Keenan followed the young man through the woods, watching for the remainder of the day how he appeared to repeat this same procedure time and time again. Never discouraged by his failure to receive a response, the man eventually made a camp for himself within the forest. He arranged a circle of stones around the cap, seemingly imbued with a power to ward away monsters.
Once his circle was completed, he laid down within its center, head facing up while his eyes remained forever closed. Keenan watched, quietly approaching and studying the man. As the circle was only meant to ward against monsters, it had no effect against him personally. Instead, he simply stepped over the barrier of stone and continued to head inwards. There was so much that he didn’t understand.
In the next moment, he realized that the teenager had turned to face him. Although his eyes remained closed, it was clear that he had moved. A smile played at his lips, and he slowly started to sit up. “I was wondering if you were going to show up.” He said as he grabbed his staff, laying it across his lap.
Keenan jumped back in alarm, his body tensing. He was used to stalking powerful beasts, and had learned numerous methods to conceal his presence. To find that even a blind man had noticed his approach was… unsettling to say the least.
“You don’t have to worry.” The teenager said, shaking his head. “I don’t want to hurt you. Better yet, I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t even if I wanted to. You’re quite higher level than I am.”
“How know…” The boy asked in a broken voice, having not spoken aloud for years. His grasp of language was one of the first skills that he had forgotten as he lived in the wild, determined to never return to civilization.
“Call it instinct. Call it luck. Call it divine providence if you really want.” The robed teen answered cryptically. “You’ve been watching me for a while, haven’t you?”
“Your actions… make no sense.” Keenan responded, doing his best to structure his thoughts properly. “So far… home. Why?”
The felyn tilted his head slightly, piecing together what Keenan wanted to say. “You want to know why I’m out here, looking for an impossible existence within a merciless forest. Actually, it’s a bit of a story. And I do love telling stories.” He grinned slightly, causing the hairs on Keenan’s neck to rise.
“From the sounds of your voice, you seem quite young. I wasn’t expecting that.” Shaking his head, the man crossed his arms over the staff in his lap. “My name is Jace Laran. I’m a priest of Terra, the Goddess of Stories, Inspiration, and Fate.”
“When I joined the church, the voice of Terra spoke to me, offering me a deal. She would offer me a trial. If I passed her trial, she would offer me a blessing, a reward to commend my faith. Her trial was for me to live without my sight. I was forbidden from opening my eyes, or using any magical means of substituting my sight.”
“Why?” Keenan asked, furrowing his brow. Having lived away from civilization for so long, he barely even remembered the gods, let alone any sort of devotion for them. All he knew was the hatred he had for his father, should he ever learn of the man’s identity.
“Because that was her will.” Jace answered simply with a shake of his head. “Maybe she saw something in me that I didn’t. Maybe she thought it would be amusing. Either way, I accepted her test. I spoke with the bishop about what I had heard, and he seemed surprised. It was rare for the Goddess to issue such trials, but not entirely unheard of.”
“For two years, from the ages of twelve to fourteen, I kept my eyes closed. I even wrapped a cloth around my head when I slept to make sure that I did not open them by accident when I awoke. After two years of this, I heard her voice again, congratulating me for my perseverance.”
“I did not question her about the reward that was promised, as I knew it was not my place to do so. Instead, she whispered to me, telling me how she had used her power to write a special fate for me. So long as I keep my eyes closed, I can choose any one of my stats. Until my eyes open again, this stat will continue to increase at a rate of one point per week. After my eyes open, the stat will be reset to normal, and I will need to choose again when I close my eyes.”
“Naturally, I was ecstatic. A single stat to increase passively, and all I had to do was keep my eyes closed, a thing I had already done for two years? At that point, the thought of opening my eyes seemed daunting, as if I wouldn’t recognize the world anymore. So, I consulted with the bishop again, telling him about the reward that Terra had given me. I needed to ask him which stat I should choose.”
“Thankfully, I did, as I was initially planning to choose either Strength or Dexterity. He quickly dissuaded me from this path, warning me of the dangers of having a physical stat rise too high above the others. At the same time, it was decided that I shouldn’t choose Intelligence or Wisdom either. If I adjusted to a heightened state of mind, only to have it crash down one day when my eyes are opened, I would be debilitated.”
“This left me with either Charm or Luck. Neither of these would lead to any adverse effects if they rose too high, aside from perhaps making a few too many ‘close friends’ with a high enough Charm. Given this consideration, I chose Luck. If my Luck is high enough, then it would be just as good as having other high statistics.”
Keenan’s stomach sank when he heard that, realizing that the boy was like him, someone with an extremely high luck score. “How long…?”
“How long have I kept my eyes closed after that?” Jace smiled. “That was five years ago. Combined with my normal levels, my Luck recently rose above three hundred and fifty. After it hit that point, I suddenly had a strange idea… I felt like I needed to leave, to walk around and experience the world.”
