Heretical Oaths 17.5: Escalation V (Patreon)

The oathtongue had the wrath of the betrayed behind it. As it pulsed across the room, I felt it out, the taste of alignment crossing my lips. Orchid was one of Ditas’. Not one I had hated all too much, once upon a time.

What were the conditions for alignment for his god, again? To gain a fuller understanding of his body? Of how to change others?

I wondered what he’d done, because whatever he’d figured out, it had worked well enough for his magic to nearly triple in strength. It was strong enough that it almost affected me as it washed across the gathered oathholders.

Ah. Right. I fell under the list of those people who had slain their kin.

Thankfully, that little slipup wasn’t enough to get his oathtongue to sink into me. The spell did manage to set its roots in, but it wasn’t enough. For a moment, I was my domain and my domain was me and I ruined the pieces of influence that would’ve hit me.

If Orchid noticed, he didn’t mention it. Well, he probably knew who I was already. Wasn’t like my identity was much of a secret anymore.

My identity. That had been such a massive sticking point in my life, what with how keeping it secret had literally defined Lily Syashan, but now it felt… insignificant. House Byron had still been a pathetic mess, yes, but what was the point of reclaiming a noble’s name when I could be more?

Lily of House Byron, Lily Syashan… either way, I was the Lily who carried a god in my hands, and that was what was important.

A Ceretian meteor cast with tinges of the plague-god—Voci, that was its name after all these aeons—came soaring my way, and I slapped it aside without raising a hand.

Right. There was still a task to be completed here, no matter how trivial. Orchid’s spell had forced those who’d failed to resist him—the larger part of our enemies, apparently—to communicate, but it hadn’t stopped them from attacking.

“We—“ one of the House Alzaq members that I didn’t recognize began, and then she clutched at her throat, scrabbling at the flesh like she could stop herself from speaking if she drew her own blood. "We had plans to take the Crown.”

“No fucking shit, Sarah,” Orchid snarled. “I figured that out when you sent Chris to murder me in my sleep.”

“Not murder,” she gasped, out, still clawing at her own throat. The noble’s nails had scratched the skin hard enough for her to bleed, but not near enough to keep her mouth from betraying her. “Just a crippling.”

“Right, like that makes it any better,” Orchid said.

“It wasn’t a crippling with me,” Seb added, the wild-eyed commoner adding his anger to the mix. “You came after me with a poisoned blade and a contract, cousin.”

Oh. Was that why Seb was so invested? A blood feud, once again started by nobles?

And he’d come out on top, in the end. On the side of a god with a blade in hand, prepared to slay the ones who’d started his journey in the first place.

Life as a commoner had done him well.

“The weak… fall,” Sarah snarled.

“You didn’t finish answering me,” Orchid said. “What was the plan?”

Another one of the nobles took aim and fired. Having evidently decided that magic wasn’t going to do it, they’d resorted to using a revolver.

Unfortunately for them, that wasn’t the solution either. The bullet stopped in midair, its momentum removed by ruin, and the shot dissolved a moment later.

In response, Jasmine shot back, a bright red streak marking the trail of her bullet. As it flew, I took in the efforts of the woman I loved, and I watched.

She was still damn powerful. Even with the full force of Inome on my side, I wouldn’t want to get hit by that thing. Yes, it would never hit me, but if it did, I would be in serious trouble.

Jasmine hadn’t been completely forthright with what those bullets did, though to be fair I’d never asked. Inside that revolver was a rune that enchanted every shot with the full force of Jasmine’s Igni oath, but that had been obvious. What had been less apparent to my previously unskilled eyes was the healing magic that she poured into them. Healing magic that had been analyzed perfectly, corrupted in just the right ways to tear someone’s flesh apart rather than sew it together.

She even had a way to prevent her bullets from completely annihilating her targets. Even as the shot made contact with the noble who’d fired at us, I could feel the true magic of the hated—of Nacea, her god, pulsing through the streak of light and preventing her target from suffering as they died.

“I do dislike killing,” Jasmine sighed. “But sometimes, there is no other way to remove a stain.”

I didn’t feel particularly stronger either way, but I felt compelled to provide comfort nonetheless. My body felt too light as I moved, as if I was walking amongst the clouds and not on the soft plush floor that I’d so casually ripped to shreds, and I laid a hand on Jasmine’s shoulder.

I didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.

“Thank you,” Jasmine said, leaning her head to one side and brushing it against my hand.

The contact was nice, and it was grounding in a way that not much else had been. For a moment, that thick cottonlike barrier that had stood between me and reality broke, and even when it returned, it came back a little thinner.

Right. I had come to Dakheng to fight for someone, and I was going to keep fighting for her. I couldn’t lose track of the objectives I’d come here with.

Somebody else cried out in pain, and I flicked my attention back to the room to see that Seb had thrown a dagger with pinpoint accuracy, taking out another noble.

Five left, I counted. All of them under the influence of the oathtongue.

