2. Ophelia
OPHELIA
“Hands of the sun, hold us close. Grant blessings to your humble servants below,” Ophelia sings with all the other Priestesses of the Sun, standing in carefully organized concentric circles around the flaming forsterite blessing bowl.
“Undeserving of your praise, unworthy of your gifts, unable to conceptualize your Goodness.”
She doesn’t need to think about the notes or the words or the hand motions. At this point, you could probably behead her and she’d still be able to complete the chants perfectly before keeling over and dying.
“But bless us still today, undying Form of the Good. Bestow the knowledge of Good and light to what we create in your Forms-blessed name.”
Ah, yes, the Forms. The unreachable ideal of all that is beautiful, good, and just in this world distilled down to three worshiped symbols: the sun, the rose, and the scale. Nothing she hasn’t heard already, hence why she is bored out of her mind.
“Praise be to the Good. Give us light.”
She holds hands with the two Priestesses next to her and they begin their rotations, whose number depends on how many amber pendants they’re making—today it’s only one. They come to a slow stop once they’ve completed a circle and wait for the girls in the outer layers to come back around.
Then the chanting resumes, heads tilted toward the sun. She could close her eyes and ‘reflect on the Forms’ like she’s supposed to, but she’s done so much reflecting in her life she could be a mirror by now.
So instead, she performs the equally dull task of scanning her surroundings for the thousandth time. She may be tired of her humdrum life here, but even she can’t deny that the temple is ethereal.
Amber ceremonies like this one are held exclusively in the Atrium, with walls covered in a mix of terracotta, tile, and sea-glass. It’s built in a perfect circle with an opening on top that follows the arc of the sun.
That isn’t what Ophelia’s eyes are really drawn to, though.
She’s watching the precisely placed mirrors and magnifying glasses around the room as they turn the sun into a force capable of melting even the toughest of stones.
Until sunset, the mechanism creates a brilliant power source with almost no environmental impact.
It’s genius, the whole setup. And it accomplishes its mundane objective very well: to make Forms-blessed necklace pendants for all of the Auxiliaries training at the Academy.
But she wishes the system could be used for more dignified purposes.
To save lives or help the planet or make work less laborious in the lower Arcs. Instead it’s hidden away, wasted here.
She feels a bit like that too. Wasted.
She’s not so arrogant as to think she’s a genius or prodigy, but she knows she’s smart. Crafty. Pretty.
She knows she could do something amazing, if she were given the chance to try. But Priestesses don’t get to try; they get to ‘reflect’ and chant the same words every day of their stupid lives.
Her ambition isn’t something most of the girls share; they’re all quite happy at the Temple. That leaves Ophelia the odd man out, wondering why she’s even here at all. In a philosophical sense, at least.
Because she knows all too well why she’s here in a technical sense.
If a Guardian’s female child is rejected from the Academy, as most are, they end up with the Priestesses.
Meaning that all the girls here were born with the potential to be leaders.
But, in some arbitrary process that everyone knows is rigged against women, children are weeded out before training at the Academy starts.
She’s one of the only Priestesses sent here at less than a year old. Deemed unfit to lead at the age of three months, because obviously they could tell whether she was worthy of power based on how many goo-goos versus ga-gas and the contents of her diapers.
How else would they do it when testing a child barely old enough to sleep unsupervised?
But it doesn’t matter anymore. Because here she is, chanting ‘Praise be to the Good. Give us light,’ over and over again in her billowy Priestess robes with no prospect of change.
She watches the Mother take her ceremonial walk through each of the concentric circles, then approach the blessing bowl. She steps on a tile that deactivates the sun system, and all of the mirrors involved curl into themselves to cool off.
Then she slides her hands into two forsterite gauntlets positioned next to the now-extinguished bowl and scoops up the amber from inside to close it between her hands, one on top of the other.
When pushed together, the gauntlets form a small mold that pushes the amber into the almond shape necessary for the pendant.
Keeping her hands joined, the Mother walks through the circles once more, approaching a basin of water at the far west point of the Atrium. She drops the amber in to cool it completely and solidify its shape.
The moment it enters the water, a resounding crack echoes through the room and Ophelia flinches.
It’s not irregular for the amulets to have small cracks running in their interior, but she’s never heard one make a noise so loud and unforgiving.
The Mother sets her fireproof gauntlets into the wall’s divots and, after a moment of surprise, pushes another tile to flush the amber down to the Priestesses of All Forms. She turns on her heel and returns to the circle.
Ophelia is dying to see what this pendant looks like, but the Priestesses don’t get to alter them after they’ve been made. The pendants are whatever the Form of the Good determines they should be for the person receiving them.
The Priestesses of All Forms will join it with the rose quartz crescent from the Priestesses of the Rose and the iron crescent from the Priestesses of the Scale. Then, they’ll give it a leather cord and send it to the Academy.
Ophelia taps her foot in impatience while the Mother completes her re-grounding walk at a torturously slow pace.
When she’s finished, she glares at any girls who made noticeable mistakes in the ritual, and then, thank the Forms, claps loudly to announce that they’re finally done.
The younger girls groan, whispering to their friends about what they did wrong in the song or the dance. The older girls cheer in relief that it’s over and remove their robes to take them to their allotted hooks.
As always, the end of the ceremony makes her feel one hundred times lighter. She’s found she’s always most maudlin whilst chanting. But there are things to look forward to this week, and she’d rather charge ahead than look back.
“Aikateriiiiiiiiine,” she sings, her voice floating through the room until her friend turns to her conspiratorially.
“Opheeeeeelia,” Aika screams back, because she never could sing. Years ago the Mothers told her to mouth the words during chants because ‘her horrible voice was ruining them,’ All Aika did in response was laugh and yell louder.
