12 - 1 [Magus] Enlightenment Sown, Of Ken and Crone

Spread the Light steadfast, soweth corn of good knowing in the minds of men.

That is the prime commandment Manna giveth to thee, o’ woman of wisdom pledged in heart and soul.

As every bough has its shadow, so too does thine obligations bear a darkness. To take upon the Enlightener’s Pledge is not merely to shoulder the burden of evangelion but that of eredwarding also.

Spread the Light, yet forget not to forfend the Dark from wayward hands. As the Godly Lunat is White and Black Twain, so too is She Who Remembers.

All knowledge, be it Faire or Fell, is Her demesne. And you must veil That Which Must Not Be Known with weaving of thy very spirit. Such is thine service to the Goddess of Kennen Fruit as a maiden pledged.

Temptation lurks in knowledge without restraint.

Lust for the flesh is natural, yet to lust for the kennen of good and evil is to lust for doom.

-Mandatos Mannah-Daath, Holy Scripture of the Cult of the Soothsayer.

The Blue Priestess of Berrowden - 1st of Evening Star, Year 1125 A.E.

The man did not sit by the fire.

The sellsword-sorcerer seemed strangely at ease in the cold, resting his legs on the dinning hall’s bench at the end opposite the crackling hearth.

Emilia returned from the pantry and larder, bringing many eats atop a pewter platter—she had practically begged for finery wrought of more noble metals such as platinum or silver. But this would do in a pinch, Emilia only had to be careful.

The Priestess did not ask the town treasury to empty its coffers out of vain vanity. The need for replacement of the cutlery and plattery was instead because of a healthy fear of the poisonous mortician’s metals contained within the alloy of pewter; lead and antimony.

Nine-damned antimony’s name was monk’s bane in the Kedweni tongue, for the Seventh God’s sake! It had killed many a parish priesthood in undue time. Though not acutely toxic, exposure over a long period to this unfortunately common heavy metal was enough to push the frail bodies of elder clergymen past the brink and unto the waiting hands of White Gull Herself.

Worst still was the second half of antimony that dwelt inside the alloy of peltrum.

Though usually inert, the lead within pewter reacted badly when introduced to acids, making citric fruits deadly when combined with such.

Men afraid so dearly of the Pale did not make reasonable decisions.

In the year of Our Lord 1098 A.E., the King Himself had—against the wishes of the Orders Mahneanic, Gaian, Dyeusian, and the Guildam Arkanum both—decried tomatl, of all things, poisonous.

It was not a naturally poisonous fruit. Instead, the acidic juices of the Valencian-bound berry corroded pewter cutlery—most often used by middle nobility and merchantdom—releasing or “leeching” the mortician’s metals of lead and antimony from within their usually inert prisons.

Even kings had to abide by the customs of Kedweni hospitality. And so, no matter that it was His Highness Himself, a man had to take the food he was given and offered while in the house of another. Even if said food made of its resting pewter, a poison.

Worse still was juice o’ tomatl, as juicing the fruit and concentrating its acid in liquid form inside a pewter goblet leeched that much more lead.

An imbibement of insanity and encephalopathies different to Turchian black wine only in that it did not give the imbiber a nice stupor.

It had not helped that tomatl was of the nightshade clade of plant, being called to this day the “poisonous apple” in King’s Kedwen as the fruit was the size of a decent pomo—apple in the Floreni haggle—only much more savory and less rigid in structure.

The unduly-damned berry had even been unjustly compared to doomlust; the descendant of the Forbidden Fruit Itself.

It was easier to demonize a foreign import than the natal and widespread pauper’s metals of one’s own Nine’s damned country.

Emilia had a good deal of time to think these things as she wobbled towards the sellsword-sorcerer. He would’ve—nay, should’ve—helped her with the burdens, but was instead staring into the dark of his hands.

The Priestess would give him no undue grief. A change so great, a cripplement like that, was no easy thing to get over quickly—if at all. Sure, the lad still had limbs of a sort, but he had nevertheless lost parts of himself.

He had lost so much.

Finally realizing her plight, Barry got up and dashed to help her with the heavyset platter.

Those arms wrought of the mana of Shadows were difficult not to flinch from. They writhed like snakelings, young and thin strands blending into the dark host of their burrow.

They were the fur of something baleful and great, hidden away yet far too close for comfort’s sake. Like being near a predator, the Priestess’ spirit beckoned her to avoid proximity.

It was an instinct borne from the depths of herself.

It whispered of black tidings.

How quick would it be for those arms to snatch her and break her in two? The preyen instinct spoke, its voice her own.

Emilia gave the feeling not much more thought than that. Acknowledgement of irrational fear was as far as she was willing to indulge in, lest the Priestess cow under the heel of her own mind.

Setting the pewter down atop the seven-span-long table, Barry clapped his hands together as if to brush away dust.

They made not a sound, that shadow-flesh of his. The gesture only served to disrupt the magickal limbs’ forms, rendering them unto essence-vapour before they resolidified back into their proper semblances like stitching done with smoke.

