Makers

Penitent

Taffen Grange, semi-resplendent in her Prime Inquisitor robes, made her careful way down the crumbling steps leading from her office to the hidden cell resting beneath it. The robes made her descent precarious and she proceeded carefully. She despised the office itself, it's sorrowful lighting and cramped feel kept her out of it more frequently than travel for her job duties did. The stairwell was a study in dedicated treachery. The little cell at the bottom of the stairs though, found by accident and unknown to her compatriots, had kept Taffen fighting to keep the decrepit office for years. Her stubbornness on the issue had befuddled superiors and inferiors alike. Of course nobody would mutter a word about moving her to 'appropriate spaces' now. Nobody muttered anything near her since she had been given authority to launch the Third Inquisition of Elod. She was now the most powerful cleric in Pell. She could challenge the prelate himself on doctrine.

Taffen's stern visage cracked into a rare smile as she considered her latest success. The key had been when she had realized how great a gift the Shade's depredations were, and thought to capitalize on the murders of Elod's faithful. After months of riling the Conclave with reports on the Shade's nefarious activities it had been a relatively simple thing to spur them to action over Jurii's death. A full Justicar had been murdered, and that struck very close to home for members of the Conclave.

The fact that they would individually be elevated in power and influence was also a factor, and was an argument Taffen had used in private conversations. Foul words to foul people! These bribes and flatteries felt like corruption on her tongue. The results were worth all of it though. She was Prime Inquisitor and had launched a massive assault on darkness and weaving as a result of that unpleasantness. The results were worth the cost. Sacrifice now to gain later.

These were the principles of Elod that spoke loudest to Taffen. She had based her life and her life's work on them. She had sacrificed, and she would sacrifice again. Weavers and makers were destroying her world and it was her holy duty to stop them. She had known this even before Paterus Cojat's respected paper on the topic became popular. She knew it because she had been told it since she was a child, preached to by family, Church and Prophet alike. She knew it in her bones. She held a pure faith, terrible in its certainty, and was now in a position to unleash it on her world.

She paused at the base of the stairs and hung her lantern from a hook on the wall. She took a piece of cloth and lit it from that lantern before turning the light down to a glimmer and taking the few steps that the room required to cross it. She brought the lit wick down to a larger lamp sitting on a small secretary desk. As the lamp took, it illuminated a bookcase behind the desk, populated not by books or papers but by an eclectic selection of glass jars.

Taffen looked over the dozens of jars. There were no two seemingly alike. They were different shapes and sizes, some were smaller or wider, others had etchings or remains of paper labels still stuck to them. Similarly they all lacked a notification of their contents. What the jars lacked in their own consistency they recovered by being seemingly identical. Each jar contained two white orbs, variably visible as they floated in a viscous, murky fluid. Taffen identified the jar she wanted and moved it to the desk. She took another jar from the pocket of her robe, as dissimilar in appearance and identical in contents to the rest, and set it next to the first.

In many ways, these were the secret to her power. They had certainly figured prominently in her successful rise through the ranks of inquisitors, putting her in a place capable of making a difference. They had saved her life and helped her to destroy abomination. But did using them make her an abomination as well?

Taffen abruptly grabbed both jars and strode the few steps required to reach the shadowed opposite corner of the room. Such thoughts were worthless. She would pay penance as she always did, to scrub the taint of the things from her soul. And the results were worth the costs.