I have found that the best lies are wrapped in nothing but the truth.

— Excerpt from Meditations, by the Red Emperor

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Molam found himself lost in Sanctuary, unable to remember the winding twists and turns that the two Priestesses had taken to guide him here. He berated himself for thinking that he didn't need to memorize the path, having been lulled into a false sense of security when he thought he was going home.

He could only console himself with the thought that he could find the exit somewhere if he wandered the stone halls of Sanctuary long enough with one hand sliding against the cool stone murals that decorated the walls. He found the situation ironic. Here he was, wandering the halls of Sanctuary after having escaped Crimson City's Palace just a month ago, two places that few ever had the privilege to enter. Yet without the Oracle's help, he couldn't go home. RainBringer had seen to that.

With a start, he realized that his hand currently touched a mural depicting RainBringer. The image captured the dragon's coiling form as it soared through the sky, surrounded by clouds and the dotted rain that fell to the earth, with crowds of people holding their hands up high in a gesture of gratitude.

Rage gripped at him and he pounded his fist against the carving, as though the act could somehow channel his frustration from the stone depiction to the dragon itself. Once, twice, then three times, and when he pulled his arm back for a fourth blow a voice stopped him.

"Strike away, but when flesh meets stone I believe all you hurt is yourself."

Molam whirled around to face the speaker, flushed with embarrassment at being caught displaying his anger. Upon recognizing the Priestess, he looked down at his feet, then exhaled and raised his eyes to meet her gaze.

"Priestess Komura." He greeted her. "I didn't know you relocated to Sanctuary."

The Priestess had been in charge of Molam's worldly education for the first few months after the Oracle had sent him out on his initial task. Her previously black hair was now visibly streaked with gray, but still cut short at her shoulders and though a few extra wrinkles had developed on her face since they had parted ways, her small eyes held the same hint of kindness that Molam rarely found elsewhere.

"My village evacuated when the Red Army marched past, and the Oracle was kind enough to offer us all shelter in Sanctuary." She replied in a mild tone. "Perhaps we can return to the village come Spring's Blessings if the Red Army didn't pillage it. But for now the people I serve are here, and so I follow."

Molam realized that of all the Priestesses within Sanctuary, it was Priestess Komura that had found him and suspicion emerged. "The Oracle sent you here. Are you here to convince me to be her tool?"

"She sent me here to see that you were given accommodations, and to help you with whatever you wanted to do. I was not given any orders about making you her tool."

"And what if I want to go home?" Molam challenged her with a menacing half-step forwards, his fingertips pressing into the wall. Though he wasn't tall, Priestess Komura stood half a head shorter than him. She looked up at him with a measured gaze as he demanded, "Does she really think that you have leverage over me just because you taught me for half a year?"

"You are asking the wrong person. I'm a Priestess. None of us are arrogant enough to presume we can begin to understand what the Oracle thinks." Priestess Komura turned to the side and began walking. "Instead, I can show you the best place in ZhiXia City to get some sweets so you do not go to bed hungry. Come along now, I wouldn't want you to get lost."

Molam's frustration surged at Priestess' retreating back. He wanted to shout at her for treating him the same way she did when they first met. But he closed his eyes and exhaled, giving the stone mural one last limp strike before allowing the arm to fall back down to his side and following the Priestess' white robe.

***

Priestess Komura guided Molam out through a side door within Sanctuary and they walked back out into ZhiXia City. The late afternoon Sun barely kept the alleys of the city warm in the shadows of the buildings, and Molam became intimately aware of his lack of warmer clothes now that he was walking outside without the spirit's warm Domain. The material woven into his flameproof cloak did little to keep him warm in the waning days of Autumn's Colors.

Without a word, Priestess Komura stopped by a street seller and spoke with the owner, who readily handed a black cloak to the Priestess. She offered it to him expectantly and Molam considered refusing, but the wind made his limbs shiver and he accepted it.

She continued to guide him through the city until they came to a bell tower. Another line crowded in front of a shop here, and Molam glanced at the sign, written in elegant strokes in the Common Tongue. It identified the shop as a confectionery that also served tea.

