“Until Night comes,

God’s right be done.”

-Maledictine Creed

The rectory echoed with the soft shuffle of his altar boy’s slippers on the smooth, concrete floor. There was only one boy where there had been two, the half-grown elder of the two having already taken the Cross, even now manning the tower, maintaining their last ancient cannon against the chance that the Heathen would dare do more than raid or murder, that the Heathen might bring their hate of all that is holy here, to this sacred place.

Thus he woke, every morning, with that fell thought hanging over his conscience. If it were not impious he might wish for death so that he would not be upon the rampart when the unholy tide finally rose high enough to swamp the Priory.

“By mine eyes—never!” hissed the Rector, to which a small set of hands came to his forehead comfortingly out of the perpetual dark.

“I have them, Father. Be still now.”

So the small voice chimed in the cold, concrete bowels of Cumberland Unction as the tiny hands worked to dock the red peepers by which he saw the world in shades of gray and its inhabitants in ghostly red. Well he remembered the streak of lightning that had come by night in the form of a Heathen arrow to take his sight even as he taught Vestries on the parapet above the ancient city…

“Rector, coming online—think blue. Think blue, Papa.”

With a searing tingle that shot through his head, the world—such as it was—came to shadowed life, the small robed angel standing over him as he lay in the stainless steel chrysalis that was the bed of such of the salvageable leavings of war that might yet serve God on earth.

“Good morning, My Son,” croaked his jagged voice, so pained as not to be his own but some extinct creature's caw.

“Blessed dawn comes, Father. Please, raise your hand when you are ready.”

Dreading the procedure, but knowing that even now that the Dictor of the Cross, Prior of this Holy Unction, strode closer in his uncompromising haste, he raised what remained of his remaining hand—the sword hand, thanks be to God—so that it might be fitted with the gauntlet of augment.

At that very moment, when he grasped the inner workings of his outer hand, an illusion of strength returned in a flood and an earthquake of agony shot down his spine and through his legs as the exoskeleton engaged with a whine of toiling gears. With a hollow groan he sat upright from the chrysalis to look into the angelic blue eyes of the caring boy, who smiled, “Father, the Dictor comes. Let us pray:”

The searing pain dulled to a numbed haze as the Armor of Christ sat him strong and upright.

The Rector brought his augmented hand together with the exoskeleton claw in a sad parody of prayerful hands and followed along with the altar boy as he sat, the soft hum of the exoskeleton that straightened his back with the agony that humbles accompanying the morning prayer of what remained of the advisory staff at Cumberland Unction, the ageing, war-eaten Vector and his altar boy, barely ten summers—as The Order reckoned Time—old.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Amen.”

The pair shuffled out of the rectory hand-in-hand and stood so at the Gate of Unction, that grim, black-barred portal which separated the military and administrative wings of The Order. Through this gate The Order received the Heathen, the Heretic, the Apostate, the Jew, the Muslim, the Protestant who dared speak against the Mother of God and also embraced the various agnates—yet from it issued forth only Christian Catholic souls, and they numbered mightily few. The Maledictine Order had been the target of criticism from the Dominicans, Jesuits and Benedictines of old, though these orders had dwindled to such proportions that their opinions meant naught.

Whatever the enemies of Holy Mother Church—and the detractors of The Order within her very cloisters—thought of the Maledictine Order, their very existence over this past half millennia definitively stifled one old theological debate within and without the Church. Purgatory could never again be consigned to the theoretic criticism of Protestants, mocked by heretics and scoffed at by Muslims and agnates, for Purgatory had now, for these past 537 years, existed on earth as assuredly as the Garden of Eden once had. And so the Rector of Cumberland Unction stood, tall and straight in his exoskeleton, the gatekeeper of one of the 91 remaining portals to Purgatory, abiding in as many concrete caverns, a way station for the sorting of graceless souls.

The Dictor was both military and overall Commander. The Rector was his subordinate in all things, yet had near autonomy of command within the Womb of Unction, the abode of the various damned and penitent souls that must languish there until repentance had been achieved or until they finally embraced the fiendish penalty for their foul beliefs. Of late, so many more of the latter than of the former had come to this terrible door. The strange heresy of the ancient, pagan Norse was improbably taking hold among the godless of the hinterlands, rising oddly from their abject status as body worshippers to something far worse in its own way, a return to the gods of the name-day week vile enough to be termed “Heathen.” It was no longer necessary to take up the Cross in a Muslim hunt or a Jew cleansing. One could simply and fervently take up the Cross against those savages that embraced gods long since dead, gods as simple as thunder and ice.

There they stood as the hobnails of the Dictor and the Lazarus Detail echoed down the hallowed hall along with the melancholy song of chains slinking together and drag-clanging on the distant floor around the distant corner, lit so weakly by the old element fed from the power of their single remaining turbine, whirling its sword-like arms atop the low, white-capped mountain unseen and above.

As the Rector and his altar boy peered through the blackened steel bars, one through God’s gloriously worked, sky-like windows upon the world and the other through Man’s hideously imitative arts, their hands separated, sensing that something ominous was about to enter the Holy Precinct, the Portal of Unction, the sacred space that separated the profane world from the tomb of its vilest denizens.

As his gauntlet and claw came to hang by his side and he wondered at the weight of chain indicated by the nearing noise, his dear boy answered him with the joy that only boys can muster at such times, “It’s a big one, Papa—big, hairy, Heaven-cursed and Hell-bent, I’d say!”

Not having the heart to dampen every shred of boyishness in this angel’s heart, he placed his gauntlet on the little blonde head and patted gently, eliciting the silence worthy of the moment.