Sunday made the city sound like shoes deciding whether to creak. Patricia liked to walk in churches—not to argue with heaven, just to say it had been consulted. Christian came because stained glass professes an honest physics he admired; also, you can discuss fittings with God if you have the right tone.
They brought Thomas because the alternative was leaving him to count chairs and invent crimes for them in his absence.
They chose a smaller church—one that hides its bones under modest plaster and pretends not to have eavesdropping saints. The nave held light like a decision. Candles breathed in perfect rhetoric.
He studied the windows. Most told stories that know exactly who should win. One, in a side chapel, had suffered a break no artisan could be blamed for. The patch was elegant, but a single shard—an isosceles triangle of deep blue streaked with white like a finger laid across it—held a wrongness that set his teeth at a new angle.
It watched.
Not with eyes. With refraction. It put the room together with a theory, and the theory included him.
He approached with the old chalk lady's advice in his head: keep lamps polite; keep wards honest. He did not touch. He attended. Breath in, asking. Breath out, agreeing. Focus like a cloth smoothed over a table.
[SEQ] Relic — Eligible (Vitre Saint Fragment)
[SEQ] Requirement: Reverence + Focus + No disturbance.
[SEQ] Warning: Sanctum context. Be precise.
Precision by the body: slack muscles, awake attention, intent thinner than a whisper. He didn't take; he offered care. The shard warmed the fraction an idea warms when placed in the right sentence.
A slanted glintsong slid along the floor to his foot and asked if he knew how to step with it. He lifted his toe by a hair. The line curved; his breath curved with it; a possibility wrote itself—a lance of light that would agree to be aimed if a lamp agreed to help.
He thought of Lantern Thrust without naming it. To name is to wake. He needed it asleep.
He pressed—not to change glass, which was already doing the job, but to carry a copy of the shard's intention in his Confluence. Warmth threaded up his forefinger to the knuckle and nested there like a tiny oath.
Patricia's hand found his shoulder as if to keep his soul from changing churches without permission. Christian followed his gaze to the repaired panel and nodded as men nod at good joins.
"Someone who cared fixed that," Christian said.
"Someone who cared broke it," Patricia murmured.
A priest with careful footsteps paused beside them. He looked at Thomas the way people look at candles that burn evenly. "You read windows," he said.
"I try to read what they read," Thomas answered, and the priest seemed satisfied.
He noticed a hairline in the flagstones: a clean path from the font to the door, a channel for water and intentions. He stood on it and felt steadier. Churches collect these lines the way markets collect rumors.
(…to be continued)