| Dunric, The Confederacy of Dun |Mathis Rauzil stood amongst his closest friend, Lexia Uael, as the two stood in the shadows of where it all had really begun only a few months ago—at the chapel of Infinity. Although it nearly felt like a year as it had happened on the eve of the previous summer and here they were in late winter of the current cycle. When Marlowe had decided to travel northeast to seek a society that he believed was the key to getting stronger, Mathis had supplied him with the information he had on the society but overall the young man didn’t know as much as he would have liked to share.
In the absence of Marlowe, he had seen the swordsman named Kath get more obsessive in his approach as he became a Vann to seek out any whisper of the Order as after the battle with Gandilos the majority of the Order’s approach disappeared which frightened as well as confused Mathis as he couldn’t fathom why. With Otis Malr deceased and out of the way why would they not come at Dunric so viciously? or for that matter why didn’t they seek to end his and Lexia’s lives? They were traitors to them, and The Order was pretty clear how they handled treason. Were they so insignificant to not care? Did they reprioritize the relevance of Dunric or had their entire assault on Dunric had a different intention the whole time and he not know it even when he was within their employ?
A heavy sigh left him as he placed his hands down on the bench before him. “They’re still out there, doing… something.”
The despair in Mathis’ voice was clear as his female companion approached him, “Rauz—”
“They’ve gone quiet, Lexi, and I can’t grasp one single theory that makes any form of comprehensive sense.” The blue-haired man took a heavy breath after he spoke the sentence, reflecting on this uncomfortable feeling he had about the entirety of the situation.
“I’ve been sitting here, trying to think about what they could possibly thinking or doing—but one thing is for sure, Dunric hasn’t seen a white-cloak in over two months. Why did they send your father and myself after you if Dunric was so important last summer?”
Lexi frowned, “I don’t know.”
He nodded in reply, “That’s the thing, no matter how obsessive some of the city’s vann are… there’s no sense of them, like they never existed, like Dun wasn’t their big plan. What was the point of Dunric?”
Lexi shuffled her hands in her pockets, “We were told that it was the perfect place to reveal our intent, to repair the world—to instill order.”
“Which is the thing, it doesn’t make much sense… unless their purpose has been filled?”
“Impossible, The Order intends to eradicate all theology by any means necessary, you know that. It’s a cult of the blind, the vicious, and the apathetic.”
“I know. So why have they gone quiet? Where have they gone?”
There was a thick tension as a new voice cut through their silence, a voice that sent both of the former orderlings on edge. “That’s a very good question. Where have we gone?”
Both of the two’s expressions sank as the new voice replied to their own worries and they spun around toward the direction to not see a man in white but in a very blatant disguise. It was exceptionally rare for the order to send somebody to not announce themselves by flying their flags that mocked the godly color.
“The answer is that we never left.”
A knot rose in Mathis Rauzil’s throat as he crossed his arms. “Then why are we still alive?”
“That’s an interesting question.” The disguised orderling stated as he narrowed his eyes with a wide smirk. It was at the end of that where the orderling disappeared in the simple blink of an eye. Why would the order announce such information to them? Was it a lie to get them on edge, distrusting everybody in Dunric to be an orderling in disguise? What were they waiting for if they were watching him and his friends? The only thing Mathis could deduce was that they perhaps wanted him to see the end result before dying which unsettled the man even more. His eyes moved to Lexi’s as he spoke again.
“I don’t know what that was about, but we have to be on our guard and find out what they are up to.”
“But how do we find that out?”
“I’ll… think of something. The Order is too arrogant to not slip up and not have one of their men succumb to their personal taste for destruction and murder.”