya was heaved into the air. The pain in her hip surged to life, then faded microscopically.

"There is only one punishment for such insubordination," Sister Coriah said, more quietly.

"I know. Give me the warp if you like, but do it after I've gotten Chrisenya to the Hospitallers."

They started walking away, carefully, so as not to jostle Chrisenya's wound too severely. Coriah seemed to have no response. After a while, with a resigned tone, she said, "Very well, then. After she is safe. I will report this, Sister… Severn, was it?"

 

[dragonsaffron]

Chrisenya had two stays in the sanatorium overlayed on each other, like two pieces of flimsy with holes cut through so that the readable text switches from one to the other. The first of those stays was awful; the second was terrifying.

In the first stay, she was passed out of the thick arms of Sister Severn, of all people, and onto a hard, cold slab. Pain rendered her blind and deaf, but could not muffle the harshness with which the death-masked Sisters Hospitaller stripped her out of her clothing in order that they could poke and prod away at the flesh underneath. At one point, one of the sisters touched her in just the right way that Chrisenya could feel bone grind against bone. There was another gap in her memory after that.

She was wheeled into a bright room, bright enough to blind, and her mouth was gagged and her wrists and ankles bound. There were watchers, dozens of them in high rows all around her, nurses and novitiates and Hospitallers alike. A needle plunged into her thigh, and in a matter of seconds Chrisenya's mind curled in on itself. Pain became dull and distributed across the whole of her skin, her vision blurred, her muscles went slack. But the stimm coursing through her veins made sure that she remained awake; the Hospitallers had to clamp her down in order to operate on her hip, which they did after a few mutters about "reckless fighters".

Warm blood. Cold argentisteel. It was a blessing from the Empress that humanity was not designed with too many nerves on the inside, for if Chrisenya could have felt the touch of the forceps and haemostats upon her very inner flesh she might have begged for death. As it was, her narcotized lips slurred quiet prayers into the acrid theater air.

There were two huge machines, each requiring the strength of an entire servitor to heft them aloft. One looked like a gun; the other looked like one of the starfishes that Chrisenya would find washed up on one of Aktranis's white-sand beaches. The gun machine went first, pressed into the wound, a cogitator display measuring the angles. A gloved hand pressed the button. The thunk was loud enough to make Chrisenya twitch, and the thing that pressed into her flesh did so with such force that it caused the slab to rock.

The second machine worked with impossible speed. The thousands of tiny needles only pierced her around the hip, but with the drugs coursing through her system it felt as if her entire skin were being enfiladed. Then, with deadly finality, the starfish machine pressed close to her skin. There was a hiss, and a great burning, and it was done. The Hospitallers congratulated one another on their good work, and Chrisenya's slab was wheeled out into the recovery chamber.

That was when the second stay in the sanatorium began. It proceeded much as the first did, Chrisenya in the operating chamber, drugged to within an inch of her life, dozens of eyes looking down on her. But those eyes glowed miserably violet, and were covered not by thermoplas masks, but masks of skin and shell. They opened up her side and began to pull out whatever they could, wrenching forth deformed shards of bone that tore the muscle on exit, ripping out long coils of organ that could not exist in a human body. And they laughed, swallowed, chuckled, kissed each other and Chrisenya wherever they could.

The first surgery lasted minutes but felt like hours. The second lasted all night and felt like she should have died of old age before it was completed.

And then she was back in the first sanatorium stay. There was a plasflex pipe running under the skin on the left side of her hip, dripping red-and-white effluvia into an argent dish. Over that were the sutures, and over the sutures a black tattoo in the shape of a doubled-edged sword. Skull-faced nurses came in no time at all, providing nutrient slop, a compendium of medicated pills, and a change of the fluid dish. What there was not, and what there would not be so long as Chrisenya was bed bound, was stimm.

Chrisenya spent most of the morning in prayer, but before noon her mind inevitably turned to the secret vial in the crack in the chapel wall. She wanted it, wanted to remain awake, wanted the clarity of mind. She was in pain, her stomach ached with hunger, her mind was sluggish with an exhaustion that could not be met and a sadness that could not be soothed. But she could not ask the nurses for it. Hallucinatory plans turned sluggishly in her mind, coiling atop one another and melting together as the need for sleep infiltrated Chrisenya's struggling brain. She could not walk. No plan could overcome that.

And then, finally, Chrisenya returned to the second stay. The operation, drugged and pinned down, became a regular event, the periods of rest between each repetition growing slimmer and slimmer. Not that she was allowed any respite. Misty was there, after all, to whisper impossible lies and always-tempting promises into Chrisenya's ear. Misty told her things that were impossible, that her mind had no choice but to drown within the very depths of subconscious, and then she told her those things again. Her limbs were broken, the side of her hip was an awful bleeding pit of an injury, and yet they continued to operate and operate and operate.

There were visitors, ere long. Not many, but they were there. Regina visited constantly, or what felt like constantly, bringing gifts of proffered mess hall food and, at one point, a get-well message attached to a flower out of the botanical garden. Gwynette made an appearance, once, to say that she was sorry. Liniel came just to hold Chrisenya's hand and pray alongside her, and somehow that was more comforting than anything. It proved that some of this was real, after all, that the Empress had not utterly abandoned her.

Fidelitas and Severn only appeared during the second stay. Fidelitas argued and ranted and screamed, damning Chrisenya as a traitor and a heretic and a hundred other things. Chrisenya's throat was dry with agony and guilt, her words came out only as croaking imitations of a human voice. Not that she could have defended herself regardless. Severn's visits were worse, somehow. She would straddle Chrisenya, or slip her hand under the hospital robes, coating her fingers in Chrisenya's diseased blood and licking them dry one at a time. Severn mixed pleasure and pain in equal measure, moaning nonsense about impending death as she made Chrisenya's blood pump ferociously.

As time passed, the pain from the operation faded, but the pain of withdrawal grew more intense. Chrisenya fell into a fever, and every joint and nerve and muscle began to tremble uncontrollably. Hunger and exhaustion lashed at her flanks, and desperate thoughts of of the little white pills crashed thunderously against her mind at intervals impossible to predict. Over time, a faint awareness began to grow of what she had done to herself, sobriety allowing her to look upon her memories with far greater clarity. At times her will drove her to resist, to tamp down upon the urge for stimm as she did with so many others, but such temperate moods could never survive for long.

Eventually a nurse came by to inform Chrisenya that she had to try to walk, or risk losing the capability entirely. The prospect enticed her more than it frightened her. Mobility, after all, meant escape. Even when she was levered out of bed and onto her feet, discovering as she did an entirely new variety of pain, she relished the challenge. Pain would cleanse her, focus her. Once the nurse had supplied her with a crutch, Chrisenya set to the task of regaining her mobility with as much gusto as she was allowed.

