Demon Priest knows you hate to beg, and he’d never be one to make you do so. No, not his blessing. His gift. His everything. He lives to serve you. Whatever you ask for he will acquire without hesitation. But that doesn’t mean he can’t make you admit how badly you need him in other ways.
He bends you over the alter, the church empty. But Demon Priest would worship you in front of the masses if only you’d let him. He rubs his cock along your dripping slit, mixing his precum with your slick. Your pussy throbs, senses tingling. He’s so close to where you need him most.
“Put in—hmm— put it in,” you moan, hips wiggling against his. His cock catches onto your entrance and you suck in a harsh breath. He chuckles lowly in your ear.
“Oh, you want something? Tell me what you want, precious dove,” he rasps, his voice sending sparks that go straight to your core. A long whine leaves you.
“You know what.”
“But I wanna hear you say it, my love. What would you like me to stuff inside you,” he starts, his voice turning into a rough growls as his claws dig into your hips.
A high pitched mewl tears from your throat and echos off the empty church walls. No one but him and God there to witness such a blessed sound.
“Your cock!” You shout in desperation, pussy clenching around the bit of his tip pressed against you.
“How bad you want it?” He asks darkly as he starts to push in.
You let out a long moan, pushing back to help suck in his cock but his claws keep you in your place. You’re stuck going at his pace and he goes as slow as he seems bearable. The warmth of your slick walls proving relief for the stinging pain in his feet.
“S-sooo bad,” you whine, feeling the way your body slowly stretches around his girth, accommodating such a dizzying size. Every vein brushes along your depths and your body pulses with need.
Demon Priest huffs out a growl with every breath as your tightness nearly suffocates him. He leans over you, his frame swallowing your plump body, surrounding you with him and only him. His hot breath fans your ear and you clench around him, only serving to make him snarl at you.
“Now what would you like? You know I live to serve my God,” he says, voice sounding more demonic by the second.
“M-move.”
“Move?” He asks, his voice almost playful as he starts pulling out of you. You immediately whine in protest, core clenching around him to keep him trapped inside. Demon Priest lightly scrapes along your belly to restrain himself, his jaw clenching.
“Fuck me, please!” You cry out and Demon Priest roars, slamming his cock inside you at full force.
A massive claw reaches and brings your head down onto the alter. Keeping you positioned perfectly for him as Demon Priest brutally fucks up into your sopping cunt. From your place on your alter you can only just see his true demonic form and your pussy ripples along his length, making his thrusts grow even rougher as he splits you open on his cock.
“As you so command, little dove,” he says deeply through broken moans.
His eyes flash and you know you’ve unleashed something within him that you can’t contain. At least not until he’s forced a few dozen orgasms out of your ruined pussy.
But it’s alright. There isn’t another service until next Sunday. And Demon Priest is going to take advantage of every second he has alone with you inside this holy sanctum, and yours.
Upon this pedestal rests P'urg-orp Lysh, the demonic high priest of Pyaray's temple. Lysh was at one time a mortal but has long since traded his humanity for the power and immortality that comes to one of the servants of Chaos.
Chaos has a reliable health plan -- they'll never let you die (Alain Gassner from Rogue Mistress, campaign supplement for Stormbringer or Hawkmoon, Chaosium, 1991)
content: m!demon/Archeologist!reader, gender neutral reader, size kink (yes again), demon priest, religious under tones (and over tones), blasphemy.
You knew you didn’t go to church as often as your parents wanted. Even with your degree in classics and your work in archeology, you didn’t often find yourself in churches.
It made sense that the first one you were assigned to was haunted by a demon. The rumor was that it waited in the rafters when the church was in use. The other rumors, the ones you were more set to believe, were that it was a carving of a demon in the rafters of a church that had been nearly forgotten by the town that had once grown around it and had since moved away from the dark stained wood in the center of the forest.
