"What do you mean she's going to need my help?" Natalie asked as she slowly turned to face the mirror. This wasn't a surprise. She had been depressed and grieving. Hallucinations are perfectly normal for someone with impaired mental health. It's been a year of anti-social behavior and something had to break. Somewhere inside, she was convinced that she had finally lost her mind.

Instead, Natalie was shocked to see a Greek goddess facing her from across the plane of glass. The brunette woman was very tall, very regal, and every bit as beautiful as Naythen had worked to portray on Halloween. There was a faint glow radiating from her head, reflecting gold and copper hues in her hair. Despite all these marks of Divinity, however, the goddess looked haggard, leaning heavily upon a spear for support.

"You're shitting me," Natalie muttered, her pale blue eyes widening in shock.

"I'd have to eat you, first, to do that," the reflected woman replied drily.

"You're, uh, Athena, right? I mean, like, the goddess that Nayt worshipped, right?" Natalie inquired as she approached the mirror. "So, I finally snapped and I'm seeing things?"

"You wish to know whether I am a figment of your imagination?" the goddess asked as a pitying smile spread across her lips. "I've neither the time nor the energy to convince you." Athena's eyes were the color of steel, her determination and strength of will reflected plainly upon them. "But whether or not you trust your senses, it doesn't change the fact that she needs you."

"Well that's not terribly reassuring," Natalie said. "Anyway, who is 'she?' I thought you said Nayt needed my help."

Athena gave out an exasperated chuckle, a tumble of chestnut hair falling loose from the helm upon her brow. "You're shitting me," she mimicked with an uncharacteristic shrug. "You expect me to believe you didn't realize?"

Natalie frowned and tilted her head, color blossoming in her cheeks as she began to puzzle out the reflection's meaning. "You mean Nayt really was..."

"Yes. And she's been given a new life. However, it took most of the energy I possessed. Now that she needs me most, I can't be there to protect her." Athena's gray-blue eyes glistened with sorrow, her brow furrowed with concern as she looked meaningfully to the small girl on the other side of the glass.

Natalie didn't dare to get her hopes up. This had to be some sort of dream or delusion. But if there was a chance, any chance at all that she could meet Naythen again, did she dare give it up? "Okay... what do you need me to do?"

Athena smiled in relief. "For starters, believe in her. And fetch something to write or type on. We're going to write some scripture."

Natalie's jaw dropped in disbelief. "We're going to what, now?"

---

Pallas woke up feeling just a bit more energetic than when she'd fallen asleep. It wasn't a lot, but it was something. There was just a bit more grip as she clenched her hands. There was just a bit more speed as she tossed aside the sheets. There was just a bit more lift as she rose to her feet. With a calming breath, she shook off her sweaty clothes and walked the few steps toward the water basin that had been left for her on the table. A bar of scented soap and a washcloth lay to one side and a fuller tower was folded neatly on the other. Pallas smiled gratefully as she thanked whoever had been kind enough to set this up for her.

After spending a brief period washing up, she took a seat by the window and looked out onto the street below. People went about their business as if nothing hugely traumatic had just happened a few days ago. All vestiges of the festival had been removed, leaving nothing but some churned dirt here and there to mark where the stalls had been. The dancing circle had been torn apart, but the beaten earth where countless feet had pressed in merriment remained. Even the sun, glowing softly over the circle where the festival had taken place, appeared the same as it had any other day.

So why did it all feel so dim?

Pallas closed her eyes and tried to recall how things had looked before her rebirth. That chilly autumn day where colors danced in tune to music, when the moonlight poured down upon Natalie's painted face and reflected in her sky blue eyes, did the hues of her vision seem so dim? Honestly, the saturation of the colors was similar.

Putting it from her mind for now, she stood and dressed herself. She had long since become accustomed to the ritual of clothing herself in this world's garb. There was an order to it, a rhythm that increased in tempo as she performed it each day.

Pallas had decided to add a few steps to the dance. She carefully brushed her hair and pulled half of it behind her head into a simple braid. The rest she then arranged around her shoulders before looking into the mirror. Laraline would be proud, she thought to herself.

