The Canticle of Rust

The Black Vestal Mammon 

This vision cometh to me while dead. Delivered to me by something neither Mortis nor Vital but instead by the lid of my third eye that I did open to see the life of a woman who walked the Path before me and called herself Sister Mammon and it is her Canticle we summon. 

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The sun hung like a golden plate, pounded into shape and displayed proudly, on the celestial mantle above the Dune Sea. The sky behind it was shades of green and blue and the sands below had been bleached perfect white generations ago when the bombs fell and the first nuclear summer rendered this place a crucible of light and heat. 

The caravans of the Anneh Yaba snaked across the featureless landscape; nearly a mile long and a quarter mile wide. A meandering municipality, the modular housewagons favored by these itinerant folk were stucco and vibrant in a hundred different shades of blue, red, green and yellow. 

The smoke of a hundred moving cookfires and a thousand churning motors made the air shimmer and, in the warm orange light of early evening, cast everything in soft gold. 

Sister Mammon stole into the caravans of the Anneh Yabah in the guise of a tradeswoman. She was a scholar of lore and of language and so when the ancient and roving principles were invoked, Sister Mammon spake their promises and drank the third cup offered to her and never before and before the first moon since her coming rose over Anneh Yabah she supped with its headsman and ate sweet meats cooked on the hot steel of his engine block and traded pleasantries like coin. 

And it was to the sharp notes of the Anneh Yabah’s lap instruments that Sister Mammon did travel for some weeks towards the Roving City of Barouge and its very beating heart and the ambition of her own, The Scion Vossa. The task that loomed before her was both too great and too grand to fathom without heresy and so she pondered it greedily. The winds chased the Anneh Yabah to Barouge and on them Sister Mammon could hear the sound of a more spectacular suffering and the color in her cheeks was ruddy and high with the promise of coming glory. 

She would steal, from that wandering city of Barouge, a Scionic Shard of spectacular size and power. That crystal, nested in the heart of an itinerant desert kingdom like an everburning ward against the night that presses inward; Scyon Vossa was the prize of kingdoms - and the power source for a city of some ten thousand. Sister Mammon was to steal this arcstone of their covenant and plunge the city into darkness and quiescence so that Change would come upon them. 

And so the sun rose and descended over the Dune Sea and the caravans of the Anneh Yabah followed the road of glass that Barouge paved in its passing. Twin rivers of vitrified sand, superheated by the pressure of that city’s metalithic treads, broke under the heel of some five hundred rovers and served as a road and a map to the Wandering Eye with its high and mighty walls. 

A fortnight passed and in the early light of morning the spires of the city’s main control bridge crested the horizon in the West. The Anneh Yabah caravans, not built simply for the ponderous and stately promenade of common tradesfolk, evoked their shared majikk and to each house a Scyionic and to each magnificent ride a special and specific cell in which the Scyionic is kept for fuel and for speed, eeking out the monstrous energy that lives close to their bones and transforming it instead into glorious momentum.

In the space of three days the Anneh Yabah did reach the boarding docks of Barouge and it occurred to our Sister Mammon not for the first time that Barouge screamed. Distantly like a keening woman, intimately it roared with all the heat and fury of the thousand churning engines that keep its massive chassis, easily a quarter of a mile wide at its broadest, moving at speed. Its underbelly looked like a jumbled, welded mesh of steel members salvaged surely from the corpses of cities that existed before the Dune Sea and it was the walls of Barouge that resembled an iron mouth, gaping open around the city’s perimeter. 

And it was with the practice of a thousand lifetimes that Sister Mammon did press her way into the city. She did not enter through their loud and lordly gates but rather in the business of the common and uncourtly she scaled the seamless edifice of Barouge’s walls using that ancient art of Telekynetica, propelling her own body gaily upward towards the unforgiving sun with only her will. 

She did crest the rise like a winged predator and cast her sharp and knowing gaze down upon the Roving city. Cloistered here and all places like it, its ten thousand people had grown soft and complacent and Sister Mammon knew it was her duty and her delight to show them the Glory of the Great Perhaps and to save from them the stability that hobbled them. 

And so she plunged into the marketplace, unseen save for a single child in undyed linen who begged at the corner. Sister Mammon did place her hands on the child’s head and did not hate him for what the city had wrought from him. But she hated the city and its high walls for keeping the potential of its citizens inside, as much as the threats that define them, out. She gave the child her pouch of coins and spake to him and all Eternity, blind or otherwise: 

“Take what I have given you and make more with it. Be never satisfied, sibling, with the trappings of the present and pleasant things. Power begets power begets power. And the clout of coins only lasts so long as the city does. Make temporary power pemnement and spend it wisely.” 

She told the beggar child to flee the city and moved towards its center. The middle of the roving city rose up like a tower of perfect quartz, with a hollow at its crest that contained the purpose of her ingress. The Scion Vossa thummed with energy as maggikal as any godhead and Sister Mammon did know in the hollows of her heart that she would die retrieving her quarry. 

And she gloried in it. 

With the incredible grace of a telekynetic Sister Mammon jumped and strode across the small and flat-roofed buildings at the city’s edge towards its crest and epicenter. 

