Coming Home to an Empty Fridge

I let out an awkward little laugh as I looked down at Sarah’s name on the page.

“This is such an obvious manipulation tactic. I mean, she put it right on top of the pile like that, all theatrical. She did a good job with your handwriting though, that kind of looks real.”

My chuckles came out hollow. I didn’t look up, I didn’t want to see her face.

“How d’ya reckon she managed that? Some kind of god of forgery, or something? Is that a thing, Sarah?”

She didn’t reply. Just silence from behind me. I really didn’t want to look at Sarah, but I tore my eyes away from the paper anyway, couldn’t take the silence.

“Sarah?”

You’d think a Bishop would have a better poker face. Hers was crestfallen. Her jaw was clenched, voice stiff as she said “Fuck, Alex, I didn’t want you to see that.”

Ah.

I tried to keep my chest from pounding too hard.

It was just like Irons had said. She wasn’t stupid, she knew we weren’t stupid. She wouldn’t bother with an obvious trick. So it was probably true.

As if just one look at Sarah didn’t tell me that on its own.

“You were really going to- his house? This says he could lose his house if he got prosecuted for his research. Is that- You were going to try to take his house?” I asked. I felt like I was fixating on that, but my mind was fixating on every point. The threats to take his money, the threat of arrest, the threats that he’d spend his life in jail, and for what?

She gave me a single, slow nod. No words. Not one.

I crumpled the letter in my fist. “What the hells, Sarah, you were supposed to be his friend!”

She paced on the spot. She started a reply once, then twice. “I- you-” Before sucking in a breath like she was biting down on a curse. When she finally found the words, they came out harsh. “What was I supposed to do, huh? He was going to get himself hurt, or worse. I just wanted him to stop and go back to his old research, the antiquarian stuff. I-” She paused, swallowed. “Honestly, I had no idea if I was going to have the guts to follow through if push came to shove. Don’t want to be like the son of a cunt who gave you that letter. But I swear, he was going to lose so much more than his freedom if he kept going. Like-” Her voice tightened, nearly choked. “His life, I guess.”

I held the paper to my chest. “Hurt… hurt how?” I wanted to hit her, or run. But I wanted to hear her out too. Wanted her to have some kind of explanation.

“The Staircase and Irons had both put too much money in for him to keep stringing them along, eventually he was going to fail and the bill would come due. Irons would scream fraud, and fuck, man, the way the Staircase had been acting I half thought they were going to kill him. That was my first thought when he wound up floating like that hanging by the necktie, honestly. I thought he could maybe save himself from the fraud allegations if he had the excuse I’d pressured him, and-”

“So you were in together? It- it was a trick, you conspired to give him the excuse, he knew it wasn’t real?” I cut her off. Almost pleading with her. She put an arm around her side, shook her head.

“No. I tried that, we talked, had a big fight about it. So I just… I started pressuring anyway. He was so sure he was about to revolutionise everything, he wasn’t listening to reason. If he had nothing, they would take everything, not just threaten it. And worse, if he had something real… Hylyss tits, was I glad when I saw her.” She walked over to Lady Regress, patted her on the head even.

“You didn’t know about her? He… he hid her from me pretty well. The Liberationists said he was torturing her, did you know about-”

“Torture?” Sarah scoffed. She flicked a nail with a clink against the brass, then pushed it with a fingertip until the idol rocked back a little on its base. “You can’t torture deities. They can’t feel. She killed Raspe because she was told to. Because-” Sarah’s expression cracked. She was facing away from me, looking at the idol of a crying woman. But I saw a wet droplet land on the top of its head.

Then another.

Sarah wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Hyliss fucking son of a cunt… can’t believe I’m being such a goddamned piss-baby that I’m… ugh…” She went for her flask again. Uncorked it and swigged, then peered inside the open neck. Empty.

“Why-” I took a step towards her. Another. “Why are you…?”

A second later I was hugging her. My brain only caught up with my body a moment after, something in my brain figured out the answer faster than my consciousness, put the pieces together.

“...Cowardly old bastard had to have told her to. It- he thought he was gonna lose everything. Like I said at the auditorium. It… it was a suicide, wasn’t it? Because he believed me, because he thought…”

I didn’t believe that. Didn’t believe that for a second. And for all the arguments I had to try to convince her, for that moment, all I had was hugs.

She tried to take another drink from an empty flask, and I reached out to put a hand over hers, gently, gently taking it off her. I rummaged in my pockets instead, took out a little chocolate, unwrapped it. Gave that to her instead.

She just held the sweet in her hand long enough it started to melt and go sticky. Eventually the tears stopped, and she found enough strength to put it into her mouth. That was when I let her go.

She slumped against the wall and sat herself on the floor next to the idol. I did too.

We just waited a little bit, just giving a chance for her tears to dry.

