V2Ch55-Upon This Rock
The exercises continued for over an hour before Tybalt called a halt.
He could see the adults were tired, and more importantly, they had more work to do than just drilling with Tybalt. There were farmers and craftsmen of various types there, and he knew he had taken up a lot of their time. He didn’t want people to refuse to come back, worried about their plots of land going untended.
“All right, we’re done!” he called. “Same time next week, everyone!”
The tired beastfolk responded with muttered agreements and halfhearted thanks for the instruction.
“Priest candidates, please remain after the rest of the citizens have gone home,” Tybalt added. In response, around twenty people said their goodbyes and separated themselves from the others.
At the same time, Tybalt saw Eldest Isak appear on the cliffside, coming around a bend with a number of children in tow.
“I think those are the kids we’re meant to take care of,” he said in a low voice to Mariella.
She nodded and smiled, then responded quietly, “Are you ready to act as a father?”
He looked at her and smiled back.
“I guess we’ll see.”
While the children descended slowly down the mountain alongside the Eldest, Tybalt met with his new prospective priesthood. There were more candidates than there had been at the Council of Elders meeting, because it was no longer just foxes.
“I’m glad to see a couple of ibex beastfolk and some harpies here,” Tybalt said. “I was going to come around and talk to your Elders after this, because I was under the impression that you hadn’t heard I was reestablishing the priesthood.”
“We had not, Your Holiness,” said one of the ibexfolk. “Um, my name is Malak.”
“And I am Zorba,” added the other ibexfolk hurriedly. “My friend and I decided to stay just based on your revealing that you were doing something with priests after the training session. We have both been studying Lord Mudo’s texts devoutly for years, and we would both be eager to serve you. I hope that’s acceptable, Your Holiness!” He bowed low, anxiety apparent in his whole frame.
“Of course,” Tybalt said smoothly, managing not to laugh at Zorba’s stiffness. “Your zealous interest is to be praised. I brought up the fact that not everyone knows about this yet, because this means I will still want to mention this to your Elders after we’re through here.”
“Um, we all heard about this through Tatiana or Sabine,” said one of the harpies.
Oh, that girl who seems to have a crush on Andric, Tybalt thought. And, I guess, one of her friends? Or a family member.
“My name is Julia, by the way,” the girl added, curtsying deeply. She was olive-skinned, with long dark hair. Her winged frame was built like a ballerina’s, and she moved with the same elegant grace. She rose and resumed speaking, her words rolling out swift and passionate. “Your Holiness, I don’t know if you are allowing women to join the priesthood, but I think you should!”
“Julia, shut up!” exclaimed one of the other harpies, who looked a bit like Julia, but perhaps a year or two older. She turned to look at Tybalt. “Forgive her impertinence, Your Holiness. Of course, you will do whatever our god deems best, and we will not question it. It was… an act of sheer optimism for us to stay, and we will not be offended at all if you tell us to leave.”
“Yeah, I think priestesses are a good idea,” Tybalt said mildly. “All the harpies are female, anyway, right? So your tribe would have no priests at all otherwise.”
They nodded.
“What was your name, by the way?” he asked the woman he assumed was an older sister.
“Oh, I’m Olivia, Your Holiness,” she said, looking away embarrassed as if she felt she had drawn his attention for exactly the wrong reasons.
But Tybalt wasn’t paying much attention to her emotional reaction just then. He was more interested in the strange feature he had just fully noticed about the harpies for the first time: how they looked. Each other tribe had a specific sort of look to them, as he would expect of an ethnic group within a race. The catfolk all had the same perfectly balanced faces, the same dark brunette hair, colorful eyes, and well toned bodies - their similarities closer than the other tribes due to incest. The fox tribe were mostly tall and blond with blue-gray eyes. The ibexfolk tended to be olive toned with dark eyes and shorter, stockier frames. This wasn’t a constant, but it was what was most common for each group. There was a foxfolk type, an ibexfolk type, and a catfolk type.
But the eight harpies here brought home something that Tybalt had only noticed fleetingly when he had gone to meet the harpy Council of Elders. He had only seen a couple of harpies besides the Council members at that time, as it had been a bit of a stealth visit. Vidalia was still concealing Tybalt’s recovery from the fox tribe back then.
Now he confirmed that the harpy tribe, unlike the others, had a wide range of traits. It made sense when he recalled that they intermixed with all of the other tribes, as well as occasionally with outsiders. That was the distinct thing about the only all-female tribe. No one family looked like any other.
