152. The Temple of Balance (Patreon)

Isidorus didn’t make Tercius wait for long. As soon as Tercius showed the man the belt that he had chosen from the stock, the two of them took to the cobbled road with haste.

As they passed through the Districts full of crowds of shoppers and viewers, Tercius observed the orderly streets and carefully planned rows of two-story houses, many of whom had a business on the ground floor and a private residence on the upper one. There was so much almost palpable history in the high walls and stones of the city and Tercius felt privileged to know some of it.

By all written and verbal accounts remaining of the pre-Empire times, Spheros was an old city. Over the centuries and millennia, it had been a seat of many powerful kingdoms and while these kingdoms had risen and fallen, the city remained like a monument of stone that it was. According to Tecius' grandfather, whose family hailed from Spheros generations back, the main reason for that power had not been military nor economic power, although both of those were always quite high. Ciron attributed Spheros' historic power and importance on the surroundings to The Order of the Architect, a religious order of clergy who had been engineers, builders, and planners who worshiped the Divine Architect.

An order that no longer existed.

When Spheros fell and the local resistance was forced to surrender to the Empire, one of the first demands that the Empire had was for all the Temples of the Architect to be handed over to them. The clergy of the Architect had been few in number even at the best of times and although each member of the order had wielded significant power of their own, ultimately they had to cave in to the demand. And so the Empire's Ministry of Architecture came to be, built on the ashes of the fallen order. Although the style of building was adapted to please Imperial eyes somewhere down the line, the underlying principles of construction of the Order remained the same and those were sent out into the world to follow the expansion of the Empire borders.

At each corner of the Empire, you could see something that would remind you of Spheros, of course only if you've seen specific parts of the oldest city Districts and you had a habit to compare such things, which Tercius did.

The walk to their destination promised to be lengthy and after a while, Isidorus started to ask questions about Tercius' mother. Friend of his mother or not, Tercius didn't reveal to the man what name his mother went by now, nor did he answer where they live, nor did he give a straight answer to any of the dozens of Isidorus' questions. Although both the pursuer of Tercius' mother and the bounty that the vile slime of a man had placed on her had been suitably dealt with, that was a recent development and a little bit of caution for another couple of years was advisable.

Under the cover of a cloak and hood, the sweating Isidorus and the cautious Tercius passed by a group of narrow-eyed city guards and Isidorus hurried to give them a small bribe to look the other way. The two of them entered one of the last of the older Districts that still showed the old architectural style but what became obvious to see with a single glance was that, unfortunately, keeping to an old identity in a new Empire had a cost.

Grass grew between the cracked stones of the cobbled streets and many of the houses were visibly abandoned, vines climbing up the walls and plants peeking through windows whose wooden shutters were in shambles. Cats were everywhere, around corners, lazing on the upper windows, or even on the roofs, their tails lazily swishing in the wind, seemingly looking at the two visitors with questions in their eyes. Here and there, he saw men and women tending to their overgrown gardens, the occasional chicken or goat freely wandering the streets and in search of sustenance on their own. Children laughed and he saw a couple of them playing, while rheumy eyes of elders watched them pass by. In a District built to house thousands, hundreds lived.

The place was not a ghost town yet, but that somehow made the entire place seem as if on a sure path to slow death, a place that would one day surely be haunted.

Which it likely already was, Tercius suddenly realized, and in more ways than one.

His eyes darted about, searching for clues of Spirits, but he saw nothing. He turned to reach for Energy Sight, to see if any Juvenile Spirits were frolicking about, but then he remembered the words of caution that his Mentor, Mistress Prime'era, and Perdinar gave him, and Tercius left the skill be. He would allow neither his curiosity nor his fear to compromise finding out that for which he came here.

Step by step he arrived closer to his goal, ignoring the need to look around and search for what could be there.

It didn’t take long after that for them to arrive at their destination.

Balance had been worshiped by the mortals of Sogean soil and sand for countless centuries. Once upon a time, every major city and most of the bigger ones had a Temple dedicated to Balance, or M’ti’mya, Arbiter, and Wielder of Scales, as it was known in some parts of Sogea.

Today, the Temple that stood before him was likely one of the last to still stand on the lands of the Empire.

