The first one I approached was Bard, but in retrospect, he had a lot of things to do and not much to do with the actual process of scouting or guarding anything, so it should not have surprised me that he was dismissive of the idea that I could teach people anything. I might have done some strange things in Bard's eyes, but I wasn't special.

Not to be dissuaded by one bad encounter, that night I approached the nearest guard on watch and sat with him for a bit. We made idle chat for a bit--his name was Clent--and then I finally broached the topic, feeling more than a bit nervous.

"Before I came to Olesport," I said, "I met a god in the wild, who said he was the God of Eyes. Since then... especially when I pray to him, but I'd swear my sight is better. Night sight, too." I looked at him, then glanced around at the nearby tents. "The tent over there, with the flap open... I can just barely see the boots set inside from here."

Clent couldn't see that at all, but he crept over and confirmed for himself that the flap was open and boots were sitting just inside. He knew I had come from the other direction, more or less, and I'd gotten there after dark, so he was a bit impressed. Still, he didn't look all that interested. "You got some luck, I guess," he said. "Not all that fond of gods, myself."

"I'm not asking if you want to be a priest," I said, then gave him a grin. "I'm not, or not really. But I know he wants followers, and I think he'd be willing to help you on your night watch if you asked for it. I'm happy to know the Goddess of Blades is watching out for us, but there are animals and scouts out there too, right? Some dangers won't carry a blade with 'em."

He didn't give a committal answer, and after a bit, I moved on and repeated more or less the same spiel to another night watchman. This woman, named Tammy, was more receptive, and less than halfway through she bothered to ask me the god's name--"Xethram"--and she closed her eyes and tried a prayer. I felt the request, and offered just the slightest trickle of power in return, and when she opened her eyes again, I could somehow feel the difference--her eyes seemed to be radiating dark power, or perhaps absorbing more light than usual.

"I could get used to this," she said with a grin. "Feels like it's using essence, somehow, though. Might not be able to use it forever."

"Long as it helps," was all I said, and moved on to the next one.

Night guards were generally not the squad leader, so although I talked with people every night the next couple nights, it was usually different people on watch, and rarely someone I'd talked to in any capacity before. Somewhere under half of them were interested in my... err, my religion? I guess that's literally true, isn't it? Anyway, anyone who showed interest learned my name and tried it out. Each request did take a little bit of soulflame to grant, but I was pretty sure I got more back than it cost me--some blue flame for the initial request, and mostly silver flame afterwards, as people really appreciated not being alone in the dark.

In fact, I think the whole mood of the camp improved as the night guards stopped being quite so scared of the dark. The name Xethram started to spread without my active involvement, and people even prayed to me for mundane things--like being able to see straight when they had a headache, or being able to peep on members of the opposite sex.

I quickly realized that I didn't have to, and shouldn't, grant every request I got. Nevertheless, in my off time I considered what it would take to see through... things. Non-specific things. In case there was a request that I did want to grant. Hopefully, granting that request wouldn't require too much energy., because I was enjoying having a budget to spend.

After a good two weeks of sitting, though, the camp was getting restless, and we started to get messengers coming in from the east. More than likely, I thought, we would be moving on soon, so if I wanted to get some help from Alanna, it would have to be sooner rather than later.

That afternoon, in one of the downtimes when nothing was going on, I found a quiet place to pray. I found myself back at Alanna's Little God's Room, with her avatar sorting through requests. I had thought to get permission to speak with Lucile directly, but strangely enough, the Avatar Alanna responded to my request for knowledge directly, offering me a strange packet of godly energy that seemed like it could have just gotten sucked straight into my brain if I had let it.

Instead, though, I offered the flame as payment and retreated with my prize to my own Little Gods' Room. I ended up on top of the cliff, and was surprised to see that when I looked down, there were a small number of people at the bottom. They were mostly blind, stumbling around down there in what I assumed to be some kind of vaguely poetic metaphor for being lost in a dangerous world, but I didn't take much time to think about it. Instead, I left my godly Avatar on the edge of the cliff and hid in the spot behind the waterfall--the place where, in the real cliff, my actual body was.

For the purposes of the dream, though, the place behind the waterfall was my private room, the one that had been my hospital room before. Now, it was a muddled metaphor full of lots of mismatched pieces and parts, but I didn't take the time to try to straighten it out.

Alanna's package was tightly bundled knowledge, and it actually took some soulflame on my part to preserve the package while opening it, so that I could read it once now and again later. This, I think, was wise, because the package contained many books' worth of knowledge, and although I was able to absorb the knowledge, it was a lot like reading that damned book on Wind Magic: I couldn't understand the first half because it was organized poorly, and only after reading the second half would the first part make any sense. Because it was magic, though, and not an object, the parts that didn't make sense simply didn't get absorbed, and I was left with the impression that there was more to know that I hadn't gotten.

