The Sermon of Foxes

Mayfly sat in the back.

None of the others noticed her, or cared. They scattered into pews near the middle, or up close, and whispered quietly amongst themselves under the music. The front was slightly raised, and off to the side was a piano too gray to be wooden. A lone man played with his backs to them, and when he pressed the keys, the deeper and more enveloping sounds of an organ played through mesh boxes on the walls.

Minutes slipped by with ease. Mayfly shut her eyes, let herself sway gently as one song melded into the next, and she began to forget where she was. This feeling, this comfort, it was Valley through and through. How had it only been a day? Between Flytrap and the depot, that couldn’t be right. Surely weeks had passed since she’d fed the cats farewell, and failed to heed Ealdwin’s warnings. Since she’d seen mama.

Weeks smashed into hours.

She wanted to go home. She couldn’t, but she wanted to.

The music stopped. The whispering stopped. She opened her eyes and noticed everyone was standing, so she stood too. The man at the piano approached the podium, but rather than get behind it, he lifted it effortlessly with a single hand, and moved it aside.

There was age to him, more evident in the lines of his clean-shaven face than his salted hair. He wore open robes over a vest, both black as the sky, with a bright orange cravat tucked at his neck. He held a cold metal staff, though appeared to have no issues walking. Beneath his sleeves, Mayfly could see his hands were prosthetic.

They all waited in silence as he made his way back to the center. His eyes were a lusterless green, and when they passed over her she turned her gaze to the floor. He clicked his staff on the ground, and everyone sat down again.

“Good evening,” he said. His voice was the deep, level creaking of a heavy door. “My name is Aubin Lavoie. Thank you for coming, those who knew I was stopping in New Cazzer. Thank you doubly to those who did not. By hand of fate or providence, I am glad to receive you. 

“I apologize for the first impression. If you look around, you’ll see evidence that I am, by all accounts of my faith, a very poor housekeeper.” There were chuckles, but Mayfly didn’t quite understand. She thought the little church was lovely and authentic. “Some might say that makes me a poor priest, as well. No Sim-pods, no product showcase, no surgery ward. There are probably five outlets in the whole building, and one of them belongs to a coffee machine. Oh, the piety.

"If Cazriel teaches us that our faith—that all faith—is not flesh, or stone, but steel, why do I preach his word in a house made of rocks? All of my worships are this way, so I get this question a lot. I can only ask: 'what is steel?'  

"Sometimes the answers I get are very literal, academic, other times I'm met with sermons myself about the divine nature of metal. One man just said: 'It's hard.' Whatever the case, the answers are always material. Always, in my mind, missing the point.

"What is steel? Does it grow on trees? Can you pull it from the earth, blessed and ready? No. It is, like faith, something not naturally given, or inherited, but a thing which must be forged by one’s own hands in the fires of a crucible. Cazriel teaches us to become more than what we are, you see, in all ways. He teaches us to build, to make steel of ourselves—literally, yes, but also spiritually. Wise words, I’d say, from a man who made himself a god."

Lavoie retrieved a book from the podium. He walked slowly, thumbing through the pages in its dark bindings. “But he was a mason before that,” he said, holding the book open at his waist, though he hardly glanced at it. “In the first age, before the star, Cazriel built at the whims of the magi. He was a thrall, but he was invaluably talented. The forts of San’sen, the walls of Raethon. There are towers in Hounding whose stones were laid by his hands, and they still stand today.

“That’s how he crawled to the star. As a man. A man of drive, and skill, but still just a man, ground beneath the heel of a tyrannical empire. When he founded Foxtail, it was for the express purpose of creating a refuge for those who had suffered as he had. A place where sorcery was not law, and lineage was not the unimpeachable mark of a ruler. 

"Cazriel did not want to be worshipped as an untouchable deity. He wanted to be respected—he wanted to be a aspired to. No other god in the Pent sought to blur the lines between humanity and the divine, but he did. It was his vision that any who were able, any who were willing, could achieve exactly as much as he had.”

With a loud clap, he shut the book and tossed it aside, motioned to it with a dismissive flick of his wrist. “But that’s not taught anymore. You won’t find a single word of that printed in any sponsored parish anywhere in the Confederacy. And why is that? Because the Board does not share Cazriel’s vision.” He gestured to the wall, or rather, through it, towards the pillar. “They want you to see the Sommet, but they do not want you, or you, or you—” and he pointed to a few of the listeners. “Any of you to be there. They want you to strive for greatness, but they do not want you to achieve it. To climb, so long as you always fall. They want to be envied, not adored. Do these seem like godly principles to you?”

