TE-002: Initiation
Originally published 30th of March, 2021 on telegram. Revised for upload 22nd of August, 2024.
In which the Glittering Church and the recurring character that would become Archknight Mox was introduced. She ended up using she/her pronouns in every story after this, which we considered rewriting into this revised upload, but it felt inauthentic to the process that led to her to where she is later, particularly as her transition took place after joining the Glittering Church and has its own story. Also, arguably a TF scene?
"Rise, Initiate Mox. "
The Sectarch Priestess's words were soft but commanding as she spoke the kneeling spider's name.
He looked up to meet her eyes, the millions of mirrored tiles that made up the temple's ceiling glittering polychromatic with the reflections of the stained glass iconographs of the Core Worlds that lined the walls of the open airy chamber, framing the black dragoness's head like a halo of light.
Mox had heard much about the splendor of the cathedrals of Glittering Church, when he still draped the banner of the Black Invicta around his shoulders, when he still had chains fixed around his chest and his neck.
He had dreamed of looting them, a boarding axe in each of his six claws and words of blasphemy on his tongue.
Mox had never expected to find himself kneeling before one of their priestesses-by his own volition no less-pale chitinous claws shaking with excitement he hadn't felt since he was a child on a world whose name he had forgotten through years of trauma and combat stimulants, eager now to walk among the wonders of the machine cultists as one of their own.
Mox rose to his feet, and regarded the priestess for a moment, her warm smile welcoming him, her outstretched claw, a masterwork of machinecraft in its own right, intricate plates of copper-tinged metallic ceramics sliding over one another with the flexibility of skin and the veneer of porcelain, though he held no illusions of it being as fragile as either.
"Initiate Mox?"
Her voice is gentle, but insistent, knowing it was often overwhelming for initiates from the farther reaches of the galaxy, she was used to being patient with them.
The spider snapped from his admiration of the priestess's cybernetic, and his tongue failing him, he took her claw with one of his own, feeling the cool ceramic encase the warm, fuzzy chitin of his own paw.
She began to lead him down the hall of the palatial cathedral, away from the other waiting initiates in the reflection chamber.
His feet followed while his senses wandered, entranced by his surroundings. The play of light was intense, stained glass in both spiraling abstracts of color and form and depictions of Church and Core Worlds Circle symbology, every space not taken up by glass taken up by the green-tinted mirrored mosaic tiles set into the silvery metal of the structure itself, a strangely organic construction, with many folds and curves that only amplified the dizzying fractals of multicolored light that seemed to hang in the warm air, accented by hidden sources of multicolored light.
That air was laden with a thin veil of blue incense smoke from censers that hung from rungs on the ceiling or rested on ledges beneath windows, herbal smoke and floral notes mingling with traces of ozone and the copper-iron scent of the Argent Serum in aerosol, doubtlessly subtly altering his physiology already.
The priestess brought him to a broad hexagonal room, the ceiling here terminating in a geometric spiral like a snail's shell, lit dimly not by stained glass but by tubes of fluro-lights recessed cleverly into the dias that stood in the room's center, upon which there was a simple silver fountain, quicksilver liquid welling from it, the Argent Serum in purest form. The Sectarch released his hand gently, allowing him to take in the room, the shift in scent to something more metallic than floral, the way the colors of the mosaic shone nacreous in the dimmer light of the ritual chamber.
"Initiate Mox, drink from the fountain and be reborn in the image of the Glittering Beast."
He hesitated for just a moment, eyes fixated on the liquid that seemed to buzz and shimmer as if it was itself alive, which perhaps it was.
The dragoness in her multicolored cloak with its silver brooch-depicting the inverted chaos star of the Singularity Insignia-regarded him calmly, giving him time to come to the decision.
"You don't have to do this today, Mox. Our temple is always open."
He shook his head.
“No, I want this. I want this more than anything."
Mox stepped forward, onto the dias and up to the fountain and plunged his claws into the serum in one fluid motion, feeling it soak into plates of his exoskeleton.
With shaky, cupped palms he drank deeply of the silver elixir.
The serum was like lightning in his mouth and down his throat, like cold fire washing through his body as he felt himself flow apart, into the serum, into the distant sky beyond the cathedral walls, until the room was no longer there, and he was no longer in his own body.
Adrift, in the black, a consciousness alone and formless.
Threads of golden light, pulling through him, spiraling from and into the nothing that was him and giving him form again in the abstract space beyond space, as he heard distant voices, the whispers of a trillion souls, deafening in their number, incomprehensible, wonderful, vast.
He was part of them now.
The threads spiral outwards further, and his consciousness follows along the golden path, a vast weave of souls spun from gilded light around him, spiraling each upwards and outwards, joining again in a great distant black orb, his consciousness pulled upwards to it, inexorable.
As he neared, he could see within the shadow of the sphere the shape of a great beast looming over him, embryonic but radiant, itself spun from the weave, an unborn god-creature of song and will and light.
And for a moment, he is alone again before it, and back within himself beneath the great dark sphere with naught but the golden threads spiraling between the two, his astral body a suggestion of his form as he saw himself.
And in that moment, he felt himself as the unborn god, as the Glittering Beast, the love and hope and fear and wonder and a hundred other emotions of a trillion other souls and for that fleeting moment, he is All Of Them.
And then with an exhale he's on his knees again before the fountain, looking at his claws through eyes wet with tears that flowed unbidden, chitin shining silver like polished steel, mind racing with a clarity and intensity he'd never felt as emotions he had long locked away surged through him, the enormity of what he had seen echoed in the new sensations in his flesh as the Serum altered his physiology, old pains dissolving, new life and new strength flowing into his limbs.
For the first time in memory, Mox felt whole.