The city’s holy temple entrance was adorned with various figures and artifacts drawn from the scriptures, aides of the gods rendered in stone and set into every surface with deliberate reverence. Ren squinted to get a better look at a statue positioned high on the temple’s spire. Just below it was a humanoid figure dressed in robes of the same style he had been seeing on the streets since arriving, but it was the one above that held his attention.

It looks familiar. He stood there for a stretch, maybe eighty seconds, turning the image over in his memory, and then it came to him and he began snapping his fingers.

The angels. It had taken him longer than it should have because the sculptor had rendered the hair as something closer to a robe, and at the very top of the spire the figure had been made enormous, with a scale and bearing that leaned toward the terrifying rather than the comforting.

I wonder if this is artistic interpretation, or if they genuinely believe the angels are that large.

There were other statues scattered about, some tucked between pillars and some standing freely on the ground as though frozen mid-step. All of them were carved from white alabaster, capturing the poetic descriptions of these figures as the scriptures recorded them. The gods were a different matter entirely. They could not be grouped alongside the others. A temple dedicated to a single god might erect one statue of that god, but Marina’s city temple worshipped all of them, and placing statues of gods beside one another was considered an act of irreverence too serious to commit.

Ren took a breath and walked forward. Two young men stood at the ornate door in white robes embroidered with gold, with tall ceremonial hats on their heads. They looked adolescent, and yet something about how they held themselves made them seem more imposing than their age suggested.

"May the gods be with you," they said together, and opened the door.

Where the outside had seemed like something conjured from a sculptor’s dream, the inside had been built from an engineer’s. Massive golden gears turned continuously along the walls and across the ceiling, filling the space with a deep and constant sound. The interior was otherwise spare, decorated only by a painting spread across the roof high above. People knelt throughout the hall in prayer, some of them weeping openly, some crying out their supplications with the full force of their lungs, others with their heads bowed and their lips barely moving. The hall was so vast and so tall that Ren stood for a moment wondering whether it had been built for ordinary people at all. It had seemed large from outside, but inside it felt designed to hold an entire city. The scale of it produced something in the chest, a kind of involuntary smallness. The gears turned and turned, and the ceiling stretched away above, and a person standing in it could not help but feel that the architecture itself was making an argument about their place in things.

Where are the workers? Ren looked around. There had to be priests or shamans, more of those figures he had seen at the door.

As if in answer, he spotted one moving across the hall at a distance. White-robed, headed in his direction. Ren activated his Mana Sense and Mana Perception out of habit, and what he found was not what he had expected. Most of these priests carried mana reserves that exceeded a knight’s, some of them approaching Tuarine’s level, enough that they sat on the edge of what cultivation would look like if they chose to go that direction. They did not appear to be cultivators, but the talent was plainly there. There seemed to be a prerequisite at work, a set of conditions that had to be met before a person could serve here, and mana aptitude was evidently among them.

"Greetings! Daydawn!" A tall priest broke from the group and addressed the hall with easy authority. He was blonde and pale and handsome in the clean, effortless way of someone who had never gone without much, the kind of face that suggested a wealthy father and a childhood without difficulty. His accent and the way he carried himself confirmed the impression.

"The Chronicles of Avaryard, part three, Chapter four, line thirteen." His voice was a rich baritone that rolled through the space without effort. "’The devout will be only the ones upon whom the lords above choose to gaze. Praise the lords, and worship them, for only they can truly set you free.’" Several of the worshippers broke into quiet sobs at the words.

Ren’s expression must have said something he did not intend, because the priest’s gaze moved across the hall and found him.

Of all the— Ren looked away. As he did, he caught sight of the people around him, their grey robes, their bowed heads, and he understood with fresh clarity just how thoroughly he did not belong here. He was dressed like someone who had traveled three days on a luggage cart, because he had.

"You there. What do you seek?"

Every head in the vicinity turned. Ren almost looked behind himself to check.

He walked forward and answered the priest’s question with a nod. Despite everything, the temple’s effect had reached him too. It would have felt wrong to speak above a low murmur, and so he did not.

"I have come to see the Shaman."

The blonde priest looked at him directly, and the look was not casual. It held and pressed, the kind of gaze that seemed to be doing something more than simply looking. Ren felt his hands close into fists at his sides.

Can he sense my mana?

They were not cultivators. Abilities like Mana Sense and Mana Perception should have been beyond them. And yet the quality of those blue eyes, the intensity behind them, the particular hue they carried, gave Ren the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that this priest could perceive things that ordinary sight did not reach.

Then again, there was a man who could mimic the abilities of a frog.* People in this world bore skills. It was not impossible.

"Come with me," the priest said, cutting through Ren’s chain of thought, and turned and walked deeper into the hall.

Ren followed.

He watched ahead for doors as they walked, and saw none. Even the entrance he had come through had vanished behind him, the wall sealed as though it had never opened. Then the priest turned sharply toward a section of wall that split open without ceremony and closed again the moment Ren stepped through after him.

The room beyond was dark. Small specks of golden light drifted through it, flickering and moving like a slow swarm of insects, illuminating brief patches as they passed, enough to reveal inscriptions carved into the walls and paintings that stretched across them. Ren tracked the priest by his mana signature in the darkness ahead.

This is not wise. An ambush here would be simple. The environment offered him very little.

The drifting specks of light made the narrow passage strangely calm to move through, almost pleasant, until they scattered all at once as though something had disturbed them, breaking apart in every direction. Ren’s attention pulled forward immediately.

Ahead in the darkness, a large source of light was rising, the kind that did not shine so much as drape, falling softly outward from its source like cloth.

"The Shaman," the blonde priest said.