The Lady is the divinity who is the literal incarnation of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame of Uchronic Paris in Antiterra. She was profaned and awakened during the assault on the cathedral in 1901 A.D.A., and survives marked by its scars.
Names
The faithful call her Our Lady; her cult calls her the Sacred; in her highest avatars she is the Lady of Pain; those who know her and prefer not to name her fully say simply the Lady.
Nature
The whole building is her body: the naves are her arms, the apse her head, the stained-glass windows her eyes, open inward. Whoever enters Notre Dame enters her.
- She has wounds on her face.
- Fragments of the great rose window are driven into her shoulders and side, from an event before her awakening.
- A continuous electric current runs through her and sustains her petrified life.
History
The warning
Around 1886 A.D.A., Paulus, under the name Paul Claudel, approached Henri in a Paris street to give him the Blue Book, key to time transit, and a warning: “the Lady inside Notre Dame is sacred and the Great Khan wants to profane her”. He delivered the book but was run through mid-sentence by Graz’zt, the six-fingered hand in the curtained carriage. Having learned of the book and the danger, Henri reached the cathedral in time to assist the Lady during the assault.
The assault (1901 A.D.A.)
- The Great Khan, a two-headed vrock specializing in time stop, froze the Regulators at the crossing of the naves, leaving the cathedral defenseless.
- Graz’zt profaned the Lady.
- The gargoyles broke away from the eaves: three gigantic devils, part of the building’s fabric, joined its defense.
- Henri assisted the Lady. How is not recorded precisely; the surviving witnesses gave differing versions.
The profanation was not completed. The rose window became fully embedded in her body as a permanent mark, and Antiterran Christendom has not fully recovered from the act.
Awakening with scars
The Lady awoke as she was, with the wounds, the rose window and the current; it was not a restoration. Those who saw her before and after found no essential difference.
The Lady and Sigil
Some doctrinarians identify her with the Lady of Pain of Sigil: one female divinity in two places, “two bodies and a single pain”. As proof they note that neither forgives profanation: Sigil erases whoever looks directly at the Lady, and Notre Dame kept the gargoyles that turned against Graz’zt as a warning.
Open questions
- The event that first drove the rose window into her body is not fully reconstructed.
- The source of the current that sustains her is unknown.
- Whether she is the same divinity as the Lady of Pain of Sigil is held only by some doctrinarians.