It was a large hall for the number of people present in it.
Really it was just her, Leticia thought to herself with some irony. She felt like the only living person in the space. The spirit form of Azalie next to her certainly didn’t count, and the man in the priest’s robes staring at her from a slight distance, Jack Frisbee, looked more like a ghost than anything else with his killer’s eyes. Then there were the three women sitting across a table from her.
These looked entirely like spirits of the dead.
...More than me? Azalie spoke into her mind, apparently having overheard her thoughts.
Leticia ignored the comment, but she more or less agreed with it. The women were dressed like the Celestials she had only heard about in legends—much like the one she’d seen earlier up at the podium. Beautiful women with green hair. Once she freed herself from their mental dominion, however, it was easy for her to tell that the color was simply dyed. Their eyes weren’t the distinctive green that dragons’ eyes were either. On the podium, the woman had used a transparent sheet in front of her face to give her eyes a green appearance, but they weren’t utilizing such methods now.
The women were human. That was clear enough to Leticia. Humans dressed as Celestials. Spirits masquerading as an ancient, destroyed race from the continent’s past. She couldn’t help the sardonic comments springing to mind about them.
One of the women was the first to actually speak between them. “Firstly... May we ask how you teleported here directly?”
The leftmost woman had spoken. She was the oldest of them and likely the leader. She spoke in a self-important, grandiose manner, but there was a shadow in her expression that never left her face. Leticia suddenly wondered if it wasn’t her age that made her seem older than the others.
“I used the pact Childman Powderfield swore.” Leticia said what Azalie whispered to her. Unused to being a spirit, Azalie apparently had trouble even conveying her voice to living people. Leticia sighed, eyeing Azalie—she was the only one who could see her here.
“The pact...”
Leticia returned her focus to the women in front of her. The woman dressed as a Celestial, calling herself a priestess, nodded bitterly.
“I see. If you know about that, then it means you weren’t just bluffing, I suppose.”
“The pact summons warriors to the sanctuary when the time comes. As the sanctuary’s representative, Sister Istersiva formed it with the lord of the Imminent Domain two hundred years ago.”
“Istersiva was expelled from the sanctuary!” The rightmost woman suddenly raised her voice.
Leticia couldn’t respond to her right away—she was only conveying Azalie’s words, after all—but she glared at the woman nonetheless. “The pact still stands. As proof, the Fairy Dragons’ spirit sorcery didn’t attack us.”
“If the pact still stands, then that’s all the more reason why we should have the full story.” The woman in the middle was the most calm of the three of them. She was the one who had stood up at the podium, and from her age, Leticia judged that she likely had a certain amount of responsibility even if she wasn’t a leader.
She continued, “The pact that Sister Istersiva formed with the then-lord of the Imminent Domain summons warriors to the sanctuary under certain circumstances...and it allows those warriors to make use of the sanctuary’s facilities and equipment in order to fight the sacred beasts of the gods. But we do not know the details of these circumstances.”
“Misuse of this pact could lead to rebel forces overtaking the sanctuary,” the woman on the right added with a huff of breath from her nose.
The woman in the center shot a look at her but didn’t protest at the interruption. “The Deep Dragons are also a part of the pact. They must have abandoned their defense of the sanctuary because someone is plotting sedition using the pact as a shield!”
“I don’t know how it is now, but there was no way the sanctuary at the time wasn’t aware of the pact,” Leticia said coolly. “I’m sure that’s the reason they started the sorcerer hunts.”
“What reason would the sanctuary have to fear humans—” The woman on the right stood from her chair and shouted, and this time Leticia voiced her own thoughts instead of speaking Azalie’s words.
“If you’re really not afraid, then go ahead and throw me out!” She banged a fist on the table. The high-quality, heavy piece of furniture didn’t so much as budge. Leticia ignored the pain in her fist and kept going. “Go ahead and kill me like you killed everyone in the Imminent Domain! Do it! If you do that, you’ll have no way to negotiate with Azalie—”
“There’s no need to rush to your death now when the whole world will end in another ten days. I apologize for our rudeness,” the middle woman said calmly. “But I would ask that you refrain from slandering our ancestors as well. Much about history is only known by those who lived through it. It is not simply an argument that can be won.”
