aurora

I'd been sent to the frozen south partly, I think, because my superiors in the Order didn't particularly like me. Too many opinions that, in their eyes, nearly crossed the line into heresy. (This was outright slander, of course; my opinions had all well since crossed that line, but they were not imaginative enough to see why.) But there were pre-Spire relics there, and given that the church's influence there was weak . . . well, someone had to go and make sure these pagan relics and blasphemous texts were properly sealed away.

In the days when the church was run by zealots, they would never have dreamed of sending someone like me on such missions. But now, even the Order's ecclesiastical hierarchy was filled, not with those who seemed the most pious or the most devoted, but to those who were most apt to doing the political bidding of those in the position to appoint them, and the most prestigious (and lucrative) positions were those where they could be the most useful politically. Censors in the major cities, scholars at the biggest libraries . . . of course they sent people to the south as punishment. Of course they didn't consider that sending their most heterodox and iconoclastic thinkers to a place where the church's influence was almost nonexistent would backfire.

I thought at first that they were simply not thinking clearly. But I realized, one night late in the fall--already those nights were bitter cold--when the whole southern sky seemed to dance with a strange red light, and my host, at my astonished cry, simply said, "That's the aurora; it happens sometimes"--that they were afraid. These chaotic, joyful lights, in their minds, could not have been the work of their creator, who tamed chaos and brought the wilds to order. Another wonder they'd suppress if they could, I suppose.