Chapter 4: The Cult of Abadeth

In hindsight, going after my sister immediately might have been the smart thing to do. Barring that the other real good option for me would have been to sneak close enough to father’s office to eavesdrop on his conversation with the priests using my [Observe] skill. However to my shame I did neither of those things. Instead I just sat on that couch for the better part of half an hour, indecision and worry pulling me in different directions.

Should I go after Catherine? Was it better to give her space? Eavesdropping in on a private meeting was a serious violation of privacy, was I willing to go that far? If it was serious father would surely tell us what the priests wanted, right? Or was it better to take matters into my own hands?

As much as I did not particularly wish to still be in the legions, I could not deny that I dearly missed parts of it now that I was back in civilian life. Navigating social situations there was relatively straightforward. The lines were clear. Then, once you were given a mission, it was just a matter of getting it done by any means necessary. Feelings? Giving offense? Propriety and respect? All things I constantly had to think about and balance now that I was back in civilization. All things that had been simple if somewhat rigid when in the service of the empire.

Still, minding all of those things was part of what it meant to be civilized. Civilization was important. It was what kept us safe from the savage barbarians pressing in on the empire from all directions, from Juselva, to Sindhu, to Still Lakes and more. Civilization was what separated good men from men who acted little better than beasts. It was the organized structure of the empire that, quite literally, was needed to stabilize the world and keep it from being overrun by magic beasts and raw magic. So, as much as I could, I wanted to uphold the rules and order that ultimately kept the empire and civilization itself together.

Still. I had to protect my family. I had a bad feeling and I could not quite convince myself that the priest’s presence was anything but a danger. But what kind of danger? And how severe was it, really?

I was still frozen in place when I heard the faint noises of people leaving and the front door being open and shut. That was in part what I had been waiting for. Perhaps I had been unwilling to eavesdrop on my father, but I sure as hells wasn’t above marching into his office and demanding answers from him now that they were gone.

If those priests were a threat to our family – to Catherine – then I needed to know about it. And I needed to know about it now.

Standing up I quickly marched to my father’s office. I considered knocking before discarding propriety and simply opening the door. My father was there, still sitting behind his desk, his face looking as haunted and troubled as I had ever seen it.

“Father?” I asked slowly, some of the fire and urgency leaving me at seeing his state.

Orlandus looked up, finally seeming to notice me standing in his doorway. His expression quickly turned to a frown as spoke to me, seemingly still distracted. “What is it boy? Unless it’s an emergency I don’t have time for you right now. Go away and don’t bother me until later with whatever it is.”

Anger flashed in my chest, hot and unexpected. He’s really just going to pretend that nothing is going on? Or is he just thinking of hiding whatever this is from me?

“I know about the priests that just left, father,” I said to him, doing my best to keep a tight reign on my temper. “What did they want?”

Orlandus said nothing for a few long moments and I could practically see him running calculations behind his eyes. “I’m a merchant boy, what do you think? They had a very special order they wanted to place that they were feeling jittery about. Occasionally one needs to make concessions for skittish customers. Now was that all you wanted to bother me with? Or was there something else?”

I loved my father. Or at least, I thought I did. But in that moment I wanted nothing more than to grab my sword and run it through his fat, lying head.

“They weren’t here for merchandise,” I ground out through clenched teeth. “This was about something that concerns our family. Something serious. What was it?”

Orlandus blinked at my tone before scowling. “I told you, it was just business. And you have no right to speak to me that wa-”

“Lie to me one more time and I will beat you within an inch of your life.”

I could see it clear as day on his face, the moment he realized I was being deathly serious. I also thought I could see it the moment he began to remember that I was a [Level 20] in a purely combat class, and that I was no stranger to inflicting catastrophic violence on others when I chose to do so. There was a spark of alarm and fear on his face, and I would be lying if I said a part of me didn’t find that immensely satisfying.

“I’m your pater familias,” he said, but his protestation sounded weak to my ears.

“What they had to say, it involved Catherine somehow, didn’t it?” I said, ignoring him and voicing my suspicions out loud. The look on his face told me all I needed to know. My jaw clenched so hard I thought that my teeth might crack. “Tell me now, or you and I are going to have a lot more than just words.”

