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penance at their kneeling desks and anchorites bearing electro-generative monstrances; on, through the sound of melismatic antiphon and canticle welling from the mouthless choirs in chantry niches, screened by lace-pattern iconostases so they cannot catch sight of him and forget the words; past regiments of catachumen observants, seeking expiation and brimming with eucharistic ardour; along the walls of porphery and mica mosaic, frescoes of death’s-head putti and cackling ephebes that conceal hidden figures of alchemy; past engraved genealogies, and past the blazoned armorial hatchments of the twenty Legions, all but eight now shrouded in amaranthine drapes of mourning; past the iron tabernacles of the chimerical brethrendae composing, as rapidly and ceaselessly as they can, via feverish automatic writing, new variations of the material truth in a frantic effort to mediate and divert the impending bow wave of fate; past flocks of scurrying serfs and deferential abhumans, all blindfolded so they can remain present and sane at the same time, all rushing to deliver reports that no longer matter; past Zagreus Kane, the Fabricator-in-exile, with his coterie of adepts, weeping for the decimation of his battle engines, and plotting the deployment of the few that remain; past acres of empty marble floor where one day we will have to place tombs; past the great banners of liberty and victory that hang like waterfalls from the high walls every step of the nave’s six-kilometre length; beneath the vaulted gloom of the ceiling, wrought of Peruvian gold and tromp l’oeil and crystal mined on Enceladus, a ceiling a kilometre high; past the silent, waiting companies of the refulgent Custodes Pylorus who make their motionless vigil at the door, whispering their ever-mantra of by His will alone, to the ceramite and adamantine door itself, the Silver Door, the innermost gate of eternity.
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