“Thanks.” She sighed. She gave me a little smile through teary eyes. It was like a rainbow, the sun through rain.

“It’s nothing.” I said. I still took another little chocolate from my pocket. I needed one too, after that.

It was odd, sitting comforting her like that with the idol right there. Almost like Lady Regress was next to us. As was her wont, she hadn’t commented. There wasn’t even a glow, I wasn’t sure she was inhabiting the idol right now or not, honestly.

I offered her a chocolate too, left it at her feet, on the base of the idol. I figured she’d appreciate the gesture even if she couldn’t eat or absorb it or whatever without a sacrifice bowl.

“...Fish.” Sarah said after a moment. It was enough of a non-sequitor to throw me, I just goggled at her in confusion.

“I- her contract said fish is one of her sacred materials. You wanna get snacks for her she can’t take sweets, but…”

“Huh. Just fish? Not even cod, or- Wait, she’s not a water deity, right? ‘Cause that’s the second time she’s been associated with-” I still left the chocolate on her base. It was the thought that counted, and all.

“Just fish.” Sarah said, voice kind of hollow. “Not water, but yeah, it’s weird.”

We just sat there together a little longer. I let the sweet taste fill my mouth and distract me from, well, everything. Once Sarah swallowed the first sweet I gave her another one, then another. Was starting to run out, really.

Eventually, I figured I oughta speak up.

“You know it wasn’t you, right? Like- look, whatever you did, or said, or mailed… I think it’s pretty clear at this point Lady Regress made that call, not Raspe.”

“Oh come on, she can’t make calls. If she killed them she-” Sarah’s brow twitched. This was going poorly already, huh?

“There’s no other way to explain half of what’s happened, if they only obey people strictly-”

“Can’t believe you fell in with those flat-earth, batshit crazy-

“-then why did you detect no divine magic, if the box was divinely powered and-”

“-because we lied about the damned divine magic! Of course we bloody well detected some!”

I blinked at that. We’d both started shouting, our nerves frazzled, both our voices hoarse. Talking over each other, I'd only caught half of her retorts.

“We- Hylyss fuck, It’s all coming out tonight, huh? Look, half my job is making sure people believe the right things about gods, and faced with a sudden unexplained event and with no time to come up with an explanation before the rumor mill kicked in… with bloody Liberationists right there waiting to call it the start of their bastard uprising? Yeah, I told the others to say they didn’t detect anything, I went for the fastest way to shut those morons up, didn’t think about the logic of it.” A pause. I’d say she looked guilty, but guilt had been so etched into her face a while now her expression barely shifted. She put a hand on my shoulder though. “...I’m worried about you talking like you believe those guys, Alex. You know they’re nuts, right?”

I recoiled from the touch. “Maybe I’d have more faith if you stopped lying to- you couldn’t have told me earlier? I’ve been obsessing over this for weeks.”

“Yeah, I- figured it’d keep you out of trouble. Not go chasing off wild theories. You want this to be real almost as badly as Raspe did and if you thought there was a chance it might’ve been a runaway deity in that damned box, I was worried you’d, I dunno, blunder into a liberationist hideout and almost get yourself shot!” She stood with a jolt, red in the face. I stayed quiet, stayed sat.

“And I was right. I found the Godbox, didn’t I? I could’ve done it faster, if you’d-”

“You found it by pure luck. I dunno how it got there, but…” She was breathing hard, fast. Honestly, I just wanted to curl in on myself, I didn’t want to have this argument. I just wanted to know what had actually happened that night, not to fight Sarah about it. And it seemed I was still fighting over that one question long after I’d figured out the answers.

“Are you so unwilling to consider the possibility the gods might actually be sentient?”

Sarah went cold at that. “I’ve seen the scientific experiments showing it, the common methods to induce contradictions, archaeological records from Authas. Hells, I’ve been to Authas. I’ve considered that possibility very, very hard, Alex, and unfortunately I’m right. Gods aren’t sentient. A God killed Raspe. And that means Raspe asked Our Lady Of The Infinite Regress to kill him, nobody else would be licensed to command it.”

She didn’t have any more tears. And I didn’t have any more words. We just met each other’s eyes for a long, long time.

“Fuck. Fuck!” She screamed, and kicked the statuette to Anchorhold that was powering the protective circle around the godbox. Then she screamed “Fuck!” A third time, clutching her foot. It had been made of rock.

Her chest was heaving in the aftermath. “Hylyss tits, I hate Irons… knows how to get right up my godsdamned ass…”

“Is that-” I stood up, slowly. Put the statue of Anchorhold to rights, frowning a little at the mess she’d made in the chalk. “-is that it? All the secrets, there’s no more… no more evidence you’re concealing?”

