She laughed again, a nervous, breathy laugh that immediately caught in her throat.

"That is... a very interesting answer." [i]But I think perhaps you need to travel more.[/i] "Maybe I will see it?"

The passage had begun to slope upward, curving like a spiral staircase, a dim twilight haze of sunlight beginning to creep into the dank, dusty air.  With each step, shadows began to deepen in the carven alcoves, strange religious iconography and the eyeless skulls of dead clerics.  Loka's breath came thicker and harder as the ascent went on.  She mentally bit back against the possibility that the luxury of the Peacock temple had perhaps made her soft.

"For me..." she said, trying to mask her exertion, "[i]He[/i], is.  I was to ask you also what the most frightening thing you had seen was, but I think maybe it is best..." her eyes flitted over the skulls set into the walls, "...not to know.

"But imagine, that the most beautiful thing and the most frightening thing were the same.  He is like that.  Like looking down from a high tower until you are dizzy with fear.  Gazing into the sun until your eyes are burned from your head.  He is beauty so great that we are too small to behold it, that the gods would tremble at it.  Think of something so beautiful it makes you want to scream.  That is what He is."

"Only girls worship him," she went on, huffing a little, "Males do not, for He is... [i]in[/i] them, if they seek Him there.  When men are beautiful, when they are powerful, so that other men drop their blades in awe and even the strongest woman longs only to be his plaything, then the blue god is there, even if he does not know Him.  Shining with his light--"

She threw up a hand as the bright glare of daylight blinded her and a cool wind blew her lank, greasy hair across her face.  She blinked, wincing inwardly as her eyes adjusted.  They stood in a wide, immaculately-maintained garden of hedges, flowers, rosebushes and rhododendrons, a perfect path of flagstones meandering across the flattened green grasses.  The huge, hazy shape of the cathedral loomed like a blue shadow beneath wispy, drifting clouds, and an orchard of apple trees rustled to either side in the slow and gentle wind, robed shapes climbing ladders and carrying baskets beneath the shady eaves.

A cowled monk tended to the bushes, trimming stray branches with an iron sickle.  He turned, meeting her eyes deliberately, and smiled at her, a gentle, practiced smile.  She turned behind her, her mouth hanging open, and saw only a humble altar house, its gate already beginning to creak slowly shut in the soft spring breeze.   

Loka stared in horror.  She looked at Gregor, trying to speak and finding no words.

Somewhere, a church bell began to toll, echoing across the serene, silent distance.