Basilica of Agony

[The Patriarchy]

In the nave of the basilica of the Agony, at the sixth hour of the fast, the congregation howled beneath a hundred silvered chandeliers, each forged in the shape of a man being flayed alive. The scent of burning resin and musk drifted from censers, mingling with the odor of sweating flesh and spent ecstasy. On the altar, High Priest Ingersol, naked save for his copper gorget and ceremonial boots, pressed the hilt of a relic-blade to the throat of a weeping acolyte and spoke the invocation in a voice hoarse from four days without sleep.

"By blood, by agony, by truth unsoftened—so we recall the birth of a world."

The nave roared. It was not only the nobility in their viperous silks but the butcher's daughters and canal-haulers, the lowest dregs clad in sackcloth and penitence, all rapt as the blade pricked skin and the acolyte sang her part in the agony—pure, artful, and exalting. It was a fine morning.

When the confession runner arrived—a boy, bare-shanked and trembling with awe—he knelt at the foot of the altar, uncertain whether to keep his eyes on the floor or risk a glimpse at Ingersol's glistening torso. "High Priest," the boy managed, "the penitent begs audience. He comes from the Fenlands. It's… urgent."

Ingersol, who had not yet tasted the climax of the day's worship, felt a flare of irritation. "Let him steep in his misery," he muttered, but even as he returned the blade to its sheath, he sensed a familiar pulse of compulsion. Duty—sulfurous and relentless. He dismissed the congregation with a gesture; the deacons would see to the rest.

He stalked from the nave, boots slapping wet marble, through the incense haze and into the deeper shadows of the basilica, where the air was cooler and smelled of age. The confessional was a blackened iron cage, its door dented from centuries of self-flagellation. Ingersol paused outside, composing himself—straightening the gorget, letting his heartbeat steady.

Inside, the penitent sat huddled on the grated bench, face hidden beneath a cowl, hands clenched around a wooden idol painted crudely with red flowers. Peasant. Ingersol entered, the door clanging shut behind him. He let the silence stretch, savoring the contrast between the reverent hush and the howls still echoing in the nave.

"State your affliction," Ingersol said at last.

The penitent raised his head. He was younger than expected, cheeks mottled by sun and wind, the eyes an unsteady blue. "Forgive me, your Holiness," the man began, words tumbling. "They call me Elwin. Elwin Marsh. My people—they've no more hope. The Fen's gone sour. The crops—drowned in red water. Our children wither. The elders say it's the old curse, the one you…" Elwin faltered, voice trembling as if the next words would burn him. "The one your Church promised to break."

Ingersol regarded him with mild contempt. "You come for absolution, but bring only complaints. The Agony favors those who bite the bit, not those who bray at the reins." He watched Elwin shrink into his cloak, waiting for the tears or threats that usually came at this point. Instead, the peasant simply unclasped the idol, cradling it as if it might bite.

"Holiness," Elwin said, the word thick with desperation, "my child is already dead. The mire takes them, one by one. My wife and I—we did all the rituals, fasted, bled, took the sacraments. But now she's fallen to rot as well. Please. Send a miracle, or a curse, or even the blackguard priests. Anything."

The plea was nothing new. What caught Ingersol was the fervor in the man's voice, the way he recited misery as if it were a holy text memorized since birth. Ingersol found himself almost admiring it. He reached out, gently prying the idol from Elwin's hands.

"You understand what you ask? The old ways linger in the fen. If I loose the Church's wrath on your village, not one stone will stand. You may gain a brief harvest, but at what cost?"

Elwin met his gaze. "Cost me nothing, Holiness. I've nothing left to lose."

Ingersol turned the idol over in his palm, noting the crude runes carved into the base. Beneath the paint, the wood was dense and very old—likely relic from the pagan cults predating the Agony. He felt a flicker of disgust. Or perhaps curiosity.

He pressed the idol to his brow, breathing in the tang of blood and pine resin. For a moment, he let himself drift—opening that old wound where revelation came, the spot at the center of his skull where voices nested like hornets. The world tilted.

He saw: A field of reeds taller than a man's head, bending under a sky the color of rust. The ground rippled, then split, vomiting up hands, faces, whole bodies—all tangled in roots and sorrow. In the distance, a horned shadow loomed, picking at its teeth with a silvered nail. The scent of brine and rot and unborn rain. Through the vision ran a whisper, dry as old parchment:

"Send him. Let the agony take root. Water the world in grief."