Sarah just looked at me like I was an idiot. “Of course there’s more we’re hiding. We’re the friggin’ Priest’s Union. But it’s… it’s institutional, it’s internal politics stuff. Irons playing underhanded with the Staircase. You’ve… I swear to you, Alex. You have the fundamental truth of it, to the best of my knowledge. If I didn’t think this silent little bitch did it, why would I have been so eager to show her off to Irons?”

I was too tired to argue. But honestly, she looked too tired to lie. That was…

“...That’s good enough for me.” I lied.

Sarah at least tried to smile. She barely managed to quirk her lips. “Look, I- I want you to stop with the Liberationist stuff, okay? I can show you, sometime, the old studies that prove it’s bunk. You’re free of Irons and this Godbox stuff. You can get yourself re-hired at that nice place in Belmon, maybe, rebuild.”

I nodded as best I could. “Maybe I will.”

I knew my voice sounded hollow, but I hoped she thought it was just the emotional exhaustion. She didn’t call me on it, anyway.

“...Vick…” She dabbed at her cheeks after an awkward moment’s silence, seeming to realise how red-eyed she’d gotten. “I should clean myself up, I’ll never hear the end of it if I’m seen like this… I’ll be back to get the paperwork done to make sure Irons holds up her end of the bargain. You uh, you finish reading the papers, okay? See if you can… well, yeah.”

I knew she was thinking I wouldn’t find anything useful. She thought the Godbox wasn’t replicable. And honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d find anything useful in this pile either, anymore.

I still had two things to do though.

Firstly, the papers. I looked through them a little bit. I tried not to, uh, tried not to get any tears on them. Way, way too many of them were in languages I didn’t recognise, which was nothing new. Now I had access to them, I had no doubt I could hire a translator, but that would take time and I doubted Irons would let me take them out of the building. There were more letters. I put most of them to the side. I didn’t want to violate his privacy.

I’d wait until I was getting desperate for that.

Not a lot I could use, not immediately. But I wouldn’t lose these after leaving this room, I could come back for them, per our agreement.

I searched through for one thing in particular. A licensing document, proving he’d passed the basic examination to show he had the correct beliefs to qualify to worship Our Lady of the Infinite Regress.

I never quite found it.

Huh.

I picked up Lady Regress. Took her over to the Godbox. I put her in the little inset where she was supposed to go then sat opposite her, in the confession booth.

“I know you can hear me. You’ve been… quiet, lately, huh? Look, this… I appreciate your help, but this is your last chance. One last opportunity to give me a sign that, I dunno, you don’t want this, I guess. Or I hand you over to the Union to do whatever with. Probably punish you by, uh… doing whatever they do to punish deities.”

She said nothing. I felt like I was talking to a rock. “...Sure I can’t bribe you with chocolates to open up? Fishes maybe? I can get you fish.” I tried, a bit more desperate than I really intended to come off, I think. “If you don’t, I’ll find a paintbrush, draw a moustache and stink-lines all over your face. Is this your only idol?”

The jokes weren’t helping, much too forced. They just made me feel more tired. I closed my eyes and sighed.

“That’s my friend out there, you know.” My voice shook a little more than I wanted to. I took a haggard breath as I tried to steady it. “Who thinks you killed Raspe because he told you to.”

Silence. Silence, silence, silence.

“...You wanna make her cry, huh? You want that on your conscience? You could solve that with a word, you know. A simple ‘I did it for me, because he hurt me’. I dunno how you even hurt a God, but apparently you told the Liberationists that much, so…”

I wasn’t even sure she was in there. There was a glow, but maybe something was broken. I’d never heard of mute gods. Maybe it’d say something about it in that file Sarah had found, her Divine Contract. I’d need to ask for a copy, I felt dumb for not reading it in detail when I had the chance, now. I was pretty sure that stuff was open to the public.

My words were harsh, but they didn’t have much bite to them. I didn’t think that Regress felt challenged, hurt. I did, though. I had a twisting knot in my gut I couldn’t untie, and I barely knew what to do with it.

“...There’s something wrong with me, man…” I whimpered. I sat back, back against the wall of the Godbox, the plush leather like seating against my back even if the bench my ass was on was uncomfortable hard wood. “I oughta be mad at you for Sarah. Hells, for Raspe. But I’m not here for- I didn’t go finding you to avenge my mentor, and I’m not talking to you now to save my best friend’s conscience, keep her from living a life of, I dunno, crying herself to sleep every night thinking she killed a friend.” I let out a rueful chuckle, knowing Sarah would probably want to kick my ass for thinking of her as that much of a pansy.

She would, though, I knew she would cry like that. Not every night, but some.

“I just- I almost had it, you know? I had it in my hand.” I held up an empty cupped hand, gripping at nothing in the air. “...And now I don’t. And now I find out it never existed, and I dunno why I even got told it was real in the first place. I’ve almost starved to death once, Regress, and been lied to about why, and I told myself that next time-” I was hyperventilating. I was hyperventilating, my mouth was dry. Was I having a heart attack? My heart was pounding, but I didn’t think I was.

