Published at 1st of December 2023 10:41 am

Chapter 70 Foundations

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The first several months Todd spent with Priest Verdenin was a dull and lonely time that made him miss the brothers he’d spent the last couple of years fighting beside. There was nothing wrong with the man that Todd could put his finger on precisely, but his presence and the way that his superior did things chafed at him.

It wasn’t even the imperious way he used to treat Todd because he no longer seemed to value ordering him around to do menial things. Instead, the priest practically lived in his own world. He was constantly designing strange new plumbing fixtures or deciding what parable would be the most uplifting in the south-facing stained glass windows. If Todd hadn’t known better, he would have been certain that Brother Verdenin had died and been replaced by someone else during their trips into the depths of Fallravea.

From the riverboat trip to Blackwater to the way he organized things once he’d arrived, he had Todd perpetually on edge. When he started unilaterally razing buildings for the site of Siddrim’s future temple without so much as discussing it with the head of the city guard or the mayor of the burgeoning town, he’d thought there would be a riot. Instead, people just accepted it, which struck Todd as odd.

He’d known that Brother Faerbar and his fellow templars had put the fear in this town, but he hadn’t expected it to last for months in their absence. Todd and a few of his fellows could hardly be expected to stand against dozens or hundreds of angry men, but they never materialized.

Instead, Priest Verdenin began to hire the excess riffraff as laborers to clear the area and install new brick streets to replace the crude rotted boards that were the current standard throughout the town. Todd wanted no part of that, of course, though he did take two trips up the canal in the following weeks to escort the one-armed priest while they looked at likely sandstone quarries near the banks of the waterway.

It was a tense time for Todd, as he was made the leader of the small band of warriors assigned to protect the priest and his artisans. Every night he went to bed in his armor, fearing there’d be an ambush from the dark, and every morning he woke up unharmed. It was a mystery, but one he eventually chalked up to his childhood fear of the monsters that called the Red Hills home.

According to other members of the church that he’d spoken with, the stones of Siddrim’s temples were usually brought down from the mountains to the north, where there was a quarry with marble of the purest white. For the structure they were going to start building soon, though, the priest had received special dispensation to use sunrise colored sandstone found in the area.

“Don’t you see, it’s not just about cost, but the beauty!” the priest said, setting several of the rock samples they’d retrieved on the way back to the city. “The only way we'll ever inspire those ne’er-do-wells is to give them a taste of Siddrim’s grace they can’t help but look at every day!”

While Todd did have to admit that the shades of orange, pink, and red sandstone that the priest had chosen did look lovely together, and that they might create a very sunrise-like effect, he still harbored private reservations that he didn’t know how to express. The importance wasn’t just the color white, after all; it was the purity of the stone that came from such a high and distant field. It was the opposite of the red hills.

If you’d told him that the red color of the stone came from centuries of goblins murdering anyone that happened through there, Todd would have believed it. Centuries of mindless slaughter were pretty much the opposite of purity as far as he was concerned, but the only time Todd brought it up, the priest had laughed at him. “There’s one crucial fact your theory forgets, young man. Goblin blood is green. If it was really tainted by the cycle of death you describe, then the stones we’ve spent the last week looking at would be olive, emerald, and forest, not orange, salmon, and coral.”

Chagrined, Todd hadn’t brought it up again, but the point festered. Eventually, he started to think he was going crazy. After all - they’d been out in the red hills for more than a week all together but they hadn’t suffered a single goblin attack. That seemed very unlikely to him. The Gift was still attacked almost every month, and the few villages left in the region also reported occasional attacks, but the small group of humans traveling alone in the wilderness had received almost no attention at all. It was almost as if the goblins had been ordered to leave their group alone, but that was impossible, wasn’t it?

While the first stones were being cut to lay the foundations, Todd spent those weeks consecrating and reconsecrating the ground upon which the temple would rest. Each time he finished, he felt his god’s peace, but each morning he felt as if it had somehow faded a bit overnight. And the faint light he saw no longer shined as brightly as it once had. It was a conundrum, but one that he was forced, ultimately, to associate with the low quality of people that were doing the work of clearing the space and bringing in the stone.

Until the day that they held the ceremony for the laying of the cornerstone, Todd tried to stay away from his superior as much as possible, though he wouldn’t have admitted it. He cleaned Siddrim’s shrine, patrolled the back alleys looking for signs of villains, and took long rides through the countryside just to get away from the smell of the river, but the priest never seemed to care. Now that he had those artists he’d found in Fallravea, he no longer needed Todd to write his letters, which frustrated him to no end since that was the reason he’d come with the priest in the first place.

