I'll Do Anything for Warmth — 19 (End)
Future Hope Church. That was the name of the cult one person had raised by twisting a primitive religion that already existed, and the cult was burning now, in the full heat of its fervor. Never once, until this, had they witnessed a proper miracle with their own eyes.
The faithful knew the legend, of course — that it appears before the one who has despaired the furthest, and grants a final revenge. Survivors who had seen that deep-violet flame and lived did exist, scattered few and far between. But to come to this church and behold the thing in a form anyone could understand: that was a first.
Call it a cult. Brainwash them as thoroughly as you please. Force a wound into the personality and drive a human being mad by the method known as gaslighting. Even then, not every person loses reason altogether and turns into a monster of blind devotion.
So when it was announced that there would be a rite — sacrifices offered, blessings received — some of them were sickened to the core. Even so, did someone truly have to be given up? Someone was bound to think it. However low a person had fallen in becoming a believer of a cult, not all of them loved a disgusting murder.
And when the rite began, the loathing reached its peak. Their leader, Hieronymus, had brought a girl he called an apostle, and she looked ordinary. What was strange about her amounted only to purple hair, almost never seen in this region, and a chest far too large for her frame. Then the ones Hieronymus had summoned as those who would receive the blessing went to the apostle's side, and the revulsion touched its limit.
They were offering their own babies. Newborns. No one in their right mind could have done it. Even through the eyes of a cult's believers, to smile while giving up one's own child was an act standing in the very center of madness. No human being could point to that and call it right. Anyone who could was not human at all, but a brute beast.
At least, that had been true until now. After that girl rose, it was true no longer.
The babies offered as sacrifices turned into loathsome monsters. And the couple who received the blessing came out of it far fairer than before, far stronger, and in possession of abilities besides. Above all, there was the deep-violet mist.
Those who knew, knew. There was no mistaking the shape of the miracle their god worked, nor the color of it, for this was a legend that had drifted through the world since an antiquity so old that no one could say when it began.
In this world there is a power that moves for the sake of the lowest. And so, when it appeared directly before their eyes — though they felt in it neither greatness nor fear — they slipped, without knowing it, into the delusion that everything they had believed until now was true in every part.
Those who possessed some special knowledge, of the kind magic is, doubted the act on the strength of shallow learning, and before long reached a conclusion: magic alone could not have done it. If a magic existed powerful enough to wrench a body out of shape in a single instant, then they, standing in that very place, could not possibly have failed to feel it. Common sense itself stood guarantor to the apostle's authority.
A single baby. With nothing more than that, a person could be remade. Overwhelming strength. A beautiful face. A special ability on top of the rest. All of it could be had. A miracle. Every unfairness that had piled up until now could be blown away, and one could begin again. That realization passed from person to person and became heat, and at last the heat became frenzy.
However carefully they had pretended to reason, they had already fallen as far as falling goes, the necklace called victim hung about their necks. The place was full of people who would do anything at all, if only they could slip that necklace off. From this moment, the reason they had carried and the last scrap of morality lost every claim they had to exist.
They could become something better. Who, then, would cling to a trifle like that? And others just like themselves stood all around, driving them deeper into madness still. A red light stops being frightening when everyone crosses it together.
The more people there are to share a responsibility, the more the responsibility vanishes. The sentence waiting at the end of this is the following.
Selfish logic smashes the weapon called society — the thing humanity managed to build — and slides back to something beneath even the primitive age. It is a collapse into beasts lower than the primates. And just as primitive religion once did, they found an object onto which their own sacrifice could be shifted, and they learned what that sacrifice could buy them.
The scapegoat rite. It is not, in truth, so unusual a practice. What would be strange is for it to be missing from among people. Anyone with a mind can invent one. It happens in schools all the time. There is the one who holds the power, the one who sits in the middle, and the victim. No one has to teach it. It assembles itself.
The rite continues until the scapegoat's life runs out, and when the scapegoat dies, the next scapegoat is sought. Morality does not operate here.
To the strong, law and morality are weapons for protecting themselves. The law exists so the weak cannot pool their strength and kill the strong. Morality exists to bar the road by which anyone might arrive at that thought. They are rules for no purpose except the exploitation of others by the strong.
The ones in the middle have no need of morality. Close your eyes, and the harm never crosses over to you. It isn't even that one is doing something so very wicked. A single turning away of the face, and you secure the immense profit called your life.