It was a slow process of recuperation, coterminous with the slow fading of the wound at Chrisenya's hip into a faint scar concealed under the accompanying tattoo. The hunger and exhaustion and tremors of withdrawal remained fully in place, but even through such tribulation Chrisenya's scant bodily strength returned to her with speed. At first, taking even a single step was a struggle, her injury feeling like it was threatening to burst open under even the slightest strain. But as Chrisenya learned to use the crutch, she soon became able to circle around her room, with difficulty. It grew more easy with each passing day, until there were times when she could rise from bed without the assistance of a nurse and pace about, though never for very long.

The second stay gradually faded from existence, replaced by more of Misty's typical torments. Chrisenya loathed to be forced to face her once more, but there was nothing that Misty could put forward which Chrisenya could not resist.

After some days, Sister-Superior Doloria came by once again, giving Chrisenya an examination, then asking her to demonstrate her walking ability with the crutch. When all that was done, Doloria pronounced that Chrisenya was ready to leave the sanatorium and begin her rehabilitation proper. Chrisenya was ecstatic, and prepared to leave at once.

"Not yet. There's someone who needs to talk to you first. Bellara will need to have a word."

"What about?" Chrisenya said, a cold sense of dread settling upon her heart.

"I don't know," said Doloria. "Empress's luck with you."

Doloria exited and Bellara entered with a sour expression on her face, to find Chrisenya sitting on the bed. Her augmetic eye was fixed firmly on her novitiate, while the organic one swept the room as though she were performing an inspection.

"Sister-Superior Coriah told me everything that happened," Bellara said in a grim tone. "Of course, what she can't tell me is the question of why."

"I was—"

"I don't want to hear from you," Bellara snapped. "I've already narrowed it down to one of two possibilities, and nothing you say will sway me toward or against either one. Option the first: this is a moment of bad luck, an incident of no greater import and one which will not be repeated."

Again, a pause. Chrisenya froze in place, her heart hammering in her chest. She knew that the augmetic eye was meant for acuity across long distance and in low-light environs, that no matter how intently it stared it could not read her soul. Nonetheless, the black, glassy surface threatened to draw out everything hiding within. The stimm, her own failure, everything, she nearly let it spill all at once.

After too long, Bellara continued. "Option the second: this incident is the result of your incompetence, a sign of a novitiate unsuited for the physical rigors of the Orders Militant. And this option is one which I cannot abide. Did you know, Sister Chrisenya, that the three ceramite pins currently holding together your pelvic bone could have been used for repairing a damaged suit of power armor, allowing another soldier of the Empress to return to the field? The drugs you have been taking could have gone to a casualty of war. If this waste of resources is the result of your error, and not mere bad luck, then there will be no mercy for you.

Bellara took a breath, letting her volume drop back down to merely a raised voice. "But, as I said, I do not know which of these two possible explanations is true. The only way to find out, falls to you. If anything like this happens to you again, another unexpected accident or unnecessary injury, you. Are. Out. And that is the end of that."

Chrisenya stared down into her lap and held back tears as best as she could. A single droplet spilled down her cheek, and her lungs seized with suppressed sobs, but she did not cry. "What will happen to me, then?"

"You've taken the orders already," Bellara said with a sigh. "There is no way out but death. It is possible that the Hospitallers will have you, but I doubt it. There might be room in the Pronatus, but I don't think they've taken on more than one new novitiate in the last decade. So the most likely option is that you do serf's work here for however many years it takes for us to arrange to have you shipped off to join the Dialogus."

Another tear slipped past Chrisenya's defenses. "'For the will of the Empress is absolute." she muttered. "'Yea, with a light that is shed across the whole of the galaxy, how could it not be? Let thy will be as absolute as Hers.'"

"A girl in my drill-squad washed out, you know," said Bellara. "There are worse dishonors."

And with that, the Sister-Superior turned around and left, leaving Chrisenya to consider. She was going to find a way. She was going to become a Sister Militant. Mere rhetoric would not serve to repay the debt of gratitude which she had accumulated towards Innogen and all the others who had rescued her.

The first thing that Chrisenya did upon being allowed out into the wider Abbey was to make a beeline for the chapel, and the secret she had hidden within. A growing awareness that she had been damaging herself in more ways than she knew by partaking in her stimm habit did absolutely nothing to counteract the need. Of course, when she did arrive, the chapel was bustling. All the better; she fell to her knees and, for the first time in however many days it had been, she could pray properly.

Eventually the time came when the chapel mostly emptied out, the majority of the sisters going off to training or the like, Chrisenya snatched up the vial with absolute haste. There were five pills still remaining. Somehow that proved more sobering than anything else. What was she going to have to do to acquire another bottle, when it came down to it? What would she do if she couldn't?

Perhaps she didn't need the stimm at all. Chrisenya glanced to the nearby icon. The Empress was meant to grant strength to her holy warriors, it was said, strength beyond their human capabilities. If her faith were true, there would be no need for such chemical assistance as Chrisenya had been reliant upon. And that was not even to mention the increasingly obvious downsides, the distortion of her sense of time, the rapidly multiplying hallucinations. Clearly it would be a much better thing, overall, if she kicked the habit as soon as possible. Thus, Chrisenya resolved to only take one pill. Perhaps the day after she could refrain entirely, if she were up to it.

There was a great deal of fanfare when Chrisenya finally returned to the bunk-room, or at least as much fanfare as could be drawn from a pack of physically-exhausted adolescents. Leaning on her crutch, Chrisenya allowed each of her sisters to welcome her back in turn. Regina and Liniel were by far the most excited, Liniel thanking the Empress that their prayers had been answered. Benedicta made sure to give her several hearty slaps on the back, heedless of the way that threatened to knock Chrisenya entirely off of her feet. Fidelitas did not have the same enthusiasm.

She hung back from the others, arms folded under her breasts as she leaned against a bunk post. When Chrisenya was done receiving her welcome, she moved past the others, extending her arms towards Fidelitas. "I've missed you," she said.

"Don't touch me."

"What?"

Fidelitas raised an eyebrow. "Did you forget? You'd better start remembering if you did. I'm not going to let you get back into my good graces so easily, I've made that mistake too many times. Earn my forgiveness, really earn it, or piss off."

Chrisenya reeled back. She had had so many other things on her mind, she had almost hoped that it had blown over. How had she managed as long as she had without Fidelitas at her side? She was no longer so deluded about stimm as she had been, but there were other problems that had driven them apart, issues Chrisenya could not so easily dismiss. In the end, those thoughts had to be set aside, lest they consume her. Chrisenya turned around, searching every corner of the room as she realized that there was something missing.

"Where's Severn? I would like to see her too."

All at once, Fidelitas's dour mood spread to cover the rest of the squad. Many a timid glance was shared, as those in the know debated silently over who had to break the bad news.

"Do you not remember?" said Liniel. "Severn, she… she disobeyed an order to get you quickly to the Hospitallers. And there's only one punishment for disobedience of a direct order…"

Chrisenya knew the Rule Sororitas inside and out, she had since she was fifteen. She knew the answer. But it had to be asked regardless. "Where is Severn?"

Benedicta rolled her eyes. "She's with the Repentia."

