The Mass had ended; after they made their thanksgiving, knights and their pupils filed out the doors of the church in pairs. Clad in their white robes detailed with blue crosses, they shone as small candles in an interior that was otherwise vast and dark, excepting the occasional luminous stained glass window which let in rays of light between the cold stony walls of the building. Among their ranks was a knight and his squire, who at first glance seemed as ordinary as any other pair. Once they had reached the vestibule, he motioned for his companion to step aside. While the others walked through the open doors of wood in solemn silence, he leaned towards his pupil’s ear.

“Zeno, my son,” said the knight, whispering in a friendly yet grave tone, “are you prepared for the trial?”

The boy nodded. Putting an arm on Zeno’s shoulder, his elder looked into his eyes with a gaze of paternal love, and then gestured for him to follow. A cool air greeted them outside the Church of the Holy Martyrs of Prussia on that autumn day; seated on a hill, this imposing structure of gray stone towered above the village of Arcadia and the many rising puffs of smoke that emanated from the dwellings of its inhabitants. It was not only a visible reminder of the watchfulness of God, whom the Order of the Holy Virgin served, but also a monument to the noble and lofty ideals that the knights and all other members of the Order were meant to embody.

Walking towards the romanesque Monastery of the Immaculate which was positioned within a few paces of the church, the boy and the knight found two steeds prepared for them. Two brothers of the Order led the horses, and after bestowing their benediction on the travelers, Zeno and the knight rode steadily down the well-trod slope into the town below. Trees bordered the path, and leaves were strewn about the dirt upon which the horses stepped, until the path joined the main street of Arcadia, a road of cobblestone. This was a wide and active place; the pair rode beside one another comfortably as small companies of handsomely dressed peasants and tradesmen ambled about with an air of intentionality as they went about their morning affairs, while a squad of youths kicked a ball to one another.

Zeno happened to catch the eye of not a few of these souls, in whom he saw admiration. He vaguely recognized their faces, for he had grown up in this town before he had been sent to serve the Order by his parents; he was unsure, however, if they recognized him as one of their own, or if they merely saw in him another postulant. In a way, such a distinction was almost unimportant. Wherever the men of the Order came from, they were greatly respected in any town or city in which they were garrisoned, for they pledged to lay down their lives in defense of the last man if need be—such was the high degree of chivalry expected of them. Thinking that rule over, Zeno recalled that Abbé Kirouac had taught him that this rule had not been carried out since the Wars of Unrest, and that was long ago…

Within moments, the boy felt the eyes of yet another upon him, pulling him from his considerations, as it were. He looked to his left; down an alley between log houses and cobblestone dwellings with thatched roofs, he could see a girl saluting him. She was distant, but close to the point where he could make out the features of her pale face and her brown hair hid beneath her shawl—and he recognized her immediately. Zeno felt his eyes light up with joy; it was Pilar, a friend from the days of his childhood!

At once he felt a nudge from his right. He turned, and saw the calm blue eyes of his companion, Knight Adolphus. No words needed to be exchanged as they passed to the walls of the town, and beyond the gates to the fields and forest beyond.

Zeno rode behind his elder as they traveled. The path began wide, but as they diverted further into the forest, it shrunk in size and splintered more frequently, beckoning to the potential of sites unseen. Under cover of the trees, rain slipped through the leaves of brown, yellow, and red. The drops fell upon him so lightly that they almost seemed to tickle him. If it were not so serious an occasion, the feeling might have made Zeno laugh. But the change in weather was not all a joy for him, for it brought on the presence of a thick mist. Unease rose in him, but the boy did not lose confidence altogether; for he could see that Knight Adolphus knew the path well, though it was traveled little.

By the time they reached the coast, a barren place of rocks, sand, and dirt, it seemed that a whole day had passed. But in reality, darkness had not come; Zeno could see glimmers of sun’s rays peaking through the white-gray vault above. He had not seen the ocean before, so this sight was all new to him, eerie as it was, this vast stretch of water with no seeming end in sight, corralled only by ghastly clouds.

