While Lucius was a prisoner, we were quite busy aboard the Sea Bird’s Rest. The crew were trying to repair the storm damage. Captain Bodin had to catch up on sleep then resume steering the ship. I had to prepare a rescue plan for my pupil, with only the help of my budding medicinal apprentice, whose only relevant skill was steady hands.

By means of some scattered grains after the storm dissipated, I had attracted a small flock of gulls, and begun tampering with them. One such purpose was the spying puppet I sent south to the pirate ship, but the vast majority were requisitioned for the purpose of collecting the viscera left behind by the giant sea boa. The broken scales, the jagged spines and fins, all still drenched in blood and poison. They didn’t make for my best reagents, but they were what I had.

One person aboard the ship was unoccupied, unfortunately. Aisha Canta descended upon me wordlessly, after rising from her collapse of exhaustion. She stared at my work, as I turned the monstrous body parts into charms, and tried to divine my purpose with them. It was undeniably clear I was working to save Lucius, so she couldn't berate me on that front, however, I could only take so many hours of telling her to go away and getting no response.

At last, to pacify her, I offered to explain Lucius’ initiation, all those years ago. I was still feeling out just how much use Aisha would be to us, but I saw merit in beginning to disseminate information about the true threat to the world, that which the kingdoms needed to rally against.

When Ezra awoke the morning after, she leapt from her sleeping roll as though the memories had struck like lightning. She didn’t find a poor, maimed boy shivering with fever and on death’s door because he had protected her, she instead found Lucius peeling carrots. He was tossing the vegetables into a fresh pot of simmering water, and the skins into a pan to simmer with a dollop of lard.

The sight gave her emotional whiplash from relief, to confusion, to merely impressed he could, by means of having the blade fixed against a table, skin the vegetable with but a single hand. She had slept through his learning phase, and gotten reasonably skilled at it. While not the most luxurious of meals, far from civilization it did fine to fill our stomachs. Ezra was still trying to wrap her head around what to say when I returned to our shelter with two fat grouse in one hand.(1)

“Fill your stomach and get ready, today’s the day,” I said, tossing the birds on the ground next to the fire.

“The day to do what?” Lucius asked.

“To kill a parasite,” I said, gesturing for Ezra to breast the birds out and get them in the pan. They were lean pieces of meat, and I didn’t want the lard to be wasted.

With some muttered assent, Ezra took the seat next to Lucius at the lichen covered table. After puncturing the guts of the birds, she deftly ripped them apart and peeled the meet from the bone.

Once he finished the last carrot, he leaned over to ask, “What’s a parasite?”

“It means it lives inside other creatures. Like worms.”

That idea nearly made him sick, to imagine something crawling through his guts. “So, it’s small?” he asked, gripping his belly.

Ezra rolled her eyes, decidedly coming to the decision to not thank him for his chivalry. “Maybe if it was in you.”

“I don’t have any in me.”

“Yes, you do. We all do.”

“Do not!”

“Everyone has little tiny parasites in them, else they’d have diarrhea. You do too.”

Young Lucius nearly claimed to have such movement problems, but his good sense caught up with him before his tongue flapped. “Then that must not be what we’re doing.”

“No, it’s not,” Ezra said. She slapped the bird breasts into the frying pan atop the coals, and blood immediately sizzled with the lard. “We’re not here for human parasites, we’re here for world parasites.”

“Godling,” I said, arranging my various instruments and reagents for one final inspection. They were all correct, but a single mistake could let the thing escape and I had no interest in giving it a chance at my throat. From the very first moment it would realize something was happening, it was to be too late. Like war, the battle was to be won before the first charge. “How much do you know about religion, boy?”

He frowned, looking first at the skillet and then to the mossy roof. “Well, there’s the goddess Saphira, and everyone knows the sun god, and…”

“And the wolf goddess of the north, and the dragon of the mountains, and the trickster of the east. Whether Shepherd counts is up for debate, but she’s certainly worshiped as a goddess in the south. They are the six divines that rule over this world. To put it simply however, they aren’t the only gods and goddesses out there, in the darkness which knows no sun. Jealous little worms, they sneak into the human world to eat and grow, and maybe one day supplant the gods.”

“So, monsters,” he said.

“Yes, but very terrible monsters. If left alone, they would become disasters. Many people would die. So, I kill them first.”

He frowned, trying to fit the idea into his framework of the world, and struggling. It wasn’t like crime and justice. It wasn’t like a hunter and prey. This was his first taste of war; a preemptive strike. “Well, if it’s a monster, that’s good, right?”

Ezra’s groaning made me laugh. “Yes, you can think of it that way. Now eat up. You’ll have some running to do. If this all goes to plan, we’ll be back in Podrest tomorrow. I’ll even pay for a day in the baths.”

Ezra jumped up, dropping the handle of the pan, which Lucius snatched from the coals. “No more sleeping on dirt?”

“No more sleeping on dirt, if the two of you can run fast enough.” Only after the three of us ate, did they understand what I had meant with that statement. The bones of abominations were then handed to them, heavy and glowing with infused magic. I lead the way to the temple.

The weather was calm and dreary that day. The sky, a gray haze mixed with the swaying canopy. I was glad it wasn’t raining, it left the dirt firm for running upon, and mud would have done nothing to slow the godling, only mire us.