 

[dragonsaffron]

The Repentrium looked hostile. There was no gold on that edifice, only skulls, and the ferrocrete of its construction had been allowed to decay until the splintery metal bones of the thing came to the surface. It was like a body, starved until the skeleton lay close to the surface and then scourged and beaten to bring the bones out the rest of the way out. That was the only impression that Severn was able to gather before she was blindfolded and stripped of all her clothing. In another moment, the Repentrium swallowed her whole.

Seeing only the inside of the rough synthcloth over her eyes, Severn was forced to rely upon her other senses to understand the vast gullet down which she was being peristaltically pushed. The immediate impression was of overwhelming heat and thick, oppressive moisture. Severn was made slick with sweat almost instantly, and her nudity proved to be one of the building's few mercies.

The hot air was far from clean, of course; it stank of sweat, blood, and rust, bereft of the incense and atmospheric processing that sanctified most holy structures. The sounds of metal clanking against itself, of thudding bare footsteps on hard surfaces, the crack of whip against skin, that was merely secondary. Occasionally there would be screaming, screaming so sudden and so close by that Severn expected a penitent's hand to reach out and grab her in a bid for succor. None did.

And then, all at once, Severn had reached the bottom of the throat, and she was within the very stomach of the beast. The hands that had guided her forward now pressed down, forcing her to her knees. For several seconds, Severn stared downward, trying to penetrate the blindfold and see something, anything about where she was.

"Sister Severn Nodensia. The violation of your covenant of faith has brought you here."

The voice was surprisingly deep, about as deep as Severn's, and it came from somewhere above her and slightly to the side. Severn did not move. She knew her crime, and if wrenched backwards in the flow of time she would do it again.

"You swore your life away when you took the orders. Your life belongs to the Empress and her Adepta Sororitas, and it is our right to take it away." There was movement in the air; Severn knew it to be an executioner's blade, its harsh edge rising into the air. "Speak your pathetic exoneration."

It was an ancient ritual, one whose words Severn had been schooled in while she was being brought over. The risk of death was very real. "I have disobeyed an order from my superior, and though I had my reasons, the act was still done. I repent, and beg to be allowed to repent."

"Say it again, novitiate."

"I repent."

"Louder!"

Severn rose, blindfolded though she was, her back straightening up as she screamed, "I repent!"

For a moment, she panted, tongue soaking in the atmospheric musk. Severn almost wanted to see what would happen if the Repentia-Superior tried to take her head off, how interesting it would get. But instead, after a couple of seconds, there was a clank as the sword was set aside. A moment later, the Repentia-Superior pulled up on the blindfold.

"A will as strong as yours is like a knife, girl. In here, it can cut you to the bone."

The Repentia-Superior was tall and dark-skinned, buxom and sturdily built, her hair shaved down to the scalp. She was also, as was becoming a theme, quite nude, aside from a few belts wrapped around various limbs entirely too tightly for comfort. The belts failed to disguise that she had a cock.

But Severn's eyes quickly went past the Repentia-Superior to what was behind her. At first she thought it a physical manifestation of the Empress herself, some titan of faith and bioengineering. But it was only a plasteel statue, though one so finely wrought as to present the illusion of life. Standing twenty meters tall, her face rapt with perfect agony, her body twisting as it was bitten into by countless barbed chains, stood Saint Lucretia, patron of the penitent. Yet more chains hung from the statue's arms, suspending in mid-air a series of sealed coffins which, even as Severn watched, trembled and shook under their own power.

More screams and groans filled the hot, wet air as Severn struggled to rise under the weight of what she was seeing. Everything was tinged an awful red, as the already-dim light from far overhead was reflected again and again off of the rusted walls and columns. The Repentia-Superior stepped forward, and Severn staggered back.

"Through a long study of the liturgy, we have come to understand the nature of sin and penitence, at least as much as any mortal mind can. The Repentrium has but one rule: pain is to be rewarded, avoidance of pain, punished. Seek pain, novitiate, castigate yourself as severely as you can, and your crime may yet be forgiven. Allow me to give you a headstart."

The Repentia-Superior's hand went to her thigh. Severn hadn't even realized it until that exact moment, but there was a whip coiled tightly around one of her legs. With an ugly grimace she drew the whip, and with a flick of her wrist she sent its tip flying towards Severn. It struck her on the abdomen, halfway between navel and crotch.

Severn had been whipped before, once or twice. She still remembered the harsh sting, the long and lingering burn. This was not that. Her hands flew to the spot where the whip had touched her, terrified that it had torn her skin open, screaming in agony. The flesh that her hands found was totally untouched, but it hardly mattered when every ridge of her fingerprints was scraping against raw, agonized nerves. Even feeling a worse pain than she ever had, Severn stayed standing, though she rapidly backpedaled away from the grinning Repentia-Superior. Already the dark shadows were moving about her, turning what moments before had been another human being into a dark silhouette of punishment.

"Do not flee from pain, Severn," she said. "Or we will ensure it finds you."

The whip flew out again, barely tickling the edge of Severn's jaw, but that was enough. It felt like all of her teeth had been ripped out, her skull shattered. She scrambled back and away as quickly as she could, and only when she was far beyond the precipice did she realize that she had made a crucial error. She wasn't standing on flat ground. This was a platform, rising three or maybe four meters off of the main floor of the Repentrium. Severn slid backwards, tipped over, and rolled all the way to the bottom.

For several seconds, Severn followed the spirit of the place and indulged in her own weakness and frailty, sobbing and rolling on the floor in misery. The overwhelming pain of the neural whip faded, replaced by the dull ache of various bruises, and Severn rose to her feet. She could tell that she was amongst the victims now. They milled about, made indistinct by the dark, some praying, some self-flagellating, others engaged in the working of various strange machines whose shapes that could only be half-defined in the gloom. More easy to discern was the difference between the listless, grim majority, and the Repentias-Superior. They, the arbiters of agony, stalked about with keen awareness and poise, whips in hand, occasionally stopping to force someone into action with a series of artistically-applied strikes.

A hand seized Severn by the shoulder and wrenched her around. She had only a fraction of a second to take in the image of a sallow-skinned, wiry woman half a head shorter than her, before said woman had punched her square in the face. Severn stumbled back, wiping the blood from her nostrils, and to her relief found that her nose hadn't been broken. Without even having to think about it, she punched back, bruising her knuckles on the stranger's cheek.

"Seek pain, eh Sister?"

The other Sororitas laughed. Her eyes were bloodshot, pupils horribly dilated in a way that would suggest drugs if Severn didn't know better. "Yes, Novitiate, you are beginning to understand! Is this your first time?"

Severn nodded, flexing her wrists in preparation for the next salvo. "Disobeyed a direct order. Had a good reason, though."

The stranger grinned. "No such thing as reason in here. Only pain and guilt." She then rushed in with a knee strike to Severn's midsection. Severn dodged, slamming her forearm into the stranger's chest, and it went on and on.

