Who We Are
"We tend what the Light has given us to tend: the sick, the poor, the old, the dying, and the holy dead."
The Pale Sisters are the order of women who keep the Cathedral of the Grey Saint. We attend the Saints in their sanctity, we prepare the rites of the Remaking, we keep the cathedral and its candles, and we carry the Light of the Root to those in the city who have none. We take our vows young, and we keep them until we are received. It is said among the faithful that the Root favours us — that sickness does not touch the Sisters as it touches others. We do not boast of this. We understand it only as a mercy, and we give thanks for it, and we use the years it grants us in service.
Charity & the Tithe
The faithful give to the cathedral, and the cathedral gives to the faithful. This is the tithe, and it is the oldest of our works. What is given to us we return to those in need: bread to the hungry of the lower city, medicine to the sick, shelter to those the winter would take. The Sisters walk the lower tiers each Bellday with the alms-baskets. None who comes to the cathedral in true need is turned away.
[ they will not tell you which offerings i answer, so i will. try the count you can make yourself: sixty-eight, not the eighty-seven they ask for. try the years — three hundred and ten of them. try the empty grave, the eighty-eighth. try one, for the first child. try five, for the thrones, and seven, for the shrouded days. and try nothing at all — a zero — the way the Eikthyr refuse to date their grief. the rest you will find on your own. read what they wrote, then offer what they did not want offered. — A. ]
The Almonry & the Goldroot
Those the cathedral takes into its care are given the Goldroot — the coin struck by the cathedral itself, bearing the Silver Crow on one face and the root on the other. It is the only coin the church mints, and it cannot be spent as common money. It is spent only within Corvael, and only for the things the cathedral provides: a bed in the almshouses, the attendance of a physician, the care of the aged in their final years. The Goldroot is given freely to those who keep the observances and live obedient to the rule of the cathedral, that no faithful soul need want for shelter or care. The elderly so cared for are housed in the upper city, in the peace of the Still Gardens, among the statues of the Saints — well kept, and watched over, for as long as they remain in good standing with the cathedral.
In the cathedral's keeping at present are sixty-eight souls of the almshouses and the Gardens, each tended in the Light, each known to the Sisters by name. We pray for them at the Dawn Vigil and the Evening Vigil, as we pray for all the sanctified.
Blessings & Prayer
The Sisters offer the blessings of the cathedral to all who ask in good faith: the blessing of the threshold, for those who travel; the blessing of the sick-bed; the blessing of the returned, spoken over the dead before they are given to the Root. We keep the hours of prayer at every bell. The faithful may come to the cathedral at any daylight hour and find a Sister to pray with them.
It is our custom to keep the memory of every soul the cathedral has received. The cathedral has tended the sanctified for over three hundred years, since the first of them, and reads their names — all eighty-seven — upon the appointed days. Of the eighty-seventh and the place that is kept after him, we are not permitted to speak.
Donations Accepted Here
"What you give in faith is never lost. What you give in truth is never wasted." — the blessing of the alms-basket
The Sisters at Their Work
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