A soft jingle sounded as a coin dropped down to the hard stone. I snapped my head over curiously and was greeted by the sight of my lucky coin rolling away. Without a care in the world, the silver disc rolled to the nearby wall and began to flip up it. I beat down my confusion and watched the small object give the middle finger to the laws of physics. Slowly and steadily, it made its way up the cavern, with only the soft sound of its tinging to give away its bizarre movement.

This would have been a reasonable occurrence in the spirit realm but certainly not this one. The bazar and wonderful were muted in the mortal realm, to the point where it barely exists. The conclusion I could draw was that my lucky coin was doing this because of me, somehow. With a sinking feeling In my stomach, I said one word, “Hey.”

Instantly the coin stopped, balanced on its edge, and turned a side engraved with a crown towards me. I need to be more careful with my magic from now on, the next thing I know the pebbles beneath my feet are going to become sentient. I sighed, “continue on.”

With a slight bow, the coin turned and resumed its gravity-defying stroll, at least it was polite. Quickly it scaled the almost vertical stone wall as it was nothing, it probably wanted to show me something. I placed a clawed hand onto the cold wet rock in front of me, it should hold my admittedly heavy weight. With a sigh, magic trickled into the wall and spread out in a web, with ease I pulled myself up and repeated the process. I guess I couldn’t be too hard on the strange things around me, after all, I’m the strangest thing here.

My mind drifted off as I climbed, I should probably do some experiments on this new intriguing, yet terrifying, occurrence of spontaneous sentience. I had experimented with inanimate objects gaining intelligence before, but that takes years of intense emotion and our massive energies. The previous occurrences so far have been out of the usual, yes, but not completely abnormal. This coin, however, is a completely different matter entirely. All I did was, simply, injecting it with high amounts of magic and completely entwined it with the strings of fate. Actually, now that I think about that, I can’t really tack on simply with that statement. Still, the other stuff was programmed to do certain things, the pestilence and ward system did have intelligence, artificial as it may be, but they did not have sentience, as they apparently do now.

I was ripped out of my musings by almost brushing up against this world’s first competent ward. I felt like giving it an applause for being set up decently well, it was a beautiful sight to behold. I did feel like kicking myself though, I should have detected something like this from a couple of miles away, unless… I really put my eye to work examining the loose weave of strands in front of me. Yes, deeply hidden in the weave was a few golden strings of… divinity.

With a bit of trickery, I was able to slip unnoticed through the ward. Though it was decent, decent wasn’t enough to stop me. As soon as I was through, I notice two voices, “So let me get this straight madam, you want me to have Elizabeth here, to fly you over to the Dead Wood forest? That is akin to suicide to you both, not to mention that Liz is currently injured,” said a memorable tired voice.

“I know that this is a lot to ask for someone I barely know but I need your help. The church’s oracle has received a message relating to a massive event that happened there. You and Ms. Elizabeth will be compensated greatly.”

The sound of shuffling feet clued me in on the indecisiveness of a certain knight, “Fine, I can’t just deny a high priestess, especially one from the religion my kingdom worships. But you will have to wait until after the siege of fort Briare is dealt with. Liz will need a couple of weeks just to fly properly.”

I heard low bellow come from whom I can only assume to be Elizabeth, “I know Liz, but we both know that you need time to heal, now can you please stay still.”

A feminine sigh was punctuated by the sound of something large shuffling slightly, “Hold still please, it’s hard enough to heal a largely magic resistant entity such as yourself, I don’t need you to break off my connection every few minutes.”

I felt a huff followed by a large sigh, “Let this be a lesson to not tanking a royal mage's spell. You almost killed yourself, as well as me. What would I tell your mother, hmmm?” A low gurgle told me that Elizabeth did not like that idea, “Exactly, now lay down while I see if I can nab a dead horse for you.”

“Be careful Mr. Adle, though the good physician patched you up, we don’t need you tearing his workup. I’m sure he would not be very pleased.”

“Noted,” Guillemot responded stiffly.

I felt pleased with his willingness to not make my job any harder. Suddenly I noted a fourth presence breach the ward, this one completely tripping it though. I found an unordinary amount of rage pass through my mind at the sight of such sloppy work. The girl whose henchman shot me quickly stopped her healing session and prepared for battle.

This new presence just swaggered forward without a care in the world, a faint familiarity to him too, but this one resembling a certain organization that harbored a certain sentry. I sighed lightly and watched for an opening. The presence skirted the edges of the shelf they were on as it made no attempt to hide itself. “We meet yet again oh-so-high priest, have you missed me?”