"'Malum is often represented by the flames of a dragon. Deceit, harm without cause, greed with no end, and all of these things fall under his domain,'" Aureum read. "I've heard some uptight little lordlings discuss whether having the nature of malice frees him from the duty of good and that there is use for it. Shallow nonsense from people who never saw a storm shatter lives. Does the plague choose who is right or evil? The plague only devours."
"Gahh ga," the baby said.
Or Gemmo, as she had taken to calling him.
He sat in between her legs as Aureum held a thick book in front of them. It was the only book Spesavia had on the subject.
Currently, they were on a page with an engraved print of a man breathing fire. This image had Malum depicted as a beautiful young man. Aureum first thought of the academic fascination for studying evil as if understanding it brought any merit, but then she changed her judgement. It might be in the right.
If evil was not alluring, who would fall for it?
"People leave offerings to try and bribe him not to turn on them. If they go to war, if the plague takes their pigs, and if one wants to be left alone. That's what everyone says.
But his altars always have offerings, and not all the bribes given to him are just for protection. It's an unspoken thing people realize as they get older. I guess you won't understand any of this, huh?"
Aureum turned the page.
"Buuuuh," the baby said.
"Buuuh, all right," Aureum said. "That's Bonum. She's represented by dragon's wings."
Aureum paused, looking at the picture. The goddess was shown with the wings of a dragon coming from her back. She wasn't in armor, but nor was she adorned for beauty. The artist had her in a comfortable dress and a severe expression on the face.
"'All the honor of mankind is shown in her. Kindness, empathy, love, and respect. But her altars are empty, and there are no festivals in her name.'" Aureum read. "'It is said those who speak to praise her with ill intentions are struck dead. It is better not to speak of her.'"
The next page was still mostly of Bonum, but there was a small paragraph that had its own heading.
"Libratum. I almost forgot about him," Aureum said. "You won't find any altars or even shrines to him. Most people think he's nonsense. There is Bonum, and there is Malum. What force could coexist between them?
He's mostly a folktale. Balance is what he represents. I remember that much... It says here he's represented by the dragon's pearl... and that his earliest recorded mentions predate the collapse of the Aeternitus empire.
Bonum and Malum predate the Aeternitus empire entirely, according to this, but their names were different."
The author of the book supposed him to be propaganda by the Sorcerer King to make sorcerers look more godly. Aureum didn't read that aloud.
She had enough bad times in her life not to curse potential gods. Stating what she thought was true was one thing, but connecting him to the Sorcerer King's crimes was another.
"And that's the basics," Aureum said, pulling the book away as the baby reached at it.
He had grown quickly. Quicker than any human. Spesavia had watched how he had gripped at things right out of the egg, and within a few weeks he was crawling around.
"He's growing up fast," Spesavia said.
This wasn't a moment of endearment but a slightly frightened statement of fact.
"So he looks like a human but definitely isn't exactly one," Spesavia had muttered. "What traits could be retained from dragons, and what are some mixture of the two? Or came from an entirely different source?"
While Aureum had taken up the majority of work taking care of the child, Spesavia had stuck around studying him. She took sketches of his teeth, which were there from the start and slightly pointed, and anything else slightly peculiar. The pile of notes the old woman took on him became thicker and thicker. Though she still continued her other studies throughout the ruins.
Aureum glanced into it once and saw measurements of growth besides dates, but she didn't spend much time studying it.
Her time was taken either bathing the baby, or cleaning soiled clothes of the baby, or feeding the baby, or rocking the baby to sleep, or being woken by the baby.
When Spesavia was studying him, it was time she could keep. Nothing the old woman did seemed particularly invasive, so Aureum let her initial concerns go unspoken.
As a woman of considerable age from older days, Spesavia was familiar with children. Despite how her choices for Gemmo's had made her appear.
Perhaps Spesavia was not the worst influence on the child.
This name, Gemmo, that was closer to a nickname, had been chosen rather lightly.
"For such a tiny thing, you sure are a lot of work," Aureum had said one day while washing him off. "You're like a little bud. Gemmo. Bud. Gemmo. Geeemmmo."
She spoke to him as he sat in the wooden bucket they used to clean him.
"Gego. Gegoo."
He didn't quite seem to get it. That was fine. Aureum continued to keep calling him it until Spesavia started doing the same. Without discussing it, it became his name.
As an egg, it was large, but once a baby came out of it, things changed. As a person, he was tiny.
Aureum hadn't spent a lot of time with babies since she grew up. In her adult life for obvious reasons, but even living with her parents, she had hardly touched them.
Her mother's side of the family was large but often didn't visit. She and Felixia were close in age. They had been small together.
So this tininess was new.
Even if it came in a gross, incomprehensible babbling package, Aureum had to admit: it was sometimes cute.
And she had no knowledge to see his quick growth as strange, except for Spesavia's reaction.
For Aureum, it was merely convenient.
And how he, as a tiny baby, didn't get his life drained out of him in this cursed place didn't even occur to her. The headband she only took off for washing had become a normal part of her life. The awkwardness of holding it near her head while she bathed was old hat by now.
Perhaps the biggest factor of all for Aureum's fondness of this "Gemmo" was his ability to distract her from everything. The labor was something to distract from the suffocating setting.
Watching him grow gave her a sense of clear progress that had been missing. Sure, she kept at her practice and her layering, which she could continue to do with the mana from the pool, but her results felt like sanding a full board to dust.
As a child, he would grow up. Spesavia's words about his quick growth reminded Aureum of that. Which meant she had to teach him. The earlier the better, especially if he was different from other children.
How to get started was the question.
Aureum didn't remember her early lessons clearly.
"Education? For now?" Spesavia replied. "Just keep talking to him and showing him things."
Spesavia waved her off.
