In the three days since his arrival in the capital, Arthur felt he had started to get used to the sheer scale of everything. Nearly half a million souls resided in the city of Regos, he’d been told, and he could almost believe it when he looked down the endless rows of buildings three stories high, or even taller.
Perhaps that mental adjustment was why Arthur was so surprised to see the unimpressive size and decoration of the city’s primary temple to Urizen. Only two things marked it as unusual from the outside: the eight men and women in silvery plate armor standing guard outside its door, and the dented shield fixed above the doorway, marking it to those who knew what to look for as a holy place for the god of war.
As Arthur approached, surrounded as he constantly had been for months now by important members of his own sect, the guards lowered their heads in acknowledgement.
“Voice of Ahania,” greeted the guard closest to the door, in a tone that was clearly rehearsed. She was staring straight ahead, in the direction of Arthur but noticeably past him. “You are welcome in our temple, now and onward. May you always find what you are looking for.”
Arthur hesitated, unsure if he was supposed to respond. He had been trained in etiquette over the last seven months, but his knowledge was shallow, and this was a situation with little precedent. The decision was mercifully taken out of his hands as Prag swept in front of him, bowing to the guard who had spoken and motioning for Arthur to follow him through the door of the temple, nearly a dozen Ahanian priests and functionaries close behind.
The interior of the temple was roomier than he might have guessed from the outside, but no more elaborate. There was an austere beauty to the design, with four rows of wooden benches facing a podium on the left side of the main room, a heavy table with chairs only on the far side on the right, and a split staircase at the back. It took Arthur a few seconds to realize what was unusual about the room: that there were no visible flaws. None of the wood was warped or rotten, no stains marked the floors, and all the furniture was perfectly arranged on geometric lines. The temple carried an undeniable air of deliberateness, an ambience that communicated its martial nature more effectively than a hundred swords.
The large room contained roughly twenty Urizites, the majority outfitted in the same kind of silver armor the guards outside wore, with perhaps a quarter settling instead on grey robes. The Ahanian delegation was dramatically outnumbered, not that conflict was a conceivable outcome of the day’s activities. The followers of Ahania and Urizen may not have shared any close historical bonds, but their meeting today was obviously in the spirit of friendship and cooperation.
“There you are!” It was an unnecessary declaration, as nearly everybody in the room had already turned to look at the new entrants. The man speaking was tall, with the broad shoulders and hefty belly of a once-muscular man who had let it turn to fat. His hair was greying, and he was one of the few people in the temple who had elected to belt on a sword for the occasion. “A little later than we were expecting, but that’s your goddess’ reputation, isn’t it?”
There was a smattering of polite chuckles. Prag and Madeline, the Ahanian Inter-sect Liaison, stepped into place on either side of Arthur, facing the man who had spoken.
“We’re sorry about the delay. Most of us are from outside the city, so it’s been something of an adventure to navigate,” Prag explained. Arthur would never stop being thankful for the Ahanian priest from his county, who always seemed to know what to do and say.
A kind-looking woman stepped forward to stand beside the armored man who had spoken first. There was a long, thin scar on her brow, the only thing marking her as a soldier with the voluminous robes obscuring her build.
“How many times have two paragons been known to meet without a battlefield to draw them together? A quarter hour here or there is nothing compared to the act of divine timing that has brought our respective prides together, and that’s the last we’ll speak of it.”
Madeline spoke up. “Quite right. As much as I’ve looked forward to speaking with you all today, and I’m sure I can say the same for my colleagues, we’re not the ones who matter here, are we?” She gave a good-natured shrug, in the same motion making a small gesture with her hand towards Arthur. “On that subject, where is the Voice of Urizen? I’ve been led to believe that she is rather less…experienced than those of us I see gathered here.”
The tall man snorted. “Less old, you mean? Yeah, that she is, just like your boy there. Hell of a thing, two gods in the span of a season choosing damn near children as their paragons. I suppose there’s a virtue in youth, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me nervous.”
His partner in the robes cut in, addressing Arthur directly, her smile betraying a faint embarrassment. “She’s waiting in a room up those stairs, on the left. The reason for this meeting was to establish a dialogue between the two living paragons, and we believe that you should have the chance to speak in private before we’re forced to bore you both with inter-sect diplomacy. Take as much time as you would like. I’m sure we won’t lack conversation topics down here.”
Arthur nodded and took two steps toward the stairs before he stopped, remembering his manners. “It was a pleasure to meet you, ma’am. Sir.” He looked between the two Urizites who had spoken, before continuing to the stairs, feeling every eye in the room on his back like rays of the harsh sun.