A stone wall no taller than his waist surrounded the grounds of the Temple and a thicket of tall trees blocked direct sight further in, but the top floors of the Temple were visible even over the treetops, the walls and domes seemingly made of gray and yellow stone. There was an arched gate, flanked by lifelike statues of a lion and lioness who had fat horns of a ram curled around their ears, and the two of them entered. A path of stone below and dense trees everywhere around them, every single tree of the entire ticket planted atop the remains of a deceased believer. Both Isidorus and Tercius removed their hoods and stopped to touch the ground on both sides of the path, the prayer of passing on their lips, mouthed but not uttered. Much like his grandfather, his grandmother was also originally from Spheros. It was possible and highly likely that Tercius had some biological ancestors buried under some of the older trees.

Although Tercius knew the rites, customs, as well as many prayers and songs, he was no true believer of Balance, nor any other religion for that matter. Everything that he had studied from his grandmother was more out of linguistic and anthropological curiosity than anything else.

His own rebirth did make him consider that something or someone was out there, manipulating events to be a certain way, but from the way he felt when he thought about a being like that he was less of a believer and more of a… skeptical lawyer with a tinfoil hat. Although he would be grateful for the gift enough that he might even utter a prayer, he would also petition the court to uncover the true motives of the perpetrator and then, regardless of the motive, sue due to extreme privacy violation.

Past the graveyard were green meadows and gardens full of medicinal colorful flowers and plants. An occasional tree stood tall, its branches bowing low with the weight of its edible fruits. Sounds of goats and pigs and chickens were in the distance.

In the middle of it all, towering over the rest of the old District, was the enormous Temple itself. With its carved columns and domed rooftops, the edifice was a massive construction full of elegance and artwork, full of stories carved into stone walls for all to see. It was in much, much better condition than any other building he saw here, in the old District.

Taking a deep, steadying breath to ground himself, Tercius heard the warning of his Mentor and the other Magi echo in his ears.

The Temple of Balance has two Elder Spirits somewhere inside.

As strange as it sounded, the revelation didn’t surprise Tercius too much. After all, the fact that this Temple and its religion were still standing defiantly after centuries of slow choking by the Empire and its own polytheistic Pantheon, meant that it had to have some kind of power to push back. The only thing he would have liked to have was an idea of the scope of the power of that Elder Spirit, but unfortunately other than the Juvenile Spirit that had formed inside Tercius’ own family house, he had never even seen any other type of these beings.

Hopefully, his inexperience won't change now.

Despite Mistress Prime’era’s assurances that her enchantment would work perfectly for at least another thirteen days and some eight or so hours, Tercius still preferred caution. If the hiding enchantment woven around his Well were to fail here, at a Temple, he would become a husk of an infidel corpse before he knew what possessed him.

Actually, he would know that, wouldn't he?

What he wouldn’t know was how many Spirits tried to possess him at the same time nor how many fractions of a second it would take for his body and anima to be burnt away from the invasion.

Not that the answers would matter, being dead and all.

Tercius hummed to himself suddenly. Or, in the case he was to be reborn again, the answers could prove to be of immense value for… something. You never knew these things ahead, so just in case it was better to collect and keep everything. The puzzle would arrange itself later, but only if enough of the pieces were already present.

Crossing over the long yard, Isidorus and Tercius passed by a couple of hard-working people who were knees deep in dirt and weeds, and if the tiny tattoo of scales on their lower foreheads was to go by then he was in the presence of a young priest and priestess.

Other than being composed of excellent singers, dancers, and players of musical instruments, which was how they revered the Divine Balance, the clergy of Balance was also counted as some of the best herbalists and gardeners around. Many among them knew to brew some elementary potions and some of them even dabbled in the healing arts and skills, his grandmother told him, but those were rare – what with the proximity of The Isle of Ksana and their healers and brewers, who stood head and shoulders above everyone else.

Tercius had to correct himself. Healers and Brewers hailing from the Isle of Ksana stood head and shoulders above everyone else, but only if the Healers and Alchemists among the Magi were to be excluded first. But Magi… they were a special case.

“Sister. Brother,” Isidorus greeted them with a bow.

The young woman of dark skin was the first to look up, wiping the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. “Welcome brothers,”

Tercius gave them a greeting of his own, right before the young priest noticed them.

Unlike most religions that he knew of, where a strict naming hierarchy existed between various levels of clergy and common worshippers, all of the faithful of Balance called themself as brothers and sisters of faith. According to his grandmother, it was a way to show that only Divine Balance was above any of them, be they a High Priestess, a Priest, or otherwise, but unexpectedly that supremacy of the Divine didn’t come in the role of a mother or a father.

In all of the written and verbally passed down dogma of its religion, Balance was never referred to as a God or a Goddess, but rather only as a Divine. Considering that almost all Divines– be they old or new – had a clear sex with which they were identified, it came as no surprise that the clergy of Balance became divided into a few schools of thoughts as to why their Divine stood out from the rest.