“It will try to escape the moment I begin. Anything of the temple it breaks, you must run to and stab with one of the bones or legs,” I said, drawing from my bag the crux of the spell. I had procured a padlock from Donjon, as it was an aged prison even in those days. That rusting heap of iron didn’t seem impressive to the boy, but it would do the job.

“Stab?” He held a shaft of bone like a dirk, still pink with life and, to my eyes, throbbing with energy. The boy couldn’t imagine stabbing a stone wall with it.

“You aren’t stabbing the thing itself, but piercing the essence. Trust me,” I said, though I knew I was asking a lot of the boy. If Ezra had not been beside him, resolutely nodding obedience, I doubt he would have taken one step from my side or perhaps ran for the hills. Everyone the world over has seen a stigmata of at least some modest ability. The fact that magic is infused throughout the world can plainly be seen.

To feel it is another matter. Imagine someone taking a knife to a painting and carving away the pigments. They scrape it off in chunks and flakes, ruining it entirely to reveal that beneath the crude painting is not a canvas but a mosaic more dazzling than the art that had masked it. That might approximate the sensation Lucius felt when I pressed the padlock to the door of the temple and rewrote the memory of the place.

I changed it from a holy site, to a fortress, to a prison. I touched it at its core and realigned its essence and in this world, the idea of essence overrides the world of things(2). The idea of imprisonment passed through the stone and changed it like a ripple. Loose mortar spilled out from the foundation as the temple shrank down, pulling in on itself. The roof timbers groaned, bending like rib bones. The bell from the tower was cast off, crashing to the ground near us.

Then the godling awoke. It stormed from the subterranean mausoleum, where all the corpses of the faithful of old had been interred. It came from where it had desecrated and devoured them. From tunnels it quietly bored beyond the sight of the sun, from webbings and traps of all things divine.

It screamed. Bone-chilling, knee shaking fear, beyond anything rational or comprehensible. It forced fear into the body till the children nearly vomited. But it was merely fear. As long as they had hope, it remained just that, never falling to the pit known as despair. “Remember what I told you. This isn’t something you can run from. It is something to be defeated!”

The godling threw its body into the inner wall, smashing apart the window. Glass and lead lath sprayed out. Stone too. “Secure it!” I screamed, not taking my hand from the padlock.

Ezra went first. She was older, and had worked with me before. She took it upon herself to prove her faith in my methods. The girl sprinted past Lucius, giving him her backside as she pounced upon the broken window sill. She didn’t even glance at the black spears of chitin that stabbed out from the hole in the temple-prison, the carapace claws trying to rip the wall apart. She leapt and stabbed the stone with a hand claw recovered from an abomination, just as I had told her.

It sank into the stone, smearing through it like she was grinding a stick of chalk against the surface, and left behind a black smear before the effect took hold. The masonry piece flew back into the air, reversing the previous trajectory to return to where it belonged. The fact that a godling’s limb was in the way mattered not; the stone ripped through with ease and slotted in not just where it had been, but multiplied across the window gap. The wall sealed up, breaking the claws of the beast off. They showered blood across the ground as it screeched in pain, but that was just the start.

“The other side,” I bellowed.

The good example proved enough for Lucius. He screamed a warcry, like many an amateur fighter, and charged as the spider-like creature threw itself against another window. He slammed the bone down through the keystone of the window arch and fell on his side as it launched back. He watched it fly, and made eye contact with the godling. His sight reflected back eight times. Scarlet gems in the shadows.

Corpse-eating gems the likes of which he wouldn’t see again for almost twenty years.

Lucius froze. He locked up in shock and uncomprehension. The blood of the beast sprayed across him, staining his muddy clothes red and all he could do was shuffle away. Ezra had to handle the next two windows and then slap him. She hauled him to his feet and shouted, “If you keep laying around, you’re going to die.” I believe it was the act of stuffing the next bone shard into his grasp that did it. It gave him something to hold onto, an action to take, a way to fight on his own behalf.

I still remember the way the birds fled, the rodents too. Even the insects got out of their holes and scurried away from the death throes of the godling. The screams got worse. For every arcane stake they drove in, the temple grew smaller. It shrank and shriveled until the godling had no room to move, none to exist. It crushed until blood oozed from between the rocks and pooled on the ground and even the screams became squeaks and gasps. It twitched in pain, yet unable to die.

I sent the children away when I began the process of actually killing it. The two of them stumbled off to a river that we had used for washing, and dropped into it. The cold, mountain stream poured over them and wiped the blood and the sweat and took from them the fire of combat. It cleansed them, leaving behind the memory and the knowledge gained.

“This is what you do?” Lucius asked, eyes unfocused to the sky.

“Sometimes,” Ezra responded, ringing her hair out.

“You people are crazy.”

She scowled at him. “If you knew what we knew, and kept living your life like usual, you’d be the crazy one.”

The same magic which I can use to spy through a bird can also kill it. In fact, using it to hunt is considerably easier. Manipulation of the world of things by the world of ideas is the exact same mechanism by which Lucius’ body never forgot how to shape itself when it healed. Lesser forms of healing simply increase the rate of cell division and repair, which quickly kills the host through cancer.