The war room felt smaller than it had the night before, though nothing about its actual dimensions had changed — only the weight of what they now understood, pressing the walls closer, making the crowded table of maps and candles and scattered religious paraphernalia feel less like a workspace and more like the last defensible room in a much larger building.
Abigail stood at the head of the table. The group around her carried the specific tension of people who had all, individually, arrived at the same unwelcome conclusion and were each waiting for someone else to be the one who said it first.
She said it.
"Religion alone isn't enough."
The room absorbed the line the way a held breath absorbs bad news — silently, entirely, no one rushing to fill the space it left behind.
In the corner, Aldric knelt, unfolding a scrap of paper — a single sigil, half-drawn, something he'd clearly been working on privately for longer than he'd mentioned to anyone. He slid it into a small wooden reliquary and set it on the floor with the same careful attention a farmer might give a seed he wasn't yet certain would take root.
"You're asking us to rewrite the rite," Ferrara said, quiet, not quite accusation, not quite agreement either.
"I'm asking us to survive long enough to argue about it later."
"I've been a priest for forty years." Aldric's voice, from the corner, carried none of his usual gentleness. "What you're proposing has never been done before."
"Maybe not." Abigail held his gaze. "Which might be exactly the kind of disorder we need."
He was quiet for a long moment — long enough that Abigail began to suspect she'd overstepped, pushed a man forty years into a vocation past the edge of what he could be asked to abandon in a single conversation.
Then, quietly, he shook his head.
"No. It's not."
He let a long pause settle before he continued, the particular pause of a man arriving at something he hadn't planned to say and finding, once he started, that it needed saying anyway.
"My congregation didn't come to me in formal Latin," he said. "They prayed in kitchens. At bedsides. In plain English." A beat, something almost like peace moving through his exhausted face. "God has always made do with what's available."
No one spoke for a moment. Abigail felt something in her chest loosen slightly — not relief, not yet, but the particular ease of watching an argument resolve itself from the inside rather than requiring her to keep pressing it from the outside.
"Then that's where we start," she said. "Not less sacred. Just — undefended. Nothing for it to anticipate."
Ferrara looked between them, something working behind his tired eyes — the specific look of a careful, precise man being asked to trust a plan built on the deliberate absence of precision.
"And if it doesn't work?"
"Then we'll have learned something the Kolberg file didn't." Abigail didn't soften it. "That's more than anyone's managed so far."
Aldric rose from the corner, joints audibly protesting after too many hours kneeling on stone, the reliquary with its half-formed sigil left where he'd set it, a small, quiet offering in a war room otherwise crowded with maps and candlelight and the accumulated debris of an argument no one had wanted to have.
"I'll need the night to prepare," he said. "Plain words carry more weight when a man actually believes them. I'd like mine to be believed."
"Take what you need," Abigail said. "We don't move until you're ready."
He nodded once, and made his way toward the door — pausing there, briefly, to look back at the room full of exhausted, frightened people who had just agreed, together, to abandon four hundred years of careful, defended tradition in favor of something none of them could fully predict.
"Pray for me tonight," he said, to no one in particular, and to everyone. "Whichever words you still trust."
Then he was gone, off toward the confessional to sit alone with whatever preparation this new, undefended kind of faith actually required of a man forty years into a life built entirely around the old one.