To the victim, law and morality are worthless. They are tools for keeping up the society the strong have piled together, and from the very beginning they are built to steer the world toward the making of victims.
A society always has people it must shrink from. Shamans, witches, butchers, executioners — those who cut life short. They are set far off from the community, despised, and used to tighten the community's rules, even though the work they do is indispensable if the community is to keep turning.
And so. For the members of this cult, casting off the last scrap of morality was not particularly difficult. Sacrifice someone, and you yourself can receive a blessing.
The gates of hell opened.
Not one of them excepted, they set their feet on the road that led down into the pit of despair.
Law and morality, of course, ought to be made precisely to prevent such acts and build a better world. By rights the law should hobble the strong and look after the weak. Morality should force a stop to horrific acts, and help people find their way toward a better life.
But the ideal and the real are not the same. Fatal above all else is this: the ones who wield them are not gods, but human beings. Corruption is easy, and it is fun, and it is happy.
No. This cult had already crossed a river it could never recross, in the moment it sacrificed a girl who had been living her life perfectly well. The fall was an old one, and so what fit the present better than corruption was rot.
Fervor swallowed Future Hope Church.
At first, two. Two days later, three. And then three a day received the blessing.
The people dwindled. But the lateral bonds inside Future Hope Church had been all but cut, and so the dwindling could not be felt. All there was to see were the blessed, wearing happy smiles. They had looks that were handsome or beautiful; they could bring tremendous strength to bear; sometimes they could even use powers beyond the natural. Sacrifice someone, and you could become that.
The brakes had failed ages ago.
Now the faithful of Future Hope Church lived out their days hunting for victims, or making them, while they yearned to be blessed.
Hieronymus looked on the cult in its dissolute rot and thought nothing at all. From the beginning it had been a collective meant to be used for his own ends. If it proved useful, so much the better. And now he resolved to drive the fervor inside Future Hope Church to something fiercer still, and so he showed them a single miracle.
From among the members he brought forward one who had carried a special task through to the end and lost both arms and legs in the doing, and he had Rebecca bestow a blessing with no sacrifice offered. Hieronymus, of course, still believed a blessing required a sacrifice, and so he had offered one beforehand, somewhere else.
Thus the devotee who bore a disability nearly impossible to undo received the blessing, as Joanna once had, and arms and legs came into being. The skin turned blue, of course — unlike that of the devotee whose skin had gone white.
Hieronymus held the matter up before the church and advertised it.
And he led the people to devote themselves for the church's sake. Succeed, and come back alive, and whatever wound you had taken, you could be restored. He arranged things so that anyone at all would take a command with gladness and carry it out.
Missions on which a life might be lost. Missions bound for places where the persecution cut deep. The cult had been gathered from those who had already given up and already despaired, and so they had found it hard to move of their own accord, the way Hieronymus wanted. Now the motive that had been lacking was supplied, and what had been difficult to set in motion began to come smoothly free.
Do what Hieronymus wanted and return, and the blessing could be yours. He deceived the faithful, telling them this was what the god desired — but in substance the orders were his. And they were acts carried out for the revenge Yasle wanted.
Invested with its new power, the church began to expand at a rush. Until now it had grown only quietly, by word of mouth, nothing more than a faith of paltry scale; now it set the blessed out in front and widened its sway. The new power was that great. An ordinary person, once blessed, became one of the strong, fit to stand against a hundred.
And every so often, with no regularity to it, a jackpot burst. A superhuman appeared who could stand against a thousand — against ten thousand. A man of towering renown within the church, one of the very first to be blessed. Wide was such a man.
The purple flame burned physical force and magic alike, all of it away. His swollen self wanted a specialness laid upon his name, and so Wide coined the title of Violet Flame and fixed it to himself.
Hieronymus sneered inwardly, and permitted it. Specialness was among the strongest motives by which a person can be moved. And just as he had thought, Wide began to gather a following of his own. The most exceptional among them trained hard in order to become human, and obeyed well.
Hieronymus confirmed that the plan of long years was advancing, slowly. And Yasle ground the blade made of hatred to a keener edge.
Once an outer god had been drawn down into the body of Rebecca Rolf, Future Hope Church began to change. The outer god is pure, and it can be controlled. Future Hope Church moves as Yasle intends. In Yasle's eyes, nothing about any of it looked wrong.