Father Desmond Porter's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Father Desmond Porter knelt in the wasteland with his collar still buttoned, digging through a pile of sand and jagged scrap for anything the Vael had left behind. He was a priest before the world ended and a priest after, though his current prayer was practical: one more shard of their violet glass, one more humming sliver, and the wings he was building back at the chapel workbench would be finished. Six months ago a shaking trader took his last good boots for a handful of Vael components and called him a madman for the trade. Desmond had smiled and kept digging ever since, because stained glass and Vael tech spoke to each other in a language he could not name but had watched with his own eyes. He meant to forge angel wings from that language and fly out to fight the things that burned the eastern settlements. He found a curved shard the color of a bruise and slid it into his coat. When he stood, the scout was already watching him from the ridge. Small, purple, armored in plates that caught the sun. A single antenna curled above its helmet. It did not raise a weapon. It only tilted its head, lifted one clawed hand, and flicked something small and dark toward him. The bead struck his shoulder and stuck there. Desmond felt it through the wool, a hard pill the size of a tooth. The scout turned and walked back over the ridge, unhurried, as if the work were already done. Desmond understood then that he had not been attacked. He had been marked. He dug his knife from his belt and scraped the bead off his coat, hissing when the blade nicked skin. The traders had whispered about these: adhesive tags the scouts used to call others in. He pressed the bead against a rusted spike jutting from the sand heap and left it there, humming faintly against the metal. Then he ran. Not toward the chapel, because the chapel had his workbench and his half-built wings and the girl he had promised to arm was somewhere on the road to meet him there. He ran toward the hidden cavern instead, coat pulled tight over the violet shard, boots slipping on broken rock. Behind him the wasteland was quiet. Ahead of him, he knew, more scouts were already moving.