Their path takes them on a right turn, and as Misery comes around it a wave of pressure takes her breath and she has to stop from gasping. They stand at the head of a grand and blinding walkway, studded with floor lights and florid depictions of the Eight Messiahs. A holy walkway: Misery knows the pattern of these things in her bones. At the end stands an ornate pair of doors, reef-tall, shimmering and pearlescent. Pure holystone. Its song, high and clear over the ambient hum of the Capital, pulls at the tide of blood in Misery’s veins. This is where the Church lives on the station, there’s no mistaking it. Those doors are made of the same holystone that barred her prison cell, and as they get closer Misery realizes that their iridescent surfaces are extruded in a bas-relief of Bastion the Many-Voiced, First Angel, Herald of the Larex Forge, bringing the good word to humanity. The Church guards peel off, forming two lines to funnel them in. Misery tries not to look at their faces as she walks past.

The bas-relief vanishes as the doors liquefy, the stone releasing its structure with a great sigh. First through are the Archbishop and the princess, followed by the Duke and Misery. The saints and soldiers come last, sealing the portal behind them. The stone hugs Misery like a lost relative as she strides through it. The sheer volume of it overwhelms her and she keeps her breath tightly held, terrified of her lungs collapsing under the weight of so much holystone if she doesn’t fight it every moment. Then she’s through with the rest of them and into the elaborately arched interior of Church HQ in the Capital.

Growing up with a brother slowly ascending the ranks of local Church hierarchy, Misery was forced to spend large chunks of time within the green walls of Rootsdown’s churchhall. Holy jade, architectural stuff, able to hold fantastical shapes with no consideration for the laws of physics. In Misery’s memory those high and sacred vaults have tangled themselves with a wide swathe of sensations and emotions, and faced with the verdant columns and cornices of the Church’s lobby she recalls the pressure of that still and dense atmosphere, filled with the murmur of long-prayer and a mix of antiseptic and incense. But the air here is pure and weightless in the lungs and the walls glazed with the steady aura of flasklights, nothing like back home, where the stained acrylic cracked with age and breathing put the texture of dirt in the mouth. A dozen officials and holy ones mill through the lobby, busy, minding their own business, paying no attention to them.

None of those creepy white saints present, thank the Forge.