Pain and relief were the rule of law in the Repentrium. It came in endless cycles. The walls were lined with metal thorns, and climbing as high as she could, hands covered in tiny bleeding cuts, was something that Severn latched onto as, not true freedom, but a sort of pseudo-freedom. Once, a sister begged for her help, securing her to a machine that would bend her almost but not quite to the breaking point, where she could shriek for hours. Sometimes it was all that Severn could do to fall to her knees and pray until her legs went numb against the harsh metal.

The Repentias-Superior were always watching, of course. They would rarely interrupt the grand gestures of pain, but when Severn was alone, leaning against a wall or lying curled up on the floor, one would approach. Her wounds would be examined for sufficient depth and coverage, whispers of repentance delivered into her ear, and she would be ordered to repeat her crime again and again and again. Only then would the Repentia-Superior call upon her greatest power, and summon a cherub from the flocks that hid in the high places of the ceiling. The cherubim were the root of all mercy in the Repentrium; they would bring clean water to slake thirst and clean the body, salves and patches for the treatment of injury, and little ration blocks to sustain the flesh.

When exhaustion finally took her, after what felt like days, Severn was taken away to the cells. They were larger than one might expect, but utterly bare, plasteel walls and plasteel ceilings and a plasteel floor, the only accoutrements being a relief vent and a narrow, barred window. Some kind of technological sorcery made each cell utterly isolated from its neighbor; no sound could penetrate. Some Repentias, the Repentia-Superior explained, had not left their cells for anything but food and drink in years. This was as valid a route of contrition as any other.

There was no day or night in the Repentrium. When Severn returned to her chosen cell, the shaft of light could tell her that it was day or night in the world beyond, but that information bore no significance within the walls. All time was measured in cycles of tension and release. Severn would take up the sword, duel her fellow Repentia until every muscle felt fit to burst, and then she would find a corner in which to curl in on herself and yearn for the outside world. She would subject herself to the slow burning of the furnace chamber, then return and feel as though the foggy heat outside was freezing her to the bone. She would climb to the highest highs, then sink into melancholy. Time passed.

Eventually even the constant novelty of the tortures grew tiresome, and Severn sought out a more placid form of suffering. Again, the Repentias intervened, somehow able to read her via some arcane means. She was provided with a tool of mortification, a set of rings to slip onto all ten of her fingers, each one chained to its opposite by a thin argentisteel chain barely a dozen centimeters in length. She clasped her hands in prayer, occasionally allowing herself to be whipped or beaten by whoever passed, and ate food and water directly off of the ground like an animal.

But when she retreated to her cell, Severn's wounds did not worry her so much. She slept restfully, enjoying confused dreams whose meanings only barely escaped her understanding. Occasionally, though, they went in strange directions.

"Severn. Severn, help me. Please, I'm stuck."

Chrisenya's voice was as it always had been, a paradoxical contrast of pitch and tone that Severn found regretfully exciting. But it wasn't that kind of dream, Severn was meant to be eating a meal with someone she had left behind half a decade ago. Severn grimaced and mumbled something about going away. Chrisenya did not.

"Severn? Severn. Wake up! Severn!"

Severn woke up. She tried to stretch, failed, then wiped the sand from her eyes on the inside of her elbow.

"Severn, good, now help me."

With a lurch, Severn realized that she was still hearing Chrisenya's voice, despite her dreary surroundings proving that she was very much awake. Chrisenya had jammed herself halfway through the bars of the window, her torso hanging out into the room from high near the ceiling. Severn hadn't thought it possible that someone could fit through so narrow a gap, but as she slowly stood up, she was forced to admit that if anybody could manage it, it would be Sister Chrisenya.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Severn whispered as she crossed the room.

"Looking for you." Apparently it was the hips that had become an issue, the very widest part of them a few millimeters too wide for the gap.

Severn couldn't part her hands enough to do much, but by maneuvering she could get the heels of her palms around Chrisenya's arm. "How did you know I was here?"

Chrisenya grunted as Severn started to pull, and through the gap she could see Chrisenya's legs kicking frantically. "I didn't!" she groaned. "I just started looking and I found you, though I haven't the faintest how."

"And then you immediately went and got yourself stuck halfway through my window, which is a real— fuck!"

Chrisenya finally slipped through, the sudden release of pressure causing Severn to tip entirely backwards, Chrisenya landing on top of her and causing them both to become strongly aware of Severn's complete nudity. There was a quiet moment, during which Chrisenya was frozen in place like a rodent caught under lumen-light. Her dish eyes stared right into Severn's until the latter regained enough composure to shove her off and to the side.

"So, you reconsidering that offer I gave you in the chapel or what?"

"Absolutely not," Chrisenya said, focusing her eyes on a nondescript section of ferrocrete in front of her. "But… that is somewhat related to why I came here."

Severn was curious. When Chrisenya paused, a look of shame crossing her features, she gestured for her to continue.

"Why did you do this?" Chrisenya said haltingly. "Why did you help me, even if you knew this is where it would lead?"

"Because you were hurt," Severn said. "I wasn't just going to leave you there, even if that meant punishment."

"But… the injury was my fault, entirely my fault. You had no need to give up anything of yours for the sake of… me."

Severn slowly exhaled. The cogs of her mind were working swiftly and efficiently, as they put all of the pieces together. "Oh. So it's like that, then. Chrisenya..." Severn shook her head. "You've got to be fucking kidding me."

 

[dragonsaffron]

Chrisenya immediately became defensive. "Don't you dare."

"Don't I dare what?" said Severn.

"Don't you dare pretend to know me. You've tried it before and it won't work again, so just stop. I came here to ask you a question, not the other way around."

Severn sighed. Chrisenya, unfortunately, had a point. But at the same time, if she was right, then getting into Chrisenya's neuroses was going to be the only way of answering her question in a way she'd find satisfactory. So she took a different tack.

"Yeah, yeah, of course. Mind if I tell you a bit about myself? We've got time, the Superiors never check back here and it's all sonically isolated."

The way Chrisenya's attention suddenly turned towards the door was as though she hadn't even considered the idea of being caught until that moment. There was nobody coming, of course.

"Go ahead," she said. "But don't waste my time."

Severn nodded, then tried to settle back. It was another way in which the chains on her hands acted to torment her, they made it almost impossible to find a position that was completely comfortable. "So, when I was younger, I used to believe I was completely worthless, that I was nothing but a waste of skin. Any cause that you put in front of me, I would throw myself into it in the hopes that maybe this time I'd be able to justify my own existence. And do you know where that all got me?"

Chrisenya frowned, very seriously. "It got you here," she said. "In the Abbey, that is. Not necessarily in this cell."

Severn shook her head. "No, Chris, how I got here is an entirely different story. Thinking I was nothing, that got me thrown around, used up, and treated like fucking trash. One step above a servitor. The only reason I survived as long as I did, the only reason I made it far enough to take the orders at all, was because I stopped seeing myself like that."

She stared directly into Chrisenya's eyes, trying to drive the point home as firmly as she could in her profoundly unimposing state. Even still, deep behind those huge grey eyes, Severn saw her certainty begin to waver. It was getting through to her.

"What worth would we have, then?" She looked down into her lap. "If worth does not come through acts of faith or service, then the human being is… what, free of obligation?"

