GRP Chapter 33

Garthe stepped into the temple only after the last person had disappeared from the alley corner. A priest of massive build, his face divided by a large scar, moved to block the entrance. The priest tilted his head sideways and cracked his knuckles.

"Lunch break—brother?"

Garthe lit a small flame in his palm.

"Welcome, brother!"

The priest folded himself nearly in half at the waist. Mariaeks recognized that the unfamiliar address of "brother" was a product of the people who had been making demands for Garthe outside.

"Samthyeon?"

"In the research room."

Garthe had just started to move when he stopped again. His gaze settled on a commotion past the large priest. A bearded middle-aged man was streaming tears and clutching another priest. The words that drifted across from the two men's exchange at intervals were: lunch break, attack, lunch break, reindeer herd, lunch break, entire fortune, lunch break. The one repeating "lunch break" was the priest. The one saying "attack, reindeer herd, entire fortune" was the weeping man.

The priest who had received them spoke up with some hesitation, apparently deciding Garthe found the commotion irritating.

"Sh-shall I handle it?"

Mariaeks wasn't entirely certain whether "handle it" meant the complaint or the human filing it.

With few people in the space, the ones causing the disturbance had also noticed Garthe's presence. The man turned his head sharply. The man, weeping hard enough that his eyes had gone raw at the edges, stared when he saw Garthe. He appeared to recognize him despite the deep hood pulled forward. He seemed to have met Garthe before. Garthe made a short sound.

"Poppie."

'Poppie...?' The word repeated itself in Mariaeks's mind without her help. Whatever it was, it seemed excessively cute to be coming out of Garthe's mouth.

"A-Ani—"

Before the word Anir could complete itself, flames burst and bloomed in front of the middle-aged man's eyes. Whether the instruction to keep quiet came through clearly, the man rapidly substituted the form of address.

"O-Owner! My master!"

Since he was indeed the owner of Olgidphaenn, it wasn't technically wrong... but it is quite a startling choice. The priests failed to fully conceal their complicated feelings and muttered. The man scrambled forward and dropped to both knees before Garthe.

"Master, please—please spare me!"

The old man's tears fell steadily.

The man's name was Rugel. He was chief of a nomadic tribe wandering the cold lands—and one of the few who still used the name "Olgidphaenn" after the region had frozen in the divine punishment incident one hundred and thirty-five years ago. His people had survived by virtue of being nomadic.

Since Garthe had reconquered Olgidphaenn, Rugel's tribe had returned to their homeland and built ties with the fortresses through trade. But recently, monsters and gods had begun rampaging across not only Olgidphaenn but the nearby cold lands as well, leaving him utterly unable to hold on. He had intended to sell the reindeer herd and throw himself into the warm embrace of the Thul'Mhoriae Alliance.

And so he had been heading to Fox's Den Fortress to trade the reindeer when a monster horde appeared without warning. Fortunately his tribe had enough strong fighters to dispatch them without loss of life—but the startled reindeer had scattered entirely. My entire fortune, my entire fortu-une...! Even watching Rugel wail, Garthe's eyebrow did not so much as twitch.

"I know every major monster and god habitat in the area! I confirmed the route was safe by scouting in advance—and then monsters from the Jüllaphan direction suddenly came at us..."

Jüllaphan... He rampaged through Jüllaphan and drove the ones whose territory he disrupted right into this man. The priests who knew the backstory slid their eyes sideways toward Garthe. When Garthe smiled at them as if to ask whether they had something to say about it, the priests dropped their eyes quickly.

"Please spare me! Master! What's the use of feeling warmly toward people from the same region—I was going to hand over my children for a pittance and be on my way..."

Garthe, a man with not a scrap of human warmth nor shortage of funds, returned nothing to these words except a languid smile.

Despair-stricken, tears welling, Rugel drew a sharp breath. His hands dove into his coat and came back out with something—a piece of old leather, rolled into a tube.

"I recently came across ruins! There were monsters sleeping nearby so I couldn't go in... but if you help me, this map..."

At that moment, Samthyeon materialized from somewhere and snatched the map cleanly from the man's hand. Rugel stared at his empty hand in bewilderment. The hollow-eyed Samthyeon paid that gaze no attention whatsoever, spreading the map flat to scan it.

"Solphan?"

"No, a small place called Beiphan, just attached to Solphan."

"Not a region I've given attention to. Is the information reliable?"

"Yes! Yes! I saw it with my own two eyes! There were inscriptions too, in some kind of ancient language I couldn't read..."