Orlandus tried to glare at me one more time, but my own stare was utterly unyielding. After a few seconds, my father seemed to deflate as he looked away. He suddenly looked ten years older, and more fragile than I had ever seen him. My father bent down to open a drawer and came up with a glass and a bottle of what I recognized as expensive rum imported from Ellade. He poured himself a very generous measure and slammed it down in one go before turning back to look at me.

“Damn you, boy,” he said in a low voice. “You’re right. They were here about Catherine. Damn useless girl will be the death of me.”

At hearing his words the cold knives tearing at my insides came back. “What did they want?”

Orlandus hesitated, a far away look on his face before he answered. “Apparently, someone practicing their [Observe] skill around town happened to use it on Catherine yesterday. It turns out she is [Cursed].”

“[Cursed]?” I replied in shock. Of all the things I might have expected, that had certainly not been one of them. “What do you mean she is [Cursed]?”

“She’s [Cursed] boy, how much more self explanatory can it be?” Orlandus growled. The he sighed tiredly and poured himself another drink. “Apparently it’s not just any [Curse]. Not the sort of thing that can be broken by priests or magic users. Something about her [Curse] being a part of her, and not something that was cast on her from the outside.”

“What is it called?” I said, my voice going quiet as I struggled to process all of this. “What does it do?”

“That second part I wasn’t too clear about,” Orlandus said with a tired shrug. “The [Curse] apparently just gives her a title, though the priests were kind of dodgy on what effects having that title would have on her. Or maybe they simply didn’t know. Her [Curse] gives her a title that names her the [Second Herald of the End].”

Hearing that title sent a chill all the way through me. That was about as ominous a title as a person could get. I had to swallow down a lump in my throat before speaking. “What does that mean?”

Orlandus shrugged helplessly and took another drink. “They were kind of vague about that, too. The gist of it seemed to be that she is now supposed to be a symbol of the end of days. Or a herald of the end of the world. Or the person who is destined to bring about the end of the world. Or something. They said something about the signs being clear but also that they needed to do more research. Their explanation seemed far from convincing to me, but the three of them absolutely believed their nonsense wholeheartedly. That much I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt. They were very clear in how they saw the situation. To them, Catherine’s [Curse] makes her a clear and present danger to the stability of the world. Somehow. They were rather thin on any details or specifics.”

“They think this [Curse] makes her a threat to the stability of the world?” I asked, incredulous.

“That’s what they said,” said Orlandus with a scoff, reaching for another drink. “Take from that what you will.”

This was insane. How could one girl be a threat to the stability of the whole world, curse or no curse? It went counter to everything that everyone knew about cosmology. Every educated person in the empire knew how the world would eventually end. No matter how much the empire tries to prevent it, eventually, our plane will one day become overwhelmed and oversaturated with magic until it was completely overrun with magical anomalies and magic beasts. When that occurred this plane, the Imperial Plane, the plane of Oolansta, will no longer be suitable for human and other intelligent life. This was well known to be the ultimate fate of all planes. The empire had sent countless expeditions to the ruins of other magic oversaturated planes and confirmed this to be the fate of nearly every dead world out there in the wider universe. Never mind the countless prophecies and revelations that our plane would one day end up no different from any other. The end of the world was an event that was going to occur on a plane wide scale. How could anyone think one eleven year old commoner girl could have any influence over something so unfathomably vast and far reaching?

Then I remembered that these were Priests of Abadeth, Iskander’s so-called God of Purification and Prophecy. The fact that the priests were probably basing their beliefs on some kind of prophecy given by Abadeth gave me pause, but only for a minute. The fact was that Abadeth was not one of the eight children of the Heaven King and the Earth Mother who then went on to create our plane and all the intelligent races in it. He wasn’t even one of the sixty-four children of the Eight who created the Divine System to allow the intelligent races to survive and thrive in this hostile world filled with magic. No, Abadeth was simply one of the countless descendants of the Sixty-Four. Divine? Absolutely. Powerful? Undeniably. Influential? Well, he was the most widely worshiped god in Iskander if you did not count the Celestial Family. But did I consider his words flawless, his will absolute? No. Abadeth was nothing special. He wasn’t one of the Celestial Family, which encompassed the inscrutable First God down to the Sixty-Four. Abadeth was rumored to sometimes directly communicate with his clergy, but that only made him lesser, not more. No. I would not be goaded into condemning my sister on the word of some lesser god and his priests.

