Servants · Arcane working · Artifice and Clockwork
Procession Child
Bearer of Candles and Censers
Cathedral naves and great churches; it walks in processions and tends the candles
A small construct in the vestments of an acolyte, with a chipped childlike ceramic face, made to carry candles and censers in procession and to tend the lights of a nave. Visitors find it touching and choirs find it unsettling.
A few great churches keep these from an older age, when a chapter could afford what it could not explain. The procession child walks in its place in the procession, carrying a candle or a censer at an even height, and turns where the procession turns. Between services it walks the nave and trims the candles in an order it has followed for longer than any verger has served. It does not kneel or pray. It walks, and carries, and returns to its niche.
Oxford does not like them and keeps none. Canterbury keeps two and does not discuss them. The question the chapters will not answer is whether a thing made to take part in a rite takes part in it, and the procession child has made the question harder by being, in the opinion of most who have watched it, better at the procession than the boys.
As witnesses describe it
A small figure the height of a child of eight, with a chipped ceramic face, unequal lens eyes and visible brass workings at the wrists and neck, dressed in a white surplice and a dark hood, or in processional red. It carries a tall candle or a smoking censer. A faint light shows behind its eyes.
