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You twitch as you gaze upon the scene unfolding before your eyes. You would want to flee. You would certainly be glad to pester Ansàrra for one more Sanction, one that would turn this blasphemous place into cinders.
But that same force that pulled you here amidst the others is telling you to wait and to listen, and to see… and so you do.
The masked celebrant raises the newborn to the ceiling. You shudder at the look of the poor creature. There is no great wave of evil coming from it, like you perceived in the Well with the floating head the Sister was using to incarnate.
But then— you used the ancient language of the Kiengir. How could these not be related to the influence of the Seven?
The old woman next to you provides an unexpected answer.
She slowly pulls up her sleeve, revealing a body mangled by some illness, or perhaps a malformation from birth: her arm is pale, devoured by thick stains of mottled skin, growing on her flesh like mould upon an old wall. Her hand has six fingers.
She takes in deep grating breaths, and the others pull her forward, until she sits next to the poor woman, and she’s holding her hand as she rocks back and forth, wailing more of those words that sound like cracking ice, and whose meaning you perceive by instinct.
It’s as if they were made before words, some form of language that does not need you to understand the form to know the meaning.
This is—
A celebration, but not of the Sisters.
Of the lost Kiengiri kind.

[cont.]