But here you were. Gone to see if the forgotten church was still there and if the demon of the rafters was still perched and waiting.
The first thing that struck you was the line of salt around the door. It wouldn’t have been so unusual, if it hadn’t stormed like a motherfucker all night long. A salt line across a half-buried-in-muck threshold shouldn’t have been intact. It should have blown away or dissolved. Anything.
Unless someone came to make sure it was still there.
The second thing that struck you as odd was that there were no crosses on the church. Usually on churches from this time period there was a large one behind the altar and a gorgeous one on the roof. You couldn’t even see an outline from where one might have been fixed and was stolen by opportunistic looters or time.
The final thing that struck you as odd was that it was impeccably clean inside. There was no dirt blown in through the broken windows. No cracked glass littering the floor. There wasn’t even dust on the altar. It had been cleaned well and often.
And you could not see who had cleaned it today. Anyone who would have come in would have tracked in mud from the squelching wet lands that surrounded the half-sunken church. But the floor was perfectly clean. So clean that you felt bad about tracking in mud yourself and left your shoes outside, rather than leave muddy foot prints to clean afterwards.
You didn’t go to church often at all. Certainly not often enough to have the habit of kneeling in front of the altar and crossing yourself.
But you did it anyways.
“Have you come for confession, my child?”
The voice sounded like brimstone and the speaker smelled of ozone and fresh rain in the mud. The hand that curled over your shoulder was too big, too long in the fingers and too sharp in the claws. The white gloves hid it as well as it would be hidden, you suspected, but there was no hiding the sharpness of the claw tips that dug into your shoulder.
You stood and turned, your hands flying to your mouth and to cross yourself as your eyes laid on the priest offering you absolution in the eyes of the lord.
His long sleeved shirt hid much, his high priest’s collar hid more, but there was no hiding his face. Red and snarling, with curved and jagged ram’s horns and teeth like a shattered window in his smiling mouth, the devil looked at you in serenity.
“I can take your confession if you wish, my child. No one has come for confession in…” he sighed, “such a long time.”
You could not stop trembling long enough to nod or shake your head. You could not stop staring long enough to think of which you wanted to do. He took you gently by the hand, pulling it away from your agape mouth, to lead you to the front pews.
“You’ll have to forgive me, the confessional was rotted long ago. I had to remove it.”
His voice was kind. Exactly as kind as you'd imagined priests should be, with a low rumble that spoke of hellfire and forgiveness in the same gravel. You let him lead you to sit on the pew.
“Bless me…” he encourages.
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It's been…” You'd never been to confession. You were only repeating the words that movies and shows had told you were right. “Some time since my last confession.”
He nodded solemnly, his head bowed over folded hands. You realized that you should be confessing over bowed hands as well, that your hands should be folded in a sign of deference, your head bowed in shame. Or reverence. Whichever one it was supposed to be. But you could not stop staring at those curling horns. At the ridges and lines that made up his face. At the stained blood red of his skin and the curling shape of his black wings. They rotted, the wings. Feathers falling from them with every breath he seemed to take. And his tail was no better, the spade shaped end of the devil’s tails you were warned about.
“But I have nothing to confess,” the words fell from your lips like Lucifer from heaven.
His head snapped, the point of his tail digging into the wood of the pews with a crack, and his eyes narrowing on you. As his lips curled in a slow sinful smile, you saw the teeth of shattered glass reflecting sunlight in a beam of brilliance back at you.
“Nothing, my child? Are you sure?”
The growl in his second question was a warning. A line drawn on the floor that you knew you should not cross.
“Nothing,” you breathed and crossed the line.
His hands shredded through the gloves as he reached for you so quickly that the fabric would not hold. His hands around your throat and waist as he lifted you, his wings beating a flurry of necrotic feathers from their bones as he rocketed you into the rafters of the forgotten church.
