Mehily was following a hunch. It wasn’t much. actually, it was basically nothing, but it was not factually nothing, which was what she would have had otherwise. Aclysia had fled several days ago. Tomorrow would be the Day of the First Ascension. Then they would have all the resources to concentrate on searching for the three escaped or revived targets again.

That was for the Church at large. Mehily herself had little to do these days. The Cardinal had kept her close, which honoured her to no end. He must have seen something in her or, at the very least, wanted to talk in confidentiality about these current affairs with someone that wasn’t Evmeria. That second explanation seemed more likely, given the Inquisitor’s zealotry.

A zealotry, Mehily confessed at one of these talks, that she wished she herself could maintain. “I still feel honest disgust at Reysha’s choice of company. I understand the need to catch the slime, even if I don’t entirely know what it is you fear he knows. The angel’s love for it is odd to me. However, I can no longer bring myself to just accept all of these things as wrong…”

It had gnawed at her, doubt, it was an emotion she had buried under mountains of prayers. Then, after she had been spared by a monster, under the purpose the Church gave her. Now that her world-view was shook by the slime not being a true monster, neither prayers nor purpose prevented the doubt from creeping into her thoughts, bubbling to the surface.

She had told the Cardinal all of this with a hanging head.

“Good,” was the last answer she had expected.

“Good, your holiness?” she had raised her head and furrowed her eyebrows. They were a bit thicker than the average woman’s, so the expression had carried her confusion quite clearly.

“What is faith, Mehily?” the Cardinal had asked, grabbing two cups. He set them down and they were miraculously filled with a liquid. It smelled sweet and looked like wine, a reddish-purple colour. It was one of the many forms Ambrosia took, holy food and drink that higher-level Priests could create. At the level of Remezan’s ability, it could be used as a complete replacement of normal nourishment.

“Belief in the word of the gods, your holiness,” she had answered without a moment’s hesitation, causing the Cardinal to shake his head. “Is my definition wrong?” she had been confused by this reaction. It was what the Priest’s codex had taught her.

“No, it is exactly correct, but you make the same mistake as the faithless and the neophytes always do,” he had sighed. “You repeat, but you do not understand. You add silent words that change the meaning of the entire definition…” She had still been confused, so the Cardinal had added a little more. “The gods are no tyrants, Mehily. That is the only hint I want to give you. Even Jersoja, strictest among the gods, has never endorsed a tyrant.”

‘Tyrant…’ Mehily had since thought about this and today was no different. What had the Cardinal meant? What was a tyrant? Somebody who suppressed his people to keep himself in absolute power. What was faith? Belief in the word the gods. What silent word was it that the Cardinal meant she added?

The answer seemed to swim at the edge of her mind and elude her whenever she grasped for it. Did she even want to catch it? It seemed to be uncertain out there, beyond her horizon. She would step into a sea of things she did not know. Worse yet, a place where she couldn't infer new things properly from her previous knowledge. It was fear that stifled her, fear of the unknown.

It felt like she was gazing into the darkness between the branches.

Yet, the darkness inside her mind seemed tiny, incomprehensibly unimportant, compared to the darkness beyond the Omniverse.

The world seemed to be dominated by darkness in every aspect. Corners of her mind unexplored and dangerous. Corners of the world unexplored and hungering. Starving. Waiting for somebody to look at them, creating new, further corners, an endless carpet of unanswered eventualities that only multiplied with each new question and even answer introduced into the vast carpet of reality. Even just remembering that tiny bit she had seen, it was gnawing at her mind. The hand she touched the door with seemed to tingle and then…

She shook her head and concentrated on her task at hand. All of these things had to wait. Maybe. Her mind was still involuntarily swarming around the questions, as she walked down the dirt road. She had disliked marching previously. Being outside the cities, where the streets were swept regularly, caused the rim of her robes to stain with particles of dust and samp dirt, not quite qualifying to be called mud. This was especially true around here, on the roads that separated farms, where grass had made room for crops, less reliant on sealing up the ground.

Warriors and even other mages tended to not care about the dirt. On their leather or coloured cloth, it didn’t show a lot. On Mehily’s white priest robe, bleached completely with not a single decoration, every bit of dirt ruined the pristine white. There were no blue stripes on her. For the moment, she had taken off the colours of Jersoja, as she couldn’t bear to wear his colour while she didn’t understand his words. Oddly enough this, too, the Cardinal had approved of, just like this suggestion when she had made it.

There was a report made to the city guard that clothes had been stolen, not the most unusual thing. People hung out their clothes to dry in the sun, often leaving them out overnight. Be it jesting Rogues in training, mischievous kids, or confused drunks, clothes disappeared every now and again. It was often annoying, but more often ignored.

This time, a dress had been stolen that seemed to have some sentimental value, so the wife had urged her man to make the report on his next trip to the city. Nobody really guessed anything would come of it, but it couldn’t hurt to try. Mehily had happened to ask about exactly things like this a few hours later.

The logic was quite easy, Aclysia would need to wear something. Angels of the God of Arts and Actors were universally known for their distaste to be naked. That could be seen as a common sense thing, but angels were under no obligation to obey common sense. It largely depended on their creator what personality traits they would display. For Hashahin, his direct creations usually were dedicated to their one role in life to a degree other might find absurd, Mehily not being one of them, or wore many faces. In either case, their naked bodies were not the usual canvas they used to display their acting.

Aclysia was, quite clearly, the former type. Nothing of the way she had carried herself had ever shown her to be someone who acted out other characteristics than her dedicated love and respect for life. Even the way she fled had been accurate to her, taking the road most harmful to herself in order to avoid making things difficult for others.

‘Just what have we destroyed?’ Mehily wondered, for maybe the hundredth time, as she trotted along.

It was just a hunch that Aclysia had stolen that dress. There was no way to know for certain. As a matter of fact, it was entirely unlikely that she had. Even so, Mehily wanted to see for herself. That she was on her own, had several reasons. They couldn’t move as quickly as a group. They were easily spotted as a group. Since she could just fly away once she spotted them, actually trying to catch her was unrealistic. Indeed, Mehily didn’t want to catch the metal fairy at all.

She just wanted to tell her a simple thing. A simple thing that she shouted at the top of her lungs, now that she had arrived in the area. It made her look like a madwoman to those farmers around going after their daywork, but that didn’t matter. She had accepted that her path as a Priest would sometimes earn her questioning gazes or even scorn. Despite her reason for this, her shaken faith, her resolve remained.

It was something that Aclysia wouldn’t hear for as long as she avoided people. Something that she needed to hear and that may yet salvage this situation, at least to some degree. “APEXUS IS ALIVE, DO YOU HEAR, ACLYSIA? APEXUS IS ALIVE!”