As Arthur moved along the hall on the second floor, hoping desperately that some door would stand out as having the person he was meant to meet behind it, his shoulder brushed against an Urizite priest heading in the opposite direction. He was surprised to notice that she was a very thin woman, and though her eyes were turned to the floor he thought she looked quite young. He supposed that even Urizen must have some in his service who had never seen war, but her presence in the building on that day seemed to indicate a higher rank than he would have expected.
Just a few paces before the end of the hallway, a door was open. Arthur knocked on the frame twice before stepping through, hoping that he was expected. It was a small room, clearly designed for private meetings like the one he was about to be in. There was a map of Lysia on one wall and a bookshelf on another, with three comfortable-looking chairs facing each other around the center of the room. A girl maybe slightly older than him had just turned to face him, having clearly been studying the map before he knocked. She wore what must have been ceremonial armor, with decorative additions that would surely be impractical in a fight. As ornamental as the armor was, though, the girl was anything but. She had intense eyes, studying him from the instant he became visible, and her black hair was held back in a braid, tied off with a scrap of leather. Just from the way she stood, balanced and at ease, Arthur knew without a doubt that the sword at her waist was not a prop, but a deadly weapon.
“Hello,” he said, praying that the feeling of intimidation didn’t show on his face. “I’m Arthur Kay of Allendale, lately Voice of Ahania. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” He walked forward and held out his hand to shake.
“Cameron Baird, Voice of Urizen. Of Regos, I guess. I feel the same.” Cameron moved to sit down, then hurriedly stood back up while flushing red, having forgotten his outstretched hand.
They shook, and Arthur couldn’t escape the mental image of toddlers aping the behavior of their parents, playing at business. It was surreal, having only recently become a man in the eyes of the law, to see everyone acting like his opinion mattered, like a handshake or a casual word meant something.
“I’m…not exactly sure what we’re supposed to be discussing,” the girl across from him said slowly as they sat down.
Arthur smiled, relieved. “I think they’re hoping that there’s some special paragon-only information we got that we can share with each other. And, well, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard a peep from Ahania since I was anointed.”
“I’ve gotten dreams, I think, but if they’re meant to be divine instructions, then they could do with some more clarity. Unless you happen to know the meaning of a wolf dying while he eats, or a bird with one wing flying into a funeral pyre?”
Arthur was quite sure that he did not, but he considered the images for a moment anyway, on the grounds that if he did have some insight, it would be awfully embarrassing to discover that when it mattered, rather than right now.
“No, I can’t say those have any particular meaning to me, but gods, neither sounds like a very happy omen. I hope it’s like the stories, where every vision of the future ends up meaning nearly the opposite of what it looks like at first.”
The only other living paragon, the first to be called by the heavens in nearly thirty years, somehow managed to sit up even more straight, her face deadly serious. “No! I don’t think so, and I don’t hope so. This is what we’re here for, Arthur. A paragon is defined by her enemies, and I refuse to sit here and pretend that they don’t exist. We were given everything: power, purpose, prestige. That comes with a duty, and talking like that is shirking it.”
Arthur felt like he was being pushed into the back of his seat, the zeal in her voice and fire in her eyes acting like a physical force. “I didn’t mean…of course I’m willing to serve, to sacrifice. It’s only, you know, it would be nice if things weren’t as grim as those dreams of yours seem to say, that’s all. Even paragons can’t be everywhere.”
He didn’t want to admit his real concern, the thing that had kept him up at night this last half-year. Arthur couldn’t guess what the armored girl’s reaction would be upon finding out that the Voice of a goddess, selected as a hero by the highest authority known to mankind, was a coward. He didn’t care to find out.
Cameron’s expression softened, though her posture didn’t change. “Yeah. Sorry for blowing up like that. It’s just that I’ve been passed around from meeting to meeting for most of a year now, almost always inside Regos, and that’s when they actually have someone for me to meet! Half the time I’m just living like I did before, but with a lot more luxuries.” She made a motion with her hand, indicating the surrounding room. It was certainly well-furnished, but Arthur didn’t think he would describe it as luxurious. “I’ve been reading the histories, you know. It doesn’t seem like my predecessors ever sat around quite so much. I want to get out there, do my duty, make the world safer.”
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Arthur had not been reading the histories. He didn’t even know if the cult of Ahania kept biographies of her paragons, though now that it had been mentioned, he felt stupid for never asking. “Maybe there’s just less to do now than there used to be. We’ve been more or less at peace with the elves for over a decade, and the only real international war is an ocean away. I’m sure we were called for a reason, but is your sect really wrong for thinking that reason might not be here yet?”
To her credit, the girl sitting opposite him seemed to consider his words. “Maybe. There are always minor incursions from the Hells, though, so they could send me to those, or I suppose I could go try to end the war in Reuthia. Teleporting that far isn’t cheap or easy, but it must be possible for one of the most powerful sects on the continent. I know there’s no dragon to slay or necromantic horde to defeat, not yet at least, but I could be doing something.”
