-Around the same time Rover appeared-
The hour is early or late; under the Synod, day and night are determined by the weight of the next prophecy. The Valley of the Word doesn't care for clocks. There's only the low-level hum of machines, the piped-in sussurus of Gregorian chant spliced with the tick and whine of difference engines, and the smell of old stone, copper, and dried blood.
He is kneeling. This is not a child's pose but the position demanded by the architecture of his cell. The floor is inlaid with lines of gold, fractal sigils radiating from a single cruciform slab at the center of the chamber. The slab is marble, carved to a standard the Vatican would have envied in the days before Hell clawed its way onto the surface. Atop it stands the likeness of the Man Himself—arms outstretched, gaze fixed on eternity, a crown of thorns rendered in wire so fine it catches the faint light with every air-cycled movement.
The Tactician does not cry. His tear ducts were cauterized in the Third Initiation, replaced by tiny mesh strainers designed to filter out metabolic contaminants. His hands are small, age indeterminate, knuckles like marbles under skin that's both pale and mottled, the veins beneath tracing unfamiliar cartographies. He clutches the rosary as if strangling it might unlock a better class of miracle, but the pressure only deepens the pattern of the cross into his palm.
He prays, but it's not prayer like the Receptors chant as they trudge the perimeter with their Arks of the Signal. This is silent. This is not for God, but for the moment before God notices him.
He feels it before it arrives: a kindling behind the eyes, a pop in the left cochlear implant, the subtle twitch of the myelin sheath around the upper spinal cable. Then, a stillness. Time goes flat. The air stills, even the background noise of the hidden monastery's constant function blanked as though something unspeakably old is holding its breath.
The Voice hits.
He doesn't remember the first second. Only the soundless scream as his spine arcs backward hard enough that two vertebrae crack, and the crown of his skull slams into the padded collar of the restraint frame bolted to the altar.
He shakes, but the real shaking is in the vision: a sequence of images, faster than any chemical mind could process, burning themselves into the lining of his consciousness like stigmata on fresh skin.
First, a field of iron, blackened, and the sky ablaze with streaks of golden fire.
Second, a beast with horns bent double, dragging its body across a charnel pit, feeding on what remains of the Faithful.
And lastly, a man, or more than a man, at the center of it, with eyes like pieces of the dying sun and a wound in his chest that pours out light.
The images layer, fragment, reassemble with the unsparing clarity of true prophecy. He sees a map in the shape of a neural net, stretching from the ruined Jerusalem to the ramparts of New Antioch, every point of violence a neuron firing.
His body convulses in realspace. The seizure lasts twenty minutes, but subjectively, he lives a lifetime in that state, witness to every death and every glory in the next two days of the Crusade.
He is aware, even as his limbs lock and his lungs starve, that the machines plugged into his spinal harness are running hot. The resin around his nape itches with the heat of a thousand micro-calculations, the difference engine in the next room flaring its cooling fans in desperation as it tries to keep pace with the data dump coming through his god-damned soul.
Then, with a pop like a finger snap beside his ear, it ends.
He is left hanging, limp, drooling from the side of his mouth, the blood that seeps from his left nostril immediately caught by the monastic drip-catcher sewn into his collar. He can taste iron, ozone, and something he knows for certain is not a flavor of Earth.
He wants to lie down, to go somewhere dark and quiet, but the prophecy is never about what you want.
He wrenches himself upright, joints creaking, and peels his hands from the cross. Some skin comes with it; it'll grow back. The next phase is always clarity, the world sharpened to a spearpoint, colors too bright, sound like a blade in the ear. He staggers from the cell, past the white-robed Receptor at the door, who doesn't meet his eyes or move to help. Their brains are half metal anyway, and not designed to withstand the fallout of a direct transmission.
The corridor is cool stone, lit by a chemical blue that flickers in time with the pulse of the prophecy. He runs. He has to get the message to the transmission hub before the overload phase kicks in and his body resets to factory default, which is to say: dead.