“Right.” Leticia pulled her fist back, taking a deep breath. She glanced to the woman on the right, who had returned to her seat, her face flushed red.
At the same time, she caught a glance of the man in the priest’s robes, observing their conversation with a smirk on his face. He sneered like he was watching a farce. It was a nasty smile. Leticia shot him a loathing look. There was nothing she could do but agree with the woman, however. And not just about history. There were many things that only a person with firsthand experience could know.
The woman in the middle began speaking again. Leticia was glad for the excuse to focus on something other than Jack’s smirk. “I presume you were caught up in the battle with the Imminent Domain. You do not look like someone on Almagest’s side... Your anger is reasonable, but there was a reason we were forced to take such an action. I believe the sorcerer hunts two hundred years ago occurred for much the same reason.”
“Then what about what’s happening right now?” Leticia asked, returning to her job interpreting for Azalie. “Damian Rue and the white sorcerers foresaw that the sanctuary would attempt to shrink the Ayrmankar barrier. Just how small are they planning on making it?”
“The barrier must be dissolved in order to be remade. The fewer tries it takes to reform it, the better. Additionally, now that we’ve lost one of the founding sorcerers, Aureole, we don’t know just how small the barrier has to be to form fully. This means that we must shrink it to its smallest possible state. Its most safe state.”
“So...leave the sanctuary, and abandon everything else?” Leticia clarified.
The woman in the middle smiled wryly. “Don’t act ignorant. What do you want, a guarantee?”
“I am ignorant. I have no idea, for instance, why humans like you rule the sanctuary.”
The woman’s only answer was to continue smiling wryly.
After waiting for a time, Leticia realized that she wasn’t going to say anything more and took an irritated breath. She was just supposed to be conveying Azalie’s words, but the more she did so, the more her own emotions were finding their way into those words.
“How many dragons remain in the sanctuary?” Leticia asked.
“What an insolent question—”
“None,” the woman in the middle muttered, cutting off the woman on the left. The other women opened their eyes wide at her, but she ignored them and said again, “It may as well be none. Who remains with the power that they can truly be called a dragon? The War Dragons stumbling around the dwarves’ nation? The Weird Dragons who died out? The Deep Dragons chose the pact over the sanctuary. They’re sure to challenge the goddess in the next ten days and be wiped out.”
By this point, the two other women had such fire in their eyes, they seemed openly hostile toward the middle woman, but she just coolly ignored them, even smiling.
She waved her hand mockingly as she continued, “Speak or strike them and the Fairy Dragons don’t even respond...not since they lost all five senses in their previous battle with the goddess. They’re nothing but living corpses! The Red Dragons are loyal, but all they do is obey. Their lethargy is their only rebellion.” The woman spoke faster and faster, like some kind of dam had burst, but her words remained precise even as her emotions rose.
Leticia just listened in silence, partially because there was no room for her to get a word in.
“Silence, Sister Preenia.” The old woman finally reached out to grab hold of the middle woman, but Preenia knocked her hand away. It was practically a slap. The old woman yelped in shock, and the third woman ran to her side when she fell over, calling a name that Leticia didn’t catch.
Meanwhile, Preenia’s diatribe continued. “What use are the wandering Mist Dragons? Well? Are there any dragons remaining on this rotten continent? That’s not a question that I want to answer...”
No one could stop her. They had to just wait until Preenia stopped herself. She hung her head, brushing aside her dyed-green hair when it fell in her eyes, and returned to the resolute expression she’d worn earlier. Then she said, “Do we seem insane to you?”
Yes, and I’m sure I do too. But Leticia swallowed her own response and instead waited for Azalie’s words to convey them precisely.
“I think that exchange wasn’t entirely irrelevant. It connects to what we were talking about before. From your perspective, the sanctuary as it is now doesn’t possess the power to resist the goddess, does it?”
“You speak as if this doesn’t concern you, Chaos Witch.” Preenia glared at her viciously—the woman’s eyes were looking at Leticia, but it was Azalie that she was trying to see.