“Well, I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that the priests didn’t show up on our doorstep with soldiers and pitch forks,” I said dryly with a frown on my face. “But obviously they’ll want to do something. What were their demands?”

Orlandus hesitated before answering, eyeing me carefully. “They asked – but practically demanded, really – that I surrender custody of Catherine to the Cult of Abadeth.”

My reaction was instantaneous and explosive. “Absolutely not!”

“Relax, I didn’t agree to anything,” said Orlandus, his eyes scrutinizing. “I put them off. Told them I needed time to consider the situation carefully. We have until tomorrow to give them our decision.”

“And what happens tomorrow if we don’t give up Cat?” I asked, my hands balling into fists.

“They’ll take action, but not the brutish kind you’re thinking of. These are civilized men,” father said, his eyes flicking to my fists. “No, if I don’t give her up voluntarily they’ll go to the local provincial magistrate. According to them, there are laws in the books that allow the Cult of Abadeth a great deal of power and leeway when it comes to certain religious matters across all of Iskander. They’re confident they have the legal standing to force the issue. If they can get a magistrate to order us to surrender custody of Catherine to the cult on theological grounds, then well, that will be that.”

That… that gave me pause. If the priests tried to take her by force, I could deal with anyone they sent our way. That was what I knew, that was what I was good at. But the priests getting a court order from a provincial magistrate? How was I supposed to fight that? Even then the thought of defying proper imperial law seemed almost unthinkable. I’d fought, my dearest friends and our province and the Imperial Legions had all fought and died to preserve the empire. How could I just turn around and spit on the empire and its laws just a few years later? Would that not spit on the sacrifice of the thousands and thousands of men and women who had died to preserve our very civilization, our very way of life?

A great deal of my righteous anger drained away, only to be replaced by confusion and uncertainty. I did not know what to do. Something like fighting legal battles was hilariously outside of my realm of expertise.

I turned to look at my father. As much as I hated to admit it, if there was one member of our family that knew how to deal with problems involving the law, it was him.

“So what are we going to do?” I asked him.

My father was quiet for a long, long time before he answered. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” I demanded. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I mean I don’t know, boy!” Orlandus said, exploding at me before visibly drawing himself back. “I don’t know. I’ll need some time to think about it and figure out what to do. Now go away. Keep yourself busy and out of trouble.”

My eyes narrowed on him. “We’re not done discussing this topic.”

“No, we’re not,” Orlandus agreed with a grunt. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I need to think about things. We’ll reconvene tonight, after Catherine is put to bed. I’ll probably even need to fill Marcus in on what’s going on, too. Until then go away. Suddenly I’ve got a great deal to do before then and an unfortunately short amount of time to do it in.”

I thought about protesting further but after a moment’s thought had to reluctantly concede that his request wasn’t unreasonable. Giving him time to think through this problem was the sensible and intelligent thing to do.

“Very well. Until tonight then,” I said, making it sound like a promise.

Father’s response was to grunt and pour himself another drink.

I turned on my heel and left his office, my mind whirling in a hundred directions at once as I immediately set about to plan my next move.

Father had said that he would figure out what to do. If I was a good and dutiful son, I would have taken him at his word and that should have been the end of it. But I suppose that I wasn’t truly, no matter how much the imperial ideal insisted that I should be. His promise to figure things out in this instance simply was not good enough for me. Not in this case. Not by a long shot.

My father was our family’s pater familias. That meant that, legally and morally, he had complete authority over every member of his family. As his children we were all expected to be obedient and follow his lead. To obey him in all things. The truth was, however, that no matter how well I could see the logic of a household being united behind their pater familias, at the end of the day I no longer trusted my father. Oh, I could certainly trust him to get the most coin out of any situation, but beyond that? I’m not sure that I had ever fully trusted my father since I was a little boy. To protect Cat, was I willing to take matters into my own hands?

I had the means to do so. In fact, I had an option that would make this entire issue with our pater familias a moot point entirely, at least legally speaking. Though I was no expert in the law I had learned a few useful tidbits. The catch was that using this option would irrevocably destroy my relationship with my father forever.

My heart heart hardened and my eyes narrowed. So be it. If he faltered in his duty to protect Catherine, then I would be the one to step in. That was simply the way things were going to be.

