The Great Hall spread before him like a map. He saw it not with sight, but through the flow. Seven hundred and twenty-three figures knelt on the stone floor, each pulsing with its own pale light. Their threads—hundreds of bright, vibrating filaments—stretched upward and converged at a single point: him. It looked like a spiderweb woven from glowing smoke, or the roots of a tree seen from below, merging into a single trunk.
Kaelen opened the doors and entered. The hall was vast—a former factory operating room, repurposed into something else. The ceiling vanished into the darkness high above their heads, and the walls were bare, made of gray stone and rusted steel. There were no ornaments, no statues. Kaelen wanted no statues; he knew that a god who requires statues is a weak god.
Everyone was kneeling face-down as he walked in. He moved through the narrow aisle between the rows of followers. None raised their heads. He heard their breaths—measured, slow, synchronized. Months ago, they had each breathed differently; now, they breathed as one. He hadn't planned this; it had simply happened.
He stepped onto the dais at the end of the hall—a simple wooden platform, devoid of ornament. He turned to face the congregation, seven hundred and twenty-three faces still turned toward the floor. Kaelen reached out and dipped his fingers into one of the strands of luminous smoke. The filament vibrated in his hand like a taut string. Through it, he felt the breath of a woman in the third row—Ines, a silk merchant who had lost her son during an epidemic two years ago. He felt the breath of the man in the ninth row—Torvald, a former soldier with a broken nose and three scars on his back. He felt the breath of the boy in the last row—fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, who had come alone and trembled throughout the entire service. Hundreds of stories, hundreds of pains, hundreds of things they had lost and sought.
Kaelen closed his hand around the filament.
"Let us begin".
His voice did not echo through the hall. It slipped into the threads, permeated each of the filaments, and struck the space of the great hall as if Kaelen were standing directly behind the back of every person gathered there. Seven hundred and twenty-three pairs of hands rose toward the heavens.
The ritual continued. Kaelen spoke—words of a liturgy he had written himself, which sounded ancient and inviolable because he had constructed them to be so. The followers answered. Their voices were one voice, their gestures one gesture. The threads pulsed in rhythm with the spoken prayer.
Energy flowed into him slowly, in warm waves. Pure, human faith. Not the wild Ether from the Rift—not chaotic, stinging, and reeking of decay. This was different. Dense, calm, and warm as the glow of a fireplace. It spread through him evenly. Ten minutes passed, then twenty. Kaelen held the threads with both hands, clenched in his fists like reins. The stream of faith was building. Normally, at this stage, it would slow as the followers grew exhausted and lost concentration. Today, it did not slow. It grew.
Kaelen clenched his jaw. The threads that should have vibrated calmly and steadily were now trembling like strings on the verge of snapping. He felt the stream of faith gathering within him, thickening, pressing against the boundaries of what he could hold.
The Critical Threshold.
He could have let go of the threads. He could have ended the ritual and told the followers that it was enough for today. Nothing would have happened. He could have. Kaelen looked through his mask at the hundreds of pulsing lights, seven hundred and twenty-three filaments strained to their limits.
He did not let go. He tightened his hands and allowed the stream to swell.
It happened quickly. Too quickly to react, too quickly to think—a wave of energy struck him from within, and for a fraction of a second, everything else ceased to exist. The hall, the followers, the torches—all gone. Kaelen felt his consciousness—his thoughts, his memories, everything that made him—being violently torn from his body like a cork from a bottle.
Darkness. Not like the darkness beneath the mask, but deeper, absolute. And then, something else. A space without borders, without shape, without color. There was no sound, no smell. Only the heavy, overwhelming presence of something immense—something so vast that Kaelen could not grasp where it ended. Because it ended nowhere.
In the middle of this space, in a place without a name or coordinates, something smoldered—gigantic, fading, as slow as the death of a star. A warmth that was cold, a light that was darkness. Kaelen knew without a single word or explanation what it was.
The Mover. The Creator. But how?
It slept. It breathed unevenly, in long, intermittent sighs stretching over time beyond the calculation of a human mind. Around it—far off, in places Kaelen saw as points on a map too large to fit in one head—other things circled. Dark, patient, waiting. Kaelen saw them for a fraction of a second: twelve pairs of eyes looking in his direction.
Then, consciousness rushed back into his body like water pouring through a rift in a hull, and Kaelen fell to his knees on the wooden platform with a dull thud. The mask on his face heated to the temperature of living skin. Followers moved in their pews, a murmur of voices rose, and he heard Mira's footsteps as she ran through the nave. Kaelen pressed his hands against the wood of the platform, focusing on its roughness, the splinters biting into his fingers, and the chill of the old boards. Real, present, here.
He was trembling. Mira knelt beside him and caught his arm.
"Kaelen—"
"Quiet". His voice did not break; that was important. "Give me a moment".
She gave him a moment. Kaelen knelt on the dais, looking through the mask at the hundreds of pale threads now falling limp like severed ropes. The followers waited in silence. He knew two things. First, he had seen the Mover, the Creator. He had seen the Rift and… no, he could not think of it. When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into…
He stood up slowly, his legs steady. Good. He turned to the followers.
"That is enough for today," he said, his voice through the threads emerging calm and controlled. "Go". No one protested.
Once the hall had emptied, Mira stood by his side in silence. Kaelen sat on the edge of the platform, his mask removed and resting on his knees. The silver oval reflected the torchlight. Mira waited; she had learned not to ask until he began to speak.
Kaelen turned the mask over in his hands. "Mira," he said, not looking at her. "How many contacts do we have in other districts?"
"Six points, maybe seven".
"That's not enough". He set the mask on his knee and looked up at the darkened ceiling. "I need more. Much more. And not just in this district. In other cities, in other places".
"That will be difficult. The Church—"
"I know what the Church is," he said, his voice calm and steady. "That is why it must be done right. Quietly, in small steps".
Mira was silent for a moment. "What happened during the ritual?"
Kaelen stood, took the mask, and tucked it under his arm. "I saw something," he said. "Something I was not meant to see". He moved toward the exit, his footsteps echoing in the empty hall.
"And what now?" Mira asked behind him.
Kaelen stopped at the door but did not turn around. "Now, we look for the others".
He stepped out into the corridor.