That Which Was Lost

She found Novitiate Mildred in the Square of the Mariner. Bedivera’s battle-sister in training knelt near the center of the empty plaza. Only a few scattered bricks lay near her, those tossed furthest from the debris piles at the feet of the ruined buildings they’d fallen from like scree beneath a cliff.
The battle for Gibraltar had been hard-fought, testing the martial prowess and purity of faith of its defenders. In its most desperate hour, even Bedivera had struggled to believe victory could be found against the xenos’ endless, hateful tide. But the Shrine World’s defenders had not wavered. More than their home, Gibraltar’s daily existence was a feat of devotion to Him on Terra. Its common denizens offered up prayers all through the battle to echo from hundreds of belfry spires to either side of each blessed, barricaded thoroughfare.
Ultimately, the invaders’ black-sailed ships had been driven from the skies of His most blessed domain, and the wonderful blue of the heavens exalted in their return to unbroken emptiness. If Bedivera’s faith in the Emperor’s will had ever wavered, she would atone for that moment with prayer and flagellation in the days ahead.
Their triumph, of course, had not left Gibraltar unscathed. The foe had delighted in the destruction they wrought, laying waste to the domes and spires with abominable energy weapons. The explosions these sorcerous instruments made cast shattered masonry far and wide, and dusted the city with crumbled mortar. Steeples were torn down precisely to make their bells ring last, mournful tolls.
Bedivera refused to let despair take root in her again, however. From across the square came the gurgling roar of a prometheum engine. A Repressor, one in the silver livery of the Order of the Ennobling Edict, was already at work clearing debris with its dozer blade to reopen a road. If its people were alive, they could rebuild. That was what mattered.
She reached her sister in arms and respected the stillness which had come over her. Mildred’s folded legs were hidden beneath the crumpled, taupe fabric of her tabard. Bedivera first thought she knelt in prayer, but then noticed her open eyes.
This was not unusual by itself. A Sororitas as they aspired to be might stop to offer prayer on the field of battle and yet need to remain alert. The ruins of Gibraltar could still hide a stranded and desperate foe. But Mildred wasn’t watching the rooftops or alleyways for danger. Nor were her lips parting to silently recite prayer.
Instead, she stared at the chunk of broken stonework in her gauntleted hand. Barely longer than the delicately-articulated ceramite digits which held it, Bedivera could not readily tell what the chunk had once been. One edge of the shard was hewn rough where it had been parted from its parent, while the other had the look of woven cord. Mildred stared at the broken stone as if on the deck of a tossing sea craft, and its focus the only thing keeping her from being sick.
The sharp clack of her boots on the cobblestones assured Bedivera her approach would have been heard. If Mildred did not respond, it was customary between sisters of the Ennobling Edict to respect the silence of prayer or reflection. But after a minute, her sister’s countenance prompted Bedivera to break it.
“Mildred?” she asked. “The Sister Superior has called us to return. Our patrol is done.”
Mildred’s armor amplified the start she tried to suppress. Her fingers closed over the stone and brought it to her chest, hiding it behind the shoulder she looked over. Beneath a white cowl, her wide-set eyes betrayed surprise and embarrassment—but not the jealous anger of a discovered heretic.
Were the Sister Superior, or—may He forbid it—the Canoness to see such an impulse, they would take it to mean Mildred harbored some treasonous thought. Confession, mortification, and perhaps worse atonement would follow. But Bedivera knew it to be a troubled heart, not a secret one.
Mildred hailed from a Shrine World like Gibraltar, and her faith had ever been free of questions. Coming from the comparatively backwards Nikolaevna, with its own beliefs still being reconciled as it rejoined the Imperium, Bedivera had struggled to ignore the paradoxes in the Schola Progenium’s teachings. It was why she’d sought out Mildred’s friendship early on, and learned from her to set questions aside in the name of devotion. Mildred simply lacked the capacity for guile.
Whatever thought beset her, however, would need confessing. Thought begets heresy, as the divination went. Better now to Bedivera than later to a Repentia Mistress.
Kneeling beside her, Bedivera shifted her bolter on its sling to hang at her side. Mildred, to her credit, didn’t try to brush off the matter. She didn’t cast the stone away, nor rise to protest the importance of the Superior’s order. Instead, she consciously opened her hand to reveal the microlith.
“We’re outside the patrol route,” Bedivera commented, careful not to sound like an accusation. “What brought you here?”
Mildred gazed toward the center of the square. A decorative fountain the admission booths collected tolls for sat in ruin, the plinth at its center cratered by a shell impact and its pool drained by a bolter hole in the retaining wall. Her voice came out troublingly shallow, as if her lungs came up short of air. “I wanted to see it. I learned the story of the saint for which it was named. Do you know of it?”
Bedivera shook her head. On a Shrine World, every cathedral and alley bore a name to honor the Emperor, so numerous they had to differentiate by referring to His many virtues, then his champions, then the individual virtues of those champions. Even if she had heard it, the story would’ve been lost among the dozens she’d seen inscribed in stone or floating in so many displays.
