Mage or Priest

The door creaks wider, stone grating against stone, until a figure steps into the flickering candlelight.

He's small (barely taller than the altar) and ancient, the kind of old that looks like it's been cultivated with patience and stubbornness. Deep-set wrinkles fold around sharp eyes, and he leans heavily on a cane carved with sigils I can now read. Protective wards. Woven faith. Time-hardened magic.

His robes are priestly violet with gold trim, marked with the same crescent sigil of Deyinara that pulses behind the altar. His white beard is neatly trimmed, and a silver chain with a stone pendant glows faintly against his chest.

He freezes when he sees me. His eyes widen at the sight: a ragged young man slouched against one of the pillars, missing a leg and an arm, one eye covered in a fresh wrap. My robe is half-thrown on, my breaths shallow, sweat beading on my forehead. I probably look like I've crawled out of a grave.

His cane taps once against the stone, the air shifts and I feel the pressure of a spell forming, subtle but precise. Defensive. A shimmer of light flickers at his fingertips, just behind his back.

"By the Veil," he mutters, voice rasping but firm. "Who are you, boy? What are you doing in the sacred temple of Lady Deyinara?"

I push off the pillar slowly, not daring to rise too fast. My balance is a joke now, a single wrong move and I'll be face-first on the floor. I raise my good hand, palm open.

"Easy," I croak. "I'm not here to desecrate anything. I was… sent."

The old man stares at me a long moment. His sharp eyes roam over the bandages, the runes burned faintly into my skin, and the hollow space where my limbs used to be. I catch the flicker of understanding, then hesitation, then something else confusion, maybe even discomfort. He lowers his cane, but doesn't drop his guard completely.

Then, in a surprisingly firm voice for someone so small and brittle-looking, he mutters,

"Gods above, boy. What happened to you?"

I try to answer but falter. The truth sounds insane even in my own head: I traded body parts for magic at the request of a celestial being so she could enter a cosmic battle royale to inherit the throne of a death-weary god. So instead, I settle for something simpler.

"An agreement," I say. "I gave up pieces of myself in return for… blessings."

He frowns at the word, deeply. "Blessings shouldn't leave you bleeding."

"Well," I say, gesturing vaguely at my wrapped stump, "it was a very committed blessing."

He grumbles something under his breath and steps forward. His cane clacks against the stone floor as he makes his way to me, and with surprising strength, he grips my good arm and helps me into a wooden chair pulled near the altar.

As I collapse into it, I sigh with something like relief. It's the first time I've been able to rest without stone pressing into my bones.

He studies me again, longer this time, then says, "This is a small town so we don't have any high-tier healing mages to regrow your lost limbs. Not that it would help you if there were, something sacrificed to the gods cannot be reclaimed."

"Convenient," I mutter sarcastically.

The old man grunts in agreement, or maybe just because he's tired. He shifts his weight onto the cane and looks down at me, expression unreadable.

I glance up at him, trying to piece together the picture. His robes, the temple, the crescent marks all suggest someone important. But if he can't heal me, if he's just a caretaker in some backwater shrine...

"Wait," I say, squinting at him through the haze in my head. "Does that mean you're not a high-ranking priest?"

He chuckles dryly. "Hardly. I'm a third-circle mage. Barely qualified to keep the place from collapsing, let alone regrow limbs."

I blink. "Mage?"

That catches me off guard. He'd walked in chanting like a cleric, warded like a battle priest, and dresses like the sort of holy man who blesses crops and lectures about moral purity not someone who hurls fireballs or summons arcane shields.

"Hold on," I say slowly, "you're a mage? I thought you were a priest."

He raises a bushy white eyebrow, like I've asked whether water is wet.

"I am. Both."

I frown. "Is that… normal?"

The old man taps his cane against the floor, the sound sharp and deliberate. "For most gods? No. For Deyinara? Absolutely. Anyone who serves the Lady of Magic as a priest must first be a trained mage. No exceptions. Faith alone doesn't earn her favour you have to understand the craft."

I sit back in the chair, absorbing that. It makes sense, in a way. Deyinara hadn't struck me as the type to reward blind belief. She was cold, methodical, and impossibly exacting. She hadn't chosen me because I prayed. She'd chosen me because I could think.

"So… all her priests are magic users?"

He nods. "We are her stewards in the mortal realm, and she does not suffer fools. Magic is our scripture. Understanding is our worship."

That last line hits harder than I expect.

Understanding is our worship.

It echoes somewhere deep inside me, in the raw place where her mark still burns faintly across my skin. That's what Deyinara is. Not just a goddess of power, but of comprehension. Of knowing.

Maybe that's why she chose me.

Or maybe I'm just grasping at meaning because everything else is broken.

Either way, the old man's words settle something inside me like puzzle pieces falling into place. The blessings I've received, the language etched into my mind, the spectral book waiting behind my thoughts, it all points to the same truth.

Magic isn't just a weapon. It's a language. A lens.

And I've been given the vocabulary.