Here is a teaser from the origin story of the Secourists

 

Pierre sought sanctuary beneath a row of weeping trees, their low-hanging boughs veiling the Saint-Médard Church from his exhausted gaze. He stripped his robe, wringing the fabric until his hands ached; it was a marvel how much of the deluge the threads had swallowed. He twisted his torso, trying to coax the stiffness from his spine, though he resisted the base urge to rub his bruised seat. Seventeen days of rattling in a carriage from Marseille had turned his muscles to lead, making the final half-mile trek through the downpour feel like a mercy. The journey had soured in Lyon when the second driver took the reins—a man who seemed to nurse a visceral hatred for his passengers, aiming for every pothole with the precision of a marksman.

“Twenty-five!”

A high-pitched squeal, sharp enough to pierce the din of the gathered masses, cut through the air.

Pierre stepped from the shadows of the trees only to be met by a pack of drunken youths. They surged toward him, but at the sight of his ecclesiastical robes, they veered off one by one, regrouping like scavengers in the distance. Beyond them lay the true obstacle: a sea of humanity churning between him and the source of that childish cry.

He found a narrow gap in the throng and paused, pushing his sodden hood back. A rivulet of icy water escaped the wool, snaking down his spine like a frozen finger. The scene before him was utter pandemonium—hundreds of souls lost in a feverish frenzy.

“Twenty-six!” the voice shrieked again.

It came from the right, beyond the stone basin of the fountain.

“Got him,” Pierre hissed.

His eyes locked onto a boy, no older than twelve, perched precariously upon a narrow stone railing.

“Twenty-seven!”

The child paced the ledge like a tightrope walker, his head craned downward at a spectacle Pierre could not yet see. A ridiculous, oversized hat sat atop the boy’s head, flopping forward to swallow his face every time he moved.

“A guidepost,” Pierre muttered, his instincts prickling. “What lies at the foot of that stone wall?”

“Twenty-eight!”

The boy spun in a wild circle, spraying rainwater from his jacket onto the disgruntled crowd below, reveling in their curses. The sight reminded Pierre of the sodden weight of his own stolen vestments. He needed to find his bearings in this madness.

“Twenty-nine!”

To his far left, the Saint-Médard Church loomed. From its grand doors, a serpent of people coiled along the upper walkway, disappearing into the maw of the cemetery. The iron fence surrounding the graveyard groaned under the weight of the desperate; some were even clawing at the bars, attempting to wrench the iron from the earth to force an entry.

“Thirty!”

Two nuns stood sentinel at the gate, doling out entry like scraps to the starving. Dotted throughout the line were the elites of Paris, their vibrant umbrellas forming a silken canopy above the squalor. Noblewomen clutched wine glasses, their servants hovering nearby to shift chairs or hold urine buckets as the procession crawled forward.

“Thirty-one!”

The boy’s voice was a blade, slicing through the hymns and the cacophony of the courtyard. Pierre set his sights on the central fountain, a towering monument three men tall. Pilgrims clung to the stone spouts like barnacles.

“Thirty-two!”

A young man reached the summit of the fountain, bellowing praises to the Almighty. Below him, others stood knee-deep in the freezing basin, hoisting glasses of wine as if the icy water were a summer spring. Pierre estimated five hundred souls in the lower square alone, with hundreds more haunting the balconies and shopfronts that boxed them in.

“Thirty-three!”

“Where are you, Jean-Paul?” Pierre whispered. He had travelled leagues for this meeting. He knew his friend inhabited the apartments behind him—third floor, somewhere—but the exact door remained a mystery.

Jean-Paul’s letters had spoken of a pilgrimage for the deceased Deacon, François de Paris, but the prose had been draped in shadows. He had alluded to horrors and wonders not seen since the Sun King unleashed his Black Musketeers upon the Camisards, scattering Pierre’s kin to the winds.

“Thirty-four!”

“Perhaps the answer lies in your riddles, JP,” he grumbled. He tried to wring his hood once more, but only succeeded in sending a fresh chill down his neck. He scanned the perimeter. A direct path was impossible; he would have to skirt the edge of the courtyard.

“Thirty-five!”

He chose the path of least resistance: the line of aristocrats. Their servants acted as a living wall against the unwashed, but Pierre gambled on his borrowed sanctity. A priest’s robe was a key that turned many locks.

“Thirty-six!”

Before he could advance, the boy on the wall mimed a violent strike, swinging his arms as if wielding a heavy axe, stopping abruptly against an invisible target.

The stench of the crowd hit him then—a foul, musty rot that dragged his mind back to the salt air and the agonies of the voyage from Venezuela.

“Thirty-seven!”

Eleven days into that crossing, the rot had taken root in the hull. Pierre had seen the signs before; he knew the sickness would devour the crew. It began slowly, a few men shivering in their cots while the gulls circled above like feathered omens.

“Thirty-eight!”

He slipped between two clusters of men, reaching the line of courtiers. They parted for him, offering small, respectful nods to the Abbe’s cloth.

By the third week, the ship was a floating morgue. Save for the captain, the navigator, and a handful of wretches, the crew lay dying in their own filth.

“Thirty-eight!” Pierre repeated, stepping around a huddled group. “The number of men that died aboard our ship.”

The weakness had been absolute. Soon, Pierre was the only soul with the strength to haul the lines. When the captain finally surrendered the helm, the man could barely stand. He demanded Pierre prop him up so he might watch his ship die with his own failing eyes.

