The Shining Wyrm

Leo’s thoughts were spinning in his head, even after a night’s rest summoned through the delicately invoked miracle he’d always kept ready since he was a child, even after he had broken fast and tried to set it all in order, even after he reviewed the small collection of books that the Temple Fortress of Nerthus had deemed allowable to pass with him to Valasect.

Racking his memory for every case he had ever memorized of miracles and intervention from the heavens. Nothing fit together with what had transpired last night!

Oh, it was certainly some errant and terrible intervention of starborn horror, a miracle that had gone wild somehow. But he had not fed it with his own fears, he had done all the rites properly, it had been a well vetted and pre-sanctified vessel for the god in question, with a strong relationship with all parties involved.

It had been the kind of divine working that an apprentice should have been able to manage! He had done everything right!

Except for when he had heard those catching, terrible, tantalizing words.

He’d stepped in and asked, no, Leo had demanded of the god wearing flesh they had summoned into that room. And unlike how it would have gone in any other case he had not been dismissed, he had not been waylaid, distracted or diverted.

The spirit from the stars and the heavens had not looked into his mind and said something which drew his eye away again, like had always happened before, ephemeral illusions that dissolved in the clarity of the sun.

No, by invoking his place as a speaker for Jewel, Countess and Wyrm. Leo had demanded an answer from a god! And at least for a few moments, for sparse sentences he had thought he was getting an answer!

He’d done everything right, when he caught the sense of it pulling upon his own fears he had turned into himself and found his stillness, he had found calm.

There had only been Leo and the Countess in that room with the man worn by a god. There should have been nothing to perturb the divine’s will, nothing to divert it towards wildness. It had been shown again and again that the Shining Wyrm was invisible to the eyes of the divine, by their own admittance the gods themselves declared her ‘beyond the destiny of the stars’.

So why had it all gone so terribly, violently wrong?!

There was no one there but Jewel and Leo with the god worn man, a wyrm invisible to the sight of the stars and a practitioner who was trained in the stillness needed to take himself out of the influences of a ritual!

There should have been nothing there to leave even a crack to be pried open for such feral divinity loose in the world, and now Leo was in the position of having the judgemental attention of his Countess and a Wyrm glaring down at him, her voice flat and slightly buzzing with annoyance.

“Leo, my appointed Court Priest, my Advisor in the Divine, Explain. What precisely transpired last night? Why was an elder of my brother’s demesne twisted into that thing!”

He held his face still, he sought the focus of calm, breathing evenly, in and out. He held and released each breath and let it flow through him like a river’s water washing clean a bandage. Only once he had stilled the whirling of his thoughts did Leo open his eyes and meet the fury that glared down at him from the Countess’ pitch black eyes.

“Something which I do not yet understand.”

The rumble of her throat made the hair on the back of his neck tremble before he could even hear her voice.

“It was not something beyond my ability to discern! Yet still! What happened here in your chambers last night should have been impossible!”

But it had happened, he had seen it, he had felt it, the will and act of a god untethered by any influence, Invoked into this very room and left-

“In fact, it was beyond extraordinary! We all three did everything correctly! The Rites were observed, in the hundred and ten years of the records I have available: the Veles, Volos and the five other names and aspects available to me there has never been an instance of any of the methods I invoked ever going wild or feral like that!”

His countess raised a brow, looming over him with a judgement undeserved, he raised a finger to forestall any words, he had seen Jewel’s reaction to such acts before, she was uncharacteristically forgiving of her other advisors being so familiar! Leo should have earned the same of her by now!

“There was no undue influence, you are opaque to the heavens, by all testimony and observation of the divine themselves. And even if it was from you, Countess you did not fear anything like what we saw occuring? It was nothing like what your guilt twisted inside you said would happen? correct?”

The Wyrm huffed heavily, her breath smelling of rain and that faint itching touch of distant thunder.

“No, what happened last night was nothing like what I feared.”

He nodded, closing his eyes again, working through it without distraction of light, his thoughts, every moment, trying to dredge his memories into sensible order.

“The closest to it that I have ever heard of was an instance of a wild invocation, an untrained man or woman sending unwary prayer to the stars, calling down a starborne without name or role. But that was not the case my Countess, The Veles is well known of and by you, we confirmed it did we not?”

The wyrm huffed again, filling the room with more scent of petrichor.

“In so much as the books I have read and your own advisement has claimed, yes it was a known and named god familiar to me, confirmed and apparent. Although as it noted, it's out of season.”

Leo waved his hand, a beginner’s sentiment, no consequence.

“The seasons can wax and wane but even a god normally only prominent in the dead of winter can be called at noon in the brightest summer day, it is just a matter of focus and difficulty in finding them in the heart of the diviner while calling to the heavens blocked by the blue veil.”

He flinched when he remembered that he was not speaking to Gem but her mother, yet despite any reproach the words reminded him far more of the child then the Countess.

“So the Veles was here, and it was not wild, then why and how could it have done, acted and been how it was last night? And why did you insist that you spoke for me and not yourself!?”