Just this little bit of primping made Pallas feel better about herself despite the situation. For once, she didn't feel 'trapped' or 'lost' or 'cast aside.' With just this little bit of self-care, Pallas felt a bit more alive.

She made her way downstairs where, as expected, the townsfolk gave a wide berth, uncertain whether or how to approach the strange maiden who had broken their Priestess. Eber, on the other hand, raised a hand in greeting and gave her a warm smile.

"Oi, lass! Glad to see ye up an' about!" Eber shouted over the din of the dining hall. "Don't worry 'bout work, today. Yer still recovering," he said as he stepped away from his usual place at the front desk to stand before her. "Now how are ye feelin'?"

Pallas grinned despite the fatigue. "I feel like I can walk around the inn without getting too winded. What did you have in mind?"

"Rather than keep ye tied up in drudge work inside, ah figured it'd be better for ye to get some fresh air an' see what ye can do 'round the village. Ol' Walfrey may have some advice for ye, as well. Maybe run that stash o' books ye've been keepin' in yer room back to his study," the old man replied with a wink, laying his accent on rather more thickly than normal.

Nodding in understanding, Pallas made her way to the kitchen to snag a bite of sausage and eggs (and banter a bit with the cooks who seemed nonplussed about the events at the festival) before returning to her room to gather the painfully dry volumes she'd been studying.

As she was transferring the books into her leather satchel, an envelope fell from its weathered pages to the floor. On its surface, Eber had written "Mayor Rusk" in his deceptively neat script. The envelope had been sealed with green wax and the emblem of a feather quill. Whatever the missive was, Pallas's objective was clear. She dropped the envelope into a separate pouch within the satchel, slipped the ornately tooled strap over her shoulder, and locked her room up behind her.

It wasn't long before she arrived at the green door of the Mayor's house. As Berna had done before her, Pallas knocked firmly then stood aside to wait. In the span of a couple breaths, Madam Rusk had opened the door and looked down with visible surprise at the guest on her doorstep.

"Good day, Pallas! What brings you to the Mayor's home?" Madam Rusk asked in a cautious tone.

"I wanted to return some things that I had borrowed," Pallas replied with an equal measure of discretion. "Eber insisted I should take care of it today," she continued, hoping that Madam Rusk would understand.

A moment passed as the older woman weighed the words of the younger and Pallas found herself holding her breath unintentionally. When Madam Rusk nodded and stepped aside to allow Pallas room to enter, she let out the breath in a sigh of relief.

The interior of the home looked much the same as it had on her previous visits, although there seemed to be rather more stacks of parchment on the Mayor's desk. Mayor Rusk turned his gaze up resignedly from his desk a the approach of their footsteps only to break into a wan smile at the sight of his guest.

"Good day, Pallas! I'm glad to see you're faring well!" Walfrey said cheerily as he gestured to one of the two chairs before him.

Pallas bowed her head in thanks and took the same chair she'd chosen on her last couple visits, shifting her satchel around to sit in her lap. Marin left the room wordlessly to attend to some other matter, leaving the Mayor to address his guest directly.

"That was quite the show you put on the other day," he began. "The whole village has been in an uproar about it. Some have said you're possessed, a tool of the Shadows to weaken the Light of the Church. Others have said you're simply mad and that your madness infected Berna when she tried to bless you."

"That's not true!" Pallas exclaimed. "I was just--"

"Oh, I already know the truth of it, Pallas. I knew what Berna had planned for you from the moment she brought you into my office. It was quite the insult to her when you refused her offer to join the Church of Listern. Nobody refuses the call of the Church, you see. Not officially, anyway. Every time it happens, the unwilling acolyte has a change of heart after the Moonlight Festival."

He let out a heavy sigh. "Truth told, I feared to see the light in your eyes get swept out and replaced with... whatever's left when Berna gives them her 'blessing,'" the mayor admitted somberly.

"Like with Carin?"

