Cardinal Remezan slowly exhaled and opened his eyes. They burned a little bit, the lack of sleep making itself apparent. Trying to catch some more sleep before the evening of the festivities came had been a failure. Regardless of that, he raised his upper body from the frame of the bed. It creaked somewhat, as it had for several years now. His predecessor would have bought a new bed with as little as that, but the dark-bearded man was of the mind that things should be kept until they collapsed.

There were two kinds of thoughts about luxury in the Church, Remezan had found over the years. One was that the men of the holy word should live with humility, using only what they needed. The other was that the Church should display its wealth to show the grandeur of divinity. As he had found, people of the latter belief often stuffed their rooms, which no one would ever see aside from themselves and their closest acquaintances, with untold amounts of luxury.

Someone of that faction would have countered that the humble tended to create very scarcely decorated churches. Both would have been right. Remezan was somewhat famous amongst his fellow Cardinals for being exceptionally stingy. Everything wondrous about the church building here on Ctania was from his predecessor, including the terribly luxurious room for divine messengers.

Remezan was not one to destroy beauty that already existed. At least not where it was publicly available. For his own rooms, however, he had thrown out everything that wasn’t needed, sold it, and oftentimes replaced it with a cheaper variant. He preferred sleeping on hard mattresses anyway.

Just today, his back hurt. He rubbed his head with both hands as he pulled the magic out of the air around him. It flowed through his blessed spark on a metaphysical layer and through his magical cortex on the physical layer. In humans, the organ laid right behind the sternum, and wasn’t particularly large. Surprisingly durable though, as Remezan himself had found out on several occasions where his chest had been shattered. 9 broken ribs and sternum, one of the bone shards had pierced the organ, temporarily disabling him from using magic.

The magic flowed out of his hands and back into his body, now shaped into a proper healing spell. No permanent replacement for sleep, but good enough for the day. He got up and looked into the mirror. The oddly square scar from the hammer that had been used for aforementioned wound accompanied the naturally light-brown man to this day. As did a number of other ones, scattered all over his broad frame.

Every one of the white or red streaks seemed to ache today especially.. One would think that a Priest wouldn’t bear scars, were they healers themselves, but sometimes a wound was left to fester for long enough due to various circumstances. The Omniverse wasn’t a forgiving place.

‘I miss those circumstances,’ the Cardinal thought and sighed as he opened a door and found himself in a room with a deep stone tub in the ground. It was filled with lukewarm water. He had been stuck on this Safe Leaf for years now. At the start, he had embraced the vacation, but he was slowly feeling the boredom settle in. His task was of immense importance, but it was also one that shackled him to this location. Someone had to do it and he had no intent to forsake this post, at least not before he had confirmation that somebody would take over.

Regardless, he had been safe for so long that he barely knew what fighting felt like anymore. The taste of blood in his mouth, the screams of aggression and the trembling fist when he held back his power before the final confrontation. Joking with his comrades around a campfire. Barely escaping a trap inside a dungeon and feeling the rush of being alive. Only the despair of losing someone, he did not miss. He would have been a monster to.

After taking a quick bath, he dressed himself. The robe he put on, he also felt unnecessarily decorated. It was a white base, like all Priests, that was where it started. Producing a pure white robe was unnecessary work, he would have been all fine with grey. The lines stretching over it were fine. Icy blue, a dark, leafy green and rust red, three colours ran in parallel. Then there was the golden embroidery all over it. Again, unnecessary embellishments.

However, these were tradition and Remezan valued those quite highly. He still questioned them from time to time, wondering if they were good as they were or where they might be able to improve them a little bit. For this one, he begrudgingly agreed that it was a good look for a Cardinal to have, was it so easy to discern them from other people.

In his clothes and dry again, he stepped over to his private altar. Three figures had been put there, each on a small tower, one taller than another. A Cardinal usually worshipped three gods, but they valued them differently. Although the fact that there were 33 Cardinals could easily lead to the idea that each god had their own Cardinal as a main worshipper, this was actually false. In reality, it was just being recognized by the 3 gods, no matter which, that made someone eligible to be a Cardinal. From there, it was being appointed by one of the 11 Ecclesiarches.

For Remezan, his three gods were, in ascending order: Jersoja, symbolized by a flawless block of glass on an icy blue pedestal, god of Priests and Purity, Hesta, symbolized by a decorated lantern on a rust red pedestal, goddess of Friends and Festivities and, on top, Imk, symbolized by an empty compass on a deep green pedestal, god of Where and When. Two things that the Cardinal found himself asking quite frequently in his youth and even now.

“Let your teachings make this another fruitful day,” Remezan finished his morning prayer. He had stopped asking for their guidance in most cases. The gods were sworn to not meddle in the affairs of mortals too much and almost never directly. Asking for their help for something that had to do with the Church was one thing that they would sometimes answer. At least, their angels would. For personal things, the Cardinal had found that sticking to their teachings as guiding principles was the truly important thing.

