It was Celeste. The white-haired magistrate stepped out from the edge of the crowd, her heavy silver mantle dark with harbor water. She did not look at Arthur or Ayame. She walked straight toward the circle of dry stone where the acolyte stood.
"I have authority here," Celeste said, her voice shaking slightly over the rumble of the drains. "Or at least partial authority over this port under the crown."
The young acolyte turned his head. His amber eyes fixed on her pale hair and the official badge pinned to her collar.
"What in God's name is happening here?" Celeste demanded.
"God's name?" the acolyte repeated. He lowered the shaft of his staff an inch, his wet sandals squeaking against the stone. "Goddess, Magistrate. You seem to have forgotten our benevolent creator. Alisia is the mother of all."
He looked at her with a steady, unblinking curiosity, as if examining a child who had mispronounced a common word.
Lucid halted his advance. His right fist remained clenched at his side, the newly formed knuckles still pale and sensitive to the cold air. He really wanted to punch this guy. The desire wasn't tactical anymore, it was a simple, heavy itch in his elbow.
The young acolyte raised a single finger from the polished wood of his weapon and pointed it directly at Lucid.
"Port Vexis is in need of some dire cleaning," the priest declared to Celeste, though his eyes never left Lucid's chest. "And I will start with this young man. This non-human, despicable devil spawn."
"Halt!" Celeste yelled. She took three steps forward, her boots splashing through a deep puddle between two paving stones. "By the laws of Vex, you will drop that staff!"
Celeste looked to her a couple of feet away from Arthur to where a massacred body lay that seemed to have been crushed under a tremendous weight. She looked back, her face was not very kind.
"You absolute..." He only smiled at her.
"Oh please... he is not one of you." Lucid looked at the body, there was... a purple pendant bearing something that had striking resemblance to the marks he had seen earlier.
The priest did not drop didn't drop the staff.
He waved the brass tip sideways through the air, shifting his aim away from Lucid and toward the silent row of kneeling dockworkers on their right.
The brass tip locked onto a man in a greasy wool shirt.
Lucid's eyes widened. He stepped forward instantly, his heels digging into the wet ground.
"No," Lucid growled.
The explosion occurred without fire or smoke. A sharp, localized concussive crack, no louder than a falling crate hitting a pier, shattered the dockworker's chest.
The man did not scream. He simply folded backward against the wooden wall of the baker's stall, his ribcage caved inward beneath his shirt.
Celeste screamed.
"You dare!" she yelled, her voice breaking on the second word. She reached for the small dress sword at her hip, her fingers slipping once on the wet leather of her grip. "Killing my citizens! In the middle of the street!"
The young acolyte did not look at the body. He lowered his staff until the ferrule rested an inch above the puddle.
"He was a non-believer," the priest said calmly. "I could feel his devotion. It was too low to sustain his thread of fate granted by mother herself..."
"After all wasn't he..." his eyes narrowed.
"A cultist?"
Lucid looked over the gory mess. Sure enough, each victim pulled from the river that day bore the same mark carved into their flesh, shaped exactly like the Ember symbol.
Lucid took another step forward. The remaining eighteen percent of the black hole he had consumed gathered in his right shoulder, heating the damp skin beneath his sleeves until thin wisps of steam rose from his linen shirt.
Celeste turned on her heel and stepped directly into his path. Her silver mantle was heavy with rainwater, and her boots slipped slightly on the wet stone as she blocked Lucid from advancing toward the white-robed priest.
"We can handle this peacefully," Celeste said. Her voice was thin, almost lost beneath the steady roar of water spilling into the harbor drains.
"He killed one of your people," Lucid said in a hushed tone. He kept his bare feet planted on the stone, his eyes fixed on the acolyte over the magistrate's shoulder.
Celeste showed an uncertain look on her face. Her pale eyes shifted toward the broken body of the laborer lying against the wooden stall, then back to the acolyte holding the brass-tipped staff. She stood debating heavily, taking into consideration the cost of a dead dockworker against the threat of a trade blockade from Ateris. Her hands gripped the front of her cloak, her knuckles pale in the grey coastal light.
She turned toward the young acolyte.
"What is it that you wish?" Celeste asked.
The priest did not lower his staff. The bright amber glow in his pupils cut through the gloom of the storm, steady and untouched by the falling water.