Talking to him...? Showing him things?
What kind of things?!
They were in a dark room that originally had little of interest to anyone. Of all the things they had, nothing seemed suitable for a child to learn. There were no toys. The books weren't even things Aureum wanted to read, let alone storybooks.
Of the many unidentified tools Nothing felt safe enough to touch that wasn't a book.
I should have kept the books from the inn!
Regrets came too late. And they still would have been too much to carry.
This had been what led into Aureum reading a religion textbook to Gemmo. Out of all the esoteric texts, this one seemed the most appropriate for a young learner. Maybe.
"The story of creation, the story of creation, the story of creation..."
Aureum flicked through pages. The book started with a "short" introduction of what religion is versus spirituality, the importance of evidence before believing in miracles, and how much of Aeternitus' true religion was left after the Sorcerer King's slow destruction of their original culture.
Aureum breezed through most of this. She only stopped to read the introductions of Bonum and Malum. The hesitancy to trust myths and legends wasn't a new idea to Aureum.
Amongst the major bloodlines, it was all the rage for younger lordlings to scoff at the common folk for blindly believing half-remembered legends. Instead, the trend was to look at older religious texts and try to reach a more "perfect" understanding of the gods. At the banquets held by Lord Nix, it was the rage to reference disintegrating texts to argue minutiae.
Aureum didn't give much thought to these questions. Her father and mother kept the traditions they had been taught, and these suited her fine.
Her only questions for the lordlings of the past was what made them so confident that forces of the world could be embodied in old texts so much better? And why does a name for things really matter?
They misunderstood it? Really? Who misunderstood old myths first? The writers, the retellers, or the listener? How much does anyone understand the concepts of the world in the first place?
If she were asked now, she would have responded so.
It was a lazy way of thought in some ways.
But none of this would help a baby. Better to start with the basics.
"Ah, here it is. 'A Story of the Creation'?"
The baby gurgled as Aureum sighed. It seemed Spesavia kept this book for the novelty of heresy.
"'Although there are many modern recounts of this myth, there remains little, if any, written evidence that this story truly predates the Empire of Aeternitus. The only written document is a written record after the collapse of Aeternitus. While the narrator claims the recount is a retelling of a story passed on through generations, the naming convention matches the conventions of the Aeternitus Empire—
Alrighty, let's just skip all this."
"Burrrr, huurrrrrr," the boy said.
"Your patience does you credit, little bud," Aureum said. "Finally, this is where the story really starts—
Aureum broke off and looked up. For a change of pace, they were outside tent beside the pool. Nothing had seemingly changed.
Aureum could sense it, though.
Somebody had just used mana.
It might have been far or close by, but the flow of it always came to this chamber with the pool. It would be more odd if she didn't notice stray mana flowing by.
It felt too pure to be an animal or beast.
It didn't feel like Spesavia.
She sometimes uses it in strange ways.
The baby boy, who had been waving his arms, stilled. He looked in the same direction as Aureum.
She closed the book and stood up.
It felt like paranoia, but she found herself picking up Gemmo and slowly walking back to her tent.
The ring that could carry everything was on a piece of string she tied around her neck. Her bag was out, alongside her sleeping roll.
The boy gurgled an indescribable sound.
"Shhhhh. Shh."
Aureum sat him down. He blinked up at her as she turned away to pack things up. After she was done, she looked back at him as she picked up her spear.
His dark blue eyes blinked at her.
I look crazy. At least it's only little Gemmo watching. What would Spesavia say?
Then the tent was opened by a stranger.
Aureum froze. It was seemingly a middle-aged man. He looked neither handsome or ugly, in a completely forgetful manner. Blackish-brown hair, brown eyes, and olive skin was his coloring.
The problem was no normal man could be here. Being this quiet without mana was another trick. Or maybe Aureum's senses relied too much on her mana.
"You don't seem to be Spesavia," he said.
Aureum swallowed.
"Nooo," she said. "Do you need her? She's probably off in a corner of these ruins somewhere. You could go look?"
Aureum gripped her spear and sweated. The man noticed it without comment. His eyes looked from one corner of the tent to the other. They landed on the baby.
"Who are you?" Aureum asked. "What do you want?"
"I need to talk to Spesavia," he said, taking a step towards Gemmo.
Aureum strode past him and picked Gemmo up.
"What do you want?" Aureum said. "This is my son, Gemmo. He has nothing to do with you."
"Your son?" The man questioned.
"Yes," Aureum said, shifting the boy on her hip to hide her shaking. "His eyes take after his father."
"Gemmo is an odd name for a boy."
"What's it to you?" Aureum said, pulling herself straight.
She maybe pulled herself eye level to his shoulders. Her one hand clenched around her spear showed white knuckles.
"Nothing. Mind telling me what you're doing here?"
"Why should I?" Aureum said.
Something about this man, what he said and how he said it, made her feeling of dread solidify.
I need to get out of the tent. I need to be ready to run.
Everything she needed was on her. She strode past the man as her heart thudded against her chest. He didn't stop her but followed her.
"You must be a student of hers," he said.
"You... must be an acquaintance of hers," Aureum replied.
She stopped herself from saying ascended sorcerer.
"I'm what she might have once called a colleague," he said.
He confirmed the obvious.
Aureum didn't know where to go. Her eyes kept looking at the entrance.
Nothing more than a stone doorway fading into black. Any door that might have once hung from it was long gone.
He, the stranger who still had not named himself, took a few quick steps to stand next to Aureum, quite suddenly. Aureum backed away. The man put a hand on her shoulder as Gemmo hissed at him.
Aureum looked down at the baby in surprise.
He hasn't made that noise before.
"MORS!" a familiar voice called.
Then Spesavia, glowing with the light from her necklace, stepped into view.