The Grand Cathedral of Caeloria rose from the center of the capital like something grown rather than built, white stone towers wrapped in vines of silver ivy that never lost their color regardless of season, said by the faithful to be a living gift from Gaia herself, though the Church’s own historians privately noted the ivy had been cultivated by mundane gardeners for the better part of three centuries.
Sister Aveline had never actually stood inside the Cathedral’s inner sanctum before, had only ever seen its outer halls during her initial training, and found herself now, waiting outside the Oracle’s private chamber with her carefully composed report in hand, more nervous than she’d been standing in a farmer’s garden feeling something no training had prepared her for.
The Oracle received her alone, which itself was unusual enough to make Aveline’s pulse quicken further.
Most acolytes delivered reports to a chain of senior clergy long before anything reached the Oracle’s ears directly.
That her letter, sent ahead by fast courier, had earned her a personal audience told her more clearly than anything else could have that someone above her had already recognized the shape of what she’d found.
The Oracle herself, a woman whose age was impossible to guess beneath robes the color of dawn light, listened to Aveline’s full account without interrupting once, her expression giving away nothing until the young acolyte had finished entirely.
“You said it felt like a held breath,” the Oracle finally said, repeating Aveline’s own words back to her with careful precision.
“Not warmth. Not the Abyss’s particular wrongness either. Something outside both.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And the boy knew what you were the moment he saw you.”
“He said I felt warm, but not the way the sun is warm.” Aveline hesitated, then added the detail she’d debated leaving out of her written report entirely.
“He also asked if I would report him carefully. Not whether I would report him at all. He seemed to already understand that part was inevitable.”
Something shifted behind the Oracle’s eyes, subtle but unmistakable, the look of someone recalculating an old, familiar equation with a new and unexpected variable.
“Six years old,” the Oracle murmured, mostly to herself.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
The Oracle did not summon her full council that evening, though she easily could have.
Instead, she walked alone to the Cathedral’s deepest archive, a chamber few outside the highest clergy were permitted to enter, where the Church kept its oldest and most carefully guarded texts, some predating the founding of Caeloria itself by centuries.
She was looking, specifically, for a passage she had read only once, decades ago, as a young Saintess still years from her current title, a passage she had dismissed at the time as poetic religious language rather than literal doctrine.
She found it now exactly where memory told her it would be, in a fragment of the earliest known scripture, written in a hand so old the ink had faded nearly to invisibility against the yellowed page.
Gaia gives life to all who walk beneath her sky, the passage read, in language that had shifted slightly in translation over the centuries but retained its essential meaning.
But there are those born neither of her blessing nor of the Abyss’s hunger, souls that stand outside her sight entirely, neither seen nor unseen, waiting for the day the world itself decides what they will become.
She read it three times, the same way, she suspected, Astaroth had once read a very different fragment in a very different archive, though the Oracle had no way of knowing that particular parallel existed at all.
Her decision, when it finally came, surprised even the small circle of senior clergy she eventually did bring into her confidence, days later, in a private meeting far removed from the wider Church hierarchy that would, if given the choice, almost certainly have pushed for something far more aggressive.
“We do nothing,” the Oracle said, her voice calm but final, the kind of tone that ended arguments before they’d properly begun.
“No investigation beyond what Sister Aveline has already gathered. No approach. No attempt to bring the child into the Church’s care, whatever justification anyone might construct for it.”
One of the senior clergy, an older man named Brother Denic who had spent decades advising on matters of doctrine and precedent, frowned deeply at that.
“Your Grace, if this child truly stands outside Gaia’s sight, outside the Abyss as well, that is precisely the kind of anomaly the Church exists to understand. To simply ignore it—”
“I did not say ignore,” the Oracle corrected gently.
“I said we do nothing yet. There’s a considerable difference.” She folded her hands in her lap, her gaze steady on each of them in turn.
“The Grand Academy of Elysara accepts students from every kingdom, every race, at the age of seven. If this child is even half of what the demons apparently already believe him to be, he will not remain hidden in a farming village forever. He will, in time, come to us, or somewhere very much like us, on ground that belongs to no single power, where he can be observed, understood, perhaps even guided, without the Church needing to frighten a six-year-old boy or provoke whatever forces already consider him theirs to protect.”
“And if he doesn’t come to the Academy?” Brother Denic pressed.
“If the demons keep him hidden away instead?”
“Then we will have learned something important about their intentions,” the Oracle said simply.
“Either way, patience costs us nothing here, and haste could cost us a great deal. I have lived long enough to know the difference between a threat that needs to be met today, and one that needs, instead, to be understood before it’s met at all.”
Word did not travel back to Yeun of the Oracle’s decision, not directly, not in any way Aveline herself was permitted to share once her report had been formally filed and quietly archived alongside doctrine far older than her own short life.
She returned to her modest chapel in the market town, resuming her ordinary duties, tending the shrine, recording minor blessings, though something in her had shifted permanently, the memory of that strange, breathless absence settling somewhere she suspected she would carry for the rest of her life.
She thought of the boy often in the months that followed, wondering, in quiet moments between her duties, whether he was still tending his garden, still turning that careful, watchful attention on the wider world he seemed to understand was slowly closing in around him, whether he’d ever learn that a woman in white robes, decades his senior and a continent away in influence, had chosen, on his behalf, patience over fear.
She hoped, without any real way of knowing, that patience would prove to be the right choice.
Far to the south, in a small house near a quiet river, Lucifer, now six, sat with a book Beelzebub had brought him weeks before, a simple illustrated history of the continent’s kingdoms, and traced his finger slowly along a hand-drawn map until it landed on a small, ornate symbol marking the location of the Grand Academy of Elysara, nestled at the center of the continent on land that belonged, according to the book’s careful text, to no single kingdom or race at all.
He didn’t know yet that both Hell and Caeloria had already, independently, begun quietly planning around the assumption that he would one day walk through that Academy’s gates.
He only knew, tracing the small symbol with a child’s careful curiosity, that it looked like the kind of place where, for the first time in his short life, he might not be the strangest thing anyone had ever seen.