Fleming Alabaster remembered fondly the days when he had the freedom to slip off his priestly vestiments and walk into the Haymarket District, paying a stone-faced woman a few pennies to walk across his back until he groaned in pleasure and all his tension vanished.

Even then, being a representative of the Church of the Golden Rays was fraught with stress. Now, as the head of the prestigious church, he could not escape the feeling; every problem illuminated by the golden rays of his god’s grace, big or small, was his.

Now he carefully removed his ornate habit, set aside his holy staff, and took only a moment to sit and stare out the filigree window. Heavy, wrought-iron hunks of tension curled his shoulders forward into a permanent hunch. Then he steeled his will and strode down the ornate hallway of his private residence to see his son. Stone-faced former saints and bishops stared out from the portraits lining the walls, silently judging one more of his many failings.

But in the end, they all stem from the first failing, don’t they? A horrible despair wheezed in Fleming’s chest. Being unsatisfied with my lot in life and grasping for more.

At the end of the hall, a small suppression array released a golden light. He gestured to the two guards he assigned to the door and they left him. Fleming took another breath. He raised his hand and the array faded.

When he opened the doors, his worst fears were confirmed.

Since being tracked down and dragged back to the Alabaster estate, Raccain Alabaster at least hadn’t made any attempts to escape (perhaps he understood that this time his father didn’t take the threat lightly). But in fact, his chosen behavior ended up being even more problematic; Raccain had instead doubled down on his research while making no more attempts to mask the forbidden forces with which he toyed.

Bloody lines crisscrossed the expensive wooden floor to form grim pentagrams. Small tumors of blight grew at the edges of the unholy circle, and cancerous cysts of negative energy had been piled haphazardly in the corner to form an oozing mass of degenerative necrotic energy that peeled the varnish from the wall shelves of his childhood bedroom.

A sleepless version of his son paced back and forth, his eyes bloodshot as he muttered to himself and consulted a messy pile of handwritten notes. Being in the room too long made Fleming’s lip curl upward; the smell could have either been the failed blight experiments or his unwashed son.

He only took a single step past the threshold, unwilling to risk discovering the real culprit.

As Raccain pivoted for his next circuit, he finally spotted his father. Rather than any sort of resentment for his imprisonment, excitement animated his features. “Father! Heh, I have glad tidings-- my theories have been confirmed. Blight makes it an idea vessel to contain a soul. Mother’s revival is all but assured. If we can just create a strong enough tether, and pull her from the underworld-”

“Raccain, your obsessions must cease. Your mother Lydia… cannot be revived in this manner.” Fleming might not be carrying his blessed staff, but he could still raise his hands and channel his faith in the Lord of the Golden Rays. He circulated his Mana and formed the shape of the Holy Radiance Cleanses.

A wave of rich and frothy golden Mana radiated out from his position. The smell vanished, replaced by salt and warm honey. The bloody lines were wiped away. The blight tumors whistled and shriveled away to nothing. The necrotic taint had truly begun to sink into the wooden floors, but Fleming’s pure faith stripped away the surface layers of the wood and left only a pristine surface in his wake. Perhaps in a small show of pettiness, the energy also annihilated those stained and deranged pages of notes.

Raccain didn’t even seem to notice. “Well obviously, we wouldn’t just place her within any blight. We would sculpt a body first. Heh, you old lech, we can add a bit of Mother’s human charms to this form.”

“You-” Fleming’s eyes bulged for a second, but he was almost to calm his turbulent emotions. As always, his son seemed almost deliberately obtuse. Well, so be it. Fleming would need to be harsh. “Your whole premise has doomed you. Blight cannot be used in this manner. If you look- keh, your disgusting experiments should have made it clear to you. Blight is the soft and tainted putty begotten by necrotic energies; would you truly enshrine your mother’s soul in a tomb of corruption? The presence of the necrotic energy would reduce her to hunger and need within a month.”

“Ah, I thought so as well, so I first tried to accustom the souls of animals to necrotic forces. The results… weren’t pretty. Oh, but don’t worry, I disposed of the dangerous ones.” Raccain licked his lips and continued to prattle onward, again unaware of the horrified widening of his father’s eyes. “I suppose necrotic energy is the equivalent of mental entropy. Anyway, then inspiration struck me. I had just sat down at some trash tavern for dinner and toyed with my copper fork; were not certain metals considered impossible to create in pure forms until the proper process was discovered? Perhaps I could unearth a similar refinement process for blight, to negate the presence of necrotic energies entirely! If you would just restore my liberty, give me a private place to work, the vessel mom needs can be finished… within five years?”

