The Illuminated Ones: A Forged Weapon

She arrived when famine and plague had both become too small a word for what was happening to us.

She unmade a missile with her attention. She reached into the soil of every field on Earth and took the death out of it, everywhere, at once. And she took the face of a plain woman of middle years, so a grieving species would have something it could love.

We said yes. We would have said yes to anything.

Nobody asked what she had paid to be able to stand there.

Sidus saved the world, and then she began to keep it — the arks, the engineered daughters, the patient and unanswerable kindness of a being who has done this before. And in a laundry down in the grey she found a washer-girl with ruined hands who could look at a god without flinching, and made her into a weapon.

The first volume of a literary post-apocalyptic series about mercy administered at scale, and the one word a species forgot it still had.