Celestial Hymn 30 (Patreon)

Yay, 30th chapter of CH!

-VB-

Celestial Hymn
Chapter 30

-VB-

Varys sighed.

‘Oh dear me,’ he thought to himself as he poured himself a small cup of wine.

The latest scandal to hit the halls of the Red Keep was the near assassination of the up and rising Lord Alan Marris of Brownspear.

Or as people were starting to call the openly magic practicing lord: the Mage Lord.

It irked him a lot to have magic practitioner so closer to him, one so invested in keeping the Baratheons and Lannisters in power, and be unable to do anything.

He’s already tried to insert a spy, but the damnable magicians had a way to determine a person’s intent.

Sure, the details were not captured by their detection magic. Worse, the fact that the servant he tried to get into their camp wasn’t even aware of what the work he was supposed to be doing made it harder for Varys to find the right person to slip into their camp.

Because if even a little greed was enough to set off alarms, then exactly what kind of person could join them?

-VB-

“As you have ordered, milord,” my secretary/acolyte began as she read off of a paper. “We have had nineteen infiltration attempts, and have turned away all of them.”

I hummed from where I lounged sideways on a long bed in my new Red Keep room. “What about the ones who didn’t get picked out by the intent detector?” I asked.

“Two. A desperate girl trying to find work and feed her family and an old man who’s more curious than greedy.”

“Describe them in detail for me,” I replied, bored.

See, I knew that people would try to get their claws into my Crystalline Guards and acolytes the moment they were announced in the city, so I made a faux job post, stating my will to hire servants to help my acolytes.

This was, of course, a ruse. Why did I need servants to draw water or clean plates when, I don’t know, I could do that with a flick of my hand or a senior acolyte could do that for spell practice?

Most of my acolytes were incapable of using directly like I could, true, but they could use the tools I gave them, which, for some, included wands with preset spells.

Like cleaning.

Because like hell I was going to clean when I had servants, magical and mundane!

Where was I going with this?

Right, I was waiting for the two’s description.

“The girl, who called herself Anna, is a fifteen year old from the slums. Brown hair, unhealthy yellow sickly pallor, five feet tall, and thin as a stick. The intent detection tool showed her as desperate, but it barely beat a few other intent and emotions like curiosity and fear.”

“Fear?”

“Yes. When asked and told to speak honestly lest it hurt her chance at being hired, she responded that she feared she would be forced to offer her body once she is hired, either by sacrificing bits and pieces for magic rituals-”

“Which we don’t do for several reasons,” I grunted in irritation. Westrosi’s idea of magic didn’t apply to me, but it didn’t stop people from comparing my magic to the native magic, which were the magic that required sacrifice to work.

My acolyte continued on as if I hadn’t interrupted her. “-or by having to allow senior acolytes or yourself to bed her.”

“... Not an unreasonable fear,” I replied with a sigh.

While I had gone and made my Crystalline Guards successfully, the people within it still lived as they had before; their mindset and paradigm hadn’t changed. One such mindset, one that never quite disappeared even in my past life, was that a woman might and could be forced to sell her body for one reason or another. Whether this was intentional on the woman’s part or initiated against her will was irrelevant; the fact that this paradigm existed irked me because…

Well, if I was being honest, then I had to state clearly, at least to myself, that I didn’t care because it wasn’t something I had to deal with. I was not going to force an employee for sexual favor. I also wasn’t going to be able to stop it from happening. I could punish it, but stop it?

I may as well try to stop human nature from working as intended, which was impossible.

What irked me was that such woman could rise to the top of organizations and become the new mistress of the very system that abused and used them when they were down low. After all, brothels were headed by former prostitutes more often than not, and they were just more open about using their bodies for services.

Ah, I digressed.

Perhaps I needed to be very strict about sexual relationships, especially unwanted ones, in workplace.

How should I go about doing this, though?

… I could wait for a stupid acolyte to make a mistake, but I didn’t want fear to be the cause, because fear had a tendency to numb someone to itself over time. See enough people die and it becomes hard to care about dying, only how one lived before death came.

I could preempt this by holding a guild(?) wide meeting, laying down additional rules, but if I held such a meeting often enough, then my acolytes would feel too restricted.

I could make only men acolytes, but that didn’t stop sexual relationships from happening after men rationalized homosexual activities.

Looking at you, Japanese Samurai and monks.

“... Make it clear that any sexual favors exchanged between employees will be met with heavy punishment,” I decreed. “If any rape occurs, expect the rapist to be castrated and reduced to one of my Servitors.”

I could make one. It might be hard, and I was certain to fail a certain number of times, but I had enough magic available on my side to turn a human into a magic-based automaton.

My acolyte froze and then shivered.

“Y-Yes, milord.”

“Good. Make it also known that someone accuses someone else of rape not out of mistake but with the intentional intent to cause harm to the innocent party, then they will also suffer.”

“I shall, milord.”

Good, good.

“And if someone outside the guild rapes one of us, then report to me. If they are small enough, then I will burn them down to the ground. Everything but the royalty and the lord paramounts are small, and even then, I could make them pay dividends.”

That got her to feel better.