"The map's scale is different from the Alliance's. You'll need to serve as a guide as well."

"Of course!"

"We'll pay fair value for the reindeer. In exchange, if your tribe has other maps or old documents passed down through the generations, those would be welcome donations. If donation is difficult, I'll arrange to have them copied and delivered through Alliance temples."

"Yes! I'll hand over even my great-grandfather's diary!"

Samthyeon, having concluded negotiations entirely on behalf of Olgidphaenn's "master," looked at Garthe.

"Go find us the reindeer, brother."

Having assigned the task with complete naturalness, Samthyeon only then registered the presence of Mariaeks tucked under Garthe's arm. He stared at her with startled eyes.

"Lady Mariaeks?"

Every set of human eyes in the room—all of which had failed entirely to register her existence beside the weight of Garthe's presence—swung to her at once. What's this? Why is she under the Anir's arm? Innocent, curiosity-filled gazes poured over her, and Mariaeks was too mortified to open her mouth.

"You were alive."

The exhausted man let it slip involuntarily, along with a sigh of relief he couldn't contain. Mariaeks's eyes flickered. 'Alive'—he had thought she was dead? Had she really been that close to dying? The crisis, made suddenly fresh and specific again, settled as a chill at the back of her neck. She rubbed the spot.

She had expected Garthe to show some displeasure at Samthyeon's offhand command. Contrary to expectation, he did nothing but ask Rugel for the exact location of the attack and turn toward the door. Research: Samthyeon. Procuring research materials: Garthe. A contract between the two that Mariaeks knew nothing about.

Garthe stepped outside and breathed briefly, looking up at the sky. Simultaneously, the fine hairs on Mariaeks stood up. The divine power condensed into a single point inside Garthe erupted like an avalanche.

Kwaaaaah—a storm-like pillar of fire pushed the wind upward and shot into the sky. People in the street stared up with open mouths. The brief burst extinguished itself. Only the scorching heat still threaded through the cold wind proved that any of it had actually happened.

Mariaeks felt the familiar energies scattered throughout the area begin to gather. It had the quality of a signal for assembly.

Because the effect was excessive, what gathered was not only Garthe's subordinates. Since the only one in Olgidphaenn who handled fire on that scale was the Anir, the people who had just turned away from the temple came flooding back with burning eyes.

"A-Anir Olgidphaenn!"

"We're from Duesie! Olgidphaenn's eternal ally!"

Garthe didn't respond to any of it. His eyes seemed to find no humans. His ears seemed to receive no desperate voices. Complete, perfect erasure—as though he had excised their existence from his attention entirely.

She had heard that humans covet what they cannot have all the more intensely for the not-having. Mariaeks found, watching them, that this was accurate. The humans approached Garthe with faces full of fear and wanting, the way someone might reach for a cursed treasure.

They all looked like moths to her. Mad to burn. She didn't know what they were after, but it seemed to her that if one thought carefully about it, there wasn't actually anything worth dying for. Life was precious. One ought to take care of it.

As the humans pressed toward Garthe with recklessness and borrowed courage, shadows fell across the crowd. People looked up. Three women with white wings dropped down in a thud around Garthe. They moved as though weightless—the sound had clearly been deliberate. A warning.

The intention arrived with precision. The humans made sounds of alarm and fell back. "The P-Paldoa's mad dogs!" Mariaeks thought again, if one were being precise, that they seemed more like mad birds than mad dogs.

The three Paldoa sisters stood with their weight on one leg and looked over the crowd. Wherever their eyes went, people's faces darkened like drained skin. The youngest, Akote, scowled and growled.

"What are you staring at?"

One man couldn't bring himself to point out that the staring had begun on her side, and cast his eyes down.

Ryaia tied her disheveled hair without looking up.

"The Anir's absent?"

Despite their fear, people threw incredulous looks at the man standing directly behind Ryaia.

"Like we haven't done this before? Temple for appointment inquiries. You know how it works."

The priests exhaled their annoyance.

Thirty seconds before, the ice cracked.

The frozen lake split with the sound of something structural failing, and a horde of half-human, half-fish monsters erupted through the surface. Salenoke's axe took the head of the lead creature before it had fully cleared the waterline. The severed cross-section burst.

Mariaeks closed her eyes.

She opened them.

The warriors were knocking blood from their weapons. The battle had concluded in the interval.

A monster head had rolled to a stop against her knee, still tucked under Garthe's arm. It opened and closed its beak at her. It did not appear to know its head had been separated from the rest of it.

The fish-eyes regarded her. She regarded them back, then looked away.