The basics, though, were these: Silver Essence was indeed the essence of Light... and Darkness, which were two halves of the same, but treated very differently for reasons that weren't clear. More importantly, Silver Essence carried something... more than heat, or color, or power. It carried emotion, feeling, even knowledge; it was used to push feelings and thoughts at others, both to help communicate, and also to ensorcel people and things against their will.

Which was... interesting. It definitely explained why the martial arts instructor had been using it the way she did.

Also in the packet was just a little bit more about fire magic. Alanna, Goddess of Light apparently had a lot more knowledge about Light than Fire, but since I already understood a bit about fire magic, I absorbed more of what was in the packet. On the one hand, yes, red essence was used to destroy, but it was also commonly used as fuel--some people even used red essence to help keep up their stamina on a long run, things like that. I guess that explained the instructor packing it into her muscles before letting the rest discharge into the target, but it still seemed strange to me that the same substance, if you could call it that, could both tear matter apart like an explosive and also belonged inside the body.

Still brooding, I left the re-packaged bundle of data inside my mental temple and returned to my body, finding that more time had passed than I'd thought; it was getting close to meal time already. I did my checks on our supplies again quickly, then sat and thought about what I'd learned.

The most important thing I seen in the data packet was that I was right: it was easy to absorb silver essence wrong, and if I'd done it with no training, I would have put weird foreign feelings and... things into my Spark. The "right way" to do it was simple enough, basically the same as other elements but with the added step of trying to clean the essence before I stored it... but without that knowledge, I could have easily made things hard on myself later.

So whenever I wasn't on duty, I tried to collect clean silver essence, and then at night went back to spreading the word of Xethram among the night guards.

One of the people on guard duty tonight was Tammy, and I sat down to talk to her again. Apparently she had very much appreciated the help and spread the word to several others, and now she was curious what my relationship was with the god.

I'd prepared a lie, of course, but not really practiced it. I had to take it slow, acting like I was uncertain, in hopes that would cover up that I wasn't really a great liar. In the old world, I'd been a moderately hard-working office worker, but not the kind who delved into office politics or he-said she-said. I preferred to keep my nose in my own business... and that left me without a lot of the skills that I needed now.

"Xethram... watches out for me, I suppose," I said cautiously. "I think he was lost, for a while. I know I was lost, when he found me. I don't think most people had heard of him..." I wanted to say that the General had, but then I would have to explain why I met with the General. "...although some people have, aside from me. But I definitely feel like he's been acting through me, around me. Maybe he doesn't have may followers and is just using me to get more? I have no idea."

"Sounds like maybe you have an Angel following you." Tammy stirred the fire with a stick. "Probably not the god himself. I hear that happens to folk, the ones they call Vicars. Angels are spirits, you know, fallen ones who dedicated their soul to a god. They can't come down and help on their own, so they have to live vicariously through someone, and that's a Vicar." She nodded to herself, as though satisfied.

"I'd heard the term, but didn't know what it meant." I looked into the fire, thinking about General Murn, who was actually the Goddess of Blades. That had been her explanation. Why had I not heard something similar from Alanna? Maybe she just didn't interfere much. She had left Mel alone on the beach, even...

"Yeah, religious folks can get weird. But you know when a Vicar is real, because the world changes around them, and it's not them doing it. Weird magic, sometimes. Churches form around people like that; the person speaks for the angel, the angel speaks for the god. Olissandra was supposed to be a Vicar of Alanna. She and her husband set a whole lot of things in motion back then... before they split up." Tammy shook her head. "Men..."

I had frozen in place. Was Olissandra another one of Lucile's past lives? Another mortal husband... and clearly, she had left a whole lineage of people, a whole trading clan, perhaps. The Earth god had sneered at her for "falling in love again," and she'd talked about being betrayed, but I had assumed that was all about the Xerana stuff. If Olissandra followed Alanna, not Xerana, that was a different thing entirely.

"You alright?" Tammy looked mildly curious.

"Yeah. Just thinking about... someone I knew in the past." That was true but would definitely be misleading.

"If you love her, don't betray her." Tammy took her fire-stirring stick and tossed it into the flames. "People who do that are trash."

"I'll keep that in mind." I stood, knowing that she'd misunderstand, but I needed to think. Or, if I couldn't do that, at least I should get more followers. That would take my mind off of this stuff... for now.