Am I a Faceless now?'
He shuffled forward, each step seeming to cost him effort, and sank onto one of the few intact pews with a sigh of relief. He unwrapped the cloth bundle to reveal a small, coarse loaf of dark bread. He broke it in two, the sound shockingly loud in the silent church, and held the larger piece out to me.
"Here. Eat. The night will be long, and the cold is settling in."
I approached slowly, my movements cautious. The aroma of the bread, simple and earthy, was the most wonderful thing I had ever smelled. My stomach clenched painfully. I took the offered piece, my fingers brushing his. His skin was papery and cold.
"Thank you, Father," I said, the title feeling natural on my tongue, a fragment of this body's memory guiding me.
He waved a dismissive hand before another cough wracked his frame. When it subsided, he was paler. "Eat, boy. Don't let an old man's ailments spoil your supper."
I didn't need telling twice. I tore into the bread, the crust tough but the inside surprisingly dense and filling. As I ate, I watched him. He was sick, maybe dying. And we were here, alone, in this ruin. Guardians of a dead faith in a dead place.
While I chewed, I turned my focus inward. The Curator had said the seed of my power was within me, dormant. The Pathway of The Fool. I tried to grasp it, to feel for that swirling pool of potential I'd felt in the void.
'Show me something,' I thought, concentrating with all my might. 'Give me a vision. A prophecy. Anything.' I focused on the priest. 'Tell me his secret. Tell me why he coughs.'
Nothing.
I tried to feel for the enhanced perception, the intuition of a Seer. I tried to look at the dust motes in the air and predict their paths. I tried to listen to the priest's ragged breathing and intuit the malady causing it.
Nothing. No flash of insight. No whispered secrets from the universe. There was only the taste of bread, the ache in my knees, the cold of the pendant against my skin, and the overwhelming, mundane reality of my situation.
The power was there. I could feel it, a faint, distant hum at the very edge of my perception, like a song played in another room. But it was locked away. Inert. I didn't know how to access it. The knowledge of the potion formula was there—the main ingredient of a Potion...—but the ingredients were meaningless words without the context of this world. I couldn't even tell what Potion it was. Maybe I hadn't landed with the Seer after all?
I was just a boy. A hungry, scared boy named Adam in a broken church with a sick old man.
The grand cosmic power I had chosen felt like a cruel joke. The first challenge wasn't battling Nightmare Creatures; it was figuring out how to turn on the lights.
I finished the bread, the hollow in my stomach slightly eased, a much deeper hollow of powerlessness opening up inside me. The old priest watched me, his startlingly blue eyes—a mirror of my own—full of a pity that I knew wasn't just for my hunger.
"Rest now, Adam," he said softly, his voice a dry rustle. "Today's work is done, and we will move on after just a few more. Perhaps we can finally move closer inwards, towards the better ends of the NQSC."
His voice, despite being a stranger to me not even five minutes ago, does wonders on combating my rising panic attack. Yes, I needed to get myself together. I was in the Human Realm, in the NQSC...though that took up an entire continent, so who knows where that places me. Hopefully near some of the main cast. While I didn't have any particular desire to follow them along like a stalker, I needed to keep track of how far along things were progressing. And...alright, maybe I just wanted to see them. The characters. In the flesh, not just text on a screen or a badly renditioned piece of art from Webnovel. Maybe kick Cassie in the shins a few times while I'm at it too.
The old priest watched me finish the bread, his own half-eaten portion forgotten in his lap. The brief respite from his cough seemed to have opened a floodgate of melancholy thoughts.
"Look at this place," he muttered, not to me, but to the peeling saints on the walls. "A house of God, left to rot. It tells you everything, doesn't it, boy? Everything you need to know about the state of things."
He shook his head, a slow, weary motion. "In my day... ah, but you don't want to hear an old man ramble." He coughed again, a wet, rattling sound that echoed in the hollow nave. When he stopped, he stared dazedly for a second before resuming. "In my day, there was a... a structure. A morality. You worked hard, you went to mass, you respected your elders. You didn't... you didn't claw at your neighbor's throat for a crust of bread."
He fell silent for a moment, his eyes distant. "Father Malachi of then would have wept to see it. A good man. A strong man. He built this parish from the ground up, you know. Gave people hope. Gave them something to believe in beyond their own misery."
Father Malachi. So that was his name. I filed it away, a single, solid fact in the shifting uncertainty of my new existence.