The True Savior
"You look shaken."
She spoke quietly. Looking down at Lionel as he wavered, she set the truth before him in a soft, steady voice.
"You followed Gawin's orders ready to catch the plague yourself, didn't you? Believing he would come to save you. But the man you're still waiting for so desperately never meant to save you. Not from the very start."
"Th-that... that can't be..."
"If you die of the sickness like this, the evidence vanishes with you. Neat and clean."
The square went silent, as if someone had thrown cold water over it.
Someone muttered, breaking a stillness so complete that not even a breath could be heard.
"...Orders? Evidence? My lady, are you saying that priest spread the plague?"
Odelli turned her head and looked out over the crowd.
"Yes."
And in a voice that did not so much as waver, she added, perfectly calm,
"It was a disease made on purpose. He poured it into the well himself and spread it through this village."
If someone with no tie to Cardel had appeared out of nowhere and said such a thing, no one would have believed them. But the words had come from a member of House Cardel—from the mouth of Gawin's youngest sister, blood of the direct line.
At first they thought it absurd. Slowly, that certainty curdled into the uneasy stir of what if.
A murmur raced through the crowd.
"I did see that priest skulking around the well a few days ago..."
"That's right. I saw him too."
"The moment the plague broke out, he was right there tending the sick, running relief... was all of that an act?"
"He spread the disease among us and then played the savior?"
The crowd froze in shock. Until moments ago, Lionel had been the one stirring them with the promise that Gawin Cardel would come to save them. Now every sharp gaze turned on him as one.
Only a little while before, he had been whipping the people up with cries that the great scion of Cardel was coming to deliver them. His suspicious movements were dredged up again, and suspicion hardened into certainty.
"Th-that's a lie!"
The relentless exposure had left Lionel blank for a moment. Then he screamed, the veins standing out in his neck.
"His Eminence is not that kind of man! He will come... He must...!"
"Yes. He'll come. After you're dead."
Odelli said it coldly, without a shade of doubt.
"And only after the sickness has spread past all control, and the order goes out to burn the city—then he'll appear with a grand ta-da, just like a savior."
In truth, he must have known. That Gawin would never come to save him. Had he been forcing himself to deny it?
The moment Lionel accepted reality, tears of blood slid from the corners of his eyes. The deeper his despair sank, the thicker the miasma that began to coil and rise off him.
Miasma feeds on human despair. It slips into the cracks where hope breaks, faith shatters, and betrayal opens, and there it drinks a human life.
"He said it was only a trial. That I was only carrying out God's mission... that I was the one who opens the way. That then everyone would be saved..."
Lionel lost his balance and dropped to his knees. At once the miasma in the air writhed like a living thing and wrapped itself around him.
What Gawin had made was neither the simple miasma of a monster nor a mere disease. It was an artificial calamity, born of monster-miasma fused with sickness. Once it took hold, the body suffered as from illness, and the mind collapsed under despair. And so it bred itself, and spread itself, multiplying without end.
"If I only did as he said, everyone could be saved... So why doesn't anyone come? Why doesn't anyone come...?"
Lionel murmured it, his eyes gone dim. With the dark-crimson tears, the last of his hope ran out as well.
"If that isn't true... then was he nothing but a butcher who slaughtered all those people...? I..."
He didn't save my sibling. He didn't even save me...
And in a consciousness already blurring, he murmured on. What spilled from his mouth was regret, and fear, and despair.
And it was in that moment.
A golden current began to flow from Odelli's body. A wave of light spread quietly beneath her feet.
"My God, that's..."
"Ancient magic... isn't it?"
A murmur rose through the crowd. Those long accustomed to Cardel's performances recognized the shape and the color.
Ancient magic.
The signature rite of House Cardel.
But this was different. There was no ceremony, no incantation, no symbolic vestment. She had not brought a whole troop of mages clattering in her wake, nor did she set her face in grim resolve and sweep her hands through some grand gesture. Unlike anything they had ever known, it was happening in utter quiet.
The miasma that had blanketed Lionel in black thrashed like a living creature. It twisted, trying to flee—but only for a moment. The instant the golden purification touched it, the miasma began to vanish, as if retreating of its own accord.
And so the purification began.
All the miasma that had choked the streets was drawn in at once, as if sucked down to the ground beneath Odelli's feet. Within that swirling golden current, the power of purification pulsed—quiet, and strong.
The child whose fever had only climbed returned to a normal warmth. Color came back into the cheeks of the old man whose lips had gone blue. The woman who had been vomiting blood opened her eyes. The dying man let out a breath with his cough.
"The fever's broken."
"Th-the cough stopped. I can breathe."
"I'm alive. I'm alive...!"
Even those who had not believed at first began, one by one, to feel over their own bodies and make sure. Little by little the crowd was steeped in excitement and awe.
Purification.
It was as if what had been defiled were returning of its own accord, by nature's law, through a cleansing that belonged to the world itself.
Everyone there gazed at the traces of golden purification that had spread from Odelli. The motes of light made a scene as fantastical as scattered stardust. Before that overwhelming radiance the crowd could only hold their breath, unable to look away. No one could move.
The sight was a miracle... and it was salvation.
In a silence so deep that even the sound of a swallowed breath could not be heard—
"...She's the true savior."
"That lady... the true scion of the dragon..."
The silence did not last. Emotions that had been held breathless burst all at once into a roar.
"God has not forsaken us!"
"Not Cardel—her! She is the real hero...!"
Praise and wonder spread like wildfire. The miracle no longer lived only in prayer. It was right before their eyes, and those who had crossed the threshold of death and come back were proving it themselves.
And the priest Lionel as well.
He, too, who had stood at the edge of death, quietly returned to life, wrapped in her golden purification. He looked at Odelli with a face that could not believe any of it—that she possessed such a power, and that, possessing it, she had spared a sinner like him. His mouth opened, but no words came, and tears gathered in his eyes.
"...Thank you, most merciful one."
At last he sank to his knees. He pressed his trembling hands together and murmured as if in prayer, like a man who, after a long wandering, had finally seen a true god.