He rounds the corner at a dead sprint. There's a commotion up ahead. Someone yelling, the echo of boots on tile. He can hear his own heart, irregular and stuttering.
There, down the hall, an Observer. Stature hulking, helmet reflecting all and nothing, the Eye of God embedded in its faceplate turned directly toward him.
The Tactician feels a little like crying. Instead he lifts his voice, every word tearing at the throat.
"Stop—" he says, but it comes out a whistle, the whistle of old agony and new purpose.
The Observer pauses.
He tries again, this time pushing with the full force of the thing inside him.
"GOD HAS SAID—"
He is aware, in the split second before the seizure takes him, that this is the first time anyone has ever heard him speak at this volume.
"SAINT…" Even just speaking causes pain on another scale. "ROVER…" A quick pause to catch any breath he has left before saying at last. "ANTIOCH…"
He gets the words out. That's the only job that matters. Then the crash hits. A voltage in the brain that isn't chemical, isn't electrical, but something stranger, more essential. He bites his tongue, feels the copper flood his mouth, and drops.
He has time to see the Observer's arms, clad in woven metal and inscribed with the sigils of their order, catch him before he hits the marble. Time to see the lens of the Eye whir, focusing in on his face, and then he's down, cold stone leeching the last heat from his cheek.
Somewhere above him, the Observer rips open the front of his robe, pressing metal fingers to the carotid, then leans in and whispers a line of liturgical code to the bio-implant in his neck. The world comes rushing back in with a spike of adrenaline, burning so hot it feels like he's on fire. He arches again, but this time there's control in it. The shakes subside, replaced with the knowledge that he will almost certainly die before the next sunrise, but that he has done the only thing that ever mattered.
He's aware, in the peripheral, of the Observer standing and sprinting away, the cloak trailing behind like the shadow of a banshee, boots making no noise on the stone.
He rolls onto his side. There's a thin stream of blood on the floor
He can hear, through the thick walls and the holy insulation, the first alarms going up. Bells not for prayer but for alert, for war. The monastery is awake, and the valley is about to hum with the sound of arming.
He closes his eyes and waits for the blackness, not with dread but with a sense of work well done.
He wonders if, in some other life, he would have liked to see the Saint for himself.
_
In another corridor, the Observer reaches the relay chamber in three strides. The door is a slab of iron, sealed with a code that only the Eye can see. It opens with the hiss of hydraulics, and the Observer is through, straight to the center where the transceiver waits. The room is already alive, the great dishes that line the walls vibrating with the low thunder of incoming and outgoing messages.
He punches in the sequence. The difference engine lights up. On the table, a quill writes itself into motion, documenting every word as the Observer speaks.
"Prophetic Alert," he says, voice a monotone, pure and clear. "Contact from Tactician. Word received. Subject: Saint. Subject: Rover. Vector: New Antioch."
A pause as the system parses, then a green light. Somewhere, a monk in another valley is reading the printout in real time.
The Observer stands there, waiting, silent. There is nothing else in the universe for him to do until the next command.
He does not think about the Tactician, bleeding on the floor in a side corridor. He does not consider the future, or the past. His only thought is this, the word is out. The prophecy delivered.
Whatever comes next is already on its way.
_
In the cell where it began, the boy on the floor is still breathing. Barely.
His hands are folded again, rosary beads slick with old blood and sweat.
The statue of the Christ looks down, expression carved as it has been for centuries, infinite pain, infinite patience.
He wishes, not for the first time, that he'd been born with the ordinary defects, the ones that let children die young or grow old in peace, instead of this.
He wonders what kind of world would need a Saint in 1914.
He hopes he can live just long enough to find out.
_____
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And thats it for this chapter. If you enjoyed leave a comment.
This chapter was a little short but its the start of other events.
15 more powerstones for an extra chapter. I won't be posting on Friday since i got a 12 hr shift lined up. But if we have enough powerstones ill send out 2 chapters the next time I post. So like Sat or Sunday.