CHAPTER 919: UNDER THE SAME STARS

The small group of people gathered around Heila all had different reactions to learning that Humans and the Eldritch revered the same legendary figure in the skies above. Even now, early in the night, the five bright stars that made up the ’sword’ of the constellation could be seen peeking above the horizon, and as the night wore on, the entire figure would become visible.

To Emmie, it was just common sense. Everyone knew the First Warrior, and it was such a popular sign of a warrior’s strength that she’d seen at least a dozen gladiators painting versions of the constellation on their shields before important fights in the arena.

Instead of any great shock, she wondered just how great a warrior someone must have been for the humans to attach their name to the First Warrior in the skies, and behind that thought, she wondered if the human she had been attending to would be able to tell her stories of that Champion.

To Kurtz, the feeling was different. He’d slowly begun to integrate into the community of the Horned Clan in the Vale of Mists, rediscovering the ’home’ that his ancestors had lost when they fled from Cellach Lothian’s army that burned much of the Vale to the ground.

Now, when he heard that the human Church had named the First Warrior after one of their own people, calling it an ’Ascended Swordsman’ as if some human Champion had earned a place among the stars, his blood began to simmer and his chest felt hollow, as if the humans were stealing something sacred that had belonged to him and every other Champion who chased after the strength to triumph over their foes.

For Liam, it was disquieting in a different way. He had never considered himself a devout man and for years, the most important thing about the constellation had been that the Ascended Swordsman’s blade pointed toward the south. It was an easily recognizable constellation and one that helped him to orient himself in the wilderness on countless occasions.

It was more useful than sacred, and he wasn’t the sort of person who wore a pendant dedicated to one of the Thirteen Sacred Constellations or said prayers in the name of some long-dead saint in order to get through the struggles of life. He’d met many such people among the common folk over the years, and he always looked down on them for turning to the divine instead of taking control of their own lives the way he had when he started carving out new lands to add to the Dunn Barony.

What he found disquieting, however, was the fact that the constellations the Eldritch recognized matched up exactly with the ones the Church taught in every temple and village across the kingdom and likely on the other side of the seas as well.

Constellations were just groups of brighter stars that men had drawn lines between, but if you gave a small child a piece of charcoal and told them to make figures out of a bunch of dots on the paper, ten different children would produce at least five different drawings. At some point, the Great Prophet had been the one to draw up the map of the heavens and name the Thirteen Sacred Constellations. But if he had drawn them differently, or if someone else had drawn them and they were different, it likely wouldn’t have changed anything about the stories the Church told about the ’Ascended’ ones who watched over mankind from above during the night while the Holy Lord of Light completed his journey around the world.

But if Lady Heila was really telling the truth, and they were all the same, then that must mean that these were more than just stories meant to guide impressionable fools into living ’godly’ lives...

"Lady Heila," Liam said as he swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat. "What kind of stories do your people tell about the ’First Warrior?’ And do you, do you worship him, or...?"

He couldn’t bring himself to ask the question that was slowly building within his mind, but he was starting to wonder if the reason the Church hated demons so much wasn’t because they were ’evil’ but was because they were heretics who would spread different ways of worshiping the same holy figures and undermining the Church’s power as the ’true representative of the Holy Lord of Light.’

After all, there had been schisms within the Church before, but none had ever survived the response from the Saints and their Exemplars. But if the war against the Eldritch was just more of the same strife...

"We don’t worship the way you do," Heila said bluntly, interrupting Liam’s rapidly spiralling thoughts. "But we do pass down tales from the times of old. They’re different everywhere you go," she added. "But most will tell you that the First Warrior reminds warriors what strength is for. It’s said that the First Warrior brought the tradition of challenges to the Eldritch people in order to prevent the few who survived the Age of Ice from falling into endless wars when the age ended and people scrambled to claim territory for their people."

"There are dozens of stories, and hundreds of variations on them, and I haven’t even started to learn them all," Heila admitted. "But if you compare them to the stories about Gareon, the Ascended Swordsman, some of them aren’t that different. Gareon was the First Knight, wasn’t he? The one who said that the greatest warriors must be the most virtuous? To this day, knights choose five virtues after the five stars of his sword, don’t they?"

"You... you know a great deal about our sacred stars," Liam said, genuinely impressed that the diminutive witch would take the time to study such obscure scripture. Liam had seen priests dedicated to reading the patterns in the sky and seeing the future in the stars, but only when he left the frontier.

In places like Lothian March, the Church focused so much on the power of Holy Light to banish the darkness and the strength of Holy Flames to burn away evil that few people paid any attention to the scriptures about the stars, or the orders within the Church that dedicated their life to them.

"The man who’s courting me is an Inquisitor," Heila said, folding her arms over her petite bust and turning up her nose at Liam in a huff. "Ignatious’s faith is important to him so of course I talk to him about it."

"But, but you’re a witch," Liam stammered, staring in open-mouthed shock while his world felt like it was twisting sideways or turning inside out as a witch all but quoted scripture at him and now claimed that she was being courted by an Inquisitor?!

"How could an Inquisitor... Inquisitor Ignatious," he said as he tried to remember why the name sounded so familiar, but no matter what he thought, he couldn’t put together the idea of any Inquisitor courting an Eldritch witch.

"You don’t understand what the Inquisition is supposed to be about," Heila said, pointing at the young lord and speaking sternly, as though she had transformed from a witch into some kind of Holy Sister.

"Ignatious says that an Inquisitor should search for truth in all things and find the good in the world in order to protect it," she said. "He also says that the Inquisition should discover wickedness wherever it hides and destroy it. The only problem is that somewhere along the way, your stupid Church decided that anyone who wasn’t human was wicked and had to be destroyed, and any truth that was inconvenient or disagreed with what they already thought had to be a lie."

"Lord Liam," Heila stood as she saw the feline figure of Lord Jalal returning with a much calmer and more confident-looking Hugo Hanrahan. "The point is that the First Warrior and your Ascendant Swordsmen aren’t all that different. So if you’re worried that your friend has been taken off to make an offering to a heretical Eldritch deity... Then just tell yourself that he was praying to Gareon for guidance instead."

"And if you still have questions," she said over her shoulder as she left the stupefied-looking young lord behind. "Then I’ll introduce you to Ignatious when this is all over," she said before releasing a slow sigh of relief to be away from the human nobleman.

"Maybe he’ll have an easier time being kind to you," she added under her breath. "I’m sorry, Mother Ashlynn," she whispered. "But for now, this is as much as I can do..."

There was more that she could have explained to put the young lord’s mind at ease. She could have told him that, at most, Lord Jalal and the people of his clan used the images of the constellations as visual anchors for their sorcery, simple aids in managing the complex concepts of strength in battle or courage, or whatever else they were invoking when they sought strength from the stars.

Lord Jalal wasn’t an Oracle. There had been no true Oracle of the Stars since the Human Church found a way to bind that power to the chosen successors of their ’Great Prophet.’ At most, Lord Jalal’s people were following traditions that had existed before the founding of the Church of the Holy Lord of Light.

But explaining all that, and confronting Liam’s reaction to the secrets that Amahle had revealed to Heila and Ashlynn during their training, was more than Heila could do in the limited time that she had, and she wasn’t entirely convinced that it would have been a good idea anyway.

She had planted a seed for Liam by telling him about the First Warrior and the Ascended Swordsman... he would have to come looking for answers if he wanted to learn more, and when he did, he needed to demonstrate that he could accept whatever truths he found.