Mayor Rusk's expression clouded with something unreadable, somewhere between anger and despondency. "Eber told you about her, did he?"

Pallas nodded.

"She was my wife's younger sister. A bright girl. Talented, spirited, a bit rambunctious. You've met her in the Church."

Pallas struggled to remember the other women she had briefly met in the Church over breakfast her first morning after waking. They were nondescript, all wearing the same brown robes and necklaces. Nothing about the individual women stood out. It was as though their individuality had been scrubbed away to help them fit their roles within the confines of the temple. None of them fit the description Eber and Mayor Rusk had given of the woman they had known.

"Can't remember her, can you?" the mayor asked. "Not surprised. Unless you knew what to look for, you'd never be able to tell her from the other five." The elderly man pushed his chair back from the desk and stood up to his full height, stretching his shoulders and back. As his arms dropped to his side he chuckled, "If you want to know which one is Carin, look for the woman with my wife's nose."

"What's this about my nose, dear?" Madam Rusk asked pointedly as she walked into the room bearing a tray of tea and sweet biscuits.

"It's one of your most lovely features, Marin," Walfrey stated reassuringly as his wife set the tray down on his desk. Everything about this loving display confused Pallas, as she had gained a very different impression of their relationship from her first visit.

The mayor noticed her expression and observed, "You seem be a bit confused. I take it my previous behavior is contradicting my current actions?"

With a nod, Pallas stated, "Honestly, I thought you had some kind of relationship with Second Priestess Berna, or at least had feelings for her."

"Rivergarde is little more than a vanity act for Berna," Marin said suddenly. "As long as she thinks all the men in town are afraid of her or fawning over her, the old bitch is satisfied. There's no reason for a woman of her stature to be stationed out here in the middle of nowhere except she likes being the most important person around."

Pallas, who had taken one of the cups of tea, choked on the liquid she had been sipping during Madam Rusk's heated outburst and nearly sprayed it from her nose. As she coughed a couple times to clear her airways, Walfrey began laughing.

"Sorry about that, Pallas," he said as he rounded his desk and gently patted her on the back. "As you can see, we're all stuck acting out these ridiculous roles for the benefit of bolstering Berna's sense of self. Well, the major players, anyway. Most of the folk living their day-to-day are beneath the attention of the Second Priestess of Listern, after all."

Pallas quickly recovered and nodded again. "I think I understand, now." She didn't, really. Not fully, anyway. But she was beginning to piece it together. "So Berna shows up out here, takes over the head of the local church, and proceeds to throw her weight around so that people bow and scrape to her?"

"More or less, yes," Mayor Rusk replied candidly.

"And why are you okay telling me all this?"

"Because you're the only person to resist her blessing and remain yourself afterward. You're also the only person to have so thoroughly disrupted her vanity glamour that she's been in hiding for days," stated the mayor.

"How many people know she's been magically augmenting her appearance?" Pallas asked, recalling the veins of energy she had perceived in the Priestess's face.

"Not many, truthfully. Only those few of us old enough to remember when she first arrived here and those with Sight like Eber," Madam Rusk said as she finally took the seat behind the mayor's, near the bookcase. "How did you know, Pallas?"

"I can see it. The magic, I mean. Or... the energy? If I look closely and focus, I can see threads of light below the surface of her skin," Pallas admitted. "When she took me to the inn, we had a long talk in my room. That was the first time I noticed it."

Walfrey suppressed a gasp. "That's called Sight."

Pallas raised an eyebrow. "Yes, sight is one of the five senses. The perception of light and color through the eyes," she said flatly.

The mayor rubbed a hand across his forehead. "You weren't kidding about your lack of knowledge, were you?"

"I mean, I know things. Just not *these* things," responded Pallas enigmatically.

"Fair enough. I'll simplify it for you as best I can." Walfrey pointed at his eyes. "Vision is what your eyes pick up from the reflection of light."

Then he pointed at his temple. "Sight is perception with the mind. It's using all the things you pick up with all your senses and interpreting it with more than what you see. It would be the things you feel, like the energy that powers magic or the warmth of fire or the echoes of sound. Those with Sight have a greater insight into the workings of the world."

