NOVEL WEB Chapter 26 - A Quick Chat
Novaris. Duodecir. 903. AGC.
Ravnica smiled as she saw Annale enter the Silver City. Seeing a cleric's reaction to meeting a Moon Angel for the first time was always great. Thankfully, it did precisely what Ravnica wanted by causing her fellow cleric to forget about the Jasmine issue.
After having a god's presence in their souls for so long, many forgot that the deities felt everything they felt. The gods were existences on another level, though they didn’t act like it, and made a show of paying attention by increasing their presence when they spoke with their clergy.
The gods were always watching and listening to everything their clergy did. The act of increasing the pressure was just that, an act. An act Ravnica knew helped comfort many as it made them feel special by having their god's attention on them.
In truth, there was no hiding anything from a god. Well, at least anything the clergy felt, said, or did, even within their own minds. Gods had more limitations than just being unable to manifest into physical reality without assistance. There was the obvious limitation of having to contend with other gods, but that was something entirely different. A real limitation gods did have was the limitation of their mortal clergy. Which was a huge limitation, considering the main instrument of their wills were mortals.
That alone had brought lots of questions from the non-clergy. After all, why did gods create celestials if they didn’t use them? At least not as much as they should. The clergy learned that gods didn’t use celestials due to a self-imposed limitation. The limitations often involve wanting to preserve the planet, though more often than not, it was to keep other gods from using their celestial. If the gods really began throwing magic around with their immortal celestials, they could easily bring a planet down. Naturally, this would be bad as without a planet, they wouldn’t exist. So, even the darker gods followed this practice and hence had a silent agreement to leave celestials outside most of their grudge matches.
With that being said, gods were stuck with the limits of mortals. Mortals could only focus on so much at once, and they could only channel so much power at a time. Then, there was the fact that the clergy did have free will. This was an especially tricky subject as the gods could influence their clergy's souls but could not force them to take actions they did not wish to take.
Ravnica knew it was odd, but the limitation of free will made sense. What good was an instrument of your will if they did not carry it out? Sure, you could remove them from existence with a thought, but that still meant that said instrument failed to do the one task you needed it to do.
This, of course, still led back to Annale. Ravnica had known the woman for quite a while, and she knew that Annale was one to get caught up in things and get a bit more emotional than needed. She was also one of the many who forgot that the goddess was always paying attention. And even though Annale’s dedication to the cause was good. That trait was only good until it started causing trouble for the wrong people. The fact was that some secrets could only be known by a select few—one of those secrets being the mystery behind Jasmine.
Ravnica knew their lady had allowed Annale a bit more freedom for being the one to notice Jasmine, but eventually, Annale’s thoughts and ideas got a bit too dangerously close to a secret she could not learn. So, the decision was made to help Annale take her mind off the issue.
The goddess truly wished to help the woman reach A Rank as a reward for finding and watching over Jasmine. It just happened to be that the best way to get Annale to take her mind off the issue and still get her to rank up was taking her to the Silver City. There, she would be overwhelmed with new things, and once she remembered the issues at hand, she would have no way to come back to the world on her own. So Luxana hoped the woman would instead focus on getting to A Rank rather than worrying about Jasmine. Then, once she had reached A Rank and Jasmine was out of reach, she would be brought back stronger than ever.
So, knowing she was trying to avoid her new problem, Ravnica got up and began walking to Jasmine’s recovery room.
It hadn’t been her idea, but Luxana wanted Ravnica to handle Jasmine personally. This was mainly done to prevent any other clergy from wondering about Jasmine’s true nature. Even Ravnica herself hadn’t learned about the issue until after the incident in the orphanage. Even then, Ravnica knew she wasn’t being told everything, but unlike Annale, she knew when to stop snooping for answers.
Ravnica's only complaint about the whole situation was how much gold the temple had to spend on this issue. Even paying for Annale’s little flying incident didn’t compare to the gold spent on Jasmine so far. When Ravnica said Luxana wanted to keep Jasmine’s nature as secret as possible, she hadn’t truly realized to what extent. First, they had hired a rushed job to install a new spatially expanded room within the temple. Due to the rushed nature of the job and pulling clerical rank on this particular enchanting guild’s customers so the temple could skip the queue, they had been charged way too much. That was 20,000 gold that the temple was never getting back.
Then, there was the fact that Ravnica, as a Grand Cleric, was already busy dealing with the king and nobles. If you added the fact that she ran the entire Church of Dreams in the kingdom, well, she had a lot of work. This meant that Ravnica was not happy to be the only cleric allowed contact with Jasmine. Thankfully, though in Luxana’s grateful mercy, Ravnica had been allowed to let the priestesses make contact with Jasmine. The priestesses were still non-ranked mortals, which made it so they did not have any annoying magical senses with which to probe Jasmine. So Ravnica would set up a special group of priestesses whose sole purpose was to assist Jasmine.