The fact that those mana-constructs were not temporary conjurings but instead permanent extensions of himself was astounding. Just as part and parcel to his physical form as the rest of his flesh, yet wrought of the fickle blood ephemera of reality-in-between.

Now that Emilia had been reminded of it, what made sorcerers so queer, physically speaking? Be it from wives’ tales told by commonfolk to writs published by scholars known far and wide through the Civilized Realms, a sorcerer—a magician with an Awoken soul—usually had some sort of magick trait evident to the naked eye.

Not even Emilia, possessing so much sacred virtue—Divine Ethos—in the bosom of her very soul, had changed much if at all outwardly. Her clawen nails were but artificery—done by praying over the base materials of tar and cut quartz and silver wire—not natural manocarnification; the change of nataline flesh to spirit-made-physical.

Though, perhaps, the lack of manocarnifaction in Emilia’s case was due to not possessing enough Divine Ethos. The Priestess had not any other holy person to compare to in regards to her cultivation of kennen sacren, so she could not be sure that holier-than-her clerics did not manifest a magicking trait.

Voluminous robes and large, ceremonial hats hid anointed skin. To look upon the Divine, even their most feeble of servants, was taboo. The Seven and Their godlings could—and, sometimes, did—show part of Themselves should They choose, but even so, minds were often left broken in the wake of sighting upon divinity proper.

Some truths broke men from the inside-out.

As the Maiden would not get a hint of the skin below the cloth, mayhaps she could peek at the spirit beneath all those pesky skeins. Alas, so too did that have many obstacles that the Priestess could not so easily overcome.

Emilia was stuck ‘ere in the sticks, so to speak. The Maiden of the Crone could not, in good conscience, leave Berrowden in the hands of that swit of a Priest of Red to go around gallivanting south of the Ydden in search of wandering holymen.

The gossip and idle-talk alone would be the death of her.

She could not send any of her Sisters-in-Mahna to do her bidding either. For, Emilia trusted not her disciples, even her most promising of pupils, to sense the spirits of another anointed of the Seven.

Not without being brutish and prying in their efforts. It was not the accuracy that Emilia doubted her Sisters-in-Mahna had, but instead their subtlety.

Aura etiquette was sacrosanct, especially in the Sevenfold Faith’s circles as the society of worship intersected often with high-ranking nobility and Kedweni bodies of governance.

It would be like pushing past the King’s retinue of guards for a peek of His Highness up close.

No good would come of that but the dungeon and gallows.

And so, Emilia’s thoughts reached a dead-end, having to return to one of their many forks of beforehand to continue due trek and journey along the trodden roads of her mind.

Manocarnification, the change of flesh to spirit-made-physical.

The only other magickers that the Priestess knew of having such bodily aberrations—called godsigns or omens o’ fleshe by the peasantry—were the exorcists errant hailing from Vitae.

These itinerant monster-slayers travelled all throughout the Civilized and Uncivilized Realms plying their supernatural permutation of the hunter’s trade. Their bodily appearances were just as prominent as the enchanted longswords strapped to their backs.

Be it eyes and hair of unnatural pigments not produced by the human species or stranger traits still such as saurian scales or thick placodermes fit to stop steel in the wake of a strike no different than finely-crafted suits of plate.

Each and every one of them had a magicking trait.

Yet, these exorcists errant were not always bearers of such fleshly magicks. Long ago—around half a millennium or so abouts—their original school of magicking was but fatalistic wizardry, using of the threads that bind to execute sympathies upon the Weave of Fate Itself.

Impressive magicking and with myriad applications, yes, but not indicative of being able to morph the mortal form to produce magickal mutation.

At least not without a catalyst.

And what a catalyst had they found.

The organization of oathbinders had scavenged the ancient ken of the Knights Chimaeric; witchmen of the Northern Realms that imbibed in beast’s blood, transfiguring their bodies in blasphemous ritual and mutagenic alchemy.

These “wicked” had long since been gone to all but the annals of history, snuffed out in pogroms north the Ydden. Now, only their knowledge was left in the wake of such massacres, adorning the halls of another guild with much the same objective and ethos: to hunt monsters and study the alchemy of fleshly change, of mutation.

Al-khemia mutagenika had been outlawed early in Kedwen’s history, what with its propensity for making men into monsters. To take upon the essence of man-eaters, be they necrophagic, ogroidian, chimaeric, vampyric, or whatever else, was to become as they.

A person had to be careful with eating of the mana of Monstrum—to aspect their spirit with foreign essence, even that of the natural world, was to change the very core of their beings and become other.

Yet such was a magicking Path to power in and of itself.

Barry with his eld spirit was evidence of that; he could command magicks not beholden to the limits set upon the Priestess’ mortal bodies, be they of soma or ether; physical or spiritual.

Emilia could not weave mana into such tangible and stable constructs without drawing so much upon her Ethos that it would be left as but an ember smoldering in the trough of her soul.

She could not devour a god’s holy flame like some druggae-drakon drinking peace-weed smoke from cheap pipe.