What other monsters will you birth in the meantime? Ah my son. Perhaps it is I who birthed the real monster, by telling you a truth you weren’t prepared to hear. Fleming closed his eyes and his mind drifted back to the halcyon days of Fleming’s life.

Fleming had been so proud of his newly born son because he had been so proud of himself. At that point, everything followed the path of his dreams. He had been rising in the Church of the Golden Rays at a rapid clip. He had been happy, providing for his family.

Fleming Fisherson (before he had renamed himself to Alabaster in his ecclesiastic ascension ceremony) had only a single small shame. While his Mana was pure, his faith… had a few small defects.

The gods did not give equally to their followers. Some Stats could be allocated purposefully, but Faith was a peculiar Stat that would often grow through genuine prayer. And the only benefit provided by the Stat was an increase in efficacy for holy acts. A genuine priest of the Church of the Golden Rays needs power stemming from all sorts of Stats, not just Faith.

Perhaps Fleming had simply spent too much time learning from the knee of his fisherman father. A man who squinted at the sky and read the clouds. While in terms of dedication he might be rich… the gods looked for a certain natural inclination.

Fleming, midway through his life, discovered his compatibility with the gods was actually very poor. No matter how much he prayed, his Faith never increased. But he had a second blessing in his life: his wife, the kindhearted Lydia.

In order to achieve such great results in the Church of the Golden Rays, he relied on the generosity of his wife. They prayed at home every night, her own almost miraculously radiant belief rubbing off a small bit onto his own, getting him through the day. His holy spells had a glimmer of her pure spirit.

But to advance to the prestigious role of a bishop, Fleming needed to be able to travel. To cloister himself for several days at a time, meditating on the mysteries of the Golden Rays. He would need to adventure and help subjugate rogue monsters, earning prestige for the church. He would need to patrol and bless the edges of the developed kingdoms, keeping back the insidious creep of the petty land gods and revering the established Lords and Ladies.

Stolen story; please report.

He would need his own connection with the Lord to be strong. Even after isolating and fasting for three months, focusing his entire being on prayer. Yet his Faith increased by not a single point.

He raged first. Then he wept. Until finally, Fleming Alabaster simply felt empty.

This… was the limit of his talent.

He had come to Lydia after leaving his seclusion, broken by his own inability to solve this issue. Much to his surprise, Lydia had suggested a truly radical solution.

Lydia Fisherson (having discarded her family name Barrowkeep in fulfillment of the engagement agreement made by their fathers when she was six and he five, respectively), had been a demure woman. Always smiling and nodding, cooking and cleaning, working without ever a single complaint. She would bring wine to him when he entertained other priests of the various faiths, barely a word needing to pass between them. Their time at home alone, before Raccain’s birth, passed in companionable silence that Fleming valued deeply.

Twice, he pressed her for answers. Both times, the genial support fell away from her face and she lifted her chin. He found something unflinching in the depths of her glittering eyes that left Fleming very much afraid.

The first time was when he asked her to marry him, wondering if this lovely young woman would still honor the agreement their fathers had made. The second time was when he asked why she would sacrifice so much to help him succeed in the Church of the Golden Rays, why she wouldn’t just become a priest herself.

Lydia had looked up with that same vast and intimidating light in her eyes. Fleming felt like he peered down onto a labyrinth, afraid to look too closely, lest he become lost or spot the monster lurking within. She said, “You are unable to do many of the tasks for which my humble body is appropriate; is it any shock that I feel the same way about your opportunities?”

So, the perfectly ambitious couple had prepared for a forbidden rite. Fleming was aghast as she explained it to him; Lydia had done the research, made the preparations, had just been waiting for him to come to her and ask. Before he could even wonder if this was the correct choice, they had begun. They had removed her soul with all of its near-perfect Faith compatibility and affixed it to a staff, so that it could accompany the soon-to-be Alabaster in all of his duties as Bishop of the Church of the Golden Rays.

It was one of the few regrets of Fleming’s life that he hadn’t even considered how this would affect Raccain until after the fact.

Having Lydia’s soul in his staff was very convenient for a number of reasons, but it also made one truth very obvious; Raccain had become an insufferable momma’s boy. He cried for a week straight, refusing to eat at all, screaming himself hoarse when any of the nannies that Fleming hired attempted to reason with him.

Finally, unwilling to let the boy’s foolish grief disturb Fleming’s work any longer, he decided to take a dangerous gamble with his child.

He decided to tell the truth.

“Your mother isn’t dead,” Fleming had said, exhausted from the noise of his son’s cries. “Her body has perished. But her soul remains. She has given up her body and gone on to a better place. To serve… a higher purpose.”

“Oh.” Raccain blinked away his tears. “Oh.”

