140 – Providence
Before Augustine spoke, Vivi did what she usually did and wrapped herself in an [Invisibility] spell. The day would soon arrive when Vanguard and the Sorceress returned in a public capacity, but until then, she would maintain her flimsy attempts at anonymity.
“People of Prismarche,” Augustine began, his voice ringing out across the city. “Please do not be alarmed.”
Vivi watched the bustling townsfolk below slam to a stop, their gazes snapping toward the white-robed speck above. A man near a vegetable cart froze mid-transaction with his arm outstretched; a child chasing a ball stumbled and tripped; a mother rocking her baby looked horrified as she gawked upward—no doubt having experienced more than enough surprises this past month.
Seeing those reactions, Vivi wondered if she should have gone to the Guard Captain and other city leadership first, rather than taking it upon herself to choose the time and place for this important event.
Bit too late for that now, though. Oops.
She also questioned if opening with ‘please do not be alarmed’ had ever helped settle anyone. But then again, how else would Augustine introduce himself? There wasn’t anything an unexpected, booming voice in the sky could say to put people at ease, not given the super-magical phenomena that had repeatedly assaulted the town.
“I am Archbishop Augustine,” the priest continued, voice projecting enough certainty that even she felt reassured. “On behalf of the Central Kingdom, the High Sanctum, and the good of humanity, I am here to cure the ailment that has befallen your city. I repeat: there is no cause for alarm. These actions have been sanctioned by the appropriate authorities and pose no danger to you or your loved ones.”
Vivi mentally winced. Sanctioned might be an exaggeration, but she had implied permission from the Guard Captain, and it wasn’t like he or the city’s lord would have turned down the Archbishop’s help.
“The spell will affect everyone at once and will not take long. You should feel no adverse effects, merely a warmth inside your chest, much like any healing spell, should you have experienced one before. I will begin now. Take comfort in the fact that the heavens watch over you.”
Augustine glanced at where Vivi was floating, invisible. Intuiting what he wanted, she dismissed his voice amplification.
“Do you have anything to add?” he asked her.
“I don’t.” She gestured down at the city, telling him to start whenever.
Needing no further guidance, Augustine opened the Codex and linked to it once again.
She watched with growing apprehension as energy filled the priest, and, like he had earlier, he extruded that vibrating resource in front of him. Runes twisted and morphed under holy power, and while she held some measure of interest in the magic, her fascination was limited. She had told Augustine that he was a talented mage, and she had meant it; but with divine influence reshaping the spellcircle past the point of recognition, there wasn’t much she could truly appreciate about his work on a technical level. Not like she could when observing Aeris or Lysander, for example.
The Archbishop had made it clear he expected something to happen, infusing an ocean’s worth of mana with heavenly essence. The words echoed again in her mind: the greatest single working of divine magic ever performed. Vivi herself had no reason to believe that anything special would happen, but whose opinion was worth more when it came to this topic: the most powerful priest, or the most powerful user of magic in the world, period? She wasn’t sure.
Augustine had used surprisingly little mana to cure Remy—less than she had assumed he would—a mere fraction of a page. That fraction still amounted to dozens, maybe hundreds of times his personal mana pool, but his individual skill had done the heavy lifting.
Now, he relied on Vivi’s power, overwhelming in its sheer volume. She dialed back her magical senses so the brilliant aura surrounding the Archbishop stopped hammering into her skull, and with the glare no longer blinding her, she was surprised to find sweat beading at his temples and his jaw clenching so tightly that veins stood out on his neck.
Seeing the Archbishop so obviously straining himself, Vivi reflexively assured him, “I’ll be ready to help if anything happens.” A second later, she realized her words might be taken as condescending, but thankfully the Archbishop didn’t seem to care—or more likely, he hadn’t heard her at all.
Telling herself Augustine would be fine, she turned her focus away from the man himself and scrutinized the gathering storm of divine energies. The Archbishop had taken to heart her insistence to ‘use as much as he needed,’ because the glowing rune on the first page of the Codex flickered and blinked out as its storage dried up. With a twitch of his finger, the floating book responded to his will and turned to the next page.
Then the next, and the next, and the next.
All that, just for the activation? He might actually empty it out. But that was what she had signed up for. Mana well spent, as far as I care.
