Deus Necros

Titania’s brief satisfaction disappeared.

”I found him with a young woman,” she said. ”She was badly injured, bruised across her face and arms, barely able to keep herself upright. He was hurting her when I entered. She saw me and pleaded for help.”

The room seemed to cool despite the brazier.

”I separated them,” Titania continued, her tone remaining even only because she had likely repeated the memory enough times that anger had been forced into discipline. ”The Hero decided that my interruption was an insult and attempted to order me away. When I refused, he reached for his weapon. I did not give him time to use it.”

”How badly?” Ludwig asked.

Misty answered this time. ”Lady Titania put him through three walls of a residential manor, shattered his dominant shoulder, broke both knees, and only stopped because I reminded her that killing him without witnesses present would complicate matters.”

Titania looked toward Misty with the faint disapproval of someone who thought the explanation unnecessarily dramatic. ”He remained alive.”

”That is not the part anyone finds surprising,” Ludwig said. Despite everything he had seen in the cells, he found the image deeply satisfying. He had not particularly liked the Hero before, and hearing that Titania had treated him like an inconvenient sack of meat made some small portion of this miserable day feel less unfair. It faded quickly when he remembered the girl. ”What happened to the woman?”

”That is why I am here,” Titania replied.

Her voice had become colder now.

”The following day, I was summoned before an investigative council. I expected the young woman to testify, and I expected the Hero’s position to become very difficult to defend. Instead, she walked into the chamber completely healed. No bruises. No broken bones. No sign that he had ever laid a hand upon her. She claimed that she had gone to him willingly, that everything between them had been consensual, and that I had arrived without cause and attacked both her and the Hero.”

Ludwig said nothing for several seconds.

Misty’s eyes burned with barely contained anger. ”She would not look at us,” the nun said. ”Not once. When Lady Titania asked her directly whether she was afraid, the girl repeated the accusation exactly as she had said it the first time. Every word. The same pauses. The same breaths. As though she had learned a script and could not step outside it.”

”Compulsion?” Kaiser asked.

”I do not know,” Titania replied. ”There are forms of healing capable of restoring her physical state, though not many can do so thoroughly overnight. There are charms capable of forcing testimony, memories that can be altered, oaths that can be coerced. I was denied the opportunity to inspect her. I was removed from the chamber as soon as I accused the council of allowing tampering with a witness.”

”And because the Hero is their public savior,” Ludwig said, ”they needed you to be the aggressor.”

Titania inclined her head slightly. ”The account presented to the public was simple. The ancient Saintess, increasingly out of touch and overly suspicious, had mistaken a private encounter for violence and attacked the Hero without justification. He, in his generosity, declined to press for execution or permanent stripping of my station. The Sacrosanctum, displaying restraint, placed me in confinement pending investigation.”

Ludwig’s mouth twisted. ”How generous of him.”

”I had almost hoped he would press for execution,” Titania said dryly. ”It might have created a legal contradiction strong enough for my oath to permit an objection.”

Despite the situation, Ludwig snorted. That sounded exactly like her.

”How long have you been down here?” he asked.

Titania looked toward the candle on the desk as though it contained a calendar she had long ceased caring about. ”Several months. Misty has been keeping better count than I have.”

”Three months and eleven days,” Misty said immediately.

That number struck Ludwig harder than it should have.

Three months.

The ruined timeline had begun with events in Solania. The invasion, the rise of Sloth’s forces, the breaking of the sky, the death of people he could no longer afford to lose. During all of that, one of the most powerful defenders the Holy Order possessed had been locked under the Sacrosanctum, chained by an oath that prevented her from acting.

Ludwig turned toward Misty. ”And you? They chained you here, too?”

Misty shook her head. ”No. I came by choice.”

”Why?” Ludwig asked. ”You are not Oathbound like she is. You could have left. You could have gone outside and investigated what was happening. You could have reached other people in the Order, warned the Saint’s allies, spoken to Mot, done anything besides sit in a room polishing an anchor while prisoners scream in the halls.”

The rebuke was harsher than he intended, but the sight of the cells remained too fresh in him for gentleness.

Misty’s expression tightened. Her grip around the anchor did not weaken. ”You think I wanted to stay here and listen to this place? You think I did not try to leave?”

”Misty,” Titania said.

”No, my lady,” Misty replied, anger finally cutting through her controlled voice. ”He asked. He deserves the answer. I remained because the first time I tried to go beyond the warded corridor, three members of the inner clergy intercepted me. They told me the Saintess had become unstable and that I would be arrested if I attempted to spread lies regarding her confinement. The second time, I reached the upper stairwell before someone attacked me from behind. I woke up back in this room with Lady Titania standing between me and six men demanding I be transferred elsewhere.”