His companion motioned to him, and pointed to the right—and there he looked, and saw a platform of wood floating on the water, and much stranger than this, some sort of large ashen oval that jutted out from the surface like a massive spearhead. Then Zeno saw a man in a strange outfit emerge from some hole in this structure, who then saluted him and Knight Adolphus. A rampart of wood joined the spearhead to the platform, and after the two travelers tied their horses to a nearby post, they boarded the vessel. The sensation that the boy felt when he grasped the cold steel of the ladder was foreign to him; the only ladders he had known to this point had been made out of wood, which had a much warmer feeling in comparison.

Once he had touched the floor of the spearhead’s interior with his puny feet, he looked around with astonishment at the constricted passageway of bronze and silver colors he now found himself in. But he quickly composed himself, and faced the two adults, who were simply amused by Zeno’s reaction to this new world. After moving beyond a set of light-gray doors to an adjoining room which had several booths for passengers beside windows that showed the blue horizon of water outside the spearhead, the man who had invited them in introduced himself as Captain Marco.

He was a fair-skinned man (in that respect, much akin to everyone else he knew) with his red hair hid underneath his flat navy blue hat. By way of an explanation, he informed the curious boy that he had just boarded a submarine, a kind of sea vessel built in the time before the Great Catastrophe, designed to take men below the waves. Subsequently, he went on to state there had several such purposes for such vessels in those times, but the two main ones amounted to exploration and warfare, and that furthermore, this submarine (named the Regina) was constructed according to the former purpose; and he ended this little discourse with some words to the boy that he should not worry much and enjoy the ride, for the Order had trained the crew well on how to pilot it—then he bid them with a “Godspeed!” and hurried, disappearing behind a door.

“My lord, this is a strange place,” Zeno whispered.

“Indeed, my pupil. Even a boy like you could not have imagined this,” the Knight chuckled beneath his long black beard.

The boy could not help but smile in response; and then Knight Adolphus, sensing a question, preemptively answered his pupil.

“We are here, my son,” he said, “to uncover a relic which has survived the Great Catastrophe.”

Zeno’s eyes widened.

“Will it be dangerous, my lord?” he inquired.

“Thankfully not…there are no pirates under the waves,” he said gently. Then continuing, he said, “Let us take our seats; the submarine will begin its descent very soon,” and then motioned to a booth near them, where one sat across from the other.

But before the voyage started, another man came through a door, dressed in the same style of uniform as Captain Marco, bringing them porridge, fruit, and beverages. They gave thanks—for though they had packed bread in little bags their horses carried and consumed some of these provisions on the way, the two realized that they were now quite hungry. The man was gratified to serve them, and after exchanging brief pleasantries, left the two to themselves. Moments passed, and after the Knight led grace they began to eat; but only after the first or second bite a loud rumbling could be heard—the sort of noise which Zeno imagined that weird animal known as the elephant could make, though he had never heard it himself, only hearing of it by means of tales told to him by knights who had returned from adventures in the Western regions.

The boy felt anxiety well up in him as he sensed the vessel’s descent into the depths, but the look on his elder’s face was devoid of worry—evidently this had not been his first voyage. Knight Adolphus, with a look of concern, gestured to the strange round window near them.

“Come now and take a look. This will ease your mind, my son,” he said. “Have you ever wondered what lives in these parts?” he added in an inquisitive tone.

“Yes my lord,” the boy stammered, and he looked out into the navy horizon barred by this dense sheet of glass.

Focusing his eyesight, Zeno could make out a school of fish which were moving in an impressive formation only a short distance from where he sat; immediately he was struck, as he had only seen these large brown-tan creatures sold by fisherman. But those were, of course, dead fish, not living ones as he was seeing them now. As he continued to eat his meal and watch these inhabitants of the sea in awe, he realized that he had seen living fish before; puny cousins of these ocean-dwellers which swam in a pond he and his family—father, mother, brothers and sisters—frequented when he was small, a remembrance which caused him to smile.

It was not long until there was a further descent, and a turn which brought these swimmers out of sight. Now the boy could see the sea floor, and the piles upon piles of sand and pillars of rock that laid there. Fish of all sorts weaved their way around this harsh-looking region, and even bull sharks lingered here, tough yet majestic creatures he had only known from sailors’ tales and illustrations in the monastery’s library.

Watching closely, he came to the sudden realization that some of the rock-pillars were not quite rock; they were something else—their surfaces conveyed this clearly to him. In fact, they seemed to be made out of the same sort of material as the submarine he was sitting in…

“Do you recognize where we are, Zeno?” the Knight asked. The boy looked to him, and saw him wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.

