The "Earth Mother Goddess," descended here in the body of the Goddess of Beauty, wore a dark crimson Intisian-style gown, its waist cinched by a sash tied into a bloom, making her silhouette look impossibly slender.
It was the gift Ebner had brought her when he last visited the Harvest Church.
He studied the silver hair draped casually over the divine avatar's shoulder for a moment, and thought: Something's still missing. Not enough jewelry, probably.
Without quite meaning to, he'd found a faint echo of the pleasure Emlyn took in dressing up his dolls.
Though I prefer mine alive. He pushed the thought aside, dismissed the butler and the servants, and bowed with due solemnity.
"Praise be to you, Source of Life, Mother of All Things—"
No matter how familiar they had grown, he still couldn't bring himself to show even a trace of irreverence before a god. At least not openly.
He didn't even finish the sentence. Lilith cut him off. "I told you before — you don't need to be this formal with me."
She gave him a look that was half smile, half something harder to read. "Show me what's actually going on in your head."
That would be blasphemy. He kept the thought strictly internal, nodded compliantly, and settled onto the sofa across from her.
Lilith's silver eyes rested on him. "You completed the task well. It met my expectations, broadly speaking."
"Good to hear." Ebner exhaled. "At least I didn't misread your intentions." His mind was already moving. He ventured carefully: "There are still a few things I haven't quite worked out. Would it be possible to discuss them somewhere... more secure?"
Lilith shook her head without hesitation. "I won't discuss anything related to the Silver Moon Plan with you. There is no truly secure place — not even within Amanises's Dark Heavenly Kingdom."
So it's all understood, never spoken aloud. Everyone playing riddler. Ebner thought. No wonder every major player has gone to such lengths to steer this life of mine toward the All-Knowing path. Anything else would be a nightmare to work with.
Though it does say something about just how terrifying the Outer Gods and the Primordials really are.
He let go of the idea of pressing Lilith further on the plan, and shifted. "What brings you here today, then?"
Her silver eyes swept over him, and she smiled. "Your work was exceptional. I came to give you a reward." She paused, with an air of mild reproach. "I waited from last night until noon today for you to come to the Harvest Church and report. You never showed. So I had to come to you."
A god personally making a house call to hand out a reward? Ebner thought, with a flicker of guilt. If the Earth Mother's fanatics ever found out, they'd tear me apart. He cleared his throat. "I had an urgent matter come up last night. I planned to visit you this afternoon."
"No need to explain. I'm not here to reproach you." Lilith waved it off, then lifted her teacup and took a sip before getting to the point. "This task was complicated, and you took on real risk. So I've prepared three rewards for you."
Three. Ebner couldn't help but smile. He was a straightforward man — no false modesty. "What are they?"
Lilith set her cup down and turned her hand over. A card appeared on the table between them, its face printed with an image of the giant Roselle pacifying a lion.
A Blasphemy Card, without question. The Twilight Giant.
Of course. The thought arrived before he'd even consciously formed it.
He had predicted this — that he, Klein, and Bernadette would find Blasphemy Cards turning up around them with increasing frequency. He hadn't expected one to materialize barely half a day later.
The Earth and Giant pathways were closely linked. Even the Guardian's signature ability drew on the power of Earth. On top of that, Lilith had long been impersonating the Giant Queen. It made perfect sense for the Twilight Giant card to have ended up in her hands.
He turned it over and flipped through the high-Sequence potion formulae, already in its activated state.
The ritual for the Glorious One requires directly confronting an existence of Angel rank — for a goal you must achieve — and winning outright.
The essence of it, I think, is a kind of spiritual imprint. The conviction to fight something stronger than you, for a cause worth dying for, without flinching.
It says win, not kill. You don't have to defeat the Angel — achieving the goal itself counts as victory. But the difficulty is still immense. An Angel can't hold back; if they do, the ritual fails to produce the required effect.
Come to think of it, the God of Combat's church must have Angels who survived from the Fourth Epoch. It's hard to imagine a Silver Knight who grew up in peacetime managing to defeat one. In the original story, they couldn't even take down Miss Justice. Obviously that's a different matter for exceptional cases like me and Klein.
And looking at the Twilight Giant's Sequence 0 ritual — the God of Combat joining the Rose School of Thought to use it as a stepping stone to True Godhood makes a lot more sense now.
Before that thought had fully settled, Lilith produced a second object: a round mirror, palm-sized, its frame carved with a red moon and a scattering of stars. Just looking at it quieted the mind, stilled the thoughts — as if the air around it had grown thick with stillness.
That's clearly something belonging to the Goddess. Ebner considered this. So the three rewards are one from each of the three — one god, one gift apiece? He shelved the thought and looked back at Lilith, waiting.
"The mirror itself is fairly ordinary — just a vessel shaped from Amanises's divine power," Lilith said with a smile. "What matters is what's sleeping inside it. A high-Sequence Nightmare."
Just a vessel shaped from the Goddess's divine power. Ebner nearly laughed. Condensed divine power with a physical form, in the hands of a Discerner, has endless uses.
And the purpose was obvious — this was food for the Dream Tapir held within the Observer's Castle. Which meant the Goddess and Lilith both supported him reclaiming Rhine's old castle, and with it, the Blood Moon Queen and the Source of Depravity sealed inside.
He accepted the mirror and turned his Discernment on it. Beyond the powerful soul it held captive, the mirror itself was a formidable extraordinary object in its own right. Pushed to its limit, it could erase a target entirely and dispatch them to the Kingdom of Evernight.
The drawback was that the divine power fueling it couldn't be replenished through use — which would gradually rouse the soul sleeping within.
For Ebner, that wasn't a problem at all.
(End of Chapter)