Saintess Irina (1)
Irina had long been one of the most promising candidates for saintess.
Her beauty was undeniable, and her innate divine power was exceptional besides. Everyone had assumed it was a foregone conclusion that Irina would become the saintess of her generation.
And that was exactly how it turned out — though, surprisingly, the road there was anything but honorable.
"I hereby withdraw my candidacy for saintess!"
"……"
She had not won her title by outshining every other candidate. She had become saintess because everyone else had vanished, leaving her standing alone in an empty field.
She had held an unassailable lead among the candidates from the very start — but it was precisely that situation that became her stain.
Worse still, the Heavenly God Order was in dire straits. The disgraces of the former Pope had gone far beyond the pale.
No — what he had done could scarcely be captured by so mild a word as disgrace.
He was a man who deserved to be branded a heretic, and in the end he met an end befitting exactly that.
But as is always the case with a body that has executed its own king, chaos inevitably followed. And when that chaos comes hand in hand with the loss of one's most sacred symbol, then for all practical purposes, the nation has already fallen.
Yes — the Order had fallen.
One could argue its plight was even graver than that of any ordinary country.
Their symbol had to be singular, unique, absolute. The moment it was lost, the place that was meant to be a haven for the faithful became, in effect, a prison without bars.
The Heavenly God Order had lost its god.
Because of one man's greed. Because of one ignorant heretic who, unable to content himself with worshipping the divine, had yearned to become the divine.
As a result, the Heavenly God no longer spoke to his followers.
No oracles descended. No miracles came to pass.
All that remained was the divine power he had granted them at their baptism.
Amusingly enough, even that was now regarded as less a blessing than a brand.
"They're strange people, aren't they."
That was the place Irina remained in.
As a saintess — once a title that should have been the most glorious of honors, now reduced to nothing but a symbol of foolishness.
"We believe in the Heavenly God and love him. We were never meant to be beings who demand his love in return. When exactly did the Order start forcing a two-way love affair with our god?"
All she had ever wanted was to have faith.
Because that was how she had been raised. Because she had loved that place. Was that so wrong?
Was declaring one's faith in a god truly something to be ashamed of?
No.
Of course it wasn't.
That was what she had believed, and yet——
"I'm sorry?"
One day, a pile of corpses was discovered in one of the monasteries belonging to the Heavenly God Order.
Children and adults alike. All of them dead together, as though they had simply fallen asleep in one another's company.
The cause of death was starvation.
The monastery had never received support befitting the size of the Order, and its residents had starved — slowly, and then all at once, until every last one of them was gone.
The children had not been abused, and the nuns who ran the monastery had been devout, kind people. The shock of it was beyond all words.
Yes — they had struggled, thrashed, fought to the very end, and still they had failed to outlast their poverty.
"Ah……"
Irina wept openly before that horrific scene. She could see the nuns who had died before the children did.
Scuffs on the floor told the story plainly: children too weak to carry the nuns, dragging themselves and the women they loved across the stone in a desperate bid to save them.
And even then, it was easy to picture how it must have ended — the children collapsing, breath by breath, while the others watched, surrendering to death one by one, curling into the arms of those they loved and waiting, ever so slowly, for their own final moment.
Her heart broke for them. She had known, of course, that the Heavenly God Order was a shadow of what it once was.
And at first, she had truly believed that it didn't matter.
What did the strength of the Order matter compared to the devotion of its faithful?
But religion, by then, had long since taken root as a community woven deep into the fabric of society.
Irina had come to that realization far too late. That was why people said the Heavenly God Order had truly, definitively fallen.
"Ah. I see it now. Faith and goodness alone were never enough."
At first, she had demanded answers.
She had gone directly to the Pope of the day, reported the whole affair, and pressed him for an accounting.
But she could not bring the words to their end. Because she had looked. Because she had seen the face of a man worn down to nothing by endless exhaustion.
Yes — this was the situation the former Pope had created. Because of him the Order had withered, and the saintess candidates had resigned their posts one after another.
So what kind of person could the one who took up the papacy next possibly have been?
"Saintess, I have done all I could."
"Then the world was never the hopeful place I believed it to be. That must be why people hope. Why they pray for miracles."
The Pope of that day was a scapegoat.
The burden had been passed hand to hand until at last someone chose to carry that fate willingly — how could such a man possibly have been ignorant of what was happening?
The Pope spoke. He spoke with his heart tearing in two. He told her that scenes like this one would only grow more common from here on.
The Order had not abandoned them. It had merely failed to bear a weight that would have crushed it even if it had emptied every coffers it possessed.
In its past, the Heavenly God Order had been the largest religious power on the continent, and it had enjoyed patronage to match, expanding its monasteries and churches through that wealth.