There was a chorus of “No!” more forceful than their meager numbers ought to have been able to muster. Even Mayfly found herself compelled, though she didn’t truly understand what Lavoie meant. He descended the raised platform and sat down on its steps. All of them leaned close to listen.

“I bought this little plot forty years ago. Do you know what it was, then?” He asked, but Mayfly wasn’t fooled. She'd spent enough time around Ealdwin to know what a rhetorical question was. Eventually he shrugged and answered it himself. “Exactly what it is now: a chapel. L’Clenn Ministries had a worship and minor operations facility right here in the pit of the Dauden district. Of course, nowadays they don’t build anywhere the clientele make under six-figures, but back then, they tried to branch out. Nothing big, nothing new, nothing fancy; of course, a L’Clenn finger costs more than most folks out here make in months, so the money dried up quick. I snagged it for a few counts and a bad joke.

“Then I tore it down. Every wall, every screen, every last screw, all of it, to build this instead. A stone effigy of a church. I brought it down to nothing, and then I raised it again, brick by brick, into something more. That is the path Cazriel walked. That is the way of the fox.”

A round of nods and fervent hums of agreement. Mayfly didn’t mind it either; all of the bright lights and shiny metal were great, but this place reminded her just a bit of home.

“Alright. Now,” he said. “With that in mind, I made a promise the last time I was in New Cazzer. Unfortuantely, I will be gone again by Wearytide, so I thought I might fulfill it tonight.”

Lavoie stood again and beckoned someone forward. A man draped with ratty blankets hobbled from his pew.

Lavoie smiled sympathetically. “Most of these people do not know you. Why don’t you tell them who you are?”

The man jittered out a nod. “M-my na…” his voice shuddered, he swallowed hard. “My name is Kaster. I came to New…C-Cazzer two years ago…from Hounding. I was...I was a m-magi in service of Den Alder.”

Another magi. Mayfly gripped the back of the pew, but that almost feral instinct to run flashed and was gone the moment she actually looked at him.

He was hunched and shivering in the warm air. His hair was ragged, oily, his face was flushed and damp with sweat. He looked profusely ill. Every breath was dragged out through a wince and a pitiful grunt of pain.

Someone ahead of her hissed “Wolf!” and there was a rising chorus of displeasure from the others. But this man, Kaster, didn’t look like any wolf she’d seen. He just looked sick.

Kaster’s eyes squeezed shut. Lavoie raised his hand and the chatter stopped.

“I did not invite him here to be judged,” he said sternly. “Just as I did not invite him two years ago. Kaster came to me of his own free will, after he forsook the House of Wolves. And what was your discipline?”

“F-ferromancy.”

More grumblings, but Lavoie trumped them. “A treasured calling in Hounding, a reviled crime in Foxtail. Yet he chose to leave his lineage behind, to abandon his power and status for a people who would sooner hang him than hear why. Now, because he is unwell, I will not press him to present his reasons to you, but nor, do I feel, should he have to. Kaster saw the vileness of his home, but more than that, he saw the meaning in ours.

“He came here with almost nothing. Tonight he has come to give what’s left, so that he can truly begin anew, and walk the fox’s path the way Cazriel intended. That alone makes him closer to kin than the people in the Sommet. Do any who knows the words of our god dare object?”

This time there was nothing but silence. Mayfly sensed a turn in the people, a quiet, shepherded acceptance.

“Then let us begin.”

Kaster doffed his blankets. Mayfly gasped.

His arms were stiff and gray from the elbows down. Not sickly, or pale, it almost looked like paint it was so thorough. But it wasn’t paint, and looking closer, it wasn’t simply gray, either. Veins of light spread beneath his skin in haphazard clusters, spiderwebbing up and across his arms like cracks in a window. They pulsed, blue, teal, deep green and emerald melding impossibly into pinks and bloody violets.

There were deep grooves in the flesh, hollows that fell and looped beneath bone, which was twisted and misshapen. Wire-like tendrils dangled limply or coiled down his wrist and sunk into his fingers. They too pulsed, their light a bright black with the rhythm of an angry heartbeat.

All across the skin little buds sprouted from discolored black blots. One had begun to flower, its petals a near-translucent filament. Its head blinked a seafoam color. It reminded Mayfly of—

The metal forests.

Kaster’s arms were metal.

Not like a prosthetic, but like a rash. Like it was growing on him, or out from him, and crawling slowly up. His hands were twisted, his fingers locked in painful curls that only moved with the cold shaking of his body.

With a keening sound, Kaster turned his back to them all, and lowered to his knees before Lavoie.

“Behold! The wolf has dulled his claws in the technoscape, and learned the most important lesson! Paramount is the sacrifice of power.”

