"I've never heard your accent before." Valeri said softly after we'd been sitting on a rooftop's edge for a while, greedily taking in the view of the city and the landscape beyond with our eyes as the sun grew brighter while Orisis threatened to snuff out the light.
"Really?" I said a little surprised. No one else had commented on my accent in ages, not since Mayer had asked about it, then Rethi and Alena in turn. She bobbed her head, the deep black and extremely dense hair wobbled floatily on her head as she did.
"Well, I do come from far away, so I guess that's to be expected." She turned to me, giving me a questioning look, though I disarmed the gaze with a small shake of my head. I had to keep that little secret, unfortunately.
"How…" Valeri struggled against her own question, desperately trying to not look too eager for an answer, and also feeling it burning within her chest. "How do you manage so many Gods?"
"I don't." She looked at me uncomprehendingly, "I'm probably not the best example to take from, Valeri. The Hearth Court and I have a very specific relationship that I'm not sure many will be able to hold. I'll need to know a little more before I can make a judgement." I smiled gently, a genuine emotion of warmth blooming in my chest. I don't know why, but I felt so much older than the girl sitting next to me who clearly had a few years on me. She struggled to answer, but just sighed and let the act fall away.
"My mother came here from Veringohs. She found a noble within the Brauhm Empire to marry, good enough for her royal blood." Valeri rolled her eyes, "The royal family in Veringohs is brutal, lots of murdering and conspiracy, so my mother and many of my aunts married out of the family and into others. My uncles are not so lucky." Seems even Veringohs has a dark side to it.
"Veringohs has their own pantheon of Gods, unlike the Brauhm Empire who only serve one. My mother followed a God. Tarania." She paused for a moment after saying the name, looking for any recognition on my face. I didn't know the name, though she spoke it with a strong accent almost similar to French.
"I'm sorry, I don't know of them."
"Her." She corrected lightly, then continued, "Tarania is a Goddess of Might and Strength. Though she is not a warrior." I raised an eyebrow.
"A Goddess of strength but not a warrior." I mused. Interesting, usually the two were effectively exclusive concepts, might almost entirely synonymous with military strength in a world like this, much the same as it was in the period on Earth like the Romans and the Greeks, and many more who were just the same.
"My mother had many stories of her. In one, Tarania's brother Rentara, who is the God of the Earth, was throwing a tantrum because a mountain he made was called ugly by one of his siblings, and he began to quake the earth to destroy it. Tarania went to go see the mountain that her brother had created, and found that was ugly, but that humans lived upon it in peace. They thrived there because of the concave in it that made it look ugly."
Valeri searched the distant rooftops with her eyes, shifting her bottom on the ledge that they were sitting on, legs dangling down the side of the building. I could feel a warm response in my divine energy, a brief recognition of the story within those of the Hearth that were watching.
"When the quaking began, and the mountain split in half to swallow the village whole, Tarania put her hands to the earth and pulled it back together against her brother's wishes. She saved the village and defied her brother to do so. She had Strength."
I sat with the profound story for a moment. It was simple and barebones. I'm sure that Valeri was paraphrasing as well, but it did hold a spark to it. An essence of what a God was, just as a warm tavern held a spark for the Hearth, the drunken jolly of the patrons whistling a tune. It wasn't the same sort of spark, this one being strong and independent, persevering and unquenchable.
"I see. A Goddess of Might, hm?" I mused again and Valeri nodded, looking down at the beautifully manicured hands that lay in her lap. A melancholic emotion swirling inside her chest, hidden beneath the layers.
"She always spoke so highly of Tarania. It makes me wonder why she left Veringohs in the first place. Why she left me here with father if she was only going to go back." I could feel the wound in her chest reopen as she said the sad words, but I let the emotion flow over me—keeping myself from being wrapped up in them.
"Any number of reasons could explain why she left. Any number of reasons could explain why someone might do something they believe is in line with the God they server but extends away from the God's wishes." Valeri sighed with frustration, pursing her pink lips in a pout.
"My mother said that she could speak with Tarania sometimes." She said abruptly, and the Gods of the Hearth who were listening in turned their attention more closely.
"That's an extraordinary feat." I said dully and turned to me with a 'no shit' expression.
"It'd be tantamount to being chosen by Tarania. But I think she lost her connection with Tarania after I was born." Valeri bit at her lip lightly, her emotions a swirling pit of emotion, not much of it really all that solidified. She was working through her past in front of my eyes, but I couldn't really help her with it. I may be able to see it all and work a room, but there weren't any magic words that'd solve someone's own issues.
The closest thing I had done was with Alena, and the moral reasoning for pushing the girl to use a power she was clearly terrified of was shaky at best. However, it did result in her understanding herself and her own power more, which I think is a net benefit for everyone.
"I don't know." I said, catching the girl's gorgeous eyes with mine and smiling sadly, "I couldn't possibly know why your mother did what she did, or why she lost the ability to talk with her God." I shrugged, even as she looked a little disheartened.
"But I don't care about all that. It's all stuff on the sideline, a curiosity to observe before the main show. You have more to tell me, and you're using this to preface it all." Valeri let a flash of anger cross her face. She felt like she was being mocked and goaded, like she had for years prior until she decided to hide her faith. The flash of understanding hit me, and I couldn't help but smile at the girl.
