BT II - Chapter 25 (Patreon)

“How are we looking out there?”  Micah called out, glancing from the trembling woman that had been the Bishop toward the entrance to the cave.  “The ritual is done, do you need any help?”

A second later, Drekt’s voice responded.  “There is nothing of note outside.  A suspicious flock of birds circled our campsite three times during the spellcasting, but they are gone now.  We have not been able to determine whether they were natural or affiliated with the occult, but   neither Ravi nor Leeka have noticed anything strange since.”

Micah turned back to the Bishop.  She was curled into a ball, knees held to her chest as she looked around the dimly lit cave, eyes frantic.  Almost immediately, she noticed Micah observing her and flinched, turning slightly away from him but unable to leave the circle due to the wards woven into its runes.

“Drekt,” Micah said, loudly enough for the man to hear but restraining his voice to not startle the confused woman.  “Leave Trevor and everyone else on guard in case something happens, but you should come in here.  It looks like things were more or less successful, and I’m sure you have questions that you’re going to want answered as well.”

“Who are you people?”  The Bishop asked, scooting against the rock until her back was pressed against the ritual circle’s wards.  Green and blue energy crackled behind her as the defensive field sprang into being behind her.  “It’s all starting to come back in bits and pieces, but-”

“Hold off just a second,” Micah interjected, trying to reassure her with a comforting smile.  “Drekt should be here shortly, and I don’t want to force you to repeat yourself.”

“Who is-” She cut herself off, making a small strangled noise as Drekt’s heavily built body obscured the quartz magelights for a second as he took his spot by Micah’s right side.  The man nodded at Micah before clasping his hands behind his back and looking at the Bishop.

“Do we have a name for her?”  Drekt asked.  “So far we only know her title, and I’m not going to just call her Bishop the entire time we’re talking with her.”

“My name is Anne,” she offered.  “I used to sell mostly fresh fruit and vegetables to travelers from a stall outside town, until-”

She shuddered, eyes wide as she stared off into space.  Micah waited for her to finish her thought, but Anne was unable or unwilling to speak.

“Do you remember what happened?”  Micah questioned.  “When you woke up you said that the last thing you recalled was being brought into a tavern’s basement.”

“Right, right.”  Anne shook her head before closing her eyes and taking a deep shuddering breath.  “I remember bits and pieces.  I’ll see a face and it will be incredibly vivid, and then a moment later everything’s… blurry.  It’s like there’s a fog over my memory, and only certain things actually stand out.”

“That makes sense,” Micah replied, nodding slowly.  “Your soul was tampered with, and as best I could understand the damage might be permanent.  I tried to minimize and heal your injury, but at the very minimum I would expect some disorientation.”

“My soul?”  She squeaked.  “The Church of Luxos says that forgotten don’t have those.  That’s why we don’t have blessings.”

Micah snorted, shaking his head gently.  “There are a lot of things that the Church of Luxos preaches that have very little basis in reality.  You have a soul, just a weaker one which makes the damage done by the ritual all that much more concerning.”

“Don’t worry little one,” Drekt rumbled from Micah's side.  “I’m sure Micah has done everything possible to preserve your function.”

“Maybe talking about it will help spark your memory,” Micah offered.  “Just tell us what you remember.  Drekt and I will ask some follow up questions to see if we can stir anything up, but the only way you’re going to make progress on healing the damage is to try and recall what happened during those blank spots in your memory.”

“O-okay,” Anne replied, smiling weakly.

Micah looked at Drekt and the big man nodded back.  He turned back to Anne, locking eyes with her and returning her smile.

“We’re trying to find a way to stop people from being transformed like you were,” he said, “If there’s anything you can tell us about the ritual that changed you, it could help save a lot of people.”

“Andrea was waiting for me when I came home from work, she met me at Jakint’s gates and said she had something to show me,” she began, hesitancy fading away as she spoke.  “I was pretty tired so I didn’t really ask any questions and followed her into the Bent Nail’s basement.  Then someone hit me over the head from behind, and the next thing I remember I was hearing music.”

