‘Hello,’ Robin said, at a loss for what else to do when faced with yet another illusion that didn’t seem to have the sense to stay simply that. ‘I’m Marq, a rising star of the bardic order, and these are my friends.”

He went around and introduced everyone with a false name.

Better safe than sorry.

‘I am Fiara Sunbrow,’ the woman replied with an easy smile. ‘Welcome to The Blushing Rose.’

Her figure was enough to make a stone blush, let alone a rose or a man! Robin had to fight not to stare. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, and had a pale ochre hue to it that complemented the fiery shades of red and orange of her hair. Her figure swelled and curved in a way that made him ache to wrap his arms around her and fit himself to her like she was the missing piece that completed the puzzle that was his life.

She was, in a word, stunning.

‘Thank you,’ he managed to say.

Something about this illusion—this woman—was spellbinding. Robin found it hard to think through the roseate glow that hazed his thoughts as he looked at her. The blood coursing hotly to his extremities didn’t help much either.

At the back of his mind, a thread of story was struggling to get his attention. If this was his old world, he’d say his brain was struggling because the blood it needed to function was somewhere else at the moment, but who knows what his biology was like, here.

[Bardic Lore] flared, finally making its way through the haze shrouding his mind and better judgement. He knew this story! And several more recent variants! Fiara Sunbrow has been a dream, or an illusion, or a memory—different stories changed it, but they all agreed that she was not a living woman when the story began. But there was also a man, Fionn Nightheart, who wanted, more than anything else, to find True Love.

Robin’s eyes flicked to the stained glass mural above the altar space. Was that Fionn, depicted there? The story was old enough. It seemed to match. There, on the left, was the man all alone. Slightly to the right he was asleep, possibly dreaming. Was that the indistinct whorl of colour above his head? Then there, Fiara’s face appearing from the chaos!

He glanced back and forth. Yes. That was her face!

The rest of the story has Fionn seek so long, to believe so strongly in his vision of love, that it took form first in his mind, then in reality itself. The stories all disagreed on how it had happened, but if this was a story from Tarin-Tiran, a place where they had already discovered other sentient illusions, then Robin could see how the magic first took form.

But it wasn’t enough that Fionn had the image of his love; he needed it in reality. His belief was such, his faith was such, that the illusion took physical form, became a woman in truth. And their love shook the world with its purity.

Until Fionn died. Some stories called it tragedy, an illness no magic could cure, while others laid the blame at a conspiracy of jealous lovers who wanted Fiara for themselves, but the story ended tragically.

Robin’s eyes flicked to the final image of the stained glass mural. Yes. There was Fionn, lying dead, his head in Fiara’s lap. And Fiara, after…

The bard blinked. The story rang in his head. He looked around at their surroundings. The former church. Or was it former? Ancient culture in his own world had sacred prostitution, and what was Fiara if not the embodiment of the idea of love. Of desire.

Such force and blessed power had True Love, that, if he was right…

‘You’re a demigoddess,’ Robin blurted.

Fiara laughed sadly.

‘Perhaps I was, once, but there is very little of me left. Some spare scraps of power that keep this place holy, a single memory of love so perfect it took a dream, made it real, and raised it up to a throne of divinity.’ She coloured. ‘Well. Demi-divinity.’

‘My lady,’ Savra said, reverence suddenly suffusing her voice.

Robin glanced at the cleric out of the corner of his eye. Interesting. He tended to think of the seeress as just that, a seeress, but she was a woman of faith first, a seeress second, and a healer after that.

His mind began to hum with the refrain of Sexual Healing.

‘My regards to your mistress,’ Fiara said softly to Savra. ‘I always loved her eyes, you know So beautiful.’

Savra began to tremble. Robin flashed a glance at the rest of the party and indicated that they should fall back. Let Savra have a moment with the being who had known her goddess face to face.

‘Let’s let her have a moment,’ he murmured. ‘Jhess, check the place out for traps or monsters that may be hiding in this place. Can’t be too careful. Vance, Drev, let’s see if we can uncover what the runic structures powering this place might look like. We still have a mission, and I want to know if we can complete it without disturbing anything.’

Unlikely, but they wouldn’t know until they looked. Robin gazed around the church. Unlike the other locations they’d visited, everything was intact. The runes would be hidden, hard to find.

