Sunyata Diamond’s ship plows nose-first into the side of the Edgeless Blade, destroying matter, igniting lines of stonecharge. The generative core in Heretic ships is unlike anything known to the Empire of the Faithful. Unlike anything known in the shallow pools of human history. It does not simply explode. Thermal combustion could never dream of expressing the breadth and depth of what is lost when a generative core is destroyed. The Edgeless Blade folds inward, inverting reality, and for an infinitesimal moment a supermassive black hole hangs where the ship used to be. Pin-sized, a thousand angels dancing upon its surface. Then the charge reverses, and matter spews outward in a glorious ball of heat, a plasma soup resembling the expansion of possibility that birthed the universe.

The light fades, and in its wake: a haze of vapor and fragments of stone. The fate of survivors unknown. But the arc of Sunyata Diamond’s life that spanned the hopeless stretch of time since her calamitous first encounter with Esse Temple has come to an end. In that cataclysm, in that bright flare, the archangel Misery saw the map of the cosmos, from its first seconds to its last, all of history and its infinite branching possibilities laid out before hir. Zie saw the face of God.

INTERLUDE 10

Thus it came to pass that the Messiah, Misery Nomaki, was taken into custody once again by the Faithful. The Siege of Monkglass was ended, but at what cost? Hundreds dead on the station itself, courtesy of the Messiah’s fine carving. Several ships destroyed, including a flagship of the Heretics. One of the finest minds in the Empire of the Faithful, dead. The sedition exposed, the whole of the Empire’s military and bureaucracy thrown into disarray.

How did this come to be? Despite the lashings of fate that held them together, despite the tool they had in their Heretic prisoner, the outcome of the siege was something they did not predict. Could not have predicted. Such is the way of the universe. The best-laid plans of gods and geniuses defeated by the unknown on the regular. Chaos rules over order. In the Siege of Monkglass, the Messiah and their seditious band worked off bad intel. The Heretic, it seems, provided outdated information—no? Even if what he said was truth to him, wasn’t it? As far as he knew, siege mechanisms were supposed to be double-blind. Schroedinger shields are double-blind. It’s how the technology works. It’s why sieges were so rare even during the days of active war, hot and seething. Would you risk the maneuver knowing that you could not look in, just as they could not look out? I did not think so.