Saintess Summons Skeletons

The cold and moldy basement they had been squatting in for the last eight days was terrible, but it was still better than the storm outside. Even so, they would have to walk all the way to the church if they wanted food. And they had to go there late at night, in the dark, under the pouring rain. It was then that the servants gave away the leftovers, and despite the weather, they likely wouldn’t be the only ones going.

Today again, the storm was showing no signs of stopping. It had been a week.

A young child was hugging her knees in a corner, she looked up at a slightly older child, who was preparing to go face the downpour and the wind.

“I don’t wanna go…” the child in the corner protested weakly.

Only the crashing of the rain answered her complaint. The older child looked at her silently, doing her best to force a smile on her own face.

“Stop muttering and come. I know it’s hard, but we need to eat.” She tried to appease the younger one, “Come under my cape, big sis will protect you.”

The cape in question was a stinky old patched up rag smothered in grease and mud. It did a semi decent job at repelling water. But it was too small for two. The more protection she had, the less her sister kept for herself.

Three days ago, her older sister had started coughing, she was sweaty and weak. The curled up girl couldn’t even go to the church by herself, she wouldn’t find her way in the labyrinthic streets of the city. They hadn’t eaten anything since then.

She was worried. Hunger was a thing, sickness was another. For poor people, healers didn’t exist. Thankfully, it seemed that today, her sister had recovered somewhat. She thought about telling her sister to lay back down, but her rumbling stomach forced her otherwise.

Under the glacial rain and violent winds, two frail girls trekked through the city.

 

Tenth day of the storm. The rain wasn’t stopping, some streets were flooded now, the basement’s trap door had started leaking, and the outdoors' water level was getting dangerously close to the height of their one and only ‘window’. The iron grate didn’t stop the cold, and it wouldn’t stop the water.

The older sister’s sickness had relapsed. Despite the younger one’s wishes to go find a healer, going outside wasn’t a possibility anymore. At least, a luckier group of kids had shared a bit of bread with them the day before, so they had some food.

The young kid would only wait and wait in the flooding basement, taking care of her sister however she could.

Was the rain ever going to stop?

 

Twelfth day of the storm. The basement had flooded. The two sisters had stacked all the moldy junk in a corner and that was their island. The mold, insects and wood shards made it worse than the icy floor, but uncomfortable as it was, they were out of the water.

 

The rain didn’t stop. It never stopped. Water came running through the basement’s openings, a torrent of wild natural forces, gushing streams of muddy water. Soon the basement was completely filled. Swimming up and up, thrown around by the currents, she couldn’t breathe. A light came from above. Just a bit more, she would reach it.

Finally, the surface, wild waves, flashing thunder, scriptures rain. The four lord griffins, keepers of old, watchers of the world’s beginning and end, drew circles in the red sky. Her golden blonde hair was stuck to her face. She had a hard time catching her breath. The older sister was right there, a dozen centimeters further than where she could reach, passed out on a floating crate, the waves pushing her away. Misshapen creatures swam around them both, impassive, except for two of them, fighting in the distance.

She tried to grab her sister, leveraged all of her reach, but her arms were too short. She swam but she only got further from the crate. She tried to scream, but she had no voice. Already but a tiny dot on the horizon, the sister and her crate were swallowed by a draconian wave.

The red sky turned dark. The ocean froze, rain turned to snow and snow to ash. Time stopped. The wind died down. Nary a sound could be heard. Something ate her from the inside. In the distance, there was no sun, only the great void, and its greedy apostles, coming to devour all.

 

Sofia awoke at the bottom of the lake. Her face was planted in the mud, thankfully she didn’t actually need to breathe, she was still underwater anyway.

This nightmare again... But different... Maybe...

She reached out behind her back. The tail was back in place, good as new. So was her arm. All healed.

[Trial completion : Survive the solstice (61 hours remain)]

Woah ok. I was down for a long time. It’s surprising no one came to finish me off…

Could be that Orvod was the only one with tracking abilities. Or the lake’s water was too toxic for the others.

She seriously contemplated staying down there until the end of the trial. Looks like I’m safe… And this is pretty comfortable, weirdly enough.

But it would be a waste to forgo the bonus task like this, if Alith learns that I lazed out I’ll never hear the end of it. After all, Alith's level was tied to hers.

Sofia pushed herself up from her muddy mold. The lake’s bottom, littered with stone chunks of all sizes, felt livelier than before. It didn’t take her long to find the dead body of the stone mage hero, who had sunk face first into the mud like she did. He didn’t seem to be rotting at all, perhaps preserved by the lake’s special water. Beside him was her own left arm, that had served as a ‘physical contact’ to activate the spell.

She observed the man’s robe, the whole torso area was dyed dark red. She was curious about how exactly the skill had ‘hollowed out’ his heart, but it was pretty clear that it had worked as intended, and she didn’t feel like playing with a corpse.

What about the storage item though…

Circling the cadaver, she noticed a wooden bead bracelet on its wrist.

[Bead bracelet] : Plain but sturdy.

Not it…

But the man didn’t look like he wore many things besides the bracelet and his robe. He didn’t even wear shoes. So where? She concentrated on analyzing the flow of mana, surely a storage item powerful enough to house large cubes of stone would cause some disturbance. But she couldn’t find anything, the water itself was so full of mana that she couldn’t pick up a trace of a magic item.

This is when she recalled a detail from her first interaction with the man. He had yelled at her when she appeared, calling her a demon. It wasn’t something she was focused on at the time, but she had seen it, a single gold tooth.

Well. Rest in peace I guess, the real one could still be alive anyway so…

She upturned the dead body and forced its mouth open.

[The poison needle] : A deadly last resort. But not for the user. This tooth could store many things besides stone.

She pulled the tooth and swam up. Even at the surface, no one was waiting for her. No enemies, no allies. The morning’s gentle breeze over the still lake was refreshing and serene. She swam out of the lake at the same spot she had entered it. Seeing the path of destruction she had left behind while charging through the fields and forests, it was unlikely that someone searching for her couldn’t find her.

Either they never came, or they all gave up.

Sitting on the trunk of a tree that hadn’t survived her previous sprint, she examined the gold tooth. It was quite underwhelming. This was the storage item, the identification had confirmed it, but no matter how much mana she injected inside it wouldn’t open.

“What a letdown…”

She chucked the tooth back in the lake. It probably had safety measures in place, unlike her own cursed pendant, so that no one else could use it. Either way, she wouldn’t be able to carry it out of the trial, so she had no choice but to rein down her curiosity and give up.

What was important now was the additional task rewards. She had less than three days to avenge Aurelia.

“Should be a piece of cake.”

She departed, going in a straight line towards where she estimated the royal palace to be.