“You know,” Anne continued frowning as she stared down at her hands.  “I can remember thinking at the time that the music was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard, but right now as I try to look back on it, it was all screeches, sharp tones and dissonance.  Even thinking about it is setting my teeth on edge.  It sounded like a bag full of dishes being smashed with hammers over and over again.  It was just… wrong.”

Micah and Drekt shared a knowing look before Micah focused his attention on Anne once again.

“Is there anything else you remember?” He prompted her.  “Faces, locations, activities.  Anything like that?”

“All of the other bishops would meet at the Flatsheet Playhouse once a week,” Anne replied, eyes unfocused as she searched her memory.  “We would look for new targets for conversion and receive orders from the Pontiff.  I’m pretty sure he was having us set the entire city up for a revolt.”

“There were other bishops?” Drekt cut in.  “Up until now, we had been working under the assumption that you were in charge of most of Jakint.”

Anne shook her head, squinting slightly in the dim light of the cave.

“No,” she said.  “There was only one other bishop actively recruiting but there were another five performing various tasks around the city.  I didn’t know a whole lot of the plan, but it sounded like they were organizing bribery and sabotage campaigns in between work stoppages.  I remember that Daniel was in charge of removing anyone that got too close to the truth.  He’d bring them to a safehouse before we would transfer them to the dungeon so that we could convert them into more instruments.”

“Dungeon?”  Micah asked, raising a single eyebrow.

“Right!”  Anne perked up.  “That’s where the Pontiff spends most of his time consulting with the entity.  He performed some ritual on the dungeon to corrupt it.  Now instead of mana it runs on… something else, and the normal monsters have all been replaced by daemons.  All I know is that the entire dungeon feels like the instruments from the Dread Chorus.  Probably because that’s where the Pontiff makes them.”

“So if we were to defeat the Pontiff and cleanse the dungeon?” Micah inquired, casting a meaningful look toward Drekt.

“Oh yeah,” Anne agreed, nodding firmly.  “Without either the Pontiff or the dungeon, I’m pretty sure operations in Jakint would collapse.  When I was the Bishop, we needed a constant stream of new recruits and blessed in order to fight back against the city guard.  The converts could hold their own, but they wouldn’t last that long without ichor, and we never had enough of that.”

“Slow down,” Drekt said, gesturing at her with an open palm.  “We only have bits and pieces of the full picture.  What do you mean by ichor?  Also why would your forgotten recruits not last, and why would you need blessed?”

“Normal converts only have so much power in them before they just run out,” she replied.  “They collapse in on themselves and burst into green flames.  When the fire’s done, there’s a body there, and sometimes it's still breathing, but whatever is left isn’t really a person.”

“As for the blessed,” Anne continued, “that’s how the Pontiff makes new Bishops.  He can graft portions of a blessing onto a convert, and use the ichor he taps from the blessed to power it.  I… don’t remember all that much of my investiture.  It’s hard to describe how much it hurt and how sick it made me feel, but when I woke up I suddenly knew and could do so much more.”

“Wait,” Micah said, stopping her with an upraised hand.  “What is this about tapping ichor from the blessed.  I’m not entirely sure what we’re talking about, but that sounds incredibly unpleasant.”

The woman paused, a grimace flashing over her face before she replied.

“It is.  Only the Pontiff can do it, but they cut a hole in the chest of the blessed and perform some sort of magic.  The result is a treacle thick gray liquid that a convert can drink in order to fuel their new powers.  Sometimes a blessed can survive more than one extraction of ichor, but I don’t think the Pontiff has ever let one live.  He milks them until they’re little more than a skeleton and then feeds them to the daemons.”

