Antonius Eternity

Towards the heart of the Block, drifting with non-Euclidian determination into the fringes of a freshly rooted forest, there is a room.

Towards the heart of this room, where a tracery of thousands of twisted route-lines converge and diverge, there is a circle. It sprawls across floorboards in the colourful, intertwining chalk-smears of many who have tracked their way into this space for conversation; smiled, laughed musically, and refreshed it with hands outreached.

Towards the heart of this circle, where a different Divine once dwelt, there is a chessboard.

One king is defeated. It does not matter which, somehow.

Since that white starburst, kings have stopped mattering here.

Soon, the board will be reborn, the knights and bishops resuming their dance; the pieces shifting paths across squares, between squares, past squares – past walls and boxes and cells and smoke-shrouds. New squares, old squares, all at once.

A well-worn notebook next to the board, where all this is written. This particular combination of infinities, this connection and intertwinement of pieces, catalogued by two pedantic academics. A professor and a theologian; twin spectacles, twin wineglasses shining in light-struck, spark-sharp clarity beside the board.

Deep bloodstains at the bottom of the glasses are settling, drying down to mere marks of memory. They’ll take time to scrub off, and they’ll never leave altogether, but – well, they have time. The mists are receding, clarifying, and they see where to go, now.

Exegesis. Glass shimmers mirror-soft in the starlight.

Chairs are pushed back impatiently, the players currently elsewhere. They will be back. There are always more games to play.

All this said, the no-longer-Bishop Antonius has cultivated connection in more ways than chess, and there is more to this room than no-longer-empty circles in no-longer-damned boxes.

…For one, there is a tree bursting through the wall.

Neither of the men who planted it – who knelt in the penitent ash of grief shared, with the singing of shovel-blades as earth tore and reshaped itself with the hymns of regret; with only a sapling and a homily at their altar of bloodstains – could have predicted this.

Moro was here last week. In some ways, it was the hardest thing that Antonius – kingslayer, heretic, jailbird, confessor – has ever done.

The tree is huge, boughs vaulting with cathedral grandeur and the gravity-ache of hope. More trunks as rough-whorled pillars; framing an apse alongside ribbons wound reverently into fast rope-knots around the branches, in iungando manibus ut iungando cordibus. Red veins woven with green.

Cradled in the canopy of fluttering star-limned leaves, where insights twirl and shiver in the twilight, there are flowers. Crimson, flourishing, like the foliage that blossoms with tattoo-vitality from a death mark.

Above, the flowers tremble and sing.

As above, so below.

Beneath, the hallowed roots; the catacombs.

Revived from a razed field, the burning of the brush, the redefinition of the known, the roots curl with boundless rhapsody here and beyond. Beyond where a not-Bishop in his self-built box of silence, his self-immolation, could have conceived. There is still fire here; flames flickering merrily in a cosy corner, a fireplace fed sometimes by fuel of Livith’s tribute. But it is mostly to circulate the air, nowadays. Allied against stagnancy; an integral restlessness that is leashed, reshaped, shining.

Some roots are poking in tangles through the floorboards. A tripping hazard, he is aware, and will try to fix it before the choir arrives.

There was a choir in life. Then, it was silent. Now there is a choir again.

This happened, in a way, by accident. Antonius is appreciative all the same.

Sheet music sits atop the drifts of writing that his desk always seems to accumulate; the mended doctrines, the frustrations and epiphanies of a workspace. Not all of the writing is his own, though. Pieces he is proofreading, understanding, accepting. Poems and plays from Judyth; his partner’s manifesto; letters from Lucilla. Seeing those latter two simply beside each other is as ironic as it is revelatory.

Nor is the desk the only place where words dwell; where shared lyrics shimmer and bolster and blend.

Atop shelves creaking with the weight of knowledge accumulated and borne, with the weight of a ministry lived and learnt from, is a tea set.

Many are leaf-tinted by hundreds of conversations, hundreds who have come to seek connection, guidance, tethering, in a teacup and close-woven words. Some are careworn, hand-whittled; others clear and gold-edged with laughter. Playing cards, a smoke-wreathed dragon, roses, constellations, cats. So many patterns in porcelain harmony. In the clinking chords of saucers, the melodic hiss of steam.

