Confession
"He came to confess his sins. She gave him a different kind of penance."
The Church of the Risen Neon doesn't officially exist.
That's what happens when the corps outlaw organized religion—it goes underground, into the tunnels and the basements and the forgotten spaces where the desperate still believe in something bigger than themselves.
I found it by accident, three months ago. Followed a symbol scratched into a wall, descended seven flights of stairs, and emerged into something impossible: a cathedral carved from the bones of a pre-Collapse subway station.
Holographic candles cast dancing light across salvaged icons. Incense hangs thick in the air, covering the smell of damp and rust. And at the altar, dressed in robes of white and gold, is Mother Superior Isadora.
I've been coming back ever since.
She's not what you'd picture when you think priestess.
Fifty years old, round and heavy, with dark skin that gleams in the candlelight and curves that her ceremonial robes can't quite contain. Her face is kind, lined with decades of secret ministry, and her voice—when she speaks the liturgy—is low and rich and hits something deep in my chest.
I don't know if I believe in her god.
But I believe in her.
That's the problem.
I come to services. I sit in the back. I bow my head and pretend to pray. But really, I'm watching her. The way she moves through the congregation, touching hands, offering comfort. The way her body shifts beneath those robes. The way she smiles—warm, knowing—like she can see straight through to the rotten heart of me.
Tonight, I can't take it anymore.
"I need to confess."
The words fall out of me after the service ends, while the congregation files out through hidden exits. She turns to look at me—this young man, twenty-three, hovering at the altar like he's afraid to get too close.
"Confession is available to all who seek it." Her voice is gentle. "Come. Let's find somewhere private."
She leads me through a side door, down a narrow hallway, into a small chamber lit by a single holographic candle. There's a chair, a kneeler, and her—settling into the chair with the practiced ease of someone who's heard a thousand secrets.
"Kneel, child. Tell me what troubles your soul."
I kneel. The stone is cold against my knees. My heart is hammering.
"I have sinful thoughts," I begin.
"What kind of thoughts?"
"Lustful ones." I stare at the floor. "About someone I shouldn't want."
"Lust is a common sin. It can be overcome through—"
"About you."
Silence.
I look up. Her face is unreadable, lit by the dancing holographic flame.
"I'm sorry," I say, the words tumbling out. "I know it's wrong. I know you're a priestess, that you're sacred, that thinking about you the way I do is—is an abomination. But I can't stop. Every time I see you, every time you speak, I imagine—"
"What do you imagine?"
Her voice is different now. Still calm, but there's something underneath. Something I can't name.
"I imagine you without those robes. I imagine your body—all of it, every inch. I imagine touching you, tasting you, hearing you cry out while I—" I choke on the words. "I'm sick. I know I'm sick. Just tell me my penance and I'll go."
She's quiet for a long moment.
Then she rises from her chair, crosses to where I'm kneeling, and tilts my face up with one hand.
"You think you're the first young man to confess such things to me?"
I blink. "I—no. But—"
"You're not. And do you know what I tell them?" She leans closer, and I can smell her—incense and sweat and something warmer underneath. "I tell them that the body is not shameful. That desire is not sin. That the sacred and the profane are not as separate as the old doctrines claimed."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying—" She traces her thumb across my lips, and I shudder. "—that perhaps what you need is not penance. Perhaps what you need is permission."
"This is wrong."
I say it even as she leads me to the small cot in the corner of her chamber. Even as she begins to unfasten her robes. Even as my body screams at me to stop talking and act.
"Is it?" She looks at me with those dark, knowing eyes. "Wrong according to whom? The corps who banned faith? The old church that used shame as a weapon? Or wrong because you've been taught that wanting a woman like me—older, larger, sacred—is something to be punished?"
"I don't know anymore."
"Then let me show you something." She lets her robes fall.
God.
She's naked beneath, and she's everything I imagined and more. Heavy breasts with dark nipples, a soft belly that curves and swells, wide hips, thick thighs. She's unapologetically much—more body than I've ever seen, more flesh than I know what to do with.
She's beautiful.
She's terrifying.
