Per 
Ruvim Korsakov was not there for the destruction of his world.
(In the days, months, years to come he will wonder at this fact more than all the others - was it just a random flicker of fate that saved him, or was there some too-thoroughly-concealed purpose behind it? And if so, whose? To believe it the Lord’s would be the height of hubris - no, a man from such a place as Svyatilishche could ever matter so much. A spell that Afanasay half-prophet had placed upon his head, to drive him unconsenting to safety in Noginsk?
Or - and this will be the worst to think, a thought skied away from before being touched in the way one draws back a hand from a pan radiating heat - had it been his own cowardice, his own premonition? Their fall had been long in the making - since the loss of Mistress Toma, since the arrival of Father Muratov from Moscow. No-one remembered, they always complained, and the one thing that set mankind apart from the animals was the ability to predict from existing information, and so perhaps, he thinks, he suspected this all along. The post-Christmas visit to his old friend, to pass along the family's well-wishes and some of Kseniya's baking, to see how her children were growing and greet her husband - that had not been because of fellow-feeling, but only an excuse, to find a place of refuge while their church was brought down.)
But back in the watery now, he stood in front of the burned-out shell of the house he had shared with his sister and nephew and brother-in-law and understood without being told. The snow had melted in patches all about the garden she had so carefully tended, revealing refrozen mud and wilted bulbs. A handful of scorched uprights leaned against each other like drunken bogland saplings. The expected smell of ash was gone, tamped down by the few minutes of last night’s freezing rain.
There was nothing here, and never would be again. All organisms died, eventually - deathlessness was a thing of stories and stories only, and they had all been fools to think that their church would be the exception to that rule. Hopefully Kseniya and Dmitriy and all the others were safe beyond the reaches of Muratov and the rest, whether fled into the woods or subsumed into the sod and tissues underlying the building.
And so, less than an hour after he had stepped out of its doors, Ruvim Korsakov went back to the train station.
It was night again when the train pulled to a stop and what passengers remained were commanded off - end of the line, here. The sun had but barely returned from its hiding, and yearly would have to ease itself into spring again - a few minutes more of clouded light each morn, a single fire-red beam striking the steeple each evening.
(That was the wrong metaphor, wasn’t it, though? Not fire any more, not with his family like as not buried beneath it - like Friday’s wine-dyed robes, like blessings and the blood for which they were named.)
A handful of dry snow worked its way into the wrists and collar of his coat as soon as he stepped out into the street. So - a string of houses, most lamps extinguished, and the clouds too thick to show any star- or moonlight now, just after midwinter. An island in the vast boreal ocean, and his trapping-place for the foreseeable future, for he had no more coin for another ticket. And even if he did - where else should he go?
Ruvim bent his head, and then stopped. What was the point in praying, to a saint who let his own worship disappear? Either He was impotent, to tamp down the fires and to rescue them all from their sins, or He did not care.
But then again, he didn't have anything else to do, either.
John Far-seeing - he imagined the eagle of the icons circling above that sky of clouds, gaze piercing them to light on his tiny rabbit-like figure here on the sidewalk - be merciful. Please - still exist. Even though there are none left to worship you. Don't - let the world go cold and meaningless, please, let our salvation still exist.
…and no, Ruvim refused to count it as a blessing that there was a room for let for the small amount of coin he still had. Nor that, after five days of begging around for someone, anyone, who would pay a man for honest work even if it was hard, eventually the woman at the sugar-and-bread store down the corner told him that the butcher might accept an assistant, though he denied the need for one.
What was he to say, anyway? I learned this at the hand of God, I watched my companions-in-faith slaughter rabbits and songbirds and once even a young red deer in order to divine which way the winds would blow, in order to offer to the saint the reality in flesh which He demanded? That this is how I was shown, to respect life and things that were once-living?
(Mistress Toma, back when he had been young and before she had died without successor, had told him once that he had excellent handwriting. She had even let him trade out his slate and chalk for her precious fountain pen, to copy down for her recipes, a few of the old prayers, the way of the spells that were going unused. He remembered the smoothness of the barrel against the pads of his child-fingers, how the ink had slid out onto the soft ivory paper easy as mucus. - Tvoyego, Vlad’iko, po glagolu tvoyemu, s’ myrom’ yako -
Now, in small, clear print, he writes out blood sausage, 60 k/lb; rib loin and front hock and bone, marrow, 17 k.)
(When did running away turn into running towards?)
It takes two looks for it to fully catch his eye, in the store. Must have been something just off the train - he can’t imagine a luxury such as this sitting idle on the shelf for long. A stack of creamy paper, tied tight with string, and beside it, bottles of ink in all the colours of garnets - pyrope and grossular and andradite, red-green-black like holiday vestments.
There is no way to justify bringing it to the counter, carrying it in brown wrapping back to his rooms, spreading it out on the table with one lame leg. He hesitates before unscrewing the first cap, before touching the pen-tip to the flat and shining surface. You do not have the right to do this. Your hands are ineloquent, you barely even believe any more - you endured. You lived, and continue to live, when everyone else who remembers is gone.
What do you think you’re going to do? Tell the tales? Remember? To who would care to read?
But Ruvim Korsakov has already used up his allotment of cowardice, in surviving at all. So the pen drops down, and the colour slips on, easy as mucus.
And before he manages to count it, a whole other year has rolled around. The sun has bedded herself down again beneath the horizon, and the town has all returned singing to their homes from the Teophany, including to the small and too-cold rooms that now belong to Ruvim Korsakov.
On the table, the outline of a man flees from a black-hatched night to a shapeless white patch, that could have been a garden or could have been a furnace for all that the figure would have seen of it. For his eyes are covered in his hands, and his head is turned away, back towards the dark.
