After the crowd dispersed, a vast, echoing emptiness settled over the cathedral. Lucia remained frozen in his pew, his mind deeply entangled in the threads of Lansseax's lecture, unable to pull himself back to reality.
Lansseax walked briskly down the stone nave, waving a slender hand before his face with a triumphant grin. "Well? How was it? Not a bad sermon, right?"
"It was incisive," Lucia praised sincerely. Then, his brow furrowed, a shadow of profound doubt creeping across his features. "But since you finished, I've been tracing so deeper implications. And the answers... they don't sit well."
"Oh?" Lansseax's curiosity flared. She swept her white robes aside and slid into the tier next to him. "Let's hear it."
Lucia exhaled, organizing the thoughts that had tornted his gar-intuition and his demigod soul alike. "What fractures my understanding is the very concept of 'death.' The schism between the Golden Faith and our own isn't a re war of words. It is the fundantal variance between the Primal Law and the modern Elden Ring."
"When the War of the Gods concluded, Queen Marika bound the Altus Plateau to the Golden Order, and Destined Death was violently excised from the Ring. It was then that the Erdtree burial supplanted the natural grave. Except for the most heinous transgressors, the Golden People do not rot. When their bodies decay, they crawl to the catacombs, surrendering their flesh to the roots. Their souls undergo a divine baptism, washing away every mory of their existence before being spun back into the world as new life. Am I accurate, Sister?"
"Entirely," Lansseax replied, her playful deanor shifting into an intent, sober stillness.
Lucia lunged with a lethal question. "Then tell : under an Order that has banished Death, can a soul stripped of its history, its sins, and its thoughts truly be called a new life? Or is it rely a ghost wearing a new coat of flesh?"
Lansseax went silent. For a long minute, the only sound was the crackle of the altar candles. Finally, a bitter, complex smile touched her lips. "I didn't realize your thoughts had dug so deep into the marrow of this world."
"I did not weave a lie for those commoners," she said softly. "The Golden Dynasty boasts a population growth that rises by three percent every year; those newborn souls are vibrant and real. But the baptism they receive at the roots... it is not a re purging of the mind. The Erdtree dissolves their consciousness entirely, reducing their experiences into the form of pure, primordial Runes. From our perspective, the man who enters the roots truly dies. The soul that erges later is a new entity, spawned from the raw energy left in the wake of the old life's extinction. It is a valid interpretation."
"But under the Primal Order of the old world," Lucia pressed, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper, "when a creature died, it stayed dead. A human did not return from the roots as a human; a dragon was never recycled into a dragon. Birth, growth, decay, and final ash followed no manufactured cycle. It was an untad current. That is the Order we claim to serve, isn't it?"
"Yes," Lansseax whispered, a heavy sigh escaping her as she looked toward the towering floor-to-ceiling windows. The sunlight cut through the stained glass, illuminating the distant silhouettes of the citizens outside, but her mind was wandering through the dust of a thousand buried centuries.
"When I was a fledgling, I asked the High Priest the sa question. I asked how we, the immortal lords of Farum Azula, should view the epheral mortals who huddled beneath our wings. He gave the answer that the Goddess—your mother, Halaris—had given him."
Lucia's pulse quickened. "What did Mother say?"
"She said that all living things are rely wild grass upon a vast plain," Lansseax murmured, her eyes distant. "Born of the spring dew, nurtured by the sumr sun, withered by the autumn frost, and buried by the winter snow. At the source of life, there is no ledger of high or low, no crown for the noble, no chain for the common. No matter what terrors a warrior unleashed in life, death reduces them all to a handful of quiet soil. And when the spring rain falls again, the living sprout directly from the bones of the dead."
She turned her gaze back to Lucia, her expression sharpening into sothing cold and wary. "But Radagon's Fundantalism... it treats the souls of this world like stone blocks. He seeks to build a reality where cause and effect are a closed, geotric loop, constantly returning to an unchanging, stagnant perfection. It is an incredibly stable engine—it has forged the most powerful empire in history. I am a priestess, not a god; I cannot decree if their peace is a holy thing or a curse. But if the day cos where you must hold the Ring and dictate the architecture of the Law..."
She paused, the grim solemnity breaking as a sudden, mischievous glint flashed in her eyes.
"...then I'll leave that headache to you. Whatever path you carve, Little Dragon, I have a feeling you'll bring a horizon this world hasn't seen yet."
Lucia blinked, caught completely flat-footed by the sudden shift, before a helpless smile broke through his brooding. "Sister, your faith in borders on delusion."
"Watch your tongue! I didn't hand you the Empyrean mantle; the Greater Will did," Lansseax scoffed, rolling her eyes with dramatic flair. "Besides, you are the solitary bloodline of the sovereigns I revered most. The High Priest practically threatened to watch over your egg before he departed into the space-ti rifts. If I can't be arrogant about your future, what's the point of being an elder sister?"
"I suppose there isn't one..."
"Exactly," Lansseax grinned, delivering a punishing, solid slap to his shoulder chainmail that made the steel links ring. "The afternoon is wasting. Wait here while I change out of these ceremonial rags. I'm taking you into the lower city. You've been cooped up in Valeria Hall like a brooding maiden, doing nothing but train, train, train. Tsk. Utterly devoid of ambition!"
Knowing her routine by heart, Lucia didn't bother defending his work ethic. He followed her quietly toward the rectory. Experience had taught him that trying to out-argue Lansseax was a fool's errand; she was a master of shifting goalposts, and if logic failed her, she would simply use her superior physical stats to suppress his complaints.
They passed through a rear oak door, traversing a long, subterranean corridor illuminated by iron sconces, and erged into the vaulted rear courtyard where the Knights of the Dragon Faith trained. The architecture here abandoned the delicate marble filigree of the sanctuary, built instead from colossal, rough-hewn granite block and iron braces. It exuded an atmosphere of brutal, monolithic gravity.
"When our pact with Marika was sealed, she decreed that a select cohort of elite Leyndell Knight apprentices would be sent to our plaza every year for testing," Lansseax explained as they overlooked the training fields. "I select only those with flawless discipline and martial genius. We train them in the ancient arts, maintaining a standing legion of nearly a thousand standard knights."
"Sixty percent of these n were anointed in the Erdtree churches during their childhood," she noted, her eyes scanning the drilling soldiers. "They have sworn vows to the Dragon Faith, but their blood still belongs to the Golden Lineage. The remaining forty percent are common orphans and sons of our own veterans. I baptized them myself. Their only allegiance is to Farum Azula."
She shook her head, a cold smirk playing on her lips. "Because of that division, the forty percent possess a purity of conviction that makes their mastery of Ancient Dragon Incantations a cut above the royal sycophants. A few years ago, a faction of New Faction nobles tried to weaponize that disparity. They accused Fortissax and of hoarding the true mysteries, claiming we refused to teach the Golden Knights out of malice."
"How did you handle that?" Lucia asked, his interest piqued.
Lansseax shrugged, her movent casual and dangerous. "The agitators were two high court Marquises who fancied themselves 'Hero-rank' duelists. I invited them both to the Great Colosseum for an educational seminar. I used the exact high-tier incantations they claid I was withholding. Afterward, as they were face-down in the dirt, weeping tears of profound gratitude and bleeding from their ears, I asked if my teaching style was satisfactory. They seed very content with the lesson."
Lucia stared at her, entirely speechless, before shaking his head in silent awe. "As expected of you."
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