“And what was that?” asked Ruairí, his voice calmer than before.

“I just… never figured how. Nobody ever told me what to do. ‘Was it something they read about in a book?’ I’d ask myself. ‘Does it just come as natural as breathing to others?’ I was so sure that I was just missing a tiny piece of information, but I was far too embarrassed to go asking about for it. So, I did what any young pickpocket in the Dustworks would do.”

He gestured towards the bar.

“I came here.”

“The White Rose?” asked Ruairí.

“Well, back then it was called The Sailor’s Rest, but still owned by ‘friends’ of the Guild. Anyway, I took my earnings from a whole moon’s span—made up entirely of counted coppers—I approached one of the whores and asked her to teach me.”

Ruairí stared back at Farris for a moment. “What happened next?”

“She taught me. She was sympathetic, and that was that.”

“I see…” said Ruairí, allowing a sip of thainol to remove the need to fill the silence with a better response.

“So, your vision,” asked Farris. “What did you see?”

“I’m still not going to tell you,” said Ruairí. “Even if I did, you wouldn’t understand anyway.”

“Oh, fuck off!” roared Farris, his mind clouded with rage and alcohol. He barely heard the cup of thainol smash as he leapt out of his chair and towered over the Human. “You fucking fanatics, you all walk around this city now like you built it. Just because you all had the same stupid dream about a bearded man in the clouds. You claim to know all these secrets of the Lord, but you don’t. You fucking know nothing, but you hide it by acting all mysterious, pretending that the Lord would never want us to know about it. What kind of sense is that supposed to make? If He created all of us, what makes you bastards so special? If He’s supposed to love each and every one of us, why did He create fucking dunces like you?”

If it was possible, the almost-empty brothel went even quieter than before. Even the rain outside seemed to go silent.

The Human stared straight into his drink, as if the thainol inside would provide him with an answer.

More likely to get a response there than from his god, for sure.

“If you have nothing to say,” said Farris. “Then I’ll be going upstairs. Good night!”

He turned to go, hoping to make an exit as dramatic as his speech, but a voice interrupted him. A voice that spoke with a whimper, with words barely audible over the silence.

“You’re wrong,” it said, the syllables shaking as they were spoken. “He doesn’t love us.”

Farris expected to see someone else—a frightened child or a sickly crone—sitting in Ruairí’s seat when he looked back, but the Human was still there, his head buried in his hands.

“That’s what I saw,” he croaked, avoiding Farris’s gaze. “Though there was nothing to see. We call them Seeings, but there’s nothing to see. I just felt Him.”

Farris took a step closer, not daring to interrupt.

“I felt Him. I felt every inch of His body. I felt every ounce of His impossible strength. His thoughts blended with mine for what felt like an eternity, but there was nothing I could truly comprehend. He exists in every corner of the world, yet His body never leaves Mount Selyth. He has seen what preceded existence, and He knows what will come after everything disintegrates back into emptiness. We ourselves are nothing to Him: Human, Simians, animals, plants, it doesn’t matter. This world floats alone through impossible darkness, in the space that separates the stars… and that darkness has no end. We are less than a drop in the vast oceans of Seletoth’s experience.”

He looked up at Farris, eyes red as if they had been rubbed raw.

“The Church insists that He loves His children, that He wants what’s best for everyone, but how could something like that possibly love us? Why would He even care about anything as trivial, as transient, as meaningless as… life?”

Farris paused, not quite sure what to make of the Human’s words.

“Is this true?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Ruairí. “I’ve seen a glimpse of the Truth, but it was enough to frighten me into faith. Most of the other Sons are like this, too. They worship Seletoth because there is no other reasonable thing to do after what they saw.”

“And the others,” said Farris. “The ones who go to the mountain to see the Lord Himself. What happens to them?”

“Nothing,” said Ruairí, staring down into his drink. “They never come back.”

Farris frowned, and glanced back at the stairway.

It must have been at least ten minutes by now….

It would be a shame, he knew, to leave the Human alone, with his mind in such a frail state, with so much thainol in his blood, but….

But I can’t keep a lady waiting.

He left the silence of the bar, taking the wooden staircase two steps at a time to the second-floor landing. The planks creaked as he went, even under the stained, yellow rug laid out across the floor. Three doors faced him, guarded by a particularly burly Simian with arms folded.

He’ll be fine, thought Farris, stealing a glance down at the bar. He’s just drunk. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.

“I’m looking for Lucy,” said Farris, attempting an air of defiance before the Simian bouncer. “I was told to ask for her.”

“Door behind me,” he said, his voice barely more than a grunt. “That’ll be seven stags.”

Farris counted out the silver coins, leaving an extra one in the Simian’s hand, as was customary.

The guard didn’t seem to notice the gratuity. “Do what she says,” he said. “And nothing else. One wrong move —”

“I know, I know,” said Farris, reaching for the door behind the other Simian.

The second-story bedroom was as grubby as expected, but that didn’t bother Farris in the slightest. A frigid draft came down from somewhere amongst the rafters overhead, bringing a hint of condensation to his breath. A thick candle stood tall on a bedside table, tears of wax running down its sides as it burned.

Lucy was already laid out upon the bed, naked as the day she was born. That day wasn’t all that long ago, but Farris tried not to focus on that minor detail.

She’s young enough to be your daughter, said a voice from somewhere at the back of his mind, but he ignored it. He focused instead on the dark nipples on the centre of Lucy’s supple breasts, covered in silky fur gilded under the candlelight.

“Do you always keep girls like me waiting?” she asked, shifting amongst the sheets to drape her legs over the bed, the manoeuvre as smooth and rehearsed as a gymnast’s act. She smiled and leaned her head to the side, revealing every inch of her prominent jawline.

“No,” said Farris, promptly pulling his shirt off. “There aren’t many like you.”

She laughed, doing a rather convincing job of making it sound genuine, but Farris hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

There are none as green as her, or as naive to the way the world works. She’d mistake a mercenary for a knight if she ever went to Cruachan.

That same, strange thought from before began to form in his mind, but Lucy was walking towards him now, one step right in front of the other.

“None like me?” she said, reaching out towards Farris’s waist. “But we haven’t even begun.”

She fumbled at the knots holding up his trousers, clumsily undoing them one at a time, digging her nails into each loop as she went.