He laid you down more gently than you’d expected, more gently than he’d any right to, on the intersection of two cross beams. You could see below now, as you twisted to glance at the pew you’d sat in. They were as rotten as him. As rotten as you. The floor was strewn with coal black dust and the windows streamed with red light. Nothing was safe about where you were. Nothing was clean.
“Let us give you a sin to confess, then, my child,” his voice was cracked stone and volcanic blisters as he shredded out of his disguise.
The cloth fell in black and white ribbons to decorate the pews below as he grew. He had been the height of the average man he’d impersonated. But now he was otherworldly. He loomed over you and you shrank further under the claws that separated your own disguise. Your clothes joined his as streamers falling from the rafters.
His tongue was a sinful thing, between the teeth of jagged glass that reflected the red light around you like a halo of hellfire. It slithered, flicking between parts of you that you did not know could feel pleasure and thrusting deeply into parts that you knew could. He tasted all of you while you writhed and screamed blasphemies that only invigorated him more. His claws traced occult symbols into your skin and you cried from the pleasure those red welted lines elicited.
When he had thoroughly fucked you with his tongue, spreading you until you were gasping and screaming for more, he brought you down on his cock. It was a monstrous thing, bigger than you thought should be able to fit inside of your body. And warm. So warm. You could see the steam coming off of your body as your sweat evaporated with his every thrust. He bent you, maneuvering you so he could get ever deeper. Pushing your knees to rest on the rafter under your head and pounding into you from above. You screamed an oath to a god deaf to your prayers, once and now forever more, and he laughed like a madman undone by your words.
You saw the bulge of his tip inside of you and when he ran his hand over it, stroking himself through the suddenly thin barrier of your skin, you came undone. You screamed like a hellion and dug your nails into his skin.
“Confess your sins, my child, and let me save. Your. Soul.” He growled the words and punctuated them with every thrust. You could taste him in your throat. Like lightning after the storm had already passed.
You curled up, shoving him deeper inside of you, to capture his sinful mouth with your own. His teeth bit into you and you tasted the copper of your own blood as his tongue plunged into your throat. You almost thought he could taste his own cock, he was so deep. You came once more at the thought, at being so thoroughly possessed. You let yourself spasm, shaking as your soul unraveled and braided itself between his claws.
“Confess,” he demanded, and you complied.
You screamed your love for his cock. Your lust for his claws. Your greed for his tongue. You screamed your wrath and your need and your want. You screamed as he growled and filled you, clutching you to him as his own orgasm nearly toppled you both out of the rafters.
You lay spent and panting, his cock still buried inside of you as he perched on the rafters. His hand stroked your stomach, the ridgeline of his cock still thrumming and hard inside of you.
“Do you have sins to confess to me now, my child?” He asked.
You smirked and watched his face as your mouth shaped the single syllable.
Inspired by: Dropout's Make Some Noise and the prompt "The priest taking your confessional might be playing a drinking game."
Reader!demon x female human, SFW, Part 1 of 3
Coverart: Link by chocolateal
Part 1 [Part 2]
Hiding in the confessional booth had seemed like a good idea at the time. Of course, the time had been 'spotting an inquisitor from Hell within the sacristy, your disguise spell nearly run out of power, and the youth choir blocking the way to your quarters'.
In retrospect, it still probably was the best move you could have made, but it did leave you stuck in this small booth listening to pitiful humans’ self-recriminations for the past few hours. You just needed your pendant to absorb enough sunlight for the disguise spell to work. You were never letting the maids into your personal quarters again. They’d put all your pendants back on your desk when cleaning the windows and you’d forgotten to reinvigorate them before putting one on this morning. Or test them to see how charged they’d gotten.
There have only been two upsides to your predicament. Firstly, you now have blackmail on at least two influential nobles. Secondly, the discovery of the sacramental wine under the bench. The holy water mixed in meant it had far more of a kick than typical human fare—a delightful discovery. Most human alcohol was too weak to really give you any lasting effect. It certainly makes hearing these endless petty petitions far more tolerable.
