The prester’s fury seemed heated enough to melt the frigid air of the grotto. Hannes swung his Fishhook staff to smash the sacred relics around the two preserved ancients. He hammered on the locked wooden chest, chipping pale gouges from the lid, denting the complicated padlock, though he did not succeed in smashing through.
The mummified corpses did not stir, but fragments of ice tinkled away like broken glass.
With a shocked cry, Javian lurched forward. “Stop!”
Hannes flashed a frenzied glance toward him. “Don’t be tricked! This can’t be real, and we dare not let anyone else see it, for the good of the church!”
But Javian grabbed his sleeve and held his arm to prevent him from swinging the preaching staff. Hannes glared at the young man in confusion. “You know the truth! You know that faithful Aidenists can’t be allowed to see this. It’s wrong—it’s blasphemy!”
“It’s the evidence of your own eyes!”
The prester said, “My faith gives me eyes.”
He pulled himself free and threw his weight against Aiden’s chair, pushing. The icy throne creaked, overbalanced, and crashed into Urec’s chair. Both frozen bodies tumbled onto the ground. Standing before the figure of Urec, who looked helpless lying there, Hannes raised his preaching staff high.
Javian sprang between him and the frozen figure. “I said stop!” His voice had changed to a growl. “I know more about faith than you ever will.”
Hannes was startled and confused by this persistent defiance, but Javian continued. “I’ve watched you and listened to you, Prester, just as I watched Sikara Fyiri. You accused each other of lying, but you were both saying the same thing.”
“I would never speak the same lies as a follower of Urec.”
Javian gave a derisive laugh. “Considering what I was taught, it’s a good thing you weren’t the only Aidenist I met. Captain Vora and the Dyscovera crew welcomed me as one of them. And Mia…” The young man shook his head. “It’s not the followers of Urec, or Aiden, who should be hated—it’s bad people like you and Fyiri, who inflame the passions of those who would otherwise live together in peace.”
“How dare you say such things?” Hannes cried. “I showed you the truth. Where would you learn that hateful nonsense?”
“In the ra’vir camp.” By now, Javian realized that what he had been taught—what had been burned into him—was all false. The Teacher had lied to him.
His comment rendered Hannes atypically speechless. Javian had held this confession back for half of his life, muzzled by his years of training and dammed up by his own fear and conviction. After keeping a secret for so long, though, the disguise had become as real as the truth, making Javian wonder which part was the lie.
He forced the words out of his mouth. “When I was a child, raiders kidnapped me from the village of Reefspur and took me to Uraba, where I was raised and trained to fight against wicked Aidenists.” It was like a memorized speech. He had heard the vitriolic words so many times as they flowed from behind the Teacher’s polished silver mask.
Javian had lived his mission without wavering. Convinced of his own righteousness, he had held to the course set for all ra’virs. He’d been warned (and often beaten to enforce the lesson) that Aidenists lied, that they were evil, that their beliefs were offensive to God…that they must all be exterminated.
After returning to Tierra, Javian established an identity in Calay, glad to have found such an easy way to get close to Captain Vora during the construction of the Dyscovera. He felt smug and strong that he had not let himself be deluded by the evidence he saw, the kind people he met, the strong families, the love, the charity, the teamwork they demonstrated. Those were things that the Teacher counted among the blessings of Urec’s followers.
Tierrans and Urabans had much in common. They were all people, with generous hearts or scheming souls. Javian saw no reason why Ondun would choose to love one race over the other just because of the symbols on their flags or which son of Ondun they revered.
Hannes looked at him with horror and revulsion, and Javian pressed his advantage. “Yes, I am a ra’vir, sent here to sabotage the voyage and make sure the Dyscovera did not reach Terravitae.”
Now, though, the idea of who and what he was nauseated him. But in front of this obsessive prester, and in the presence of the final truth of Aiden and Urec, he continued his confession. “I sabotaged the Captain’s Compass so we couldn’t find our way back home. I killed the Saedran’s pigeons, so that Tierra wouldn’t receive any more messages from us. I also listened to your words of mutiny, Prester. I watched how you spurned the aid of the mer-Saedrans, because your hatred of them was greater than your desire to find Terravitae and Holy Joron.”
“That’s a lie!” Hannes spat. But it was true, and they both knew it.
“Beyond that, you murdered as many Urabans as you could. You killed Ondun’s children and took pride in it. When Mailes told us, you did not deny it.”
“Why should I deny doing a good thing? Improving the world, by the grace of Ondun.”
“The Teacher used the same rationale.” Javian’s grip was white on the preaching staff. “Yet even though I did all those things, I was wrong. Have you ever said that, Prester Hannes? ‘I was wrong’? It wasn’t the ship that needed to be destroyed, it wasn’t the Dyscovera’s mission that needed to be stopped. It’s fanatics like you and Sikara Fyiri. You are the blight and the danger. You are the ones from whom Ondun turns His face and His light.”
Infuriated beyond reason, Hannes gripped his Fishhook staff. “You are an abomination, ra’vir! I curse you with all the power that Ondun has granted me!” The prester pointed an accusing finger and continued with increasing vitriol, hurling damnation. “I call upon Aiden to destroy you! In the name—”
Javian swung his Fishhook cudgel and struck the center of the prester’s forehead, caving in his skull and leaving a crater of bone fragments and brain. Hannes fell to the floor of the ice cave, dead before he could even finish his prayer.