He was reminded of some details from Abbé Kirouac’s lessons…a great city from the Old World sunk into the sea…so impossibly large, that none today could compare to it. Eight million once dwelt within it! There were not even that many people today living in the spacious domains of the Northern White provinces, the crown of the Columbian Empire!

And as he looked out into the blue horizon again, he was growing more confident in his guess. This colossal wreck stretched out as far as his eyes could take him.

“Sir, it must be New York City,” Zeno answered.

“You are correct,” Knight Adolphus responded. “This place was once the city of the Old World’s desire. Unlike the faithful Emperor Constantine and the Romans, who built Constantinople to honor God, the Americans were happy to build towers to overshadow the churches, for they worshiped Mammon. But then the Catastrophe came, and well could we here apply the words of Our Lord when He spoke of the Great Flood in the Gospel, ‘they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and then the flood came.’ Their punishment, as you know, was sudden.”

The boy wanted to know more, yet was afraid of more knowledge because of the harsh realizations it could bring. To be above the site where millions were destroyed for their sins! Yet to be fascinated with the past, to be curious for what was and now is no more? Was this what it was like to step on the sands were Sodom and Gommorah once laid? Perhaps he was not ready yet to know. But he arrested his sense of surreal horror, and decided upon putting the question to his superior.

“Was there ever any good here, my lord?” Zeno inquired sorrowfully. Then he added, “Abbé Kirouac was rather vague.”

“There was,” he replied. “During the Colonial Era, the holy martyr St. Issac Jogues was the first priest to visit this place, which was then a Dutch trading city called New Amsterdam. It was smaller, more humble—though in those times the Hollanders were heretics. Our coreligionists of that nation remained in Europe, and did not come to these shores until later centuries. Indeed, there were a substantial number of Catholics who made this city their first home in the New World, but that occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Old Republic was a vigorous nation.”

Concluding, his elder went on, “You and I may, in fact, be descended from those settlers. But then the Dark Ages came, and it became a second Babel….”

“Thank you for explaining these things to me, sir,” the boy said in a gratified tone. “Are there any books in the monastery’s library I can consult about the history of this city? I think I would benefit from knowing further information.”

“It is good to be interested in the past,” the Knight began, “but to what end, my pupil?”

“I want to learn from the wisdom of the Before Time, to avoid its follies, and to prevent them from ever being repeated,” he replied.

His lord’s eyes shone after that answer.

“Well spoken, my son,” Knight Adolphus responded. “The permission will be granted to you,” he continued, “if you pass your trial. And I have faith in you that this will happen.”

“When will I be tried?” the boy asked excitedly.

“Soon,” his elder said. “As soon as the submarine pilots find the site we are looking for. Then the Captain will instruct you on what you must do.”

Zeno nodded gleefully.

“But in the meantime,” the Knight added, “I suppose you have more questions about New York City, or rather what remains of it?”

“Yes sir,” the boy said. “I see that the broken towers here are made of a strange material. Why are buildings not made with these elements any more?”

“Because,” the Knight explained, “those materials—steel and reinforced concrete, as they are called—are harder to produce now than they were then. The Order could make such materials, and indeed we have for some projects, but we have never executed them in the style of the Dark Ages. Too monstrous,” he concluded with a look of disgust and a dismissive wave of his hand.

“Furthermore,” he elaborated more calmly, “the Order does not trust men of the world with these advanced things from the ‘Before Time’, as you put it. They are too weak, I am afraid.”

“Too weak?” the boy asked.

“Yes, too weak, my son,” Knight Adolphus reiterated in a grave tone. “We are made of the same stuff as the men of that former time,” he continued, “are we not? They were fallen, and so are we. Thus we must regulate these things to those who can handle them, to those who have been tried and have not been found wanting.”

“Let me give you an example,” his elder elaborated, “what if the pirates of our days could acquire a single war submarine from the Old World? They could take many travelers ransom, raid multitudes of fisheries, and wreck the trade of nations in mere weeks. And without another vessel like to it, or without trapping them with explosives, it would be practically impossible to stop them. Do you understand, Zeno? The Order cannot allow these things to fall into the wrong hands.”

“I understand, my lord,” Zeno answered. Things were becoming more clear to him.