In the people; invited into the circle with a hand outstretched, reaching.

There will be even more, soon, when the choir returns.

Where once the door was self-defeatingly locked, now it has been left open for them. It is their choice to cross the threshold.

Windows, too, have been thrown wide; gauzes and silks whispering in the twilight glow, in the sacrosanct breeze. This place, and all in it, luminous with starshine.

Mingled snatches of voices. Distant, softened laughter.

And, in this space, not confined to the circle but everywhere; sound spilling past stained glass—

Windchimes.

Symphonies of them, shining bright as any candle, clear as any church-bell. Connected, shifting, imperfect, half-cracked, healing.

Together, tethered, the melody grows.

It encompasses, grounds, embraces. Sees and grasps. Loves.

Sings.

For so long, he sensed nothing here.

The choir is still in transit, but the path sprawls open before them. Eternity stirs like snatched exhales between clock-chimes.

Epiphany, exegesis.

There is always something singing.

– by Rose G.

What is a bishop to do in the face of an unexpected afterlife? What is a bishop to do in the face of their mistakes? What is a bishop to do, but realise that they were right about more than they once thought.

Ave proximitas radicibus.

Connection. Truly, it is this most valued, esteemed, fundamental aspect of humanity that the Divine is, and was. The absence of express divinity does not make that any less the case, or any less vital a part of the human condition. And living or dead, we are all human. Antonius, bishop no longer, is human.

He clasps a mug of tea, reclined in his room of entwining technicolour vine-marks, a golden serpent adorning his fourth finger. He was betrayed once, murdered by the very man he was closest to. Now they are both here, through providence or otherwise. They have the chance, however reluctant they might be to take it, to make amends. Their relationship now is far different than what it once was. Antonius’ affection lies elsewhere, but there is room after the years and ordeals apart for something different. Something new.

Ave proximitas alteris.

Lucilla sits across from him, tea in hand. On any day, it could be any or multiple of his friends gracing his home, but today it is her. A ring adorns her own finger; April, he knows, bears its counterpart. Few words are exchanged through the comfortable silence this day, between sips of warm and comforting infusion.

The red of Antonius’ deathmark hums placidly as with a heartbeat, now adorned with budding leaves and fruits expressed in ink of that same red. The turmoil now is past. The future is growth.

Ave proximitas iunctione.

Turnips = poggers

“Know thyself.”

“I have another question for you first. A purely logistical one, mind. Black or white?”

Antonius smiles, all teeth, all light-struck eyes. “What I do for the Divine, I do with my own intent.”

“Are we doomed to always be playing chess?”

“So alive, and so present. It is as though the very earth sings with the choir.”

A voice like smoke, like the dying of the light. “Tell me… How am I to truly know I can trust you?”

“The day I let myself think you understood me was the day that I died. I will not let that happen again. I will not let you be the blade that pierces me. I will not LET YOU-” And there is a blade.

“I love you.” “I don't believe you.”

A smile. A smashed thing, fractured around every edge. “Have you heard much music lately, my dear?”

Caving into gravity, as though there is no ground beneath them, Antonius falls too. He cradles Titus like a sacred thing.

“Damnation, for us, is to be cut off. To be alone.”

“What is this place if not a box.”

Like a pillar cracking, or a bonfire burning in on itself, he finally collapses into Titus’ touch. This time, this collapse, the Bishop does not emerge from the wreckage. Antonius remains in Titus’ hands.

“Do not honour me so,” he spits. “I do not deserve it.” And then Antonius, the shattered church-glass, the drowning man, the mirrored sinner, begins to cry.

Antonius does not pray anymore. Or at least, not as he once defined it. Confession feels religious all the same.

All at once. As though tearing a knife from his chest. “I mean you have me beaten. I mean you have me.”

“I am as I am, as I was, as I will be. As we are, as we choose to be. Together.”

Sparks revive in their eyes at Judyth's speech. Star-sharp; sunlit dapples through stained glass, through growing, linking green. Light shining not from the blade of a dagger, but the blade of a shovel.

The glasses chime resonantly. All the lightness and clarity of a church bell, a poem spoken, a ringing clock. Sounding out.

A new hour, an old hour, an hour onwards. All of it in one, forever.