“A primordial,” Sarah choked out, spitting blood with her words. “We made a primordial.”

“Fuck me,” Jasmine muttered under her breath. “The Church’s ritual. They weren’t the only ones.”

I hadn’t had these senses properly under my control when we’d been in the Church. I’d been blind, then, and I couldn’t help but be frustrated that I had been incapable of opening my eyes and understanding.

“They weren’t alone,” I repeated, just as quiet. “The primordial.”

“The ritual,” Jasmine said, louder. “I should have realized it for what it was.”

“What?” Orchid said, his voice half an octave higher. He was taking this about as well as the rest of us, all things considered. “A fucking primordial? Sarah, what in the gods’ names have you been doing?”

“Winning,” she replied, hoarse.

“This doesn’t look much like winning to me,” Alex said.

“You end here,” Seb told her. “Now.”

“I concur,” Orchid said. “Now die.”

And die they did, collapsing one by one by one, puppets with their strings cut one and all.

It was an anticlimactic end to an event that had revealed information that was anything but.

“We need to move,” Lord Rayes said. “If there’s a primordial active—“

“It’s not just one,” Jasmine said. “The Church. The ritual I was talking about?”

“It was interrupted,” the Lord said, frowning. “Would that not have been enough to cancel it?”

“They had far more time,” Jasmine said. “The night. Even if the effect of the fifty-man ritual still has yet to take effect, I do not think that we can consider them out of this.”

“Much as I hate to admit it, the little one is correct,” Fleur said. “From the descriptions of it, it very well could have been an attempt to infuse something with the divine.”

“One primordial with the possibility of another on the side, huh?” I said.

“Shouldn’t the TAG be here?” Seb asked. “Isn’t this their thing? It’s always the same, when I read news about primordials.”

“The TAG is—“ Fleur and Orchid both started speaking at the same time, but the latter gestured at the noblewoman to speak first, his aligned oathtongue having evidently taken a lot out of him.

“The TAG is near useless,” Fleur said. “It buys time with the bodies of oathholders that the Crown could not or would not call their own, culling the pool of those who would defy our rule while purchasing a golden few moments for the army.”

“It’s true,” Orchid said.

“It is what I had hoped to change,” Jasmine said. “If the day plays out in a favorable manner, it is possible that I still may have that ability. However… I doubt fate will be so kind.”

“You need not fate,” I whispered, “for I am with you.”

I wasn’t sure if she’d heard me, but she gave me a small nod and I nodded back.

“The point is,” Fleur continued, “the goal of the TAG is to delay before a major threat is able to reach a high-value target. If the primordial activates inside of Dakheng, there is nothing they can do.”

“They can still provide bodies on our side,” Seb argued. “Wayward souls. Adventurers. Wasn’t that what it’s all about?”

“Wastes of air,” Fleur said. “Wastes of divinity.”

I turned my gaze onto her.

“Fleur,” Lord Rayes said, tired, “must we have this same conversation once again?”

“Fine,” Fleur said. “If you wish for me to not speak the truth that even you know, I can.”

“It’s not a truth,” Jasmine said. “But if you wish to perpetuate the cycle of violence begetting violence, of oppressing potential so you can crown yourself king, be my fucking guest for when I tear it down.“

“It’s not important,” Seb said. “Not right now.”

“There may be a primordial loose in the city,” Lukas said. “Lily, can you feel it? I could feel your senses observing everything everywhere earlier. You must have the capability, yes?”

Perceptive. I hadn’t spoken to the couple in a fair bit now, so I had to admit that Lukas speaking up kind of caught me off guard.

It didn’t make him any less right.

“I can,” I said.

“Little one, you know as well as any that the gift of oathsight is one granted rarely to even us, let alone a commoner,” Fleur cut in, speaking to Jasmine. “How do you—“

“Shut up,” I told her, and I extended my senses.

There was nothing in the city proper, nothing within the circle of my sensation, but the reason was obvious.

Humans rarely look beyond the obvious, three memories told me at once. Lord Byron. A dying god. A man whose face I didn’t recognize. Their attentions are easily drawn by the immediate, blinding them to the truth. A weakness of the species—

The memories fractured into pieces, each of the three separate histories splitting off in their own way.

We must rise above. That I created. That you may one day destroy.

I extended my reach, searching the grounds below and the skies above, and I saw.

Two perfect spheres of divine essence, both as hateful to me as they’d been on the day they had left me for dead.

One of Caël’s. One of Aedi’s.

The former was hidden amongst the clouds, the latter deep beneath the city, deeper even than the catacombs that we’d traversed to find the secret hiding location of the Church.

“There’s two,” I said. “Two potential triggers, at least.”

“Fuck,” someone muttered. I couldn’t tell who it was.

“Two primordials in one place?” Lukas asked. “That hasn’t occurred since the damned continental war.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Trying to figure more stuff out.”

Try as I might, I couldn’t tell if they had been attached to anything yet. There was a barrier there, one that even my divine senses couldn’t fully pierce through.