“…my brother’s carriage is surely an example of excess, isn’t it, Father?” a plaintive voice—male and too old for such a petulant whine—says from beyond the screen. Lord Neville, if you’re not mistaken. A second son of some minor baronet. “So it isn’t truly my fault that I’m envious of it.”
You’d begun a little game to pass the time, noticing all the similarities between these human’s “confessions”. Jealousy and siblings have been staples so you take one big sip to cover them both. Hypocrites, the lot of them, and always trying to wriggle out of blame, of fault. And sure you could encourage their vice as they’d likely expect of a demon, but it’s far more satisfying to be the one condemning for once. “One sin does not neutralize the other, my son,” you intone once you’ve swallowed. Smirking at the image you know you’d make if only any of the humans could see you, you continue, “Come now, you’re not a child, surely you know that in your heart.”
The man flinched and lowered his head. “Yes, Father. I’m sorry, Father.”
Adjusting your seat on the uncomfortable stone floor, you try to ensure your horns don’t knock into the walls. You’re just tall enough in your undisguised form that you can’t sit on the bench. You should be grateful your robes are loose as they’re still comfortable enough after you transformed, although your shoes and collar had been hastily removed. “Greed is your brother’s sin. Vanity belongs to you both. Envy is yours to own. You must pray at dawn,” the man made a little sound of dismay—you knew he was the one always yawning at morning service. You’ve only been here a month but it was more than enough time to observe the humans who attended. Your smirk deepens. “For one hour for a week, give an entire day's profits to charity, and pay your brother a genuine compliment.”
“Father—“ Lord Neville began to protest, which is how you know you’d hit on all the soft spots you’d intended.
“This is your penance,” you cut him off, parroting the words from other confessional sessions you’d overheard. You add a bit of deeper resonance to your voice in order to inspire that extra touch of fear. “Do you object to your sentence?”
“No, Father, of course not,” the man immediately crumbles. “Thank you for your wisdom and setting me on the righteous path.”
“Of course, my child,” you reply as he bows his way out of the little booth. “Have a blessed day.”
You go to take a final drag from the bottle, owed because he tried to argue his penance, only to realize you’ve finished it. Sighing, you carefully set it down, making sure the clay on stone nor the sound of your claws on either cause any undue noise. You touch your pendant, hung from the tiny window placed in vain to make the booth less stuffy. You risk sending a tendril of your power into the pendant to test it—which you should have done this morning, thrice curse your own haste and distraction—and you can tell it's almost full, but will need another half hour. Why did today of all days have to be so cloudy?
If you hadn’t found the wine, you’d have fallen asleep hours ago or dared discovery out of boredom. At least spending so much time in here meant the inquisitor was long gone. Her fault for being shit as disguising who she was to you, if not the oblivious humans around her. Your disguise had been at least twice as good—except for the nature of tying it to the pendant which left this loophole of a weak point. It only worked when fully charged.
If she can’t find you, you wonder who will be sent next. First those demonic beasts found a path up so they sent you, a fallen angel, after them. Generally the fallen could more easily disguise themselves as humans and caused less wanton destruction. However, you’d figured out how to slip your chains and sent them back below alone. Rather than risking another fallen being freed in a similar manner, they’d sent this outer circle demon to find you. If she failed, would they send an inner circle demon? Or give up as long as you don’t draw attention to yourself?
Hard to say. It is true that you don’t plan to get caught. You hate Hell and you resent the humans for their freedom, but you’re far more interested in earthly pleasures than destruction. Not to mention an aspect of your nature as a fallen is still to order and balance. You simply enjoy punishing the wicked more than rewarding or protecting the weak. Living humans are so much more fun to play with than the ones below. More vivid. More substantial. More satisfying.
The door opens and another figure slips inside. You glance over and frown: the silhouette is all wrong.
