Postmortem

And so, the building has ceased. The cathedral now lies empty, the windows have been boarded up, the statuary stripped, the alter flattened, and the candles blown out. The grand building is now but a shell, a cave into which the glory of Her light will no longer pour. And the Architect, head held low, exits from a side entrance, head already buzzing with plans for a cathedral even more magnificent, for a new She who would actually deserve it.

The simple fact is, the cathedral was built in the wrong spot. It was the best spot the Architect had found thus far, but it had a fatal, secret flaw that was not revealed until the last day. It was only when the the ribbon ceremony had commenced and the crowds had gathered and the mayor had cleared out his schedule that Her light shined suddenly upon the Fissure Most Foul. It was a deep structural Lie she'd kept hidden from the Architect, for she could not bring herself to disturb him upon seeing the alacrity and excitement with which he took to this building project.

But as the cathedral grew taller, and as more workers were put to use on its myriad scaffolds, and as more artisans were kept busy gilding and carving and painting and frescoing, as the Architect took to pacing back and forth, staring at the sky and telling every passerby about the glory that was Her, She knew what she must do.

The Flaw, of course, was a fissure entirely of her own making, having to do with her young age, her heady disposition, and the fact that she'd seen other cathedrals created in Her honour with none of the difficulty of this current one. Those were light, airy affairs into which She leapt with ease and grace, so in love was she with their porticos and pinnacles and buttresses and transepts and the men who made them.

Yet each one crumbled, owing to the fact that those architects had not built them for Her, and when Her light did shine through it was abused and twisted, mangled and distorted, such that the lowest reaches of those cathedrals required other, more crude forms of light to keep the workers from stumbling in the darkness.

But this Architect was different: his blueprints had been drafted with Her in mind even before meeting Her. It was a stroke of luck that he knew precisely which time of day she would shine, he'd know the angle of her rise and the angle of her setting, the strength of her shine, its hue and its wattage.

But alas, his plan was made for a Light which arose with some Regularity, which obeyed the Heavenly rules and moved the way a Heavenly body should move. She, of course, pretended to be one of the same, but there was a wobble in her orbit the Architect could never detect, for he could never look directly at her blinding rise and fall.

This wobble came from the fact that she herself was imbalanced and un-whole, with an oblong hollow inside of Her self which affected her transit across the sky in ways barely detectable to the naked eye. What looked from the outside like blistering, blinding Confidence was inside ready to combust at any second, and woe be unto he who should stand beneath this unholy conflagration.

Though She wanted with all of her force to be the one to shine with regularity on this magnifent cathedral, to dance and dash through its sunny halls the way she did so freely through the previous, smaller cathedrals, alas she could not. The Architect had staked his life on Her participation in the project, and indeed she was flattered by his worshipful labour, but deep inside, she wobbled.

And so now, here it was, the day of the ribbon-cutting, the day the whole town dressed in their Sunday Best, the day when the mayor held a pair of golden shears, and the Architect and his Foremen, the workers and the artisans, the swamp-drainers and the bread-cookers and the locksmiths, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, and jewelers lined up for this Grand Unveiling.

But as the shears came to snip downward upon this ribbon so red, there was a rumble in the sky. A shock of grey cloud had suddenly occluded Her, and flames licked forth, and thunder did clap, and all at once Her grand heavenly magnifecence had disappeared, and all that was left was a wimpering basket of spark and ash hurtling towards the horizon.

"Oh no!" cried the Architect.

"Oh no!" wailed the Mayor.

"Oh no!" screamed the Foremen.

"Oh no!" bellowed the workers, the artisans, the swamp-drainers, bread-cookers, locksmiths, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, and the jewelers.

But the Light had gone out, and the cathedral had gone gloomy, and the day was thus ruined.