Titania’s gaze moved away from Misty. ”After that, I required her to remain.”

”You made her stay?” Ludwig asked.

”I did,” Titania replied. ”Not because I desired company. Though she is tolerable enough, when she is not using that anchor to damage furniture. I kept her here because I no longer trusted the people above to leave her alive if she continued looking into my imprisonment. As long as she remained in this chamber, they considered her contained. If she left again, I suspected she would suffer an accident before reaching anyone who mattered.”

Misty looked unhappy with the explanation, though not because it was false. ”She said I was more useful alive and angry than dead and righteous.”

”That is generally true,” Titania said.

Ludwig paced slowly toward the bed, his eyes returning to the golden veil around Titania. The picture had been scattered before, ugly pieces of information that did not yet make a complete shape. The trapped children. The sealed souls. Clementine dealing with the forces of Sloth. The Hero being raised as a savior while someone arranged the disaster that would make salvation necessary. Mot, still unaware, being positioned to act when the crisis became unbearable. Titania, one of the Holy Order’s greatest defenders, removed from play through a manufactured scandal. Misty, the person most loyal to her, buried alongside her under the guise of choice.

Then there was the silence of Titania’s gods.

That was the piece that made everything fit.

Ludwig approached close enough that the Soul Letting Lantern reacted again. Its dark flame shifted within the glass, leaning toward Titania rather than the corridor behind him. At the same moment, the compass vestige beneath it gave a faint movement. Not enough to point away from the deeper source binding the dead, but enough for Ludwig to understand that the same principle was at work here. Different chains, perhaps. Different target. But the magic carried the same purpose.

Control what is allowed to leave.

A soul from a corpse.

A revelation from a god.

A Saintess from her oath.

He reached toward the golden veil, stopping just short of touching it. Something in the light resisted his nearness, not violently, but with the polished pressure of a locked door. It was holy magic, unquestionably so. Yet underneath that holiness was an arrangement Ludwig had already learned to despise: a binding, a redirection, a false layer inserted between someone and the force that should have answered them.

Titania studied him with mild interest. ”You are making a particularly grim face, Ludwig. I assume you have noticed something unpleasant.”

”Several things,” Ludwig replied.

Misty stepped closer, anchor still in hand. ”What is it?”

Ludwig looked first at the restraints holding Titania to the bed, then at the golden veil surrounding her body, and finally at the shelves of books and comfortable bedding that made this prison look kind enough to discourage questions.

”They didn’t imprison you because they were investigating you,” he said.

Titania’s expression did not change, but her attention sharpened.

”They did not keep Misty here only because she was inconvenient. They did not rely on your oath simply because it stopped you from breaking Clementine’s skull. That was useful, sure, but it was not enough. You are still a Saintess. If your gods spoke to you, if they told you what Clementine was doing, your oath would have had two competing authorities to answer to. Orders from a corrupt head of the Sacrosanctum would not hold cleanly against the will of the gods you originally swore to serve.”

For the first time, Titania sat a little straighter against the pillows. The chains gave a faint metallic sound as her wrists shifted.

Ludwig’s voice grew colder as the conclusion formed completely. ”That veil around you is not protecting you. It is not preserving your power. It is isolating it. The same kind of filth holding the souls inside the corpses above is being used differently here. They are not keeping your gods silent because your gods abandoned you. They are keeping whatever message your gods send from ever reaching you.”

Misty’s face went pale. ”That cannot be... The divine won’t be suppressed by mere... magic.”

”It can,” Kaiser said from behind Ludwig. The lich had remained silent through most of the exchange, but now his voice carried the quiet certainty of someone who understood the architecture of corrupted magic. ”A soul-binding matrix and a divine-interference ward are not identical, but both require the manipulation of passage. One stops a departing presence. The other stops an arriving one. If both are rooted in the same source beneath this building, then destroying it may release more than the dead.”

Titania’s eyes had not left Ludwig’s face. Her boredom was gone now. Not replaced by fear, and certainly not by panic. Instead there was a stillness far more dangerous than either, the stillness of an ancient woman discovering that her patience had been cultivated by people who believed they had stolen her ability to respond.

Ludwig held her gaze.

”You’ve been tricked,” he said. ”Trapped, chained by your own oath, and sealed away from your own gods. They made sure they couldn’t contact you, sealed your body by the veil, and the messages by the writing on these walls...”