Feeling determined yet deeply troubled, I headed to a wing on the far side of the house, down a long hallway that I seldom went. The few rooms down that particular hallway were unassuming, all of them used for storage except for one. At the very end of the hall, I opened the door into the one room in the house that we as a family maintained ourselves.

The room was dominated by an altar, a heavy thing of wood with eight levels reaching nearly as high as I was, the lowest level being roughly waist high. The room smelled of years of incense and candle flame, along with the burnt smells of various offerings the family made to the gods as tradition dictated. On each level with candles at the forefront, with statues or small portraits behind those, arranged in a hierarchy that was both a mix of what my family valued and that of the Celestial hierarchy itself.

It was our family shrine. I’d been told that shrines could vary wildly in different parts of the empire, but in Iskander family shrines were simple, private things that people did not leave out for public display. A family like ours could afford something bigger but the same principles still applied. Grabbing fresh incense, I replaced and lit the incense on every level, beginning from the top. While the Gods were generally disinterested in the minutia of human affairs it was still unwise to carelessly risk giving offense.

When I knelt in front of the altar to pray, however, I did not focus my attention on any of the Gods. While I respected the worship of the Gods, I had never felt drawn to the worship of any particular deity. Instead I turned to attention to the lowest level of the shrine, the one that housed the images and small statues of our ancestors.

While I honored most of them, I focused my attention most on the immaculately rendered small image of my late mother.

My mother had not been a particularly remarkable woman in any objective way, but she had been kind and she had been loving. She was the only person I’d ever seen father show anything resembling a tender side to and me and my brother both had adored her. If there had ever been such a thing as an ideal imperial wife and mother, it had been my own mother Maria Chapman.

Mother, however, had always been somewhat sickly and frail of health. After the strain of bearing two sons the midwives had told her that she should not have any more children, as the risk to her life and health would be too great. Mother getting pregnant with Catherine had been accidental and unintended, fifteen years after I had been born and after she had started taking an herbal concoction to prevent pregnancies. A concoction that, as I would later learn, was known to occasionally prove ineffective for unknown reasons.

My mother died a few minutes after giving birth to Catherine, the strain of childbirth too much for her frail body to bear. The pain at remembering her was dulled with time but I did not think that it would ever completely fade away. Her last words had been to name the last child of her body and to bid us, the men of the family, to love our new sister no matter what. I think that perhaps she knew she would not survive her ordeal and feared that we would resent Catherine, blaming her for taking away our mother. I took her words to heart, vowing to honor her final request with everything I had.

Mother’s death impacted our family badly, tearing us apart. Things had still been tense and uncomfortable one year later. Father had taken it the hardest. He’d always been strict, but after mother’s death he became a tyrant with Marcus and I. His attitude towards little Catherine during that time – swinging from apathetic to resentful – left me deeply uncomfortable, too. After that however I am ashamed to say I completely lost track of how my family continued to deal with our loss.

The sky barbarians descended from the mountains and every family was ordered to supply one member to fill the ranks of the new legions that were being drawn up in response to the threat. Marcus was the heir and I was the spare. So at sixteen, I was forced to leave my family and go to war.

However, I never forgot them. And though Catherine was only a year old when I left, I never forgot my mother’s dying request or my vow to live up to it with everything I had.

Now, it seemed, that perhaps the time had come for that vow would be put to the test.

“Dear departed ancestor,” I prayed, head held low. “Mother. Your only daughter stands at a crucible, threatened by forces far more powerful and influential than our family. Grant us… grant me, the wisdom and the strength needed to protect one of our own. From beyond the veil, watch over us and guide us. You son asks this of you, beloved ancestor. Your family needs you now more than ever.”

My short prayer done, I lit another stick of incense as an offering, another further incentive so that my prayer may be heard. I wasn’t sure if it would do any good. It was however, at the very least, a small comfort to speak to the departed and remember them. And if she could I had no doubt that my mother would watch over her children in their time of need.

After another minute of silent prayer and contemplation, I stood and left the room. Now there was one more thing I needed to do that could not wait. Catherine obviously knew something about what was going on. Her reaction to learning about the priests had been rather telling, to say the least. I needed to get the full story out of her and it needed to happen as soon as possible.