I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1465: The Blessing of the Eyes

The marble steps of the Luminance Spire were worn smooth in the center, hollowed out by three hundred years of pilgrims’ boots.

Rian walked up the wide stairs slowly, his hands in his uniform pockets, keeping his pace matched to the old street priest three steps ahead. The air near the top smelled of ozone, burnt lard, and the heavy sweetness of crushed white lilies.

Below them, the slate roofs of Reimhold stretched out toward the Crimson Tide like a carpet of dark scales, but up here, the wind was clean and cold enough to burn the back of the throat.

The street priest was an old man in ragged white linen, gesturing wildly at the sky with a wooden censer that threw no smoke.

"Look to the Spire!" the old man shouted to the carters and servants struggling up the steps beside them. "Look to the star that never sets! For when the Great Dimming fell upon the world, when the Worthy poured their light into the soil to buy our freedom, it was the Royal Blood that stayed nearest the source! The Blood of Flame! Closer to the Luminance Star than any common earth!"

Rian listened as he climbed.

’Closer to the star. Right.’

’A white-haired man sits on an iron chair in the middle of the river, and everyone pretends he’s made of sunlight.’

At the high bronze doors of the Spire’s inner sanctuary, two temple guards in silver plate stepped aside without a word. They did not look at Rian’s face. They looked at his black uniform, at the frayed cuffs, and at the seal of El Fach stamped onto the envelope in his right hand.

The inner hall was blindingly white.

Plates of polished gypsum lined the walls, angled so that the thin morning light from the high, narrow slits above bounced from plate to plate a dozen times, filling the vaulted space with a glare that left no shadow anywhere. In the center of the hall stood a circular altar of solid granite.

A priest stood behind the altar. He wore robes of unbleached silk, so heavy they did not rustle when he moved, and his pale hair was shaved close to the scalp. At his left hand, an instrument of tarnished brass stood on a hinged tripod, a thick tube carrying three layered lenses of ground sea-glass.

"Step forward, Mercenary," High Priest Corvus said. His voice was smooth, with none of the street preacher’s theatrical rasp. "Remove your cap."

Rian took off his cap and stepped up to the altar.

"Hold still," Corvus said.

The priest swung the instrument forward on its hinge until the front lens hovered exactly four inches from Rian’s right eye.

Rian did not flinch. He did not blink. Deep within his soul core, locked behind three layers of compressed essence, Shingan surged against its restraints. The Third Eye wanted to open. It wanted to read the stress fractures in the priest’s lenses, the faint pulse of essence in the man’s throat, and the hidden mechanisms set into the granite floor.

Rian forced it down. He slammed the internal gates shut, burying every trace of Demon Eye perception beneath a thick layer of ordinary human vitality. He let his dark irises sit open and empty, reflecting nothing but the glare off the gypsum walls.

Corvus leaned close and peered through the rear eyepiece.

For five long seconds, the only sound in the vast hall was the slow tick of a water-clock against the far wall.

The priest turned a small thumb-screw on the side of the tube. Glass clicked as the second lens shifted into alignment. Corvus studied the dark ring of Rian’s iris, searching every speck of pigment for the faint radial threads of silver that marked Asgardian blood and the forbidden eye-magic of the old northern lines.

Rian kept his breathing slow and even, in and out through his nose.

’Keep looking. It’s just ordinary blue paint in there today, old man.’

Corvus let out a short breath and swung the instrument away.

"Dark blue," Corvus noted, turning to a small writing desk beside the altar, where a ledger bound in cracked black leather lay open. "No silver striation. No secondary pupil contraction. Standard southern stock."

He picked up a reed pen, dipped it in dark red ink, and drew a single line across the page.

"You pass the inspection of the Spire, Rian the Mercenary," Corvus said, not looking up from his writing. "The Order maintains this ledger by decree of the Starward Court. Three hundred years of eyes, recorded from every province, every garrison, and every border post. We ensure that no corrupted lines, no false eye traits from the northern wastes, find shelter within the Crown City."

"A long ledger," Rian said, keeping his voice perfectly neutral.

"Three hundred years of vigilance," Corvus replied, closing the book with a soft thud that lifted a breath of dust from its pages. "You may go. The blessing of El Fach rests upon those who walk in the light."

Rian put his cap back on, turned, and walked down the long white nave toward the exit archway. His boots clicked against the smooth stone.

’Three hundred years of tracking my mother’s family. They didn’t just conquer the north. They cataloged the survivors like cattle.’

He turned down the vaulted corridor that led toward the outer courtyard, stepping out of the glare and into the cool, damp shadows of the lower galleries.

The corridor was quiet. A few shrine-servants swept the floor with long birch brooms, the hems of their grey robes brushing the flagstones.

As Rian passed a narrow alcove that housed a statue of a weeping saint, an old woman stepped out from behind its pillar.

She wore no white silk or polished brass. She wore the faded grey wool of a scullery servant, with her sleeves turned up over forearms covered in old chemical burns and salt-scars. Her face was lined like dry leather, and her white hair was tied back in a messy knot with a strip of frayed twine.

She moved fast. Faster than any old servant had a right to.

Before Rian could shift his weight, her bony hand shot out and clamped onto his right wrist. Her grip was cold and dry, and iron-hard.

Rian stopped at once. His left hand hovered an inch above his side-blade, and his eyes cut down to her face.

The old woman did not look at his weapon. She leaned in close, her breath smelling faintly of dried mint and old parchment, and looked straight into his irises from six inches away.

Her milky eyes widened.

"The lens sees what it is taught to see, boy," she whispered, so low that her voice barely carried past his shoulder. "But stone remembers what the fire left behind."

She squeezed his wrist once, hard enough to bruise, then let go.

"The Eyes have returned," she breathed into his ear.

She turned on her heel and slipped back into the shadow of the alcove before the temple guards at the end of the corridor had even turned their heads.

Rian stood in the dim corridor for a second, rubbing the red mark on his wrist. The corner of his mouth twitched.

’Well. So much for the church’s three-hundred-year record.’