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Arcanist - Chapter 83
🕑 Added 2025-04-28 18:10:27 +0000 UTCIt was a dark, foggy night outside, and Valens walked with a spring in his step through the deserted streets of Belgrave. His visit to the Magi’s Guild had taken a much different turn than he’d expected, and hence it took him the greater part of the day to conclude his conversation with Master Archibald on an interesting note.
The old man suffered from tuberculosis, a most painful sickness that had the habit of fighting a stubborn battle against any attempts to cleanse it from one’s body. A vile predator, consuming slowly the victim and lending them a most painful death which was no less infectious than that of a plague, and given enough grounds to fertilize, could devour a city’s worth of people in a brutally short time.
Such cases demanded intricate work. You could not, in good conscience, let an Assistant Healer handle a patient suffering from consumption, for the bacteria could feed on the unguided lifemana to strengthen its hold around one’s body. That was why, during his regular visits to the Church’s most respectable Infirmary, the cure he was getting from those Priests only further quickened the pace at which the sickness consumed the Master’s body.
Valens, instead, targeted the bacterial granulomas with minute precision, bursting the cell walls and killing them in quick succession. To not have the lungs suffocate on the resulting dead material of these cells, he opened intricate canals inside his body and washed them off with generous amounts of lifemana.
However, there was not much he could do about the cells that had already died in the long time the Master suffered from the sickness. The scars and cavities across the lungs would remain, but with time and enough stats poured into Endurance and Vitality, Valens promised the Master a complete recovery.
It was something of a dream of his, and to have it realized in this world was perhaps one of the rare good-natured surprises he had experienced. The stats could do the work which would take a Healer months, or possibly years of his precious time. They couldn’t, however, fight off against a bacterial infection that mutated insidiously in a way that left even a man of Master Archibald’s stature helpless.
Once again this showed Valens that the human body remained ever the slave of Mother Nature. A tiny ant in the face of the grand ability to impress its authority upon even the specimen who were beyond what was considered human back in the Empire.
But then, that was a lesson well learned. Master Eldras had told him once that the answer resided in the word ‘nature’. You could fight against the nature of things, but you should, at all times, expect it to fight back in equal measure. Here, Valens could see it with his own eyes how that equal measure translated into real life.
Through the silent streets, he sucked in the dusty air of Melton’s Belgrave, and breathed it out. There was a lightness around his feet. A sense of belonging that wasn’t there since he came to this world. The Golden Cathedral looming from above the brick buildings, the Resni’s Tower that rose in defiance to the monotony of streets around it, and there beyond the squares of the rich-class’ folks of the city, a single apartment building with but two rooms to its name.
Three was a big number, and it just so happened that he had three different places that he could belong should he ever decide to embrace each one of them.
The Church was a dubious choice, of course. Ask any sane Magi in their field, and likely you would get a scoff, or a biting remark about the religious organizations and their way of handling certain things, but Magi Guild… Now that was a different thing. He was given a mark that represented his Master status in the Guild, painted in rich, red color to which Sebastian’s eyes blared, and his face went pale when Valens showed it to him on his way out.
He was free to join the afternoon gatherings in the Chamber of Masters, but was told of all the kingdoms in the world, Melton could be the only one that lacked an actual presence of Magi’s Guild. The visionaries of the field, he was told, didn’t like the oppressive mood of the city, and hated with passion the Sun’s Church’s presence like you would hate a bigoted man’s ever-loud voice.
Either way, his being a Master Healer would be known by the few Magi who inhabited the Guild’s tower on a daily basis. Master Archibald had told him so, and offered him a precious piece of advice that was seen as common sense across all Healers of the Caligian Lands.
To the rich, there was no greater currency than one’s health, and to keep themselves safe and sound there was not a price they wouldn’t pay in the world, which was to say if Valens could just squint enough, he could see the opportunities the Sun’s Church’s oppression against Healers represented in a city like Belgrave.
Whether he would cash in on those opportunities wasn’t relevant. The Master just wanted him to understand how rare of a feat being a Master Healer truly was. He even mentioned Baht in the talk they had after Valens treated the old man, and told him that the famous heretic had little to no rivals in his field.
The crux of the matter was that the Healers weren’t meant for turbulent times. As in, they were the primary targets for Tainted Father’s court, and the few who were courageous enough to venture off into the Broken Lands almost always ended up in a ditch with a body broken beyond repair.
That was why the doctors and surgeons of Caligian Lands were valued in such light. Although their levels were low, they compensated for it with their equipment and experience, which sounded much like how Assistant Healers in the Empire carried out their work.
With that, Valens finally got an answer to one of his many questions. Getting levels through practicing one’s Class — or job in this context — was possible, but it was a painfully slow process against the simple act of butchering the dwellers of the Tainted Father. Skill levels, on the other hand, could be mastered through experience, but without enough stats to support this growth, they mattered little in the long run.
