MHHC Chapter 140

Exhausted Faith

Was it only her frayed nerves, or had something in Father Padre's eyes truly changed?

The old man's face—so heavy with regret only moments ago—had emptied. Now he looked like something else entirely: a distant observer, watching from a remove so vast it might have been measured in centuries rather than feet.

"......"

Meeting those unfocused, drifting eyes, Adelheid understood at once what had unsettled her.

The transcendent sense that resonance had once awakened in her was sending the faintest of warnings.

Something had shifted within the High Priest. The man before her was no longer the "Father Padre" she had known.

And Adelheid had heard, once, what happened inside a priest when such moments came upon them.

She had lived within the temple long enough to know it—how could she not? It was the state every priest prayed with everything they had to attain.

'When a divine oracle descends. When a priest is in contact with the voice of god—that's what this looks like. I remember being told exactly this.'

She swallowed against the dryness gathering in her throat.

'But we're far from the Grand Cathedral. There isn't even a Revelation Plate here.'

The thought surfaced unbidden, and Adelheid bit her lip with a bleak, humorless smile.

How crude they had turned out to be—all the "immutable truths" she had once accepted as common sense and gospel. The unshakeable pillars of her understanding.

Measured against that, receiving an oracle without a Revelation Plate was almost trivial.

And besides, this was not what mattered most.

She had to determine whose divine presence now inhabited Father Padre. Whether it was Morig or Valentin—whoever it was, this was the being who had issued the oracle thirty years ago.

"They say that during a divine oracle, only truth can be spoken in response." A faint note of accusation had crept into Adelheid's voice. "Though now I'm not certain even that is true."

"Who are you, exactly?"

She waited, rigid with tension, and even she could hear the gravity in her own voice—something that had become, she realized, very close to desperation.

Father Padre's expression, which had been still beneath her gaze, began to solidify by degrees. The faint upward curve that had touched his lips receded to nothing. His eyes sank into an unreadable quiet.

Adelheid thought his face looked a little sorrowful. And for just one unguarded moment, it felt like a face she had known very well.

"The being you most desperately desire at this moment."

"Don't give me such imprecise—"

"Whatever you expected, it will not be different. Though not completely the same, either."

Adelheid shoved herself to her feet. The hand clenched in her skirts went white at the knuckles.

"Not completely the same, yet not different either. What kind of answer is that?"

"A fractured shard, or an echo......" Something in the voice was almost gentle. "You may call it whatever is most comfortable."

"......I cannot believe this. No. I don't believe it." Her voice had begun firm; it was blurring now at the edges, unstable. "Even if you speak in that entirely different tone, just like that......"

She could feel them coiling, the newly planted seeds of doubt, burrowing down to take root in the deepest part of her.

"If you truly are...... the one I want—then until you tell me clearly, in your own body, with your own voice, face to face with me...... I......"

"What you choose to believe is your own affair." The tone was serene. Utterly unmoved. "I have forced nothing."

She stared at Father Padre with incredulous eyes.

It seemed to mean that she already believed it herself, without needing any persuasion at all. Was even that suspicion unwarranted self-consciousness on her part?

Whatever the case, she no longer wished to be entangled in his words.

Adelheid stepped away from the table and crossed the room. She wanted to be out of this place as quickly as possible. The more she listened to that voice, the more she felt herself being pulled in—bewitched, slowly, without noticing the moment it happened.

As her hand closed urgently around the door handle, Father Padre's pale voice followed after her.

"Adelheid."

She froze with her hand still on the handle, holding her breath. She could have ignored it and walked out—and yet that simple utterance of her name stopped her as surely as if her entire body had turned to ice.

"Fate assigns purpose to every human being. And according to that purpose, you will have need of me in time."

"That will never—"

"You believe no such occasion will arise. But in the end, you will come to find me."

Was this prophecy? Or a new curse?

Adelheid stared at Father Padre with eyes so wide the whites had gone red at the edges.

Whether his true nature was a divine shard, an echo, or Morig itself...... she was simply, utterly tired of it all. The weariness went bone-deep.

"One thing is certain." She clipped each word. "That I...... will never be able to trust you again."

She snapped the words and slammed the door behind her with a bang.

Then she startled at her own action—and fled quickly down the corridor before she could think better of it.

Adelheid returned to her room in distress and spent the hours until dawn lost entirely in thought.

Shards and echoes and oracles. It was too much to hold in her mind all at once, like trying to keep water cupped in both hands while someone kept adding more.

She paced restlessly between the window and the doorway, waiting only for Valentin's return.