"So. You succeeded, against all expectations." Priestess Komura said matter-of-factly when they finally sat down in a secluded room within the shop. She pushed a plate of colorful mochi balls in front of him and handed him a wooden toothpick. "Consider this my congratulations. Eat."

"I only followed you here because I didn't have anything else to do." Molam grumbled, pulling the cloak around him. Though the cloak provided no warmth like the spirit's Domain, it was thicker than his previous one and he no longer winced whenever the wind blew. "I'm not hungry."

She ignored him, setting out two cups and filled them with steaming tea before pushing a cup to him. "I have a penchant for their jasmine tea, so give it a try. It goes very well with their mochi."

"I said I'm not hungry."

The Priestess caught his gaze with her own, then slowly raised an eyebrow.

Molam dug a toothpick into the mochi and chewed. Sweet and sticky, he tasted sugar mixed with crushed nuts.

Priestess Komura pointed to his cup of hot tea.

He tasted it gingerly, allowing the aroma to permeate his nose. "It's good."

"Good. Now listen." Priestess Komura sat back and regarded him with her beady eyes. "Five years ago, the Oracle sent a young man to me and told me to educate him on how to survive the world. While I didn't —"

"I'm not in the mood for reminiscing, Priestess Komura."

Her eyes flashed. "Don't speak with your mouth full. I taught you better than that."

Molam chewed in resigned silence.

"...but, I will cut to the chase." The Priestess leaned forward. "You're not the only one that wants to go home, Molam. Ah-ah-ah," she held up a warning finger in response to Molam's angry swallowing, "Listen. See to it that you don't choke. Yes, I know you think it's different between the two of us. Perhaps you think it is unfair for me to compare wanting to return to my Shrine in my village with the place I suspect you come from." She tapped her finger on the table, a steady rhythm. "But the young man I taught had conviction when he spoke to me of wanting to reduce my burden. He spoke of completing his task and then convincing RainBringer and the Oracle to help him raise an army, because he believed that he could stop the Empire of the Sun and put an end to the disasters that filled my Shrine with orphans."

"I never asked, but I believe he himself was an unfortunate result of the very same catastrophes that the Empire of the Sun causes, and he wanted to make sure that it would never happen again." The Priestess leaned back, folding her arms into the sleeves of her white robe. "Drink some tea before you choke."

Molam sipped with simmering anger — the tea was too hot for him to swallow bigger gulps and he had much to say. Priestess Komura watched in silence as he cleared his throat and then responded, "The Oracle knew what she was doing when she sent you to talk to me."

Priestess Komura's steady gaze seemed unperturbed by his combative tone. "She is the Oracle. She knows what you can do and she knows what I can do, and she asked me to show you why you need to do what you need to do."

Molam snorted. "Because young people think the problem is simple? That the world is easy to fix?"

The Priestess interlaced her fingers and placed her hands above her lap. "Do you no longer think it needs fixing?"

"That's not what I said." He jammed the toothpick into the last ball of mochi, angry at the Priestess, frustrated at himself, furious at the direction of their conversation. "You don't know what the Oracle is really asking me to do." Molam suppressed the urge to shout, to tell Priestess Komura exactly how insurmountable the path in front of him seemed. "Do you…" He paused, exhaled, then met Priestess Komura's eyes, "Do you even know what it is?"

"I don't, but I'm sure that it must be something that only you can do."

"You sit there and tell me to listen to the Oracle, when you don't even know what she asked?" Molam pounded the table hard enough for the plate and cups to shake. "You congratulated me earlier, but what part of my struggle in the past five years did you see? All you know is the result! All you know is that I'm currently here, having done it. That's all you and anyone else sees, the part where I succeeded. But you know what you didn't see? The depths of the journey to achieve that success —" his jaw clenched, and Molam looked down. His fist clenched; there was little possibility of danger if he told Priestess Komura he had stolen the spirit's egg from Crimson City, but he couldn't risk burdening her with that knowledge.