Ingersol came to, still clutching the idol. His hands trembled, a rare and delicious thing. He glanced at Elwin, who sat with eyes screwed shut, knuckles white on his knees.

"You're in luck," Ingersol said softly. "The Agony hears you."

He rose and slid the cage door open, gesturing for the peasant to follow. The corridors beyond were darker, colder. Torches spat resinous flame. They passed beneath frescoes of saints devoured by jackals, martyrs on fire, the victorious wreathed in vines and thorns. Elwin stumbled, still blinking as if stunned by the memory of hope.

They reached the reliquary. Ingersol produced a ring of iron keys and unlocked the smallest of the armories—a stone cell holding an ancient, leather-bound tome and a phial of black oil. He handed both to Elwin.

"Return to your people. Perform the rites as written. Burn the oil at the four corners of your marsh. If you falter, if you doubt, you will die. If you prevail, the fen will be remade." He smiled, though his face hurt from the effort. "Do not look for mercy in it."

Elwin nodded, cradling the gifts to his chest. "Thank you," he whispered, but Ingersol was already turning away.

Back in his chambers, the High Priest washed his hands in rosewater and stared at his reflection in a battered tin mirror. He saw the lines of exhaustion, the little flecks of blood, the tired lust lurking in the corners of his mouth. But most of all, he saw the fire rekindled in his eyes.

There would be a miracle. The hinterlands would burn. And in the charred residue of suffering, the Church would find its next harvest of faithful. This was the true work of saints.

He donned his finest cassock—black velvet crusted with bone fragments—and returned to the nave, where the congregation awaited. The deacons arranged the kneelers, and the naked penitents filed in, voices hushed. Ingersol looked out over the sea of need and wretchedness, and felt himself newly sanctified.

He lifted the relic-blade, and the people bent as one. His words rang in the cold air:

"Rejoice, for suffering is never wasted. Through pain, we are made new."

Beneath the chandeliers, a thousand throats screamed Amen, and the day of agony began anew.

 

[The Patriarchy]

Far away in the drowning reaches of the Fenlands, Elwin Marsh trudged homeward under a sky that sagged like a bloated corpse, the tome and phial clutched tight against his chest as if they were the last sparks of a dying fire. The mud sucked at his boots with every step, whispering secrets of rot and ruin, and the air hung heavy with the stink of stagnant water and forgotten graves. He could still feel the High Priest's gaze on him, that cold fire promising change at the edge of a blade, and it made his heart stutter with a mix of dread and something almost like joy—finally, a path out of this endless mire.

Back in his village, a sorry cluster of thatched huts sinking into the bog, Elwin's neighbors gathered around the central fire pit as he approached, their faces gaunt and hopeful in the flickering light. His wife, Mira, was there too, her once-bright eyes dulled by fever, wrapped in a threadbare shawl that did little to hide the sores creeping up her arms. "Elwin," she murmured, reaching for him with trembling hands, "did the priest... did he listen?"

He nodded, setting the relics down on a warped wooden table with the care of a man handling live coals. "He did more than listen, love. He gave us the way." The words felt heavy on his tongue, laced with the basilica's incense that still clung to his clothes, but he pushed on, opening the tome to reveal pages scrawled in a script that twisted like thorns. "We burn the oil at the four corners come midnight. Chant the words, and let the Agony do its work."

The villagers exchanged glances, a murmur rippling through them like wind over reeds—old Tamsin with her scarred hands from years of failed harvests, young Jem who dreamed of escaping to the cities but never quite mustered the nerve. "And if it calls down hell itself?" Tamsin asked, her voice a gravelly whisper, but there was no real fight in it; they'd all seen too many children swallowed by the red waters.

Elwin met her eyes, his stammer gone for once in the heat of conviction. "Then hell it is. Better fire than this slow drowning." He thought of the idol he'd surrendered, the one his grandfather carved from fen-wood, and wondered if the old gods were watching, chuckling in the shadows. But the High Priest's vision had seeped into him too, a whisper of roots and rising hands, and he knew there was no turning back.

As night fell, they prepared, marking the corners with stakes driven into the muck, the black oil sloshing in its phial like liquid midnight. Mira leaned on Elwin's arm, her breath ragged but her smile faint and real. "Whatever comes, we face it together," she said, and he squeezed her hand, feeling the fragile bones beneath her skin, his love for her a quiet ache amid the gathering storm.

