The Prism Kingdom had Twelve Churches, each corresponding to one of the months, for its citizens believed every month ushered in a new sun. The Divine Church of the Firstlight was linked to December, a month often associated with spirituality, celebration, and transcendence.

Consequently, every city or town affiliated with the Divine Church devoted itself to preparation for the final month of the year, intent on worshipping and celebrating the divine month when it arrived.

Walking through the rain with an umbrella, beneath the glitching street lamps, with the thunderstorm and lightning cracking overhead, was Raine. The juxtaposition between the gentle puddles she walked through and the chaos in the dark skies stirred something within her.

She began to understand that what seemed like violence above was not separate from the calm beneath her feet. The sky did not only break, but it also gave. Each crash of thunder pressed life downward, shaping quiet ripples that softened the earth.

Perhaps gentleness was not the absence of chaos, but what chaos became when it reached the ground and learned to rest.

...Perhaps that was what she needed to understand that day. And even if it wasn’t, she couldn’t help but conclude as much, suspended in the stupor of something she perhaps wasn’t ready to confront just yet.

After a moment or two under the relentless rain, Raine paused before a chapel, pausing to inspect her boots more closely.

The leather boots were soaked through, her toes numb beneath them, something that shouldn’t have happened considering how tough and durable the leather was meant to be.

As her eyes scanned around her surroundings, she began to miss home already. Her family’s church, the Church of Change, was connected to the month of May, and even though the church had fallen from grace, a few elders with considerable connections to it would still come around now and then.

It was always a warm month in the St. Claire household, even though these old folks only made an appearance during this particular month, their numbers thinning nonetheless.

’Leomaris must be seething right about now... Sorry, little boy, but your name was simply too useful.’

Her feet dried up a little, and she deemed it sufficient enough. She’d used Leomaris’s influence as a Calamity to get off campus, and so there was no time to waste... she had to be back at the academy before dawn, and her allies would be waiting for her at their designated spot.

When she took a few steps away from the chapel, that was when it registered. Faint breaths, distorted heartbeats, and an erratic, precipitous drop in health.

She froze for a moment and extended her Divine Aura even farther, to roughly thirty metres away. She continued to perceive humans she could scarcely distinguish from broken dolls.

"What’s that?"

Her lips moved before she could think, her feet already carrying her toward the second dark alley from the chapel.

No fewer than six stretched steps later, something in the distance down the alley froze her in her boots.

"Stay back! The disease is contagious!"

The voice belonged to a child, no older than ten years old. Their dirty-brown hair caught the rays of light from the street, and that alone was enough for Raine to verify her suspicions.

"What are you doing there, kid? No... what are all of you doing in this alley? It’s raining outside, isn’t it?"

The kid’s brown eyes lingered a moment, darting back and forth in contemplation.

"What do you think? Use your head. We don’t have anywhere else to go."

The words were cutting, almost galling, but Raine paid them no mind, insisting on her questions just the same.

"All of you? Really? Isn’t that a little excessive? Besides, aren’t you afraid the cold will kill you?"

The child narrowed his eyes. "Are you messing with me? Are you new here, old noble lady? We’ve got nowhere to go because we came down with the flu and don’t have the money to get treated. All we can do is wait until December, or November if we’re lucky, and hope we can get healed for free."

Some words cut deeper than any blade could. She’d always assumed such words would take the form of an insult or a threat to her family, never once considering they might emerge from the solitude of a stranger’s carefree remark.

She stood there, dazed, losing herself a little more with every passing second.

This was what she’d come here for. To confirm whether the rumours held any truth: that the church afflicted the townspeople with sickness, only to heal them and exact offerings in the name of the Goddess’s services.

No fewer than fifty people lay down that alley, children included, and yet the chapel, sitting only a few metres away, had abandoned them to die? Children too?

By now, her heart was hammering at an alarming rate when the realisation hit. Sometimes, it seemed, the chaos above was what gave shape to the calm, quiet path below.

Nothing had ever weighed as heavily in her hand as that umbrella did then. She made no attempt to resist it, and even had she tried, she doubted she’d have succeeded. She tossed the umbrella toward the kid and, her expression hoarse with emotion, said.

"Take it, kid. Keep as many people as you can out of the rain with it."

"Hey, old bird! Add something else while you’re at it... Pence — no, wait. A note. Ah, forget it. Okay, pence!"

More insulting, avaricious words from the irksome brat. Their attitude was hardly conducive to kindness, but Raine wasn’t in any state of mind to register a word of it.

While the rain soaked her completely, her mind fixated on a single thing: whoever had orchestrated all of this wasn’t walking away with their head intact. She would become the chaos, and in her wake, her parents could run their church, paving the way for those who could actually be humane.

—

Despite her disordered state of mind, Raine still followed the vestiges of the path her allies had paved for her, and before long, she’d arrived at an Oracle Parlour.

The place was cosy, with a stench suggesting it had been built to deceive. Maybe her senses had been distorted by the unpleasantness she’d just witnessed, but the dubious air the fortune teller carried was enough to tell her she was right on the money.

"Choose the card before you and reveal it."

Her crimson eyes narrowed to the brim as they fixed on the tarot card she’d chosen: a crooked, skeletal creature with four limbs on either side, threads tethered to six, the remaining two wielding a scythe to cut the threads free.

"... death."

The Oracle grew more apprehensive than warranted, as though expecting something that wasn’t coming to pass.

With the assuredness of someone who knew exactly what she was saying, the elderly woman’s tone took on the quality of a witch trying to lurk within a child’s nightmares.

"Something in your life is finishing its cycle, and you’re being asked to accept it rather than resist it."

It wouldn’t work... whatever the old woman was attempting, Raine proved utterly impervious. Her reading of the tarot cards, however, did manage to penetrate...

’Change, huh?’