Finally, Pyrex Imogen says, “Forgive me, Misery. I had my doubts, you know. Not when you came to us at first. But in the amphitheater, watching the wrath you brought down upon the nobility, the ones who just happened to be watching … I knew people in the stands who died. Most people on the Capital did, friends of friends … It’s not such a large place that it can easily absorb the impact of such a tragedy. And my faith faltered in that moment, and I began to doubt. I even thought, this must be some kind of evil, for why would the Larex Forge rain such destruction upon Hir own Faithful? Forgive my weakness in that moment. I know I was seen by the Demiurge and I will be accordingly judged.”

The amphitheater. Her confrontation with the boy Emperor. It seems so long ago now. Misery was a different creature back then, still darkened by doubt and her core of ego. Still unhumbled and saddled by hubris. But the Larex Forge was working through her even then. “You are already forgiven,” she says. For if even she—the liar, the cheater, and unwilling Messiah—can be absolved of her crimes and granted the Grace of the Larex Forge, why shouldn’t the Archbishop? “The compassion of the Demiurge is infinite, and far outstrips the foibles of our weak human natures. Nothing you do can turn Hir love away from you.”

“This I believe. This I know.” The Archbishop raises their head, their head and heart already lighter. “And you were right, in the end—the Larex Forge was right. Zie guided your hand toward a truth I was unwilling to see. Sometimes things have to be sacrificed in order to save something greater. Those deaths were necessary, a wake-up call that would otherwise have never come.”

She nods. “Sometimes a small sacrifice saves the greater whole.”

“I wish you luck,” says Pyrex Imogen. “Do it for me. Do it for my sister. Most of all, do it for those who still do not believe. Perhaps this way we can save their souls.”

INTERLUDE 9

Thus the banquet of Angelsteeth set out on the mission that would place them in the annals of history. Four courses of thirty-two dishes, each with four servings, hundreds of personnel of all ranks and ages. A hundred sleek black ships, with hearts of live holystone, surrounded by the iridescent silhouettes of seraphim. A sight for the poets and playwrights and propagandists, enough grace and majesty to fill the hearts of billions scattered across the wide, starry voids. Yet no more than a swarm of fleas, mere specks, a sea of microorganisms, when juxtaposed against the scope and width of the universe. A bare flicker of existence in a firmament billions of years old.