Lavoie shed his robe. All the way to the shoulder his arms were prosthetic, and simple, seeming more like wrought iron than steel. There were seams running his neck, like sealed paneling, and Mayfly noticed for the first time that his tongue was soft black, and his jaw was not clean shaven, but discolored as if mismatched with the rest of his face.

“Paramount is the fall from undue grace.”

Kaster’s head hung low between his shoulders. He raised his arms in worship, the others did the same. Mayfly held the pew.

“Paramount is the climb to true glory.”

With a twist of his grip, the metal staff clicked. A thin rod flipped out from the length, curled into a gentle sideways arc. Another twist, and a beam of bright blue light hummed to life, connecting the tip of the rod to the body like the hollow outline of a scythe. He brought it before him, between himself and Kaster, and took it with one hand low on the staff, and another high.

“Relinquished is your name, your House, your god. With this you offer your magic, and in doing so, you are freed.”

Mayfly felt her heart drop into the empty where her stomach would have been.

“May you walk this path unburdened.”

In a single clockwise motion, Lavoie spun the string-light blade around and severed Kaster’s arms at the elbows, right above the metallic rot. They dropped to the ground with a whine of bloody steam and a hollow clang. His screams were muffled through gritted teeth.

Mayfly’s were not.

The congregation whirled on her, but she’d already scrambled over the pews into the aisle, and bolting outside.

Arms caught her. She shrieked.

“Sweetheart, it’s me!” Enfie said, just barely keeping them both from tumbling into the street. “It’s me! It’s okay, you’re okay!”

Okay, yes, but for how long? She looked frantically back at the church. People rubbernecked down the pews, muttering to one another. Lavoie had his hand on Kaster’s shoulder, but was watching as well.

“We have to go,” she blurted, gripping Enfie’s duster. “They cut him Enfie they cut him we have to go!”

But Enfie wasn’t listening. Her attentions were inside, face an indecipherable whirl of concerned and perplexed, frustrated, incredulous. She pulled Mayfly behind her, and a moment later Lavoie emerged from the church, robes donned, thin sickle retracted into his staff. The light from inside silhouetted him, all she could see were his eyes. In the dark they were no longer dim, but ringed with tiny lights.

“Little bird,” he said in his low croak. “How fortuitous that the winds should return us both to the city at once.”

Enfie only stared. A pair of the congregation came out, dragging Kaster along between them. The stumps of his severed arms smoked but scarcely bled. Lavoie tilted his head towards them, but did not take his eyes off of Enfie.

“Take him to the clinic three blocks over. They’re expecting him,” he said, and dutifully they obeyed. Kaster’s groaning lingered long after they were gone. “I’m afraid you’ve missed my sermon, but I’ll be here again in the afternoon. Unless of course you’ve come to take me up on my offer? I’ll gladly preach in private.”

“No.”

Lavoie smiled the way mama did when Mayfly told her she hated vegetables and would absolutely never, ever eat them.

“Lovely night for a miracle,” he said. “I turned a wolf into a fox. They're big beasts. Compared to that, a bird doesn’t seem like much of a challenge, does it?”

“Did he touch you?” Enfie asked, and it took Mayfly a moment to realize she was talking to her.

“N-no. But that man, he…he cut off his arms.”

Lavoie chuckled. “If you want to be literal, I saved his life. His arms were metallicizing, without amputation the infection would have claimed him in a matter of hours. But in the truer sense, I freed him. As a magi he would always have been chained to the wolves. Now he has nothing—now he can have something.” His eyes found her exposed arm, and she shifted it away. “You seem no stranger to sacrifice. And so young. What path do you walk?”

“Don’t talk to her, please,” Enfie said.

“Fate brought her to my worship, little bird, not I. If she seeks a truer path than yours, it is my duty to reveal it.”

“She’s not a Dora.”

“She wears the mark,” Lavoie said curiously.

Mayfly looked down and saw the bird pendant had slipped free of her shirt. She hastily stuffed it back.

“The finchfolk are so detached from their own piety. Tell me, girl, do you know anything of your House? Do they tell you of Doraesa’s foolishness? Do they tell you she was the first to die? This aimless life will bring you nothing but pain—even our little bird here knows that. She has a purpose, and already that makes her more fur than feather.”

An awful tension wound between them. Enfie frowned, and it didn’t fit her now any more than it did on the train. Her prosthetic hand curled into a fist, but relaxed just as quickly.

“Sweetie,” she said. “We’re leaving.”

Lavoie merely bowed his head.

Without another word, Enfie took Mayfly’s hand, and together they marched out of the church’s light and into the hungry dark of New Cazzer.