But then another thought rushed in upon the boy, and this prompted another question.

“What of the mechanisms I have seen in the hospitals? Are these things from the Dark Ages?” he asked.

“They are, my son,” the Knight answered him. “But they can only save life, not destroy it. So that is why we allow them to have such things.”

“And besides,” he went on, “only those brothers and sisters whom the Order trusts are trained to use those mechanisms, those machines.”

This was indeed a satisfying answer to an extent, but it made Zeno consider the whole matter further than he had before.

“So then,” he asked, “why not use war submarines to sink the pirates’ fleets? That would be a use of violence, sure, but it would help save many lives! The Order surely could destroy them all with such power!”

“The matter is not as simple as it seems,” Knight Adolphus stated grimly. “They are small in number and change their routes frequently; they are like the fox, more deadly by their cunning than by their brute strength. Superiority in technology is no guarantee of victory, my young friend. That was one of the great lessons of the Second American Revolution—”

The submarine, which had been gently cruising for some time, had now come to a sudden halt. Both knight and squire looked out into the blue horizon once more, and saw again a scene of toppled towers and piles of sand; but now the presence of what was once a grand cathedral dominated the scene. Wrecked it was, yet it stood more intact than any of the buildings which once contemptuously looked down upon it.

“Here we are,” the Knight said with a sigh of relief. “St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the crown of grace in this lost city.”

The boy’s face gleamed with wonder as he studied the marble walls, the beauty of which remained despite the growths of sea algae and moss that scattered about the ancient surface. Even the fish that swam about the sacred structure seemed to have an air of thoughtfulness about them, though Zeno knew such a thing was really impossible for these simple creatures.

His attention swiftly turned to the sound of the door opening; Captain Marco had returned, with instructions to the knight and the squire that they needed to follow him for the trial. But before they left the room, all joined in saying grace in order to close the meal.

As the three marched through the dark corridors, Zeno could not help but still feel that these ashen and black halls were alien to him.

It was not long until the Captain led them to the door of a new room, a room which Zeno found stranger than anything else he had seen on the Regina. It was wider than the quarters wherein he had consumed his supper only minutes ago, but had strange boxes somehow lit up in various colors (mainly green and red) which rested upon metallic tables. As dazzling as this was, it did not even match his amazement with what he subsequently noticed. Above these lights were images—images of the ocean—images more real, more exact than even the finest murals and paintings he had seen in the numerous churches he had visited in his many travels with Knight Adolphus. And unlike those images, these were not still! He could see the swimming of fish and the swaying of seaweed as if he was looking through the window he had looked out of earlier. So true to life, that one would think…

“Yes, my young friend—that is really the outside of the ship you are looking at. Those objects are called screens,” Knight Adolphus gently said to him.

The boy shook out of this brief trance, and saw two other men in blue uniforms carrying some kind of odd shape. It was a bone-white rectangular shaped object as large as an amply sized pumpkin. Two appendages shaped like human arms protruded from its sides, and two circles with sharp curved spirals were placed in the back of this thing.

He noticed Captain Marco pressing some button on one of the tables which immediately caused a sound that Zeno did not quite understand; and the boy’s eyes switched from confusion to a sort of joyful shock when part of the floor started to move against itself and retreat, making way for a hidden cubicle where the men placed the white object.

Captain Marco went over to those men, and bid them to halt. He then ushered Knight Adolphus and Zeno forward.

“My son, pay close attention to Captain Marco. This is crucial for your trial,” he said in a serious tone.

“This is a kind of device that was called a ‘drone’ in the Dark Ages.” Captain Marco said. “Not all drones, however, were made for the water…”

One of the men came up to Zeno and gave him a smaller object, some kind of rectangle in the same color as the drone.

“But that is a story for another time, as they used to say in those days…” he stated in a longing tone, as if the man was hinting at a hidden desire to converse further but knew he had to keep things brief for the sake of duty. This provoked a momentary thought in Zeno’s mind: did life ever get lonely in a submarine?

“Once we have familiarized you with the controls, we will close this container, and it will be able to go out into the open sea. The camera on the drone will connect with our screens by the means of Dark Age technology, and you will be able to see what the drone ‘sees’. And this,” he continued, holding out the strange device to the boy, “is what they called a ‘remote’, which you will use to control it.”