"I won't tell you what it was, only that it took years of planning and risking my life." His voice turned bitter. "And then having accomplished it, all I wanted was to go back to having my life to myself, not to dedicate it to what others want again. But the Oracle won't let me. She wants me to continue putting my life on the line knowing full well of my incapabilities." He looked down at the table, eyes unfocused. "I'm tired, Priestess Komura. I've given my life twice already and now I just want to go home."

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"I'm sure there's much you want to say but cannot," The Priestess agreed, "But I do know that she wouldn't have asked you if she thought you couldn't do it, or that another could easily take your place. Just as I am the one here talking to you and not any other Priestess, the Oracle only asks us to do that which she knows we can do. No one can make you do anything, Molam. Only you can. I taught you that when you studied with me. But that also means only you can disappoint yourself the most, because you have to live with the decisions you make when it comes to the things you choose to do. And make no mistake: choosing not to do something is still a choice."

She raised her arms, propping her elbows on the table between them as she laid her chin upon her interlaced fingers and continued to gaze at him with kind eyes. "I don't know what she asked you to do this time, but I want to remind you: The Oracle only asks us to do the things we are best at. She asked me to talk to you about what you wanted in the past and I see that it will be hard to convince you to consider who you were, yet here I am, an older Priestess reminiscing with a young man. But the same task is thrust upon you: the things you are best at — are you going to walk away from them because it's harder than you thought?"

Before Molam could answer, a commotion broke out and the door to their room fell open with a bang, three children toppling into the room in a sprawl of flailing limbs. The oldest, a young girl with short black hair, leapt up immediately.

"Priestess Komura!" The girl tried to redeem herself by smoothing out her clothes. "I told them not to follow you, but they insisted and —"

"Hey, no fair, Kanao!" A boy struggled to stand up from underneath the other boy. "Get off me, Bevyn!"

"Children!" A man rushed in and Molam recognized him from afar as the shop owner, a young man with darker skin and dark, slicked-back hair. "My apologies, Priestess Komura, I didn't mean to allow the children to rush in, but they snuck past me at the front counter."

"Your shop is busy and it is no fault of yours, Jiovanny," Priestess Komura waved a dismissive hand as she stood up and pulled the two boys apart, the little girl Kanao wringing her hands to the side. "Bevyn, Lee, how many times have I told you two to listen when Kanao says something might be a bad idea?"

"It was Bevyn!"

"Nuh uh, Lee said we should surprise you first!"

Priestess Komura gave them an earful, but Molam stared at the shop owner now that they were up close, the name giving him pause. "Jiovanny?"

The shop owner squinted at Molam, then opened his mouth in surprise. "Wah. Molam, right?" He beamed a crooked smile at Molam and stepped forward, holding his hand out. "I haven't seen you since…oh, four? Almost five years ago when you left Komura's Shrine!"

"You're so much … thinner. And now you're the owner of a sweets shop?" Molam accepted the hand, but Jiovanny gave his hand a vigorous shake. "I thought you'd be… well, I don't know where you'd be, but I guess it never occurred to me that you left Komura's Shrine."

"Oh, heh, about that, yes." The man ran a sheepish hand through his hair. "I suppose I have lost some weight, now that I make sweets instead of just eating them. I left the Shrine a year after you departed," Jiovanny beamed a smile. "I didn't know what to do with my life, but remember that old cook Sevyka? She taught me how to make sweets! Said something about if I could make it myself I wouldn't need to steal from her. So I started making sweets and experimenting on my own and, well, people loved it. Before I knew it, the Whale of ZhiXia himself became a regular and some say mine is the most well-known confectionery in ZhiXia City!"

"That can't have been easy." Molam felt a giddy sense of displacement, as though he had suddenly become many years younger. "I haven't seen you in a few years and you've made a name for yourself already."

"Well, it wasn't an easy journey. You'd think I know what makes the best sweets and desserts, given how much I love them!"

Molam laughed at that. "That's a given, isn't it? You must have sampled everything sweet on this side of the Endless Sands! Surely that's helped."