‘I’ll take the altar,’ he said. The most complex runes should be there, and there was something Robin wanted to do anyway.

The party split apart and Robin made his way up to the altar, careful not to look in any of the mirrors as he passed the doors of the small rooms to either side of him as he went.

This was a holy place, one that had stood since Rhyth was an active power and gave his patronage to this city. It was likely Fiara knew—had known—him as well as Savra’s patron.

The altar held a comb, a candle, and a mirror. Robin’s breath caught in his throat as he approached. Was there a chance…?

If there was, he’d want a bit of privacy.

Robin called upon [Visual Phantasm] and shrouded himself and the altar with a whirling vortex of shadows. He then used his [Mask of Disguise] to cover himself in the illusion of himself and invoked [Lesser Phantasm] together with his memories and both [Bardic Lore] and [Shard of the Shattered Manymind] to create or recreate a brief prayer to Rhyth.

He expected—well, he didn’t know what he expected. A sense of peace? A vision? A whisper in the dark?

Robin got none of those. He stared at the illusion of himself reflected in the mirror. Same eyes. Same hair. Same rakish smile…

Wait. Robin saw the smile before he felt it creep across his own lips, as if he himself were the mirror instead. A spark of something flared briefly in his heart and visions of mischief suddenly rampages across his mind.

A moment of pure inspiration.

And then it was gone. He couldn’t even be sure he’d actually connected with Rhyth, or the memory of Rhyth. This was a place of illusion and desire. The other mirrors had already shown him that. There was no way he could truly trust what he saw or sensed in this place.

And yet…Rhyth was a god of illusion. This had been his sacred city. If there was anywhere he could catch a whisper of the god’s memory it was here.

Robin decided it didn’t matter if it had been real or not. The effect on him was real, and that was enough. He didn’t know why he felt such a connection to Rhyth, but he could feel it growing, and the thrill of his new powers of illusion and shapeshifting, fuck, they were exactly what he’d always wanted form magic. Fun and beauty and wonder. Maybe the limitations on them were annoying, maybe the hard numbers the system showed him took some of the “magic” away from the magic, but it was still wonder and creation and magic!

And he could only imagine what it would be like of Rhyth were found once more.

Maybe he could ask Nilsiir what it was like. Fiara might also know, a bit. Probably not as much as the High Priest, but still.

Robin ached to talk to Fiara himself, and not just because basking in her presence, staring on her form, all of that made him feel alive, made him feel sexy and vital and primal.

What could she tell him about Rhyth, as she was telling Savra about her goddess?

Robin forced the thought aside. He wasn’t just before this altar to reach out to the lost god. He was here because this had to be the nexus of the enchantments on this place and he needed to get a look at them.

He kept the illusion shrouding him around the altar, and, before he did anything that might offend her, the bard paused and decided to make an offering. Robin leaned in and whispered an abbreviated version of the story of his first crush, the first tim ehe had dreamed of love, into the mirror on the altar. It might have been his imagination, but he thought the mirror shined a little more brightly, after.

Right. To business.

Robin called magical energies to his fingertips and extended his magical senses out around him. It wasn’t easy, trying to sense magical flows like this, but thankfully they were illusion, mostly, and so matched well with his magic. It made it easier to feel how the energy flows in the place moved.

And he had been right! There was a big knot of energies here! Robin used [Lesser Phantasm] to try and recreate an image of what the runes here might look like, but it was hard going. The runes were complex and not being able to see them made his task next to impossible.

What he saw didn’t reassure him. It felt like there were several places that Fiara was keyed into the runes here. He wouldn’t have recognised them if he hadn’t so closely examined the changes Nilsiir had made to the last place the High Priest had taken over.

Could Robin figure out a way to alter this structure without hurting or even destroying what was left of Fiara? Would Nilsiir even want her to still be around? Robin thought the priest would prefer if she persevered, as another piece of the Tarin-Tiran that was, but there was no way to ask.

And could they afford to skip over this place as well? Try to find the next one and hope it was repairable? That there would be enough places beyond that to complete their quest? They’d already lost one to Gis’s destruction.

Did Robin have to choose between the demigoddess and the High Priest?