“So what brought y-you here? To Marz, I mean?” Ruler asked.
Daisy considered the question. It was fair enough, they had been through two weeks of sermonizing and good-natured theological debate, to say nothing of a breakneck flight from jail. But where did her story begin? “I suppose it started…”
Daisy was born on Jupitre, to a family which, while at times dysfunctional, was at least not of the dominant Witnessate sect of the Eternalists, nor to the multifarious cults of the Enemy masquerading as righteous worshippers. She had, in short, been one of the Unchained. They were reactionary, as most things in the Kingdom of Air inevitably had to be if they were to defy the norms of the fallen world. They were anti-isolationist, and anti-imperialist. Everything the Wholist Church and the Eternalists who were their offshoot hated and feared. But that had become relevant much after her birth. Or, perhaps, if she looked at who her parents were, much before. All she knew when she was a small child sliding along the frozen bergs of air and water was that her parents reminded her that she had no obligation to say the Creed of Loyalty at school, but still made her go to school.
In school, she had excelled at ciphering. It wasn’t a popular subject, not considered necessary to master the more prestigious spheres of sorcery or write rabble-rousing pamphlets against the “regressive and repressive” or even “heretical” faiths which believed in direct relationship with the One God. Daisy had not seen the sense in such rhetoric even from an early age, perhaps because of the influence much before of Unchained parents.
They attended a small congregation a considerable walk from home, which had the good fortune to be upwards through the clouds on the hyperactive walk there, and then a joyful sled ride downhill on the way home, punctuated by bridge crossings. She didn’t think until years later of the fact her parents always arranged for there to be a sled for the ride home. But at church, the doctrine was that the Creator Supreme loved His children, and that through the ignominious death of Christ Savior by bodily launch into the vacuum of space and His meteoric return, the One God had made a way for all mortals to know Him personally, and be freed from sin. Sin could still entangle one, it wasn’t a cult like the Named who deluded themselves to be beyond sin. But it was analogous to a trip up an icy berg, footing only sure if you knew how to look, rather than iron manacles from which there was no escape. Thus “the Order of the Broken Chain.”
But she was getting sidetracked from ciphering, and from another religious dead end she had avoided despite said talent. Alleged to be spread across every planet, the Coven of Geometers was a women-run order of calculators and triangulators, mapping the stars with cross staves and numbers rather than relying on dead reckoning. The Coven had its own faith, not compulsory but highly encouraged; the Tops of Eight. It related the holy number eight with a line drawn across its middle to numerological concepts of limits and infinity, and had to Daisy seemed entirely too fanciful for her by-now well-ordered mind.
It was, however, out of worries for her religiosity that her church pastor had taken her aside and begun to teach her water sorcery. He had said that with a sufficient grasp of water sorcery, she could know the depths of her heart, her very soul. It had brought up the realization of how close her rationalist inclinations had come to getting a stranglehold on her faith, because she had struggled for the first time in a long time to master the art of sorcery. Even given a bowl of water, she had trouble believing that the One God willed… much of anything for her life, much less that she make the water so much as tremble. It had taken many fruitless nights of prayer to the ceiling before she had realized her faith. She still couldn’t explain what had changed in her heart. All she knew was that one night, just as she was about to become a Bachelor of Geometry, she realized she believed, and in one motion conjured a ball of water into her outstretched hand and filled it with her inner light.
A Bachelor geometer, a proud water sorceress, and a critically reasoned Unchained, she came into a world armed to the teeth and ready to oppose everything she thought or said. The Coven of Geometers was no stranger to this fact of life of Jupitre, they had equipped every Bachelor with a dragon staff, ostensibly only for dragons. A cross staff and rifle of unique design, it had a breech-loading rifled barrel capable of accepting common lead ammunition and turning it into accurate projectiles, again ostensibly for dealing with dragons, but also effective at taking out demagogues at range. Daisy had never seen the sense of that either. “Thou shalt not kill a human being.” Dragons were fair game, but the very Word of God, the Savior whose Mercy allowed anyone any hope of attaining Heaven, forbade the taking of human life.
