“Bong-ka sahng-ma…”

“Bong-ka sahng-ma…”

“Bong-ka sahng-ma…”

“Bong-ka sahng-ma!”

In the inner-sanctum of the former temple, the priestesses had gathered for their shift. The din from the chant of their magic hymn drowning out most-all traces of the goings-on of the outside world. Pellegrina mantlettes woven of the same plain brown leaves most peasants fashioned their roofs from adorned their otherwise bare shoulders as they continued to chant the incantation in the same sing-song lilt, “Bong-ka sahng-ma, bong-ka sahng…” The words themselves held virtually no power, rather, the energy was in the way the words strummed their vocal cords in a way that complimented and harmonized with the qi flow of the meridians of their vocal chakra. Most were of some kind or some other elvish ethnicity and all were devout generational kenotics, granting them natural affinity with thaumaturgic magics on a level as instinctual as taking breathing, and yet for the specialized task at hand every breath, every chant, every skirt swirling step in their concentric, synchronized dance around the altar of their heavenly hostage was conscious and calculated the way a runner modulates the breathes he takes during a marathon. All of this in service towards the cycling of qi through their meridians and dantians, so that the apherisized elements separated from their Onda Vital, their qi flow, would be of only the highest, most refined quality that they were capable of as hierophants for when the briar-transistors that sprouted from beneath the wooden hafts of their Shepard's crooks pricked the flesh of the palms that gripped them and drew the “decanted” elements from their blood.

Shackled to the altar by mycorrhizal chains and earthern manacles lay a koi the size of a rhinoceros, long disgraced from his position among the Terravaraic pantheon as a minor banner lord in service to the lords of the water arcana of the kenotic-minded isvara’s divine Fellowship. Indeed, although he had been still merely a guppy long ago when, following the Primordial Divine Endowment of Creation and kindling apheresis of the light of the Progenitor Isvara’s myriad consciousness to all humanity, when the first Fellowship of kenotic-Isvaras began to codify the stipulations of magical theory according to the physics of the WuXing Principle that the Progenitor had set to govern Creation, he had been there all the same. Certainly, he had watched with his own eyes the advent of magical theory as the lord of the element of electric, the Catfish King, under the decree of the god of the air arcana, disseminated the secrets of elemental conductivity to the First Men, the original bearers of jijnasa, and began humanity’s tutelage in magical theory.

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Now he could do nothing but watch as the far-flung descendants of the First Men plyed their knowledge of magical theory on him, as the elements drawn from their blood by the briar transistors of their shepard’s crooks conducted through the tracings of the mycorrhizal circuits beneath the wooden shafts, cycling according to the signals of the mycorrhizal matrices housed within the vivianite crystals affixed within the crooks of the priestesses’ staffs, until finally the song reached its crescendo and the priestesses raised their voices in exulted unison, closing the mycorrhizal circuits within the wood and lancing beams of enchanted light towards his body; beams of enchant light that should have been impossible considering the relative darkness of the inner-sanctum. Already he could feel the warmth of the spell spreading across his scales and working its way through his meridians and respiratory systems, for after one thousand years he’d become all too familiar with the spell; a healing incantation, designed to artificially massage grant the koi spirit enough sustenance and exercise to prevent his own meridians from atrophying and keep him from falling into that great slumber that gods, major and minor, fell once their body’s qi-pressure had been depleted beyond a level capable of sustaining their Onda Vital. That was the closest a god could get to experiencing death, next to being reconsummated into the henotic mind of the Progenitor Isvara beyond the firmament of the dream, and for a kenotic-minded Terravara like himself, it was the only death he was allowed and yet, it seemed to him now more than ever that even to fall into that great slumber for a time would be preferable to spending another day here in the temple, branded a traitor and station usurper, damned to serve as little more than a glorified dantian to power the water plant in the backwater borough that used to house his once exalted temple.

Now, his only consolation was the knowledge that with any luck, a piece of himself would soon lay in the hands of the remnants of the former imperial legion of the western tetrachate. It had taken decades to reverse engineer the blueprints of the spell in his mind’s eye from the annals of his ailing memory of a near-forgotten conversation with one of his fellow divine bannerlords, a particular sponge spirit, of the secrets of an asexual budding spell, and even longer in order to actually amass the needed excess qi and covertly arrange the synapses of his meridians pull unbeknownst to the templars who watched him day and night under the orders of the plant administrators. But in time he had managed to pull it off, isolating a “bud” of his consciousness and condensing it within a single, inconspicuous scale so that when the priestesses next bathed him, too concerned with scraping away the old, rotting scales and spraying away his growing pile of refuse they would never notice his disciple, a sympathizer whom he spoke to only in a morse-semaphore of blinks, as his disciple pocketed a lone, discoloured scale. That night, outside the grass palisades that grew in deliberate, terraformed rings she would hand the scale off to a man clad in the lorica segmentata of the old Kingsguard…