But her silhouette, red and pale with power crackling between her fingers, was well known and worrisome to the guards of Roving Barouge who sought her with their own magigiks and maladies and tried to kill the Black Vestal as she stalked her prey. 

Each time they fell upon her, Sister Mammon did escape. Her image was like a mirage in the white heat of the Dune Sea and the courtly men of Barouge did not know her suffering and so their supple and softened hearts faltered before hers and spake red glory across the bricks of their homesteads. 

The center of the city was encircled when Sister Mammon reached it by a brilliant wall the color of brass. Reflecting the sun it was impossible to look at in the noonday sun and would burn the eyes of all those brazen enough to gaze upon it. 

But look upon it Sister Mammon did and, blind as an mole, she did scale those perfect and ardant walls till their zenith was beneath her and she arced over them as a peregrine falcon might the mountain’s top before plunging into the heart of the city and the heart of its defenses. 

Sister Mammon did land lightly as her maggiks did allow and broke the neck of forty guardsmen who did stand between her and her quarry. She fell upon them without fury, for these men struggled and strove. But she did not spare them as it was a contest of will and Sister Mammon was a good and honest woman. 

Sister Mammon did stride up the steps of the Ardant Castle and to the great and brassy doors of the Godking Nahlik’s own estate and she did knock three and thirty times on the metal and waited duley and respectfully to be admitted. She did this because the door had not affronted her and was beautiful.  She did this because the suffering was holy that birthed this art. She did this because she chose to and it is the purview of the powerful to choose. 

But when the Godking Nahlik only sent more soldiers to shoot at her from the pigeonholes of his white castle she did open up herself upon the great and brassy door and smote it into seven pieces which shattered and clanged like a wedding bell on the stone steps at her feet.

And it was those soldiers who shot from pigeon holes that she next killed and it was only one, a young woman who nearly bested her in an act of wild self-preservation, that she did spare long enough to brand with her sigil and then kill with her own two and honest hands. Later, that woman would become a queen in her own right. And it was her city that would come to power in the shadow of Barouqe’s passing. Her name was Ardentea. And you may know her as the First Pharaoh. 

Sister Mammon pushed further into the seat of Barouqe’s power and she did sweep over its halls like a thick and rolling fog and spake blood across the walls as she wound her way up its many sharply architectured steps towards the headwaters of the city’s wealth.

And when she crested that perfect and final rise she did see the face of the Godking Nahlik who she had known once as an infant and whose mother she had loved and killed with her own two and honest hands. Sister Mammon spoke thusly to Godking Nahlik and to all Eternity Blind or Otherwise: 

“The seat of power must move, the sun must set and the moon rises again on the peoples of Baroque. The sky is bleached with your wealth and your radiance and no longer can your citizens love the suffering they endure for the glories they achieve. The Crystal and your Godhead must acquit this place and it is by my will and my arm I will see it done.” 

And so Nahlik did not speak but instead gestured with his thin and slender fingers for his honor guard to dismantle the Black Vestal at the foot of his throne. 

Fifty men in plate fell upon Sister Mammon who struggled and strove against them as the rocky edifice does the thin and salty spray thrown up by some distant ocean. Their blood rendered her a splendid hue in the hall of the Sunking as the day tended towards its end and the sky above them turned red and lovely, Sister Mammon pursued the retreating and sickly form of God and Sun Nahlik to the final floor of his lofty palace. 

And in the middle of that great garden did sit the Scion Vossa, a scyonic crystal so huge as to outweigh the head of any nobleman and powerful enough to move a city at speed. Its color was citrine and the sun poured through it as words through the mouth of some distant and truthful god. 

And in the middle of that great garden, Nahlik rested his hands on the Scion Vossa and evoked for himself his art of Great Necromancy and set upon Sister Mammon with all the fury of those she had slain in the halls below. 

But Sister Mammon had known greater suffering than any soldier she killed. And so she strode to the dais unmolested and set her own two and honest hands on the neck of Godking Nahlik and killed him slowly as it was his sin that had rendered his people weak and his city fat and stupid. 

And it was as the last of Nahlik’s life slipped from his purple’d lips that Sister Mammon did sprout forty arrows from her back as the last of the Sunking’s guard arrived too late. And it was with a terrible scream that Sister Mammon faltered but did not fail as her own blood spake across the many faces of the Scion Vossa.

In the seconds she had left to choose, Sister Mammon did so and stole the Scion Vossa from its dias and threw herself up into the air with every ounce of her majjak that remained in her dying, bleeding body. High, high above the city of Barouge she drifted for mere seconds, at the crest of her arc she pondered the whole world beneath her and saw that it was good. 

And then Black Vestal Mammon reached into the dark corners of herself and detonated the Scion Vossa over the Ardent Castle in the shadow of the true sun; a tropospheric nuclear explosion that rendered the city inert and unmoving for all the years ever after. 

And Black Vestal Mammon did burn. There in the empty sky above the city she wrought her will across the dunes as surely the Knight Furcas and Cemira before and as surely as Gaul Tyrson after and the City of Baroque would never again rove, stranded in the middle of a terrible sea of superheated sand evermore.

But its people would grow strong, after they died. And it was the strength of their hatred that saved them and birthed and the church of the Black Vestal that begat all that they would become ever after. 

FIN