I pulled it out of my shirt and showed it to him as I sat beside him.
Relief touched his eyes. “I reinforced the chimaera, and the obscuration filter. I tested it all yesterday, so the chimaerashouldwork to block us entirely, and even if it doesn’t, the obscuration is there as back-up. At worst, whoever’s on the other end should only see masks where our faces are. But the crystal––”
“––will make our magic invisible,” I finished for him. “We’ll be okay, Alaric. My mom used it to hide from the Praecuri for nearly a decade. It’ll work.”
He nodded, hands clasped.
The first few times we’d done this, it had shocked me to learn the receivers were all two-way. Alaric wasreallygood with magical objects, but the thought that they might see us here, sitting on the couch in my suite at the Dragon’s Keep, made both of us intensely nervous. When I showed him my mother’s crystal, he’d spent over a week testing it and examining its magical properties. In the end, he proclaimed it our first, most important defense against being found out, as it blocked our magical signatures entirely, making us impossible to trace.
It hadn’t stopped him tinkering with other protective spells.
I adjusted my weight closer to him on the couch, right as a cloud of magical smoke billowed out of the round face of of the device. The cloud reconfigured precisely as I watched, and sharpened into a three-dimensional figure. That body and face hadn’t yet fully formed when my breath stopped in my chest.
It didn’t seem to matter how many times we did this; something in me always reacted the same––like I’d been punched, hard, in the middle of my chest, right over an open wound. His presence hit into me like a knife to the solar plexus.
Maybe it even got a little worse each time.
The apparition solidified.
When it finished, a hooded figure in a gold mask appeared to grow out of my wooden table. He seemed to be looking straight at us. At me.
The Priest.
It was the only name anyone knew him by, even most followers of Dark Cathedral. No one knew the identity of the Magical behind the gold mask, no one we had access to, at least. He was simply the Priest. Hero of Dark Cathedral.
Spokesperson for the cause.
The Priest served as religious leader, translator, message-bearer, and recruiter. Sent to inspire, instruct, and swell their numbers, he transmitted scripture, ideology, and direct orders to the faithful.
Whoever this “Priest” was, they breathed magic out in a sickening, nauseating, permeating, inexorable wave. Something about it hit into me like an electrical current, vibrating my skin and making me feel sick, like I had a live wire between my teeth.
Even so, I knew it didn’t affect me like it did Alaric. Alaric seemed to think it affected most Magicals the way it did him, that I was the strange one.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the shining gold, featureless face.
Maybe an inch of shockingly pale skin showed below the edge of the metal mask, the only hint of flesh before it met the high collar of what looked like a dark uniform. I couldn’t see his hair, any feature of his face, not even his eyes, which glowed a sharp, raptor-like, blue-black through the holes of the mask. The broad shoulders suggested male, but realistically, there was no way to be certain about that, either. It could all be an illusion.
There was no way to prove any of it.
There was no way to know for sure.
My obsession with knowing whether or not it was Caelum was like a sickness I couldn’t shake, a compulsion to pick at a sore that would never heal, mostly because I couldn’t make myself leave it alone.
Whoever they were, they were so heavily illusioned, their magical signature so distorted, their body so entirely coveredin cloth, metal, magic, and mist, I couldn’t convince myself in either direction. On one side, I knew what I felt. On the other, I didn’t want to believe it, so I held out some hope that it was another weird manifestation of my stalker-like obsession, a way to convince myself I was better off with him no longer in my life.
I tried to remind myself of the practical, logical reasons for pirating the Priest’s broadcasts. This wasn’t about Caelum Bones and whether or not he’d decided to join the ranks of a supremacist, dark magic, anti-human cult. The Priest was still the onlytruelink we had, the only link anyone had, to the sorcerers behind Dark Cathedral.
If we could find the Priest, we could, in theory, find the rest of them.
So why did my heart still beat painfully hard whenever I saw that gold mask?
Gods, why did I feel like I was going to throw up?
I told myself it was just the same reality-distortion field that affected Alaric. Those feelings were probably just a different manifestation of the same sickly, insidious wave that filled Alaric’s head, and sometimes forced us to stop listening, mid-broadcast. Whatever caused it, that distortion seemed to grow stronger each time. Even though it had never affected me the way it did my friend, something in that magic still felt like a poison gas over my skin.
The Priest’s voice rose, mid-sentence.
“…my brothers and sisters in the Light, listen carefully. Those of you who have felt disturbances in the Aether, your perceptions steer you well. The magical veil shifts even as I speak, ever-faster as history accelerates. The unnaturalness of the current order feeds the breakdown and rot. It is because the weak and corrupt lead us with their mewling, mirroring, deceptive speech, spreading lies throughout the Aether and the Light. We all feel that sickness, what has been allowedto sink and slither into everything, even if we can give it no name. It pollutes the stones of the very cities and structures our forefathers built. The unworthy and the unblooded and the hybrid will destroy all we have wrought over history and time…”
