Tim's POV
The light sat in my palm for three seconds before I let it fade.
Clean, steady, exactly the pale white that the priest had described in his preliminary instruction. No flicker, no instability, no gradual build from nothing. It had arrived fully formed on the first attempt, as if the spell had simply been waiting for me to ask for it.
The room was very quiet.
I looked up at the priest. He was staring at my hand with the expression of a man whose carefully organised understanding of how things worked had just been handed a piece of information it couldn't file anywhere sensible. Beside him, one of the nuns had gone completely still, her cloth forgotten in her hands, watching.
I let the light go and waited.
The priest recovered first. the professional composure of someone trained to handle unexpected events without causing a scene. He folded his hands, arranged his face into its default expression of gentle authority, and asked me, in a measured and kindly voice, whether I had perhaps learned this spell somewhere before. Another church, perhaps. A travelling priest. A family member with holy training.
"This was my first time," I said.
The smile he gave me was warm and completely unconvincing. It was the smile of a man deciding that a child had misremembered, or was exaggerating, or simply didn't understand what first time meant in this context.
"Of course," he said pleasantly. "Well, you have a natural inclination, clearly. Let me just..."
He was already reaching for his spell, the familiar preparation of the danger level scan. I watched him cast it, cleaner than Lype's version, the paper forming with more precision, the product of more years with the same tool. He took it from the air with practiced ease and looked at it.
The silence this time was different in quality from the one after the light. That silence had been surprise. This one was something more fundamental, the silence of a mind encountering something it actively needed time to process.
The paper fell.
Not dropped with drama, he simply released from fingers that had forgotten to hold it, drifting the short distance to the stone floor while the priest stared at the space it had occupied. Then his eyes moved to me, and for just a moment, unguarded, there was something very raw in them. Something I recognised from my previous life's long experience reading people in meetings and negotiations and difficult conversations.
Calculation.
Not greed exactly or not only greed. The calculation of a man who had just discovered something unexpectedly valuable and was processing, very rapidly, what that meant and what he should do about it.
It lasted perhaps two seconds.
Then his hands came down onto my shoulders, both of them, gripping with a firmness that was not quite what you'd call gentle, and his face reorganised itself into an expression of warm concern.
"Child," he said, "where are your parents? I would very much like to speak with them."
"I don't have parents," I said. "I live at St. Linel's orphanage."
The calculation flickered behind his eyes again, faster this time, running through implications. Then the polite smile returned, fuller now, with a quality that reminded me of a door swinging open.
He reached down and took my hand.
"Come with me," he said. "I think we should talk to the people who look after you."
I let him lead me.
This was a deliberate choice, made in the thirty seconds of walking between forming the intention and acting on it. I could have resisted, but a five year old being led by an adult was not a situation where physical resistance was a meaningful option, but I could have created friction. Expressed reluctance.
Asked pointed questions designed to make him uncomfortable.
I chose not to.
Because I had already run the calculation myself, faster than he had, and I had arrived somewhere he hadn't expected me to be.
The church wanted me. That was now obvious. A five year old with a danger level of fifteen and an apparent natural affinity for holy magic was, by this world's standards, a prodigy of the first order, the kind of talent that institutions competed for, invested in, and leveraged. The priest's momentary eye-gleam had been institutional greed rather than personal, I thought. Not malicious. Just the reflexive response of an organisation man who had found something his organisation would very much want.
The question was whether that was bad for me.
I thought about it honestly as we walked through the winter streets, my hand in his, playing the part of the slightly overwhelmed orphan child, which required very little performance.
The church offered things I needed. Structure, access, training, legitimacy. A child who lived in a church institution had a reason to learn magic, had access to texts and instruction and the gradual accumulation of clerical knowledge that I couldn't easily access from an orphanage. It also offered protection, the Water God's church was one of six major religious institutions in this part of the world, with political weight and social capital that a street child simply didn't have.