The Priestess had to sit by the fire.

She was not of the cold, cold Black. She had only affinacious bindings to constellation and gossamer, to the Place Where Stars Dwell, given unto her by the Crone Herself… well, more so an intermediary messenger in the form of a burning tree, but still of divine providence nonetheless.

Barry—in contrast and by the taste of his soul—was of Beyond, further than the White; of the ancient, mooring dark in between the light. Beyond further, perhaps, than wherever the gods called home and hearth.

Eldritch and eldricht.

An alder thing, hailing not from this world but from where worlds were born.

A creature that swims in the Grand Loch Between Realities.

“Thank you, son.” Emilia intoned as she gingerly accepted the bit of food Barry handed her. Her apprehension was hidden away by the skein of her frail flesh and voluminous robe sleeves.

The shake would not be seen, not even the shivering of her spirit as the Priestess had leashed her aura tight and taut; not even the finest and thinnest silk-thread of the Far East would pass through the needle that was the veiling of her mind.

The Maiden of the Crone chewed on the particularly nice piece of cheese Floreni as she silently ruminated, her thoughts somewhere far away. Paradoxically, her focus of attention lay transfixed on the lad in front of her.

Though Emilia very much doubted the sellsword-sorcerer had imbibed in the blood of beasts and dabbled in warlockerous al-khemia mutagenika, Barry had not a mortal’s constitution.

Not with a spirit so utterly alien beneath the surface of his false aura.

Not when he could speak with the voice of his soul and mandate that matter immaterial carry out his will no different than a father giving order to his sons.

No different than, Mahna forgive me, a god.

The act even felt eerily like drawing upon Divine Ethos: the World of Weal carried out his mandatum with utmost rigor; he spoke and All Things listened. Even the world’s sleeping will—that which stunted grand feats of magicking so that reality-in-between would not be harmed too, too much—was silenced.

It was a mastery over metaphysicality that boggled the mind.

Not even journeymen wizards of the Academy of the Guildam Arkanum had such astute control over mana without their rituals and staves and reagents. Sure, the magicking guild had their drakon’s hoard of ken-beyond-mortal-ken, but they were not naturally endowed with such prowess.

They had to earn it through laborious study and practice.

Pretenders to magicking, the Guildam wizards were but that when compared to sorcerers Daath; theirs were a kind whose very blood was doused in the stuff of magick such so that bodily aberrations were inevitable happenstances.

‘For a soul Awoken will not contend to be trapped beneath the flesh, and so will rise up the well of the spirit and spill over the brim of its vessel.’

Such was the popular explanation for the phenomenon of manocarnifaction occurring so readily in sorcerers and their progeny.

Really, Emilia thought of it as just propaganda given the treatise was written by Eobardson Ydden: a Kedweni loyalist to the Old Families and bearing much ties to the Guildam.

He would spew whatever he was told to, the very spit on his tongue belonging to another. A, quite literal, mouthpiece for the old guard of the King’s lot, she thought with a crinkly smirk.

Though sorcerous bloodlines were common enough in many noble Kedweni Houses—mostly those of high-station beyond the middle rank of Baron—the magicks therein were now but barren wellsprings, the magickal potency of an Awoken soul long since spent through the centuries.

To throw in new, virile sorcerous blood into the lot of Kedweni high society? Such was to tempt the wayward eye of fire. A soul drawn from the scabbard of slumber could be sheathed once again, but the first song of naked steel would remain sung.

For someone had heard.

That bloody priest of the Seventh God had seen what the sellsword could do. Worse still was that Thethelsten was of a vicious and stubborn lot, ambitious too.

Though Emilia doubted the war-god’s devout would know exactly what he had stumbled upon, wolf-clad-in-the-cloth that he was had sniffed a trace of worthwhile quarry nonetheless.

The Orianthian clergyman would use and abuse that bit o’ ken to extract whatever advantages he could, wring it dry even. Such was his nature as a Priest of Red.

A tactician’s calculating mind was useful in war, but stuck here in Berrow with no proper outlet? Such was a double-edged blade.

It cut not only forward, but back unto the hand that wields it.

And it had tasted of a soul Awoken.

An omen of upheaval. The sellsword-sorcerer unknowingly brought with him would-be change to the status quo; a conflagration that would render aged growth unto ash so that the new may come from the old.

It would be inevitable, really, should Barry survive long enough or garner himself political support from a Great Kedweni House. His Power, after being matured and mastered, would beget no small reckoning.

No, Emilia murmured in mind, it most certainly would not.

The Priestess had snuck a peek of something grand and great, the presence like that of her Patron but just different enough to not be divinity proper.

She was left wanting for more.

Some truths broke men from the inside-out, and yet they sought such fellen ken nonetheless.

Emilia wondered how the sellsword-sorcerer’s spirit would look without its mundane veil, borne unto the world as it truly was, no longer beneath the superfluous fat it sequestered itself in; its false aura.

To forsake the frail and weak Skein of Man and become greater.

It sounded eerily like the attainment of godhood.

A blasphemous thought, that.