LightReader

Chapter 15 - Sacristy Secrets

Morning came clean and spare. He took the habit's hood for the walk, not the mask. Priests trusted faces more than symbols.

Father Aldric was already in the sacristy, sleeves rolled, brass water stilling in a bowl. The room smelled of wax and old linen—secrets kept tidy.

"I brought you an answer first," Nameless said. "Penumbra won't come howling over Mathis. Not for a man like that. In their creed he failed himself; trash disqualifies itself. They save vengeance for assets that embarrassed them, not initiates who slipped on the first stair."

Aldric's mouth tightened, not in disagreement—more like relief he didn't want to own. "You sound sure."

"I've watched their weather," Nameless said. "Enough storms to know which clouds bother to return."

He let the next truth stand where it had to. "Something else is coming. You'll see strange people on your roads for a dozen reasons and none you can name. Many won't respect you, your bell, or any order you think still holds. They'll be loud, clever, hungry, and convinced the rules are suggestions."

Aldric went still. "How do you know that?"

"I saw the drift before I ever walked here," Nameless said, even. "From a long way off. Movement builds, and then it breaks. You prepare for the break."

The priest studied him as if the cloth between them had suddenly become thinner. "Then more will try the hood," he said softly. "More Mathises."

"Likely," Nameless answered. "Penumbra recruits where the ground is soft. If initiates cross this way, they'll repeat his theater—come back to erase their own names. Culum likes clean doors. Villages make convenient brooms."

"Is there a way to hedge against that?" Aldric asked. "Something we can do that isn't just waiting to burn?"

"Yes," Nameless said. He let the word sit until it mattered. "On a condition."

The priest's eyes narrowed. "Name it."

"Teach me a simple blessing," Nameless said. "A working, not a sermon. Sacred, but small."

Aldric blinked once, slow. "That isn't… how we give such things. You'd need a bishop's hand, a course of study—formation—not a favor in a sacristy."

"I'm not asking to stop being what I am," Nameless said, voice dry. "I won't trade the clerc for the cleric. I need a tool, not a collar."

He cut across Aldric's inhale with a line older than both of them.

"We know nothing but the veil; but the veil is enough to wound us with eternity."

Aldric almost came out of his chair. "Even the Ratiols are doing their catechism these days… What perturbed days we're given."

He leaned back, thought a long time—then, thinking better so as not to think worse, nodded once. "Very well. An initiation for our pagan."

He tried on a smile to make the law feel smaller. "By the Code of Canon Law, what we're about to do would count as a mild penal contravention. So I'm not a criminal—merely a contravener."

Nameless thought, dry: "Knowing the law is the best way to bend it."

"And given the chaos that presently reigns," Aldric went on, "you've shown enough for the process. We don't need bureaucracy in a storm. Necessity knows no rule, and the circumstances themselves lend you the principle of epikeia."

It was Nameless turn to be impressed. A priest at the end of the world assembling a dissertation in a breath.

"Don't be surprised," Aldric said, reading it on his face. "The best are often sent to lonely parishes so they don't trouble the high clergy. Not that I count myself among them—but the pattern holds."

Before Nameless could answer, Aldric moved—quick hands, quiet purpose. He shrugged into a stole, set out a stoppered vial and a small cruet. The sacristy narrowed to the business of vows and violations.

"Solemnly, then," he said.

He placed both palms on Nameless bare crown, then pressed two fingers, light and deliberate, over his eyelids. Words gathered; the room seemed to step aside. Oil touched skin; water followed in a fine cross along cheek and brow.

"From the abyss you came, shrouded in darkness.By the waters you are undone, by the breath you are raised.The earth that entombs you yields to the Breath that hovered over the abyss.Thus you are reborn — not by the flesh that withers,but by the light no gaze can contain.The ancient Ratiol named this to be born anew.We name it only: the crossing of the veil."

