Beneath the gleaming
skyscrapers and picturesque facade of the City of Redemption lies another city;
a community of dark and ancient magic populated by creatures of the night. Dark
Redemption is a shared-world novel based on an online role-playing game by
James Crowther.
Strephon Mackenzie, a
semi-immortal half-fae has been tasked by the Faerie Queen with the mission of
investigating a renegade faerie lord named Melchior who has established himself
in the city.
When
Strephon attended church, which he admitted, was more out of a sense of
nostalgia and a fondness for the Anglican hymnody that any piety, he went to
St. Onesimus, a small neighborhood parish not far from his home. The grand Cathedral of the Holdy Redemption,
built on the medieval shrine from which the city took its name, was a bit too
“High Church” for his tastes. He
preferred St. Onesimus, where he and Phyllis had been married and to which they
had walked on pleasant Sunday mornings in his more ambulatory days.
Devon
would not have approved of him visiting the church, which is why Strephon
didn’t tell him. The fae have a long-standing
antipathy towards churches, largely stemming from the ancient war waged between
the Children of Oberon and the Inheritors of St. Augustine. To Strephon this was ancient history, but the
immortal fae have long memories about these things. Perhaps this was the reason why holy things
dispelled faerie glamours, and were an anathema to the Fair Folk in
general. Strephon didn’t know; no one
had ever told him why, just that it was the way things were. He did not share this vulnerability to
Sanctity, partially because of his half-human heritage, and partially, he
surmised, because his mortal father had him christened, and the rite had
conveyed a sort of immunization against it.
But
the real reason Strephon didn’t want to tell his cousin was that if he did, he
would have to admit that he wasn’t going to visit the Vicar, but rather the
Vicar’s wife, Lydia; and he’d had quite his fill of Devon’s remarks about his
social life.
In
addition to being the vicar’s wife, Lydia Palmer was a member of the International Sisterhood of Independent Sorceresses;
a group founded by the Wobblies back in the 1930s in an attempt to organize the
witches of England. How she managed to
reconcile this affiliation with her position as a clergyman’s wife, Strephon
often wondered; but never felt impudent enough to ask. He suspected that she found it expedient not
to tell her husband about these things.
The
International Sisterhood was never quite the political force its founders
envisioned; witches tend to be independent-minded and treated the organization
more as a social group. Phyllis had been
a member back when the two of them had been more active in the magical
community; sort of an “honorary witch” deemed magical by marriage. But that was long, long ago. When Second-Wave Feminism hit the
organization in the early ‘70s, it briefly took on a more activist role and
successfully lobbied to have witches added to the Council. About that time Strephon re-established his
connection with the group in order to oppose a development plan to build a
shopping center in Stillwell Forest, one of the large areas of parkland in the
city. He had met Lydia then and the two
had remained cordial acquaintances.
“Mister
Strephon, so good to see you!” the vicar greeted him. “Lydia told me you would be dropping by. May I help you in?”
“Yes,
thank you.” Strephon preferred to manage
his wheelchair by himself when at all possible, but Albert was a good soul and
allowing him to do this small charity was a charity in itself. And the vicarage, like many old houses, were
beastly difficult for wheelchairs.
“I
wished to speak with your wife about donating some flowers to the Altar
Guild. It’s my mother’s birthday, you
see.” Actually, he wasn’t sure faeries
even had birthdays; being immortal, they certainly didn’t celebrate them; but
it seemed a harmless enough taradiddle.
“I
don’t think we’ve seen you at service in a while.” The vicar tried to make the remark sound
casual, but as he was also trying to manhandle Strephon’s chair over the front
steps of the vicarage, he couldn’t avoid a grunt in the middle of it.
Strephon
expected the comment; it was, after all, part of the man’s job. And he was certain that the vicar expected
his reply: “I’m afraid not, vicar. I do find it difficult to get out and about
these days.”
“Do
you have a computer? I’ve been putting
my sermons and our Bible study outlines on our website. I’m trying to convince the Parish Board to
let me do live streaming of our services.”
Strephon
tried not to shudder. Did everything
have to involve computers these days? Still,
he should have expected this too. Albert
always was a tech enthusiast. When they
had first met, it was cassette tapes, and then videos.
Fortunately,
at this point Lydia rescued him. “Albert,
are you going on about your computers again?
I thought you were working on your hymn schedule.”
The
vicar gave a guilty acknowledgement and excused himself.
“Albert
hates selecting hymns and tends to put if off ‘til the last moment. It drives our organist mad!” the vicar’s wife
explained
“I
imagine.”
“So
he’s taken to doing it all at once, once a year, to get it all over and done
with.”
Strephon
agreed that this was quite sensible.
When
her husband had left the room, Lydia quietly shut the door and turned to
Strephon. “Now then, why are you really
here?”
