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In life, Adelard Dekker was matchstick-thin. In his transformation, he is no thinner. The power’s influence presents him in slices. Here’s the gray of his hair, shorn asbestos fibers. The white of his eye, a chemical cloud. His legs are their own withered shadows.
Taken together, the pieces would measure the same as their former whole, and yet they make up something entirely different. Even the scars on his hands are in the wrong places.
“You can just say it,” Gertrude says. “‘I told you so.’”
The Extinction smiles; now that’s him, the match lit. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Faith, it seems, prefers to transfer rather than disperse. Adelard has exchanged his belief in a Christian god for worship of his patron. His former creed had irritated Gertrude at times, comforted her at others. Primarily, though, it amused her. Souls, an afterlife, divine mercy: these concepts appeared to her as quaint and fragile as her youthful aspirations toward heroism. She’d told him so, often, and he had just laughed.
The amusement she wrings from the new avatar’s devotion is bitter and insufficient. Doubt had been the charm of Adelard Dekker’s faith. As a fanatic, he is merely another nuisance.
Despite the new power’s emergence, the world does not end. The Archivist’s work continues, and the Institute’s expansion with it. There will always be rot to stamp out.
Adelard has gone, but Gertrude gets emails. Strings of random characters, made unsettling by the occasional legible pleasantry. Attachments, which she knows better than to open. Infrequently, a website link. Though they look innocuous, she doesn’t click.
She’ll have to kill him someday. She always thought it would be the other way around. Gertrude has no patience for regrets or sentimentality, but in weaker moments, she prefers that version of the world.