Invitation to a Beheading

Invitation to a Beheading
Category	Story Event
Type	Story
Linked to	Chapel of Lights

Invitation to a Beheading is a Sunless Sea Story Event.

Linked to[ | ]

It is linked to storylet in the Chapel of Lights, Memoirs: Lessons of the Chapel

Trigger conditions[ | ]

Invitation to a Beheading is a triggered event that occurs at the Chapel of Lights when the player's Memoirs: Lessons of the Chapel quality is equal to 7.

Story description[ | ]

The priest leads you to the altar. That hollow for offerings at its edge - if you knelt, it would fit your neck precisely. Someone is standing at the back of the chapel. Drapes stir. A sword glitters. You cannot see their face.

Interactions[ | ]

Actions

Requirements

Effects

Kneel, at the Priest's invitation

Place your head in the hollow. Await the blade, and your death, that you may become a candle for the multitude.

A new you

After the sacrifice, when the captain's neck has been cleanly severed and their blood pooled on the steps, the pithing process begins. The outer integument is peeled away and their bones, organs, muscles removed. This remnant will be given false life with the glyphs, so that it may wait with a bright sword in the chapel until one day, another sacrifice may come. The old executioner will be retired and given to the sea.

The captain's skin will be filled with glory. The attendants will place it in the mould and pour the wax donated by lesser celebrants. The wick will be emplaced, down through the crown of the head to the hollow of the groin. The Priest will recite the lessons once more, and replace the captain's eyes in the skin of the sockets for the living wax to grasp them. The odour of searing will fade. The woman from the Second City will coax the flesh with oils until it resembles life. The glyphs will be imparted and the chest will heave with false breath.

At last you will rise and take your name. You will leave the chapel in the shape of the captain, and take your place aboard the captain's ship. No one will ever know. The differences will be invisible. Perhaps one day a sweetheart will trace the scar around your neck and ask laughingly, were you once beheaded? And you will shrug and answer, "Only once."

+7

Secret

Terror

Memoirs: Lessons of the Chapel = 9

Flee

This has gone far enough. You are steeped in crimson prayers, but you will not give yourself up.

Out into darkness

The bell's clangour shakes the night, drowning the priest's cries of rage. You saw what waited in the chapel - the brown-boned skinless eyeless scarecrow, tattered into tendoned gristle, sword still clutched firmly as it shuffled forward, skull-glyphs ablaze. You will not become that.