When Dalliance woke up, Civility was gone. The school was all abuzz about it, and Dalliance realized very quickly that no one knew anything, except for Mister Best. And nothing Mister Best ever considered doing shed any light on the mystery of where Civility had gone. He simply would not comment. It was most unhelpful.

  But remembering the look on the gentle-hearted giant's face when his sister, Prudence, stopped moving, Dalliance thought he knew a thing or two.

  That morning, Dalliance put forth his theory. "He ran away. Joined the army."

  "And why shouldn't he?" said Earnest. "He's going to be a farmer; you don't need schooling for that. He's going to be a soldier; you don't have to go through schooling for that either. And he's already big enough for it. What does he have to lose? Just bad memories."

  Just bad memories and a constant reminder of what he lost, Dalliance thought.

  But then it became clear that Civility hadn't been seen by his family either, and that was a little bit more serious. A call went out along the cart paths: if you're passing the Matters' farm, ask about the boy. The Matters boy had always been really reliable to his parents, and now he wasn't anywhere to be seen at all.

  This was the first time Dalliance had ever seen the effects of running away on those who stay behind. Elder Matters lost weight, visibly becoming gaunt over the next month. And Missus Matters was never seen at all. It was as if she had retreated into the comfort of her home, perhaps barricaded herself in one of the inner rooms.

  "Maybe she's bedridden, like in the books," Earnest had suggested in a moment of complete tastelessness.

  "I wish we could help her," said Charity one day. The razor-sharp edge of the shadow of one of the god-islands was passing over them, the table now half in light and half in shade. Not the soft cut-off from a cloud, but the sharp, jagged cut-off of a mountain's shadow. "I wish we could help. I wish we knew where Civility was, or something."

  It had been a month, or maybe it had been two. At some point, he had always been gone, just as at some point, he had always been there. The third hunt was coming up, and Dalliance hadn't really given the Matters boy a lot of thought.

  “It’s none of our business,” Dalliance said, off-hand. This was the wrong thing to say.

  “What if it’s something we could help with!” Charity was getting a little heated.

  “Then it’s STILL none of our business,” Dalliance supplied the answer at half volume. “Really, I can’t imagine what he’s going through,” he said. “Think about it: if Whimsy . . . if anything like that happened, I don’t know what I’d have done, so I don’t think I can make judgments about how other people handle that kind of loss. If he wants to run away . . . maybe he doesn’t want to be found right now.”

  “It’s not about passing judgment, it’s about whether it’s any of my business,” Earnest added, his voice in support of Dalliance.

  “Deal the cards?” This, Charity pleading again. “Please—what if we can help?”

  “What if we can’t?” he said. “What if we misunderstand the cards? What if I read wrong and make things worse, and someone gets hurt?”

  Charity gave him an old-fashioned look. “A very narrow view—”

  “You’re the one who wants to be a theologian, okay?” His voice was a bit snappish, and Mr. Best cleared his throat without looking up from the pile of quiz papers. “Look, okay, I’ve been talking to my mom,” said Earnest, “and she said that I have a responsibility for how people react to the extent that I could predict their reaction, and I think that you, Charity, plan to go running off like a hare in the spring and do something stupid—”

  Dalliance giggled against his will and added, “Also like a hare in the spring.” The two ignored him, and he continued to grin, and they continued to ignore him.

  “All I’m saying,” Charity said reasonably, “is that it wouldn’t hurt to know if we have the option.”

  “Knowledge that I acquire without you knowing about it can totally hurt you,” argued Earnest. “I was playing with fire. I shouldn’t have done your readings without asking a priest about it. I’ll be going to Dowser’s Temple next week to talk—”

  “Dowsing,” said Dalliance. This time they both looked at him. “I just remembered we can—that is, you can—Earnest can find things, or people. All you need is a forked stick.”

  Charity looked so excited, and Earnest looked so conflicted. It was a foregone conclusion.

  Earnest glared at him. “We just went from, ‘It’s plausible that it won’t hurt anything for me to do something,’ to, ‘I’m definitely going to hurt something if I do something,’” he complained.

  “Well,” said Dalliance reasonably, “she wasn’t going to give up.”

