Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who asks “faithful to what?”
The teaching of La Cattédral have guided me in every particular of my toils, and through their grace I was appointed Knight Justicar, and entrusted as a vessel of the divine will expressed in the person of the great Cathedralis Armorum XIV, that known as The Benediction Of Might, its forty cubits of steel-boned, sanctified brass and marble. Long have I humbly laboured in this service, teaching an errant world the proper hierarchy into which all must gladly fall: all of the natural in its order below all of the supernal in its own, and set rightly above all, our own Divinity.
The mysteries of the animation of the Cathedralis Armorum are proof, in itself, of the might of the Divine. The crude daemonologies of the lesser faiths, true, make imitation: their baked clay war-bodies, the clockwork affronts of the merchant-peoples of the inner sea, the barbaric wooden hulks of the wilderness peoples not yet taken in hand by civilisation. But the Divine only, the preordained summit of the world's entirety, can animate such a mountain.
It is the long campaign against the sorceror-kings under the Sign of the Eye that has truly broken me, your Holiness.
All are aware that questions exist, that an excess of wit can turn like a blade in the hand when applied to the indestructible strength of What Simply Is; for have I not been trained to recognise and answer the self-injury in such doubts as "but La Cattédral fielded such miracles long before the existence of the Cathedralis Armorum I, let alone the XIV, on a lesser scale; was not its existence preceded by the metallurgical developments that refined Galera steel and holy bellmaking to the arts they are today? Does it not simply embody the development of the artisans of the world? Are not the inner sea merchant-states said to presently field the fire-breathing clockwork Collossus of the Straits, a mere machine in every way the equal of the Cathedralis Armorum in force of arms?" It is trivial to dismiss; the Cathedralis Armorum is the gift of a loving Divine, sufficient to the day, and the Collossus the blasphemous abomination of a jealous world, not to mention necessarily exaggerated in every particular.
The sorcerors of the Eye, however, have wicked miracles I have witnessed with mine own eyes. Devices sixty, eighty, one hundred cubits high; ones which wield the very lightnings of the heavens, one which move with the speed of the wind, ones which take to the air and fly. And the Sign of the Eye recognises no god nor spirit, bends no knee, asks for nor receives any gift at all inherent to their working.
I cannot unsee, in their insistence that the inner qualities of the pilot are key to their devices' activation, the similarity to our Divinity's exacting yet mysterious criteria for worthiness to channel the ineffable will. Nor that the physical rigours of their work is terribly similar to the sacred agonies undergone as the Divinity's conduit to the Cathedralis Armorum's controls.
The Sign of the Eye holds no god in regard, and yet they call on their devices to smite in exactly the same fashion as our own; and their devices answer. Perhaps they are hubristic, and in their folly they call unknown on something daemonological, and it answers; but if so, it answers the same as the Divine in every particular. I must report, your Holiness, that they offered a test — which I undertook in arrogance, to demonstrate the righteousness of the Faith; and I called upon the Divine, in the manner of the awakening of the Cathedralis Armorum, within the confines of one of their godless machines.
I regret I must report that neither they nor I can account, in any particular at all of the subjective experience, outward appearance, or function, that my activation of their machine was distinguishable at all from my dutiful awakening of the Cathedralis Armorum XIV.
By the time this missive reaches you, I will of necessity be gone. For by my faith alone I have piloted the great demonstration of La Cattédral's martial might and just supremacy; but the blade has turned in my hand, and I can no longer outrun this thought: that whatever power I have called upon in all this time, it is one and the same — not only with that of the godless devices of the Eye, but that of every animated war-body fielded by every people on the face of the world, whether it is of steel and brass and marble, or of the unnatural materials of the sorcerors, or of humble clay or even rough, mean wood.
I remain forever a man of faith, your Holiness. But I must ask every person to ask themself, as I have been forced to:
Faith in what?
Je regrette: no longer yr dutiful servant,
St-John Deliver-Us-Through-Conflagration