[Ritual: Complete]

[Justice Points: 04/04] Acquired

[PRV +2]

INT 10 · WIS 9 · STR 6 · PER 7 (DEX 1 · CON 1 · STA 1 · WIL 3 · CHA 1 · PRV 4)

The theory came clean, the kind that explains without apology: Nameless stood, in terms of Justice Points (JP), at the rank of a newborn—a new man in the ledger of sacred cults. Priests spend JP, not IP; sages do the reverse. The rite did not change his nature, but it added a circuit: sacred points that sustain blessings, healings, and other works of light. This is the old human advantage, called Providence (PRV). Humans are usually born with 4; as a half-Ratiol, he had begun with 2. Now he could pluck that string more surely. He would suffer less from sacred damage, and when wielding light against malign alignments, he would have a slight edge and increased damage—so long as it was the sacred he drew upon. Cicero would murmur that Rome's only superiority was piety; in Devir, that still buys the future.

He let the corollary come without ceremony: he was standing here on Aldric's Providence, not his own. If the books said two for him, then the margin that had kept his days from cracking had been someone else's credit extended across his path. Borrowed light is still light, but it arrives with a guarantor's name in the ledger; it binds the recipient to a patience that is not his, a goodness that will one day ask to be answered.

Perhaps Aldric had paid in the small, invisible ways—candles offered where no one watched, fasts that no system tallied, the quiet abstentions that are louder than vows. If so, then Nameless had walked through a doorway held open by another man's arm. That is the irony of Providence: it humbles competence more efficiently than failure. He could feel the new circuit humming, yes—but like a lamp lit from a neighbour's house. He would pay back in the only currency that keeps its value: judgement rightly measured, mercy without theatre, victories that do not profane their cause. Until then, he would move as one carried forward by another's piety, careful with the light because it was not his to waste.

"There it is," he thought. "It is consumed."

Aldric did not break the solemn air. "Imitate," he said, raising his hand, his voice tuned to the altar's tone.

"Everything burned in the flame that cannot be seen, and we still live from it."

The flame woke at the tip of the priest's fingers—small, contained, yet intense, the color of certainty.

The blade of the system rose inside his skull:

[Aldric offers to teach you: Sacred Flame.]

[Cost: 2 Skill Points. Accept?]

"Smaller, thankfully," he reckoned. "It fits my points."

Yes.

The world of mist took him. Not cold—the heat. He hung suspended in fire, in an inaccessible light incrusted in the flames. He breathed in trance, repeated the cadence, copied the gesture. He saw a volcano from within—the forges of the Ratioli—soot rising, but the fire conquering the dark until it struck the sky. He engineered the flame: focus, duration, escape, the exact place where air decides to be light.

He awoke like one returning from the brink.

[Skill Learned: Sacred Flame (Level I)]

[Skill Points: 2 → 0]

He let the warmth settle behind his ribs and didn't smile. "A small flame," he told himself, "no more than a mustard seed. Enough to move a mountain if I plant it right."

The rules wrote themselves in the back of his head. From here on, as INT and WIS climbed, both pools would fatten—the arcane and the holy. Every two points in either stat would nudge IP and JP upward in their turns. Nameless now carried both circuits at once—far ahead of most players, who wouldn't touch light and lore together until late game unless they'd sworn themselves healers from minute one.

"Given my preferred solitude," he thought, dry, "outsourcing my bedside manner to a stranger seems optimistic. Better to be my own physician when the night decides to be honest."

He counted time the way he trusted: backwards from the crowd. "The first players are stepping in. My 24 hours are spent. Launch has begun." This corner of the map was truly nowhere—harder biomes, stingy spawn tables. Fewer arrivals by design. "I drew the long straw." But three million whitelisted for the first night alone can do miracles with statistics. "Even 0.01% landing out here would be too many bodies for one palisade.", he thought.

The VRMMORPG rode on dream architecture. Nameless had simply gone to sleep early to test for seams and stayed because the world held. Launches sat at 22:00 so workers, bosses, and the jobless young could lie down and wake up elsewhere. The tech taught whole nations to long for dreams and made sleep aids obsolete; people preferred the bright copy to the dim original. His last "days" inside were three hours outside. Three million names only for the first night's white list; more tomorrow.

Aldric, who believed in clocks that weren't his, broke the quiet. "And the second miracle for today? How does this village survive a vertical invasion of barbarians?"

Nameless rolled the plan against his tongue, then put it away. "I'll give the answer with Roland present. Saves me a sermon twice over, and I'll borrow your authority while I have it. We'll need agreement fast."

He looked toward the door, hearing a crowd that wasn't here yet. "I don't give them more than three days to find this place."

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