The Caël oathholder had been trussed up, bound by thin ropes at his wrists, ankles, knees, elbows, and basically everywhere across his limbs. His robes had been removed, a simple bloodstained shirt and trousers underneath, and from the looks of it he’d been healed for the time being. Nothing seemed broken, at least, though he was limp and apparently unconscious.

“You sure ropes that thin will hold a Caël oath?” I asked. “Those can’t be wider than my fingers.”

Sure, Caël’s focus was movement, not strength, but those oathholders had a nasty tendency to break free from any form of imprisonment.

“I made them myself,” someone said. “They’ll hold.”

I looked towards the sound, turning away Jasmine. The voice had come from a woman, probably a few years older than me. Messy hair, tired eyes, and posture that had probably come from sleepless nights spent hunched over a stack of papers— yeah, this was probably a University graduate.

“Aedi oathholder?” I asked.

“Yes ma’am,” she said, looking down. “With a specialization in uh, in restrainment devices.”

What’s your story? Sure, non-lethal devices generally weren’t used by the military, but there were surely applications for it in the kingdom that would be safer and far better paid than adventuring. They were always looking for more Aedi oaths.

Whatever. If nothing went drastically wrong, I would never speak to these adventurers again.

“I’m going to wake him up now,” a man said. The same adventurer that we’d first seen, no longer wearing the armor that must’ve shattered over the course of the fight. The Nacea oath, who had been thrown through a wall in front of me and Jasmine.

The Nacea oathholder passed a hand over the Caël oath’s forehead, and the latter’s eyes flew open, a gasp escaping his breath.

“Good morning, you pathetic fuck.” This from the man who’d asked if I was awake earlier. Michael, I was pretty sure, standing a little bit to the side from us.

The oathholder in question barked out a laugh. “I’m sure you saying that makes your friends feel better.”

He turned his head, indicating the field where two of the adventurers had died.

Michael’s face tightened with rage, and he blurred, travelling five meters in the span of an instant.

“We killed eight of yours, gods damn you!” he shouted, sounding simultaneously like he was about to strangle the last oathholder and like he was on the verge of tears. “You piece of shit!”

“Michael,” the Aedi oath said. “Come on. Let’s go back to the inn and calm down a little.”

From the looks of it, this wasn’t the first job on which a provocation like this had happened. Michael sighed and turned away, the two of them walking away. He didn’t seem any calmer, but at least his teammates knew better than to let him continue being provoked.

“Your friends died like cattle,” our captive shouted. “Their deaths were not even worthy for-“

The last remaining adventurer socked him in the face.

“Don’t mistake calmness for tolerance,” he growled.

“This is the last remaining enemy, yes?” I asked, ignoring the almost palpable tension in the air.

“Yes,” Jasmine replied. “This is the first conversation we’ve managed to have.”

“Alright,” I said. “Nacea oath. Uhh…”

“John,” he filled in. “John Qinan.”

“Before I talk to this idiot,” I said, cocking my head at the captive mage, who was still reeling from Qinan’s punch, “Why don’t you tell me something, adventurer Qinan?”

Jasmine nudged me lightly.

“I have way too many questions and they keep on adding up,” I told her. “I’m going to get this one answered while I still can.”

“You want to know why they chased and fought us.” It wasn’t a question.

I nodded.

“We’re class five to six oathholders,” Qinan said. “Me, Michael, Andra, and Benjamin have been adventuring for a few years now, and Kara was a solo class six oathholder that joined us for the job.”

“Andra is the Aedi oathholder,” Jasmine supplied. “Benjamin was sworn to Ditas, and I’m not sure what Kara was.”

Benjamin and Kara were the two that had died, then. Had Benjamin been the one throwing exploding chunks of himself? It didn’t matter, now.

It said something about the power of the enemies, then, if they had come so close to totally wiping out five class five oathholders as well as our little duo.

“You-“

The captive Caël oath didn’t get out another word before Qinan punched him again. I was pretty sure I heard something crack, this time.

“You talk when we need you to talk,” he ordered. “Until then, stay silent.”

Nacea oaths couldn’t influence the body as freely as Ditas oaths, but they were menders and that meant they could mend something wrong.

Qinan cast another healing spell, and the captive fell silent.

“As I was saying,” he sighed. “We were on a job for the TAG. Cultists took over a village just past the Yelian border. Our intel told us that they were relatively low-level aside for one or two that might’ve been their leader. Pretty standard stuff, for our class.”

“With you so far.”

“Our intel wasn’t complete. We cleared out the cultists in the village, but a whole other nest of them in the woods nearby ambushed us an hour afterward. We brought three full adventuring parties in, and only we came out.”

“That explains your end,” I said, accepting his words. “A failure on the Guild’s part, for sure.”

“I still don’t know who they were,” Qinan sighed.

