Archive of Our Own

Asal was not raised with hymns and altars. Learning the Principles in her onboarding was much the same as her two semesters of Spanish for an undergraduate requirement. She could summon a few phrases and recall the underlying grammar. She could occasionally parse the structure beneath Cobel's zealotry, the chemical fire fueling the engine, but it was still a foreign language.

She had her own principles, lowercase, and she found their limits. It was no breaking of faith when she left. But she still hoped irrationally that Cobel took it like a knife, that she cursed her as a heretic.