The day that Purifier-General Lyonel Havikar witnessed the miracle, his mind was not on the divine, but rather on paperwork.
Paperwork in truly enormous quantities; a plague of paperwork, perhaps, or a trial of paperwork that Aëo sent to test the mettle of only his most stalwart (and masochistic) faithful. It seemed that a caravan of tithes and tributes, intended for the Campus of St. Michael, had been diverted to the family estate of a particular priest of the Clerica Ecclesiastica. “For its own protection, owing to a most regrettable abundance of brigands infesting the road to Charligan at this time of year,” the good Father claimed. And, in a deeply predictable turn of events, several sacred relics, valuable items of silver and gold, and casks of sacramental wine, had been unloaded and delivered to the premises, “for safekeeping”. It had fallen on Havikar to pore through the piles of manifests detailing the caravan’s inventory and reconcile them with the version detailed upon arrival in Charligan, because numerous high-ranking members of the Clerica were embroiled in some petty feud that sounded comically close to a full Church schism. The losers of the feud, including, evidently, the covetous priest in question, were demanding that some party who was non-involved and even non-clergy, but of high enough rank to be credible and above reproach, reconcile the documents.
So, instead of rooting out diabolists with the keen eye and silent claws of a stooping hawk, Havikar had been hunched over piles of paperwork in his office all day, deciphering the wobbly penmanship of some arthritic clerk, in an attempt to ascertain the location of the priceless reliquary of St. Urmath’s Blessed Molars or Aëo knows what else. The bells had finally rung vespers, freeing him from this punishment, and before his assistant could breathe a word, he was out the door, on his horse, and cantering into the woods of the northernmost preserve behind Saint Yeshuel’s Academy.
Havikar was exceedingly fond of the preserve. Unlike the mercilessly groomed and manicured gardens of the Ordo Contemplata’s compounds, the preserves were left as Aëo created them– towering oaks and elms, dappled shafts of evening light slanting between them, babbling creeks and a few spots where a man could crouch in wait with bow drawn for the passage of a pheasant or white-tailed deer. He gave the horse its head and it oriented, as always, to a faint game trail. Its terminus was a lovely clearing with tall sweet grass and a stump perfect for resting one's rear on, smoking a pipe, and pondering.
Moments later his rear had achieved blissful communion with the stump, and pipe-weed smoke was curling into his lungs. Thank Aëo for small blessings, he thought, and permitted himself to relax, as much as he ever did.
Perhaps even such a trivial allowance was a mistake, because he heard a twig snap and didn't even turn his head. By the time he smelled the sharp stink of sulfur, it was too late. The ice-cold and deeply violating touch of demonic power coiled a crushing tentacle around his chest before he could reach for his sword or his holy symbol. It thrust an unseen fist into his mouth, gagging him and tasting of rot and rust, preventing him from crying out. Immobilized, he felt himself lifted off the ground; he dangled from an invisible pressure around his neck as though from a noose, and he knew he had mere moments before he suffocated.
“Hello, Havikar,” came a voice from below, one that sounded like the rustle of dead leaves on stone. The tentacle of power held his neck fast and his face pointed at the evening sky; he could not see his captor. Rage and sheer animal terror mingled in him, and he managed to gasp a few syllables.
“You… dare…. Come here…”
A malignant chuckle rasped across the clearing. “Indeed I do. You wouldn't remember me, as I was but a child when we last met. You were the one who dared, back then. You– just a Purifier back then, not the Purifier-General– came to the village of Ten Larches. You dared to pass judgment on the villagers for doing what they had to survive.”
Oh, Archons. That… was not his proudest moment. The villagers had sent to Charligan for help with a vicious and powerful bandit lord plaguing their lands. The Ordo Hasta could not assist, as they were engaged in putting down a minor armed insurrection in the southwest. An Imperial warden was dispatched, but too late. It seemed that the villagers bargained with demons of the Utterdark, hosting them in their own flesh in exchange for the power to defend themselves from the marauders. The bandit lord and all his followers were torn limb from limb. As was the Imperial warden when he arrived.
The worst part, though, was that this demonic protection has been bestowed upon the older children as well as the adults. Havikar had led a force of Gladium Aëo to Purify the village. An Aëo-forsaken mess, it had been. The villagers could assume a guise halfway between human and the enormous timberwolves of the region. Many of the Gladium, good men he'd grown to rely upon, met an undeservedly brutal end at their claws and jaws that day.
The monsters, once slain, recovered their human forms in death, and Havikar and the other survivors found, to their horror, children as young as twelve or thirteen among the corpses.
