The first step in the assumption process was the ritual cleansing- in three years of preparation for this moment, Albanes had rarely undergone any procedure that did not involve a ritual cleansing.

The maidservants derobed her carefully, a dozen hands delicately removing layer by layer of coarse monastic cloth, with all the intimacy of a security pat-down at the airport. Their eyes were bound, in imitation of modesty this environment was so averse to. A dozen young hands, a dozen young bodies she would not look at, as they did not look at her. Though she knew she was not meant to think of them as people, she did. She wondered their names, their histories, who their families were and how they had ended up undressing their newest God-to-be. They would not have answered her questions if she had the will or courage to voice them. They knew the sacrament of their role more than she did- they were hands to assist her, not souls to connect with.

Albanes’s bare skin was dull with age, even under the warm light of the dawn that peeked through her washchamber’s paper-curtained window. It was pockmarked and freckled, warm with the ghost of a suntan, from some long-ago summer. Time had treated her not unkindly, but with the same irreverence it bestowed upon all living, unchanging bodies.Over thirty years ago, she had found it impossible to believe her body would become this- she would have never assumed she’d have the chance to age. Her predecessors, the many others who had taken the throne before her, had assumed at a younger age, been immortalized in their lusty, beautiful youth. She did not envy them, their unblemished skin or their bright eyes. She would go into her Godhood with crows-feet in the corners of her eyes and stretch marks patterning her thighs. She would not part with the portrait time had made of her. To let go of it would be to let go of memory.

The dozen impersonal hands guided her descent as much as she guided their blind steps- ever nearer to the ceramic tub laid inset into the tile floor. One deliberate step after another, her arms held tenderly by an unintimate embrace, she stepped into the bath til the water reached her waistline. Then, the cleansing began.

Albanes tried to relax as all pretense of grime was scrubbed from her palms, her scalp, her feet. Perhaps she could, if this had been any scenario but this. In the dredges of the memories she so rarely like to recall, she was reminded of a childhood, where her mother had sat her in a smaller, dirtier tub, with her closest sibling in age, and attempted to wash her dark curls while her juvenile mind was preoccupied with a floating, plastic toy. Albanes was want to fall back into these memories, to drown herself so fully in them she might taste the bitter soap beneath her tongue. Now, of any day, she could not.

The bathwater was pleasantly warm, and the soap they ritually cleansed her with scented with lavender and milk. The hands that cleansed her were gentle, though not in the way of a mother or lover. Thinking of that sort of touch brought up sourer memories, of grief she still could not swallow, so she did her very best not to recall the warm embrace of another woman so like her, her blue eyes as deep as the sea they had crossed together. Albanes did not watch the slender hands massaging decades of dead skin off of hers, and she did not watch the pitch of her eyelids. Her gaze was fixated solely on the unadorned expanse of the ceiling. She wondered: How many days will pass under my immortal gaze? How long will this burden be mine to carry, til I find some poor sap to pawn it off to, just as it was pawned off to me?

When the cleansing was done, the masked faces and unadorned hands rose her from the bath, dried her entire body with coarse towels she figured were not fitting of any ceremony but this, and began to redress her in entirely fresh clothes. They wrapped her first in cotton undergarments, that pressed flat her bosom and clung tight around her arms, but fell into a skirt beneath the waist. Then came the robes- four of them, some pulled securely across her abdomen, others draped loosely around her shoulders, in a manner that was meant to imply nonchalance, but in fact was carefully poised. She was belted, and bejeweled, and left barefoot. Her hair was not pinned up or braided, but brushed loose around her shoulders. The simple jewelry of her new dimple piercings, which had finally healed, were exchanged for the antiquated, ceremonial set. Her bottom lip and her eyelids were painted with gold.

Then, she was left alone. The hands disappeared, and Albanes found herself too queasy with nerve to watch which hidden servant’s door they scurried off to. She sat, and waited, til another body arrived to speak to her.

“Thy Eternal Divinity,”Said the Archdeacon, for such formal occasions warranted only the most formal of titles, though she hated it. “The Centroidal Sanctum awaits your presence.

Albanes rose, and gathered her breath. In less than an hour’s time, she would shorn her mortality, and all the burden that came with it. She would no longer be her own name. God would become her.