Church girls were batteries.

  This was, of course, something a proper member of the Imperial Family was never supposed to admit.

  A church girl was at her right hand.

  Princess Angelina Grace Marca Prima Omnio, currently going by Mercy, stood in a circle around the Diamond of Annuation. It was a Gem the size of a small hen, and it was covered by a bck velvet.

  Just as Sister Catherine was at her right hand, that ginger braggart Raehel “the magnificent” was at her left. But her focus was on the wannabe nun.

  Mercy had not been raised to explicitly think of the devout as sources of magical energy, but it was impossible to believe otherwise growing up in the Imperial Capital of Omnio, where the Imperial Family’s word was w.

  The devout honed themselves through prayer and meditation on the sacred relics of the Church. For some reason, which no one thought was politically wise to investigate, this led to them developing abilities that were oddly simir to Awakenings — “Blessings”, which they used only sparingly, so as to not “waste the gift of the Goddess” — and rge depths of magical potency. A rare few advanced in the clergy, becoming Sisters and Mothers, gaining formal training in magic and its effects.

  But most? They gave themselves to their devotions, and they became magically potent, but they ascribed all that power to the Will of the Goddess, never testing their Gems unless they felt divinely inspired. If they did, they became Saints, but the vast majority were grateful simply to receive feelings of divine grace.

  Which made them great recruits whenever the Empire needed to press-gang a mage or two to power a magical working. Though the Church and the Empire were nominally independent, in their centers of power allegiance was often blurred.

  Churchgoers, more accurately, not just church girls, were batteries. But the men often went and died in the name of the Goddess, in the Church’s subjugation campaigns of the Frontier and their occasional inquisitions for heretics. They were spent in other ways. So that left the girls.

  Anyways, all that was in the abstract.

  In practice, it was hard to stand right next to this girl from Granavale’s town, Sister Catherine, and think of her as nothing but a well of power to be tapped. She seemed so nice and innocent.

  “You were carrying that around with you?” Raehel said, giving a skeptical gnce at the veiled Diamond of Annuation.

  Mercy bristled at the words of the mage. What had Granavale been thinking, hiring the cheapest and youngest Master he could to tutor him? It was easily a case of the blind leading the blind. If he’d asked her, she could’ve arranged something better for him. It was simply good politics, after all. It wouldn’t do for her to ask him to be her secret ally and then leave him in the dust. It wouldn’t do at all. That was the only reason why, for sure. It had nothing to do with her guilt about what she was currently doing or his long-term usefulness. Nothing at all.

  She didn’t dignify Raehel with a response.

  “The ways of nobles and royals are vast and mysterious,” Sister Catherine said sagely. “That’s what the Church Mothers always say.”

  “You kids are so cute!” Raehel said. “Honestly, it’s just adorable. You look like you could be sisters!”

  Catherine ignored that. Mercy ignored that as well. She had two sisters and if she had a secret third one then there were bigger games afoot.

  “What, pray tell, is the pn?” said Sister Catherine. She spoke in that pseudo-formal tone used by kids who didn’t have any friends but who read a lot of books.

  “I need your power,” Mercy said, pointing at the veiled Gem. “As much as you can muster. Dump it all into here.”

  Raehel frowned. “That’s a recipe for disaster if I’ve ever seen one. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  Mercy bit back a retort; she couldn’t well reveal that she was the Crown Princess of the Omnio Empire, so she’d have to use her words instead of her status.

  Conversely, if she could convince a Master mage of her position, even one that probably got the title through nepotism, then her cause was fully justified, and it wouldn’t be difficult at all to get the church girl on board.

  “It’s a Grand Working,” she said. Which was true. Gems of Worldsoul, by definition, enabled Grand Workings. But not all Grand Workings required Gems of Worldsoul.

  “From a rock that small?” Raehel said, her red eyebrows furrowing suspiciously. “I didn’t realize—”

  “It’s not the size. It’s the cut and density,” Mercy said.

  Raehel pursed her lips.

  “What’s a Grand Working?” Sister Catherine said.

  “It’s a Gem-bound Enchantment that needs the power of more than one person. Most of the cases that’s because it just needs more power than one person can provide safely, though I’ve heard rumors of Enchantments that need differing magical energies. If one’s cut properly, the magic is… dispelled, or wholly directed. But in their natural state, they… leave a permanent mark on their casters, more quickly and more forcefully than other Gems. You’re asking something very dangerous of us.”

  Mercy nodded. “There’s a lot on the line. I wouldn’t reveal this to you if there wasn’t. And I assure you, this Gem has been cut very well.”

  “And what does it do?” Raehel asked suspiciously.

  “It… it will pacify the Dungeon more strongly than traditional wards. It’ll prevent days like this.”

