You must think Cremoline Nomaki a cackling villain, irredeemable in his cruelty. And perhaps that is the way the Messiah saw it, but allow me to inject another perspective. Speculative, of course, but I have enough knowledge of the proceedings to make such presumptions.

Imagine a young boy, barely weaned, left in the care of chaplains in a dusty, unhappy mining town while his mother returned to the stars to continue working, returning home in between expeditions once every few years to make sure he’s still alive. It’s not her fault, she is poor and options are few for the poor. Her line of work is dangerous and the open void is no place for a baby. For twelve years Cremoline Nomaki was raised as a ward of the Church, cleaning altars and reciting Scripture and learning to mix salves. By the time his mother returned for good, twelve years later, he had already pledged his life to service of the Larex Forge. And the woman he barely knew had irrevocably changed, seeing ghosts in the air and confusing dreams and illusion and reality. To him, his mother’s ravings were nonsense, her talk of angels and prophecy all falsehoods fed to her by the nullvoid. Voidsickness had found her in those long years spent slow-trawling the infinite, uncharted depths of space, exploring the wildernesses in between the neat network of jump portals that bring you from one duchy to the next in a heartbeat. Friend, do you know the rate of voidmadness in stonehunting crews? I won’t say it’s a third, but the truth lingers near that number. Not very pretty odds, no. That Amaranth Nomaki would fall to the ravages of the nullvoid was only a natural consequence of her line of work.

Brother Cremoline Nomaki feared his mother’s madness becoming scandal; he feared a chorus of whispers rising into chatter that would reach the ears of the ducal cardinal. Feared his mother being whipped away from them and into a house for the voidmad, located on some isolated asteroid where the cold walls and the cosmic radiation would shred her open faster than the nullvoid would. If he hid reports of her voidsickness, if it remained a dirty secret known only to those who worked in Rootsdown’s church—those who had raised him, those he considered family—if he kept the truth suppressed, he could keep her safe. Cremoline Nomaki was twelve years old when he made this decision.