The path down the promontory was no improvement on the path up. The wind had changed direction, which meant it was now finding the gaps in their clothing from a new and educational angle, and the frost on the steps had spent the intervening hours committing more fully to the project.
Laila walked ahead. “We need to see that cove before we lose the light.”
Lambert had stopped. He was looking at the squat building tucked into the rock where the trail curved. He had noticed it on the way up and his gaze had returned to it twice during their visit at the lighthouse, pulled back each time like a compass needle resettling.
“One stop,” he said, and turned off the path.
“Lambert.” Laila’s voice carried the weight of a woman whose schedule had just been interfered with. “We are losing the light.”
“It will take a moment. Walking past it twice feels like a discourtesy I’m not prepared to offer.”
“It had better.”
The building was old. While the rest of Fairhaven demonstrated comfortable age of repair and replaster, this was aged with salt and weather. The stone was dark and once had been carved with looping marine shapes. The door was driftwood, hung heavily on iron that had made its peace with rust.
There were no offerings at the threshold. No coins pressed into the mortar, no ribbons, no tokens. Either the congregation was very devout or very small.
He stopped at the door and studied the lintel. The carvings continued here, worn but deliberate. He recognised the iconographic grammar even before he could name the tradition. Someone had built this place with intent; and maintained it. The tallow-smell from inside was recent.
“This is active,” he said, half to himself. “Someone still worships here.”
Wylan had followed him off the path. “Active worship of what?”
Lambert pushed the door open and hung in the doorway before entering. The air inside was damp, cold and still. The honest winter outside had been doing honest work; the air in here had other commitments. Moisture clung to his skin like film, heavy with brine and tallow and mineral still water.
The chapel was small, with a stone altar at the centre polished by hands rather than craft. The marine figures along the walls were clearer inside: looping, sinuous, half-human shapes with too many limbs. Lambert had the unpleasant sense that the floor was thinner than it should be. The space made him aware of fathoms beneath him.
Wylan crouched beside the nearest wall, running his thumb across one of the carved sigils. “The stone’s local,” he said, not looking up. “But the carving technique isn’t. These were done with metal tools, not chisels.”
Lambert’s gaze moved across the religious display. “This place belongs to Malothar,” he said at last.
“Who?” Wylan said, reaching for his notebook.
“She is a goddess of the deep; of nightmares and madness.” Lambert stepped inside, studying the walls. “I had thought her temples abandoned.”
“Not this one,” said a voice from the shadows beside the altar.
The man had been sitting there the whole time. He was old and weather-cured, much like the building. His hands wove calmly in rhythmic patterns that spoke of rote and repetition. A wooden bowl sat beside him, with a half-eaten dinner. The blanket folded on the bench had a compressed look. The chapel had quietly resigned itself to being a bedsit.
He rose, slowly, with the careful movement of someone whose joints had opinions about the cold. “Welcome to the temple of Malothar.” He looked at the three of them with mild surprise. “I wasn’t expecting company. We get few visitors, especially in the middle of winter.”
“I’m a Cleric,” Lambert said. “I noticed the chapel on the way up. I was curious about the tradition.”
“Curious.” The man turned the word over. “Even most of the locals walk past at this time of the year.”
“Most people aren’t Clerics.” Lambert extended a hand that the priest did not take, and let it fall without offence. “I am Lambert sol Pallas of the Church of Invictus. These are my companions, Laila and Wylan.”
“I am Marin. I merely tend this temple.”
Marin cast his eyes over him, taking in clothes, then bearing, and finally his face. The scrutiny held Lambert in place. He wanted to step back from it.
Marin’s face softened into something cautious and warm.
“You have been blessed,” he said, quietly, “with the pallor of the White Lady of the Moon.”
The words took a moment to catch up with Lambert, but when they did they hit him like cold water. Calm, Lambert. He steadied himself.
His hand had gone to the Invictus sigil at his chest. He made himself let go.
Wylan’s pencil had stopped. Lambert could feel the question forming behind him and willed it to stay there.
He glanced at Laila, whose face gave him nothing.
“The White Lady,” he said. “I’m not familiar with the title. Whose tradition is this?”
Marin gestured toward the wall carvings, and Lambert saw what he had taken for decoration resolve into narrative. The marine figures framed a taller shape: pale, elongated, standing among the coils of something vast.
Laila, who had been moving slowly along the opposite wall, stopped. She did not move again for the rest of their visit.
“She is a legend in these parts, a tale handed down from one generation to the next. They say she was Malothar’s beloved,” Marin said. “She who killed Agony.”
Lambert felt Wylan’s pencil stop moving behind him.
“Killed,” Lambert said. “And what exactly does killing Agony look like?”
“You can see for yourself.” Marin gestured toward the door, toward the grey light outside.
“I don’t follow your meaning? That is just the coming of night. Agony still shines and will shine again tomorrow when the Pendulum reaches the eastern reach.”
“Yes, it is the way of things: day follows night.”
Wylan snorted. “It does not seem to have been a very thorough killing.”
Lambert almost smiled but kept his composure.
“So it’s a metaphor for the swing of the Pendulum?”
