Dogma

Aldric stood there for a long moment. The candles guttered again. Somewhere, in the dusty dark of his own mind, the old god Unwitnessed and Exact yawned and turned over, uninterested. No thunder. No earthquake. Just the soft, terrifying sound of a man unfolding a laminated card and tearing it, once, down the middle.

In the beginning, there was the Word. And the Word was a list. Aldric stood there for a long moment

The sun rose anyway.

He saw a cage. And he was the only one still inside. No thunder

The chapel went colder. Aldric felt the old god’s attention—or perhaps just the weight of forty years—press down on his shoulders. “The rules are not wrong. The rules are . Without them, the beast wakes.” In the beginning, there was the Word

He believed. He truly did. The world, he’d been taught, was a fractious beast held together by the thinnest of leashes: ritual. One forgotten genuflection, one poorly timed nod, and the whole tapestry of reality might unravel into chaos. The old god, Unwitnessed and Exact, demanded precision the way a starving man demanded bread.