Ophelia adores her.
“You know what I heard?” Aika asks.
Ophelia smiles. She loves this tradition of theirs.
“Oh, goodness! What did you hear?”
“I heard there’s—” she shakes Ophelia’s shoulder “—a party this weekend.”
Ophelia gasps and exclaims, “How sacrilegious. A scandal!” She falls dramatically to her knees. “A horrible insult to all that is Good.”
Aika falls next to her. “It’s horrid, I know. Enough to make a grown woman weep.”
“Would you guys stop it?”
Isadora—the third and final piece of their close-knit group—takes their hands.
“This terrible happenstance is too overwhelming to bear, already!” Isadora cries, pretending to faint on the cold tiles.
Everyone else in the Atrium rolls their eyes fondly. They’ve seen this routine enough times. It happens at the end of every week.
The first party invite they’d ever received left them scandalized. A party? How could they possibly be expected to break the rules? They reacted like nothing worse had ever happened—they weren’t close enough then to know how much all three of them loved to break the rules.
They all showed up separately, of course, because who were they to turn down a rare invite? Once the party was in full swing, they encountered each other on the dance floor, drunk out of their minds on cheap wine, and laughed themselves silly. They’ve been inseparable ever since.
Now parties are a drachma a dozen, and no one would dare leave the three of them off their invite list, but the joke persists.
Isadora links her arms with theirs and drags them up the north stairs to the roof.
“Okay, so are we going to this party tomorrow or what?” Isadora asks.
“Please can we?” Ophelia immediately whines. “I’m so bored here I’m going to die.”
Aika kisses Ophelia’s cheek. “Our beautiful dreamer. Only you could be bored of being a Priestess. You know everyone wants to be us.”
“Right,” Ophelia responds. She forgets sometimes that her friends are not nearly as dissatisfied with this life as she is.
“We’re going, don’t worry,” Dora insists. “If we don’t, how will we wear the outfits Aika and I bought when we were blessing that school in the sixth Arc?”
“With what money?” Ophelia asks. They’ve been doing this more and more—buying things.
Which Ophelia doesn’t mind, of course. She loves ‘things.’ But Priestesses aren’t meant to have an income. They’re supposed to live austere but elegant lives outside the capitalist system of the Producers and the communist system of the Leadership Classes.
“Oh, you know,” Aika says as Dora nods mysteriously.
It’s impossible to pry something out of the two of them when they don’t want you to, so Ophelia gives up on understanding for now. When they reach the top of the twisting, ornately carved stairs, the scent of dinner wafts pleasantly through the air.
She separates from her girls and finds her floor cushion in the giant circle of Priestesses.
The Priestesses are purposely placed far from their friends because, according to the Mothers, ‘Dinner is meant to be a time for reflection and thanking the Good for all that we have. Not for chitter-chatter.’
Forms, she hates the Mothers. And they are more than wary of her. She doesn’t mind.
When she sits down, her favorite vegetable curry is in a bowl in front of her cushion.
She hums contentedly at her first bite. They’re meant to take an hour to complete the bowl because savoring it brings them closer to the Forms or something, but Ophelia scarfs it down like there’s no tomorrow.
The girls next to her send judging looks, so she smiles around her spoon and winks at them. This seems to win them over, if their giggles have anything to say about it.
“Only you, Ophelia. Only you could still look good shoving curry down your throat at record pace,” one of them says. She’s probably about seventeen with dark brown hair and pretty hazel eyes. Ophelia doesn’t know her name, but she wishes she did.
It’s hard to feel special as a Priestess, so Ophelia tries her best to appreciate each girl as an individual, not just part of a whole.
Before she can ask for hazel-eyes’ name, though, the girl is back to eating her curry and pointedly looking in the opposite direction. They’re not supposed to be talking, so Ophelia lets it slide.
With nothing to do and no one to yap to, her eyes wander across the landscape. The Sun Temple has a fantastic view, nestled into a cliff by the Academy dorms. The Temple of the Rose is on the flat grass platform below and the Temple of the Scale is sticking out of the cliff below that.
The gauzy pink curtains of the Temple of the Rose are gently rippling in the wind, as beautiful and entrancing as the Priestesses inside.
Through the windows of the Rose Temple she sees girls eating dinner in a highly decorated room full of gorgeous ornaments, intricate rugs, and golden lamps.
They eat at an oval table of dark wood, low enough to the ground that they can sit on the floor.
She can just barely hear them blessing their food by the Form of Beauty.
As for the Temple of the Scale, she can only really see the roof. It looks rather like a military monument, which, in a sense, it is. The windows are small with no curtains, and flags for the Form of Justice fly defiantly from nearly every surface possible.
The defiance is unnecessary; all Priestesses are well-respected no matter their faction. But the Priestesses of the Scale tend to act the same as their flags. Argumentative with no cause to be, with chips on their shoulders that Ophelia doesn’t understand.
From what she’s heard, they eat in an cave beneath their Temple. Some say that it’s a beautiful, crystal-covered cavern. Others say that it’s cold and sad, with a long, iron table and stiff chairs. They don’t allow anyone into their fortress, so she supposes she’ll never know.
She pushes her bowl away and turns to the horizon. The sun is orange and red in the west, setting into the ocean. The way that the light reflects off the sea makes everything sparkle. In the far distance, storm clouds loom, but she knows they won’t reach the Republic. They never do.
Night crawls up, patient and sure, and overtakes the horizon so the sun may lend its warmth to the desolate, uninhabited wasteland beyond the Republic.
It’s moments like these she thinks the Forms might be real. Or, at least, she feels like something is looking out for her.
And if not? Well, she’s perfectly capable of looking out for herself.