Between the violent heaves and the hollow coughing, the captain stared toward France with glassy, haunted eyes. A few sailors, granted brief moments of lucidity, helped Pierre reef the sails as the winds turned predatory.

“Thirty-nine!”

Pierre stepped over a man convulsing on the cobbles, clutching his stomach. The memory surged back, unbidden and sharp.

The captain’s arrogance had survived longer than his health. Even as he withered, he spat slurs at Pierre, cursed by the fact that a commoner remained upright while his own ‘noble’ blood succumbed to the bile.

“Forty!”

Pierre dodged a sudden halt in the crowd. The robe cleared the way, yes, but it drew the desperate. The sick reached out with trembling hands, begging for a blessing, for a miracle he did not possess.

“Forty-one!”

He paused as two nuns rushed toward the convulsing man. He could not afford to be pulled into their ministrations.

When full command finally fell to him, it was a hollow victory. Six crewmen remained, lashed to the deck so they might bark instructions while Pierre wrestled the canvas alone. The Mediterranean sun was a furnace, and the stench from below was a physical blow.

“Forty-two!”

Pierre stopped dead. Why now? he wondered. Why does this place demand these ghosts? Is it guilt that anchors me to the dead?

He had watched them die, one by one. By the time the French coast appeared on the horizon, only three remained. When Pierre fought the rigging, the gulls—hundreds of them now—descended upon the dying captain, forcing Pierre to shroud the man in canvas just to keep the birds from his living eyes.

“Forty-three!”

Pierre spotted the boy’s hat again. He was closing in.

The captain and the navigator died two days from port. Pierre found the navigator slumped over his charts, his prized sextant clutched to his chest. The man had taught Pierre the stars and the wind in his final hours, a final act of grace before the darkness took him.

“Forty-four!”

A man collided with him, snapping the vision. Pierre waited with a mask of practiced piety, his heart hammering against his ribs. He was forced down the steps into the lower section—the very pit he had hoped to avoid. He found a path around a group shivering with fever; the crowd gave them a wide berth, fearing the pestilence.

Hands grazed his sleeves. “Mercy, Father,” they whispered. Pierre mumbled incoherent blessings, his voice a low jumble to hide his ignorance of the liturgy.

“Forty-five!”

He gently pried his hem from a man’s desperate grip. As he did, the scent of the robe wafted up—a scent he feared he would never truly wash away.

He had taken the robe from a dead Abbé, a man who had expired in a spectacular explosion of bodily failure. Pierre had justified the theft; the dead have no need for wool. It was a disguise to avoid the exorbitant fares of the road to Paris.

The captain had warned him that casting a man of the cloth overboard would bring a curse upon Pierre’s family. He had been convinced the Abbé was the source of the plague—the first to die, infecting all who sought his counsel. Pierre had waited until the end, until the captain’s last breath, to execute his escape.

He had slipped into the sea the night before they reached Marseille, swimming for the shore with the Abbé’s Bible and rosary strapped to his head in a waterproof pouch. He had watched from the cliffs as the townspeople, terrified of the ‘plague ship,’ set the vessel ablaze. The captain, the navigator, and the dead Abbé had been cremated by the tide.

“Forty-five!”

The shout anchored Pierre to the cobbles of Saint-Médard. He was close enough now to see the boy’s focus. His curiosity, whetted by Jean-Paul’s cryptic warnings, pushed him forward. He tapped a woman on the shoulder.

“Why does the boy count?”

She turned, her eyes widening at his collar before she bowed. “He counts the strikes, Father. He counts how many times the poor jeune fille has felt the hammer.”

Pierre’s jaw tightened. He stammered a blessing and pushed toward the stairs.

“Forty-six!” the boy shrieked, his voice trembling with a dark ecstasy.

Pierre shoved past a group of noblewomen. They recoiled from his Jesuit black—the wrong order for this Jansenist crowd—but he ignored their sneers. A wet, sickening thud echoed through the courtyard, followed by a collective gasp from the masses.

“Forty-seven!” the boy yelled, pointing wildly. “Her dress! She is naked!”

This was merely wishful thinking, not a fact, on the boy’s part. Yes there was plenty of exposed skin, but beside this tortured woman was a young woman that kept a watchful eye out, darting in-between each of the hammer’s blows adjust what remained of the clothing remained where it should.

“The devil is within her!” a man screamed from the shadows. “Only the Prince of Lies could endure such a thing!”

Pierre broke through to the front rank. There, against the cold stone, lay a girl. Her garments were shredded, reduced to rags that barely clung to her frame, yet her skin—pale and unblemished—bore no marks. No blood, no bruising, not even a welt. She looked up with eyes that burned with a terrifying lucidity.

“Strike again, kind sir,” she wheezed. The crowd fell into a deathly silence. “As hard as you can. It… it relieves the pain.”

A burly man, his face slick with sweat and effort, hoisted a heavy iron sledgehammer high above his head.

The hair on Pierre’s neck stood on end. “Jean-Paul was right…” he breathed.

The hammer swung in a brutal arc, slamming into the girl’s midriff with a force that would have shattered a bull’s ribs.

“Forty-eight!”

The girl let out a long, haunting groan, drawing a breath that seemed to fill the entire square. Her voice rang out, clear and resonant, defying every law of nature Pierre knew., but he had seen this before, not at this level, but close.

“Please… kind sir. Again. It is a blessing.”