I think I was just mad.

“Why’d you do it, Regress? Why’d he do it? Can’t’ve been for money, Raspe had to know the fraud would collapse quick. I feel like I’m going mad. What does-” I reached out of the Godbox and grabbed a stray document, the first one my hand touched really, a technical diagram in unreadable Dreaming Empire script. “-what does any of this mean? Is it nonsense? Why bother making nonsense diagrams only his assistant would ever really see? Where’s- where’s the fucking monster bone, Regress? Is it here?” I started tearing frantically with my nails at the walls. It had to be behind there somewhere, right? Raspe ordered a huge amount of liquid void and monster bone and it wasn’t in here, anywhere?!

I gripped the idol. I was about ready to dash it to the floor. Looked it right in the eyes, I knew I was almost screeching.

“I’ve got an empty fridge I’m coming home to tonight, I’m going to be sleeping on an empty stomach, and I damned well want to know why!”

A voice cut in. I jumped out of my skin, almost screamed.

“Everything okay in there?”

I put a hand over my heart, let my breathing slow. It was Iron’s priest, watching me.

Hale and healthy fellow, large and muscled. An odd look for a priest, though given he was in charge of guarding me maybe he doubled as security. He didn’t look like he was going to bed on an empty stomach tonight, he’d need the calories to keep up that physique.

Irons’ prophecy for me ran through my head, an answer to that question. I’d gone chasing questions, acted like the Godbox was real, it hadn’t been in line with reality and I’d punished, that was why I had an empty fridge. And If I kept going, kept acting like this wasn’t a solved mystery, like it wasn’t clearly just suicide or the Liberationists…

I smiled at the guard, brushed a strand of hair behind my ear. It had gotten frazzled, messy. I looked like a crazy woman. Probably was one.

“I’m fine.” I told him.

He nodded, seemed to take my word for it.

Why my pantry was empty was the wrong question though. I turned back to Lady Regress with a silent accusation.

I was one famine, one recession, one bad siege away from starving whether I lived my life in line with reality or not. That wasn’t on my behavior.

For just a few weeks, I’d gotten to live in a world where that wasn’t true.

I didn’t care which was real anymore. Sentient or non-sentient, magic food-box or no magic food-box. Suicide or murder, Whichever it was, I’d take the answer, I’d move on with my life. But I couldn’t live in line with reality until I knew what reality was, couldn’t avert catastrophe until I knew what world I lived in.

It was like I told Irons all those weeks ago.

Don’t you want to know?

A few hours later, I was home.

I’d signed a lot of paperwork, not to mention non-disclosure agreements I intended to violate as soon as I pieced everything together. I was being told that it’d take a little bit to arrange a meeting with Frank, and that the break-ins to my home weren’t actually caused by the Union, but I had a police watch to handle that and everything else was delivered as promised.

Hells, Sarah had wheedled a little money out of Irons. Not ‘Set up a food-bank in the Caravan Ward’ money, that deal had expired, but enough I wouldn’t starve in the week or two it would take me to get a fresh job somewhere else, and to afford to repair my repeatedly wrecked house to boot.

I walked over to the back of my house, the little room I’d set up the shrine to Lugann in. I was only half sure why I did it, my head was still a little numb, fuzzy with emotional exhaustion. I’d talked too much, yelled too much, and cried too much today to really be thinking clearly.

The light came on in the statue’s eyes as I entered.

“How can I help you, lass? You’ve a few days left in the tank yet, but I’m due a top-up soon if you want to continue service.”

The copper bar was almost all the way gone now. Worn down to slivers, almost the entire thing green with rust.

“Actually, I have a question.” Lugann was one of the Chartered Nine. One of the biggest, most believed in deities in the world, or at least in Lysium. It wasn’t like talking to a minor deity where a little doubt or one stray believer’s misplaced faith could corrupt them because they only had a few hundred or maybe even a few dozen worshippers.

He had hundreds of thousands of followers, one person’s belief wouldn’t corrupt him like it could a smaller god, not alone.

“Are you… happy, Lugann? Working like this, powering my kettle?”

He didn’t seem to expect the question. As ever, a god's expression is unchanging and unreadable, he still had the steely-eyed look that was carved into his statue, staring into the middle distance with a hammer slung over his shoulder.

“Yes, I rather think I am. Why?”

It was only a few words. Barely enough to draw anything from, but he spoke them in a certain way, with a certain tension.

It sounded for all the world to me like the tone of voice used by every shop clerk and salesman I’d ever heard talking to a customer they find deeply annoying.

I let out a long, slow breath.

“Yeah, okay. I uh, In that case, I think I’d like to cancel my contract, please.”