Arthur nodded, hoping that she would take his quietude as deep contemplation instead of the conversational inadequacy that it actually was. For several moments they just sat like that, in a silence too nervous to be called comfortable but too friendly to be tense.
Cameron was the first to break the verbal standoff. “Whatever we end up doing, it’s good that we’ve met first. Maybe we’ll end up working together sometime, and my mom— my mother says that fighting next to someone you don’t know is like wearing a bedsheet for armor.”
“That sounds like good advice to me. Say, there wouldn’t happen to be a washroom in the temple, would there? I’d like to freshen up a bit before we have to go and pretend we know what the priests are talking about.”
* * *
A short distance down the hallway, a slim girl in the grey robes of an Urizite priest was getting frustrated. The lock itself wasn’t all that difficult; there was no reason for the sect to have serious mechanical precautions in a place usually full of devout warriors who wouldn’t let anyone suspicious-looking take more than a step into the building. This day was different, though. The rank and file had cleared out in the morning to give the clergy some privacy, so it had been a simple matter of sleeping on the roof for one night, then climbing into the second floor through a window once the Silver Hand had all left. All the priests were gathered in the main room downstairs, so the risk of discovery was slim to none. A slightly modified bathrobe stained thoroughly with ash had served well enough to earn the disinterest of a jumped-up farm boy, who was the only person likely to see her that day, and now all that was left was a mundane lock.
No, the lock wouldn’t ordinarily be a problem to someone with her experience. The problem, which she had known was a possibility but hoped wouldn’t matter, was her tools. Traditional Urizite garb, unfortunately, did not have pockets, and while the bathrobe which formed the basis for her imitation was blessed with that feature, they had to be cut off to make her disguise even remotely convincing. All that the thief had been able to bring into the temple were the few picks she could tie into her hair and keep in her mouth without being obvious, nowhere near a full kit.
There were three moving parts to the lock, and each was the work of less than ten seconds to pick open. As soon as the faux priest moved to open the third, however, she could no longer hold the first in an open position, and the mechanism clicked back into its default locked state. Usually this would be an easy fix, picking the first with a tool bulky enough to get caught and hold the mechanism open without her hand. Worst case, she could fold up some wire and jam it in there, if she was careful about taking the pick out afterwards. But with two hands and a couple of basic tools, it wasn’t happening.
She had been standing out in the hallway with no cover for nearly two minutes now, trying different ways of cheating the lock. Trying to hold one pick in place with her teeth while doing the other two with her hands was the most ridiculous of her attempts, but nothing was working, and every passing second was another chance for some wandering Urizite to walk up the stairs and see a teenager biting a doorknob.
“Fuck,” she breathed, which was as close as she usually got to praying. “Okay.”
The thief set the first mechanism to its open position, held it, and leaned back, shifting some weight to her heels. She lowered her head and closed her eyes, neither of which was strictly necessary, but going through the motions tended to help with this kind of thing.
When she opened them again, a faint golden glow emanated from the keyhole. Its source was a tiny bar of Light inside the lock, keeping the first mechanism stuck. The thief retracted the pick, then hurriedly opened the remaining two parts and turned the handle. She had never tried praying to one god in another’s temple before, let alone a couple rooms away from two paragons, but she figured it was the sort of thing that might draw attention. That meant the job was on an even tighter schedule now.
As she slipped through the door and closed it gently behind her, her eyes adjusted almost instantly to the darkness of the room, one of the unfortunately temporary side effects of channeling her god’s power. She scanned the small space while walking forward, greeted by a handful of chests, cabinets, and tables with assorted nonsense gathered inside and atop them. Several of the drawers and containers were partially open, and none had locks of their own. Loose pieces of paper, a few articles of clothing, books, a pocket-watch, there was no discernible theme to the contents of the room. Weapons of all sorts, mostly rusty and with not a single firearm among them, were leaning up against walls or hanging from hooks. The thief’s gaze passed over those quickly, uninterested. Finally, she spotted a wooden box, closed, sitting alone on a low table against a side wall. It was well made, with expensive wood, but there were no carved designs or accents of precious metal. The thief knew what to look for, though, and there was little doubt in her mind as she made her way to the table, careful to step lightly despite the need for haste.
She opened the box, confirming the presence of her target. A single necklace and the pendant attached to it sat inside. The chain looked and felt like gold, but the thief would have bet all she owned that it was nothing so ordinary. She picked up the necklace and moved to the closed door, leaving the open box behind. There was a strong temptation to wear the prize around her neck, but that was a stupid thought, a needless risk for the sake of vanity. She pushed up her right sleeve and wrapped the chain around her upper arm several times, then lowered the sleeve again to cover it. The thief pressed her ear against the door, and her blood ran cold. The faint noises of priestly discussion downstairs had stopped. She didn’t hear footsteps on the stairs, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, and likely wouldn’t be true for long, anyway.