So it was that she tried to oppose the death cults and Eternalists—themselves a death cult, but so iconic and pervasive as to practically be their own category—in the court of public opinion, with facts and arguments, with persuasion and truth.
In the Kingdom of Air, home to the diamond citadel of the Lord of Lies.
She tried not to hate, but she misliked seeing people misled with out of context quotes and pomp and fanfare. Without question, the Savior had lectured about Hell. But the Draconic word for Hell and the Jovian concept were two very different things. Hell was literately the place of consumption, for dragonkind could across the ten varieties eat anything. But in the Jovian loan word it had taken on the dimensions of… well, it fit very well with Infernalist doctrine. The Savior had never spoken of eternal conscious torment, but preachers in death cults—such as the Waterborne and the Eternalists—spoke of it often. It put fire in her blood, and it was the thought of the gentle luminous glow of her soul reflected in a ball of water that kept her from violence.
As she’d said before getting sidetracked, so it was that she tried to oppose the death cults in the court of public opinion, armed with facts and arguments, with persuasion and truth. She was foolhardy, but she had been certain as youths are certain of the rightness of her position, of the good and reason in human beings. Ironically, the same thing that made her so certain of victory was the same thing that had led to her defeat. She had not, in school, been taught critical thought, but only rote memorization and the tricks of calculation. Indeed, it was endemic of Jupitre’s education system—she would remember later that it was a system—that critical thought was buried under the demands of trivial pursuit and simple answers. But she was getting ahead of herself.
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Under Jovian law, at least in the district of the state of the octant of Jupitre in which she resided, allowed anyone to file a suit of appeal for blatant defiance of the Will of God. This had been used in the past to persecute the Coven of Geometers when they had proclaimed that Jupitre was not the center around which the orb of Heaven circled, which was why she knew of it. She filed a suit against the Eternalists themselves, the prevailing religion of Jupitre. She was prepared with quotations, facts, measurements of space, and an as-yet undaunted spirit.
She was utterly unprepared for what came next.
A rain of vitriol poured in from all sides. Not only she, but the Coven of Geometers, the Unchained, and her family faced the deluge. She was attacked, much as she had been bullied in primary school, as a heretic. She belonged to the geometers, and as everyone knew, geometers believed they had some special “in” with the One God. This was not true, but splashed across broadsides were the words “Tops of Eight” with the word “Top” in bright red ink. Never mind that she didn’t belong to that faith. Never mind that in the same article they pronounced that her faith was some little nothing nobody had ever heard of, and so who was she to claim she knew anything of religion? Everyone knew of the Eights, but nobody had ever heard of the Unchained, but everyone knew they were heretics, worse than the Named.
She was attacked personally. Branded a harlot, simply because she was comely. Arrogant, for challenging an institution dating back to the Age of Loss. Stupid, for she had never once made a pilgrimage to the Repositorium of Knowledge—which she had, in fact, but had declined to leave a part of her mind behind in exchange for their wealth.
Things got worse from there. And she had turned to desperate measures. She accused the high hierophant of the Eternalists of encouraging his parish to harass her. She mentioned threats to her life, made by people she had never met nor heard of before. Daisy counted on the law to shield her, but her faith was misplaced. Her home in her berg had been defaced with human waste, but when she was out with their child, sorcery or direct draconic interference had collapsed the cavern, killing her husband.