Lately, he’d been lost in the minutia of setting up a small workshop for the production of plaster casts and molds for all the ornate decorations that he’d planned. Todd would have thought that they should focus on having walls to decorate first, but the priest obviously disagreed. This was on top of the stone carvers he’d brought in from the capital to begin carving likenesses of the saints that the temple would be dedicated to.

To Todd, all of this was putting the cart before the horse, but in the end, it wasn’t his problem. His duty was to keep Brother Verdenin safe and to keep his eyes open for any hints that the evil inside the man might be growing. The priest was in no danger as long as he kept spending such vast sums of money to build his vision, though. Todd was sure of that. The residents of Blackwater were wealthier than they’d ever been, thanks to the church’s spending. At this point, perhaps a third of the growing town was connected to the project in one way or another.

Todd never really appreciated that until he saw all of them at once, gathered on the prepared ground in front of the cornerstone where the priest gave his invocation for the dedication. There were hundreds of people in attendance, and though many of them were dull-eyed laborers that were obviously being forced to attend as they stared at their feet, the rest of them seemed to ardently believe in Brother Verdenin’s great project. Todd found that shocking, but not as shocking as the blood he found on the cornerstone the next day.

“Brother Verdenin, you must come at once,” Todd said, waking his superior.

“Wha-what’s happened?” he asked, still drowsing in his bed when he should have already been awake.

Priests of Siddrim were required to wake with the sun, but due to Brother Verdenin’s injury and the pain and weakness it caused him, he was permitted to sleep in as necessary, which turned out to be almost every day, much to Todd’s dismay.

“Someone has desecrated the cornerstone!” Todd said breathlessly. “You must come at once!”

That at least got Brother Verdenin out of bed, and as he quickly dressed, Todd relayed to him what he’d seen. “Despite the drizzle of light rain, I’d gone to the building site to say my prayers. When I got there though, I saw the sun rose over the water. That was when I noticed the cornerstone drenched in blood. There were footprints in the wet sand too, along with an aura of evil. I fear that last night some cult conducted some dark ritual there to taint our work.”

They arrived only a few minutes later, but it had already begun to pour, and by the time they reached the stone, most of the blood he’d seen just ten minutes before had washed away.

“Are you sure that what you saw wasn’t just red stone dust?” the priest asked him skeptically. “Because after carving in the words of—”

“I know what I saw,” Todd shot back angrily, hurt that the priest would ever doubt him.

“Acolyte, I’ve been very lax with you and your assignments, but this behavior is completely unacceptable,” the priest admonished him. “Once you are dry, you are to copy the Psalms of Sorrow until you—”

“But Brother Verdenin—” Todd tried to interrupt, but he was cut off immediately.

“You will copy the Psalms of Sorrow, in seclusion, until you regret the way that you have treated a priest of your god!” he repeated himself in a way that would brook no argument before he stormed off, leaving Todd alone with no evidence but his own gut instincts that something was amiss and that somehow the priest that was admonishing him was in on it.

Todd spent the next three days in his small room copying the same few pages over and over as he tried to find some amount of regret for his actions. He couldn’t, though. In the end, the only thing he regretted was that he hadn’t thought to somehow take the evidence with him or shelter it from the elements.

Once he’d decided that collusion was the only possible way he could explain what had happened, he managed to create the mien of compliance and contrition. He felt like a fraud for lying to his superior so, but he could no longer trust the man enough to tell him the truth.

So instead of working with him, he began to spy on him. Instead of wandering around the town in search of some hidden conspiracy, he began to look for one in the construction site he’d sworn to protect. Each day he got up and helped the workmen with their tasks or simply supervised them as they brought the stones in from the barge while the walls steadily grew, and though he saw nothing untoward, he was sure that he was on the right trail because the longer he persisted in helping, the more Brother Verdenin found excuses to send him away.

“Todd, please fetch these manifests from the tax clerk’s office.”

“Todd, please ride upriver to see if my next shipment is on its way.”

Every week it was something new, and almost always toward dusk. Even on the nights Todd doubled back and observed the masons hard at work on their ever-growing project, he still couldn’t see anything obviously wrong, but his certainty only increased. Something was deeply wrong in Blackwater, and he needed to find out what, just like Brother Faerbar had tasked him.

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