The sun rose anyway.
It was twilight. The Order’s chapel smelled of dust and burnt beeswax. Brother Matthias, a novice with hair like straw and a face full of doubt, sneezed. It was a wet, violent, unapologetic sneeze. And it happened exactly as the sun’s last sliver bled below the horizon.
Matthias wiped his nose on his sleeve—the wrong sleeve, Aldric noted with a spike of panic—and looked around. “Sorry,” he whispered. The sun rose anyway
He saw a cage. And he was the only one still inside.
Matthias blinked. “Father, it’s dark. The reliquary is unlit. I’ll break my neck on the marble.” Brother Matthias, a novice with hair like straw
Not carved in stone, not whispered by prophets, but printed on cheap, laminated cardstock and tucked into the breast pocket of every acolyte of the Order of the Unfurled Truth. It was called the Compendium of Small Correctnesses , and it was, by all accounts, a masterpiece of misery.
Matthias didn’t move. Instead, he did something extraordinary. He laughed. Not a mocking laugh, but a small, weary, human laugh. “What if the rule is wrong?” he asked. Matthias wiped his nose on his sleeve—the wrong
“What if,” Aldric said slowly, “I don’t do the laps?”