  Charity smiled innocently.

  Earnest sighed. “Some friends you are.”

  “We just want you for your magic,” chortled Charity.

  It took time to set up the cards—enough for Effluvia to come through the door, followed closely by Circe—the quiz had been given in shifts, and it was nearly lunchtime. The sharp-eyed girl seized immediately upon the spread of cards, and Charity’s hopeful expression.

  “I don’t want to know,” she said immediately.

  “Absolutely not,” agreed Dalliance.

  “They’re picking on me,” complained Earnest. “They want to make me go on an adventure.”

  Effie turned stern eyes, incongruous in her unlined face, on the pair of them. “No adventures,” she said. “I still have homework today.”

  “You weren’t invited,” said Dalliance quickly. She looked momentarily affronted, but he winked, and she accepted his nonsense with a small smile and the duck of her head.

  Circe pulled up a chair, spun it around, and sat on it backwards. “No adventures without a healer,” she said. “I’m telling you, I read it somewhere.”

  “'No one outranks their healer, their bodyguard, or their wife.',” quoted Dalliance.

  Now Charity and Effluvia were giving the pair of them a look. “Is that the sort of stuff that you read?” said Earnest speculatively.

  “Not recently,” said Dalliance honestly, “on account of you borrowed it and never brought it back.”

  Mister Best cut in during the ensuing silence. “A five-man group,” he said speculatively. “They used to say this was the perfect size before the Imperial College ran experiments. Would you like to guess what the perfect size turned out to be?” It was good seeing Mister Best in a better mood again; nothing kept the man down for very long, apparently, though perhaps there was a little tightness around the eyes.

  Three empty desks in the room, now.

  “Fifty,” guessed Earnest.

  Mr. Best gave a significant look to Charity and Dalliance, but nothing more was said on the matter as classmates began filing back in, and Dalliance hoped futilely that this might all go away.

  Effluvia was leaving her homework unfinished. Circe claimed to have done hers the previous night. After class, having made arrangements for their absence from their usual duties and whereabouts, the group converged again. This was happening.

  Cutting the stick and getting their burgeoning seer to hold it was the easy part. Dowsing? Harder than it sounded.

  “Okay,” Earnest said at last, opening his eyes. Dalliance looked on from behind him, attempting to sight down the shorter boy's scalp, but it was no use. The closest they could get was a general "that way."

  It was Circe‘s idea to move Earnest one hundred yards before getting a second reading, which only confirmed the problem: the stick pointed into the edges of the mire, then over tall deadfalls and beyond into the dense tree coverage.

  There was absolutely no way over or under the Earth that Dalliance was going to step into those fetid waters. “We go around,” agreed Charity. She looked a little green herself—it was probably the memory of the serpent. They were all feeling it. As one, they turned and began the perpendicular route to the one indicated by the dowsing rod.

  “What’s in this for you?” Dalliance asked Circe, for something to do.

  The [Hedge Witch] rolled a cattail between her hands, breaking the dense cone into a fluffy white mess. “Oh, I don’t know. Hopefully, I’m not going to be needed.”

  “She yearns for adventure,” predicted Earnest darkly. “Girls eat that crap up.”

  “That’s exactly the way,” commented Effie. “Keep talking just like that if you want to die a bachelor.”

  As they walked, the bearing of Earnest's dowsing began to deflect.

  “Why doesn’t everyone do this?” asked Circe.

  “Most people don’t get the option to select Dreamer,” said Earnest. “I don’t know why the gods picked me.”

  Dalliance had wondered the same thing. Scamp wasn’t a generally available class either. What makes some people different from others? The priests talked about noblesse oblige, how the naturally elevated were obligated to safeguard their fellows, but why were they naturally elevated? You could select Scion if you were born to nobility, or you could select Foundling if you were of unknown heritage. Some of the accidents of birth, some of the context mattered, but he had wondered what alignment of the celestial bodies had resulted in his friend getting the Dreamer class offered to him. Certainly, Earnest had always wanted to peek behind the veil, and looked happy enough relating instructions that no one else could’ve sourced.

  Abruptly, they came around a copse of trees and found themselves following Earnest's instructions on a clear path, wide and wagon-rutted, and obviously in the correct direction.

