Cece’s fear was quickly suppressed by the more logical parts of her mind, the thumb she had tied to the movement spell, pointed itself skyward immediately. The wind rushed past her head as slowly their velocity lessened and they came to a stop in the air. Lotte didn’t appear to be active anymore, but she was in one piece, as was Cece. It seemed like only a second or so had passed, although it was hard to tell. She took a deep breath after the harrowing experience and looked at the outcome.
Large swathes of the forest were on fire, the smoke making it hard to see, but where the explosion happened there was no smoke, as everything that could be burned had been incinerated in the initial blast. A barren crater awaited her, where a blackened, burnt form rested, motionless. She shot it again with her pistol to make sure it was actually dead. Not that a bullet would be what finally put it down, but she hoped it would piss it off enough to see if it was still alive. It did not move.
She lowered them to the ground and was greeted by the alien carcass on the ground. Dissecting it was a labor, it’s nigh indestructible body did not want to be cut, and she had to make some very specialized scrolls on the fly to get it into small enough pieces to take back to her atelier. Putting such large pieces into her spatially enhanced purse was not a great idea as it would reduce the structural integrity, but she was not going to waste any part of it if she could help it. Except for the feathers, most had survived, but were now a charcoal black. She even managed to get the soul, although it behaved very differently than people’s souls, the sulfur spell normally made a strangely warm, glasslike sphere. With the angel however, it created a more teardrop shape and it was cold to the touch, a strange blue-white liquid moved around inside it, seeming to climb up the transparent walls of the shape.
With that task completed, Cece switched her focus to Lotte. She was unresponsive, still curled up. At first she assumed that the blast had simply interfered with her power, but she was mechanically pristine, and any attempts at starting her up again failed to work. She wracked her brain for a few minutes before deciding that the angel’s cry had been responsible for it. Something that affected a human mind shouldn’t also affect a golem core, but clearly the angel was too weird to apply shoulds and should nots to it. She took a more thorough look at the golem core and the ruby that served as data storage, and she found them in complete disarray. Inscriptions had been completely rearranged into chaos. Cece knew what they were supposed to look like and managed to rewrite everything for the automaton. Upon rewinding her key, Lotte’s eyes fluttered open.
“Warning: Gap in memory detected.”
“Yes, yes, Lotte I’m aware. Your inscriptions were scrambled by that angel somehow, but I rewrote them.” She grumbled.
“I see. Thank you.”
“No problem, Lotte. Let’s get out of here.” Cece said, using the still active mercury scroll to start propelling them towards the town, past the parts of the forest that were still on fire. After all that, she really just wanted to use a teleportation scroll to get home, but it would have been suspicious. Considering the scale of destruction and the amount of magic used to achieve it, people had likely already noticed. It was already suspicious enough that all of this happened after she was seen leaving the inn, but it would be worse if she also never returned. She wasn’t in disguise, so her actions could be traced to her in theory, but few people would jump to her being the cause of the disaster. She was just a simple mundane girl with a bit too much money as far as anyone important was concerned. This smokescreen was less likely to work however if she just disappeared, she needed to tie up the lose ends.
“Oh miss, I’m so glad you’re alright! They something terrible is happening in the eastern forest!” The kind innkeeper exclaimed as Cece walked in.
“Oh, is that what those noises were!?” Cece bluffed. “I started to walk back right away when I heard them, how frightening!”
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“Yes, I wonder if it was a landslide?”
“That would make sense.” Cece replied sagely, “Do you think the trains will be delayed.”
“Opposite I heard, they’re sending some men to check it out, so they’ll be sending one early, you might be able to catch the return trip early if you go now.”
“Oh then I better pack, thank you for all the help!” Cece said while climbing the stairs to her room, doing her best to seem forgettable.
Cece packed her bags quickly and had Lotte carry them on their way to the station, giving one last goodbye to the innkeeper. The train ride back was uneventful besides the crowd that came off the train. A group of paladins, the church’s enforcers, marched out of the train cars in full plate mail armor. Cece didn’t know much about them, although the church held a lot of sway, it wasn’t the final say in any government, besides their holy city of course. She knew they generally were sent to hunt daemons, but she didn’t think they could detect that she was one, none had ever stopped her before and none stopped her as she got on the train. Her father had always told her to keep a fair distance from the church, it was what most mage families did, close enough to not piss them off, but far enough that they wouldn’t involve themselves in your business. Some families disregarded this tradition of course, like a certain disgusting gold family, who Cece would refrain from naming. Despite being now just one person and not part of a family, she had kept up the practice of staying away from the institution.
Still it was interesting that paladins were being sent before mages. It would make sense for some mage with a government position to come and check it, considering the amount of magic used it should have easily been flagged by any sensors. Instead however, it was the church that arrived first, which made Cece think they knew the angel was nearby, or at least had a way to detect it. The train ride and the walk home were filled with thoughts of what that meant, but they were easily discarded once she walked through her front door.
She desperately wanted to take the rest of the day off, but unfortunately every day was precious, she only had so much time to derail an elemental ascension, and she didn’t want to fail to do so because she had a bubble bath, of all reasons. Instead she found herself back in her atelier with a rolled up rug in one corner and a circle of her own blood in another.
“[…] Grant me the knowledge divine.” She finished chanting. She didn’t even bother assessing the change of setting before starting to walk to a gigantic obelisk in the center of a shallow pool, ignoring the splashing of her own footsteps along the way.
“Welcome back Cece, what have you brought me today.” A colossal serpent asked, coiled as always around a beacon of knowledge.
“Heading straight to business?” Cece teased.
“And you weren’t?” it hissed in amusement.
“Fair enough your unholiness.” She said curtsying. The serpent hissed a laugh at the gesture. “I’ve got the soul of a doppelgänger and the soul of a feral angel.” She continued. The serpent didn’t react to the news of the doppelgänger, but upon hearing of the angel its eyes flashed multiple times, similar to when it analyzed the grimoire.
“Angels do not have souls.” Knowledge responded in its characteristically calm tone.
“You told me everything that was alive had a soul.”
“Yes. What does that tell you?”
“I see. Normally I would be shocked, but considering how difficult it was to kill, that’s not all that surprising.”
“What was it like.” The serpent asked in anticipation.
“I thought that information wasn’t free.”
“Very well, if you tell me I will answer one question in return.”
“It was awful, it was like a ball of wings with four limbs, but all of them were arms. It made noises that I don’t think are physically possible to make, it stopped me from teleporting away, and when it died, it’s death throes somehow destroyed the human parts of my mind and I had to piece myself together. Also, it scrambled my golem’s core, which I still don’t understand.”
“Yes, that does sound typical for their kind.” Cece cringed as the snake said that, trying to imagine one more horrifying. “Now, what would you like to ask?”
“What are angels if they aren’t living things?”
“That’s a very complex question, but to put it simply, they are more like arms and legs than they are independent living organisms.”
“Who’s arms and legs are they?”
“Who do you think?” The snake laughed.
“What makes an angel feral?”
“I said one question.”
“You answered a second one just now.”
“Do you wish me to be less charitable in the future?” The serpent said, waiting for a response from Cece. When none came, it sighed and continued. “This is all to say, that what you have is not an angel’s soul, it is divine essence, and I will pay you handsomely for it.”