Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 63: Bestowment

"And how do you know the High Sovereign's will so well?" I asked with barely concealed contempt from the crowd. "You're just as mortal as the rest of us."

The vicar's movements paused as he scanned the crowd with angry eyes, finally finding my defiant stare. "Ah, and I suppose you failed to awaken a rune yourself, boy?" the vicar said with a faux sympathetic air. "You should worry for yourself. If you continue to question the Sovereigns' chosen, you will never enter the path of magic."

In other words, I thought with gritted teeth, Shut up and obey us, or we won't give you magic.

I had been deliberately muffling my mana presence. From what I could sense of the vicar, my core was of a higher purity than his, which made it exceptionally difficult for him to sense my mana at all. He thought I was an unad.

I flared my mana, making the man miss a step as he tried to continue his speech. The men and women milling around me lurched away like I was a beast with its hackles raised. "You didn't answer my question, vicar," I said. These priests irritated me on a fundamental level: their holier-than-thou airs, their stranglehold on the people of East Fiachra, and their casual dismissal of people's futures. "How do you know the High Sovereign's will?"

A hush fell over the crowd, all eyes watching my confrontation with fearful attention. The air was taught as a bowstring; the only requirement for an arrow to be loosed was a slip of the finger.

"He has given us his words," the vicar sneered, trying to take back control of the situation. "His absolute will has been handed down to the Doctrination for nearly two millennia. And so it is, and so it ever shall be. And questioning us, you impudent boy, is akin to questioning the Sovereigns themselves," he snarled, trying to loom higher from his platform.

The man was thicker around the waist; not powerfully built like Darrin or a wall of a man like Jared. He was unimpressive.

I shook my head. "I think I am owed a single bestowment today," I said. "I am a resident of East Fiachra, after all."

The vicar's eyes trailed me up and down, resting particularly long on the signet ring on my finger. "The church does not owe you anything, mage," he said, a vindictive light in his eyes. "In fact, let this be a lesson to you. You shall have no bestowment for daring to question our Sovereign's will."

At his words, though, a few nearby vicars began to move through the crowds toward me. They parted like a sea, allowing a straight path.

"And one of his Doctrines is that the strong rule the weak, isn't it?" I asked, feeling my mana thrum in my veins. Lady Dawn shared in my anger. Hers was of a different quality; for a different reason than I could discern. But our shared anger cemented my own emotions.

"That is inviolable truth," the vicar on the platform sneered. "One that none can escape from."

The vicars reached me. One laid his hand on my shoulder, some sort of spell primed on his palm. Lightning skittered over my telekinetic shroud, each tendril trying to worm its way through my protections like a snake.

But the spell was ineffective. My barrier shrugged off the attack as if it didn't exist.

The vicar only had time to let out a grunt of surprise before I swung my fist backward, my knuckles cracking against his nose. He collapsed without another sound, knocked out cold. One of the other vicars tried to swing a heavy club at me, a crude thing designed to crack bone.

I caught it with my bare palm, then yanked it from the shocked vicar's grip with a pull of telekinesis. The cudgel, now under my telekinetic control, swung low against the vicar's thighs, impacting with a meaty thud.