A person of middle height and build strides toward the Archbishop. Zie’s properly and heavily robed, but the colors and trim of station are unrecognizable to Misery. What rank is zie? No idea. Some kind of deacon, perhaps. Something new, at any rate. Fancy that. The world is wider and deeper than her brother’s church, his precious little domain. Misery swells with inexplicable pride, which he isn’t here to smack the back of her hand for. Feels good.

“Bridge,” the Archbishop says to the unknown deacon, “take them to the confessional. I wish to speak with the Duke for a moment.”

“Understood,” says the one called Bridge, pronouns still unknown. Zie beckons to Misery. “Come with me.”

The Duke ducks close for a second. “Just for once,” he pleads, “will you do as you’re told?”

Two warring instincts: tighten her jaw and say nothing, or blurt out something stupid but satisfying. Predictably Misery springs for the latter: “Sorry, boss. Failed that chapter in study.”

The Duke sighs volcanically, but the Archbishop has split from the group and he has no choice but to follow, dispatching a final stern look in Misery’s direction. Whatever.

“Come with me,” Bridge says. Hir demeanor has all the texture and flavor of porridge and Misery can’t read anything off the flatness of hir expression. Like glancing over a desert, white sand as far as the eye can see. Zie’s not a saint either, and maybe the way up Church hierarchy is to have a personality like blended concrete. Absolutely tedious. Misery follows Bridge down a side corridor of holy jade, beautifully claustrophobic, flasklights replaced by wall-mounted orbs of holy opal, and screens in between the pillars playing frescoes from the lives of the Eight Messiahs. They’re exactly the same as the ones back home, one thing the Church has kept consistent across its little fingers plunged into the corners of human civilization. The familiarity brings no comfort.

Ruin, walking beside her, brushes pale fingers across one glowing surface and the fresco changes: same scene, but rendered by a different hand, the values darker and the faces realer, almost photographic. Saint Ono has a frown on their face and a scar across their upper lip that almost matches the one Misery carries. What is this? This version of the fresco is alien to her, and for someone Church-raised it’s like jawing a door open to find someone’s bedroom where a library should be. Another hallucination. The voidmadness is truly working overtime today. Ruin says nothing, casually slinging hir hands behind hir back without giving a second glance to the transformed scene.

The corridor opens into a circular atrium ringed by golden doors. In the middle is a perfect tenth-scale bronze replica of Misery’s Absolution, the ship that carried the Eight Messiahs, suspended over a plinth of holy tigereye. Misery pauses before it. “I was named after this ship, you know,” she says.