The Primeval Era-Chapter 144: The Covenant! II

Across the grand halls filled with this quiet chaos, through doorways marked with symbols allowing only the most trusted to pass, there was one particular room where very few were permitted to approach. Guards stood outside its entrance with expressions suggesting they would die before allowing unauthorized entry. The door itself was plain white stone, unremarkable save for the intensity of the Mana it radiated.

Inside this room, everything was minimal and pure.

White walls surrounded a space containing almost nothing. White light emanated from sources that had no visible origin. The air itself seemed purified beyond ordinary atmosphere, carrying scents of sacred herbs and blessed waters. At the center of this minimal space stood an elevated marble platform, its surface carved with healing inscriptions that pulsed with gentle radiance.

Upon that platform lay the body of the Saint of Stone.

She was unconscious, her features peaceful despite whatever violence had brought her to this state. Her breathing was shallow but steady, life persisting within a form that had endured assault designed to end it. Sacred cloths covered her modesty, white fabric that seemed to glow with the same purity as everything else in this room.

An old man with white hair sat beside her on a simple stool.

His robes were plain compared to what his station could have demanded, simple white fabric without elaborate decoration or obvious markers of authority. His face was lined with the passage of countless years, wrinkles mapping a life spent in service to others. His eyes were kind when they rested upon the unconscious woman before him, filled with concern that transcended simple duty.

He held a vibrant cloth shining with extremely pure Mana, and with this cloth, he gently wiped her brow. The motion was tender. Ritualistic. The action of someone who had performed similar services countless times before and would perform them countless times again.

"They stab you in the back and bring you to me as if I would not be able to tell."

His voice emerged soft, meant only for himself and the unhearing woman before him.

"They could have finished you and killed you completely, but they chose not to. They preserved a glimmer of your existence and brought you to me as a message."

He continued wiping her face, removing traces of whatever trauma she had endured.

"They know I am the best healer and Shaman in these Lands. They know I can tell the Mana of the fools from the Dominion of Crimson Stone on your body. They know all of this, but they purposefully brought you to me regardless because..."

His kind eyes grew cold for just a moment.

"They are making their choice and stance clear."

He set aside the cloth and looked at her with an expression mixing sorrow and something harder.

"They don’t know that as a healer, I also know how lethal someone like me can be. I have laid too low these past decades, it seems. They have grown arrogant. They think me weak."

He rose from his stool.

"It seems like the time has come to remind them why I became The Hallowed Voice."

BOOM!

The air around him shifted as power that had been suppressed for years stirred in response to his intent. The rivers of Mana flowing around the cathedral pulsed brighter. The guards outside the door felt their cultivation tremble in the presence of something waking.

"As for little Serala..."

His voice softened again as he turned toward the door.

"Don’t worry. I sense her life still burns brightly. Well, brighter than ever, actually."

He began walking, each step carrying purpose that had been absent from his demeanor for far too long.

"I need to figure out where she is, but one step at a time. One step at a time."

He moved through the doorway and into the hall beyond, and as he walked, his back seemed unfathomably broad and grand. The guards who witnessed his passage felt their breath catch. The Holy Women and High Paladins who saw him move through the cathedral stopped whatever they were doing to watch.

Under his kind and passive demeanor, something terrible was waking.

The healer who had spent decades in gentle service was remembering that he had not always been gentle.

And those who had mistaken his compassion for weakness were about to learn the difference.

---

There are those who see the old man in his white robes and think him nothing more than a healer.

They watch him tend to the sick and comfort the grieving, and they assume this gentleness is all he has ever been. They observe his patience with the frightened and his mercy toward the wicked, and they conclude that such compassion must be the product of a soul too soft for harder things.

They forget.

Or perhaps they never knew.

Sixty-three years before the present age, when the borders between the Lands of Beasts and the Lands of Humans were marked by blood rather than treaty, the Hallowed Voice did something no one else had dared attempt. He walked into territories where Primal Beasts killed trespassers without hesitation. He walked alone.

The Dominion of Crimson Stone called him mad. Even his own Covenant begged him to reconsider, to send armies or diplomats or anyone other than their most sacred leader into what seemed like certain slaughter.

He went anyway.

What occurred in the Lands of Beasts during the months that followed became legend precisely because so few witnessed it directly. The Royal Qilins, those ancient beings whose wisdom predated human civilization itself, had never permitted a human to address them as an equal. Their scales shimmered with colors that had no names in human tongues, and their horns carried power refined across eons of existence. They viewed humans as children at best and vermin at worst.

The Hallowed Voice changed their minds.

He simply spoke to them, and in his speaking, he revealed truths about the nature of coexistence that the Royal Qilins had never considered. The exact words he used remain unknown, preserved only in the memories of beings who do not share such things with lesser creatures.

But the Qilins listened.

And then they agreed.

The Noble Eoraptors were harder to convince. These swift and deadly beasts trusted nothing as corrupt as humans, their memories filled with generations of human hunters seeking their feathers and bones for trophies. Their speed made them nearly impossible to match, and their intelligence made them impossible to fool. Many had tried diplomacy with the Eoraptors before. All had failed, usually fatally.

The Hallowed Voice spent three months among them.

He ate what they ate. He slept where they slept. He learned their ways and showed them his own, demonstrating through action what words alone could never prove. When a sickness swept through their nesting grounds, he healed their young without asking anything in return. When predators threatened their territory, he stood beside them in defense.

By the time he left, the Noble Eoraptors called him brother. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

The alliance he forged that year has endured for more than six decades. Humans and Beasts may not love each other, but they no longer slaughter each other without cause.

Sacred Mountains and human settlements exist in proximity that would have been unthinkable before his journey.

But very fee knew. History has a way of redistributing glory to those who did nothing to earn it.

But the Beasts remember.

The Royal Qilins remember.

The Noble Eoraptors remember.

And when the old man in white robes finally decides to remind everyone else what he is capable of, the Lands of Stone will remember too.