Master Archibald mentioned a few old records that had snippets talking about this being not the case in the Ancient Era. Back then, these recordings told, dealing with the dwellers was the second most popular choice of progressing one’s Class, while the first one was experiencing one’s own path of life.
For an unfathomable reason, this had changed when the Ancient Era had come to an end. It was as though some unseen force had feared the people would cherish the protection the Carving of Haven’s Reach had brought to the society too much that they would forget the danger lurking beyond its limits, and had made it so that humans would be forced to confront the dwellers to become stronger.
That was an odd thing to change, to Valens’s thinking, but he decided to stay quiet and let the old man talk it out. He had seemed to yearn for a company with whom he could have long talks through endless nights, share more wine than any man could stomach, and breathe in the smoke of a grand pipe fitting to that of his robe which he had Sebastian fetch from his mansion by the Golden Cathedral.
Valens would’ve entertained him a touch longer had he not signed in for his new job earlier that day. He was a working man now, and a working man had to manage a good sleeping schedule.
Outside the apartment, Valens found the same guard standing there by the pole with his hat lowered to his eyes. He tipped his hat at him even if the man wasn’t in a position to acknowledge his greeting, and strolled into the building with his body sore from the long walk.
When he came upon the door of his house, and was about to insert the key into the hole, a peculiar letter peeked up at him from under the small slit of the door. Half of it was pushed into the house in a way that would alert the residents of its presence, and the other half of it was left visible from outside as though whoever brought this letter here considered Valens might be out for a night stroll.
Leaning down, Valens took the white letter into his hand and inserted the key into the hole. The door welcomed him with a loud creak, which he pushed gently open, entered inside, and locked neatly, as they weren’t living in the most respectable part of Belgrave.
Selin was sleeping soundly in the main hall, her body sprawled across their single couch, her clothes still from the morning. The poor woman likely waited for him all night long, but in the end couldn’t resist the sleep that crept on her. Valens considered for a moment whether to carry her to her room, but decided getting the blanket to her would be more appropriate in this case.
He covered her from tip to toe, and lay her head gently on the pillow. She wasn’t suffering from nightmares anymore, but there was tightness remaining on her lips. The residual memories of a time long past still poked her primal brain from the depths of her mind, unknown and silent perhaps, but no less relevant to this day.
That was the price of fiddling with one’s memories.
Without it, however, they wouldn’t have a case to offer to the Sun’s Church of Selin’s past. A healed Wailborn she might be, but coupled with a mysterious past, she would have been hanged without further thought on account that she posed a threat to Belgrave’s safety.
Letter in hand, Valens took seat atop the chair by the window, an old and broken thing much lacking in comfort compared to the cushioned perfection of Master Archibald’s seats, and removed the seal over it with the tip of his finger.
The first thing that caught his attention wasn’t the words on the letter, but the way they had been written. There was a softness to the writing, an elegance in the way the words laid out over the simple paper. Then came a rich waft of cologne with a touch of stark spice to it, taking a stab at his nostrils, but not lingering enough to become a bother.
Interesting. I don’t think I know enough people to get a letter on my first day. Certainly not a letter of this elegance, which seems like it belongs to a man who has quite a taste for strong cologne.
The richness of the ink had no magical qualities, but the feeling it gave was nothing short of magical. The content itself read as ‘It would afford us the greatest pleasure and singular honour should you deign to grace us with your presence,’ below which stood a mysterious sign that involved only two letters, a time, and an address that was not in the least familiar to Valens.
Friday. Six of the clock.
Anguier Street. No. 12. Gray Mansion. And the name of this man is…
D.G.
Do I know anyone with those initials?
There was Dain who would be his mate in the Golden Ward, but the moment Valens pictured that towered, gap-toothed man in his mind, he dismissed the possibility. There could not be a scenario in this world in which Dain would be a rich, fancy man who liked to dabble in the art of literature to the point of handing out elegantly written letters of invitation to people.
I’ll ask around tomorrow.
Valens nodded, and folded the letter before stuffing it into his pocket. He took another look at Selin.
I suppose I should get some sleep. After all, tomorrow is the first day of the work.
There would be an Oath, a flurry of people, and new meetings. Valens wasn’t too worried about the Oath as he knew by now how to break them. He did so with the old Codes, and wasn’t a stranger to that practice. What worried him, however, was the last one.
Meetings.
There might not be in this world a more dreadful thing than meeting new people. The expectations, the awkwardness, the hand gestures, and all that talking. It was fine so long as he was the one who did the talking, but listening to others…
Sometimes that could be tricky.
At least there will be familiar faces.
Right. His work involved the mind and shadows part of the deal, which would have him deal with a particularly interesting woman than the Templars. Lenora would show him around, and tell him about the work in detail.
That woman has quite a few demons.
And shadows, Valens thought, that had been imprisoned inside a locket that she carried as if it were the most precious jewellery in the world.
It seems no matter where I go, there’s only the strange and the wicked waiting for me.
Still, he had to admit there was something refreshing about that.
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Comments
Stephen Pearson
Thanks for the chapter! :-)