“He-hello, Father,” a child’s lisp makes itself known and you inwardly groan. The children are all either boring, impossible to understand, or end up inadvertently adding more humans to your list of fair game to play with. The deaths of wicked humans doesn’t draw attention from below or above the way a righteous death might. You’ve been picking your targets carefully thus far. Ingratiating yourself with the church had been a risky, but brilliant move in the end.
So had this confessional, truth be told. You should have gotten into the rotation from the start, except you’d gone as a deacon, not a priest. It had seemed like a good idea at the time since it’d been so long since you’d been on this plane of existence. A good way to re-learn the ropes. And it had. But it also had its limitations. Oh well, you needed to be moving on soon anyways if an inquisitor had tracked you here. You’ll swipe priestly garments on your way out and be a full fledged Father from here on.
You barely pay attention to the kid as they stammer their way through something about taking a second child’s toy and being mad at their mother. Instead you focus on trying to find a full bottle of wine for this last stretch. You don’t even know what you tell the child, but they leave without tears or laughter so hopefully you’ve finally found the right middle ground for them.
The door barely shuts after the kid when another parishioner enters.
“Greetings, Father,” a woman says as she sits delicately on the seat, adjusting her skirts with careful attention.
Frowning, you look over, trying to make out a face through the lattice work. The dark is no object to you and sure enough you identify one of the other deacon’s daughters. Prim and proper, Lady Mara assists her father in his duties and is a model devotee. She’s also been keeping a close eye on you nearly the entire time you’d been here—and not as some others had given your disguise’s handsome face. No, she’s observant and disciplined—devout to a fault. You’ve never seen her angry or cruel or selfish. Her placid expression and polite words made your hackles raise. It was plain unnatural for a human to be so free of vice.
She’s only human, you’d checked, but she’s been worrying you nearly as much as the inquisitor when it came to exposure. Not that you had any idea what might have tipped her off—which only made her more of a concern. After her suspicion had first been piqued, you’d tried to get on her good side only for her suspicions to grow. It was infuriating. With that plan having backfired, you’d tried to distance yourself from her the past week with some success.
“Greetings, my child,” you reply, hoping your deeper voice in this form was enough to keep her from realizing who you were. Forgetting your true nature, she knew deacons weren’t allowed to take confession. Still, this was a golden opportunity to figure out what was on her mind—what else made it tick and what she might know. Given her devotion, this was the most likely place she’d share any secrets or sins kept in her confidence. Has she been sharing her suspicions with anyone so far? You doubted the clergy would deign to listen to even a woman as respected and pious as her. Still, you wanted a clean break from this church and city. “What brings you here on this day?”
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” Mara’s reply is as traditional as can be. You find it hard to believe she’s done much of anything that could be considered a sin. All you’ve found on her has been disgustingly pure. She likely thought something unkind about a criminal than anything more substantial. “Lately, I have been feeling rather aimless, without purpose. I do not understand the direction my life appears to be heading.”
You nearly sigh out loud. Or maybe she is just like all the others. Resisting the urge to tell her that isn’t a sin, you focus on getting the cork out of a bottle. “So would you say you’ve been feeling lost?” you ask, a little leadingly. Hastily covering the cork with your hand when it releases with a little “pop”, you wait for her answer.
“Yes.” You take gulp because all these ridiculous humans are all fucking lost. It must be what makes them cling to these laughable rules they don’t even bother to follow. “Yes, I am feeling rather lost, Father.” Mara sighs, a practiced and winsome sound if there ever was one. “I thought I knew what I wanted out of my life and where it was going,” she’s losing some of that scripted, careful speech as she continues—a small hint of frustration under her polish as she continues, “but now I just don’t know.”