Leo shivered a moment then finally opened his eyes to fix those shining pits of wet coal.

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“It was the correct thing to do, the stars can draw their attention to the diviner when guiding an intervention, the thoughts, the heart, the sins of a Priest can become the focus of a God summoned on behalf of another.”

The Countess’ brow furrowed and her lip began to curl towards a snarl.

“Court Priest Leo Haeborne! if you ever speak a lie to me again in council I will have you expelled from my service and imprisoned for treason.”

He gaped, then paused, closed his eyes, centering, focusing on himself, on the beat of his heart, the beat that had suddenly spiked to a thunderous pace before he breathed again, sought calm, peace, the serenity expected of a diviner.

“I beg your pardon?! I didn't I mean-”

He suddenly was reminded that his Countess was not just a Wyrm terrible upon the battlefield and apparently humbling and disorienting to the divine powers, but also an incredibly observant creature.

“I apologize Countess, It was a...” he swallowed hard but did not flinch away this time from her rumble, instead Leo focused on the feeling in his chest, on the thoughts behind his words. Focusing on them with the same intensity he had held on a total emptiness of mind and thought that night when the heavens went wild and horribly feral against all reason.

Finally he found where he had let truth become falsehood.

“I am sorry, you are correct, although I...”

Why had he said what he did? It was true that you needed to divert the divine from yourself when conducting such matters, to keep the focus (if mitigated and managed) upon the petitioner rather than the diviner.

His throat felt dry. He had lied to a Wyrm without even realizing it. He might as well have botched a ritual with a divinity just now.

“I am so terribly sorryCountess, I have lied to myself in my own thoughts and in so doing carried it to you. It is... it is true that it is the correct act to divert and focus the divine’s attention on you as the petitioner but... Last night.”

He took a heavy breath, the memory of the terrifying, world shaking words echoed in his head.

“But it said that your father’s soul could be made!”

It was not really that outlandish, such had been claimed by the heavens before, inconsistently perhaps, but that had not been the nature of the words Leo remembered coming from an old man’s throat.

Not that the souls of man were a thing made in the past, gifted to them, but that it would be a thing made then, in that moment, a spirit shaped in the form of Jewel’s Father. Not called forth, not summoned from the well deserved rest.

But made at the order of invocation, assembled from materials on hand like a meat pie!

He felt his heart starting to beat harder in his chest.

“It said not only that it would make it, but that it could not make it yet! You heard the words as the starborne went feral too didn't you Countess? I apologize but those words, it would not have answered me! They never do! They never have! Not really! They are blind to the world but they see our hearts and souls like nothing else Countess! The Veles would have looked into my heart Countess, he would have said what he found inside me... But you!”

The words wouldn't stop, all the nights calling up his blood brother Erno stinging in his mind, in his eyes. A boy pleading with the priests to speak to the ghost of his departed and closest friend! The way that the words had begun to ring hollow for him as the nights wore on, yet he’d still called on them to let him speak one more time, the sting of when the priests had finally forbidden him.

The strangeness of how his friend had spoken to him when Leo had paid another apprentice to do the rites again in secret. For a shift of extra chores.

“The Veles told you! It told you what none of the heavens would say to any of us mortals! It told you! It told you the truth! The gods would only tell you, the Shining Wyrm, that they are lying to us!”

Leo was shaking, his cheeks were wet, the coal black eyes of his Countess were turned away, ever courteous, ever trying to spare others the shame of making a spectacle of themselves. He reached up to touch his own cheeks, his breath was coming in gasps.

He’d said it, he’d said the fear that had been worming in his heart. That he’d never accepted, had always let the heavens soothe away because to let it linger was somehow so much worse than to accept it.

He felt his knees give way, the stones bit at his shins as he fell before the Shining Wyrm.

“My Countess, I am sorry, I have done you terrible evil, I’ve let my own selfish wish ruin what should have been done to heal you I-”

“Be Quiet”

The buzz in her voice was like a swarm of wasps roaring in the air.

In that sudden emptiness between them he heard the heavy billowing of lungs larger than himself, of a throat long enough to drink a barrel dry before it even began to fill the Wyrm’s stomach.

It went on for quite some time, but eventually the Countess evened her breath, found calm.

“Court Priest Leo Haeborne, what exactly are you proposing?”

In that time he had found his own calm, although his heart felt like it was squeezing in dread at the prospect, at what they may have found.

“We will have to verify... It could have been a feral god, a ruined invocation-”

The Shining Wyrm of Viznove hissed like water thrown into an oven.

“What are we verifying, court priest!?” It was a spoken question, but Leo heard no curiosity in her tone, nothing but a mirror of his own anxiety.

He whispered his words softly, quietly, as only a Diviner could, with the certainty that the heavens could yet be listening.

“To verify that the dead, the departed, that their souls are not truly kept.”

He felt a twist in his gut, and a sense of vertigo, like the entire world might be dropping out into a new vault, all passing through the middle of his stomach.

“To verify that the gods, the stars, all of the heavens, are lying to us.”