A Remnant’s Tale
Rue had been inside the story for forty-nine days before the first rite.
That was the requirement. The body treated as preparation — no alcohol, specific foods, the instruction to hold the magical desire at the forefront of attention every waking hour without naming it aloud. She had treated it the way she treated every assignment with unusual access requirements. You become what the room needs you to be. This room needed forty-nine days of her. Fine.
The building smelled of old wood and something underneath the wood she couldn’t locate in any reference she’d consulted. That bothered her slightly, which she noted and set aside.
The woman who took her coat was perhaps sixty. The stillness of someone who had stopped performing composure a long time ago. The corridor beyond her was dense with symbols Rue had researched for three months and understood, standing inside them, not at all. The understanding and the not-understanding occupied the same moment without resolving.
Noted.
A candle burned in the waiting room. When it had gone down two inches a man came for her.
The First Rite
The blindfold was dense cloth. The hand on her elbow practiced. She counted steps, noted turns, maintained the internal map. Done before. Good at it.
They stopped. The hand released.
Seven flames at the edges she guessed from the light pressing warm at the blindfold’s rim — something that moved rather than burned steadily. A smell she still couldn’t name. Her own breathing loud in her ears and beneath it the breathing of people who were waiting for something.
Something was placed in her palm. Small. The preparatory documents had described it. She had made the decision about it weeks ago in the abstract and the abstract became specific and she placed it on her tongue and it dissolved with a bitterness that went all the way down.
The room continued breathing.
After a time that stopped being available as a concept, something arrived from underneath the narrating mind — not from the room but from somewhere below her own floor. The exact weight of a body in space. The specific quality of a mind that had been running its own narration for so long it had forgotten the experience was underneath, patient, unchanged.
She didn’t examine it. Waited for whatever came next.
She had no memory of the blindfold being removed.
The Second Rite
The mirror was perhaps thirty centimetres across. Its surface not quite black and not quite clear — something with depth in it, like water at night.
Gaze without expectation, they said. Clear the mind. Wait.
She was good at cultivated empty attention. Had been doing a version of it for years across tables from people who needed to believe they were being fully received.
For most of the sitting she observed her own face dimly. Light moving on glass. Nothing that required a new category.
Then in the last minutes something that did.
Not a face. A quality in the depth — a sense of the surface becoming less like surface. She was aware, with a precision that arrived before any interpretation of it, that what she was looking at was looking back.
She didn’t examine that either. Moved it to the file that was getting heavier without being opened.
The Third Rite
Aletheia, the older woman said. Truth.
The room received it. Rue received it with an expression she had worn many times — the face of someone receiving something real. One of her best. She knew exactly how it sat on her features.
They called her Aletheia for the rest of the night. She answered without hesitation. She had answered to other names. A name was a handle.
In the third hour someone said Aletheia and she turned before deciding to.
Noted. Filed without being opened. The older woman across the room had an expression she couldn’t catalogue and didn’t try to.
The Fourth Rite
A circle of twelve. Seven candles in an arrangement she recognised from the documents and understood differently standing inside it.
She had decided before arriving that the words would be words. Language in service of the story. Covers don’t accrue real obligations.
The words were specific. Weighted. The names of people in the room attached to consequence running in both directions. The silence that followed felt less like quiet and more like the room holding what had been placed into it.
The oath left her mouth and entered that silence.
She was aware — briefly, without examining it — that the room now held something of hers it hadn’t held before.
Filed.
The Fifth Rite
Speak something true, they said. Unscripted. Whatever comes.
What came out was not what she would have chosen. It arrived before the narrating mind could intercept it — small, old, the kind of thing that waits in a specific location in the body for a specific kind of room to make it sayable.
The circle held it in the particular silence that feels, from the inside, like being held.
She filed it before it finished landing. Moved on. Always good at moving on.
The older woman’s eyes had not moved from her face.
The Sixth Rite
She had spoken with her three times.
Knew the shape of her hands around a cup. The way she laughed slightly before she meant to, catching it halfway. The specific quality of someone who had found for the first time a language for something they had never been able to name. Knew exactly what had been withheld from her and when and in what order and why. Knew what she believed about this room and knew what this room was.
Her name in the Order was Phos.
She came forward from the eastern gate without hesitation and Rue watched her go and felt something she didn’t examine about watching her go.
Took her place in the horseshoe. The woman to her left put her thumb into her palm. She closed her hand around it.
The lead practitioner spoke. The room became what it became.
Phos at the altar.