  “I think he just went to the next village,” Circe sounded disappointed. That put paid to Earnest's guess that he’d run off to be a soldier.

  “Somehow, I’ve never been here,” Dalliance said out loud. He’d ranged far and wide, but not in this direction.

  “No reason to,” said Earnest idly. “All the good sticks for making bows are the other direction.” The trees around them ran heavily to cedar and pine, both awful woods for bows.

  That was true.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  They rounded a final hill and then, over a little bridge, spotted the settlement. It had been built into the side of a hill. Houses, one on each side of a single-lane road, ran up from the bridge to the hilltop where a circle of houses and a chapel stood. Tents and crates broadened the otherwise narrow expanse to two or three times its width, the ramshackle additions looking temporary, as if built for a purpose. Perhaps temporary lodging for a wave of immigrants or visiting traders. The houses proper were all artistically constructed of stone to the halfway point and whitewashed wood above. It was a storybook effect, all told, and spoke of a community not less prosperous than Dalliance's own, though certainly smaller.

  The stick in Earnest's hands hadn’t twitched once that Dalliance had seen, but perhaps it was simply a subtle effect. The boy indicated the tall form of the steepled chapel with a face pinched with unhappiness, as though distrusting what they would find there.

  “I don’t like this,” he said. “We could just go home.”

  Circe slapped him on the back. “Man up.” At his incredulous face, she shrugged. “Someone had to say it.”

  It was broad daylight, so there was no one directly out and about—the men would be about their work, the women about the house—but the knowledge didn’t remove the eerie feeling of a pristine, sun-dappled, abandoned alpine village.

  As they approached the village, Effluvia was complaining that she should have brought her horse.

  “You didn’t have to come in the first place,” Earnest grumbled.

  “We girls have to stick together,” she said, clearly directing the comment at Charity. Circe agreed with her.

  Earnest shared a resigned and confused look with Dalliance, who was suddenly seeing the recent conversation with his fairy godmother about finally having friends in a slightly new light. He was starting to wonder if, in fact, this was Charity’s venture. It was starting to look likely that Charity had friends—among them, Effie and Circe—and he was just along for the ride because Charity wanted to do something. And so was everyone else. He wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that. By default, he wouldn’t care, but at this moment, he didn’t know if he should feel relieved or disappointed. Up until now, he thought they were all there because of him.

  Dalliance pushed the thought aside. Charity wanted to be able to report back to their friend's parents that he was okay, and that was a worthy goal. Still, he felt it was weird for basically nobody to be out and about. The place felt like a ghost town.

  Carried by the light breeze from the hilltop, they could hear faint chanting on the wind.

  “Wait . . . listen,” said Charity. After a moment, she recoiled in horror. “They’re praying to Gnosis. One of the dark gods!"

  First off, as far as Dalliance was aware, there was only one dark god: Gnosis. Him being merely one of them was new and disturbing information, assuming he could trust Charity, the theologian-in-training, which he suspected he could. Second, they were in the middle of a village of people who worshipped a dark god—people who might potentially not want other people to know that.

  At this, Effluvia was suddenly much more interested than she was earlier. “We have to stay,” she demanded. “We have to know. This is important. This is the sort of thing a baron would marshal his levies for. I can’t just ignore this.” She was now determined to find out the depth of what was going on.

  There was a crack, a breaking branch.

  “Someone’s coming!”

  Effluvia broke, sprinting up the hill.

  Earnest, looking conflicted, ran after her.

  And so they were committed, scrambling up the hill, together.

  The climb up the hill from the little bridge was absolutely nerve-racking, making their tense conversation even more so.

  "Are the tents in use?"

  It wasn’t obvious what they were for. When Dalliance commented sotto voce that it looked like someone was expanding their holdings, Effie looked puzzled and upset about it. Perhaps she expected to be able to identify them. Dalliance believed he could find the way home, but had no illusions as to his ability to identify this holding on a map. Even if he could trace the route with his finger, the warp and weft of the island was so contorted by dungeons and demesnes that he wasn’t sure how distorted the path they were following actually was. No one had commented on them having entered an actual dungeon, but that didn’t mean there were no pathmaker shenanigans afoot. The Imperial roads were famously faster to traverse than the side roads for a reason.

