Chapter 93: Through the Hurricane

Larson and Sinclair traded a glance across the carriage, each one silently asking the other the same question, hoping the other might already have the answer. Neither of them did. A new hero. Whoever the Oracle meant, the name meant nothing to either of them yet.

Then something surfaced in the back of Larson’s mind, a detail he’d nearly let slip past him. Beyond Terectora, there was one other Guardian whose duties occasionally brushed against the Korven region.

"Could you mean Guardian Iniesta, Oracle? Though I’d have thought he was still escorting Cardinal Leonardo. That’s quite a distance from Korven, isn’t it?"

Somewhere in the south, in one of the cities that fell under House Austur’s watch, stood a cathedral large enough to house a Cardinal of the Order of Lumielle in his own right, the same kind of posting Castilla’s Cardinal held.

The difference was that Cardinal Leonardo kept a Guardian-ranked escort at his side at all times, a quiet but unmistakable mark of how strategically important his seat had become within the Cardinal ranks.

The Oracle only shook her head, a small, unhurried motion. Not the right answer.

The gesture reminded Sinclair of something she’d been meaning to bring up since before they’d even left on this journey.

She reached into the folds of her coat and drew out a letter bound in gold thread, freshly arrived from the Order’s own seat of power in Virelle, the city that served as the Order of Lumielle’s administrative heart on this continent.

She broke the seal carefully and began reading from the top, a summary of this season’s Awakening results drawn from two of the continent’s major regions: the Republic of Rippledale, and the Bravenheart Empire.

The first entry alone was worth celebrating on its own.

A fresh Purple, S-tier Awakening, the rarest color the continent ever produced, and exactly the kind of talent the Order threw everything it had into recruiting, grooming candidates like that into future Guardians, the very path Larson and Sinclair had each walked themselves.

The excitement didn’t last. According to the report, the bearer had already turned the Order down flat, choosing instead to serve the Republic of Rippledale directly, citing nothing more complicated than a wish to protect and build up the only home they’d ever known.

It wasn’t an unreasonable choice, even by the Order’s own reckoning.

The continent of Arta answered, in practice, to three dominant powers, and Rippledale was one of them, alongside Bravenheart and the notoriously closed-off Corvinus Empire. Of the three, Rippledale carried the least military weight by far, having never built anything resembling an imperial or noble class at all.

Its leadership changed hands through open elections instead, every few years, which meant each new government arrived trailing a fresh set of policies behind the old ones, leaving the nation briefly and predictably exposed during every transition.

And yet, in nearly every other measure that mattered, Rippledale had quietly pulled ahead of both its rivals, its people bound together by a refusal to divide themselves along lines of race or tribe, a kind of unity that made the whole nation harder to break than its size alone would suggest.

Neither Bravenheart nor Corvinus had ever dared provoke it carelessly.

Sinclair’s eyes kept moving down the page, and a second marking caught her attention, inked in white, a color that meant exactly one thing.

A White Awakening bearer. Also seeking to join the Order.

She relayed it to the Oracle at once, her voice bright with an excitement she didn’t bother hiding, because the name belonged to her own corner of Rippledale, to a well-regarded family she knew personally.

It would be the first Saintess her homeland had ever produced in its entire history, and she could already picture the two of them crossing paths often, once they both reached Virelle.

Across from her, Larson’s expression sank a little, watching what already looked, in his eyes, like a Saintess Sinclair had all but claimed for herself before either of them had even set foot in the capital.

He’d genuinely hoped, more than once, to be the one chosen to serve beside a Saintess of his own. The trouble was that nearly every Saintess currently active already had a Guardian standing at her side.

His own post beside the Oracle tonight, shared with Sinclair, was little more than a coincidence of geography, the Oracle’s route simply happening to run straight through his home territory this time.

"Is there really no new Saintess from anywhere but Rippledale this season? Shame there’s never once been a White Awakening out of Corvinus."

Larson said it half to himself, grumbling that in all his years wearing the Guardian’s mantle, he’d never once had the chance to meet a Saintess born within Corvinus’s own borders, despite it standing as one of the continent’s three great powers in its own right.

Corvinus kept itself famously sealed off from the rest of the world, its government whispered about across the continent as something close to tyranny, buried under more regulation than most kingdoms bothered to write down.