"Ah. You've been blessed, haven't you?" She flinched, but it was too late. The grasp on my hand being a little too tight. If I thought about it in terms of normal human grip strength, she'd have probably broken my hand, or at least given me some mean bruises. She was testing if too was blessed.
"By the way," I said with a half grin, "you might not want to pull the grip thing like you did with me. Any other Hearth blessed would probably just end up with a broken hand." Valeri was lost for words, her jaw hanging slack and a blush somehow making itself visible through her intensely pigmented skin.
"I was just making sure!" She exclaimed, ten different emotions waging war in her gut at once. "Nothing bad happened, so it's fine." I laughed at the grumbling girl before I pushed myself off the ledge while maintaining eye contact with her dark eyes.
Of course, I didn't let myself fall. That'd be stupid. I just walked across the lip of the building casually, openly defying gravity as I did so. The shock on her face and throughout her emotions was delicious, doing an excellent job of wiping the slate of her emotions clean. After a quick sidewards stroll, I hopped back up to the ledge, right next to the wide-eyed girl and whispered in her right ear, having been on the left only moments earlier.
"I might be a bit of a… special case."
She stammered for a second as she looked me dead in the eye like I was some sort of fairy tale creature, "W–what the hell. What kind of shifting even is that?" Her voice was only just barely constrained from yelling, so overwhelmed by the mind-bending display.
"Just a little trick I've been working on recently." I said with a wave of the hand, brushing it off like dust on my suit jacket. Obviously, she wasn't going to fall for the non-attempt at diversion.
"I know some earth shifting and know some experts in air shifting. Nothing I know could let me do that, and they can basically only make themselves run fast." Her piercing eyes were locked with mine, her mind not even registering that our faces were probably only centimetres apart, sitting at an extremely intimate distance.
"And how much do you train a day?" I asked her, and her eyebrow scrunched.
"An hour or two? I work on theory more." I just shrugged lackadaisically.
"I barely do any theory." The bewilderment sprung to her face, "Practice is key. I trained all day every day for the equivalent of years worth of time to be able to do things like these. You'd need to step up big time to match me, kiddo." The slight ribbing at the end made her scowl heartlessly.
"How do you expect me to do that, old man?"
"Prioritize." I said simply, face going dead serious, "You're blessed by a Goddess. I don't know what Tarania wants from you, but you have it easy because you've been blessed and you're stuck here, pussyfooting around on a rooftop with some random boy you just met." I spread my arms wide, forcing her to take in the whole world and bring it into perspective—the pure scale of it all, the majesty of Orisis as it eclipsed the sun, and the landscape as it was showered in the dribbles of light that escaped Orisis' grasps.
"You have all of this to go see, to explore, to find a world in, and you're letting yourself stagnate here despite being given every chance?" I tilted my head to the side as I looked the girl in the eyes, drawing my face close to hers, our noses only centimetres apart. "What is it that you're waiting for, Valeri Ephars?" She stared into my eyes with a hefty dose of wonder, so enraptured by my theatrics that she could barely stay self-aware enough to tame her expression.
"Someone like you?" She said breathily, the words slipping out between her lips before she could stop them. The light tint of red on her features exemplified just how embarrassing those words had been for her. I let out a gentle chime of laughter and began to walk along the side of the balcony again, one that we'd been allowed up to due to the clout of 'Lady Ephars'.
"And if a person like me never came? Would you simply sit in your little tower and mourn what could have been like a good princess?" The mocking words inspired a little anger from the girl, probably because she might have never been spoken to that way, but she did a good job at quelling it.
"I would have. I–" She cut herself off, almost biting her tongue. "I just don't know when." I snorted at the answer.
I made a sentence of movement, flinging myself across the balcony's side with a rush of speed, spinning in much the same way as a dancer might. I added grace and flow to the action, making it like a symphony of movement, the steps singing as I placed them. I looked briefly to the girl as she watched me move, and it was immediately obvious that she could hear them too. The sound of the movements.
"Bad answer." I said with a grin as I stopped myself, bending at my waist and righting my torso to look at her, tapping my foot impatiently. "So, you just expect me to whisk you away on an adventure, to extricate you from all your problems and give you something nice and juicy to work on?" I felt the build-up of kinetic energy slowly wear off, making my body fall backwards, unable to sustain its fight against gravity. Valeri yelped as I fell towards the street, but I quickly caught myself with another sentence that allowed me to sneak my form underneath the balcony. With a few quick movements, I flipped back onto the balcony, right-side up, and approached the girl from behind.
"But I won't give you that." The tall dark-skinned woman just about screamed in surprise, turning to face me with her hand to her chest. "You need to earn that." My face lost all humour and hers did too.
"What do I need to do?" She asked in a whisper, a feeling of deep-seated shame washing over her. I doubt she's had to ask something so subserviently before, but the fact that she's willing to do it at all just means that she'd invested.
"Easy," I laughed gently as I stared at her with a beguiling smile, "you're going to have your ass handed to you on a silver platter."