As though sensing his thoughts, the voice rasped, “I was only ten. I did not receive the Dark One’s blessing. But my sister was twelve. I wept over her and my parents' bodies, rent apart by Purifier blades. Ten years I waited, eating shit and garbage in the alleys of Charligan. But the Dark Ones were still there when I begged them for help in my quest for vengeance. Again they were there when Aëo and his Imperial lackeys were nowhere to be found.”
Dark spots swam in Havikar’s vision, and the sound of the thing’s voice seemed to come from far away, an impossibly long hallway filled with darkening water.
Not long now. May Aëo receive my soul. May He not find the works of my hand wanting…
And then he heard another voice. Small. Soft. Quaking with fear. Female?
“In the Holy Name of Aëo, I invoke the Keys of St. Gabril and the Church’s authority and I bind each and every demon in and around us…”
Laughter, riotous laughter. “By the Maelstrom itself! What have we here?! A nun? Quite the brave little thing, aren't you? And what's that you have there pointed at me? A… a pruning knife??!”
Howls of incredulous laughter sawed across the clearing. “Aëo really is weak and desperate, isn't he? He sends a child nun with a gardening tool to defend his most sadistic servant from being brought to justice. Havikar, you really must see this.”
An agonizing wrench, and his head jerked downward.
Oh, Aëo. He was hovering suspended a few feet off the ground. In front of him stood a truly horrific abomination–seven feet tall, a fusion of wolf and man, like his sorry kin, and not a happy one. The voice rasped from a misshapen muzzle-face, from which three eyes glared, a preternatural green with a dim glow; mangy tufts of fur sprouted willy-nilly from scabrous human skin. Grotesquely muscled limbs poised at strange angles, and barbed spines that belonged to neither wolf for man sprang from its extremities.
Just behind it stood a girl. Young, still in her teenage years, clad in drab linens– the raiment of an initiate; she likely hadn't taken her Ordo Solatium vows yet. Her frame was tall, girded with the muscle of one who hauled a great deal of water and shoveled a great deal of dirt on the convent grounds. A wimple covered her hair, and her pale face might have been thought pretty with her hair in ringlets, rouge on her cheeks, and a taffeta gown on her person… until one saw the dour cast of her mouth, and her eyes. There lived in those eyes only a strange, unsettling intensity that dispelled any such thoughts from Havikar’s head.
And indeed, she held a dented iron pruning knife pointed at the demon, still probably wet with dew from trimming the Contemplata’s rose bushes.
Well, Havikar thought, maybe the demon's right and Aëo's giving up on me, if an insane teenage nun really is who he sends to rescue me. Ah well, I'll be sure to ask Him in person shortly…
But the girl's prayer continued, her voice steadying as she continued, her gaze unwavering. “In the Archons’ name I bind them all, and I bind any demons supporting them, their evil leaders, and any minions of the Utterdark. I render them all deaf, dumb, blind and powerless…” It raised in pitch and volume, even as the demon’s cackles filled the clearing.
“Enough, I tire of this, Havikar. Time to return to the Utterdark carrying your head as a trophy and wearing this little whore’s face as a codpiece.”
And then the pruning knife in the girl’s hand began to glow. Brighter and brighter and brighter until the dusk-shadowed clearing was as bright as noonday. Havikar squinted. The demon hissed in pain.
…And its power wavered. The tentacle of force suddenly vanished. He hit the ground like a sack of turnips, winded and gasping.
“Oh, you meddling little cunt. DIE!”
Before he could blink or breathe or struggle to his feet or unsheathe his sword, the thing lunged at the girl, a dark blur almost too quick to behold. But the glow from the knife intensified till Havikar's eyes streamed tears from the pain of remaining open. Lightning forked through her hands, through the knife, and as it touched the knife, its silhouette moved, flowing like quicksilver, assuming a new form, longer, broader, beautiful. A longsword. And even as the thing’s claws raked the girl, a horrifying diagonal path splitting her from left shoulder to right hip, and she screamed as they rent her flesh, divine lightning of a white so pure it hurt to look at, blasted through the blade of the sword, blasted the demon into pieces.
It was over in moments. Silence. The stench of rot and sulfur. The purple of twilight. Ash, the greasy ash of burnt flesh, fell like snow.
_________________
“Praise Aëo. Oh, praise the Emperor. Milord Purifier! She's awake!”
The girl’s eyes opened. Even unfocused and half conscious, the fierce strangeness Havikar remembered from the clearing still smouldered. Now that he was close enough to see, they were hazel, almost amber in the afternoon light from the window. A clucking coterie of Ordo Solatium descended on her and commenced fussing frantically.
