I’ve begun writing a long story/short novella in the Piraeus-headspace (like the Halia and Dreamfish pieces, except way longer and way more tangential), and I’ll be posting the mostly-unedited segments here. Highly unfinished and likely not at all in the order they’ll be for the finished product, but hopefully good reading.
The one who visited the chapterhouse that season was named Livia–Magnia Livia, the Knight Captain enforced, for failure to address the Magni by their proper title was punishable by Sacristi. She arrived in Piraeus, as was traditional for Kolai dignitaries, in a palanquin suspended on barbed handles carried by chanting acolytes–the Order of the Blades of Kol, temporarily bereft of their deific wielder–steps perfectly synchronized, immaculate, precise control belied by mania stitched in bloodshot eyes. I remember finding it at once appropriate and deeply unnatural. I saw in it a reflection of the rules and ritual of the chapterhouse–though perhaps I was merely part of the mirror image–in turn a careful mold to the deliberate equities and geometries of Piraeus itself, though this was an irony I would not realize until much later.
But in their hymns and mutilations I could sense a current connecting them, focusing them in burning passion toward horrifyingly singular end. I did not know why the feeling was familiar to me, nor why I found it so perverse, but I was possessed of many misconceptions back then. So was the Knight Captain, it turned out.
Prior to the Magnia’s arrival, the Knights had sorted us according to their impressions of our magical aptitude, toward vocations of knight, servant, or squire as our capabilities allowed, but even then, in the “Era of Free Magic”, certain forms of mana were repellant enough that cultural awareness of them all but vanished with distance from the World City. The Blood Knight chapterhouse in Piraeus thus had minimal record of the mana currents that existed in the microsensory networks of swarms, they did not look for those currents in their recruits, and they had little ability to find them even if they were so inclined. But this was part of the reason the Magni supervised the recruiting process.
I was surprised to find that Magnia Livia showed little regard to the stiff sort of ritual espoused by the Blood God’s other faithful. Far from the Knight Captain’s stone-faced severity–an attitude I had come to understand as the invariable face of the Kolai–Livia was warm, mirthful, middle-aged and slightly overweight, but effusively energetic. Upon her first tour of the chapterhouse, she loudly bemoaned the asceticism of the squires’ quarters, the kitchens’ stores of spices, the frequency with which Sacristi was exacted from the servants:
“‘It is not suffering for which we care,’” she said, quoting Kolai scripture. “Stop this at once, Captain.”
I found it odd at the time that the Knight Captain was willing to suffer such admonishment from a bureaucrat, but I was naive. I later learned that Livia could have eviscerated him with a gesture were she truly displeased–a prowess I saw for myself in the Dereliction when she slaughtered a militia of over 300 before the Lady of the Flies overwhelmed her. And it proved I would owe far more of my fate to Livia than the Knight Captain. It seemed I had potential of which I was unaware, and she recognized it immediately.
“You’ve misjudged these ones,” she remarked to him, patting me and two other would-be squires on the head. And with that single gesture she altered my destiny. No longer was I to be a foot soldier to an institution that bound the world by code, by a paradigm of sense to match its chaos. I was to be a leader of that institution, and I was to discover all the degrees of deeply unsustainable freedom it allowed itself.
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