Severn chuckled. "Want to talk theology? Personally I think you've got the whole idea wrong. That's not what—"

But Chrisenya's thought process, whatever it may have been, was working totally without Severn's input. "But then, if that is what gives a person worth, then what of the… What of… They had no faith, they had the opposite of faith, and yet I still…"

Chrisenya was becoming truly alarmed, turning to Severn as if she had all the answers. The softer part of her felt awful seeing a face so pretty being so distressed, but if it meant whatever psychological block Chrisenya had was being broken down, then all the better.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Severn said. "I can't exactly give you answers."

Chrisenya fell silent. Despite being the person in the room whose hands definitively weren't chained together, they fell naturally together in her lap, and she started to rock slightly back and forth. Severn gave her the time to process.

"How did you escape it? How did you come to believe that you had worth?"

"Dunno," Severn said with a shrug. She didn't want to convince Chrisenya that an intense crisis of faith was a necessary part of the process. "How does anybody come to believe in anything? Faith's a mystery. The key part is that you act like it; you have to act like you're… like you're worth investing in, doing maintenance on, not just something that outputs whatever the fuck people ask you to do."

Chrisenya continued to look terrified, unable to decide whether to look at the floor or at Severn's face, or sometimes even at Severn's chest. "I don't understand. What do you… what do you mean? I need an example."

Severn had to think about it for a moment, to find something that Chrisenya would be able to understand. The ideal would be some liturgical citation, but that wasn't coming easily. She shifted closer. "That stuff you've got all over your face," she said, trying to gesture at the appropriate area and succeeding mostly in jangling her hand-chains. "Take that as an example. It's something you do for yourself, for your appearance, to make you feel better."

Chrisenya frowned. "I've told you this once before and I'll tell you again, I do this out of obedience to the Decree Passive."

Severn rolled her eyes, but then thought about it very seriously. It was a little bit disappointing, having to realize that Chrisenya was being totally serious. "Is… is that why you wear the padding, too? Just because you feel like you have to?"

Chrisenya nodded.

Every time Severn thought she understood the depths of what was wrong with Chrisenya, she discovered yet another layer of sediment to dig up. Chrisenya looked faintly apologetic.

A few moments later, Severn broke free of her momentary paralysis. "Do you see yourself as a woman at all?" she said, speaking delicately so as not to break her any further.

"I… Does it matter?"

"Yes, Chrisenya, it matters quite a bit whether you actually see yourself as a woman."

She had to think about it some more. Her eyes got all shiny, not quite at the point of tears but very close to it. "I don't know? Ever since I was young, ever since the Sororitas rescued me, I have known that it was my destiny to repay them through my service. I hardly cared about matters of sex. Why don't I know? I should know!"

Severn nodded. "Yeah, you should."

Chrisenya's breathing was rapid and erratic, her eyes twitching as they searched around the bare penitent's cell for absolution or answers or something of the sort.

"Why did you save me, then? Even if it meant… this?"

"Because it was the right thing to do," Severn said. "Even if it meant facing hell."

Chrisenya rose up onto her knees, and for a moment it looked as though she were about to stand up and force herself back out through the window. Instead, she stared down, past Severn entirely, and shuffled forward on her knees.

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you." She reached out her arms to take Severn's shoulders, but couldn't bring herself to touch.

Severn suppressed the urge to make a quip about the offer she had made in the chapel. As rewarding as it would be, this was not the correct time. "You can go all the way, if you like. You know I'm not going to stop you."

Chrisenya threw her arms around Severn's bare shoulders, and pressed her face into her collarbone, and started openly weeping. Severn's hands were trapped between their bodies at around Chrisenya's chest level, but that wasn't what she was there for any longer. She grinned bemusedly at the bizarre inversion, the free woman sobbing with relief at the Repentia. Eventually Chrisenya's tears dried up, and she pulled away just a fraction, looking into Severn's eyes once more.

"Thank you. I think."

"Don't mention it." A heat was starting to build up in Severn's chest, and her heart was moving rapidly. She said something reckless. "You look like you could use a kiss."

Chrisenya stopped breathing. Her lips opened slightly. Then she lunged forward, giving Severn a quick peck on the lips. Severn reached up: though her hands were still bound, there was enough give in the chains to allow her to cup the narrowest part of Chrisenya's chin between her fingertips. That way she could guide her in—Chrisenya allowed herself to be guided—and they could kiss properly. Deeply.

When they pulled apart, Chrisenya's throat had turned red, and no doubt her face had done the same under all the cosmetic. But something had Severn confused, verging on upset.

"Was that… Did I just taste stimm?"

Chrisenya hesitated a moment before nodding. She fell back into Severn's chest, wrapping both arms around her midsection, and told the whole story. The fear of failure, the need to keep performing no matter what, Gwynette's offer, the haze of drugs that had led her to injure herself in the first place. She started talking about Fidelitas too, coupling in her room on the Gabriellum, the hatred she felt for Fidelitas's motives in taking the orders, the parts about the trip to the baths that Regina hadn't been able to relay.

Severn listened quietly as she rushed through the whole thing. She was well aware of Gwynette's smuggling, being as Gwynette was her sole source of lho sticks, but if she ever got out of the Repentrium she knew she was going to have a talk with her about the stimm. The main thing she learned was just how close Chrisenya and Fidelitas really were. She had had suspicions, of course, but hearing it from Chrisenya's mouth was something entirely different.

"Do you want me to help you with Fidelitas? Once I'm out of here, that is. I'm sure I can—"

"Don't talk to me about Fidelitas," Chrisenya said. "Don't even mention her name."

"If you say so." Severn paused. She was still thinking about Fidelitas, but maybe what needed to happen was a shift to something less serious. "Have you really never… That is, has she only ever fucked you using your cock?"

Chrisenya shifted slightly against Severn's side. "Why do you say it like that? Like it's a bad thing."

"Well it just… a girl like you, it feels like you should at least be given the option, you know?"

"The option to what?"

Severn sighed. If her hands weren't chained together and trapped against her chest, she would have covered her face. "Just because you have a cock doesn't mean that sex has to be you sticking it in various holes. There's other ways that might feel better."

"Oh. Of course you would know about that sort of thing." Chrisenya's voice lowered down to a weak whisper. "What are they?"

Severn clenched her thighs together, wishing she was wearing clothes. She wasn't going to do this tonight, not so quickly after their relationship had turned around the way it had. But she needed to make certain of something first.

"Do you want me to tell you… or do you want me to show you?"

"I would not be… adverse to a degree of hands-on experience. Though it damns me to say so."

Severn shoved her back with her bound hands, a predatory smirk establishing itself on her face. She was back in control again.

"Not tonight. And you'll have to do as I say. There are some… things I'll need. I have a hidden stash, same as yours, and you'll need to gather some things from it."

