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Chapter 891: The Cloister’s Bitterness

“I’m not the pope — the Supreme Pontiff was—” Isabella started to say, but Agatha’s hand found her shoulder.

“The task at hand is more important. I don’t think His Majesty will mind.”

The words were oblique, but Isabella understood at once. She knew what kind of signal a liege lord who valued power would read into such a deception — a red flag, a presumption. She turned the problem over once in her memory of Neverwinter, and swallowed her objection whole.

“What do you mean, needing us to help you? Where are the Judgement Warriors and the priests?”

“They all fled!”

“Not exactly — some were recalled to the Holy City!”

“We committed crimes. We even killed the priests—”

“That’s not her fault!”

“We have no food, no clothes. We haven’t received supplies in two months. Are we abandoned?”

“Nonsense! Don’t you see Her Holiness here?”

The nuns and orphans erupted, voices cutting across voices, accusations trading with denials. Isabella let it run for three seconds.

“Quiet.” She did not shout the second time. “I only need one voice.” Her gaze moved across the crowd and settled on the nun whose bearing marked her as the one who had been keeping this place together. “You. Rise and tell me.”

“Yes, Your Holiness.” The nun pressed her forehead to the ground with a deference so habitual it looked like reflex, then struggled to her feet. “It’s been over a month since we received word from Hermes…”

It took Isabella an hour to understand what had happened.

After the battle of Coldwind Ridge, the supplies had drained like sand from a cracked vessel — first the food portions, then the delivery intervals, then nothing at all. Order had held, barely, because the three cloisters were managed with severity and kept in deliberate ignorance of the outside world. The priests and Judgement Warriors told the orphans and nuns to pray, to endure, to wait for the hard times to end. The hard times would almost be over.

They never ended.

Six weeks ago, the church had issued its final order: all formal members were to be recalled to Hermes. The nuns had not known the content of that order, only its effect. The believers who departed had left the Great Hall looking gutted — as though something essential had been removed from them and they had not yet noticed the wound.

After that, the cloister came apart.

The vacant positions cascaded downward through the hierarchy in the way such things always do — not filled so much as claimed. The men who stepped into those roles had spent their careers as glorified clerks, useful mainly for keeping records and carrying messages, with no path upward and no ambitions they had ever been permitted to speak aloud. Power, when it arrived, arrived without constraint. They abandoned the rationing discipline their predecessors had maintained. They consumed what they wished, when they wished, and deducted from the orphans’ portions to supplement their own.

It was in bargaining for food that the nuns first heard the monstrous news: the Hermes Cathedral had fallen. The church had staked everything on one final engagement. It had given up the Old Holy City, recalled every formal member to the highland, and left those remaining in the cloisters a single instruction — resist until the last moment of your lives.

Incredible, and yet: the passage to the Reflection Church had been sealed. That sealed it.

The news split the nuns into two factions — those who had broken entirely with the old order, and those who remained suspended in a bewildered hesitation. The leading nun put it plainly: the church had always been so absolute in its power that there was never any need to think for oneself, to consider one’s own fate. The whole architecture of their lives had been built atop that certainty. When it collapsed, there was nothing beneath it.

It was the new priests who broke the situation past mending.

They had come from the lowest rungs — clerks who had spent years assisting managers in small tasks, men with no realistic hope of advancement, deployed here precisely because no capable person would be wasted on the cloisters. When they found themselves with power and no oversight, they became what the absence of oversight so reliably produces. What had always been the cloister’s corrupt underbelly — the “Blessing” of the choir and the ritual class, an arrangement laxly tolerated by the Holy City and no secret among those with certain interests — was stripped of all pretense once there were no punishments to fear. At first a few girls were compelled; then an entire class; then, before the full weight of it could even be apprehended, virginity was the currency exchanged for food.

It pushed the hesitating nuns into the orphans’ camp.

The girls had been taken from all four kingdoms — harvested from poverty and desperation. But the nuns had lived beside them for years, teaching them to read, to sing, to carry themselves with the rudiments of dignity. That bond was real, and the church’s order to protect the young had not quite vanished from their hearts. They stole food from the warehouses for the starving girls.

It was not enough. The stores kept falling, and the new priests grew suspicious.

Two nuns were caught in the act of smuggling and executed as a warning. The warning accomplished the opposite of its intent. Under the leadership of the woman now standing before Isabella, the nuns and orphans organized in secret — and one night, while the priests were occupied with their entertainments, they struck. They did not stop until it was finished.

Through the underground tunnels, the leader made contact with the other two cloisters. Together, they purged them the same way.

They had been trying to send a representative over the high wall to Hermes when the army of the Kingdom of Dawn appeared at the border of the Old Holy City.

Abandoned, they had only one choice left. Everyone understood that surrender would buy them nothing once the enemy held the gates. That was the defense stance Isabella had walked into.

Isabella listened to all of it with care, and when it was done she stood with the information arranged in her mind like pieces of a board she was only beginning to read.

The corrupt customs of the cloister had never been a secret to her. The swiftness with which small men became monstrous under sudden power surprised her not at all. What held her attention was the church’s order.

Fight the enemy one last time. If that were true — if the intention was truly a last stand — one did not abandon the mountain path. One did not voluntarily surrender the outer city’s first line of defense. Giving up the Old Holy City while leaving the Cloud Ladder unguarded was not strategy. It was evacuation dressed as sacrifice.

Even if Hermes had been scraped to bare minimum, it could not have produced the words give up the Old Holy City. Not willingly. Not for any battle.

Because Isabella knew what the Old Holy City actually contained.

Neither the New Holy City in the highland nor the Old Holy City at the foot of the mountain was the true heart of the church. That heart was the Pivotal Secret Area, buried deep underground — a place four centuries old, where they mined the God’s Stone, studied the Sigils of Magic Stones, and held the incarnation ceremonies of the God’s Punishment Army. The Old Holy City sat above the main exit of the path leading to it. The path itself led here.

How could they abandon such a place? How could they?

The order was a lie. Every word of it.

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