She's sacred.
"The body is a temple," she says, spreading her arms. "Mine, and yours. What happens between temples is not sin, child. It's worship."
She reaches for me.
I let her.
She guides me like a sacrament.
Every touch is ritual. Every kiss is prayer. She teaches me her body the way she'd teach scripture—patient, thorough, making sure I understand every verse.
"Here," she murmurs, pressing my hand to her breast. "Feel how the flesh responds to reverence."
I squeeze, and she sighs.
"Here." She guides my head lower, to the softness of her belly. "The center of life. Of creation. Kiss it like you mean it."
I press my lips to her skin and feel her shiver.
"Here." She spreads her thick thighs, and I see her—wet, open, waiting. "The holiest of holies. Worship here, and you will understand what salvation truly means."
I bury my face between her legs, and she cries out—not like a priestess, but like a woman. Her hands fist in my hair. Her thighs clamp around my head. She tastes like salt and something sweeter, something sacred, and I worship until my jaw aches and she's shaking above me.
When she comes, she says something in a language I don't recognize.
It sounds like a prayer.
She takes me inside her with a slow, deliberate motion.
I'm on my back, on her narrow cot, and she's above me—all of her, every pound, pressing me into the mattress like gravity itself has taken her form. Her weight is overwhelming. Her heat is consuming. And when she begins to move—
I understand.
This is worship. Not the rote repetition of ancient words, not the empty gestures of forbidden rituals. This—two bodies moving together, giving and taking, finding the divine in flesh and sweat and desperate moans—this is what the old religions were always circling around.
"Do you feel it?" she gasps, rolling her hips. "The sacred in the profane?"
"Yes."
"Then stop thinking it's wrong." She takes my hands, presses them to her breasts. "Stop carrying shame for what you want. You came here looking for forgiveness, but what you needed was freedom."
I grip her hips—thick, soft, real—and thrust up into her.
She cries out again. Not a prayer this time—my name.
After, we lie tangled in her narrow bed, the holographic candle still flickering in the corner.
"That wasn't what I expected when I came down here tonight," I admit.
"What did you expect?"
"Judgment. Punishment. Fifty Hail Marys and a lifetime of guilt."
She laughs—warm, rich, nothing like the solemn priestess of the liturgy.
"The old faith was built on shame," she says. "Shame for the body, shame for desire, shame for being human. The Church of the Risen Neon is different. We believe that the divine lives in the flesh, not despite it."
"Is that why you—"
"Is that why I take lovers?" She props herself up to look at me. "Sometimes. When I find someone whose desire is genuine. Whose need is real." She traces a finger down my chest. "You've been watching me for three months, child. Did you think I didn't notice?"
I feel my face heat. "I tried to be subtle."
"You failed." She smiles. "But your failure was... flattering. Not many young men would look at a woman my age, my size, and see something worth wanting."
"Their loss." I pull her closer. "You're the most incredible thing I've ever seen, Mother Superior."
"Isadora." Her voice is soft. "When we're like this, call me Isadora."
"Isadora." I say it like a prayer. "When can I see you again?"
"Come to services. Come to confession." She kisses me, slow and deep. "Come to me, whenever you need absolution. I'll give you the only penance that matters."
"Which is?"
She smiles against my mouth.
"More."
I become a regular at the Church of the Risen Neon.
I learn the liturgy, help with services, become a fixture in the underground congregation. And when the faithful have gone home, when the holographic candles dim, I find my way to Isadora's chamber.
She teaches me scripture and sex with equal dedication. Shows me that the body and the spirit are not enemies—that the sacred lives in every moan, every touch, every moment of connection between two people who choose each other.
"I'm falling for you," I tell her one night. "Not the priestess—the woman."
"They're the same thing." She takes my face in her hands. "I am what I am—all of it. The sacred and the profane together. Can you love both?"
"I already do."
She kisses me like I've given her a gift.
And somewhere in the depths of Neo-Rome, in a church that doesn't officially exist, a priestess and her penitent find something the corps can't outlaw:
Real faith.
In each other.
In this.
Forever.