“I am honored to present your trial to you, Zeno. It is this: you are to maneuver this drone to the ruins of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in order to recover a statue of a saint…” and he concluded “…it is incredible how many have survived…”

“If I may,” Knight Adolphus interjected.

Captain Marco paused and gave a nod; upon this cue, the Knight said, “Many—and I am included in their number—believe these remains to be miraculous in nature. As with the fall of Jerusalem to the legions of Emperor Titus in the first century, surely the just escaped New York City in the twenty-first; but here the Lord wished for some things to remain for ages afterwards.”

“You are quite right,” Marco replied.

Zeno was intrigued, but had a concern to bring before the men.

“May I pick any saint, Captain?” he inquired.

“Yes, for only the statues of the true saints have survived,” Captain Marco answered thoughtfully.

The addition of “true” before “saints” seemed a bit redundant to him, until he recalled again the Abbé’s lessons, this time about the horrific Modernist Crisis of the early twentieth to early twenty-first centuries…but then the voice of the Captain made him return to the present.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Zeno answered.

The Captain gave an order to the two men, who by now had been sitting in seats in front of the screens for some moments. One pressed a button on the metallic table in front of him, and the drone made a plopping sound as the cubicle dispensed it into the water. The images suddenly flickered, and then showed the perspective of the drone as the blue horizon slowly appeared to descend with it. Zeno reasoned to himself that there must have been some device in the front of it that painted these real-life images, and somehow sent them to the screens to be seen by all in the room. But he could not dwell in speculation; he had to act.

With the remote in hand, he saw that there were four gray buttons on the right side of this white device which had illustrated arrows pointing in different ways. After a little testing, he figured out that they corresponded with the four cardinal directions: up, down, left, and right. It helped that the drone glided slowly in the water, thus enabling him to swiftly correct his mistakes. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Knight Adolphus observing him with a restrained smile.

The boy, after a little bit of time, sent the drone further below, closer to what had been the streets of New York City. Evidently they were not at the level that they had been before the Catastrophe; sand buried any physical sight of the roads themselves, only leaving a vague outline by the means of the ruined buildings which had been built around these passageways for the automobile and the autobus, ancient mechanisms the boy had only heard tales about in whispered tones. St. Patrick’s Cathedral remained in sight, beckoning him to this sanctuary that had been decommissioned by time. While sensing the growing strain of his fingers by pushing on the buttons, he endured it, and was able to power the drone through the space of what had been the colossal bronze doors of the structure, though what remained now was only a wide gap like that of an ominous cave.

But neither dragon nor monster laid within this passage; only a monument to a faith which had died, yet still lives on. Light from the surface above the waves pierced through the collapsed ceiling as the drone went forwards into the aisle and looked about from side to side, as Zeno commanded it to. Rubble piled on the floor; yet below gigantic holes which once held massive stained glass scenes there were large marble pillars that continued to hold up much of the cathedral.

“The work of giants corrupted…” Knight Adolphus whispered.

Zeno faintly recalled the poem his lord referenced, and continued in his task.

To his right, something particular caught the boy’s eye: smashed votary candles that laid under a sort of canopy. Ordering the machine to investigate further by sending it upwards, he found several little sanctuaries in a row…

And contained within these sanctuaries were saint statues!

He saw that many of them were attached to altars and were made of white marble; but he noticed that one stood by itself before a rail, a painted statue which (though its details showed considerable wear and age) clearly distinguished itself as representing St. Anthony of Padua holding the Child Jesus. For an inexplicable reason, Zeno was drawn instantly to this piece, and desired neither to search nor retrieve another. Thus he decided upon choosing this St. Anthony statue.

Finding six buttons on the left side of the remote below the names “Arm 1” and “Arm 2”, he figured that he had to learn these controls in order to have the drone clasp the forgotten relic. Being cautious, he first ordered the drone to move backwards so as to avoid accidentally damaging his prize, and tested the new controls. He found that each arm had the same three movements: extend, retract, and grasp. After he had concluded his test, he had the drone move towards the statue and hold it with both claws as if it were a mechanical torchbearer.

He then commanded it to slowly withdraw to the Regina: to her applauding crew, her approving Knight, and to himself, a smiling squire who had just then proven himself to be a true guardian.