Tercius bowed his head in greeting. “Honored Speaker… You… are here,”

The weathered lines of the ancient face crinkled. “Yes. Well, I have my ways,” the Speaker said, and for a moment a massive pair of golden translucent wings flashed behind her only to disappear as if it was never there. The unblinking cloudy green eyes turned from him to Lucky. “As do you, I see,”

Tercius gripped the leather reins tightly.

The tall, ancient-looking woman slowly turned to the entourage behind her. “Leave us.”

Exchanging glances and whispers between them, the group of men and women slowly left— a couple of which Tercius remembered seeing in the temple of Balance in Spheros— until only the Speaker, Tercius, Pios, and Lucky remained.

“Brother Pios, may I ask you to see to it that a place in the stables is made available for your guest’s mount?”

Pios inclined his head. “Of course, sister. Until then, my guest is yours,” he said and extended a hand towards Tercius.

Tercius understood what the man wanted and so he turned to Lucky, gently petting the ram’s muzzle.

“Approach, but slowly,” Tercius said to Pios.

As Pios came to stand behind Tercius, the ram’s massive eyes settled on him and he shook his head.

“Easy, boy. Easy and calm. This man will take you to rest and eat.” Hearing his favorite word, Lucky’s ears quivered and he bleated. Tercius smiled and handed over the reins to Pios. “Yes, eat.”

Tercius stepped to the side and climbed up the stirrups, untying a couple of saddlebags and throwing them over his shoulder. Of all of the bags on the ram’s back, these two were the most important. All the rest could go to waste, but not these two. From another saddlebag, he took some salty treats and gave them to Pios.

“These will help,” he said to the priest, who nodded. “Use them to lure him to do what you want, just don’t push him,”

As soon as Pios and Lucky left back towards the grove of trees, the woman’s cloudy green eyes turned to Tercius’ face, then slowly fell on the center of his chest. “I am fairly certain that you did not have that there, just a month ago.”

Ever since he arrived at the edge of the tent town, he had been trying very hard not to think of the jolts of coldness that seemed so interested in him. Even when that hunchbacked elder had directly asked about it, he managed to keep himself calm. But now, for some reason, the curtain of calmness on his face threatened to draw back and leave his innermost core exposed in plain sight. That was not something he was willing to allow.

A mask of {Acting} fell over his face. Suddenly aware of all the tightened muscles on his face, he urged them to relax. “It is as you said. We all have our ways,” he said in an even voice.

The woman’s eyes narrowed as she looked back up, directly into his eyes. “True, true… but this changes things. That one… is not one of Balance, I can tell that much. Not hostile to us, but intent on protecting its territory nonetheless, as it should. But we can’t have it here, without doing something about it, now can we? Denerim—” the woman’s green eyes shone with golden light and suddenly there was a new presence standing behind her.

Tercius’ eyes were firmly on the new arrival.

With the feathery wings enveloping the Speaker like a shield, the golden sand cat sat on its hind legs. The eyes, so similar to Amber’s, observed Tercius as if he was a mouse.

“—Don’t frighten the boy, Denerim. Just keep your younger brethren away from him.”

Tercius said nothing to that.

The golden cat stood up and moved around the Speaker, approaching him with measured and silent steps. It stood right in front of him and lowered its head. Looking directly into its massive nostrils, Tercius stood like a statue as the spirit loomed over him. The being’s form flowed like water, melting and decreasing rapidly. In a streak of light, something hit him straight on his chest.

“What the—”

He looked down and there it was, a translucent golden star shone brightly where once stood his Amulet, slightly below heart level. At the same time, the cold pinpricks in his chest had completely disappeared.

“With that out of the way,” the Speaker said, sounding— and looking— far more worn out than just moments earlier. “Let me show you the way to your family. Come,” she extended an arm his way.

At the doorway, she took a candle from a small box and lit it on a nearby brazier.

The Speaker went first through the carved doorway and into the darkness past it and Tercius followed closely after. Her candle and his glowing star battled the darkness to illuminate the narrow stone corridors which led them deeper into the mountain.

“Do they… Do they know I’m here? Did you tell them?”

“No,” the old woman said. “For when the word reached me that your likeness has been spotted in the mountains, and furthermore that by all accounts you are traveling alone, I thought it prudent not to burden your father and grandmother with such news. Most would not survive the journey, after all, and your grandmother is in a precarious position, where any kind of bad news may as well tip the scales against her.”

Tercius nodded, feeling a tiny bit of gratitude for the act, regardless if the reason behind it was the stated one. “Thank you for the kindness,”

The Speaker snorted and just as she opened her mouth to reply, someone marched out of one of the many side corridors and halted right in their path, blocking their advance. She was tall and thin, with dark skin and dark hair, and a face frozen in a pose that made Tercius think that she smelled something nasty.

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“Sister Antia,” the Speaker said, with a strange edge to her voice.

The woman in the long dark robe ignored the Speaker, instead bluntly staring at the golden star on his chest. The mark between her brows made her a High Priestess of Balance. Her eyes, dark brown and placid, seemed to find him wanting in some way and a corner of her lip curled even further. Tercius’ skin crawled.

“Sister,” the new arrival said, finally inclining her head to the Speaker, but keeping her eyes on Tercius’ chest.

“Is there something you need, sister?” the Speaker asked.