“Things like this typically happen when your luck is high enough. Some deep part of you realizes something that your conscious mind doesn’t know, and tries to guide you. You want to turn left at an intersection when you have no idea what lies in either direction. It’s just a gut instinct, a voice saying ‘why not?’, and you find yourself doing it.”
“After telling the bishop, I packed what I felt I needed, and immediately left. As I had completed my apprenticeship, and was now a fully fledged priest, I was free to come and go as I wished. Of course, the bishop did find it worrying that I chose to suddenly leave. Such a thing could indicate that I was either seeking out some new opportunity, or avoiding a catastrophe about to befall the church.”
After saying that, Jace held up his staff, allowing Keenan to see that there were rows of carvings along it. However, these carvings were not arcane sigils, but rather numbers and words. ‘Left’, ‘Right’, ‘Straight’, ‘Turn around’, and other inscriptions like that. “I tried to keep my journey as random as possible, tossing my staff into the air and catching it. I had decided that whatever word my index finger landed on would dictate my path. Whenever I had to choose between multiple options, such as taking a portal somewhere, I tossed the staff and consulted the first number I felt.”
“Eventually, this led me here, far away from anywhere. But I knew I needed to keep going. Yesterday, I felt like I had finally arrived. That whatever I was looking for had to be here. It would be watching me, waiting. I just had to find it, or let it find me. And here you are.”
“You… looking for me?” This was utterly incomprehensible to Keenan. Even when he ran away from his home, his own mother had never tried to find him. None of his so-called friends ever looked for him, and he did not see a single sign that he was missed. But this stranger, this man he had never heard of or had ever heard of him, dropped everything to run out into a deep forest to find him because of what? Intuition? His gut?
Was that really more important than a mother’s love for her child? What had he been through for all of those years if all it took for someone to come look for him was a passing whim? “That’s right.” Jace confirmed with a nod. “I knew that whoever or whatever I found would become a very important friend to me. There was no other reason for me to come out this far.”
Keenan shook his head quickly, his eyes watering as he turned and leapt into a nearby tree. He couldn’t deal with this right now. The emotions he had suppressed through years of surviving in the forest were raging just beneath the surface, and he felt as if he were about to burst.
After he left, Jace simply smiled, standing up and holding his staff at his side. “I guess that I should find some shelter.” He muttered, releasing his staff with a practiced flourish of his wrist that caused it to spin. When he grabbed the staff, his index finger rubbed lightly against it, before he nodded. Without a word, he turned around and began walking into the forest once more.
“Well… that’s interesting.” I muttered, watching the meeting of the two. “Why would she give a blessing like that, though?”
“Hmm?” Aurivy glanced over at me, seeming like she was slightly distracted. “Oh, that? I don’t know specifically, but maybe she was testing something out? Back in the day, when we had you run around for blessings, we were still fairly new to it. We could just offer a flat stat increase based on our domains.”
“We’ve had a lot of time to practice since then, and learned different types of blessings that we can give people. It sounds like she gave a type of Trial Blessing. It’s one of the blessing types we discovered a few hundred years ago.” Aurivy grinned, slowly leaning back and stretching.
“See, if we give someone a trial in our official capacity as a divine being, the act of undertaking that trial causes their faith to build up within their body. The longer a trial lasts, or the more difficult it is, the more this faith builds. We never really noticed it back then with you, because we were still too new, and the trials we gave you were neither lengthy nor particularly difficult.”
“Anyways, once the trial is done, we can use that divine energy that’s built up in them as the foundation for the blessing. This gives us more room to customize it. For instance, I could give someone a blessing that they would never get lost, or that they could make friends with anyone they meet if I gave them a sufficient trial. I tried that last one once, and it almost led to a total dictatorship before Terra helped me arrange for a good old fashioned smiting.” She smirked playfully as she said that.
“If you can do this for people… why haven’t I heard about it before now?” I blinked in confusion, glancing at Aurivy, and then the others in the room. Accalia, however, simply shrugged.
“Like she said, Dale, the trial is dependent on the person. What’s difficult for someone might not be for others. When we want to issue a trial, we have to tailor it to the individual. In this case, the condition of ‘never opening your eyes’ is pretty strict. For a preteen boy, this is a very difficult challenge. Terra might have been pushing the limits of how much energy she could use for a blessing. After all, she only ended the trial after he was so used to it that he found it more challenging to open his eyes than to keep them closed.”
“At that point, the blessing could no longer get any stronger with that trial, so she probably decided to cancel it there. Either way, the fact that we have to tailor a trial for every person that we want to give that type of blessing severely limits how many people get it. I typically issue ten trials every year to people that I find to be the most fitting of my new worshippers.”
Aurivy let out a low whistle at that. “I only do three a year. Though, most of my trials fall into one of three categories. One, they try to circumnavigate the world under their own power, without seeking aid or accepting assistance. Two, they enter a specially prepared dungeon that I make for them. Or three, they help a total stranger of my choosing to find true love. Usually, I give one of each trial every year. Speaking of… it’s about time for the love trial.” Aurivy grinned playfully as she thought about that, clearly planning to pick someone at random.
