The Fall of the Penumbra and Lower Cadres
Entry 1
Idris talks to me at night now, when I can’t sleep, which is every night. She says someone ought to write down what happened while we still remember it right. She is older than mother was. Maybe she is the oldest person alive. I don’t know if I trust everything she says, but she’s the only one saying anything.
We were not meant to be soldiers. That’s the first thing. Mother and father, and the elders, all of them, they were meant to be a wall. Not a wall even. A…gauge? A limiter?
Entry 2
There were two of the order and they were one order really. The Penumbra Cadre reached up, toward the mountain. The Lower Cadre reached down. Every grown member had one counterpart on the other side, one to one, forever, till death. Fiend to fiend, angel to angel. And through that thread, through the conduit, the great powers could only push as much force as mortal flesh standing in the middle could bear.
The fiends and the angels hate each other so old they’ve forgotten the start of it. Somebody has to stand in the middle so the war doesn’t fall on us. That was us.
Entry 5 Entries 3, 4 lost to water
Bad night. Sorry. Not sorry for what I wrote. Sorry it’s true.
The Lower Cadre found a way to turn the pipe around. Backwards. Instead of the mortal standing in front of the power, they grabbed the other end. The immortal end. Took the angels like you’d take a puppet, and held them to the mountain’s throat like a hostage knife. The strongest of the angels they took like that and used him against his own country. They did it fast, in one night, before the mountain could even be warned. That’s what Idris says. She was there when it started. She says the ones who did it believed Heaven would bargain. Trade something for the hostage.
Entry 6
Heaven does not bargain. Heaven reacts.
I am writing that down because I want it to stay. Idris says it calm like she’s talking about the weather, and I can’t say it calm.
They came the next night. We were supposed to hide. Everyone was supposed to hide, the children, we had a place. From the place you could see through the trees. I won’t write what they looked like because I can’t spell it all of them shining and crying, ALL of them crying while they did it. The ones doing the killing cried. I have thought about that every night since and I can’t make it mean anything good.
They killed everyone with the pact-mark. Both Cadres, both sides, doesn’t matter whose side started it, doesn’t matter to them. Mother. Father. The elders. Everyone.
Entry 7
Almost nobody survived…Almost no one. Idris.
They spared her. She had gotten word to them before the night, warned them, so they granted her her life. Grant. Grace. She stood in the ash and dug the graves alone, with her own hands, ours among them, and the shining ones flew away home and called it Justice. I asked her how long she dug and she said she counted the days of her grace and stopped counting at ten thousand. I said that was a strange thing to count. She said all counting is strange when the thing counted is a wound.
Entry 8
I asked about the gem, the brooch. Hers is red, hexagonal, has a crack that (remainder lost)
Entry 9
Some of us kept the name. We talked about it, the ones of us left, in the first winter after. Some of the little ones don’t even remember the oath, just the hiding. But we agreed on the name, we keep it, we keep the old name of the order for two reasons and both are true at once. One, to honor the dead. Two, so the ones who burned them look at the name forever and know that we know.
We hate the fiends for the treachery. We hate the celestials for the fire. Idris says we’re right to hate. Then she says, and she waits a long time before she says it, that being right doesn’t keep a wound clean.
Entry 10
She still hears him. Through the brooch. She told me like a confession, watching to see if I’d do something. I didn’t.
She tried breaking the gem, years ago now, and felt nothing change, and I asked her why nothing changed if she broke the conduit, and she said the gem was never the bond. The gem was only ever the window. She wouldn’t tell me what the bond was. But she is old, older than old, and lately she has been leaving her door unlocked, and I think I understand something that I will not write down.
If somebody finds this: we were the wall in the middle. Remember us right. Not what they say we were.
#sigil/lore