Chymische Hochzeit Kudo Rinne, anno 2023
"—prepared as a bride adorned for her husband."
- Revelation 21:2
Limit your attacks to alchemists, that was the promise she had extracted from the eldest of the three Hades Sisters, ancient Atropos, dressed in the likeness of a child, solemn face and narrow eyes, her high-pitched voice at odds with the threats she delivered. Since that point, Kudo Rinne had found herself keeping a dangerous secret in her heart.
When Houtaru had gone off after the boy and the Chemy in his position, when he had put himself between the Dragonfly Malgam and the child, she had found herself increasingly frustrated with his inability to follow the rules, his need to argue with everything due to some misguided notion that Chemy and humans could be friends. That wasn't the function of such homunculi, she had wanted to protest, and yet still he had not listened, going off his own once again.
Rinne valued the rules, she valued order. Those women, the Abyssisters, had killed her father when he had transgressed the law. The man who had read to her from the pages of Christian Rosenkreutz, she thought, her hands clenched together, the man who had taught her everything she knew, who had placed before her the Paschal Lamb, a small unleavened, undefiled cake, and inducted her into the mysteries of the Creator, the Father of Lights.
Those three sisters—Clotho, who span, Lachesis, who measured, and, at the very last, Atropos, who severed—those three sisters were now the three who plagued her, who brought her dangerously close to breaking all the rules of the mystery, who compromised her with their presence.
Limit your attacks to alchemists, she had demanded of Atropos amidst the crowd of a café, and since then she had been visited nightly by each of the weird sisters, each of them reminding her of her request as she had protested them.
Her face reddened with frustration as she considered her humiliation. Atropos had been cold, demanding, Clotho had been rough and unpleasant, yet, in the end, it had been Lachesis who had been too much for her, suggestive and playful, singing her praises when she did as ordered, when she bowed her head and followed instruction.
This, Lachesis whispered to her, when all was said and done, the sweat cooling, this was true alchemy, the transubstantiation of resistance into acceptance.
"One becomes two," the measurer said softly, smoothing her damp hair from her face, reciting the old axiom of Mary the Prophetess, "two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth."
She knew the words, the works of the Prophetess, her fashioning of instruments of the art was their oldest heritage, the first tools of the mystery. Yet the context of the words, the suggestion of the other woman's meaning was dangerous, haunting.
In her daily life, she continued as usual, the Saboneedle Chemy had been recovered, the Dragonfly Malgam defeated, the school trip to Kyoto had come and gone, and she had kept herself together in the face of it all, living another life when away from friends, trading dark looks with the Hades Sisters when she encountered them in daylight, bowing her head when each of them visited her in shadow.
Suprasensuality, they called her weakness. She wondered if her father had suffered from it also?
By day, as stood wrapped in the robes of her uniform, she protested them; by night, as she undressed before them, she abandoned herself. Ananke, they whispered to her, each in turn. Her secret name, initiated into a new mystery.
At midnight, the air heavy with the scent of incense, dressed in black before the altar, clutching lilies in her hands.
Clotho, who had weaved the fine clothing she wore. Lachesis, who had broken her. Atropos, who had watched over her, so that she would not come to harm.
She stepped forward, the clack of heels on marble, reborn, youthful mystai, Ananke now by name, inevitability, compulsion, and necessity in deed; the Sabbath bride with adornments she goes, vessels and robes.
In the light of stained glass, the three sisters awaited her.