Dogma -

The beast did not wake.

The chapel went colder. Aldric felt the old god鈥檚 attention鈥攐r perhaps just the weight of forty years鈥攑ress down on his shoulders. 鈥淭he rules are not wrong. The rules are . Without them, the beast wakes.鈥�

In the beginning, there was the Word. And the Word was a list. The beast did not wake

He believed. He truly did. The world, he鈥檇 been taught, was a fractious beast held together by the thinnest of leashes: ritual. One forgotten genuflection, one poorly timed nod, and the whole tapestry of reality might unravel into chaos. The old god, Unwitnessed and Exact, demanded precision the way a starving man demanded bread.

Aldric stood there for a long moment. The candles guttered again. Somewhere, in the dusty dark of his own mind, the old god Unwitnessed and Exact yawned and turned over, uninterested. No thunder. No earthquake. Just the soft, terrifying sound of a man unfolding a laminated card and tearing it, once, down the middle. 鈥淭he rules are not wrong

Not carved in stone, not whispered by prophets, but printed on cheap, laminated cardstock and tucked into the breast pocket of every acolyte of the Order of the Unfurled Truth. It was called the Compendium of Small Correctnesses , and it was, by all accounts, a masterpiece of misery.

Aldric froze. The other monks froze. The candles guttered. And the Word was a list

Matthias shrugged. 鈥淭hen we go to bed. And in the morning, we decide which rules still matter.鈥�

And Father Aldric, for the first time in forty years, sneezed鈥攍oudly, freely, at no particular time at all. And the world, stubborn and beautiful and utterly indifferent, continued to spin.