The name of her child? Rose. Plant names were popular on Jupitre, and they had an advanced science of hydroponics somehow despite their educational system. She was alive and well, or had been when Daisy had fled Jupitre. She’d left Rose with her parents, who professed the sincerity of their faith but had obediently recited the Creed of Loyalty when pressed. It had been a sorrowful moment for Daisy, to read of her parents being humbled so. The Coven of Geometers came under persecution, their gathering sites defaced, pickets screaming obscenities during their lectures. Her school she had been educated in was brought under an unnecessary and invasive quality and standards review. And as for her church, the place she had done her growing up, the home that a fellow parishioner had so kindly opened, it was treated similarly to her own home, and collapsed. That was when she had decided she was going to leave. It wasn’t enough to estrange her from her family, they meant to dismantle and humble everyone she had ever respected or looked up to.
It was not a proud moment when she had sighted through her rifle to consider taking the life of the high hierophant. She had set down her rifle and left her position on the berg, unable to conscience such an act. “Don’t resist him who is evil.” She resolved to leave, if the planet wanted so badly nothing to do with her. Or evil to do with her. She started seeking out ley charts, books of old lore, leaving behind herself a trail of destruction as death cultists hounded her every—
Death cultist? It’s a dramatic title, admittedly. But it is one whose beliefs lead inevitably to death. The Eternalists were her archetypical example. They were an offshoot of the Wholist Church, but they were nearly identical in doctrine except for the ends to which they put their resources. They revered dragons as nearly Savior figures, just like the Wholist Church, but their heresy ran deeper. Daisy could quote the scripture which was the foundation of their faith, in the highest echelons of demon-worshiping elites. “This Good News of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole universe for a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.” They had taken Wholist doctrine, itself a tool of the draconic elite, and turned it further from the Word to serve their ends. For as is prayed, “Glory be to the Supreme, and to the Savior, and to the Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” The Glory Be served their purposes and glorified their purposes. They would distort the Gospel so that the world would never end, so that their heirs could revel in the wealth thieves broke in to steal for all eternity. For if the Good News never made it from Mercurie to Neptoon, the end would not come. They reveled in death eternal, in an unending void into which they could slip, free of the judgment to come.
The thing about those who think they’re righteous, their fervor is great. While she had no doubt the upper echelons of the Eternalists knew exactly what they were up to, their adherents were misled rather than evil. At least mostly. Those who came for her in the night were gleeful at the opportunity to take human life under the aegis of defending their faith. But they had not approached quietly, and her dragon staff, wielded in its third capacity as a quarterstaff, had left them with little worse than broken limbs.
Giving up on an easy search through lore for the location of Satern’s draconic gate, Daisy fled for the gate to Marz. It had been located long before by cultists, the Waterborne. When she arrived, they refused her entry. She was infamous by then, even beyond the octant in which she had been raised. Such was the obsessive invasiveness of the persecution she had faced, they knew she was a water sorcerer. The Waterborne would not let anyone break their stranglehold on their market. They were not, however, a fortress. Daisy had snuck inside their encampment, only to behold the more fearsome guardian of the portal, a fire dragon.
While soulcery had existed for much of an Age, there were not many gates between planets. From what she’d heard, Daisy would much rather have gone on to Orth, but actual travel between planets was severely restricted by the inability to paint a portal of somewhere one had not seen. She would have to ask Ruler when her telling was done—and she was nearly done—why light sorcerers didn’t master painting and then use light sorcery to scry on other planets and make a mint selling portals to entire new markets or parishes.
She confronted the dragon, who evidently kept the cultists as best as it could on the Jovian side of the portal. Of course, they had heard, in their adventures, that clearly some bought or snuck their way through and escaped. Though, if they were not a cult, what was there to escape from? She had killed the dragon entirely by accident, her grip slipping and her fingers sparking to fire her dragon staff at the ceiling and drop a pile of ice on its head. Daisy supposed she was lucky the entire iceland had not collapsed. She suspected the Waterborne would use the death of the dragon to emigrate wholesale, assuming their leaders didn’t crack down on it. Assuredly, they would raise their prices, free from draconic oversight. For reasons likely relating to the Wholist Church, dragons liked to pretend a benevolent facade, and so had likely limited their price fixing. And so she had come to Marz. But what was Ruler’s story?