Meanwhile, in the heart of Ontario, High Priest Ingersol knelt alone in his private oratory after the day's rituals, the bone fragments on his cassock digging into his knees like loving reminders. The visions still danced in his mind, that horned shadow grinning from the fen's depths, and he allowed himself a rare, private laugh—oh, how the Agony delighted in its ironies, turning a peasant's plea into the empire's next conquest. But doubt flickered too, unbidden: what if this miracle unraveled threads he couldn't mend? He pushed it aside, rising to pen a missive to General Adiran Delphine, his kin and rival, knowing the general's pragmatic eye would see the opportunity in the chaos to come.

"Brother," he wrote in ink as red as blood, "the fen stirs. Prepare your legions for the harvest of souls." Sealing it with wax imprinted by his gorget, Ingersol felt the familiar lust for power coil in his gut, warm and wicked, and he welcomed it like an old friend.

 

[The Patriarchy]

At the edge of the Fenlands, where dusk was no more than a purple bruise on the horizon, Elwin and Mira labored side by side beneath the ever-thickening fog. Each stake pounded into the marsh was accompanied by a muttered prayer, alternating between the brittle cadences of the Agony and the softer, older words that their mothers and grandmothers had whispered in the birthing huts. The black oil shimmered in the lantern light, iridescent, refusing to mix with the water that seeped up from the roots.

The others kept their distance. They watched from the shivering circle of the village, eyes ringed with exhaustion and suspicion, clutching charms against their necks. Even young Jem, who claimed to fear nothing, kept a wary space between his muddy boots and the wetted boundary Elwin was staking out.

By midnight the wind died, and the bog grew unnaturally still. Mira’s breathing was labored, her body spent by fever and dread, but she forced herself upright at the center of the marsh, holding the relic-tome open with hands that shook only a little.

"Is this the place?" she asked, voice lost among the reeds.

Elwin nodded, though the spot looked the same as every other in the sodden hell of his childhood. "It will do. The Agony prefers ground that remembers pain." He uncorked the phial. The scent was heavier than pitch, sour and sharp, and it made his tongue itch to speak the words even before he looked at the script. He poured a spiral of oil around their feet, as prescribed, and set a single black candle at the northernmost stake.

The ritual had sounded dramatic in the High Priest's cold voice, but now, under the dead stars, it felt childish. Still, Elwin began the chant, and Mira joined him, their voices weaving through the dark.

On the second round, the marsh began to stir. The water near the southern stake trembled. The silt shifted, a slow burble, as if a creature the size of a wagon was crawling beneath the peat toward them. From the village, a child screamed. Old Tamsin spat and drew a circle in the air with her ruined finger.

Elwin tried to focus on the words. Each repetition twisted the world tighter: reeds bending in submission, frogs falling silent, even the ever-present whine of insects going mute. Only their voices remained, thin and scraping, scraping at something just under the skin of the world.

And then, without warning, the water between the stakes erupted.

A thing rose, slow and deliberate, as if aware that it had all the time in creation. At first, it looked like a bundle of roots and river-wrack, trailing centuries of mud and bone. But as it straightened, it shed its slime with an indolent grace, and the lanterns along the bank illuminated a shape almost human, though stretched and twisted in the way of things seen through too much water. Its hair was a tangle of black eel and willow, its fingers long enough to curl around a man's thigh. Its eyes, when they found Elwin, were pale and milky, but blazed with purpose.

Mira dropped the tome and fell to her knees, clutching her stomach as if the fever had suddenly turned to fire. Elwin, for all his years of hunger and humiliation, could not move, could not even lower his gaze. He could only watch as the being regarded him with something like amusement.

"Which of you suffers most?" it asked, the words lapping out of its mouth without movement, as if it spoke in the language of cold water and memory.

Elwin tried to speak, but the reeds in his throat would not let him. Mira's lips bled with the effort to answer, but all that came was a sob.

The thing sniffed the air, thoughtful. "You both reek of loss, but only one of you clings to hope. I am not here for the hopeful."

It glided closer, never disturbing the spiral of oil on the water's surface. Its mouth widened, and something that might have been a smile fissured its face. "You have called me with the rites of the Agony, but those words are no longer my tongue. Still, I am bound to answer, for pain is pain and hunger is hunger, even among the dead gods."

Elwin's voice cracked out. "What are you?"