How humans can be so conflicted when they are living as close to paradise as most were likely to get is beyond you. Mara would probably end up above, but most of these petty little whiners should savor their “lost” feelings while they still can. Before far more distressing emotions take their place. More importantly, you need to get the root of the matter, so you ask, “I see. And how is this feeling leading you to sin, my child?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about my sister…” You nearly groan at that, not again with the siblings and envy. You’ll need a hearty sip for whatever sanctimonious nonsense this saint is envious of. If you remember the sister, she’s got nothing this one should even want. “You see she married a baron—the one I’d told her in confidence that I fancied.” You perk up at that, you’d not thought she had wants outside of serving the church. And her sister went after than the man knowing this? Perhaps she did have some depth to her after all. “I told myself he was free to choose whomever he liked as a bride, but it angered me so. Her betrayal. She could have had whomever she wished, but she courted him.”
There’s some extra grit in Mara’s voice at the word betrayal and you can’t help but savor it. It's the first sign she’s more than a sanctimonious doll. “Feeling wronged is not a sin,” you placate as you take a sip for “betrayal”. The sister is more classically beautiful, per current human beauty standards, but Mara certainly isn’t unattractive. In fact, it had begun to vex you that the more you tried to find fault with her, the more attractive she came to be in your eyes. Some hidden symptom of too much time on Earth, no doubt.
She doesn’t acknowledge your words, continuing, “They even took their wedding trip in the city I always wanted to go to but I’m forbidden from traveling.” You lean forward at the bitterness in her voice, already invested in her story despite yourself. “My father finds me too valuable to ever leave his side.”
You suppress a snort—her father is rather incompetent. You’d thought him oblivious to how skillfully she manages him and his work even if it had been apparent to you by the end of your first week. The priests here tend to ignore that which doesn’t fit the lies they tell themselves about the world and how it truly functions. That made it easier for you to maintain your disguise and for them to overlook how competent a young woman could be. “She brags about how pretty their children will be every time I see her, how rich they live, unbound by clergy orders. She even offered to make me these potential children’s governess, if I tired of working under our father—like it was some benevolent gift I should thank her for.”
How one sister could be as cruel as the other is kind is a mystery to you. You are torn between tipping your hat to the sister for her piercing words and wanting to punish her on Mara’s behalf. “Did you?” you ask with bated breath. Surely even paragon of virtue Mara hadn’t—
“Yes,” there’s a growl in her voice, gritted and low in a manner that reminds you of Hell in the most comforting of ways, “I was forced to.”
“And how did that make you feel?” you ask, eager for this pretty little thing to stop hiding behind a mask of civility. That must be where this is going, this confession. She’s only human after all. Even an angel would have trouble ignoring such intentional provocation. You certainly hadn’t been able to.
“Furious,” Mara confesses, her voice another tone darker. You watch her clench her fist. Her nails must be digging into the palm of her hand. Your nose twitches for the scent of blood. “The both of them make me sick. Selfish and grasping little worms. I wanted to castrate the baron and bash her head into the stair railing.”
How delicious. Frankly, it sounded like her sister deserved a good thrashing, but you are still trying to pretend to be pious. “Violence is never the righteous path, my child.”
“Yes, Father,” Mara replies automatically, but there’s no feeling behind it. Empty words like so many others, but so, so entertaining coming from her. “She is living the life I wanted and she doesn’t even—“ She swallows down her next words with a frustrated noise.
“Doesn’t even what?” She’s quite compelling when she speaks with true emotion rather than from behind the polite little mask she’s worn any other time you’ve spoken to her.
“She doesn’t even value it,” Mara hisses, “I found her, coming out of Father Galliano’s office late one night.” Oh, ho ho—you knew that bastard was fucking some of the girls, but his deacon’s married daughter? Now that is a tasty bit of sin. “Her dress was creased. Her stockings were falling down. Her veil askew. He reached out to help her straighten it. She went to all the trouble of taking the baron and she still wasn’t satisfied.”