The risks were real too. Institutions wanted things from the people they invested in. The church would expect compliance, faith, the gradual subordination of individual will to organisational priorities. And I had my own priorities that were not negotiable.
But I had thirty years, approximately. And thirty years spent entirely outside of institutional frameworks, accumulating power in alleys with a nail-studded plank, was a slower path than one that combined that work with the resources an institution could provide.
I could navigate a church. I had navigated offices and corporations in my previous life. This was the same thing in robes...right?
The risk, I decided, was acceptable. The opportunity was real.
I would go. And I would be careful.
Sister Edna received us in her small office with the expression she reserved for unexpected official visits, carefully neutral, slightly braced. The priest introduced himself as Father Renald of the Church of the Water God, and she poured tea with the automatic hospitality of institutional habit.
He was good at this part. He explained that each year, the four elemental churches, Water, Rock, Fire, and Wind, identified children of particular promise and offered them a place within the clerical structure. Not servitude, he was careful to emphasise. Education, stability, a future, a vocation. The church invested in these children and the children, in turn, became part of the church's community.
He did not mention the danger level reading. nor did he mention the holy spell. He presented it as routine charitable outreach, the church fulfilling its social role, which was technically true in the way that technically true.
Sister Edna listened with the careful attention. She asked several practical questions, about conditions, about contact with the orphanage, about what happened if the arrangement didn't suit. Father Renald answered each one smoothly, with the reassurance of someone who had done this before.
Then she looked at me.
I met her eyes and said nothing. She had known me for five years. She had watched me and she knew that I was not an ordinary child.
"He should pack his things," she said.
I had few possessions and had always kept them organised for exactly this kind of contingency, which I recognised was mildly alarming as a personality trait but was also practical. The clothes I wore, the chalk and stones I'd used for writing practice, the small collected tools of my daily routines.
The hidden cache required more care.
The rat hole behind my sleeping mat had to be accessed while the dormitory was empty, the other children were in the common room, drawn by the novelty of a priest's visit and Sister Edna's slightly elevated tension. I had perhaps four minutes.
I extracted the wrapped bundle and redistributed its contents systematically. The remaining gold coins went into the lining of my coat, sewn in during quiet evenings weeks ago against exactly this kind of need, I had known, in a general sense, that my situation was likely to change, and change often meant moving. The daggers were the problem.
They were well-made, clearly not items a child should possess, and far too valuable to abandon. I had wrapped them separately in cloth stripped from an old shirt, creating a bundle that looked, with some generosity of interpretation, like a collection of tools or eating implements. I packed them at the bottom of the small bag that held my few legitimate belongings and arranged the clothes on top with deliberate casualness.
I stood, smoothed my coat, and took a last look at the dormitory.
Mara's sleeping mat was next to mine. She'd been practicing her letters on a piece of cloth that was still spread on her mat, her writing careful and improving.
I hoped she kept washing her hands.
I picked up my bag and went back to the common room, where Father Renald was finishing his tea and Sister Edna was signing a piece of official church paperwork with the pen she kept for documents that mattered.
Mara was standing near the doorway. When I came in, she looked at me with an expression I recognised as the aftermath of recent crying, carefully composed back into steadiness.
"You're a big boy now." she said.
"that i am," I said.
She nodded once, with a dignity that was quietly remarkable for a seven year old. "i wish you the best of luck."
"i am going to bury this place with gold later, don't worry about it". i said.
She seemed to find this sufficient. She nodded again and stepped back to let me pass.
Father Renald collected me with the satisfied air of a man who had completed a task he'd expected to be harder. He placed a hand briefly on Sister Edna's shoulder in clerical blessing as we left, and she received it with the expression of someone who had just sold something she wasn't entirely sure she'd wanted to sell.
The winter air hit us at the door, cold and clear.
I adjusted the bag on my shoulder, feeling the careful weight of hidden coins and hidden blades, and walked beside the priest through the streets of E-Rantel toward the Water God's church.
I was already thinking about what came next.
Tim's stats ( he can't see his true stats)
level: [5]
Vermin killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]