  The little village at the top of the hill, however, was nicer than he’d expected.

  It looked like it had been built on purpose, rather than being a part of a sprawl of shacks working their way up the hill. The permanent-looking structures and the chapel were worthy of the name. The chapel was an octagonal building surmounted with a steeple, topped with the traditional chimes of the faithful. These were done in brass or bronze rather than the dark wood carried by the priests; the brazen chimes would of course last many times longer and withstand the elements. The wind was faint, but he could still hear the occasional muted chime as a clapper made incidental contact with a tubular bell.

  “They’re all at service,” said Earnest, a note of surprise in his tone, and with good reason. Temple wasn’t for two days. Mr. Idles, the local priest, would still be making his rounds, reminding everyone of the function of their home shrines and blessing newborn children. Temple was for holidays, so why come now?

  Closer, Dalliance decided it couldn’t possibly be a full holiday observance. There were simply too many people out in the outer buildings or in their personal dwellings, probably taking a brief nap after an early dinner, or sitting down for the main course now. Dalliance would be missed at home, but the official word was that he was eating with Earnest, and Earnest's mother had been told they were eating with the Rathers.

  It wasn’t exactly an airtight scheme, but needs must.

  For their part, Circe would actually have Effluvia and Charity over after their walk, it being completely unthinkable for any of the three girls to partake in whatever patched-together solution Earnest and Dalliance had fallen upon. They would be missing out, he told himself.

  The chanting was audible but largely indistinct from without, and after brief consideration, the group agreed there was no point in half-measures. They had come this far. But for all that, it was a tiny building; one exterior door led to the stairwell up to the belfry, while the doubled main doors, which presumably opened in the back of the ritual chamber, would most likely open directly within sight of the congregation. That fact alone, Dalliance found, was an insurmountable objection to their use.

  To his annoyance, he found he was the only one who found the potential connection to the main hall via the belfry at all obvious.

  “If it’s connected,” Earnest argued, “then that means the belfry doesn’t have a floor, so they’re gonna look up and see us. And if it’s not connected, they won’t be able to see us, and we won’t be able to see them, and we’ll have broken into a belfry for no reason. Except we might accidentally hit the bells. And besides, it’s tall.”

  “Do you have a problem with heights?” teased Charity uncharitably.

  “Everyone has a problem with heights,” said Earnest. “Not everyone realizes it before the first long fall. I’m trying to cut to the end where I’ve got the wisdom and both legs.”

  The girls chortled. Dalliance thought it was a perfectly reasonable position to take for someone who didn’t climb ropes as often as he or Earnest did, but not exactly a convenient time to take it.

  “No one ever looks up,” Charity prodded Earnest right back.

  “Then why do people leave belfries open? They want to look up and see the holy chimes jangling.” It was true. “That’s also why the chimes would be heavily decorated, which means they’ll look up and see yours truly, white face down, white-knuckled grip on the side of whatever little floor there is.”

  Charity’s crossbow was slung across her back. The stock itself wasn’t all that long, but the arms, not drawn back, did stick out a bit beyond her shoulders.

  “You can stay on the stairs,” Dalliance said kindly but firmly.

  “I know another way,” said Earnest stubbornly. This was breaching onto knowledge of his class and skills that Dalliance did not want brought forward at this time, or possibly ever.

  “You knew what the hobgoblin was going to do,” Effie noted. “You were resisting him with some skill. [Deflection], maybe? Is that what you’re going to do, deflect the attention of an entire congregation?”

  Dalliance sighed. “Even if I were going to do that,” he said, there not being much point in arguing about the skill, “deflecting the one person in the congregation who’s staring at the ceiling is far more possible than the dozen or so people who are going to look back at the doors when they open.”

  His logic was unassailable. Earnest grumbled but gave in.

  The entire conversation, they had been crouched behind the low, whitewashed wall of the chapel garden, within which river stones had been stacked to make lightly raised walkways between beds of cucumber, sage, rosemary, and squash. Dalliance broke off a bit of dried squash stem and felt the prickling, tiny hairs on the outside burr slightly on his fortified skin as they failed to penetrate.