Severn described the location, and a brief overview of what Chrisenya would find once she had uncovered it. For the sake of her own privacy, she didn't give any names, just basic descriptions of what Chrisenya would see and which of those things she needed to take. Chrisenya listened in rapt attention, and when it was all said and done she needed no repetition. The greater challenge was in getting her back out of the cell. In the end, the only way was for Severn to crouch before the window while Chrisenya climbed up on her back, and then to shove the girl-martyr through with her shoulder once her hips reached the bars.

Severn did not purposefully look up Chrisenya's skirt at any time during this process, as that would be horribly uncouth. The fact that she saw up it several times throughout, simply could not be helped.

It was days before Chrisenya returned, as judged by the light rising and falling in the window of the cell. Severn knew she was about to do something awful, and worse, that she was going to keep it a secret. Was finding pleasure in the house of punishment defeating the purpose? Or would the Empress forgive her trespass, on the grounds that the initial sin had been unworthy of the size of the punishment? Severn decided to err on the side of caution.

For the next few days, she threw herself into punishment as much as she could bear. Even with the chains on her hands she could still pick up a sword and duel her fellow Repentia until her back was a web of bruises, could still mock-rush the Repentias Superior until she felt the sting of the whip, then retreat into the utter silence and stillness of her cell until she could hear whispers in her ears.

She wondered what would happen if any were to find out about Chrisenya's sneaking in. Would that be enough to count as a breach of her duty as a Repentia, to have her sentenced to an eternity in the screaming coffins suspended from the ceiling, where the only mercy that existed was the Empress's? Perhaps it wouldn't. Perhaps it would merely extend her sentence, not that Severn had any idea how much longer her sentence was meant to be. Severn wasn't going to be afraid of that; she knew she was in the right, that none of this really mattered beyond what she made of her stay in that place of punishment.

And then the night came at last when Severn was awoken by Chrisenya's voice. Once again she had to pull her through the bars, though this time she didn't fall flat on her arse when Chrisenya made it through. Instead, Chrisenya fell gracefully into her arms, as though she'd had the time to practice.

"I think it was a bit more difficult that time," she said. "Not by much, but at this rate I don't know how much longer I'll stay narrow enough to fit."

"Better take advantage of the time we have, then," Severn said, before tipping Chrisenya onto the ground. A moment later, Chrisenya was pulling her into a kiss.

Severn could still taste stimm on Chrisenya's tongue, though not as strongly as the last time. Chrisenya's appetite for physical contact was insatiably ravenous. They kissed again and again, Chrisenya wrapping her arms around Severn's back, rubbing at the firm muscle, feeling the pressure of her breasts against her collar. It took almost no time at all before Severn was quite warmed up indeed, not to mention hard.

"Alright," she said. "That's enough of that. Clothes off, on your back. Preferably somewhere you can't be seen from the door."

There were few things in the world that Severn wouldn't have promised away to have her hands unchained in that moment, just so she could peel the clothes off of Chrisenya one article at a time. As it was, the trembling uncertainty filling Chrisenya's body made her stripping into a decent enough show. First the shoes, then the hosiery, then the tunic, then her underwear, each one taken off at least three times more slowly than strictly necessary. When Chrisenya lay down on her back on the cold stone floor, she even understood the assignment well enough to spread her legs.

The most surprising part by far was how much work the tunic had been doing; she looked like a totally different person without it. Still adorable, but much more… vulnerable. Pathetic. Severn let herself stare only for a little bit, before picking up one of the objects she'd asked for Chrisenya to bring, a plastic tube that fit nicely between her hands.

"This is fricgel, short for 'friction gel', on account of it gets rid of friction." Severn dropped the dispenser onto Chrisenya's mirror-flat stomach. "What you're going to want to do is get your fingers nice and soaked in the stuff, then put them up your arsehole."

Chrisenya's expression turned to fear. "Why?"

Severn tried to separate her hands, the chains rapidly going taut with a metallic click. "Because I can't do it myself."

"Oh. Yes. Of course. I'll do my best."

Severn nodded. Her attention shifted downward, towards Chrisenya's cock, which did not look ready in the slightest. "In the meantime… let's get the rest of you prepared."

Severn dropped down, too fast, bruising her knees on the stone as they landed either side of Chrisenya's hips. Carefully, she spread her legs, lowering her crotch until her arsecheeks were just touching Chrisenya's thighs and their two cocks were side by side. Not wanting to interrupt while Chrisenya fumbled with the bottle of fricgel, Severn let her eyes linger on the slender, smooth body in front of her.

Just like she'd been ordered to, Chrisenya smeared the gel across her fingers and slowly, hesitantly, reached around behind herself. That was when Severn gave her the boost she needed. Keeping her hands close enough together that the chains didn't come into play, she clumsily gripped Chrisenya's limp dick, lifting it until it came in contact with its more erect accomplice. Then, with soft motions of both hand and hip, they rubbed together.

The effect was as immediate as it was obvious that Chris was trying to hide it. She was too damn pale to hide a flush, and the hitch in her breathing could have been heard from the far side of the room. Severn needed her as relaxed as possible, and the gentle rocking contact was the best way she could think to do that. Chrisenya's eyes were locked on Severn's as, with a soft sound, she penetrated herself, fingers preparing for what was to come. A few soft whimpers were the only signs of any discomfort throughout the whole process; and other signs between her legs showed that Chrisenya was quite comfortable indeed.

"Well would you look at that," Severn said. "You're bigger than me. That doesn't feel even a little bit fair."

Chrisenya's expression went totally blank, and her face went bright red. A few moments later, she said, "'For the Empress's blade is the mightiest of all blades, and via faith in Her, any may wield it.'"

Severn did her best to ignore this, mostly on the grounds that not ignoring it would make her laugh so hard she'd pass out and ruin the fun. Instead, seeing that both of Chrisenya's fingers were outside of her body, she slowly retreated, carefully balancing on one knee at a time as she moved herself. It took some maneuvering, but before long Severn was kneeling between Chrisenya's legs.

Finding the right angle proved to be a bit of a challenge, with Severn's hands unavailable and nothing but a smooth floor to work with, but they managed. Severn ended up fully bent forward over Chrisenya's body with her bound-up hands over Chrisenya's head, while the smaller woman had her hips curled forward to get the right angle. Severn positioned the head of her cock right over Chrisenya's entrance.

"You ready?"

Chrisenya swallowed, rolling her eyes nervously. "Yes."

Severn thrust forward, burying herself halfway inside Chrisenya. She was as tight as to be expected, but the fricgel was working its magic. The incoherent, animal whimper that came out of Chrisenya's thin lips suggested that it was working for her as well.

It was another couple of awkward, stuttering thrusts before Severn was all the way down to the hilt and could start the long journey out. With her knees and hands as points of support and the muscles of her thighs to power it, Severn could just about approximate a decent rhythm. It was far from the best she'd ever done, but the miracle was that it didn't need to be the best. In the quiet of her cell, every wet sound and gasp of Chrisenya's breath sent shivers down her spine.