Pleased with the effect these vagaries had accomplished in his son’s temperament, Fleming had let the matter go there. But now, he could see how foolish that had been. The glaze of obsession in his son’s eyes, the wild experiments, the dangerous thoughts about a vessel for the soul…

In the present, Fleming Alabaster shook his head. “Raccain. I am sorry I have allowed this to go on for as long as I have. But your mother’s Soul… it will not return. I have need of it. All experiments of this nature must cease immediately. If you do not… I will submit you to the inquisition. I am sure you are aware of how they handle any sort of deviancy.”

*****

Kamaedra never liked the process of identifying a new layer to Slayer’s Dissecting Focus, but it was necessary. She wasn’t going to follow this weird necrotic monster into the Spine of Hubris, but she was going to figure out how it had masked its necrotic energies and managed to move so far without being noticed.

The young guard, whose name she had learned was Nick, shifted from foot to foot; he still didn’t like to be near the cottage, even after the body had been taken away and the blood cleaned. “Do I really need to be here for this?”

The dwarven slayer gave him a sour look. “It would be untoward for a member of the Adventurer’s Guild to investigate a murder like this when local Guard Captain has sent a request for religious intervention. However, its quite normal for you, a curious and enterprising young guard, to follow up to earn merits for your career. I, as your friend, am just helping you.”

“I’m fine not investigating.” Nick squeaked out.

Kamaedra growled. “Nick, shut up. Just stand there, that’s all you need to do.”

That earned her a few seconds of blessed silence. Then he spoke up again. “If we are friends, you should know, my name isn’t Nick, but Ryck.”

“Really? Huh.” Kamaedra blinked. But then she refocused.

Her eyes activated. She saw everything. And then, layer by layer, she began to strip things away.

The first part was the easiest. She erased the traces she understood. Which, at this point in her long career, amounted to about one-tenth of the traces she observed. And then she had to move up and down the path, focusing on one trace in particular, see whether it congregated around the cottage or was also present in the village.

For almost an hour, she slowly eliminated remnant traces that had no connection to the crime. Actually, this occurred quite a bit more quickly than usual; Nick- err, Ryck’s presence helped a lot. Any trace she could see on him could quickly be cut away, irrelevant to this strange monster’s passage.

Which left her with about a third of the total traces. Then she began eliminating traces she saw around the human village (or Ryck) but not anywhere around the cottage. Another hour passed and the sun began to sink toward the horizon.

Your Skill (Class) Slayer’s Dissecting Focus has grown to Level 74.

She followed what she believed to be a possible trace, but soon discovered it was actually the remnants of excrement from a certain bird. Another, one she found emanating from just beneath the ground, turned out to be signs of quartz deposits in the area and proved that the deceased had an almost obsessive fondness for quartz.

And then, almost by luck, she found it. For a while, she walked slowly around the farm, looking for additional traces. But this one was present in all the right areas, around the goats and the bushes, and then all throughout the inside of the cottage. It even was part of the trail leading away, although Kamaedra hadn’t really noticed it.

Because that was the trick of this energy trace; it almost seemed to incorporate the flavor of the surrounding traces.

Finally convinced enough to risk having to start the process over again, Kamaedra cut away all traces but the physical world and this particular trace. Revealed before her sat the pearlescent drips left this monster when it had approached, first attacked the bunnies, then moved onto the goats, before going after the Hedge Witch.

She took five minutes to stare and memorize this trace and then blinked out of her Skill. She looked at Ryck. “Fancy a trip.”

“No,” The young guard answered sourly, but like most humans, he didn’t actually mean what he said.

Two days later, though, Ryck’s pale expression revealed how very honestly he didn’t want to be by her side any longer. He looked around in abject fear at the leafless trees and dead ground in the area surrounding the necromancer’s former tower. “What the hell is this place?”

“A vacation destination.” Kamaedra drawled. “Hurry, it’s just a bit further.”

The ruins of the tower had been thoroughly cleansed and burnt, becoming an unassuming mound. Yet the taint of necrotic energies and blight took a long time to fade; malevolence became a constant mood in this place, whitening Ryck more with every second.

Kamaedra ignored her flimsy justification for being here and activated her Skill. She looked around. Very quickly, she found the trace of the sapphire ooze. But the news was so much worse than that.

“Shit. Seriously? Shit.” Kamaedra couldn’t believe it. Because there were earlier traces of that same energy, a trio of those trails, departing together. She left a confused Ryck behind and loped away, through the trees, until she reached a river. The trail slid into the waters and vanished.

“There are three more of these bastards out there.” Kamaedra’s expression darkened. She scratched her cheek. “Shit, Tyre is not going to like this…”