“Envy is a sin, my friend,” you say, trying to remember you can’t just sit here and commiserate with her. Demons are possessive creatures by nature and the fallen were no different. The way these humans seem tolerant of sharing, tolerant to the insult of others touching what’s theirs, and go after what doesn’t belong to them as if it's their right makes you bristle with anger every time. There isn’t even the honesty of true theft—these affairs. Just disrespect.
The church gets so many things wrong when it comes to Heaven, Hell—demons and angels. They don’t understand it's all the same—order, chaos. As is above, so is below applies to more than just this plane. If anything, here is where the least rules exist and the humans still love to flaunt those they do have. “Your sister’s affairs, her husband, you shouldn’t—”
“Do you think I still want the baron?” Mara cuts you off, her tone mocking and incredulous. You're stunned into silence. “Far from it. No, he’s revealed himself to be selfish and stupid—gambling debts up to his ears. He wins nearly as often as he loses, their coffers emptying and filling like the tides of a drunken sea.” You take a drink for gambling, even if it isn’t her sin. “I’ve been waiting for them to finally run aground for years but they keep lucking out. It is immensely frustrating. My fury at the injustice of who gains and who loses in this world grows with each passing day.”
You’re starting to feel uneasy, even with another drink of wine and its pleasant buzz. Not only did you fail to read any of this below her placid smile, but there comes that matter of why she’s confessing all of this. “Lady—” You try to interject but she keeps talking.
“The rest of this glorious institution is the same,” Mara spits. “Each year my father trusts me with more and each week I discover some new selfish hypocrisy. Someone’s skimming off the donations, another is accepting bribes for blessings, while a third runs a sweatshop disguised as a charity.”
Oh, who is that last one? He sounds like someone you could blackmail.
“And here I am, aiding my father in aiding them,” her voice is as bitter as they come and you don’t blame her one bit. The danger in lingering for too long isn’t the only reason you want to leave this place. You hate hypocrites more than any others and this place is invested. “Listening to them preach week after week about behaviors they don’t practice and give advice they would never take.” She takes a deep breath and resettles herself on the thin cushion. She pulls herself together far more quickly than you expect. “So I feel lost and angry. My thoughts grow dark with sins of wrath. What should I do, Father?”
What should you say to her? Quite frankly, your fingers twitch with the urge to met out punishment yourself. Yet, you cannot tell her such things. Any sympathy beyond the reasonable, any condoning of her impulses, would give you away more than anything. No priest who practices here would ever do such a thing. Yet you want to hear more, you want to see what other titillating things you can bring her to confess.
“The offenses you’ve laid are most egregious if true,” you see a muscle in her jaw twitch at the insinuation she might be lying, but you continue, “and yet ultimately what others do is not your concern. That is between them and our Holy Lord. It is your thoughts and actions that you must control. That you will answer for.
“The Lord calls on each of us to follow his righteous path.” You’re grateful your time here allows you to spew such bullshit with ease. “If you feel you’ve strayed from his path for you, if you are lost, you must orient yourself according to the stars of prayer and wisdom. The Lord is always speaking if we but stop and listen. He is leading you where he wishes for you to go, if you obey. If you ask the right questions He will answer. If you are lost you must ask Him for directions. You must listen for His answers with more than your ears. Now, what true questions for Him about your path cry out the loudest in your heart of hearts?”
You hope that was sufficient. The others would have interrupted her, condemned her more strongly, but you can’t help but want to nurture her for her clarity. You’d thought the same many times since arriving. You want to see if she does have any sort of plan to deal with this injustice herself.
She seems to be considering your words, weighing them in her mind. You allow her that time to think and await her response with a fascination you’ve not felt since becoming more accustomed to this plane. The mind behind her appearance was nothing like what you’d expected and you can’t predict what she might come up with next.
“I think,” Mara says slowly, “ultimately, the most pressing questions I have—in my ‘heart of hearts’ are:” she looks up and unerringly her eyes find yours through the screen, “why are you in here, Deacon Smith, and what are you?”