Chrisenya was so small and so soft that it felt impossible that she could be a soldier, a warrior of the Empress. And yet she needed to be, she had to be. Severn had never felt stronger by sheer contrast, power surging in her as her world collapsed in around her cock. As Chrisenya bit down on her bottom lip to keep herself quiet, Severn growled in the back of her throat, leaned more into her own thrusts until some of her weight settled fully on top of Chrisenya's body. Chrisenya replied to the motion in turn, wrapping both hands around Severn's back to pull her even closer. She was the only source of real warmth in the cold of the cell, and Severn was going to keep her safe, damn everything else.

With each passing second Severn's rational mind dissolved against the wave of hormones coursing through her, the soft pressure of Chrisenya's clenching arsehole and the frantic beating of her heart. The teeth on Chrisenya's lower lip were biting down so hard they seemed about liable to draw blood, and even still a shrill whine was passing up the length of her throat and filling the air. More grip, Severn needed more grip.

She pulled her bound hands in, wrapping the chains crudely around the back of Chrisenya's head and pulling it roughly in, forcing Chrisenya's face against her chest. The tiny girl was bent almost in half, but she was able to make it work, enjoy it even. With Severn's breasts to muffle her, she let herself make a soft and keening cry of peak experience, a sound that could have been pain as much as pleasure. Severn understood it well. She herself was about to go feral altogether, her cock so hard it hurt even as she kept pistoning in and out, even as all sensation melted together into one white-hot glow.

Chrisenya's dick throbbed. Severn's stomach clenched, her thighs locked, she forgot how to breathe. Everything went wet and ugly and soft and smooth. There was nothing in the universe, nothing at all but the expansion of the moment into everything. And then, with a gasp, Severn pulled out.

It was a mess, and if Chrisenya hadn't brought a small cloth with her when she'd arrived it would have been a serious problem. As it was, Severn cleaned the both of them and the cell itself with a lazy slowness. Chrisenya's expression was blank, staring up at the ceiling as though she'd had the brains fucked entirely out of her, until all of a sudden she stopped. She rolled up into a seated position, crawled over to her discarded clothes, and started to dress.

"I need to go. I'm sorry. I'll remember this. I— I need to go, I need to go right now."

And she left. Another storm came not long after, pouring rain in through the window of Severn's cell.

 

[dragonsaffron]

Chrisenya tried to quit stimm, but stimm refused to allow her . She had been trying since as soon as she left the Sanatorium, but Severn tasting the foulness of the drug on her tongue had caused her to redouble her efforts. And it was not all for nought, of course; there were many days when the allure of stimm was not too strong, when she lived in clarity. It simply wasn't enough. There would always be a day when her exhaustion grew too great, when the demands of recovery from her injury were more than she could manage, when she needed the extra time that only a sleepless night could grant.

Stimm was always there when she needed it. Reliably, emotionlessly, whensoever she needed strength stimm could provide it to her. In that sense, the only difference between stimm and the Empress was that the latter was not steadily running out.

What she would do when the vial finally emptied was one of the two concerns on Chrisenya's mind. The logical thing to do would be to do nothing at all, let the withdrawal pains take her. Smarter, more conducive to completing her training, would be to beg Gwynette for more, regardless of her inability to repay the debt she owed for the first vial. Every time she saw Gwynette alone, the thought occurred to her to make the approach; but there was never the time.

The other concern was Severn. Severn, Severn, Severn. To even describe how Chrisenya thought of the most brazen of her squad-mates would be to grant more comprehensibility to her thoughts than they truly possessed. Whenever thoughts of her entered Chrisenya's mind she was thrown into a maelstrom of confusion. Chrisenya did not know whether to love her with a greater intensity than she had ever loved before, to hate her for setting her off the path, or to be ashamed. In some ways, it was the very intensity of feeling which proved most challenging: so powerful were Chrisenya's impressions that, like noise which at high enough volumes becomes a shockwave, the nature of them could not be discerned.

It was for that reason that, one warm afternoon, Chrisenya appeared before the Centro Magisterium. It lay near the very heart of the Abbey, where the structures gained in scale and ostentatiousness until they rivaled the spires of Aktranis itself; indeed, the Centro Magisterium was the second tallest building in the Abbey, falling only behind the titanic bell-spire of the Abbey's Sacrarium Sacrosanctus. It was here that the temporal portion of the Abbey's business was carried out. Somewhere within that colossal spire were the private chambers of deliberation where came together all of the Canonesses of the Order, and above them, the personal chambers of Canoness-Superiors Cassandra and Phoebe.

It was not so lofty a reason for which Chrisenya had come, of course. The office which she sought was on the seventy-fourth floor (out of two-hundred-and-six), and the door against which she knocked was unassuming flakboard, flanked by a pair of skulls crudely stamped into the ferrocrete. It took only a few moments before the door opened. An impossibly beautiful face peeked through the crack, lips twitching with minute glee as they recognized Chrisenya.

"Oh, hello. It has been quite a long time, hasn't it been."

"Yes, Palatine Maryllis, I think it has."

Maryllis opened the door more widely, and ushered Chrisenya inside. The cherub which had shown Chrisenya to the correct door attempted to follow. But Maryllis batted her hands at it.

"Go, shoo! I can take care of her from here."

The little creature squawked and screeched, but relented after a moment spent venting its displeasure.

Beyond the door was the shared office of Canoness Innogen and her assistant. Chrisenya felt a sudden stab of pity for her rescuer; though in truth only a portion of the office was taken up by dataslates and parchment records, in comparison to any of the furniture, to Innogen's personal belongings, even to the shrine to the Empress, they seemed to dominate the space. Canoness Innogen herself was seated at her desk with a book at one hand and a dataslate at the other, referencing back and forth between the two as part of some arcane task.

"Who is it?" she said.

"It's the Thannetch g—" Maryllis shot Chrisenya a quick glance, "Er, Sister Chrisenya Thannetch."

Innogen looked up. "Oh, well then, would you look at that. It's been entirely too long. I'll be with you in a moment, Sister Chrisenya, I shan't interrupt this spot of business."

"You're jumping to conclusions. She could be here to speak to me." Maryllis rounded on Chrisenya, leaning in with a sudden and intense interest. "Are you in need of a, erm, resupply? Or more clothes? I did only give you five sets."

Chrisenya cringed away from Maryllis. The last several days had broken her iron will; such moments of weakness had become more and more common. She put up her hands in surrender and said, "I'm afraid Canoness Innogen is correct. I came here to speak to her. Alone, as it happens."

Maryllis's smugness faded instantly. "Very well then. Perhaps I will go and acquire a few extra uniforms for you while you talk."

"Thank you," said Chrisenya. "And… perhaps I could use some extra supply, though I'm not out yet."

Maryllis nodded sharply, then went for the door. The Chrisenya of one month earlier would have thought nothing more of it; but the Chrisenya of that precise moment could not help but take note—and no more than a note—of the way that Maryllis unnaturally swished her hips from side to side as she walked. She was showing off, though to who Chrisenya couldn't fathom.

And then the door clinked shut, and it was just Chrisenya and the Canoness.

"I'm almost done. Please, have a seat."

