A long exhale. Ryan shook his head, pushing down the tangled speculation and unease.
He skimmed the remaining books in the section. None of them contained Rosselle's "Notebooks" or anything else that might tell him more about the man's actual inner life and experiences.
Nearly two hundred years was a long time. People remembered the legend — a remarkable life, an undeniable legacy. Who he really was, what he truly thought, what he silently carried — posterity rarely found that interesting.
"Which makes me wonder why anyone would bother chasing posthumous fame."
Even if you achieved it, what survived you was your name, your deeds, some fragments, and other people's projections. What persisted in the record wasn't you. A few lines of text at most. He could respect the impulse — but understanding it was something else.
He snapped the last book shut and exhaled.
The poetry was beyond his judgment, but the inventions — every single one was plagiarized wholesale, without modification. If the man had contributed even one genuinely original thing, Ryan could have offered a little more respect.
He hoped there was no equivalent of an afterlife or a hall of heroes in this world. Because if there was, Rosselle had some serious accounting to do.
"Let's hope whoever's up there goes easy on him. Given that he was spreading their world's genius to this one — maybe they won't swing too hard."
The Rosselle Notebooks clearly had something to do with the supernatural — with this many books devoted to the man, only the biography had mentioned them in passing. The one illustration was too blurry to make out the content, only the script. He'd keep his eyes open going forward.
Having confirmed there was nothing more worth reading in that section, he turned and went to pursue his original goal: learning more about this world and its churches.
After returning A Brief History of Ruen to the shelf, Ryan had confirmed his guess. The royal family and the churches were not two sides of the same coin. The Ruen royal house — the Augustus family — had a long history predating the Iron Age. There had been real friction and conflict between them and the churches. And since Rosselle had managed to overthrow the Soren dynasty and establish a republic, political separation from the church was clearly not unique to Ruen — it was simply the approach used to bring those royal families into the fold. In return, the royals offered faith and other concessions in exchange for divine protection.
If that was the case, the gods viewed these royal houses as useful — worth cultivating, but not commanding. Which suggested that the gap between the gods and these dynasties was real but not unbridgeable. Sufficiently powerful Extraordinaries might approach the level of gods — or more precisely, the gods themselves might simply be Extraordinaries who had become powerful enough. And the reason for drawing in the royal families might partly be to keep tabs on them — to prevent new gods from emerging.
The Sequence numbers surfaced in his mind. Even sitting here with both the Night Revelations and the Book of Storms — the sacred texts of the two great churches — in hand, he found himself wondering whether the gods corresponded to Sequence 1.
He found a seat and settled in, narrowing his eyes.
If the rumors in the big idiot's fragments were accurate: the Storm Church's "Punishment Vessels" — as the church's Extraordinaries were designated — were formidable in water, making escape by sea from a Punishment Vessel extremely difficult. The Church of the Evernight Goddess's "Watchers of the Night" were strongest in the dark, which was why occult trading in their districts typically happened in the afternoon — the one time of day Watchers were most inattentive. And the Evernight Goddess's full title, as Ryan found it in the Night Revelations:
"She is the Evernight Goddess, more sublime than the starry sky, more enduring than eternity — Mistress of Night, Mother of Secrets, Empress of Doom and Fear, Lady of Sleep and Silence."
Not coincidental. The distinct characteristics of each church's potions seemed to correspond directly to aspects of their deity'sHonorific Names. The titles, as glossed in the texts, described the scope of each deity's power — for instance, the Evernight Goddess could bring misfortune or avert it, but couldn't disperse a storm at sea or strike down a heretic with lightning. The Lord of Storms was the reverse.
In other words, the gods of this world were not omnipotent.
A practical note the texts offered: a deity's full title could not be mispronounced during prayer. This was both an act of sacrilege and a potential means of attracting the attention of evil gods or unknown hidden entities — resulting in a swift and violent death.
And if each deity had a defined domain, that aligned neatly with different types of potions conferring different forms of supernatural power.
The formula seller had mentioned "pathway" only once, without elaboration, and the big idiot hadn't asked. Ryan was still using "a type of potion" as shorthand for a Sequence 9 potion and all its corresponding Sequence 8 through Sequence 1 successors.
The more he turned it over, the more convinced he became. Perhaps the deity's full title was, at its core, a summation of all the supernatural abilities granted from Sequence 9 down to Sequence 1.
Which would mean that the so-called evil gods and hidden entities in this world were, at root, Extraordinaries — strong enough, perhaps, to answer prayers the way the recognized gods could. Not necessarily evil or monstrous in nature. Simply beings that the established gods didn't want to see gain a following — so they'd been branded as dangerous, their reputations systematically blackened, their believers discouraged.
What made the recognized gods unique was this: no matter where you were, if you spoke their full title, they might answer. Though for an ordinary believer, a response might not come even once in a lifetime.
He made a note of it. Worth quietly gathering more specific information about the churches' Extraordinaries when the opportunity arose.
With that filed away, Ryan opened both sacred texts and read.
The contents were about what he expected: wall-to-wall praise for each deity, along with each church's teachings, the account of their god's deeds and domain, and the names and stories of their god's servants — generally angels or saints. Unlike the deities themselves, these servants were each assigned to a specific cathedral and jurisdiction. Praying outside that jurisdiction accomplished nothing.
"I imagine quite a few of these so-called evil gods and hidden entities are probably on about the same level as these saints and angels. The only difference is that they never found a patron — never got put on the official roster. That's rough."
Though given that the angels' and saints' titles had some resemblance to Honorific Names — just less imposing — the main reason those unaffiliated beings never made the roster was probably less about effort and more about the recognized gods not accepting Extraordinaries from other lineages.
"Even rougher."
A beat later, he realized: his own "Assassin" potion didn't appear to belong to any of the recognized church lineages. Which put him squarely in the same category — probably under some evil god or hidden entity, and without so much as a place on the roster.
"I think I might actually have it worse."
Author's Note (this chapter):Nearly two hundred years was a long time. People remembered the legend — a remarkable life, an undeniable legacy. Who he really was, what he truly thought, what he silently carried — posterity rarely found that interesting.