Book 3, Chapter 32

Senica bristled and jerked her arm away from the guard reaching for her. “Don’t touch me,” she snapped at the woman.

The mood, already soured over our disrespect of the town’s religious festival, turned tense. Both guards shifted their spears so that the tips were angled in our direction. Before things could escalate further, I took a step between Senica and held my hands up.

“Let’s just take a beat here,” I said. “Try to keep things civil.”

‘Arrogant little shit. Both of ‘em could do with a good beating,’ the guard thought. But what he said was, “Things will be civil as long as you do what your told. You’re in Halgir now. You’ll follow our laws while you’re here. And when the town watch tells you to come with them, you damn well come.”

“Or else you’ll do what?” Senica sneered.

Senica was doing so well in her studies that I sometimes forgot how young she was. She was a teenager now and she’d developed a healthy—or unhealthy—disregard for authority. The problem was that she seemed to be itching for a fight. Even though we weren’t in any real danger right now, starting a brawl wasn’t going to accomplish anything besides letting her show off her magic.

At the same time, I wasn’t going to let them imprison us. If things became unsalvageable, we’d just leave. Prior to that, I wanted to find out a bit more about these angels and whatever scam they were running. It probably didn’t have anything to do with Ralvost, but it was interesting enough to follow up on.

“Senica,” I said. “Stop.”

It was hard not to laugh at the outrage on her face, but I managed to keep my expression smooth. She’d probably been expecting me to flatten the guards, and to be fair, it wouldn’t have been out of character for me. If I wasn’t so curious about this festival, I very well might have swept them aside with a simple spell and went on my way.

“This is all a misunderstanding,” I said. “We’ll go talk to their captain and get it cleared up. It’s not a big deal.”

“What are you doing?” Senica hissed from behind my back. “We don’t have to take this!”

“But I want to know about the angels and their blessing,” I told her. “So try to behave.”

“Alright, that’s enough of all of this,” the first guard said. He reached out to grab me, but my shield ward deflected his hand away. He blinked in surprise, then tried to catch my arm again. I watched him silently as he tried another two times. Frowning, he asked, “What is this?”

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid I can’t be touched. Neither of us can be. Just tell me what direction we need to go.”

 Both guards and Jules looked profoundly uncomfortable, and I caught a whisper from the matronly woman’s mind with my magic. ‘Are they angels, too? Is this some sort of test? God, I hope we passed.’

The guard who’d tried to grab me recovered first. “Follow… follow me,” he said. He led the way down the street with his partner following along behind us, though they seemed to be more following procedure than expecting anything to happen.

‘What could I even do to stop them from fleeing?’ the woman guard wondered to herself. ‘I can’t even touch them. Literally can’t touch them.’

I kept an eye on the two guards as they escorted us across town, but I wasn’t particularly concerned. Unless someone nearby was secretly hiding a fourth or fifth stage core and had a level of knowledge and skill far beyond anything I’d seen since my rebirth, we were as safe here as anywhere else.

More interesting to me were the decorations being put up. There was a general theme of light colors and human-shaped silhouettes floating in the air. I was expecting some wings, but apparently the local interpretation of ‘angel’ didn’t include those. Instead, there were depictions of spires with shining lights at the top of them, almost like the coastal beacons sailors used to avoid running aground in the night.

I wasn’t a fan of religion. When I’d been young, priests had been people to watch out for, inveterate liars, one and all. Oh, the power they wielded was real enough, but they weren’t blessed by some god. They were simply mages of another flavor, or else conmen with impressive tricks and quick hands.

I’d encountered some few good religions in my life, mostly those with tenets about self-sacrifice and uplifting the downtrodden. I’d met priests who had genuinely devoted their lives to helping the less fortunate, though those were generally the exception to the rule. But even then, real, actual proof of the divine was never there. No priest had ever performed a miracle that wasn’t just mana manipulated into a spell, at least not in front of me.

A few of them had believed their own rhetoric, truly and honestly. They’d claimed their magic to be gifts from the Heavens, that they’d studied nothing but the tenets of their faith, and that their gods had rewarded their devotion. Perhaps there was something there, but I’d never been able to find anything conclusive.

I doubted these angels would be any better. They’d fall somewhere between charlatans and monsters, at best misguided and at worst malicious. The part that interested me was the whole pilgrimage aspect. The way I understood it, the angels traveled from town to town and their pilgrims followed them, or perhaps preceded them. Either way, that meant they’d have a lot of knowledge of the area, probably more than the townsfolk.

I made liberal use of mind read to not only get answers to the questions I already had, but to get information that inspired new questions. The walk only took a few minutes, but by the time we reached the guard house, I had a much better idea of what was going on.

The guard house wasn’t exactly the local jail, but it wasn’t far off. It was one-part office, one part guest rooms, except the doors locked from the outside and the rooms were distinctly less comfortable than the average for the town.