And then the former Pope had committed an act of historic, world-shattering stupidity, and the Order could no longer sustain its own vast body. That was the truth of it.
But the Order could not simply shrink and close its monasteries and orphanages along with its power.
Because that would mean choosing which people to abandon and leave to die.
So — yes. And so, therefore.
Everyone was starving.
Everyone was suffering together.
And of all those who suffered, the frailest among them were the ones who died.
That was the truth behind what she had assumed must involve someone's malice.
Not malice at all — only the plain cruelty of a harsh world, claiming lives as it always did.
"Haha……"
It would have been better, far better, if someone had been skimming funds along the way.
If there had been clear, unmistakable malice behind it, she could have resented someone. She could have condemned someone!
But it was nothing of the kind.
The Order had already fallen, and the only people who remained in it were those who had endured on responsibility and faith alone.
And every one of them knew.
They knew that a winter crueler than any before it was coming. A killing cold that no depth of devotion could hold at bay.
"No. This can't be it."
And so Irina made her decision.
If the Order had grown weak enough for this to happen, then she would make it strong.
"Sin must not be shared by association. One man committed the crime — why should everyone have to carry it?"
"Saintess."
"Your Holiness, we cannot go on like this. The sin cannot be borne by everyone. You hold that position precisely so that you can carry the responsibility, do you not?"
"……Yes. You're right."
With clear, unflinching eyes, Irina drove a blade straight into the Pope's heart.
She had been cast as the sacrificial lamb.
And so she knew nothing else to do. She went on living as nothing more than one good, devout believer among many.
No — she went on dying, together with everyone else.
That could not be allowed. The people she had to answer for were not just one or two.
She would have to embrace evil. She would have to sink her body into filth. Whatever it took, the Order had to be made stable.
"If you will not do it, Your Holiness, then I will."
"It will make you unforgivable."
"I don't need to be forgiven."
In the end, Irina chose to wrap herself in filth in place of a Pope who could not bear the burden. Before the killing cold froze everyone solid, someone had to fell a living tree and burn it for firewood.
And she did exactly that.
She actively gathered and bound the factions within the Order. She used them to infiltrate the political powers of the Empire.
She became a habitual liar.
She seized on weaknesses, collected evidence of acts that could brand men heretics, and held them like knives at throats.
She learned to crush them by force.
Fortunately, though the Order's prestige had waned, its power remained intact.
Because the most devout fanatics of all had long since taken up the name of inquisitor and stained their hands with blood in the name of purifying the world.
And now Irina had no choice but to stand at their head.
She grew the Order by committing the very acts people pointed at and cursed.
Her snow-white vestments soaked in blood became a common sight, and the sound of human screams grew familiar to her ears.
She spilled more blood than anyone — and made more blood spill — and in doing so, she built the Order's strength.
And then she hid all of it. Deceived everyone. And raised the banner of pure whiteness overhead.
From the very beginning, it had all been a lie.
A hypocrite, hiding a twisted heart behind a mask of falsehood.
A tyrant, sacrificing the few for the sake of the many.
A murderer who could never, ever be forgiven.
If that was what it took.
Yes — if only that was what it took!
If only someone would look back at her.
Irina sealed every evil within the Order inside a single vessel: herself.
For the inside of that pure white porcelain jar was already saturated, through and through, with poison and filth.
Only the hope that remained within it was the engine that kept her standing.
She was, in the truest sense, a jar of solitude.
And this woman, living a slow death while still breathing, kept forcing garments that did not fit her onto her own body, and kept being wounded by them.
Yes — that was how she lived.
And then, one day.
"Is that so? A Hero has appeared, you say? Prepare everything immediately."
The news reached her ears.
The Heavenly God Order had already entered a period of stability. It was not what it once had been, but she had dragged it to within arm's reach of that old glory.
But at the same time, it was a ceiling.
There was no advancing further, and recovering the full radiance of the past was, for now, an impossible dream.
It would be fine to achieve the legendary feat of slaying the Demon King alongside the Hero. And if not that, we could always fashion a holy relic from the Hero's corpse — an artifact to mimic the glory of god.
But their god still did not exist. Which meant the Hero's very existence was the one way left to carve the name of the Heavenly God Order into history with nails of certainty.
"Spread the word that this information came to us as an oracle — that the Heavenly God has granted us a chance at redemption."
Irina noticed that speaking the lie no longer felt the least bit strange on her tongue.
She had grown accustomed to the ill-fitting clothes; scar upon scar had layered over her wounds until she could no longer feel the pain beneath.
It was the moment when something inside her heart collapsed completely.