"To rid this port of the cultists running rampant around your streets," the acolyte said. He pointed a finger toward the lower lanes where the tenement houses crowded against the sea wall. "And as well as the non-humans. I fear that their particular place and stay has long since wagered out."
His gaze moved toward Ayame, lingering on the single horn protruding from the side of her head and the pale skin visible along the torn hem of her dark robes.
"By whom!" Lucid yelled.
The sound of his voice echoed off the stone walls of the customs house, sharp enough to turn the heads of the kneeling citizens across the plaza.
"Be quiet, you devilspawn," the acolyte replied. His tone remained smooth, devoid of any rise in temper, as if he were instructing an unruly hound. "You are nothing more than third-tier parasites. The citizens of Ateris do not share breath with filth that carries no lineage."
The insult twitched a nerve in Lucid. His jaw tightened under the crimson mist that hovered around his chin. He had spent the last week enduring the crushing weight of a divine domain, bargaining with the Monolith Mercyros for his own survival, only to stand in a muddy street and listen to an initiate from Ateris call him a parasite.
'His motives are unclear,' Alice chimed in from the back of his mind. Her voice was measured, cool against the heat rising in Lucid's chest. 'He is not here to collect tithes, and he is not preaching from the standard scripture of the High Church. He is provoking an execution.'
A moment of brief silence followed her words. The rain hit the cobblestones with a dull, rhythmic clatter.
Near the baker's stall, three members of the crowd who had been standing near the fallen laborer gathered around him to aid his recovery. They knelt in the grey puddles, pulling at the man's greasy wool shirt and lifting his head off the stones. He wasn't responsive. His chest remained caved inward, and his arms dragged lifelessly through the mud as his neighbors tried to prop him against the timber framing.
Lucid looked at the dead man, then down at his own orange life jacket. His Chain of Heart pulsed once inside his ribs, circulating his remaining eighteen percent of fate essence through his arms and legs.
"Take me," Lucid said.
He stepped around Celeste, ignoring her hand as she reached for his sleeve. He walked onto the dry circle of stone where the priest's yellow aura kept the rain from touching the ground.
"You desperately want someone to fill the targets you were assigned," Lucid said. He stopped three paces from the brass ferrule of the staff. "You need four heretics or five cultists to write in your list before the tide turns, so take me."
The young acolyte watched him approach without shifting his stance.
Lucid sighed, letting a thin trail of vapor escape his nostrils into the wet air.
"For a preacher, you make a shit job of converting people," Lucid said.
Suddenly, something stepped close.
There was no sound of footsteps on the wet stone, nor was there any flash of yellow light from the staff. A shape displaced the falling rain on Lucid's right side, moving with a velocity that left no room for his eyes to track the motion.
Lucid noticed it only when it punched.
When it punched, it tore through bone and muscle.
The impact hit the right side of his torso just below the armpit. There was no clean shockwave like the blast that had killed the sailor. This was heavy, solid mass driving through his skin. The force shattered three of his ribs instantly, snapping the bone into jagged fragments that sheared through the surrounding muscle fibers.
'What the,' Lucid thought.
His mind could not finish the sentence before his feet left the pavement. The kinetic weight of the blow launched him horizontally across the street.
He flew a couple of meters through the town, his body clearing the drainage ditch and smashing directly into the stone foundation of a wooden stall.
The masonry cracked around his impact. Timber framing from the adjacent market stall splintered and collapsed, burying his shoulders and chest under a shower of wet pine boards, slate shingles, and mud.
In the center of the street, the young acolyte lowered his staff an inch. A second figure stood beside him now, a tall man dressed in the same white linen of the Luminari Covenant, his right fist coated in a dense, shimmering white light that smoked in the damp air.
"We of the Luminari Covenant do not take in prisoners," the young acolyte said. His voice carried across the broken timber without any strain. "I fear it is nothing more than waste."
He turned his amber eyes toward the mound of debris where Lucid had fallen.
"Death is appropriate as eternal punishment in the hands of Mother Fate," the acolyte continued. "It is adequate."
Beneath the pile of broken slate and splintered pine, the timber shifted.
Lucid burst his head from the rubble. Grey dust and wet mortar clung to his hair.