“The diurnal cycle is the lesser of our lessons. As the wheels of the heavens turn, Ecstasy herself waxes and wanes across the month. So it is that Agony swells and falters across the course of the year, until he dies and is born again at Yule.”
“Yule’s alright, I like seeing the new year in.” Wylan interjected. “Never thought of it as a religious day.”
“Not a religious day? It is the shortest day! The longest night!” Marin moved to the altar as he spoke, adjusting the tallow with the absent precision of long practice. “Even your Invictus priest here must surely have some kind of custom or ritual on that day. He worships the sun you know?” His grin made it a private joke between them.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
“It is the new year, the restarting of the Calendar. However, Sol Invictus does not die, he is eternal.”
“Is he now? It wouldn’t be the first time a sun god died.”
Laila, having been quiet up till that point, stepped in. “Look this is all very lovely, but we have an appointment—”
He turned to face the tiny woman he had only just called his Mother. “Not now, this is important.” Then, after a moment’s hesitation: “To me, that is.”
The tallow on the altar guttered, though the air in the chapel had not moved.
Marin waited. Lambert recognised the silence — it was the same one seminary professors used before deciding whether a student was worth the longer answer.
“Tell me about the White Lady.”
Marin touched the pale carving. “She came to Malothar from beyond the tide. Pale as moonlight. Tall as grief.”
Lambert had crossed to the carving. The White Lady’s figure rose from the stone wall to a height that put her head above his, and Lambert was not a short man.
“Malothar loved her, in her way. She found in the White Lady a kindred lunacy.” Marin glanced at Lambert standing beneath the carving and seemed to find the comparison satisfactory. “The White Lady tried to swallow the sea, but the sea is too vast for swallowing. She drank from it instead.”
“She drank from the sea,” Lambert said. “What does that mean?”
“She bled in return. The sea took the blood of the moon in blood-dimmed tides.” Marin moved to the door and looked out at the grey light. “There are days when the seas in these parts run red. The fishermen say the moon has bled into the water again.”
“That’s a real phenomenon?” Wylan said. “Red tides?”
“You would know better than I. I am a priest, not a naturalist.” Marin turned back from the door. “From the blood she shed and the sea she drank, the White Lady fashioned a pearl. Bathed in the blood-dimmed tides. She gave it to the deep.”
“Gave it,” Laila said.
Marin’s gaze moved to her for the first time since Lambert had entered. Whatever he had expected from the small woman by the wall, that wasn’t it.
He said nothing more on the subject.
Somewhere beneath the chapel, water moved.
Lambert traced the carvings around the pale figure. What he had taken for abstract pattern was sequential: a story told in stone.
“Is she divine? Or mortal?”
Marin brushed salt-dust from the altar’s edge. “She is the Lady. The moon and the tide, cleric. They do not require your categories.”
Wylan made a sound that might have been a laugh. Lambert did not look at him.
Marin crossed to the altar and produced a book from a cavity beneath the stone. Waterlogged, ancient, the leather cover bloated with centuries of damp. It had the obstinate look of something that had refused, on principle, to fall apart. Marin opened it along a crease the leather already knew.
“Not describing a creature,” he said, turning the soft pages. “Describing the sea.”
Lambert leaned in. The text was fragmentary, the ink bled and faded, but the structure was liturgical: call-and-response, repetition at fixed intervals. “This is formal devotional composition,” he said. “Not a fisherman’s prayers. Whoever wrote this had training.”
He turned a page. Hymns to the deep, the kraken not as beast but as instrument, as the physical weight of what lived beneath the surface. The next hymn shifted metre from supplication to invocation. The same grammar he’d been taught at seminary, applied to a god his seminary had written off as extinct.
? The Church maintained a register of Extinct Deities, updated annually with the same administrative rigour applied to endangered species. Not once had they considered interviewing the subjects in question, who might object to the classification.
The carvings on the wall nearest the altar looked different than they had when he’d entered, not moved but resolved, as though the failing light had made them clearer rather than harder to see.
Whoever composed this knew exactly what they were doing.
“May I?” Wylan had moved to Lambert’s shoulder. Lambert angled the book toward him.
“The ink,” Wylan said, after a moment. “That’s unusual. What’s the base?”
“It is made from the sea.” Marin seemed pleased that someone had noticed. “The old texts say the first inks were sourced from the kraken itself. A gift from the deep, for the recording of the deep. Whether that is true, I cannot say. But the ink has lasted longer than any other I have seen.”
“If it’s genuinely kraken-derived, that’s a preservative compound I’ve never encountered.” Wylan’s pencil was already moving in his notebook.
Marin had been watching Lambert, not Wylan. “You read well. You have been trained.”
“I’m an Inquisitor.”
Marin took the book back and returned it to its cavity beneath the altar. If the word troubled him, it didn’t show.
“What is it like?” Lambert said. “Serving a goddess of madness and nightmares.”
Marin placed his hand on the altar. “I am married to her.” He said it simply, the way one might say I live alone or the roof leaks in winter. “The tides come and go. Some nights are storms. Some nights are calm. She is not comfortable. She is not kind.” He looked at Lambert. “But she is here. In the stone. In the water. In the longest night. I feel her moods. I know when she is angry, and when she grieves, and when the madness is close.”