Finally, the glowing white lines stopped squirming outward in foreign shapes, signaling the completion of the enormous spellcircle. It wasn’t the largest working she’d seen since arriving in this world, but admittedly, the exceptions were her own spells.
She inwardly cringed at the Archbishop’s expression. His shining eyes reminded her of Hollis back when the lower-level priest had also channeled oceans of divine energy. Hollis’s face had shown quiet awe, though; Augustine’s showed near-feverish conviction. Like usual, she had complicated thoughts on the man’s plain zealotry.
“[Absolution of a Wounded Spirit].”
The brief calm ended; the flow of mana returned and redoubled. Power gushed out of the Codex in waves. A part of Vivi winced to see the energy she’d painstakingly stockpiled drain so fast… but those thoughts vanished as something else seized her attention.
As a bizarre phenomenon unfolded.
She had thought the Archbishop had finished his spell, but apparently not. The massive diagram, already shining, grew painfully bright, and it expanded in leaps, new runes appearing faster with every second.
Vivi was no expert on divine magic, but as Augustine himself had said: the heavens met a person halfway. A priest needed to at least sketch the general shape of a spellcircle, with the gods—allegedly—only filling in the gaps. Yet the formation expanded without a hint of Augustine’s own influence, and so swiftly that Vivi stiffened in alarm.
The circle ballooned outwards, hundreds then thousands of unfamiliar patterns etching into the air. Vivi always found a [Priest]’s work borderline incomprehensible, but the architecture manifesting in front of her she truly couldn’t make heads or tails of.
“Augustine?” Vivi watched the magic cover first the town square, then many city blocks, then half of the entire settlement. “Augustine, what’s happening?”
The Archbishop didn’t seem to share her rapidly growing concern. Instead, he regarded the spectacle with rapt excitement. “I’m uncertain. But have faith, Vivisari.”
She inwardly sputtered at the dismissive response, but was interrupted from pushing for an answer when—just as the spellcircle reached its apparent crescendo—the entire construction blinked out of existence.
She stared. Even Augustine faltered for a moment.
Then a golden mote drifted down past her field of view, prompting her to jerk her gaze up. Augustine did the same.
The sight meeting her briefly left her gawking.
The breach into the void was… gone?
Or rather, replaced. A new portal floated where it had once been. Flickering golden dots of something were streaming through—and more importantly, past the [Void Barrier] she had placed down. Seeing how that spell was one of the strongest all-purpose barriers she had, she would have thought the blockade capable of obstructing all forms of magical interference—including divine.
But indeed: the motes of golden light crossed through without issue. Her brain struggled to process the image.
She shook herself and focused on what lay inside the portal. Her stomach clenched at what she saw. The gruesome violets, blacks, and reds once composing the breach had given way to soft whites and yellows, and though it didn’t induce an immediate headache and fill her with instinctual revulsion, her skin crawled for a different reason—because she knew she was looking into something otherworldly. Yet not necessarily unnatural, contradictory as the thought seemed.
She swore she saw vague shapes shifting in the layered golden-and-white clouds suspended in the opening, and that she could hear quiet murmurings. Like standing behind a soundproofed, foggy glass window. Something, or someone, was definitely in there, though her mind strained to comprehend what her senses told her.
Augustine began to laugh. The unexpected noise startled her out of her stupor, and she spun toward him. Though they were floating in the air hundreds of feet up, the man maneuvered so that he was on his knees, prostrating himself with his forehead pressed into the metaphorical ground.
“Augustine,” she said. “What’s happening? What is that?”
The priest remained in his pose of supplication for a moment, muttering to himself, before he glanced up. “Providence, Lady Vivisari.”
Her gaze flicked back and forth. “You expected this?”
“I expected something.”
Vivi failed to find a response and eventually tore her eyes back to what mattered more. Thousands of glowing lights drifted across the city, lazily seeking out targets. In wandering but inevitable paths, each spark of—she had no idea what, ‘divine energy’ being too shallow a description—found a townsperson and passed into them. The first recipient, a young man with brown hair, glowed brightly for a handful of seconds; then the radiance faded. He ran his hands across his chest, expression turning dumbstruck. She hardly had to activate [Soul Sight] to check—the man had been healed.
