Chapter 36
Angeline shivers against the cold wind as she pulls the high collar of her thick woollen overcoat above her nose. Damnit… she’d forgotten how early winter came to the northern-most part of this country. Not even a month after her little display of her abilities, now the middle of October, and the skies were already threatening to dump snow on the Blue Fortress.
A lot had happened in the twenty four days since she had been summoned to Samuel’s group-session. He’d become a Captain in the Knights of Aegis. He’d gotten a custom-made set of supple leather armour dyed and painted in the colours of the group. The village of Serenity Valley had been re-named to just ‘Serenity’, and her former companion had been solidified in his station as the Duke of Serenity. It was purely just a title to be worn in recognition of his bravery, and merely a way for their old Empress to show her subjects that she cared about even the smallest hamlet… but, come on…
Samuel was having fun with it, though. He jokingly made people call him ‘Dukeness’ , ‘Dukey’, or ‘Duker’, and laughed every single time that people used one of those monikers. The people of Serenity were ecstatic about the Empress’ recognition of their apothecary, and used a generous tithe from the crown to commission a statue of their hero. Hilariously enough, it had two poses; Finnigan holding a massive Daemon’s heart over his head in triumph… and the same man riding on the back of a donkey while completely nude. Samuel wasn’t very impressed at that… but he allowed it, only because he could imagine the smiles on their faces whenever they’d look at it. The granite forms were to be revealed at the end-of-year celebrations, and the both of them were to travel back through a Gate alongside High Magus Warren to take part in the festivities.
The golden-haired femme shudders against a bone-chilling gust, and blinks away the induced tears in her eyes to squint down the street at her destination. Another thing that had happened was that Samuel had already cut his list of potentials down to ten from the original fifteen. Two after their abilities-display, and three more from the questionnaires. Now he was in to the interview portion of the evaluations… and he’d bloody-well stuck her as the last one to go through it. Maybe he thought it was funny to make her wait so long… at any rate, though, she was not impressed…
From the candidates that remained, she was only truly worried about three of them. All formerly-Bonded mages, including Josephine Carriere, whose binding and alteration magicks had impressed everyone. The other two were Uma Farris, a thirty year-old second-class who specialized in warding, but was no slouch in elemental spells, and twenty-two year-old Laura Adelweiss, who was a third-class that used binding spells, though combined them with electricity to shock Daemons at random intervals to open weaknesses. Both Uma and Laura were beautiful, and each held decent figures… so there wasn’t really a way that she could appeal sexually overtop of those two…
Pulling open the door of the café and quickly hurrying inside, the blue-eyed arcanist shivers one last violent time, then pans her gaze around the cozy interior. Being a Thursday afternoon, this little eatery shouldn’t have been busy… but it appeared that everyone had ducked out of their duties early just to have a hot cup of bloody tea.
“Oi! Angie!”
Snapping her eyes towards the back corner, she then conceals a goofy smile behind the collar of her coat, and starts to work her way through the noisy crowd. “Goddess… could you have picked a worse day?”
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Aegis and Order: First Light
Fantasy"It’s shoulders were wide and powerful. At four metres in height, it was almost as large across as it was tall. The arms of the hulking beast hung nearly all the way to the ground, and were thick with rope-like muscles that bulged with even the sl...