“No. Nothing.” the woman said. “Balance guide you, sister,”

“You too, sister. You too.”

With a swish of her large sleeves, and the same abruptness with which she arrived, she went about her business, marching into one of the numberless lightless corridors. Even as the Speaker started walking again, Tercius stood his ground and observed the strange woman leave. Just before she disappeared around a corner, he saw a look illuminated with candlelight— a narrow-eyed glance that contained much more than the earlier placidity. There was a moment of surprise there, he recalled vividly with {Visualization} and {Memorization}, right before she slipped past the stone wall.

In turn, he glanced at the old woman, who, despite her cloudy green eyes, seemed to see and spot everything. With a sigh, she waved to him. "Come, let's make haste. My back can't take much more walking. Follow closely, or you could easily lose yourself here."

Left and right they went with no seeming order to the choice of going through cold tunnels or narrow corridors, through large caverns that seemed to only serve as warehouses— all filled with wooden barrels of preserved food and beverage, from what little he managed to smell and see— and passageways so narrow that only a single person at a time could walk through. After a while, they started using numberless stairs carved out from the mountain itself, circling upwards.

Finally, through a carved exit, daylight came to the world once more.

Tercius stopped walking, his mouth open as he looked up. “Wow…”

The cavern was bigger than any of the dark ones before, with a massive hole in the incredibly tall ceiling. Blue sky and soft white clouds were up there, moving between vines, bushes, and flowers that grew in a ring around the edges, only spilling partially into the hole.

Where the sun fell directly on the terraced out bottom of the cavern, gardens and even fruit-bearing trees grew. In the very center of one of these gardens, a large stone statue slumbered.

Tercius’ eyes narrowed. That was no statue. Another Elder Spirit was here, one that had chosen to make itself an ageless body. As if to confirm his thoughts, the Speaker led him down the terraces and up to the slumbering spirit, where she spent a minute in prayer, her head bowed and fingers entwined tightly.

Tercius knew the prayer, one meant to invoke protection from the unexpected, but he remained silent, if with a bowed head. The slumbering spirit, a strange looking feline of some kind, did not move a muscle throughout.

Once they placed some distance from the being, the Speaker suddenly grimaced and started swaying.

“Hey,” Without thinking about it, he ran forward and caught her under her swaying shoulders. He held her upright, but despite his best efforts she started sinking towards the ground.

"Just…" the ancient-looking woman grimaced. "Just let me… lay down for a while."

The old woman groaned, making herself comfortable on the green grass. Tercius looked around the green gardens, searching for any signs of human presence and finding none. “Should I yell for someone?”

"No need. It's just the pain of old age," she said as she started patting her furs, only to fish out a small wooden box that she quickly opened and chewed the contents of. A few moments later she sighed and closed her eyes, her grimacing face relaxing slightly. "It will pass soon enough. It just happens from time to time that my back just gives up on me…" she chuckled. "Then I have to remind it that I'm not done with using it."

Looking at the granny, and just imagining an approximation of her age, which he placed somewhere in the mid-eighties, made him question why she came to welcome and guide him. Why the hell did the others let her move about, when something like this could happen at any moment? What if she had been back on those stairs? Irresponsible, is what those priests and priestesses were. Tercius frowned. He didn’t like to dish out collective judgment– or dish out any kind of judgment at all, for that matter– but this time he would make an exception and have the priests and priestesses of this monastery fall below the strictly neutral zone that he liked to keep everyone new in.

"Don't make that face on my account, boyo," she said suddenly. With slow and deliberate moves, the old woman finally pushed herself off of the ground and onto her feet, slapping away the help he came forward to offer. "See? I'm not dead yet,"

Tercius grunted, preferring not to respond to that. Here and now, she looked like a passing breeze might topple her over. Suddenly, he glanced down at the star on his chest.

“Did this happen because of this?” he said, pointing at the star.

The woman glanced at the star, then directly in his eyes, but only for a moment before she looked elsewhere.

“It did,” he said.

“To be here, you need that, and I am one of the few able to provide it. Now come,”

“‘One of the few’? Then you don’t have to be the one to do this, do you?”

The granny gave him a strange look and without another word strode onward.

Observing the Speaker's back, Tercius followed closely, his mind awhirl. If the top of the clergy could do what this woman did, then what conclusion could he draw from their absence? What conclusion could he draw from the fact that an old woman, likely closer to her nineties than eighties, with cloudy eyes and near-broken back, was the one that had come to greet him and invite him in?

The rest did not want him here, was that it? But didn’t they want that unlocked? Was that not the will of their Divine?

Even the weakest of his instincts told him that some manner of politics was afoot here.

Tercius drew a breath. He was in. Now he had to get out, with two more people in tow, with as little involvement as he could get away with.

“They are in there,” the Speaker said in a low voice, pointing at the wall of the large cavern, where shabby-looking furs hung over a doorway, impeding direct view deeper inside. Near the door was a classical Sogean window— a network of holes that gave just the right amount of light and wildlife protection in the harsh desert.

“Don’t go anywhere until Pios comes for you. You hear me?”

Tercius nodded.

"For your sake, I hope you listen to me today more than you did before," she said, looking directly into his eyes.

Once more, Tercius nodded.

“Then go on in. Surprise them,”

Tercius nodded. “Thank you,”

The woman gave him a nod.

Moving the fur curtains out of his way, he stepped in.