Valentin could put her doubts to rest cleanly and completely. When he came back, she would finally know what had attached itself to Father Padre—the nature of the thing that had spoken through him, wearing the old priest's face.

He—Valentin—had not done a single thing to harm her. Not since waking within the body of the Grand Duke of Ansgar.

'He could never have issued an oracle like that.'

Adelheid bit her thumbnail and shook her head. That she could not fully shake the doubts that kept surging up made her feel sick with guilt.

After everything Valentin had sacrificed for her in the past.

Was it simply because she was only human? She was horrified by how quickly she forgot what she owed him.

"Your Highness. Good morn—" Lena stepped through the door the following morning with the washbasin, her greeting bright—and then she caught sight of the dark shadows beneath Adelheid's eyes and stopped short. "Don't tell me you haven't slept?"

"What happened? Was the bed uncomfortable? Or has your fever come back?"

"Nothing like that."

"That's a relief, at least. If you're ever feeling unwell, you must wake me without fail. You understand?"

"I will. Thank you for worrying about me."

Adelheid smiled faintly and added the words, then slipped in a casual question.

"By the way—is the command strategy meeting still going on?"

"It's been going since last night. Seeing them skip meals like that, the situation must be quite serious."

Adelheid considered asking Lena to carry a note to Valentin, but shook her head.

Last night, it had felt as though she would die if she did not get an answer at once. But with morning, something in her had settled.

'No matter how I think about it, it's more likely Morig than Valentin. And if the intent was to shake me, it was rather successful.'

She held firmly to the conviction that "shard" and "echo" were nothing but wordplay. Manipulation dressed in the language of the divine.

And above all, battle was imminent. Rather than losing her equilibrium now over an oracle from the past, she wanted to postpone judgment and decision until everything was over.

'I'm not trying to forget the sin of it. And I do trust Valentin...... that's not it.'

Adelheid closed her fist tightly around the ring hanging at her neck and tried to soothe herself. The comfort did not last.

Of course she wanted to believe in Valentin with everything in her. She did believe. But when that vicious, adhesive doubt attached itself to the underside of her faith, clinging there like something with teeth......

She pressed down forcibly on the corrupted thoughts that had begun to rise again.

'You decided to talk to him first. That was the decision.'

Gathering her troubled heart to her, Adelheid passed the time sorting through her medicinal herbs with listless hands.

By noon, things had improved somewhat—because the priests reportedly sent from the temple with the rear guard had joined the subjugation force, and her attention had naturally turned toward them.

The four priests assigned to Ansgar were, fortunately, seasoned veterans with extensive practical experience. Their faces were haggard from the long journey, yet without pause they began a thorough inspection of the Ansgar tents and the knights' quarters, working their way through every interior and exterior angle with the methodical calm of those accustomed to grimmer arrivals.

The priest who introduced herself as Miriam frowned with evident concern.

"Once the subjugation begins in earnest, the beds will surely prove insufficient."

Adelheid looked around at the roughly thirty beds that had been set up and nodded.

The tents pitched across the frozen ground were already packed so densely they nearly pressed against the forest's edge. Even a glance at the swarming knights and soldiers made their numbers formidable. Given that there were still knight companies yet to arrive, these beds would soon prove woefully inadequate.

"We will need to secure more space for beds regardless. Even if we use all the corridors......" Miriam's brow remained furrowed. "I'll need to check whether the other houses are in a similar situation. If conditions are truly dire, we may have to erect tents behind the castle as well."

The castle's rear received no sunlight, and was far colder than even this.

Adelheid thought for a moment, then added,

"If necessary, I will give up the room assigned to me. It isn't far from here."

"Your Highness's own quarters?"

"I have slept in tents before. And I didn't come all this way simply to look after my own comfort."

"But even so, you are Her Highness......"

Miriam regarded her with evident surprise, but shook her head with what appeared to be genuine misgiving. The reason was that adequate rest mattered as well. But Adelheid was unmoved—the other healers did not have private rooms, and she saw no justification for maintaining an exception on her behalf.

In the end, Miriam yielded a step to Adelheid's argument, and the matter was settled.

"Of course, if you truly insist, there is nothing better we could ask for. The wounded will certainly do better resting inside a proper building than lying on planks over frozen ground."

Perhaps thinking she had spoken too stiffly, Miriam added in a somewhat softer tone:

"Then I will have the servants move Your Highness's belongings to the quarters we are using. With a curtain hung inside, it should be quite livable. In truth," she conceded, "it will also be more efficient for treating the wounded."