“Where am I? What happened?”
Her voice was oddly calm, about a half octave deeper than one might expect, her accent central Hyorian, and her diction that of one who studied under fine tutors. A young noblewoman, perhaps? Gone to the nunnery after being caught in the woodpile with a stable boy? The convents surely recruited half their ranks from such…
“The sisters tell me your name is Ceonred, an initiate on pilgrimage from St. Eirene’s. Is that correct?”
She nodded. “May I please have some water?”
A plump Solatia– Sister Ermendine was her name, and filled with Gabril’s own fire was she — barreled past Havikar, ewer and cup in hand. “Oh, lamb, please forgive the Purifier-General’s gruffness. He's barely left your side for three weeks, and he's told us all of the miracle–”
The girl struggled to sit up, and just as quickly fell back. “The what?”
The scene replayed itself in Havikar’s mind; he was not a man given to softness or whimsy, but he would remember it until called to Aëo’s company. “The demon’s claws had rent your chest, your heart and lungs. I believed you to be dead; none could have survived that. But the knife in your hand– I watched it turn into a longsword, and as I approached, I saw it to be made of solid tytonium. It began to glow again. The glow suffused you, and I watched it close your wounds. The Solatium’s healers still had to labour day and night to save you, and you will bear scars to rival the most seasoned veterans of the Hasta. But…” He lowered his voice. “I saw you restored from beyond the border of death itself.”
His eyes closed of their own volition. In truth, he was not a terribly devout man. But in that moment, divine revelation surged through him like Aëo’s own lightning through the girl’s blade. He’d looked at her, barely more than a child, and a girl! ... and then at the priceless tytonium relic that had previously been a bent tool for trimming garden weeds…
And such is the power of Aëo, that through Him, even the humblest and lowliest of tools may be transformed into a fearsome instrument of His will, and His might.
“The sword, I am afraid, was claimed by the Clerica Ecclesiastica for study. They have deemed it a most sacred relic; they call it the Thunderhead of Saint Claria or some such. I am sorry, Ceonred– it should be yours, by rights, but it is unlikely to ever be.”
The girl's face was unreadable. He suspected that to be its default.
“We must speak, though. We can wait until you're feeling well, if you prefer.”
She shook her head. “I am well enough.”
“Very well. I have questions for you. As you slept, myself and others examined you. You carry no trace of devilry, but neither do you have the abilities of one destined for the Circle of Thorns. How did you know to find us? Why did you intervene?”
She fixed him with her uncanny gaze. As a child he'd had a cat with eyes that colour, and the same midnight-black fur to match her hair, to boot. A mouser of prodigious, silent ruthlessness, it had been. “I felt its evil. I could follow it. Like a bad smell. We were praying vespers and… the stench came upon me and I could not bear it. I had to find it. I… have encountered that stench before. I had to do whatever I could to stop it.”
Havikar exhaled slowly. “As the good sister said: I did indeed witness what I believe to have been a miracle, by any definition of the Church, worked through you. But that aside– you saved my life, from a demon, and laid down your own.” He lowered his voice. “I am grateful, I shall always be grateful. Ask of me any boon within my power to grant, and it shall be yours.”
And she did not need to mull it over, or hesitate for even a breath. “I want to be a Purifier.”
He sat back, startled, even as the hairs on the back of his neck tingled as surely as they did in the clearing: this is the will of Aeo, there can be no denying. He barely heard the nuns clucking that surely she should take her Solatium vows instead and leave the purifying to the menfolk. She continued, undeterred.
“There was a demon cult in our town. My friends and I found them. My brother… he was killed. A Purifier came. He was too late to stop them. But he avenged my brother. I saw it happen, I saw him strike the cultists down. All of them, just him alone. Ever since, all I have wanted is to become a Purifier.
“I… I know women aren't Purifiers. But one of the oldest nuns at St. Eirene’s told me she had heard of one, just one, a very long time ago? So I thought… maybe there was some chance… I understand if this is beyond your power to grant, Purifier-General. But I had to ask.”
His skin continued to tingle. And such is the power of Aëo, that through Him, even the humblest and lowliest of tools may be transformed into a fearsome instrument of His will, and His might. Aëo himself had transformed the sword. It was Havikar's duty as his servant to transform the girl. He knew this, somehow, surely as he knew his own name.
His face creased into what could be considered a smile. “I actually think it has quite a ring to it, don't you? Purifier Ceonred.”