Either way, Ravnica stopped her inner thoughts and plans as she came to a halt in front of Jasmine’s door. Taking a second to straighten her mind and plan out what she was going to say, she paused before knocking softly.
Not long after, she heard Jasmine’s sweet but weak voice telling her to enter.
The room, or more accurately, rooms, were created to facilitate Jasmine’s every need. They had voice-activated runic lights and room temperature control and were also adorned with many paintings and tapestries relating to Luxana or depicting other beautiful scenes. Jasmine was sitting in the entrance room as she reclined in one of the oversized soft chairs. She seemed to be reading a book about dragons, which she had probably gotten from her small personal library.
This was the first time Ravnica was seeing the girl, and if the old reports about her were accurate, Jasmine’s looks had changed. However, many of the changes were minor as Ravnica knew her celestial nature had finally properly set in, giving her increased beauty, resiliency, and confidence. Out of everything, the most notable change was her ears.
Jasmine’s once-round human ears now had the slimmer looks of an elf, but their pointy tips did not extend as far as a pureblooded elf's ears would, which marked her as a half-blood.
Giving the girl a warm smile, Ravnica approached and sat on the comfy chair across from Jasmine. However, Jasmine, in turn, just kept looking at her without saying a word, which Ravnica found weird as she should be rather outgoing in her current state. Well, maybe not, as the moon was currently in its first quarter, which meant the brother was probably advising against engaging some unknown cleric. That thought made Ravnica realize that she had come to expect everyone to know who she was, but she forgot Jasmine had yet to meet her, so she moved to fix that.
“Jasmine, it's nice to finally meet you. I am Grand Cleric Ravnica, and I have been put in charge of caring for you for the foreseeable future.” Ravnica tried to sound as nice as she could as she spoke, but her gruff, draconic voice did not help.
Jasmine was not convinced and just kept staring at her. So Ravnica continued content with being the sole speaker.
“The first thing I want to do is clarify that Annale is just fine and has been sent to do some training by order of Luxana. I know that doesn’t mean much to you since, outside of the special connection between you two, you haven’t interacted with her or her clergy. Either way, this is the new status quo. All you should know is that you are not allowed to leave the temple just yet, and please do not attempt to do so. We have B Rankers on constant watch.”
At this point, Ravnica paused to see if the girl had anything to say, but other than a slight frown at her last two sentences, she seemed unbothered.
Looking at her, Ravnica found the girl unnerving. She could not read her at all since she was blocked from doing so. Luxana had said that this blockage came from Setiel, but Ravnica wasn’t sure. Either way, it was not like Jasmine was a threat, as Ravnica could remove her from existence with a thought. Still, the fact that she couldn’t tell what the girl was thinking got to her. Inwardly smiling at herself for being unnerved by Jasmine, Ravnica continued explaining Jasmine's current situation.
“The fact is that you are special, and we can’t simply let you run around by yourself. That assassin was a servant of Setiel, whom I am sure you are aware of. Now, thankfully, he was just some C Ranker, and though at great cost to yourselves, you manage to bring him down. The issue is that Setiel won’t allow you to live as a dual vessel like Luxana is willing to tolerate. That obviously means you now have a massive target on your back. This even extends to the orphanage and your friend Rose.”
Now, that last bit hit something, and Ravnica stopped speaking as a multitude of emotions passed through the girl's face.
Worry, longing, sadness, and finally anger. However, even so, Jasmine didn’t say anything, so Ravnica continued with assurances.
“Don’t worry, Zefree has been informed that she has a B Ranker constantly watching the orphanage. As for Rose, well she is training to become a paladin and has also been put under watch. Even so, I doubt that Setiel will try anything. The last thing she needs is Sol shifting his attention from the Realm Invasion and coming down on her. So, with that said, I will go ahead and let you get back to your reading. However, before I go, I will let you know some of our plans for the future. We plan to give you lessons about the world and its workings in order to widen your horizons. We will also teach you how to fight and train you in whatever weapons you deem fit. Finally, we will give you lessons on how we clergy folk use magic as well as general knowledge on the topic. Once we reach that point, we will have another discussion.”
Then, without waiting for anything else, Ravnica gave the girl another smile and left the room. Ravnica knew the girl had a lot to think about as her life had just been flipped upside down. After all, from the girl’s perspective, she had just gone from being some barmaid to almost being killed, to then being told her whole life was a lie and that she was not going to be some nobody.