"But there's always so much to learn, you know?" Jiovanny pointed to the last ball of mochi on Molam's plate. "Even if it's just sweets, most people only eat what I make without knowing the difficulty of making it." Jiovanny's eager smile showed a toothy, white incisor. "Honestly, I think I lost all this weight working on refining my recipes. Turns out part of the secret ingredient is just endless failures and having a good source of mochigome, eh?" Jiovanny tilted his head from side to side and winked, as though sharing a secret between just the two of them. "Don't tell my competitors, of course — they're dying to know how I get the springiness of my mochi just right. I bet a bulk of my sales are them stuffing their faces trying to understand it! But enough about me, what about you?"

"I …" the smile had already faded from Molam's face halfway through Jiovanny's sharing. "I'm trying to go home." He glanced at Komura, trying to make eye contact so she would know his disapproval of her using Jiovanny in this way, but she did not meet his gaze. Had she told Jiovanny to say this?

Jiovanny frowned, a slow gathering of his eyebrows as he seemed confused about what Molam was trying to say. "Home?" The man asked quizzically. "If you mean our old village, I left two years ago but the rest abandoned it this Summer's Warmth when the Red Army came too close. Is that what you're here to talk to Priestess Komura about? Helping the village go home?"

"No," Molam began, "I—"

"You're going to help us get home?" One of the boys, Bevyn, collided with Molam's thigh, gripping tightly and looking up at Molam with a smile that contained gaps between his teeth. "Really? Are you going to fight the Red Army for us?"

Molam bent down to pull Bevyn away gently. "Fighting is a last resort, Bevyn. I don't want to fight anyone."

The boy brought up his hands in a fighting pose, throwing two fake punches at Molam's arm. "But I saw the Red Army. They were practicing their moves like this. And that. It looked so cool! I wanted to do that!" He looked up at Molam again. "But Priestess Komura said we needed to go, because we can't fight them. The Whale of ZhiXia won't fight, and you won't fight them. Why won't you help us go home?"

"Bevyn, that's an unfair question—" Jiovanny began, but Molam gave him a look.

He knelt down to the boy, considering how to begin, then decided to be as honest as possible. "There are…many forms of fighting. Violence — when you hurt people — has consequences, and sometimes… it results in death. And that's a result that can't be changed, do you understand?"

"So you just don't fight?"

"Everyone fights," Molam nodded, "but not all fighting needs to be violent." He paused, then added, "Have you ever had a disagreement with someone? Even just talking can be a fight. In fact, talking is often the most important fight — because you can resolve things without violence. You wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone used violence first, right?"

The boy looked doubtful. "But how will talking help us get home?"

"Home!" Whooped the other one, who had somehow overheard the last word while Priestess Komura gripped him by an ear. "Yes, I'm sorry for following you, Priestess Komura. OW, yes I mean it!"

A small tug made Molam look down at his sleeve to be greeted by the big brown eyes of the girl Kanao. She opened her mouth, then when nothing came out, she looked down shyly.

"Bevyn, Kanao, come here," Jiovanny ordered, "You're bothering Molam. I know him from back when we shared a time at Komura's Shrine, so we're all sort of a family. But he's here to talk to Priestess Komura about something important, I'm sure." Jiovanny winked at Molam and shepherded the children towards the door. "Come now, I'll give each of you some dango if you promise to share it with the others back in Sanctuary, alright?"

The door closed behind them and Priestess Komura sat back down at the table, smoothing out her robe. Molam collected his bearings and sat back down again, then realized that his plate was now empty. One of the children must have stolen the last ball of mochi.

"I didn't know Jiovanny could become a confectioner." Molam murmured, sipping at his tea. "Back when I was at the Shrine, I thought he was just… well, I thought he just had a sweet tooth."

"I encouraged him to pursue his passion. He said he wanted to eat the best sweets and desserts in the world, do you remember?" Priestess Komura refilled her own cup of tea and sipped. "Well, now he makes them."