Her body responded the way bodies respond and she hadn’t prepared for that — not the speed of it, not the specific quality of it, not the fact that knowing everything she knew did not constitute preparation for what her own body did without asking her. She noted it. The noting didn’t help.
Underneath that, underneath Phos and the altar and the response she hadn’t prepared for, something else that had been sitting quietly since she took her place in the horseshoe — the eastern gate behind her. The altar ahead. Not someday. After.
She was next.
Had known it for weeks, abstractly, the way you know things that haven’t happened yet. Standing in the horseshoe with the thumb in her palm it stopped being abstract.
Was she frightened. Was she — something else. The question arrived and she filed it before it finished forming and the filing didn’t help, not tonight, the file with no name receiving everything without comment and getting heavier without being opened.
She was twenty-four years old.
Phos’s face turned toward the ceiling. The expression on it was not what she had prepared herself for. Too open. Too real. The expression of someone who believes completely in where they are.
She looked away before she finished looking.
When it was over the lead practitioner’s eyes found hers across the room. Not a question. A confirmation.
She held the expression of someone who had arrived somewhere real and did not examine what arrived with it — the particular mix of things sitting in her chest that had no clean file, that she was not going to look at, that she was going to carry through the eastern gate and set down somewhere in the dark on the other side.
For the story.
The horseshoe opened. The eastern gate was behind her now.
She walked to the altar. The stone was cold through her clothes when she lay down. She arranged her breathing. Arranged her expression.
Closed her eyes.
The Seventh Rite
The full circle now. No eastern gate. Herself at the centre.
The lead practitioner stood before her. His voice was the same voice that had moved through every rite — unhurried, carrying the particular weight of someone who has believed the same things for a very long time and has never had reason to stop.
He spoke about what the Order had witnessed in her. The quality of her passage through the rites. The completeness of her giving. How rare it was — how some came to the altar and gave the performance of surrender and some gave the surface of it and some went a level deeper than that and very few, he said, very few gave everything. Gave themselves so completely that the working operated not on them but through them.
He believed it. Every word. She could hear that he believed it.
She received it with the expression of someone receiving a truth they already knew. Held it with the quiet of someone who has arrived somewhere after a long journey and is simply, finally, still.
The circle watched. Found what it expected to find.
The older woman watched from across the room and found something else.
Not a crack. Not a fracture. Not the sign of someone who had survived something or surrendered something or been changed by something. The absence of all of those things. The system running clean and perfect and complete — the cover so total, so habitual, so much the grain of her that the highest working had moved through it without touching it and the lead practitioner had felt it move and called it transcendence.
The older woman’s expression had no research category.
When the rite ended she crossed the room. Stood before Rue. Said nothing for a long moment.
Then: You were already one of us before you arrived.
Not warmth. Not accusation. The particular tone of someone saying a true thing to someone who has been living inside it without knowing.
Rue received it with the expression of someone receiving a confirmation they already knew was coming.
She had always known she would pass.
She filed the older woman’s words under the heading with no name and did not examine what they meant and moved on.
Always very good at moving on.
The story ran six months later.
Sixteen thousand words. The Order, the network beneath it, the theology that erased the line between initiation and exploitation by design rather than corruption. Three senior members in custody within a week. The lead practitioner among them. Her editor used the words landmark and career-defining in the same sentence.
What had been given to obtain the recordings was not thought about. A professional. Professionals did not think about that.
Tuesday evening. The apartment. A glass of water untouched on the kitchen counter. The particular quality of finished — clean, complete, the next thing already forming at the edges of attention.
The phone.
I read your piece. I think something like this is happening to me. Someone said you could be trusted. I don’t know who else to contact.
She opened the notebook. Typed back: Of course. You’re safe with me.
Wrote at the top of the page: source — young, new, inside something.
Four months later. A café. A young woman across the table, hands unsteady, coat too good for the fear in her eyes. Ninety minutes. The recording running on the phone between the cold cups. Afterwards the calculation completing itself below the narrating mind the way calculations did when they had already been made somewhere she didn’t examine.
The pill was in her coat pocket. Had been since the Order. She had never thought about why she kept it.
The young woman was still visible through the glass.
Rue went back inside.
Continue the Story
Belief and Love by Cian Didymos is on Kindle now: amazon.com/dp/B0H6LJM5W7
Three months after the exposé, Rue meets Selene and Edna in a café in the rain, and they decide to build the Order again, “correctly this time.”
Belief and Love is an explicit 18+ novel.