The Mother is gone.
Silque did not witness Her passing. This news comes from royal lips and passes from mouth to mouth. There are many who cannot find it in themselves to believe it. Some have even declared it blasphemous to think that the Mother has left humanity to its own devices. But Silque knows that it is true. She had seen the Father succumb under the weight of a single shining blade. Mila would have never let Her brother go on without Her.
For the second time in her life, Silque is orphaned.
It has been ten years since her first mother abandoned her at the priory on Novis Island. Silque can still remember scrubbing a doily she had been tasked with washing so hard that she tore it nearly in two. Can still remember worrying the threads on her new robes as she looked out to sea from an outcropping near the pier. Silque can still remember the sound of her slapping Nomah's hand away from her shoulder. The elderly priest had found her sobbing into her knees among the empty pews. At that late hour, the moon alone provided light. Nomah had been a half-moon himself. Only one side of his face had been visible to her then. There had been enough sympathy in that one-half to make her blood boil.
The Father had taught His children to reject sympathy. One could empathize with their equals. But those who accepted pity were valueless.
She had been slow to adopt the Mother as her own. It meant letting old hopes die so that new ones could be born. Silque had hoped it meant letting her old self die so that she could be reborn too.
Until now, Silque believed she had.
There is a trail through her life made by all the little pieces chipped off from her being. It leads all the way back to those days when hearing the hymns of the Mother made her want to smash Her statue to smithereens. Leads back even further still. So much of the old her had not died. These fragments had simply gotten stuck. In some way, Silque had always known this. But she had hoped that the Mother would guide her from the past to the present. Hoped that the Mother would guide her for all her life.
Silque had hoped that the Mother would not make her an orphan again.
A part of Silque wishes she had died in that final battle against Duma. She would have gladly given her life in service to the Mother. It was how Silque expected she would die. Never had she wanted to be a child who outlived her parent.
This shard of her being grows tinier every day.
There is no Mother and no Father any longer. There is no one to whom she can pray. Silque's clothing is antiquated. It is something like a toddler's smock. So she dyes her white robes to match the colours of the One Kingdom of Valentia. Dying her robes feels something like peeling back bandages from a caked wound: it is a step forward.
Silque wanders through what was once Rigel. She stares up at the stars at night and feels the absence of divinity in her bones. The people of this land must feel it too. Duma had commanded that they end each day a little stronger than the one prior. He had set His children against each other to battle for His love. Silque can recognize the futility of that now. Knows that love cannot be seized. Only given. But Duma had passed without bidding His children farewell. His final words are delivered by those same royal lips. So Silque cannot blame the once-Rigelian people for their disbelief. Cannot blame them for their anger.
They have all been orphaned. Just as Silque had been before and has been now. But while the faiths of the Father and the Mother have all but evaporated, there is still faith to be found in humanity.
Silque decides to have faith in herself too.