There was, indeed, a chair immediately across from Innogen's: a bare thing of synth-wood, with a small pillow on the seat. Chrisenya sat down, folding her hands in her lap and wondering if she had made a mistake. Before she could sink too deeply into her own mind, Innogen at last looked up.

"My first piece of advice is, if they ever offer to promote you past Celestian, don't take it. Facing down lasgun fire is ten times less painful than deflecting strongly-worded letters from the Lord of Notidal."

"Canoness, I fear that I have made a terrible mistake."

Immediately, Innogen's expression darkened. "Oh, I shouldn't have… What's the problem, Sister Chrisenya?"

Chrisenya covered her face with her hands, unsure if she was properly sobbing yet but not wishing for Innogen to be able to see her face. "I have forgotten my purpose," she groaned. "I have forgotten the reason for my faith, I do not know why I am here any more. I have begun to wonder whether I should have gone somewhere else."

Innogen's frown grew even deeper, and for a moment her stoicism was overcome. She reached out to touch Chrisenya's shoulder, but made it only halfway across the gulf of the desk between them before reconsidering. "You haven't actually forgotten anything," Innogen said tentatively. "So what do you really mean?"

Chrisenya sucked in a breath. Where the strength of the Empress had failed to bulwark her, the Canoness's strength still could. She wiped the tears from her eyes, but could not keep the overpowering emotion out of her voice. "I used to know everything. I used to know why I was here and what I was doing and what I stood to gain, but now I do not. Now I wonder if I was never meant for this at all, and I am trying to find that purpose again but I have lost it somewhere along the way!"

"A crisis of faith, then? If it makes you feel any better, I've seen it before."

It didn't make Chrisenya feel much of anything. Hers was surely unique, as unique as the thing that had brought her to the Sororitas in the first place; but then, that was why it was Canoness Innogen, and not Sister-Superior Bellara or Hospitaller-Superior Doloria or anyone else, whom Chrisenya had sought.

"Not just of faith," Chrisenya said. "But of capability. I have… I have not taken well to the rigors of training. Not a day has gone by when I have not faced Sister-Superior Coriah's lash, and even on the nights when I can sleep, I drift off a jagged pile of bruised skin, sore muscles, and aching bones. It is only by going to… great lengths, that I have managed to make it as far as I have."

Canoness Innogen nodded. "I can't help you with that. If you truly think the physical requirements are beyond you, then there is always the non-militant orders to take you in. But my understanding was that such a thing was unacceptable."

"I do not know anymore."

"If you want to make the transference, there's no dishonor in it. I can—"

"No! I need you to convince me. Or give me what I need to convince myself."

Canoness Innogen raised an eyebrow, and folded her hands before her. "What do you need, then?"

"When you rescued me, when you pulled me out of that…" Chrisenya could not name it. Even after seven years it was a nameless thing in her consciousness, nameless and warpish agony. "When you did that, did you expect… What am I saying, you could not possibly have expected me to end up here. But what did you expect of me?"

By the look on her face Chrisenya could instantly tell that this was not a question Innogen had expected. She smiled, for that meant that the answer, without any time to prepare, could come only from the heart. Innogen's brow furrowed, and her narrow eyes, leather-brown, burrowed into Chrisenya's mind.

"At first I was sure the Inquisitor would deem you corrupted, and that would be the end of that."

Chrisenya pulled in half a breath. Amidst all the other chaos, she had almost entirely forgotten about the presence of an Inquisitor.

"But once she deemed you pure… I thought you were going to end up at the end of the same path you'd been set on since birth. The ruler of House Thannetch, only in exile on Jericho. It was an obvious place to put you."

Chrisenya shook her head immediately. "A House cannot live on an heir alone, and the all the rest had fallen into ruin, or worse. But that was not what I intended by the question. You had no inkling that I might… join the Ecclesiarchy, or become a soldier, or anything of that nature? No inkling that I might feel a sense of obligation for your saving my life?"

"Oh, I was sure you felt an obligation," Innogen said. "Many of the higher-ups were excited by the prospect of a House Thannetch indebted to the Order of the Silver Scar, until House Thannetch vanished into so much smoke. But I never suspected that you might throw yourself into a new path based on that obligation." Innogen frowned, an expression of concentration deepening into her features. "Is that why you took the orders? Obligation?"

Chrisenya nodded. "Maybe?"

Innogen grunted. "And you've lost that sensation?"

Chrisenya nodded again. "I am afraid if I do not find it again I will lose my way entirely. Or that I never had my way in the first place."

"I think that second instinct is better than the first," Innogen said. "There is a reason why the Sororitas do not conscript, as the guard does. Obligation can bring one far, the Imperium is built upon it, but obligation does not bring about greatness."

Chrisenya winced, shrinking back in her chair. "I've had it all wrong, then. The whole course of my life, decided by a mistake. From the very root."

"Not necessarily. Sometimes we do the right thing for the wrong reason."

"But if I have chosen this path for the wrong reason, then the only reason I stay on it is once more obligation. Except this time to the oath I swore at eighteen, instead of the one I swore at eleven." Chrisenya's hand fell naturally onto the novitiate's ring on her hand, a weight that had grown heavier with each passing day.

"And yet," said Innogen, "You came to me begging that I convince you to stay and fight on. And that first oath, the one sworn only to yourself at eleven years old, you swore specifically that you would take the orders and become a battle-sister, yes?"

Chrisenya shut her eyes tightly and cast her mind back, back to the beginning. "I did, I had it. I wished to serve the Empress, to fight against chaos, to…" She opened her eyes. "Oh, but I've lost it. Whatever feeling I had, I've lost track of it."

"And here we are, back at the beginning," Innogen said with a sigh.

"Indeed."

The pair of them, rescuer and rescued, veteran and trainee, commander and grunt, spent a moment in the silence of each other's company. Canoness Innogen was deep in contemplation, brow furrowed as her hand went to her chin, while Chrisenya looked at her with an empty terror, following her every move. Eventually, Innogen's chest rose and fell.

"When was the last time you did some reading? Serious reading, the Imperiad and the Ten Thousand, and not just the common passages and prayers you liked?"

"Nearly two years," Chrisenya said ashamedly.

Innogen nodded. "Perhaps you should start there."

Chrisenya wished that there could be more. That Innogen could just speak up and say the words that would point her in the right direction. But even in her addled state she knew that it was not to be.

Innogen seemed to understand the urge well. "Only the Empress has all the answers, Chrisenya, and she's not talking.You're a wonderful young lady with a faith that burns brighter than the stars. I'm sure you'll make something of yourself yet."

"Thank you for everything," Chrisenya said with a nod. "I have much to consider. Perhaps that will distract me from my sore muscles."

"What else is prayer for?"

Chrisenya grinned, wordlessly rising from her seat. She gave the Canoness a brief bow and made for the door just as Palatine Maryllis opened it to re-enter. Seeing Chrisenya's expression, Maryllis allowed her to pass her into the hallway beyond and back into the care of the guidance cherub. The door was slow to slip closed again.

"Quite the talk, hm?" said Maryllis.

"Quite the talk indeed. I'll tell you about it later."