Chapter 375: Chapter 374- Elven Coating over Divine Power

“That kid,” she said, quiet, not to anyone in particular. The words came out before she’d decided to say them, the unguarded response of someone genuinely caught off-guard for the first time in some years. “Has he literally become some kind of god?”

Her lieutenant Mard, beside her, made a strangled sound.

“Commander.” His voice had the quality of someone revising every assessment they’d made in the past two hours, one by one, rather rapidly. “He just — that was — the man’s leg — ”

“I saw it, Mard.”

“He ’regrew a leg,’ Commander.”

“I ’saw it.’”

A voice came from the manor steps.

“Greetings.”

Celestia turned.

At the top of the front steps stood a young woman in white robes, hands folded in front of her, regarding the column with the composed warmth of someone who had prepared for this exact arrival and found it arriving on schedule. Her golden-blonde hair was pinned back at the temples and fell over her shoulders, the color of it catching the morning sun. Her face was — the kind of face that made you search for the word ’divine’ by accident, the high classical quality of it, golden-amber eyes that held something both innocent and purposeful.

And then the rest of her, which was considerably harder to look anywhere else than.

Celestia, who had seen a great many things, registered the information about the priestess’s figure the way a soldier registers terrain — fast, automatic, filed. The white robes were worn with a certain unselfconsciousness that suggested either she’d never been taught to be concerned about what she looked like in them, or had moved past the concern through some other route entirely.

“Are you here to meet Sir Viktor?” the priestess asked.

Her voice was warm. Clean. The kind of voice that had learned to make people feel immediately that they were among someone trustworthy.

“I am,” Celestia said. She dismounted, and the sound of her armor settling was the sound of thirty kilograms of silver plate readjusting to standing. She handed her reins to Ren. “You serve here?”

The priestess descended the steps. Up close, she was even more striking — the golden eyes level and direct, her bearing composed. She gave a small bow, her head dipping with the genuine respect of someone who meant it rather than performing it.

“I serve Sir Viktor,” she said. “I’m Olivia. Priestess of this household.”

Celestia looked at her for a moment.

“From the monastery?”

Something flickered in the priestess’s expression. A brief recalibration. “I was trained there. But I serve here now.” She said it with a quiet certainty, the way people say things they’ve already made peace with. “Sir Viktor is — occupied at present. Would you come inside? I’ll bring him to you.”

Celestia turned back toward the courtyard.

Viktor had moved from the center of the small crowd. The man with the new foot was being helped to stand by two others, his face still wet, his expression the specific dazed quality of a person whose relationship with their own body had just changed permanently. Viktor was speaking to someone — calm, low, just words, the way a person speaks when the dramatic part is finished and the practical remainder needs attending to.

Mard, beside her, had been calculating something. “Commander. No kingdom healer at full power can regenerate missing limbs. There is no recorded instance — ” He stopped himself. “I mean. There may be historical accounts, but nothing in living — ”

“What I want to know,” Celestia said, “is where a boy I watched get bundled into an exile carriage learns to regrow body parts.” She looked at the manor. At the priestess holding the door. At the flowers along the front walk. “And what else he’s been doing in the time since.”

“He is your nephew,” Mard offered.

“He is my nephew,” she confirmed. “Whose family left him to rot in a dying edge town for two years and has now sent me to see what he’s made of it.” She moved toward the steps. “Which is, apparently, a great deal.”

She paused at the bottom of the steps and looked back at the courtyard.

The man with the new foot was standing now, on both legs, which was something he hadn’t been able to do in however many years. The crowd around him was quiet in the way that people are quiet when something has permanently altered their sense of what’s possible.

Viktor was gone from view. Moved back inside, or around the side of the building.

Celestia filed his face — that expression of ’there she is,’ unhurried and unsurprised — and climbed the steps.

’’’

The receiving room was old furniture, good quality. Deep green upholstery, worn smooth at the armrests. A hearth with a fire already lit against the morning chill, the wood arranged with the precision of someone who’d learned to do it efficiently. A long table along one wall, clear of clutter, with a tea service set at its center — not ornate, not ostentatious, the ceramic everyday and clean.

Celestia sat.

She unbuckled her gauntlets, set them on the table beside her. Her knights arranged themselves at the room’s periphery with the disciplined ease of people who had done this in many rooms in many territories.

Olivia had bowed again at the door: ’I will bring him now, Commander.’

The room held the quality of something recently aired out. Old wood underneath, cedar and something else — a green note she couldn’t place, fresh and clean and slightly too present to be fully natural.

Time passed.

The tea was good.

Mard refilled his cup twice. Ren stood near the window, watching the courtyard with the diligence of someone who needed something to do with his attention.

Celestia closed her eyes.

She breathed.

And then, because she was who she was and the ability was something she’d trained for fifteen years, she ’reached.’

Not a dramatic gesture. Not visible. Just the quiet extension of her perception outward, the technique the Ktorian knights called the Second Survey — the ability to read the metaphysical quality of a space the way a navigator reads currents, finding the forces underneath the surfaces.

What she felt made her still.

Every territory had an energy signature. Old forests felt one way. Battlefields felt another. Holy sites had their particular quality — the thick, warm-amber density of accumulated prayer, the specific resonance of decades of human belief concentrated in a place. She knew those signatures. Had catalogued them, could read them the way she read weather.

This manor had something she had never encountered.

Not holy-site density. Not the ambient magic of a naturally powerful location. Something more specific. More ’alive.’ The green note she’d smelled in the air had a counterpart here, in whatever this sense was — a vitality that wasn’t magic in the court-mage sense, wasn’t faith in the monastery sense, was something older and simpler and considerably larger than either. Like standing in a clearing at the center of a very old forest and feeling the roots of it beneath your feet, understanding that the ground was not just ground but the surface of something breathing and enormous and incomprehensibly patient.

And underneath that — something else. Something Celestia hadn’t expected, and wouldn’t have named if asked, but which carried the unmistakable quality of a bloodline she knew.

Elven.

Pure elven nature essence, the kind that the high tribes cultivated over generations, suffused through this building like it had always been here.

Celestia opened her eyes.

“Commander?” Ren, from the window.

She said nothing.

She was recalibrating.

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