He left his quarters and immediately found himself greeted by Evmeria. The Inquisitor met him not in the clothes of a Priest, as she usually wore in these sacred halls, but in the charred leather armour of an Inquisitor. Her eyes, or the orbs of glass that had replaced them, were hidden behind a black strip of linen.

“You require proper rest, your holiness,” the black-haired woman immediately let him know. With her sight of faith, she could immediately see the miracle he had used on himself and drew the proper conclusion from it.

“I know,” Remezan replied with calm dismissal. Evmeria wasn’t someone he would have liked around him if he had the choice. She embodied the dogmatic side of the Church and that was also the reason why he had no choice. Having someone like her around was a necessity, someone who would follow orders without thinking about them and had the powers of unwavering, absolute faith in the gods. Inquisitors were their own beasts, even amongst the people of the Church they were looked at as the boiled down essence of their ideals and their illogical manifestation. As an Inquisitor sworn to Jersoja, Evmeria was all flesh and faith.

If she minded the way the Cardinal treated her, the Inquisitor hid it behind her usual wall of coldness. “All preparations have been made. If you’re ready, we can go and worship the lord of Death and Decay, as is proper.”

The Cardinal often wondered why the first ascended god had that particular moniker. A god of autumn, of death and of decay. What sort of light did it put on the universe that the Progenitor was followed by such a deity, not by Meriala, the first summer goddess, of Hope and Humility? Was it truly just a coincidence or was there something more to that?

“Let us go,” he had been pondering that for years and he would likely not arrive at a definitive answer in his lifetime. Best he could do was write it all down and hope those thoughts would let someone else further refine them. His latest book was almost filled. Soon he would need to send someone to Illumia for it to be secured in the library. ‘Perhaps Mehily would be a good candidate for that…’ he thought. He hadn’t known the Priestess for long but she displayed potential. Perhaps seeing the heart of their faith would help her development.

Thinking about Mehily, the Cardinal spotted her outside the temple. He just had to look outside the window. She was next to some hooded figure, looking a bit doubtful, her lips moving in slow speech. Remezan didn’t have a lot of time to inspect either her or her companion for too long, he had other things on his mind as he approached the gate that led to the outside.

He stopped at the frame of the door for a moment, two guards taking position at his side. Even though they weren’t standing shoulder to shoulder, they could all pass the gate at the same time, broad as it was. The reason for Remezan’s hesitation wasn’t that he was waiting for the guards, however.

He could feel it. The constant drain that he, himself had bound himself to. In recent days it had been particularly strong, by courtesy of himself increasing the drain. Now that he was about to separate himself from that drain, he felt nervous. Although he had never seen the creature he was keeping shackled, only the alter-ego that had put shackles on. Although he had only heard the tales of his misdeeds. Although he himself was strong beyond many. Despite all of that, Remezan feared the consequences of a single misstep.

The sun was slowly closing in on the horizon. ‘Just a few minutes, forty at most,’ he told himself. There was no telling how long he could actually stay away. There were no other prisons like this, tests had never been made. No, in all likelihood, there were other prisons like this, the Omniverse was too vast not to, however they were so exceedingly rare that the Cardinal wasn’t aware of any. Aside from that, those others were likely housing a creature the gods had made to stay in such a confinement, not this special case of a sinner.

Thirty minutes was just what they knew for certain would work, as the then unnamed alter-ego had assured them as much. Forty was what that could be stretched to in desperate cases.

‘That the sinner is only contained by his own sin sounds like a failure of the Church’s power…’ the Cardinal thought then finally separated himself from the contraption that laid beneath the building and stepped into the outside.

At first, it was just a boring march, surrounded by his guards. Mehily walked close, obviously trying to get his attention. However, he could not afford any kind of delay right now. “Tell her to wait,” Remezan told Evmeria, who obeyed immediately and caught the Priestess halfway. Remezan kept on walking, not paying further attention and closing in on the place of the festival, just a short march away.

The faithful cheered when they saw him and even those who lived by their own values rather than looking for guidance by the gods let a couple claps be heard. There were many, surrounding the street, leaving him a clear path down to the heart of the festivities. With large steps, quick but not hurried, Remezan walked down the cobblestone, waving and smiling at the peasants, soldiers, adventurers and merchants alike.

With surprise and happiness, Remezan observed the scope of the festivities. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of tents had been pitched in a large circle around the midpoint between church and city. They were brown like the earth, the colour of autumn. Scary masks were sold or lended, depicting the ghastly face of Trember. Depictions of death, usually in quite whimsical and comedic fashions, stood all around. Skeletons that took funny poses, people with zombie masks behaving stupidly, a person in a black cloak reciting dark poems to little children.

The god of this day was a gloomy one, but the people of this leaf were not. Between all of the thematic things were the usual displays accompanying a great festivity. Succulent food, drink, music and dance, it all intensified the further away from the church he walked.

His target was the centre, a round plaza on which a small podium had been put up. Right there, he would hold his speech.