  That seemed to satisfy them enough that they reached their hands to test it. Their fingers scrunched beneath the veil and danced upon the facets of the Gem, setting it alight with rainbow light that shone through the bck velvet.

  This was one of the fws of Gem. Once Attuned, you could access its power from anywhere, but before that happened you had to make physical contact. No one would ever be able to cim the Diamond as their own, unless they spent their whole lives mastering it. For a weapon as powerful as the Diamond of Annuation, which was almost impossible to Attune, remote activation was equally impossible. She felt bad about charging it while letting Archmund handle the dirty work of battle, but it really was safer to swoop in at the st minute to resolve things.

  But that was also a benefit. Anyone who tried to dedicate themselves to embodying the Gems of Worldsoul removed themselves from other halls of power. Mainly politics.

  Mercy grimaced. She’d used a Diamond of Annuation only twice before, and both times had been with her entire Sacred Guard, or at least the ones who’d wielded at least one piece of Gemstone Armor. Once you wore the Gem, started Climbing the Crystal Tower, new dimensions and facets of your soul opened up, and you had enough life force to spare to fuel Grand Workings.

  And yet those circumstances had felt like a hodge podge, a muddle, a melting pot. When she mingled her magic those two times, she’d poured in very little of herself, and felt very little of any individual soldier.

  She could feel their pride, their strength, their ideals of masculinity, their admiration for her in their magic, that aspect of their souls they shaved off from themselves and filtered through the Gem. (She’d drawn on those impressions to fully embody ‘Mercy’, the dark and brooding and votile commander with a heart of gold towards ‘his’ men). But there wasn’t much of their individual identities. It all blended together.

  But this was different. She was here, in close contact with Raehel ‘the magnificent’ with her red hair and rge gsses and magic that bore no particur aspect, but roiled over itself, tumbling and bubbling in all directions, ephemeral red fire from one angle, but deep sea from another, and fky wind from above, yet stolid earth from below.

  Perhaps she was the prodigy she cimed to be, to Mercy’s chagrin. Perhaps she wasn’t lying.

  Catherine almost certainly was.

  She was powerful. More powerful than she’d seemed. More powerful than a random vilge girl in a backwater county had any right to be. There was no way she had gained power as part of one of Granavale’s harebrained schemes, because the depth of her power took far longer than a few hundred days to develop.

  Where Raehel’s power was the roiling variety of nature, Catherine’s power was the scorn of God. The Goddess. Whatever the monotheists believed in these days. (“These days”. She was her own person. She was. She was.) A bright, oppressive presence that warped the world in its image. That stayed hands, slowed bdes, and held the world to an oppressed peace. All embodied in a vilge girl with no right to it.

  All of this power, as mighty and various as it was, was directed into the Diamond of Annuation, where it was fttened, processed, and refined into an alteration of reality itself. A second yer to be imposed upon the world, through the power of a Gem of Worldsoul.

  It would be more than enough.

  She wondered how her own power felt to her compatriots.

  The Omnio bloodline was immensely powerful, owing to their descent from Alexander I. Every child born to the family took one of the old gods, the gods Alexander had carried with him from his distant past, his world before birth, as a patron. Hers was the King of all the Gods, God of the Sky and the Storm, God of Lightning, Enforcer of Justice and Hospitality, a Shapeshifter, all these things. She had been marked to rule from the moment she was born, and so it did not behoove her to hide in the shadows.

  Yet hide she did. When she became Mercy, she didn’t just change her clothing and some slight aspects of her appearance as to become unrecognizable to those without the sight. She changed the very texture of her magic, sealed it behind a veil, repressed her own natural regal aspect and hardened her heart to project the shrewd military commander, the enforcer of justice and the one who kept the wilderness safe. That was Mercy Stirpstredecim di Omnio.

  And yet she’d always been paranoid that people would feel her true self leaking through. Archmund had seen. She’d shut him up by telling him the way he’d found out was a state secret and bringing him into her confidence. She liked him enough not to throw him out on a whim.

  But Sister Catherine’s magic felt like it was behind a veil. Just like her own.

  The scornful presence of the Goddess, the piety, the force — Catherine believed. She wasn’t faking any aspect of her belief. But her magic had the same veiled aspect that Mercy’s did. And if Mercy could recognize this from understanding her own nature, it followed that her disguise, too, was perceptible.

  As their magic flowed into the Diamond of Annuation, its rainbow light focused, purified, shifted from the spectrum to a bright, unified white. The Grand Working of the Diamond of Annuation or any other Gems of Worldsoul didn’t care about their individual characteristics, how they expressed themselves or what they were trying to hide. It would take their magic and perform the working all the same.

  It would be ready to fire before midnight, and Granavale County’s fate would be changed.

  Thanks for reading!

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