God's Trial
Incense hung thick in the room. Before the altar, a man in pure white robes knelt.
His name was Lionel.
Once, as a priest, he had sworn to follow nothing but the will of God. Yet when death stood before him, the hand extended in salvation had not been God's.
Gawin Cardel, scion of the hero.
Lionel's young sibling had been dying by inches under a curse that even holy power could not touch. In the moment when every prayer and blessing was about to end in vain, he had appeared, and perfectly lifted a curse over which everyone else had only shaken their heads, insisting there was no way.
From that day on, Gawin became a god to Lionel.
"…Has a mission finally been given to me as well?"
His eyes were red with rapture, and the hands he held out as an offering to a god trembled.
Footsteps approached from the other side. The one who appeared at last was Gawin Cardel, eldest son of House Cardel, a white cloak over his shoulders. He smiled quietly.
"The hour has come for God to test you."
The voice was endlessly soft, endlessly merciful. Lionel squeezed his eyes shut. This was the moment he had longed for so desperately. The moment his faith would at last be proven.
"The place you must go is Belader."
"Belader… you mean the port city?"
With a gentle gesture, Gawin laid a hand upon his shoulder.
"People are foolish creatures. They recover their faith only when a miracle occurs. You must open the prelude to that miracle."
"…Are there people I am meant to save?"
A faint smile on his lips, Gawin pressed a vial into his hand. Sealed twice over, and then a third time, it looked immensely important even at a glance.
"This is… a cure?"
"No. It is a disease."
"…What?"
For a moment he doubted his own ears. Gawin went on, his expression unchanged.
Lionel's pupils shook violently. The vial in his grip trembled.
"This is God's trial, Lionel. You are carrying out God's mission."
"Th-that… so many people will die. Innocent people…"
At those words Gawin let out a deep sigh and shook his head, as though the whole matter pained him. His smile mimicked mercy, but a quiet scorn was mixed into it.
"Dear me. A servant of God, and still clinging to such shortsighted thoughts."
He went on in a low, persuasive voice.
"Lionel, you will become the one who opens the way. Only where there is pain and despair do people remember God."
"…"
"When a miracle finally appears amid that despair, they will praise God. And the beginning of every such miracle… is you."
Lionel caught his breath. This was the man who, in the moment that might have been his young sibling's last, had wrought before his very eyes a miracle even the priests could not achieve. From then on he had believed Gawin bore God's mission from a place far closer than any priest. Surely the will of God dwelt in him…
"To awaken true faith… in the foolish…?"
"Yes. As I thought, you understand better than anyone what value matters most."
When Lionel bit down hard on his lip, as if unsettled, Gawin added one last word, gently.
"Go to Belader. Use the standing you have long held in the temple, and slip naturally among them. Then quietly pour this liquid into the village well."
Lionel swallowed and looked down at the small glass vial in his hand. Inside, a green liquid sloshed. Gawin smiled, serene.
"This is God's trial, Lionel. And do not forget that you are God's instrument."
Clutching the vial to his chest, Lionel rose unsteadily. As his footsteps grew distant, silence settled over the room once more.
It was then that the smile slid clean from Gawin's face. Not even the wreckage of the expression remained. In the cold silence, a chill light kindled in his eyes.
"Come out."
From the darkness, where there had not been so much as a presence, a man in black walked quietly forth. A covert agent of House Cardel.
"That priest loses his reason over anything to do with his sibling. If he does anything other than what he was ordered, make him carry it out. By whatever means necessary."
Gawin let out a thin, contemptuous laugh.
"He needs to be made keenly aware of exactly what price he is paying."
If the matter went awry, threaten him with his family's lives. The man understood without any longer explanation. That was his everyday work.
"And deal with him before I arrive. Disguise it as the plague."
"Yes."
"If anything unusual happens, report at once. Should the job fall apart… pin it on the temple."
He gazed quietly at the door through which Lionel had vanished, then slowly lifted the corner of his mouth.
"Once again, the time has come to save the foolish commoners."
His eyes were already turned toward Belader.
Hidden in a freight wagon, Odelli endured the night, bearing the ceaseless rattle of the wheels. As the day began to pale she reached the outskirts of Belader, slipped quietly down, and set off along the path she had chosen in advance.
A closure order had sealed every official route, but an old drainage passage remained, one merchants had used long ago and then forgotten. It appeared on no map, and even the soldiers did not know of it. Odelli remembered.
More precisely, it was Ludville's memory.
Holding her breath, she bent low and pushed herself through a crack in the ground. Damp earth, mold, and the reek of rotten water assaulted her, but she paid them no mind. She headed straight for the ruined heart of Belader.
The port city was already as still as the dead. Windows were shut tight down every alley, and the streets stood empty. On the few faces peering through cracks in the doors, fear and resignation had spread. Corpses lay abandoned in the streets, never collected, and with the stench of rot a faint miasma drifted through the alleys.
It was then that someone's weeping carried from far off.
"Ugh, please… I'm alive. I'm still alive…"
A boy staggering out of an alley mouth missed his footing and collapsed. His face was soaked in blood, his skin flushed crimson with fever. The miasma wrapped around him coiled about his body like black vines.
Odelli did not hesitate. She ran without pause into the alley where he had fallen, knelt, and examined him. His breath was so thin it seemed about to break. When she laid a hand on his forehead, heat like a burn met her palm.
"…It's all right. You'll be all right now."
In that instant something surged. The miasma writhed like a living thing and tried to bite at her fingertips.
Not a chance.
Odelli drew up her power of purification. The purifying force blooming from her palm began, little by little, to cage it. The current of the air heaved roughly, then slowly settled. The boy's trembling ceased, and the breath that had been faintly ragged evened into a steady rhythm.
She carefully laid him on a bench and made for the center of the square, thick with miasma. Streets sunk in despair. Black smoke and miasma rising, screams bursting without pause, the heart of the chaos.
It isn't too late yet.
The miasma was feeding on fear and swelling, but if she met it with precision, she could subdue it at once. Because this was—
a plague that had been sown on purpose.