The thief opened the door and ran out, not bothering to close it behind her. She tore down the hall away from the stairs, no longer caring if her footfalls made sound. There was a window at the end of the hall, not the one she’d entered through, but it would work. She’d scouted this building for most of a week, and knew that it would be possible to reach the roof from that window, and from there get to safety. The street below was not an option, full as it was of a Silver Hand honor guard.
The girl reached the window, hearing rapid movement on the stairs perhaps twenty paces behind her. Nobody wasted their breath on shouting at her, making it the quietest chase she had ever been involved in. The window swung open without resistance when pulled, and she threw her body out of it at a reckless speed. Fortunately, the temple was old, and the mortar between the bricks was crumbling, giving her tiny footholds and handholds on the wall. She climbed carefully, ascending only a few feet before her hands could reach the lip of the roof. She could hear voices below her now; those could be from the Hand, or maybe the priests who had chased her. She pulled herself over the edge and barely gave herself time to stand up before she was running again, leaping from one rooftop to the next. Pursuit was unlikely at this point, but it never hurt to be careful.
As soon as that thought entered her mind, the thief ran full tilt into a translucent blue wall that seemed to erupt from the roof below her. She toppled backward, disoriented, but managed to keep from falling off the edge. Head still spinning, the thief looked around from her prone position, trying to get her bearings. A woman was standing a few feet away on the shingled roof, hands behind her back, not focused on the thief or, apparently, anything in particular. She looked to all the world like a bored customer in line at a kahve vendor’s cart, the only notable thing about her appearance being a three-piece suit in an atrociously bright shade of orange. As the girl’s eyes became less fuzzy and her concentration improved, she noticed that the woman on the rooftop was absolutely tiny. It was hard to gauge height accurately while lying down, but the thief would guess that the horribly dressed woman was at least a foot shorter than herself, a sure sign that this was not a human.
The thief stood up, slowly and carefully. She faced the woman in orange, not having the slightest idea of how to approach this interaction. She had been attacked, maybe, except that her assailant had spent the last ten seconds doing absolutely nothing, which was not standard procedure in a fight. She held her tongue, deciding that until she knew what was going on, there was no reason to talk and make things worse.
A few moments passed in which the two occupants of a rooftop three buildings away from the temple of Urizen stood silently, the younger of the two studying the other with frightening intensity, the older making such an obvious effort to look disinterested that it was becoming comedic. Finally, the latter shattered the tension with a single sharp clap, startling the grey-robed girl across from her.
“Sorry,” she snorted. “I didn’t plan this one out. I was trying to figure out how to make the pitch properly, and then I thought you would say something and it would all come naturally from there, but that didn’t happen, so I was kind of stuck. I’m already off to a bad start on looking respectable, so I figure that ‘inscrutably bizarre’ is a suitable alternative, wouldn’t you say?”
The thief's eyebrows furrowed in concentration. “I…yeah, sure. What do you mean, ‘pitch’? Are you selling something?” She gestured vaguely at their surroundings. “Why?”
“Oh, no, not selling anything. Well, not unless you’re buying? No, I was just in the neighborhood and saw something worth taking a look at, that’s all. I have a particular interest in unusual young people at the moment, and you fit the bill.”
At the last few words, the thief’s eyes slid over toward the direction she had been running from. The…dwarf, maybe, or gnome, followed her gaze.
“Hmm, perceptive. Yes, I’ll get to them later. But this, this was really quite funny. An independent Kalisite child, talented enough to steal one of the holiest relics in Regos, and inexperienced enough to actually do it. I almost wanted to let you walk away with it, but that would be such a waste of potential. I’ll get it back to Urizen, don’t worry.”
The thief felt the chain around her bicep unwrap itself and fly down her arm at speed, cross the distance between the two of them, and clasp around the short woman’s neck. She let out a small noise of dismay before she could control herself.
“Relax. It’ll still be plenty embarrassing for the old farts down there, and that’s what you care about, isn’t it? Anyway, if you want to find out why I just saved your life, take this.”
The woman in the orange suit walked up to her, reaching into her jacket and pulling out a folded slip of paper. She handed it to the thief, and, turning on her heel, disappeared into thin air.
The girl in grey stood alone on a rooftop, clutching a small piece of paper, wondering what had just happened to her. She turned her eyes down, opening the sheet she’d been handed. It was a train ticket, marked for departure in one week, to a town she’d never heard of. Beneath the printed details was a short handwritten note.
‘You’ll figure it out before you get here.’