The creature seemed almost offended. "Once I was the wisdom in this marsh. I took the shape of your need. In another world I was queen, or monster, or solace in the dark. Today, I am the only thing that remembers how to listen. The Agony thinks it owns suffering, but that is a lie. Will you learn the truth, or do you wish only for your child to live?"

Mira, eyes rolling, whispered, "Please—just let it end. Let him grow strong."

The being reached down, and its hand rested gentle on Mira’s head, as if in benediction. "You beg for death, but you fear it too much to taste it. This is why your priests grow fat, and your fields rot: you have mistaken pain for purpose."

It turned its gaze on Elwin, appraising, the way a wolf might a bleeding rabbit. "You I like. You have lost so much that there is nothing left to sell but your soul, and yet here you are, willing to pay the price. That is the old faith, the faith before this Church of pretty wounds."

Elwin’s lips moved without his consent. "Tell me the price."

The being leaned in, so close its hair brushed his cheek, slick and cool and smelling of ancient rains. "The price is memory. The cost is witness. Take what I give you, and you will not merely feed your kin, but you will remember every face that dies in your name. You will become the root, the seed, the rot that births the next world. You will not be thanked. You will not be loved. But you will never be forgotten."

A terrible clarity split Elwin’s mind, as if a new language had been etched into his skull, all spikes and hunger and luminous, coiling need. The vision was not of crops or children reborn, but of a village in flames, of blood and flood and the slow, lovely gnaw of decay turning every suffering into fresh, fertile promise.

He understood then what the High Priest must have known: miracles were not for the meek, and every answered prayer was a birth cry for the next agony.

He nodded, and the being pressed its palm to his brow.

The world upended. For a moment, Elwin stood atop a tower of bone, looking down on a continent writhing with chained cities, black rivers running through open veins, and a sky so dense with the smoke of burning flesh that even the stars were afraid to shine. He saw himself in the nave of a cathedral, robed in a garment of rawhide and wire, leading a congregation that screamed with joy as they whipped themselves bloody on the flagstones.

He saw his children, not as children but as saints, as martyrs, as fodder for the machinery of salvation.

He saw the High Priest, Ingersol, standing naked on a hill of skulls, looking up at him with love and terror, the both of them crowned by the same crown of thorns.

When the vision passed, Elwin knelt in the marsh, skin burning with a hundred shallow wounds, and the oil on the water was gone. The being hovered above him, serene.

"It is done," it said. "Go home. In three nights’ time, your child will awaken, hungry and whole. Feed her, and all the others, until the marsh is empty. Then come to me again, and I will teach you how to eat the world."

It melted back into the water, leaving the reeds untouched, the spiral unbroken. Elwin staggered to his feet. Mira clung to him, sobbing, but her fever was already fading, and her hands, though raw, felt alive again.

From the village, a low moan of relief rose as the clouds split, letting down a drizzle as clean and sweet as a lover’s parting breath.

Far away, in the heart of the basilica, Ingersol woke from a nightmare that tasted like truth, blood running from his nostrils and the word “witness” burning on his tongue. He stared at the ceiling for a long time, too afraid to sleep, and for the first time in years, he doubted that suffering alone would save the world.

Three days later, the harvest in the Fenlands was bountiful beyond hope, though every potato and leech-root came up veined in red, and the water fowl grew enormous, eyes too bright for peace. The children healed, but their laughter was edged with something sharp, and the elders watched them with awe and a kind of animal fear.

At the new moon, Elwin took his family to the marsh, dressed in the same rags and bruises, and sang the old songs that weren’t in any book. The being appeared, this time with a crown of flowers woven from the bones of drowned men, and it smiled as it set Elwin’s daughter on its knee.

"Do you see?" it asked the girl, stroking her hair. "Pain is just the soil. What matters is what grows from it."

The girl laughed, and in her voice was the hunger of all the world.

High Priest Ingersol read the reports from the Fenlands in silence, eyes skipping over the numbers and prayers, hunting for the ghost beneath the text. He saw the pattern immediately—miracles that curdled into menace, blessings that demanded a tithe of suffering. He felt the cold hand of prophecy upon him, and knew his only choice was to claim the heretic, or see his faith consumed by it.

He donned his blackest cassock, summoned the Chain-Bearers, and made ready for pilgrimage.

Because that, he knew, was the only way to bear witness: to suffer, to conquer, to kneel before the face of the god that comes after all the old gods have died.

In the heart of the Fenlands, beneath a sky the color of old wounds, Elwin waited.