“And that’s what we have him for,” I said. “Could we unsilence him? Get an answer or two, maybe.”

Qinan nodded, and he reversed his spell from earlier.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, even as he patched over his earlier ‘healing’ of the cultist’s mouth.

“We are everyone and no one,” the cultist recited, face stretched in a disturbingly wide sneer. “We kill, we take, and one day we will rise.”

“Come to think of it,” I noted, “They did refer to a figure as ‘the rising god’ earlier.”

“Their idol,” Jasmine said. “The god they worship.”

“Oh, he’s no god, not yet.” The cultist laughed, and it sounded more like a horse’s bray than a true laugh of joy. “That part comes later.”

“Who the hell is he, then?” Qinan asked.

“Look far enough east and you’ll see, healer boy,” the cultist said. “And let me tell you this—he’ll see you looooong before you see him. He already sees you.”

“Are there more cultists of your rising god nearby?” I asked.

“Oh, lots and lots.” He had seemed surprisingly willing to divulge information about his cult so far, but his answer to this question was frustratingly vague.

“If he won’t talk anymore, we can just open him up,” I said. “We have you two, we can restore any torture we do.”

“Oh, you won’t need to do that, no no,” the cultist interjected, feral eyes glinting in the morning sun. “He knows your faces now. A little oath, you see, and he can see through all of his. And he’ll remember this, oh yes he will, and so will the next dozen, hundred, thousand of us. You better sleep with one eye open at night, kids—“

I patted Jasmine on the shoulder and stepped forward, lifting my arm off her. I still had a knife at my waist. I tried to pull magic together but found it unavailable for the time being, something inside me somehow telling me it would be back soon. Fine then, that was another addition onto the price I’d paid for power. Nothing permanent, at least.

Instead, I just took out a naked blade.

“—until your mommy and daddy are crying for you to hel—“

I slashed the knife horizontally, opening the cultist’s throat, blood fountaining out as I cut.

I stepped back to avoid the bloodspray and almost fell over. Jasmine caught me.

“What did you just do?” Qinan said, horrified.

“Everything useful he could’ve given us was already given,” I said. “He outlived his purpose.”

“We could’ve found more—“

“Look,” I said. “Half of what he said was just pure bullshit. These guys weren’t your job, just go back and recuperate, okay?”

“I don’t want to be the kind of adventurer that murders prisoners,” Qinan said, voice quavering. “That’s not me.”

“And you don’t want to be the adventurer that couldn’t follow through on a kill and let their party die,” Jasmine said.

I turned my gaze to her. “Didn’t think you’d agree with me.”

“Sometimes,” she said, voice quiet but firm, “We need to be the one guiding the executioner’s blade. I dislike it, but from time to time we must.”

“What am I going to tell the others?” Qinan said. It was a little sad, really. In terms of raw magic power, he probably had more than double mine when not factoring in oath alignment, and yet he had been so easily cowed by the words of two objectively weaker than him.

“Tell them that you learned that we wiped out the last of the cultists in this region and that you all deserve to go home, get paid, and take a break,” Jasmine suggested.

“Agh… fine.” Qinan folded like a wet piece of paper, and he left without a further word.

“I don’t know if that’s true or not,” I said, once I was sure he was out of earshot. “Some of that was bullshit, but some definitely wasn’t.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

That figure that had been present when I had had my vision. That hadn’t been the god. It’d been an observer, someone from the outside looking in, perhaps even someone with the same oath.

I felt like I could almost feel its gaze on me, its unclear visage staring at me through the glassy eyes of the man I’d just executed.

“Let’s get out of here for now,” I said. “We have a package to deliver, and you still have a story to tell.”

“Let’s.”

Jasmine put her arm around my waist again, helping me walk, and we left the carnage behind us.

It had taken another hour to finally get everything sorted out, but we were on the move again. The stables had stayed relatively untouched, thank the gods, so there were no repairs or healing needed to get us going. Both of us were on the wagon, Jasmine holding the reins of our horse and me reclining next to the package, a ‘borrowed’ blanket from the now-ruined inn under me. The innkeeper had been none too happy with the way things had turned out, but Qinan had said there was someone at the TAG that would be able to reimburse him and that had been that. I’d told him that he could pay me back for saving his life by figuring things out with the inn, and we’d left shortly afterward.

“So,” I said. “About that Nacea oath.”

“Guess I can’t avoid it forever,” she lilted. I could almost hear her smile in her voice, even when her back was turned. “Alright. Do you know how Nacea oathholders form their contracts?”

“You save someone’s life, right?” I asked, readjusting my body to get a little more comfortable. “I think that might be in one of Professor Lasi’s textbooks.”

“Yes, you save someone’s life and divine access opens,” Jasmine said. “I saved someone, once. They don’t teach noble kids medical care for nothing, after all.”