  “We’re going up,” he said.

  The door to the belfry was locked, predictably. Also predictably, when Earnest drew out his whittling knife and began industriously raising the pins on the hinges, Charity was the only one surprised.

  “What, you didn’t think we were just going to go home?” he complained. “And now you’re gonna stare at me like I’m a thief every day in class.”

  “You’re not a thief,” she said. “The gods have chosen you. But you are a sneak.”

  “I am touched,” he growled as the final pin came free. They set the door against the side of the chapel. The lock was a padlock and had not come free; with any luck, no one would notice that the door had opened the wrong direction.

  Earnest solemnly said he would maintain a watch from the bottom. As Dalliance’s eyes crested the top of the spiraling stairs and he came into view of the octagonal hall leading down into the worship space itself, he got his first glimpse in months of Civility Matters.

  The boy was kneeling before a pale altar in the shape of a tome. Even kneeling, the outsized boy was of a height with the priestess standing beside the altar, officiating. Officiating what, Dalliance did not know. The altar glowed from within, a dusky orangey-yellow in stark contrast to the pale white of its surface. This was bone.

  The chanting grew to a chorus, a crescendo. A moment later, Charity elbowed him out of the way and drew in a sharp breath.

  “That is an altar to Gnosis,” she said, horrified.

  The god of the spilled secret, of dangerous knowledge. The lost, and the hiding. Illegal to worship in the Empire, and apparently, the focus of today’s rite.

  The priestess anointed Civility with oil.

  “I will build you an altar,” he said, his voice cracking with tension but loud for all of that, “with the bones of the ignorant. But I must know why my sister had to die.”

  And the god answered.

  It started as a whisper, a sibilance at the edge of perception like a chorus of voices, male and female, faint enough to be dismissed as a figment of imagination. But it didn’t stop. It grew louder and louder, from a chorus of whispers to a hissing, a den full of vipers, and then louder still, like the rushing of water. Each voice was a siren song, a promise of understanding, a question posed in need of an answer.

  Why must men die? spoke one voice.

  Of what use is the brain? questioned another.

  Wherefore does a reptile utilize venom? came a third.

  Examine the role of the first tier from the perspective of governance, came a fourth.

  And on, and on, and on, each growing until the thunder of the response was not merely deafening, but unbearable in its overlapping complexity. And yet, they did not stop. For each question posed, there was a refinement, an additional viewpoint for consideration, a variable unchecked.

  And then, of course, the answers—like strokes of thunder rattling the small stone building, such that the chimes danced and vibrated, the tubular bells jingling in discord and dancing on their suspension hooks.

  And yet, you could not hear them, because the god was louder.

  In the epicenter of the answer, Dalliance could see Civility, his cheeks fluttering with every syllable, his hair dancing in the agitated air. The priestess beside him, eyes wide, wild with the ecstasy of revelation. And yet Dalliance knew, without any doubt, the ultimate reason for Prudence Matters' death.

  Upon final examination, it had been that she was too small a piece to be desired for herself. Just another lump of grist for the mill. An acceptable casualty in an empire-wide manhunt bent upon refining the exceptional to the point that the Empire could make use of them and their talents. For every Servility Immaculate, there would be ten Prudences, and yet the Empire considered this a bargain.

  This, even more than the disturbing specificity and grandeur of the knowledge granted, grated and horrified Dalliance. His legs were shaking so hard he didn't think he could have stood up even if it had been safe to.

  And yet, the thundering voice continued to speak, leaving the realm of the descriptive for that of the prescriptive.

  In this system, with these constraints, here is how one must comport oneself to avoid the fate of Prudence.

  Excel.

  Dalliance’s legs felt like jelly as he scooted backwards down the spiral steps. Everything was silent, now, in the absence of the Voice, all but the ringing in his ears.

  The mail-clad men waiting at the bottom of the steps didn’t bother speaking, and he wouldn’t have heard them if they had.

  ? Phoenix Flight [Lite LitRPG - Dungeon Diving - Slow Romance] ?

  by RainyLiquid

  Weak to Strong, gathering of powers, skills, and spells.