Chapter 47: Encounter
Past midnight, and it was dark outside. Dreary and silent. It smelled of sulfur and ashes that hung in a dreamy haze across the streets, blurring the distant lights of the moon that tried to seep through the fog. Not a single soul out here on this beautiful night, just the low hum of the wind and the clanking of the wooden planks.
Valens walked with a spring in his step, feeling the cold weather on his thick coat, taking in the sight of the mining city like a tourist out for new sights and new adventures from his otherwise simple life. Not much of that simple was left anymore, truth be told, and yet someone once told Valens that new was always better.
What do we have here? I wonder.
There was a certain eagerness to it, the sort of devious satisfaction to breaking the rules, to do what seemed inappropriate at first glance, and he wouldn’t have a bunch of sacred warriors dictate how he should act in this world. He had crossed that line long before he came across the Sun’s Church’s famed Templars.
No, he was due some information here, and information he would get even if it meant treading a dangerous line. Looking around him, though, there was scarcely anything that spoke of any danger right now.
Shadows here, shadows there, and shadows still.
Occult magic was fascinating to witness just as it was dreadful to feel. The possibility that anytime a man or a woman could fall victim to its practices wasn’t something entirely present in the Empire as it’d been long since forbidden along with Warmagic.
Banning a practice is simple, but how you can erase it from existence is another question.
He thought the Inquisition's ever-loud propaganda played a part in that, which seemed to be missing in Melton Kingdom. They rather preferred to hide the truths than to address them directly, and that in turn could work against the intent they were aiming for.
The wooden shacks were silent and dark as Valens trudged from between them, reeking of days’ worth of sweat and piss. He peered up at the church with its pointy tower and the golden sword cocked on top of its tip still gleaming in the dark ahead, then back at the inn he’d left behind in the main square.
“Not much sense in that, isn’t it?” came a rough voice from before a wooden shack. Valens perked at the middle-aged man sitting by a worn table with an ashtray over it, a smoking pipe laid beside it. He had both his legs stretched over another chair, boots worn and trousers torn, a face full of creases, eyebrows bushy, and a mean stubble that was somewhere between brown and gray.
“Sense in what?” Valens asked as he paused.