“You’re not even casting,” Vivi said. “The spellcircle is gone. But you’re still draining the Codex?”
“It is curious,” he agreed. Then wryly, he said, “It appears I am acting as a more literal conduit than usual.”
“How are you not more surprised by this?” She looked up toward the gateway emitting the specks of gold. “That’s a portal into…” She trailed off.
Into what? ‘The heavens’? Was it really? What else could she be looking at? And more relevantly, did that make the presences she felt through that golden-white opening some sort of… heavenly tribunal, if not the gods themselves?
“Surprised?” Augustine mused. “Why would I be surprised by what I already knew to be true?”
She felt like Augustine was understating the implications of what they were seeing. So far as she was aware, the gods had never interacted with the world directly. There was no substantial proof of them existing at all, beyond the divine energy that priests could access—which could be explained in several ways.
What would happen if I flew in? she couldn’t help but wonder, thoughts straying to less important matters, as they tended to. Was the realm physical, or at least conceptually coherent in the sense that she could visit, like she had with the void? I don’t even know where to begin with all of this.
She and the Archbishop exchanged no more words as they watched the miraculous phenomenon come to a gentle conclusion. The last of the snowfall-like golden specks floated into their respective targets, healing the denizens of Prismarche of the violence the Fell Apostate had wrought. Overhead, the bright yellow edges of the portal faded, and the cloudy domain filled with indistinct, whispering figures dimmed like a dying ember.
The grotesque sight of the dimensional breach replaced it. A part of her had wondered if the heavens would heal even that, but no: the violation remained. Her gaze shied away by instinct; the sight was as uncomfortable to look at as always.
Briefly, she considered whether she had imagined the whole thing.
Much as the action might be unnecessary, she had to check. “[Soul Sight],” she incanted, and ran her attention across the townsfolk below. The process proved as redundant as she’d expected: each of her targets was in perfect condition. Likely in better health than before the mad ritualist had visited.
“I don’t believe the work of the heavens needs to be verified, Vivisari.”
Vivi twitched and looked over at the man. Finally, there was a hint of admonishment in his tone; he clearly disapproved. She cleared her throat.
“Of course.” She dispelled [Soul Sight]. “Habit. That… went smoothly.”
She hadn’t been attempting humor, but the Archbishop laughed at her words. “It certainly did,” he said amusedly. He closed the Codex and offered it to her.
A hushed, reverential quiet had fallen over Prismarche, but city-wide silence could only last so long. Men and women began cheering, and celebration filled the streets in seconds. Augustine spared a fond smile down toward the town square, but then seriousness overtook him, and he faced her. Though he’d stayed remarkably calm through an ordeal that had shaken Vivi, his eyes were shining with conviction and wonder; he was certainly not unaffected by what they’d seen.
“Thank you, Vivisari.”
“I think I’m the one who should be saying that.”
“The gratitude can be mutual, then.”
She hesitated. The truth was, she was bursting with questions, but none of them were the sort that the Archbishop would receive well. Even the least offensive could probably be seen as, if uncharitably interpreted, blasphemy. And ungrateful to the heavens as it might be, she felt more unsettled by the supposed miracle than anything else.
I’m already dealing with too much. Please don’t let gods and goddesses start descending to say hello. It was just… a magical anomaly. A visual quirk to accompany the massive influx of mana. It’s not impossible.
“I don’t mean to rush anything,” Vivi blurted out, “but I need to go and speak with my steward.”
The Archbishop raised his eyebrows at the abrupt request. He considered her for a moment, then dipped his head. “Very well. I too would like to meditate on what I’ve seen. While the experience lingers.” He held his hands out and closed his eyes, seeming to bask in something she couldn’t feel herself. Vivi shifted awkwardly. A smile tugged onto Augustine’s lips, and he opened his eyes again. “The city’s leadership should have matters in hand.” He looked down at the celebrating masses; the streets were flooded, and most of the cheering seemed focused upward at him. His grin widened, and he waved at the crowds below. “I hope it isn’t long before we speak further, Vivisari.”
“Again, thank you for your help.”
The Archbishop accepted her outstretched hand, and she brought him back to Meridian.
Then she went to find Rafael.