139 – Will of the Heavens

Vivi rarely felt stressed when watching magic unfold. With her strong grasp on the fundamentals, and the many options available to her—both immediate ones and the backups she had prepared—she had things under control even in the most extreme circumstances.

But this was different. As much as she trusted that the Archbishop would do his best and that he was one of the three most competent mortal healers in the world, she couldn’t sit easy as events played out. Vivi had pushed Remy into this. A teenaged boy, putting his trust in her. Not that he or his sister had objected, but still: should something go wrong, she would be the one responsible.

Thus, watching Augustine close his eyes and open himself to the Codex, she was nervous in a way she had seldom been before.

Worse, she had more than Remy’s health to worry about. Not a single person had taken the Codex in stride, and the Archbishop was someone she felt especially concerned about upsetting. How would he respond to sensing the oceans of mana inside the book? What conclusions would he draw?

The man didn’t blanch and stagger away, screaming, like Saffra had. The weight of mana settled onto him, and his jaw tightened. He stood rigid for a moment, eyes closed, his breathing coming through his nose in slow and deliberate pulls.

Yet his composure held. When he finally opened his eyes, his hand resting on the pages of the Codex, his gaze turned to Vivi.

“I see now why Meridian survived with so few losses.”

There was an attempt at casualness in the words that didn’t pass muster, astonishment leaking through despite his efforts. Even so, it was a muted reaction compared to both Saffra’s and Hollis’s.

Vivi shifted awkwardly in place. She didn’t like ‘showing off.’ Using the power given to her was thrilling, and she exercised that strength whenever she had an excuse—but that was because she enjoyed doing so for its own sake. Her own sake. Attention, much less the wonder-filled scrutiny that the Archbishop briefly focused on her, was something she could easily do without.

Thankfully, the discomfort didn’t last long. The Archbishop turned away and refocused on his task. With a connection forged to the Codex and Vivi’s mana pool now available to him, the priest stepped up to an intimidated-looking teenager.

“Be at ease, son,” he said with so much confidence that Vivi herself somehow felt assured. “The heavens will provide.”

Augustine held a hand out toward the boy, and a golden-yellow light began to glow in his palm. Vivi fought the urge to step closer in concern. Elise lost that battle herself; she jerked forward with a click of her shoes on the tile floor, and her hands clenched tightly against her apron. The movement drew Remy’s gaze to his sister, worry flickering across his face.

Oddly, Augustine merely chuckled at the display. “Have faith, children,” he murmured. “Not in me, nor even the Sorceress. There are greater powers in this world and beyond, and they guide me now. I feel their will.”

The glow deepened and then began to encompass Remy. The boy closed his eyes and straightened his back, though whether he felt something or was trying to act confident in the face of his sister’s worry, Vivi had no idea.

Runes began inscribing themselves into the air. The base of the magical diagram, she could understand perfectly fine. She might not be an expert healer, but she had a grasp on all magical disciplines, including restorative ones. Yet the symbols Augustine painted quickly diverged from magic as she understood it. Golden lines twisted out from the white-blue ones he himself had etched, and the language of magic warped into something incomprehensible.

Vivi had seen divine spells before, of course. Hollis had demonstrated that same brand of magic not a week earlier. But while Eshara’s teammate might be Titled and one of the stronger healers in the world, the Archbishop had four hundred levels—two full tiers—of power on that man. Both might be Titled, but Titled was a designator meant for commoners. A way to describe people so far beyond the norm that more specific terms had little meaning. In reality, there were gulfs between the two practitioners.

Despite her concern, Vivi couldn’t help the fascination that seized her as she watched the divine spellcircle come to life. There was enough foundational logic that she almost felt like, if she tried hard enough, she could make sense of it.

As if sensing her attention, Augustine murmured, “Miracles aren’t meant to be understood. It defeats the purpose.”

The hair on her arms rose—it felt awfully like the Archbishop had read her thoughts.

The spell finished forming, and the golden glow reached its crescendo. Mana poured from the Codex and into the diagram… though less than she had expected. Even knowing that curing the weak form of Blight would be a matter of precision more than overwhelming mana, she had thought the Archbishop would pull more heavily from the book.

Vivi had left Augustine stunned with the Codex’s gigantic reservoir, but the man returned the favor as she watched him work. She couldn’t comprehend everything she saw; the art of divine magic was too divorced from the more structured fields she called her specialty, even if those fields were far from structured themselves. Yet the glimpses she caught reinforced the fact: this was a man who carried out the will of the heavens in all their incomprehensible glory.

Both the healer and the boy radiated yellow light, washing the room in stark shadows, and Remy’s interlocking scars glowed brightest of all. Mana flowed from the book into Augustine, mixed together with the energies infusing the priest’s core, and poured outward and suffused the boy in turn.

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The process lasted less than a minute. It felt longer. Then the light was fading, and with it, the red scars covering Remy’s arm.

Silence hung over the room as all traces of magic dwindled and disappeared. Vivi was, perhaps nonsensically, caught off guard as much as anyone else.

It worked?

She’d been so ready to employ her emergency backups that she had to—slowly, carefully—peel her finger off the trigger. And even then she waited for some twist, some disaster that needed her personal intervention. But none came. Remy gawked at his arm, twisting it left and right, clenching and unclenching his fist.

“The wickedness that fills this world is of our own creation,” Augustine said. He didn’t seem surprised by what he had accomplished. In fact, the man was so utterly unsurprised that she felt a pang of envy for the certainty she saw. The outcome of this event had never been in question. He had felt neither stress nor anxiety like she had. “When the heavens can intervene to solve our follies, so long as it does not contradict a greater purpose, they will always be willing.”

Remy still looked gaunt and frail, too starved for his height—Augustine’s magic couldn’t fix that. But he looked healthier even ignoring how his scars were gone, his skin a stronger hue than before. Cured in more senses than one.

It wasn’t he who burst into tears, seeing a lifelong debilitating condition erased as if by random chance. Rather, it was the sibling who had a decade of composure training. Vivi almost jumped when she heard the deep, hitching breath tear out from next to Remy’s bed.

Maybe to hide her crumpling expression, the maid hurried forward and crouched in front of Remy, putting her back to Vivi and Augustine. She grabbed Remy’s hand—the one that had once been covered in Blight—and clutched it to her.

Augustine turned away and gestured ahead, telling Vivi to leave the two siblings alone. She purposely ignored whatever Elise started choking out to her brother behind her.

“I feel the need to thank you again,” Augustine said wryly as they walked to the other side of the room, still sounding too unflustered by what had happened. Vivi found herself bewildered for a variety of reasons. “There’s nothing more that I seek in this life than to act as the conduit of the heavens, and you’ve helped me fill that role once again.”

Disoriented, she responded in a way she knew immediately that she shouldn’t have. “It was your own skill too. That runework was excellent, whether supplemented by the divine or not. You’re a very talented mage.”

Augustine’s beaming demeanor faded, and Vivi wondered just how much she had—once again—said precisely the wrong thing.