I nodded along. That made sense so far— a noble’s estate had so many moving parts in it that it was rarer to not have a life threatening accident in any given year.

“I saved his life again, and again, and again,” Jasmine said, emphasizing the word ‘again’ slightly differently with each breath, “But in the end, it wasn’t enough.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was surprised to find that I truly was. I couldn’t quite bring myself to feel for someone I’d never met, but Jasmine’s story resonated with me on a level I couldn’t quite explain.

“Thank you,” Jasmine said. “It’s long in the past now, but it’s important background information.”

“There’s more to it.” I was stating the obvious. There was no way there wasn’t more when her oath was damaged.

“I should probably get this out of the way,” Jasmine said, voice tinged with hints of insecurity. “I, uh…”

“You’ve been dancing around your oaths for some time now,” I said, putting weight on the s in the word oaths. “Come on, out with it.”

“I was born Hyacinth Rayes,” Jasmine said. “I was misassigned. I formed an oath with Nacea when I was eight years old.”

“You were saving lives when you were eight?” I asked. “Gods, who are you?”

Jasmine turned to me and cocked an eyebrow. “Not going to comment on that first part?”

I waved her off dismissively. “You are who you are. The ignorant shits are few and far between these days, and you’ll never count me among their number.”

“Huh,” she said, sounding strangely relieved. “Thank you.”

“Anyway, eight years old?” Come to think about it, I’d done my fair share of abnormal activities when I was eight, but that was an entirely different story.

“It’s a long story, and one I’m not ready to share,” Jasmine said. “But I was a Nacea oathholder for years before I swore myself to Igni.”

“So I assume that’s how you fixed the whole being born with the wrong body issue,” I said.

“Yes. We could’ve had a doctor do the procedure, but my family insisted on me learning how to perform the transition on my own. It took a while.”

“What changed, to harm the oath?”

“It was… it must’ve been five— no, six years ago now,” Jasmine said, almost wistfully. “I was fifteen and my family’s designated healer. We had a job. We were clearing out one of the few remaining hostile branch families of House Byron. Do you know who they are?”

A jolt went up my spine, shocking me to the bone, but I controlled myself, ensured I didn’t react. It wasn’t too hard, given that I was still feeling the aftereffects of my oath alignment and could still barely move.

“They tried to instigate a coup a decade or so back, right?” I asked, hoping my voice didn’t betray me.

“Yes, that was them. They killed a lot of people in the process, and some of the Byron branch families managed to hide their support for them well. This particular one tried to pick up their fallen flag and take the kingdom again. They didn’t get very far, which is why House Rayes got thrown at them.”

“Something went wrong,” I surmised, trying to ignore the rising, angry heat in my chest. House Byron still survives on the back of traitors?

“They blew up their castle,” Jasmine admitted. “It took most of their own family out and a lot of our Altered, but they had a few survivors.”

“You’re an Igni oath now,” I said. “You were caught in the crossfire, then?”

“Everything was so chaotic that I didn’t even notice that my family’s party had made it out. I locked myself in a cellar to avoid the worst of the fighting, and the cellar wasn’t fireproof. It caught from a stray fireball.”

I winced. Igni oaths were usually formed in controlled burns, carefully crafted to ensure minimal harm to the oathholder and maximum connection to the god. The chances of forming a proper oath when being trapped by fire without harming the user were… not good.

“But you’re here today,” I said. “You made the oath inside a burning room? Gods damn, you were a tough kid.”

“I did,” Jasmine said. “And when I got out of that room I was pissed off and looking for blood.”

Ah.

“I found what I was looking for,” she said. “And the next day, the healing I had given to my family broke.”

“But the power didn’t completely go away?”

“It didn’t, and healing I’d done before that day didn’t break either. I don’t think I can properly express how relieved I was when the changes I’d made to myself stuck.”

“Nacea oaths help restore the body to what the soul believes it should be,” I told her, regurgitating a passage I’d read recently. “Your soul must’ve held firm to it.”

“And I’m grateful for—“

Jasmine paused and turned to her right, an unnaturally deep growl sounding from the side of the path. Almost casually, she drew her revolver and shot a brilliantly red bullet, the magic applied to it so intense that I could see the air flaming in its wake.

The growling stopped.

“We still do have a job to do,” Jasmine said. “Alright. I’ve told you my story. Are we good?”

She was still hiding something, I could tell. There were half-truths within white lies, a veil of secrecy cloaking another layer of her life. I didn’t think I could fully trust her, but then again, who was I to speak? Maybe she was keeping a dark secret of her past hidden, but I would be throwing stones in a glass house if I called her out on that. All I could do about it now was be ready and never let my guard down too far.

“We’re good,” I said. “Let’s get this job over with.”