It’s been half an hour since the skirmish and Rogic is still staggering through the alleyways of the city, keeping to shadows and dark eaves, quiet and cautious. They’re still hunting him; Rogic can hear them, and every so often an icy blue circle will bloom in the dark night sky as a taunt.

That Govain is a force to be reckoned with, and now he’s gathered those dogs to his side. They’re arrogant, really, not even the weakest among the noble’s followers hiding their features, as if the church won’t find them.

Arrogance makes Govain think he can finish this quickly, night after night chasing the church’s followers down. But while Rogic is weary from running and still recovering from that rebound with Govain’s merchant, he has faith.

There are hundreds, thousands of believers, scattered all through the continent and rising up. If he falls, more will take his place. Faith can be lost, but it does not break.

Rogic hasn’t heard anything for a while and even the beacon of blue light has dimmed. He’s not sure how many others made it out, but he knows the ones who were caught will kill themselves before they spill secrets.

Or rather, the spell carved into their tongue will take care of it.

He stays cautious as he winds deeper down narrower roads, into packed dirt and boarded windows. Rogic steps around a corner and stops, waiting, waiting, waiting. No one comes, and only then does he take one final corner and enter a side door.

The spiral staircase sends him deep beneath the earth and opens to a cavernous grand hall, torches and candles scattered like shattered glass across its floor and walls. The Wildflower is a god of abundance and the builders carved a myriad of shifting, dizzying decals into the walls in between murals that bleed together, even the ground a spreading fan of tiles.

Wildflower is a god converted for the new age, smoothed down and plastered over to show a more tasteful version to the populace. While well-known, the god is quiet and forgotten over time, only glanced at when people need something. People display effigies of a man with a smile like sunshine, arms overflowing with flowers, and pray for minor, half-hearted blessings of health and happiness.

It is ignorance.

The massive statue at the end of the great kaleidoscope of a church is a man well-fed but obese with it, weighed down by fancy clothes that choke and jewelled rings that leave him unable to bend his fingers. He is smiling, dazed and eyes half-lidded, drifting with sickness and drugs. The vines in his cupped arms are toxic and invasive, roots sunken deep into The Wildflower’s stone with black thorns jutting out.  They wind up to pin the statue to the wall, spreading out like poisoned veins.

The candles at the statue’s feet are old, mountainous lumps of off-white wax that cascade down, burning like a pyre. They warm the cold underground but it’s the burn of fever, not placid comfort, and Rogic is sweltering under his thick hooded cloak. The rest of the church is shadowed edges, pitch-dark behind pillars of dripping artwork, an abyss stretching out across the ceiling with thick stone rafters piercing into the gloom and disappearing.

Rogic strides down the centre aisle, past offerings of poisonous fruit and venomous creatures. It’s quiet, and while it’s too soon to say that none of the others he brought out with him to face the noble survived, he thinks it all the same.

But there should still be elders here, high priests who stayed behind to defend the church. Rogic slows to a stop halfway down the aisle, the tiles forming hellfire in a deep underworld purple at his feet, a nearby pillar a scattering of stars.

Something is wrong.

The wax at the feet of the statue is cracked, the vines ripped off it where they branch out to the wall, and debris of stone slivers and broken tiles have made streaks through the faint layer of dust on the ground.

“Show yourself!” Rogic roars, green circles gaping open to ring his shoulders in preparation. It shatters a spell above his head that he didn't see and he pulls the defences in tighter.

“I’m not exactly hiding.”

Rogic’s head snaps towards the deep voice and sees a cloaked figure hovering completely still over the shoulder of The Wildflower, blending into the black crosshatching of shadowed vines. The man stands on a small 2^nd level such a dark black that it seems to absorb the light.

Rogic throws out a hand, finger-binding a fire spell so his defensive barrier doesn’t drop. The candles and torches flare up into bonfires, the flames skipping to more unlit ones and flaring the entire church into view. There are piles of offerings that now hold broken, crushed bodies of the priests, wrung out into a bloody mess.

The figure does nothing but tilt his head. “Alright, fine, I’m impressed by your multicasting. But I’m still upset.”

“Govain sent you, did he?” Rogic demands. After one last check around, he begins to stride closer.

“Oh, no, he didn’t.”

Rogic doesn’t believe the man. He’s not sure if the figure really did come alone, or if there are others waiting in the wings but the very fact that the man is talking instead of acting implies he’s stalling Rogic for something.

Rogic bursts into a sprint, dropping his defences and instead hurling out a 3^rd level that explodes into fog, gushing over the head of the statue and everything in range. He rips off his cloak to get it out of his way and summons flat 1^st level plates into a mid-air staircase that he races across.

The figure blows back the fog with a gust of cutting air but Rogic is already circling up The Wildflower and around behind the other magician, his way clear because the vines hang limply.

“You’re not one for conversation, are you?” the figure tsks, still facing the rest of the church.