The captain was a tall, reed-thin man with a bushy mustache and a large nose. He glanced up as we entered, then set his pen down. “What’s all this?” he asked.

“Couple of travelers walked into town,” the woman guard said, significantly more respectful than when they’d first tried to arrest us. “They seem… Special. Blessed, even.”

“Oh?” The captain cocked an eyebrow. “How so?”

“They’re literally untouchable,” the other guard said. He reached out a hand to touch me, only to be repulsed by my shield ward. The captain’s other eyebrow joined the first.

“It’s just a bit of simple magic,” I said, but I’d gotten the distinct impression that people didn’t do magic here, not really. The instinctive invocations that all living creatures used to strengthen themselves seemed to be the extent of their capabilities, not unlike my home village when I’d first been born. The primary difference was that this town didn’t even seem to realize magic existed.

Or rather, they thought it was exclusively the domain of the supposed ‘angels,’ and that the magic they brought with them were divine blessings. I’d picked up on thoughts of warding homes from vermin, healing injuries, transmuting earth and stone, and divining answers to the townsfolks’ questions.

If I was right, angels were nothing more than mages with a decent grasp on intermediate-tier spells. I was less inclined to interfere both because this place had nothing to do with me and because if I was understanding correctly, all that was happening was a bunch of mages were coming by and selling their magic for some food while pretending to be divine messengers or some such nonsense.

The captain and his two guards exchanged glances. “You’ve been blessed?” he asked carefully, like he was afraid of offending me.

“I wouldn’t say that, no.”

“But you have magic. So either you’ve been blessed or you’re one of the Enlightened.”

“What’s an Enlightened?” Senica asked.

“The Chosen People,” the captain said reverently. “Those who live in Paradise, separate from all that dwell in this land, under whose light we take shelter.”

Well, that was weird. This whole thing had a bit of a culty vibe, and now I was wondering how widespread it was. Was this something I was going to have to deal with in order to properly evaluate the former kingdom of Ralvost?

“Okay, I’m sorry. We are not from anywhere around here and this is all very new to us. Could we meet the angels when they get here?” I asked.

“I… That’s not a decision I can make.”

“Who could?”

“Jules, I guess,” the captain said.

Senica had been quiet during the conversation, but when Jules’s name came up, she said, “She doesn’t like us much.”

“They were, um, blaspheming against the angels,” the guard added.

“Ah,” the captain said slowly. “Thus why you’re here in front of me.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “It was an honest mistake. Our home village was victim to a scheme to steal mana from everybody years ago. There were some superficial… similarities….”

“I can assure you, the Enlightened and the divine messengers are very real,” the captain said.

“I believe you,” I said.

“But, if you’re not an Enlightened and you haven’t been blessed, how do you have magic?” the guard asked.

“Anyone can use magic,” Senica said. “You just have to learn how. My brother could teach you.”

Silence descended on the room.

“You can bless people?” the captain asked carefully.

“If you mean show people how to use magic or cast spells on them, then yes,” I said.

“I hate to ask this, but could you… How to put this…” The captain paused to consider what he wanted to say, then let out a heavy sigh and finished with, “Prove it?”

“Pardon?”

The captain gestured toward me with a hand. “You’re just not… you know… what an angel normally looks like. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be rude…”

“But you’re not willing to take it on faith,” I finished for him. “I’m not any sort of divine being, just to be clear.”

I cast a few minor telekinesis spells in rapid succession, targeting various things on the captain’s desk. His inkpot rose into the air, followed immediately by a clay mug and plate, a pen knife, and a pin shaped in a hexagon that I suspected was some sort of badge for the local watch. Both of the guards had a duplicate of the pin on their chests, at least.

“By Her Divine Grace,” one of the guards whispered. “You really are an Enlightened.”

The captain watched the contents of his desk float away, his jaw slack, only for a few moments. Then he threw himself out of his chair and scrambled to his knees, hands clasped in front of his face and head bowed. “A thousand apologies, Divine One,” he said.

Behind me, the other two guards mimicked his position. All three of them looked scared, the kind of look I’d seen on peasants’ faces when they encountered a noble or knight, the kind people wore when they were afraid for their lives and knew there was nothing they could do but hope to be spared.

“Oh, get up,” I said. “I already told you I’m not part of whatever this is. I’m not Enlightened or Divine or anything like that. I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but you people have some fundamental misconceptions about how magic works if you think it’s the exclusive domain of the gods.”

Slowly, hesitantly, the captain looked up to meet my eyes. With my scrying spell, I watched the guards behind me communicate silently through nothing but swift looks and facial expressions. In unison, they started backing away for the door while still staying on their knees.

“Today’s been a weird day,” Senica said.