“Then it sounds like we need to kill this Pontiff,” Micah responded thoughtfully.  “From what I’m hearing, it sounds like his orders and abilities are the keys to the unrest in Jakint.  If we can stop him, everything seems like it will fall apart on its own.”

“Yes,”  Drekt agreed.  “It certainly appears that our next step is to find and raid this dungeon of his.”

“I can bring you there,” Anne said eagerly.  “The bishops would take turns traveling out to the dungeon to get more ichor.  I was probably there a half dozen times.”

“Then it’s settled,” Micah replied with a firm nod.  “Drekt will get the others and I’ll break your wards.  I’m sure the third prince knows that we’ve removed its influence over you, and the sooner we get a move on, the better our chances of success are.”

Drekt stood up and left the cave at a brisk walk as Micah dropped to his knee, tracing a finger over the runes of the ritual circles.  Six times, twice for each circle, he jammed his index finger into one of the sigils, wincing slightly as the magical energy hissed and burned against his skin.  One after another, the rings of colored light dimmed until the only illumination in the cave.

Anne stepped forward hesitantly, pushing her hand through the air where the wards had been.  When it didn’t encounter any resistance, she smiled weakly at Micah and moved to join him.

Micah motioned for her to join him.  Her steps behind him were a mass of fumbling shuffles and stumbles as she struggled with her weakened body after a week of forced unconsciousness from coma.

They stepped out of the cave into the early afternoon light.  Eris and Esher were running around uncontrollably, ostensibly gathering up the things they would need to travel, but Micah suspected that Drekt was actually doing most of the work.  Nearby, Trevor was chatting quietly with Leeka while the tall orange woman stroked Ravi’s fur.

Micah nodded at the three of them, drawing a wave of Trevor’s hand in response as he led Anne toward the main camp.  Over the next ten or so minutes, they packed up everything they would need, knocking over the shelters they’d made from the local trees and kicking dirt over the ashes of their cooking fires.  Then, without any real fanfare, they set out, following Anne’s directions as the former bishop led them through the forest to another hidden trail.

From there, they hiked through the woods for most of the day, and just as night was about to fall, Micah felt a tingling through his Arcana skill.  He raised a hand, stopping their party and squinted at their surroundings.

The trees, which had been thinning for the last hour or so as the soil became rockier near the mountains, all slumped slightly, their trunks curved unnaturally toward the West.  He approached one and touched its bark only for a chunk of the wood to break off, damp yet brittle under the slightest pressure.

“The leaves,” Leeka called out softly.  “Micah, look at their leaves.”

He shifted his attention and frowned.  Despite the general… wrongness of the trees, they still had all of their leaves.  Well, what probably was their leaves.

Micah wasn’t familiar with specific tree species he was inspecting, but he suspected that its leaves weren’t supposed to be waxy circles the size of his forearm and as thick as his thumb.  They swung pendulously in the wind, giving off a heavy stench of sulfur that assaulted Micah’s nose.

“That can’t be normal,” the huntress continued.  “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but whatever it is, everything inside of me is telling me to turn tail and run.  It’s like I’m being stalked by a jungle cat, but it’s coming from every direction at once.”

“I agree,” Drekt rumbled thoughtfully.  “I feel like I am being observed by something malevolent, but I can’t quite pinpoint where or what it is.”

“Whatever you’re feeling, we’re basically at the dungeon,” Anne replied, pointing at an outcropping of rocks.  “The pontiff enchanted the East face to look like ordinary stone, but if you feel your way around, we should be able to enter.”

Micah pursed his lips, glancing away from the rocks to look one last time at the malformed trees before he spoke up.

“They’re all pointing toward the dungeon.  Now that I know where it is, it’s so obvious.  They’ve all twisted to face their leaves toward the dungeon like it’s the sun.”

“Welp,” Trevor said, slapping Micah on the shoulder as he walked past him toward the entrance.  “That’s not at all ominous.  Time to see what the big baddy is up to.  Maybe let him know that he overdid the foreboding a little bit.”