“Uh… sire?” Ortson, lacking any other conceivable course of action, raised his hand.
“My old friend.” Johan’s face split into a wide grin as his eyes fell on the guildmaster. “You must do a task for me.”
“As… as Your Majesty wishes.”
Johan grinned. “This kingdom faces a threat greater than I ever imagined. The dragon has killed my whole party, and almost myself, and now it has taken my love. If any of us are to survive its fury, if we are to slay a beast of legend, we will need more than just professional services. We will need heroes of destiny!”
“Yep. Definitely destiny.” Theological Support Friar Brouse pointed up at the statue of Niln with half of a scone. “See it all the time.”
“That’s what you said last time!” High Scribe Pathalan called to the traveling monk from the far side of the Al’Matran sanctuary, one sandaled foot out the door in case the sculpture tried anything funny. “You said it was just latent fate shifting reality or something.”
Several of the attendant priestesses and acolytes clustered behind the high scribe murmured in agreement.
“See it all the time,” said the friar again, as though this statement was in and of itself a sufficient response. He took a bite of scone and chewed thoughtfully as he watched the bronze likeness of the previous high scribe.
“Really? Statues just move all the time?” demanded the current officeholder.
“Ain’t movin’ now,” Brouse observed, spraying crumbs over his yellow robe.
“But he did! He grinned for weeks, and then he looked all calm and normal when the Dwarf visited, and since then he’s been… winking at us.” The high scribe shuddered. “Goddess, I swear his eyes are following me.”
“Just an illusion. People always see things,” muttered Brouse. He looked down at a gyroscopic contraption that was slowly rotating several colorful beads around a dish of blue liquid. “Nothing unusual in the weave.”
“Well, there might have been when we called you three weeks ago!” snapped Pathalan.
“Hey! You think you’re the only temple that’s got holy relics acting up?” Brouse glowered back at the cowering Al’Matrans. “You lot have been making calls all month. And some of the big ones got real emergencies, too. The marble glowmoths over at the Temple of Fulgen are actually starting to glow. Every fresco showin’ anything past the First Age is turning black. I had three different temples calling in statues, paintings, or relics bleeding last week. Serious stuff.”
He pulled a blue crystal from his bag and tapped it twice. It flickered with a cerulean light, then made a sound like a bumblebee on a griddle and expelled a cloud of azure smoke. “Thrice-cursed bones! And I can’t get a bloody nornstone to work for the life of me! Between the temples’ whining and artificers’ swindlin’, I got enough problems to give a god a headache. I don’t give a fig leaf about some statue making faces at—gah!”
The torches in the sanctuary flickered, casting dark shadows across the room. When they flared back to life a heartbeat later, several Al’Matran’s screamed. The statue of the former high scribe was smiling up at the ceiling above the empty throne at the center of the sanctuary, looking as though he anticipated the goddess herself was about to crash through the roof and land in her old chair.
“See?” demanded Pathalan. “It’s got to be a ghost or… or dark magic. Something sinister!”
“Ain’t looking at you now, is he?” asked Brouse. “Hrmph. No magic. And no haunting, neither.” Brouse scratched at his beard and looked back and forth from the spinning beads to Niln’s face. “I still say it’s destiny. You get this sort of thing when people are about to have big, life altering changes thrust upon them.”
“Do you?” Pathalan’s voice oozed sarcasm and doubt.
“Depends on how big and life altering the change is, how many fates are woven into it, that sort of thing.” Brouse waved a hand about his head, as if he could fan away the bothersome questions. “Usually more subtle and less spooky. But yeah. All the time.”
The current high scribe stared up at the face of his former rival. “How often?”
“Beg pardon?
“Within the last year, how often have you seen this?” the high scribe reiterated.
Brouse stared blankly. “Well, I did mention all that other strangeness over at them other temples,” he grumbled.
“But moving statues? Shifting when nobody’s looking? Inanimate objects making direct efforts to communicate?”
“Not… as much,” said Brouse. And then, with defiance, he added “This year.”
“The past decade, maybe?” the Elf asked.
“Well, maybe not often,” conceded the friar.
“But you’ve seen it before?”
“Not ‘seen,’ per se.” Brouse sucked air through his teeth. “But you hear about it, right? Like the old legend of how Lady Tiaga followed a path of whispering trees to find her clay army, or the story about how the Stennish statues bowed their heads and wept blood when Issan marched on Andarun.”
There was an expectant pause that extended into a strained silence. When High Scribe Pathalan broke it, he spoke in the punctuated rasp of a man who is one inane response away from embarking on a homicidal spree. “So… you heard about things like this in legends from ages past?”
Brouse’s years in support work had rendered him impervious to such hostility. “Yeah, and other places. Those are just a couple examples everybody knows. It’s not like you’re familiar with all of the people who almost had a destiny.”
“You can’t ‘almost’ have a destiny,” protested a young scribe. “You either have a destiny or you don’t.”
“No, everybody has one,” said a junior priestess. “Just most of them are dull, so we don’t talk about them. Nobody wants to hear that they’re destined to retire from accounting when their eyes give out, move into a small pensioner apartment, and play dice with the other old folks for the rest of their days.”
The theological support friar scoffed and pulled a piece of thick twine strung with stone beads from his case. “That’s no destiny.”
“Well, it isn’t much, but my grandad seems to enjoy it fine.”
Brouse thrust the string of beads up toward Niln as though it was a lantern. “Fine for him, sure enough, but a destiny has a purpose. A mission. And you aren’t born with it,” he snapped, wiping the smug smile off the acolyte’s face. “Maybe some prophecy or scripture out there calls for the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, or a lad with red eyes and white hair, or a low-born king, but even if you’re one of them, you aren’t the only one on Arth, or the only one who will come along.”
“So what is destiny at all then?” asked an acolyte.
Brouse snorted at some inscrutable reading in the beads and shoved them back in his case. “Destinies are places where the weave twists, like them whirlpools in the river. They show up at certain times or under particular circumstances, and if the right sort of person gets caught in their pull, they’ll be drawn toward the middle. Past a certain point, there’s no escaping it. But before then, people can pull themselves out.”