Lambert’s hand had drifted to the altar. He pulled it back. Something in the stone.
“What is it like to serve the sun, cleric?”
“I don’t—”
“The sun does not have moods. The sun does not grieve. The sun shines, and you stand in it, and it does not know your name.” Marin’s hand found the wooden bowl on the bench beside him and turned it, once, before setting it down again. “I would rather be married to the storm than warmed by something that cannot see me.”
“The sun doesn’t need to know my name,” Lambert said. “Invictus offers reason and clarity. Not comfort. I didn’t choose him because he was warm. I chose him because the truth doesn’t waver, even when it burns.”
“And when the longest night comes? When your reliable sun is at his weakest and my lady is at her strongest?” Marin’s voice was gentle. “Does the truth burn then, cleric? Or does it just go out?”
Lambert had no answer for that.
Laila had not moved. She stood where she had been since they entered, arms folded, her gaze fixed on the pale figure carved into the wall.
The White Lady of the Moon.
Something about the carving. He had seen something like it before, the impossible scale, the pallor. It tugged at him, but he could not place it.
“We should go,” Laila said. “It will be evening soon, and I would hate to reach the cove after dark.”
Marin looked at her sharply. “You’re headed to the cove?”
“We are.”
“That is a holy site of Malothar.” Marin’s voice had changed. “We pray to her there. That she might spare our ships from her reach.”
“Spare them from what, exactly?” Lambert said.
“The fishermen here do not sail past the cove without an offering. A coin into the water. A prayer. Some of them cut their hand and let the blood fall.” He held up his own palm, and Lambert saw the thin white lines across it, layered over years. “Small things. But she notices small things.”
“And if someone sails past without an offering?”
“Most times, nothing. The sea is vast. She has other concerns.” Marin closed his hand. “But in winter, in the longest nights, her attention is closer to the surface. And the cove is where she listens.”
Lambert looked at the altar. Then at the door, and the grey sea beyond it.
Her waters. Her domain. And we are about to sail into it.
He stepped toward the altar.
“Lambert?” Wylan said.
Lambert placed his hands on the stone, palms flat, and bowed his head.
“Oh great and powerful Malothar,” Lambert said. “We who intend to intrude upon your domain ask that you cast your eye away from such pitiful and small wretches as ourselves. We are hardly worth your time. Hardly worth your effort. Hardly worth your eye. We ask humbly that you turn your attention to matters of greater import, and leave us to our insignificance.”
Laila moved to the altar beside him. She did not pray, but merely placed her hand on the stone and inclined her head. Her gesture showed familiarity with these forms. An echo of her past life no doubt. Sometimes you did not need to believe, you just needed to observe the proprieties.
Marin watched them both.
The air changed.
Not a sound. Not a movement. A pressure, vast and lateral, like the weight of deep water against a hull. Lambert had felt divinity before. Invictus came from above: warmth, radiance, the steady certainty of light. This came from below. From everywhere below. From a below that had no floor.
He felt the surface of something beneath him, not the stone, not the earth. Something farther down. Vast, slow, and aware in a way that had nothing to do with consciousness. An attention that was not curiosity but gravity.
It passed. The chapel was still, the tallow flickered, and the carvings on the walls were just carvings, though Lambert did not look at them directly to confirm it.
He straightened. His fingers were numb, though the stone had not been cold.
A strange divinity indeed.
The next time he reached for Invictus, the answer might come quieter.
The chapel looked smaller now. The carvings were salt-stained stone, and the altar was just an altar and the tallow was guttering toward its end. The sacred had withdrawn and left the furniture behind.
“Thank you,” he said to Marin.
Marin inclined his head. His eyes were bright, and he did not trust himself to speak.
They left the chapel into the grey afternoon. The daylight was thinner than Lambert remembered, though the Pendulum had not moved. The wind met them immediately, with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting, and the solid rock of the promontory had never felt so reassuring beneath his boots.
They walked in silence. The path was narrow enough to enforce single file, which gave them each an excuse not to look at each other. The wind, at least, had no such reservations.
“Really,” Wylan said. “No one is going to discuss the White Lady in the room?”
“Wylan, must you?”
“Pale as moonlight. Tall as grief.” His notebook was open. He had been writing while he walked. “Those are Marin’s words. Now, who else do we know who fits that description?”
? Wylan maintained notebooks the way other people maintained grudges: compulsively, comprehensively, and with the firm conviction that everything would prove relevant eventually.
“I’m aware of what we saw,” Lambert said.
“Good. Then we’re all aware and we can stop pretending we’re thinking about the weather.”
Laila pulled her coat tighter. She did not turn around. “This is not a conversation for a cliffside path in earshot of a fishing village.”
“Maybe not!” Wylan said. “But Lambert, I have a lot of thoughts on what it must be like having the sea as an aunt.”
“Not much worse than having a fool for a brother.”
“Got to hand it to you, though.” Wylan closed his notebook. “Really interesting detour.”