Molam didn't say anything, the remembrance of the boys and the girl's eyes still fresh in his mind. "A word of advice: while I doubt you had a lot of time to plan this sequence of events, compelling circumstances of …" he searched for the word, "...convenience can have an opposite effect on your target. I'm not stupid, you know."

"I have no idea what you are referring to." Priestess Komura glanced at him innocently from behind her cup, "Not to mention, plans are your area of expertise. I merely planned to take you to the shop that sells the best sweets in ZhiXia City. The children followed me of their own accord."

"I was talking about Jiovanny." Molam's voice lowered. "And I distinctly remember seeing you catch children following you at your old village. Or do you expect me to believe those three are different?" The Priestess didn't respond as she sipped passively, and so he continued, "I don't blame you for trying what you did, but I understand why you did it. But you should have already understood that I know all of this."

"You say you know — but do you really?" Priestess Komura set down her cup, her lips pressed into a thin line. "Because once you know, you cannot unknow. Guilt taints the blissful state of ignorance, does it not? And that is why the kind will always suffer." She leaned forward and raised an eyebrow. "Or did you really think that the Shrines have stopped receiving orphans of disaster and war?"

When Molam didn't respond, she continued. "Lee is from the Empire of the Sun, the city of Exabell. Both of his parents died three years ago when the father refused the Empire's draft and they became fugitives of the Empire. Bevyn is the sole survivor of a remote village in the Spike Maelstrom – the mursashu found the boy wandering by himself after the Empire enraged EarthShaker four years ago. Kanao…" Komura hesitated. "Kanao has never spoken about what happened, but the girl cannot stand the sight of the Empire's symbol. We moved her to Sanctuary a year ago because this is the safest place for her to never see it again."

"For Bevyn and Lee, our old village has been the safest place they could remember for years. We abandoned the village and came here to avoid the Red Army, but Sanctuary is so new for them they can't possibly think of it as 'home.' For Kanao, I don't know if she thinks of Sanctuary as her home or the village, but if the Red Army is on the march then we might see the Empire's borders expand again soon, and I doubt Kanao is the only one out there that fears seeing the Empire's symbol."

"That's a lot to be telling me at this time." Molam drank his tea, hiding his face behind the cup.

"It's necessary. Because the Oracle believes you can do what the Frozen Saint could not. I'm getting old, Molam. You think I want to spend the rest of my years receiving orphans only to expect more each year? Did you know that we tally them for the Fallen Star Pavilion's scholars, and they sent notice that the number is only increasing over time?" Priestess Komura stood up and walked over to Molam, bending down on her knees and placing her hands in his lap. "I suppose it bears repeating: I cannot make you do anything. But as one that serves the people, as one that follows the Oracle's will, I will beg you if I must."

"For some reason, people seem to be repeating things to me quite often." Up close, Molam could see the depths of the wrinkles that framed Priestess Komura's eyes and the creases that lined her mouth. A wistful sense of pain lurched within his navel for the woman that had taught him how to live in the human realm. "My ears still work."

"Perhaps because it is so important to them. I'm not so arrogant as to think you would do just anything for an old woman who taught you at the Oracle's behest. I'm asking you to do it for yourself, Molam." Her eyes glittered with moisture. "For the young man you were, become the person that he hoped he could be. And if you hold any positive memories for this aging Priestess, then I want you to do it so that those children are the last children I ever need to look after."

Molam looked away from her — resentful and moved with sympathy at the same time. The boy Bevyn's question echoed in his thoughts. How will talking help us get home? Molam tried shoving the question away; he didn't even know how he would get home by talking to the Oracle. "I thought you said you didn't know what the Oracle asked of me, but you know that it's what the Frozen Saint failed to do." He murmured angrily. "Did you lie to me just because you know I can't See?"

"I honestly don't know at all what she has asked of you." He wasn't looking at her, but felt her warm hands hold his. "But I can guess that she would ask you to do what you are best at, Molam. Just as she asked me to do the same."

He drained his tea. Angry at himself. Furious with the Oracle for sending Komura of all people to talk to him.

Irritated with suspicion that they were all right.

"Let me sleep on it."