Rogic leaps forward off his last plate and comes down with a blooming 4^th level. The spell pierces the figure’s head in a perfect dead-centre shot and then rips across to split him in half with a neat line.

The man explodes into the black dust of a spell, as does the platform under him.

Rogic flies through the dust and lands hard on The Wildflower’s shoulder, boots crushing thorns under his feet with rapid cracks. His head swings around, a snarl on his face.

“Are you a knight?” the same voice asks, now echoing around the cavernous church, coming from everywhere at once and overlapping. Maybe the man isn’t stalling, he just talks too much. “I mean really, what magician runs around like that? I suppose you discovered your mana late?”

“Govain!” Rogic snaps because who else could it be. “Get out here. I didn’t take you for a coward.”

“Not quite,” the voice tsks. “No, you've upset far more than an overgrown child.”

“Who are you?” Rogic demands. He throws out seeker spells, three disks of blazing green that sweep through the church but they move blindly. They’re not finding anything.

“Me?” the voice cries, incredulous. “Who are you! This is not your neighbourhood, fool. You think you can track mud all over the place and no one will say a thing? You, a little 4^th class, like this isn't the gods-forsaken eastern capital where the air breathes with magic. Shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down before you call an 8^th here on all of us.”

Rogic staggers as the stone under him jerks, shifting forward. The rock shrieks and cracks, the thorns of the hanging vines skittering across the stone as the statue surges forward. He thinks it’s falling at first but the snapped plants, the broken wax, the crushed bodies…

Rogic hurls himself off the shoulder, over a giant grasping hand, blooming a larger platform that he lands on with a roll to slow himself before he vaults off and hits the ground with barely a stumble. The Wildflower steps forward, cracking more deep crevasses in the waterfall of wax at his feet.

A black halo is spinning lazily behind the god’s head. 6^th level.

There’s a 2^nd at every major joint, a 4^th wrapping each finger like rings for mobility, 1^st levels linked to wrap the statue like chains. That’s ten - fifteen - thirty - thirty-seven spells to puppet this effigy. What kind of monster…and all to mock him.

“You…” Rogic whispers, stunned at the sheer audacity, and then his expression twists into something wrathful. “You!”

Rogic hurls out a 4^th level, a 3^rd, another 4^th, creating a dome of green that washes through the church’s halls, shuddering the very foundations, cracking the murals and shaking off dust and debris from anything not fixed down.

“Not quite,” the voice tsks.

Rogic throws himself out of the way of a massive stone foot that comes crashing down on where he stood moments before, shaking the ground and crushing a priest further into a smear with a burst of blood that splatters against the stone.

“Where is your god now?” the voice mocks. “Call for them. Pray I don’t tear this building down. Beg for a miracle so I don’t kill you like the rest.”

“What do you want?!” Rogic roars.

“Some fucking sleep!” the voice laughs, loud and wild before it’s smothered back down. The voice clears his throat. “No, I’m sorry, that’s my problem. Listen, for the past two weeks, you and yours have been skittering through these alleyways, causing unrestrained damages and scaring people back into their homes.”

Rogic whirls around a pillar for a pause but the statue just turns and rams through it with a shoulder. Rogic dives out of the way, pieces of sharp stone shrapnel cutting straight through his clothes, one catching him across the cheek just under an eye.

“I would quite like you to stop, and you have had ample time to with that noble chasing you down, but it seems you’re rather stubborn.”

The pillar topples slowly, its very presence as it falls pushing weight down across Rogic, even when it falls far past him and shatters to more chunks on the ground.

“So here we are.”

Rogic scrambles back up, shield already raised, but the hand slams into his defences so hard it hurls him across the room. He raises another full orb shield but his bones are rattling from the blow and when he hits the wall, the spell shatters too early.

And the-

-it-

-he-

“-still good?” the voice is saying, slightly louder than necessary. “Hello? …Cultist?”

Rogic blinks, panting into the tiles. His entire body is throbbing with a sharp ache that feels like it comes from his very blood. The statue has stopped, barely a step away from him, watching.

Rogic levers himself up on shaking arms and spits out blood. “Who hired a 6^th class to wipe out a church?”

The voice scoffs. “No, I assure you, this is personal.”

Rogic slowly sits up against the wall, shoulders slamming into it when his arms give out but he gets up eventually. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

“You weren’t awake for me to enjoy it,” the voice murmurs. But the man had sounded nervous before when Rogic was unconscious.

Rogic darts a glance to one of the bodies past the statue’s fur robe. The body is mangled and the robe is torn and blood-stained but…his eyes instead slide back to the statue’s clean feet, right in front of him. It had stepped on a body. There had been blood. Too much in fact.

Illusions, of course.

The man won’t kill Rogic, and he talks enough it certainly sounds personal so maybe he’s telling the truth. Fighting here, already this injured, is foolish. Playing along until he can find the others and escape is Rogic’s best bet.

So when a black light appears above his head, barely there in the darkness of the statue standing over him, Rogic pretends to not notice.

Sleep comes swiftly.