[ADMONISHMENT], a god told me, and I realized why.

As before, the message that the god sought to deliver slammed through my mind, a dam breaking and causing a flood of images. Of ideas.

A young boy, his body torn to shreds as the god that used him as its avatar tried to force its way into reality.

Two warring armies, obliterated in an instant as divinity exploded out from within their own soldiers.

A village, torn asunder by plague as a god’s hand came down harder than necessary. The elderly and the children alike suffering and dying in the streets, their skin crawling with a magical disease.

Me, tearing apart the connections that other gods had established for years or decades. Ruining the natural order.

A warning. A prediction.

I nodded, taking in the images. The essence of the two gods were too far from me to see me, but I was sure that their owners would be able to feel the significance of that motion, sense the [ACKNOWLEDGEMENT] that I returned to them.

I am not yet powerful enough to shirk their rules. It was the most basic lie I had perhaps ever told, acting as if I was planning on acquiescing to their terms, but with the conviction of a god behind it, any lie could become truth.

“I can’t tell if either of them has actually created a primordial,” I said. “There’s one above. One below.”

“Which gods?” Jasmine pressed. “That makes a difference. Second pantheon? Third?”

“You think she’d be able to recognize the gods?” Alex asked, dubious.

Fleur was still a little shocked—presumably from the amount of power that had been coursing from my body when I’d been observing—but she somehow managed to doubt me anyway. “Of course she can’t.”

“I believe in Lily,” Jasmine said. “She spent the first few weeks with me smashing through all the expectations I had set for her, and she may very well do the same for you.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Are you quite finished?” I asked. The conversation was one with some subtle maneuvering, I could tell that much, but I truly wished to spend less time delving in the microscopic social affairs of the mortals with me. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Jasmine said. “Sorry.”

“Not a problem,” I said, tilting my head to acknowledge her. “One pocket of divine essence is in the sky. Somewhere in the clouds. I doubt that it could’ve come there and stayed there naturally, else someone would’ve taken notice of it long ago, so it may be that this is the one that the ritual created.”

“If my guess is right,” she said, “they were both summoned by a ritual.”

“Right,” I said. “The Church and this House.”

I didn’t feel panicked enough about this. The people around me had the telltale signs of fear in their voices and the glint of scared animals in their eyes, even the normally unflappaple Jasmine and Kyle.

I even knew intellectually that this was going to be rough. Even with my powerup from the broken god hitching a ride in my brain, I was still just one person, and over a hundred strong adventurers had barely been enough to even slow down a primordial just a month ago.

Why was I so calm?

That barrier was still there, I realized. The detachment. There was muted fear somewhere in my mind, worry for the future and the unwinnable battle that lay ahead of us, but those were human emotions for a human mind and I was more than that.

I sighed. It hadn’t been more than a day like this, but I could recognize the signs of thoughts that weren’t wholly mine. After a childhood spent with a mind that was made more external influence than it had been of my true identity, I had become intimately familiar with the concept.

Still, that wasn’t to say that the influence that the god had over my mind was entirely bad. I’d keep an eye out for it, but lacking a sense of fear in this case might very well save our lives.

“What pantheon?” Jasmine asked. “Are you able to tell?”

“First,” I said. “For both. Aedi and Caël.”

There was a collective murmur from the room, halfway between a gasp and a cry of despair. Everyone in this room knew what that meant. Divine essence from the first pantheon was beyond mythical in terms of its rarity. A primordial formed from them would be devastating, let alone two.

“We can do little but prepare,” Lord Rayes said, putting his composure. “I must consolidate my forces. There must be a response. Dakheng has hundreds of thousands inhabiting it, and it is the seat of the Crown. The city must not fall.”

“Hell, I said I’d be part of history,” Kyle said. “If this is how I’ll go out, I’m fine with that.”

In a matter of moments, everyone was speaking to one another, orders and suggestions and plans being tossed out every which way.

Instead of engaging with them, I kept reaching out, closing my eyes to shut out this room of corpses and oathholders who had begun to realize that they were dead men walking.

My reach was far wider than any of them could imagine, and even if I was incapable of doing a deeper analysis on the primordials because of the gods in my way, I could keep on looking.

I stepped partially in my domain, opening it to access for anyone strong enough, and as I did, I caught notice of my target.

He was far closer than I’d expected him to be. The old oathholder was already almost within the Tayan border, riding atop a train towards Dakheng.

When my influence reached him, he turned towards the city and smiled, meeting my mind’s eye with a nod, and then we were both gone.

My—Inome’s domain was familiar ground already, and the infinite crystalline fractals no longer hurt to perceive. They were parts of a whole and whole in themself, and everything that didn’t make sense here didn’t need to.

Moments after I arrived, I felt the second presence arrive and I moved towards them, warping space and time so that I could get to his entry point before he did.

“Hello, Nishi,” I said.

“Lily,” the holder of a dozen oaths said. “A pleasant surprise.”

“We need to talk.”