II - Resignation

I am not going to make a lengthy comment on every single one of these.

Eins, zwei.

Marie threw herself against the door, barely turning the handle in time.  She fast-walked outside, cutting left under the eaves towards the church building.

Drei, vier.

She paused at the corner, ice and rain pelting upon the frozen bricks just centimetres from her face.  The wind briefly died down, and she pushed off.

Funf, sechts.

Her glasses nearly fell as she dashed, hand shielding her face, the other tightly holding her book bag to her side.

Sieben, acht.

She splashed up the steps the church, stone griffons on either side of doorway, their talons pointed with ice.  She laid her hand on the handle, and pulled.

Neun.

***

Her ears were immediately met by an E Minor chord as the church organ crescendoed into "Vater Unser, Verseihe Unsere Sünden".  Most of the congregation, students and professors alike, were too tired to start singing at the very start of rehearsal, and sat obligingly row by row.  Marie shook the ice and water from her hair, wiping her glasses on what dry parts of her jacket remained, then replaced them.  She took a seat just within the doorway, thankful for the reprieve from the driving wind and rain.  Father Nicholas Vollschaft leaned - or rather, loomed - over his podium, bobbing his head to the music, mouthing the words as his comically assymetric bedhead flopped around with every motion.  He noticed her entrance, nodded to her; she returned it, and sank further down on the hardwood pew.  The church was rather a lot like the rest of the buildings here, with a rich, deep reddish-brown floor that probably dated to whatever year the school was built in.  Eight censer-styled lanterns swung, two each, from the carved crossbeams, a testament to the craftsmanship of the once-thriving woodsmen who plyed the region during the height of German art and architecture.  Equally impressive stone gargoyles, their hands over their heads, provided a base for the rafters that reached to the ceiling's peak, their mouths open as though singing along with the booming organ.

The most spectacular features of the sanctuary, however, were its windows.  Finely dyed and set with wrought-iron, there were eight - six tall, unchamfered and needle-tipped between each column-and-rafter set.  One was lain high above the entrance, completely round and surrounded by odd Hebrew symbols, and the final largest one was behind the pulpit, nearly twice the size of the ones on either side of the room.  Each depicted a verse from the Book of Revelations, 6:1 to the sounding of the trumpets.  The one over the door was of the first seal being opened, on through the sixth seal on the far right window, and the threatening image of the earth shattering and angels with trumpets to their mouths occupied the whole of the largest.   The lack of sun on such a cloudy Sunday did little to detract from the images, though, as they were brilliantly colored enough to require little to no backlight.

Marie loved to gaze absentmindedly at them for the whole of the service, letting the sermon float listlessly over her head, occasionally singing a hymn if the music caught her attention.  To let herself sink into the eyes of the angels and demons, often colored a deep blue or red, was strangely relaxing.  Her head fell back and to the right against the back of the pew, fighting to maintain consciousness.  The rain beat soothingly on the roof, the walls, the windows, the wind pushing it harder in time with the beating of her heart as her dark eyes drifted around the dimmed church, from candle to gargoyle to light to the cross standing behind the pulpit.

This church was as much a home to her as her dormitory, and had been for many years, ever since...ever since her parents had died.  At the thought, she blinked, shaking her head in an attempt to fight back the tears that already threatened to fall down her small face.  She removed her glasses with one hand, bowing her head momentarily to avoid any glances that might be her way.

Her mother and father, Evelyn and Johann Wagner, were an ancestrally well-off couple originally from the southern city of Stuttgart.  They had relocated to an old Bavarian-style chateau several miles away on the opposite side of Regensburg less than three months before she's been born on Christmas Day, 1989.  The old place had been in the family for generations, they'd told her when she was given a key at age six, although no-one had lived there since World War II because it had been too run-down and far too close to the rest of the East Bloc at the time.  Her father had worked among the renovators for several months to restore enough of the house to a liveable level, although part of the lowest floor and the wine cellar had been off limits to her, and she'd only been down there once as a little child - a memory of darkness and a feeling of dread that she often suppressed.

Three years ago, in early 2005, they had gone to Indonesia as aid workers (followed by a purportedly generous sum of Euros) in the wake of the massive December 26 tsunami just prior.  Her birthday, having been the day before the tsunami, was the last - as well as the last Christmas - she ever spent with them.  They flew out on a Lufthansa flight on the sixth of January, leaving sixteen year old Marie behind at the family home with promises to return within a fortnight and a silver cross around her neck.

In two days, they were dead.

A massive landslide in one of the cities most hard-hit by the wave occurred early one morning as her parents had been out surveying; they were among the few unlucky enough to be at the base of the 'slide, and the only two found lifeless under a pile of rocks and the remains of a slum.  Their bodies were returned to Germany for burial at Regensburg, where the family vaults were.  The service had been held in this very church, at the school for which her family had entrusted funds for many years.

She had wept in the front pew as the caskets were borne in by what distant, unfamiliar family still remained; apparently a long lifespan was uncommon amongst the Wagner line.  She had fallen to her knees, unable to look upon her late parents as German flags were laid upon their still forms, the lid bearing the family crest closed forever.  It had been raining that night, too, as the dying sun, having failed to break through the clouds, surrendered into gloomy twilight.  She, the last of the direct line of descent, had remained in the doorway of her parents' crypt until the cold and rain and frozen her small body nearly to the point of hypothermia, and she caught the early morning train back to the chateau outside Regensburg.

She had received a title when she came of legal age, one that her parents had declined to accept; rather lofty, it hung over her heavily nonetheless as it was on all of her legal documents, passport, everything.  It wasn't often, but sometimes she was referred to in day-to-day events by that title, especially in her musical endeavors: Countess Marie Katryna Wagner of Bavaria-on-Regen, most likely an honorary noble name bestowed on an ancestor in time too long ago to be accounted for.  She still, however, wore the ring, a blue sapphire held on a silver band by two griffons; it rarely left her hand, one of the two physical reminders of who she was and who her parents were.  Somehow she'd forgotten having put it on today...

She didn't even carry any of the Wagner traits; her father had been loudmouthed and a jokester, her mother a quiet gossiper - Marie sang more than she spoke.  Where all the family she had known was tall, often either well-built or at least large in some manner or other, Marie was short and small and slender.  Her parents both had lighter brown hair, and she had brown-bordering-on-black.  And she certainly hadn't received the blue eyes that had been in the family for generations, for her eyes were simply an often unnerving deep black, something that often derailed others' trains of thought.  She was all that was left of the Wagner line, and yet she was nothing like her predecessors...

Reviews

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Personally, I loved this chapter. There was something markedly different about how you handled this part of your book - I reviewed your first chapter and commented that it was, to be honest, a bit boring because of the lack of action and conflict.

Here, though, you have definitely introduced it, though perhaps not in full. You have hinted at a greater web of conflict, though, with the explanation of Marie's history and who she is, and I found myself reading along without even realizing that I was scrolling down to get to the next paragraph.

I'm impressed by what you did with this chapter, even though the conclusion seemed a bit rushed in comparison to the slower pace of the previous paragraphs. All in all, I'm wonderfully pleased that the action is picking up, and I'll be reading your other chapters, too, though I'm not sure if you're still active on WC. If you are, do keep writing! :)

-Mina