Chapel City, though it has a proper name unrelated to the hundreds of church towers clustered like a forest of masonry, was the only city in the central kingdoms that did not recognize a suzerain. The only authority it respected was that of the church, headed of course by the angels. Foremost among them was Aurum.
Long ago there had been dozens, but the centuries had been bloody. That was what made it such a decisive play to kill Lumi’el.
It was an otherwise quiet morning when Aurum realized what had happened. Service bells were ringing and bakers were selling their bread and their pastries to the endless throngs of locals and pilgrims. A proper artist’s city, every sculptor, painter, and bard who found themselves in need of a patron plied their trade to the many churches and temples.
And all of them stopped in awe that morning. They stared at the sky in silence as fire erupted from the grand basilica. The great, burning eagle that was their angel scorched the sky.
So enraged his magic spilled out of every feather, Aurum broke through the dome of the basilica that day. He destroyed mosaics, statues, and murals that had taken over two hundred years to complete. The flaps of his wings scattered embers across the city, catching innumerable more rooms and buildings on fire. Clouds of smoke covered the city as the angel abandoned it.
In a streak like the shot of an arrow, he flew for the site which had been his brother’s demise. He didn’t know that was where he moved. He simply sensed what I wished for him to sense. What he honed to was my own presence, radiating out of the body of the priest Sacerdote.
The wastelander was kept paralyzed by my magic, while Vita and Leomund fled. When I told her I would deal with the eagle, she asked not how I would do so. She believed I had some clever trick, and in a sense I did. By keeping the priest shackled with my magic, he was bait for the blazing roc.
As I sit here writing this document, I find myself wondering what truly went through Sacerdote’s mind as Aurum bore down on him. He was a tragedy of my making, and the betrayal must have hurt him deeply. The sun was setting when Aurum caught up to him, and while that light diminished upon the horizon in so many shades of fire, the glory of an angel illuminated the coarse and withered grass about him.
Sacerdote watched as the inferno grew. At first it was like a pinprick through a heavy tent, but as he knelt on the sandy earth, that fire grew and grew. His body had been paralyzed, left facing his doom, but his mind was free unto itself. The man had studied half the religions of Lumisgard, enough to know that there would be no reincarnation for him even in the most diminutive sense. There would be nothing left for the Shepherd’s reapers to reclaim.
What faced him was a true death.
Part of him accepted it, for he did not try to move his leaden feat. Another part rebelled violently. He arrested his whole mind, his very being itself, and assaulted the spell I had ingrained into his body. I can only respect the burgeoning will of a mere puppet made by Anubi, for he did manage one little act of rebellion.
He spited me.
As Aurum beat his wings above Sacerdote, the heat seared the sweat from his body. His lips blistered and his eyes burned white. But still, with the iron will of an Aillesterran ascetic monk willing to forgo food and water for weeks at a time until the grasp of the world weakens upon his soul, he fought me. As the water of his body boiled straight out of his skin and his body withered and wrinkled down to the bone, he left his mark.
He pointed to where I had gone, all the way to Drachenreach. With his finger like the iron needle of a compass, he pointed Aurum to the great spire of the world. Even though I had left half a dozen decoys across the central kingdoms, Sacerdote’s betrayal made them all worthless.
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The wastelander priest passed from life to oblivion in an instant. His brain was boiled to the point of rupturing out his skull. Several weeks later, after the local wildfires had run their course, his body was nothing more than the pickings of scavengers.
Long before then, Aurum flew into Rodrick’s war camp. With no explanation spared for the mere humans, he snatched the Aillesterrans out of the camp. He ripped their bodies with his talons and devoured their innards. With no heed for the terror of those loyal to him, he hunted down the secret weapons that the cyclops had brought with her and stole their stigmata for himself.
The paladin demanded answers of Aurum, to the point of burning half his face just to get close enough to scream at the angel. Then he finally understood, as I do, that angels see humans no different than animals. Aurum told him, “It is war,” and nothing more.
Alas, if I could have been there. Those words broke the paladin. With such simple words I could have taken him into my embrace. I could have told him that not one angel in all of Lumisgard had heard from the gods in centuries. They had, each of them, forgotten their own teachings. So many years of doubt and fear had broken them. As the godling parasites burrowed in, one or another divine beast, angel, or emissary met their end with no help from their creators. The great poison of life gnawed away at them the way the sea eats the ships upon it.
Fear drove its wedge between them and their own faith.
In the days of my people, there were thousands of angels. They ranged the entire gamut from beast to philosopher and kept one another in line while in the light of the gods. Those times are gone now, as are my people. This is not the document to reminisce however.
The constructs of magic and will that roamed the lands during Lucius von Solhart’s age had become every bit as human as the apes they were meant to guide. Aurum left Rodrick’s camp, having set fire to dozens of tents and several wagons of grain by his mere presence. He took to the skies as he digested the stigmata and incorporated them to his body, taking in skills he previously had no desire for.
The cyclops had truly found an eclectic collection of powers. Vision that could see through walls. Invisible doppelgangers that could still hear where he had been. And most problematically for me, a power of scent stronger than a bloodhound’s. Strong enough to even scent me from the skies while I walked among a throng of merchants to the tiered bazaar of Westcliff. I stood among such a mass of people hawking spices and half-rotten food that I would have been taken completely unawares if I had not been in the process of creating a new watchful bird.(1)
As it was, I was forced to play a hand I meant to keep concealed. If Golden had known I knew the spell to break through the boundary of Lumisgard, I suspect there would have been much to pay. Thankfully, that disenfranchised angel was half a world away, and never learned I breached a hole through Lumisgard right in the sanctum of Westcliff’s Acropolis. The lizard that should have been protecting the temple had only just woken up when I stepped out of Lumisgard, and then he became my unwilling guardian.
Aurum landed atop the solar ring, the peak of the dome which was unfinished. His wings blazed with light and filled the marble below with illumination. It was a brazen challenge between the religions of the world, a violation of centuries old compact. What was more, the dragon stood to profit by having the portal I left behind. Even if he didn’t want a doorway through which a godling might climb through, he could digest it and take my abandoned power for himself.
The limited fight that ensued went down in public memory as the Westcliff Eagle Fight. Not the most artistic of names, but the tale spread too fast for bards to keep up with. The two beasts exchanged fire with one another in a most literal sense, and had they been anywhere but Drachenreach, they would have started a wildfire. I couldn’t watch it first hand of course. I was no longer a resident of Lumisgard at the time. And in the shadows I remained for quite some time, lest Aurum think it worth his time to go back and scorch Lucius. But of course we all know that didn’t happen.
The boy’s fight was with the fallen paladin. The angel’s fight would not be resolved for many years yet.
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1. While it seems to me as a swift and dramatic arrival of the bird, it in fact took several days. It was during this time that the cyclops broke off with Rodrick and tried to sway Lucius directly. Fortuitous to say the least, for the people of Westcliff.