In front of him now, among these eight women, there were the two olive-toned harpies, two pale brunettes, two blondes, and two women whose features Tybalt could not readily identify as belonging to other tribes. They looked more vaguely foreign to him, though he didn’t know which country that look was native to; he did notice their eyelids looked different from those of Nietians, and their skin tone was a little different, though not significantly darker.
“Nice to meet you, Olivia,” Tybalt said. “Anyway, I wanted to briefly get to know all of you a little bit. Since you wish to be among my priesthood, I expect that all twenty of you will be following me around until we have established the basic practices and priorities of our revitalized faith. You’ll probably be spending a lot of time around me until we have more territory under our control than just these mountains, frankly, or until you awaken classes that make you useful to other people without me being present. So let’s all go around and introduce ourselves. Please don’t stand on formalities. I’m not ‘Your Holiness’ right now. Address me like you would anyone else.”
We don’t have time for the extra syllables.
The would-be priests looked at each other a bit nervously, and then all began giving their names and what their families did. There was Karl, Lukas, Peter, among others, and of course there was Zorin, Andric’s brother. Unsurprisingly, almost everyone was from farming stock.
“I assume all of you are well versed in the faith of Lord Mudo,” Tybalt said, continuing once they had all given their names.
They nodded, again a bit nervously but slightly more confident on this front. He imagined they probably knew more than he did, though it shouldn’t matter unless he stuck his foot in his mouth.
“So, what do you think the beastfolk need most from their new priesthood?” the necromancer asked.
The group began a spirited discussion, with initial answers ranging from the pragmatic - “Healers!” - to the esoteric - “Priests who can explain the merits of freedom through detachment!”
Tybalt allowed it to continue for a while, until he started to feel bad about keeping the children waiting. They had been sitting around Eldest Isak patiently all this time, while Tybalt felt out his new followers.
“I’m glad you all have goals,” he said, cutting into a discussion about the nature of reincarnation. “I feel safe entrusting the priesthood to such a spirited group. We’ll discuss our plans further later. I assume all of you have work that must be done for your families, since the beastfolk have not been wealthy enough to support a priest class that does not work for… a long time. We will meet tomorrow after sunset, in this same space, to make further plans by firelight. For now, I think I need to go and meet the children the Councils of Elders have entrusted to me.”
There were murmurs of agreement and obedience from all around.
“The key thing is that your clever and devout answers have convinced me to ordain all of you as priests and priestesses. Our god needs as many servants as he can get right now, and your initiative had already shown me you possess a lot of the qualities I will need in my clergy.”
Tybalt wasn’t being completely honest. A few, like Karl, had just parroted answers that others had given. He wasn’t blind to the fact that religious devotion and knowledge wasn’t uniformly high, even among a group that had volunteered themselves for the priesthood like these people had. He wouldn’t expect it to be.
Lord Mudo’s followers weren’t like those of Astara and Vika. While the Goddess of Love and God of War had led their servants to victory after victory for centuries, the God of Death had seen his followers, well, die in large numbers, persisting through sheer determination and grit despite the persecution of the rest of the world.
Some loss of faith was to be expected.
But it was true that he needed to make as many priests as he could, and only he could do it. There were only so many hours in the day. He couldn’t afford to spend too much time testing them. If he made bad priests, he would just defrock them. Perhaps kill them.
Unholy Consecration!
The power of a god, mixed with a tiny bit of Tybalt’s own mana, surged within him, and he began making more servants of the Death God.
“Kneel,” he ordered the closest man to him, a foxman named Peter.
The beastman fell to his knees with apparent fervor, a trembling smile forming on his lips, and the necromancer smiled in return as he laid a hand on Peter’s head. The divine energy surged through Tybalt as he formally turned Peter into a priest.
For the next fifteen minutes, Tybalt turned beastman after beastman - and beastwomen, too, since the harpies were there - into priests and priestesses of the Death God. As he had noted before, it cost a trivial amount of mana for him to use Unholy Consecration.
The other agent in the process, Lord Mudo, was doing all of the heavy lifting. This made it possible for him to continue until every man and woman who had volunteered was officially a member of the priesthood.
Whatever doubts the necromancer might have felt melted away as he sensed the sheer pleasure of his patron at what he was doing.
Upon these stones we will build a new church, Tybalt thought.