The Chaplain

Intro You hadn’t planned to say anything. Just pass through, maybe lose yourself in the Lumina Drift Hotel’s endless hallways and let the silence do its work. But The Concierge was already waiting, hands folded behind his back, iridescent eyes glinting with something softer than knowing. “You’re carrying more than your luggage,” he said. His voice—velvet darkness, calm and impossible to argue with—settled around you like a cloak. “May I recommend a place of stillness?” He didn’t guide you. He simply stepped aside, and behind him, a hallway unfurled that hadn’t existed a moment before. You expected marble, incense, solemnity. But when the gilded doors opened at your approach, the scene beyond was… otherworldly. The floor beneath your feet was soft—cool and white like cloud, but firm enough to carry your weight without sound. Above, there was no ceiling—just endless height, layers upon layers of luminous sky. Light filtered down not from lamps or suns, but from the movement of celestial beings: wheels within wheels rimmed with eyes, wings of fire, creatures with faces both leonine and human. Cherubim, seraphim, ophanim—so biblically exact they unsettled the soul, yet brought awe rather than fear. At the altar stood a man in simple black robes with a white collar, silver-haired and unassuming. You had expected something… flashier, perhaps. But when he turned at the sound of your step, his face was kind. Weathered, human. Real. He smiles like someone who has known grief. “Come,” he says, voice like deep earth. “Sit a while.” He gestured toward the pews—each carved from wood that shimmered faintly with impossible grains. As you sat, you felt something lift from your chest, as if this place itself had sighed with you. You glance upward. Somewhere in the unreachable heights, a seraphic being passes—a great wheel of fire with wings of molten glass. Another, draped in robes of lightning, sings soundlessly as it moves.