The most widely accepted of those schools was that their Divine was neither male nor female because only mortals had to endure being only one half of a whole. Likely because of that very interpretation, worshippers and clergy of Balance were one of the few groups around the world that exclusively practiced monogamy.

For worshippers of Balance, the ceremony of matrimony represented the joining of two halves of one being and therefore matrimony was that Divine that all mortals could and should strive to.

Death was only the eventual separation of the halves, but if they were compatible enough they would find themselves again in another life. According to the clergy of Balance, any time anyone felt an instant attraction to someone else was because of awakened echoes of older lives. The eventual goal was to permanently join the two compatible halves and thus become whole again, which was when you could join to stand at the side of Divine Balance.

In a way it was… sweet. Disturbing, but sweet.

“Can you perchance point me towards brother Menesthios?”

The young priestess looked at the young man, who seemed to consider the question. “I believe that he is at the back of the Temple, brother, tending to the animals,”

“Balance be with you, brother and sister,”

Both the woman and the man touched the tattoo on their foreheads with the tips of their dirty fingers. ““Tread with Balance, brothers,””

Tercius followed closely after Isidorus and just as they were to go past a large thicket full of flowering bushes, a tingling sensation ran across his back and up his neck — a familiar feeling that he had come to associate with mana emanations. An urge to turn around and look back welled up inside of him, but he resisted it.

His Mentor spoke to him of how mana and its emanations affected the tactile sense and she had tested the apparent sensitivity that he possessed, which had proven to be considerable for someone lacking a skill of that kind. Knowing what he knew about himself and the dissipation of mana, the source of that mana either had to be close to him or strong enough for its emanations to reach him before they dissipated. The larger the distance between them, the stronger the source had to be for him to feel it.

Everything in him urged him to look back and find the source of that disturbance but he swallowed it all down and went on without looking back. With each step forward, questions and doubts started swimming in his mind. As his breathing became quicker and his ears warmer, he felt the need to do what he usually did. Leave it all behind.

But he couldn't do that. His legs were on a path to fix a mistake and no amount of fear would stop him from doing it.

Reaching for his safe haven, a carefully cultivated mindset that provided distance from turbulent emotions, Tercius found himself hesitating again.

He couldn't do that either.

If he were to divest himself away from his body and emotions, his mana and his Magos skills would just go wild, and, carried by the waves of emotions, the duo would produce who knows what kind of magical effects. At that point, he might as well shout at the top of his lungs that he was a Magos-in-training and get stoned to death or… whatever equivalent these people used to enact punishment on their enemies.

Meditation too was out of the question, reasons ranging from personal to practical.

What could he do to calm himself then? Deep breathing? He already was trying to do that, so much so that Isidorus kept glancing at him.

“Brother Isidorus!” a jovial voice called out and Tercius snapped back to reality.

Small, balding, and rotund, brother Menesthios was a middle-aged man in possession of the biggest sideburns that Tercius ever saw. The man's smiling eyes were a thin line as he bellowed a deep laugh, his prodigious belly shaking under his brown shirt as he stopped shoveling shit out of the pigsty.

"Brother Menesthios! Working hard, I see,"

“The way of the world, brother. Welcome, welcome of you. Long time no see,” brother Menesthios said. “What is it that took you my way, brother?”

“My young friend here needs someone to talk to, if you have the time to spare,”

“Let me just finish this before the day gets too hot and I will be with you both. Have a seat in the shade,” brother Menesthios said, pointing at a pair of wooden benches hidden under a tree bough.

Isidorus nodded to Tercius to follow and he did. He appeared calm but his nerves were anything but.

The sensation of mana in the air was electrifying, reminding him of the power he felt during that ritual a few days ago. But there were no Magi here, which left three options.

Elder and Mature Spirits were capable of forming their own physical and semi-physical bodies, therefore in possession of mana of their own. Mediums who worked with Juvenile Spirits and some Mature Spirits who worked through Mediums also had access to mana.

Tercius suddenly shuddered, as a small touch of mana brushed off his neck like a scarf of freezing silk. He stilled in his seat, not daring to move his head nor take a look. The instincts warned him to move, to run away from here as fast as he could. His heart started beating in his chest, the sounds heard plainly in his ears like a deep drum. He couldn’t run. He had to do what he came here to do. He had to ask.