"That’s because your precious empire is far too proud for its own good. They only ever granted us the one cathedral there, and that was after the Oracle went in herself to ask for it personally. Even then, they wouldn’t budge an inch further."

"Mind your tone, Sinclair." The Oracle’s correction came soft, but final.

"They remain servants of the goddess Lumielle all the same, whatever their politics. So long as that cathedral stays open and the goddess goes unspoken against, they’ve earned our courtesy, not our contempt. Corvinus simply isn’t where our attention belongs right now."

She said it with the easy calm of someone who knew exactly how far her own Order’s weight could reach, if it ever chose to press the matter. If the Order of Lumielle truly set its full will against Corvinus, she had little doubt the empire would yield eventually.

For now, though, expanding their faith into that closed, guarded territory simply wasn’t worth the cost, not when the Order’s attention belonged elsewhere.

Sinclair’s gaze had already drifted back down to the letter, further down the page, and whatever she found there made her go very still, her lips parting slightly around words she didn’t immediately say out loud.

It was Larson’s turn to look baffled now, watching an expression cross her face that he almost never saw there.

"Hey. What else does it say? Why’d you go quiet all of a sudden, is the handwriting that bad?"

He reached for the letter, fingers brushing the edge of the page. Sinclair pulled it out of his reach before he could get a proper grip on it.

She told him instead, her voice flatter than he expected. There was another name further down. Another White Awakening bearer. This one out of the Bravenheart Empire.

Larson’s whole face lit up, something close to delight breaking across it, and he actually rose halfway out of his seat, far too impatient to wait for her to finish reading it herself. He leaned his head in close to the page instead, squinting at the cramped, hurried handwriting.

"’A White Awakener has been identified in the city of Peria, during this season’s Awakening ceremony. This individual’s eventual status as a Saintess cannot yet be confirmed. Further details will follow once they arrive in Virelle.’"

He read the short dispatch aloud himself, slow and deliberate, as though saying it twice might make the words make more sense.

"Am I the only one confused by that? Why would Cardinal Estes write that a White Awakener’s status as a Saintess can’t be confirmed? Since when has that ever been in question?"

"Did Cardinal Estes drink one too many Holy Tears celebrating two White Awakenings in a single season, and just write the report wrong?"

The remark earned him an immediate, stinging smack to the back of the head, Sinclair informing him flatly, without a trace of humor, that no Cardinal in the Order’s history had ever filed a report that carelessly.

"Ugh, fine, fine." Larson rubbed the sore spot, muttering. "Still, why does every Saintess to come out of Bravenheart end up this strange? Doesn’t matter. Whoever this one turns out to be, I’m getting assigned to them. I don’t care what it takes."

The Oracle only shook her head at him once more, quiet, offering no correction this time, though she alone, of the three of them, already understood exactly what sat folded behind that letter’s careful, deliberate wording.

Out beyond the carriage’s shelter, the storm had long since stopped behaving like ordinary rain.

It came down in driving, unrelenting sheets, cold enough to numb exposed skin within minutes, wind screaming sideways across the open road and slamming into the mounted column of Phantom soldiers cutting their way through it.

Lightning split the sky again and again, close enough each time to throw the whole world into a brief, blinding white before swallowing it back into darkness, the thunder arriving almost on top of the flash itself, a storm closer to a hurricane than anything that deserved the ordinary word for rain.

"Achoo!"

Lucian’s sneeze barely carried over the roar of hooves and water.

"Damn it. That’s twice now." He wiped his face with the back of one soaked glove, grimacing. "Don’t tell me I’m catching cold out here, or someone back home’s sitting there missing me enough to make my nose itch."

He kept both arms locked tight around Jeanne’s waist as she drove her horse forward at a pace that felt reckless even by Phantom standards, the ground beneath them nothing but a dark blur he had no hope of reading.

All he could tell, through the sheeting water and the intermittent flashes of lightning, was that they were still skirting the edge of the forest, the tree line a black wall somewhere to their left, the whole column pushing hard and fast toward Korven.

Then a rider broke away from the main body of the column, drawing level with Jeanne’s horse, shouting something against the wind that Lucian couldn’t quite catch.

Jeanne reached up and dragged back the hood shielding her face with one hand, straining to hear him properly over the storm.

"Lady Jeanne! We’ve spotted a village up ahead!" The rider’s voice came ragged, fighting the wind for every word. "It’s too quiet. Not a single light burning in any of the houses, not one."