Pallas's eyes widened in surprise as she processed this new information. It made sense! The color, the vibrancy, the intensity! "So that's why everything looked so bright and full of life!" she exclaimed. "I'd just chalked it up to waking up from a coma or constantly passing out!"

The two elders exchanged a worried look with each other. "You mean to tell me that you have natural Sight?" Mayor Rusk inquired.

"Yeah, why?"

"Because only the Gods are supposed to have natural Sight. It's a gift from the Divine to those who study under them, pray to them, and cultivate their knowledge of the world. Normally it takes decades to achieve a noticeable degree of Sight to recognize the workings of magic in a glamour," the mayor replied. "For you to have Sight on par with Eber's would mean..."

"Oh!" Pallas interrupted. "I almost forgot!" She hastily withdrew the envelope from the pouch within her satchel and passed it over to Mayor Rusk as he returned to his chair.

The mayor's wrinkled fingers broke the seal after pausing briefly to regard the image embossed into the wax. As his eyes quickly scanned the letter, Pallas busied herself with emptying the satchel of the books she had borrowed. She stacked each one carefully on the mayor's far-too-cluttered desk in a neat pile atop one of the bundles of paperwork that awaited Walfrey's official attention.

After several minutes, the mayor cleared his throat and studied Pallas over the top of his wire-rimmed frames. His eyes darted back to the paper and up again several times as if to be sure of what he was reading. Finally, having come to some sort of decision, he stated firmly, "Well, this explains quite a bit, actually."

"What's that, Walfrey?" Madam Rusk asked as she gathered the books from his desk and transferred them one-by-one to their proper places on the shelves.

"Eber seems to believe that Pallas, here, has Divinity in her. He thinks she may be the daughter of a God," Mayor Rusk said almost reverently.

"Well that can't be right. This girl was found half-drowned in a river! Shouldn't her Divinity have protected her from that?" came his wife's indignant reply.

"Not if she was just born," Walfrey surmised. "If a Goddess used the last of her power to manifest a child into being, it would explain why Pallas seems so ignorant of our ways despite her age."

Pallas, increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation, began to shift awkwardly in her seat. The mayor looked at her expectantly. In response, she shoved a biscuit in her mouth and began chewing. Very slowly.

"Isn't this all just wild conjecture, dear?" Madam Rusk asked of her husband. "What possible foundation could you base these ideas of yours upon?"

The mayor waved the letter in his hand. "Eber is a former Captain of the Paladins of Tyonon and has cultivated his Sight for years despite losing his gift for magic." With a dramatic flourish, he then smacked the letter onto his desk. "Eber makes a solid case that despite her unassuming nature, Pallas shares many similarities with high-ranking persons in the Church, people who have dedicated their lives to Listern or Tyonon to earn their blessings. And this actually explains how this young girl would have the power to disrupt the Second Priestess's magic and live to tell about it."

"That's all well and good, but what does that mean for her? Or for us?"

"It means we need to get her out of Rivergarde as soon as possible. If Berna's already sent word to Erimere that Pallas exists, we might be seeing a squadron of Paladins on our doorstep," Walfrey said as he slouched back in his chair.

"That... doesn't sound like a good thing," Pallas muttered as she swallowed the mouthful of biscuit she had been chewing. She washed it down with a generous swallow of tea.

"Well, no. They would either want to capture you or try to kill you in order to maintain the integrity of the Gospel of the Twin Gods," the mayor responded plainly. "Your very existence runs contrary to the teachings of the churches - they believe that no other Gods exist or can exist."

Pallas sighed. "I don't want to be any of this. I just want to exist, to live freely, and to be myself."

The mayor shrugged sympathetically. "That's all most of us want. But sometimes circumstances dictate that we do some things we don't want to do so that we can have the freedom to do the things we desire to do."

Pallas nodded and wrapped her arms around herself. Despite the warmth inside the home, she was feeling a bit of a chill.