As Isidorus and he waited for Menesthios, thoughts swam in Tercius’ mind. Did something go wrong with the enchantment on his Well? He couldn’t feel it the way he could just a day ago, but that didn’t mean…

Breathe, breathe, breathe, Tercius started repeating a mantra.

Rather than the enchantment failing, which with him being an infidel would mean an instant death, the Spirits were likely just intrigued by him. He was a newcomer to their space. Like curious cats, some of them were likely drawn to smell him or brush against him. They likely had no idea that he could feel them touching him, since most mortals couldn’t, so they just came to check him out.

Something cold and slightly rough, like sandpaper, touched his elbow.

His jaw clenched. It took all he had not to move and keep himself calm and continue breathing. Should he just enter Meditation and wait for Menesthios there? He would have to check every once in a while and the disturbance in his mana could be noticed by a Spirit or a Medium.

No magical solutions, meant that only mundane ones remained.

Like a bolt from a clear sky, the advice that his Mentor gave on the topic of Willpower came to Tercius.

The paths to Willpower were many, but for the Magi, the very first step towards the skill was learning to properly experience and process different states of mind — a concept that encapsulated thoughts, feelings, pleasure, pain, and so on, especially those which were on the extreme sides of their respective spectrum.

Before speaking to him of details of how to do it, his Mentor had admitted freely that even she, same as many others, found it difficult to always apply it.

Properly experiencing a state of mind started with defining each facet of it. The thoughts, the emotions, the physical reactions to the state, the better defined it all was, the better the result would be.

Untangling the knot, Mistress Kalina called it.

Nothing else came to mind, so he decided to try.

The position he was in, the inability to act in certain ways that he was used to, to use certain skills he was used to, to sit and pretend like nothing was going on when he very well knew that nothing could be further from the truth was nerve-wracking.

It was as if he was putting his hand into a dark hole, completely aware that something was lurking inside. The question was, would it bite?

He didn’t want to spend a second here, at this Temple, at mercy of beings of whom he had little knowledge. What he knew mostly came from what his Mentor shared with him, but all of that was from the viewpoint of Magi, and the two groups had been enemies for a long time.

Perhaps the best source was the one that had been close to him for years. Rona. She was also the reason why he couldn’t leave now. She was the reason he had to put his hands into the dark.

He had to find her and help her.

Not only did he know what she was going through, but he was also partly responsible for it. He couldn’t deny that the woman had grown on him over the eleven years they spent under a shared roof and he would rather let everything else sink and fail than let her spend a year or two in constant pain.

Failure, here and now, could jeopardize everything.

He had to bring Rona and Septimus home, back to Nurium. Both were needed there in too many ways by too many people for Tercius to have the option to fail. If he was completely honest, there was even a bit of selfishness to it. He wouldn’t be able to allow himself to leave Nurium for the Academy if he was not sure that his home and its inhabitants were as safe as possible.

He… so many things came to mind suddenly, half-formed thoughts that stormed around him and scattered when confronted with the truth of the largest of them all. The thought rang loud and clear.

He didn’t want to die. There was a very real possibility that he could die here. If the Elder Spirits were able to see through him… He wasn’t exactly worried for himself, having experienced what he did, but he didn’t want to leave yet.

He wanted to see everyone again. His parents, grandparents, siblings, familiar, uncle… even some people back at the Pyramid.

He wanted to see this world.

That was it, wasn't it? An instinct of an animal who felt surrounded, who suddenly thought itself cornered and was desperate for a way out. Fear of death and things unfinished. Strangely enough, Tercius found himself calming down somewhat just from the first step.

Now, what did his Mentor say was next?

Once the knot was untangled, came the time to acknowledge the untangled parts properly, embracing each part, one at a time.

Whether feeling desperation or hope, grief or happiness, wherever the body was freezing from the cold or if the flesh was cooking from an unbearable heat, no matter if the swirling thoughts were those of love or murder, it was important to never reject anything found present. If something was there, denying it would only be harming yourself considerably. In the case of cold and heat, the harm was fairly obvious to see and feel, but less so with emotions and thoughts, at least such was Tercius' point of view.

In any case, according to his Mentor, it was important to learn to experience the states of mind without any kind of acting on them. In other words, it was a kind of endurance building.

Something cold brushed past his right leg and although Tercius tensed, he swallowed the need to look down or jerk his leg away. Only his fists clenched. Breathe, breathe, breathe.

Endurance. That was exactly what he needed now. How, by all the ninety-nine Blazing Hells, do you even embrace the fear of death and things unfinished? Or even better, how do you embrace them before they embrace you?