Mildred straightened up, eyes fixating on some indistinct point ahead of her—as she’d always done when reciting one of the drill abbots’ psalms. “This world was settled in the days of the Great Crusade. When the Age of Darkness came, the supplies the first settlers needed were cut off, and they turned to the world around them for subsistence. There were many coastlines, and the settlers sought to fish for their living.
“The world would not suffer them easily, however. The boats they sent out returned empty, or failed to return at all. This fate befell the husband of a pious woman named Aderyn. By then, the village feared the sea, and no one else dared set out into it. But without food, Aderyn knew she and her children would starve. So she took a tiny craft out alone. But she returned alive, and with her boat filled with fish. She shared her catch with all the village, so they might survive.
“Twelve times she repeated this feat, each time giving away all she’d worked for, for the good of others. On the thirteenth voyage, however, she did not return. But it’s said the day the last fish she’d brought home was eaten, the Imperium returned to Gibraltar. When they heard the story, the Ecclesiarchs called it a miracle bestowed by the Emperor, and in time declared her Saint Aderyn the Mariner.”
Mildred spared no detail of the parable, too reverent to casually summarize the story of a saint, and Bedivera listened like one of a congregation to an Ecclesiarchal minister. When her sister Novitiate lapsed back into silence at the end of her tale, Bedivera asked, “So this square is named for her. Was this where her village was?”
“No, it was hundreds of kilometers from here,” The breathless edge of sorrow began to creep back into Mildred’s voice. “But Aderyn’s eldest son was a sculptor. When she disappeared, he carved a life-size statue of her, precisely as she was in life. When the Imperium returned, the Ecclesiarchy took possession of the statue to protect it, and it was brought here so all could look upon the face of a saint.”
Sparing another glance at their surroundings, grief began to pull at the corners of her mouth as Bedivera began to understand. “And, during the fighting…”
“Gone,” Mildred confirmed. “Standing alone, such a plainly important icon… it was an obvious target for the aliens’ sport.”
The tremble of fury in Mildred’s tone lost its footing as she raised her hand again. “I came in the hope something remained that might be saved, but… this was all I found.”
With context given, Bedivera recognized the piece at last for what it was. The woven cords were braids, cleaved from what must have been the statue’s likeness of Saint Aderyn’s hair. The shell which had fallen on the fountain must have cast pieces of similar size all across the square, and into the many shattered windows of the surrounding edifices. The rest would have been pulverized into the dust which blanketed the whole of the city.
She put forth a supportive hand on Mildred’s wrist. “It’s a tragic loss, sister. But statues are not why we fought this battle. The living people of this world, the body of mankind itself, was.”
“I know,” Mildred groaned. “But what is the body of mankind without the Emperor’s light? Never knowing it, we stumble through the darkness of the universe, no more than a heretic in waiting.”
“Come now,” Her condemnation surprised Bedivera. “Why this despair? Other monuments to His light surround us even now. There are…”
The platitudes she’d been about to make caught in Bedivera’s throat. On the same patrol route only the day before, she recalled happening upon a pair of Guard troopers. They’d been intimidating a denizen of the city who worked in a factory baking communion loaves for the many cathedrals, demanding food from him.
Bedivera’s stern glare and meaningful grasp on her bolter had seen them off in short order. But, as she’d later learned, the Manufactorum Hostarium worker had been hoarding loaves for his own family without thought for his neighbors across the planet. Neither had aspired to the generosity Saint Aderyn exemplified—and which her monument was supposed to remind the people of.
Her pause had grown conspicuous. Bedivera forged ahead with the first words to come to mind. “Because of our struggle, the people of this world have survived. So long as there are living subjects of His Divine Majesty still here, they will ensure His worship is continued. Monuments to His glory can be rebuilt.”
“Not this monument.” Mildred replied, her voice strained by the whine which presaged a sob. “I was with the Superior when she spoke to the Lord Deacon. After the attack, he has decided Gibraltar needs greater protection. Some of the funding for refugees will be used to create an air defense tower on this site.”
Now Bedivera understood. Mildred had come here in hopes of committing the site and the Saint it was dedicated to into memory before both were gone.
Bedivera may not have disagreed with the decision to replace one of a thousand artifices of devotion with one of defense… but she understood why Mildred grieved. The Imperium’s need for protection from xenos and other threats had irrevocably robbed it of something. Survival of its people, in this case, had not been enough.
“We can—” Bedivera faltered, knowing how empty her suggestion would be. “We can petition the Canoness. Perhaps she can convince the Lord Deacon to select another site. Or a new statue built someplace else.”
The hopes of two Novitiates who’d only just completed their last Trials taking part in the defense would sway no one, of course. Even if they accomplished the merest of their hopes, no copy wrought today would capture Saint Aderyn’s countenance as her own son had without geometric records which didn’t exist.
Mildred rested her head on Bedivera’s shoulder pauldron, strangling sobs to preserve a silent moment mourning the loss. Tears wore clean rivulets in the stone dust on her cheeks.
Together, they paid what time they could spare for the effigy’s memory. It was only a few minutes, which already made late their return from the patrol. There would be further struggle ahead, always in the name of mere survival, while worlds crumbled around them.
Category:Stories