"I've gotta admit," Allana observed, "that was a pretty solid entrance."

Adeline shot the unapologetic rogue a glare, but the Mendicant merely smiled. "I'll admit, it seemed to be good timing."

The sage was at their most celestial. With no hair on their head, no wrinkles on their face, and long robes draped over their body, it was impossible to tell the intended gender or age of the Mendicant's current body, giving them an almost ethereal androgyny.

"Master Mendicant," Adeline greeted the sage more formally, dipping her head. "I thought you'd want to have this talk at your hospital."

"And waste this lovely evening?" they asked. "Enough with the titles, Adeline. I get plenty of that from Anthony and his ilk. I'd rather not have it from an adventurer too."

Adeline was startled by the gentle rebuke, but she noticed the glitter of amusement in the Mendicant's eyes. "Servile doesn't suit you," the sage added.

Adeline gave them a rueful smile and nodded. "Fair enough. Then what's the real reason we're doing this out here?"

"Those same mages I mentioned," the Mendicant explained with a small roll of their eyes. "Anthony would dearly love to know some of the secrets I'm sharing with you all today, and I'd rather not tempt him to the point of distraction."

"And a random place outside is more secure than that?" Tenebres asked cautiously.

The Mendicant nodded. "With young Tobias assuring our privacy, yes, it is."

Adeline tried not to startle at the sage calling the second most powerful adventurer she knew "young Tobias." She knew that the Mendicant benefited from the lifespan of a Master level gifted, combined with their own talents at healing to soothe away even the most remote ravages of age, but she was still left wondering just how old the sage truly was.

"With all due respect, Master Mendicant," Kenton started.

"I said enough of the formalities, Kenton. That means you too."

The knight-errant, younger and lower level than Adeline despite his accolades, was even more unsure than she had been at the swift response, but he only had to swallow once to speak through his nervousness. "If this conversation is a deal you made with the others, I don't know if I should have a place in it."

"Of course you should," the Mendicant said dismissively. "My brethren in the upper echelons of the Apothic Order have become a bit obsessive about keeping secrets, but as a mythic gifted, you deserve this information just as much as young Cadence and Tenebres, if not more so. If not me, Storyteller would be giving you the same talk. It's simply easier to get it out of the way all at once."

"Ah… okay…" Kenton looked around the group, somewhat at a loss, and Tenebres reached up to path the knight's arm reassuringly.

"Right then," the Mendicant said, brushing their long, smooth hands against their robes absently. "Let's start this then, before we're out here all knight. "Can I assume you are all familiar with the traditional path to Master level?"

Adeline nodded, and she saw Olivia and Kenton do the same, but the other three seemed much less sure. The Mendicant must've noted the same, as they gestured to Adeline.

She turned to face Cadence, Allana, and Tenebres as she explained. "Once you get your third gift and make it to Adept, leveling up requires even more time and work than the first few levels all put together. Ten years to Expert is considered a rapid progression, and it can take twice as long to reach Master, which is the apex of normal gifted."

"'Normal gifted?'" Cadence echoed. "As opposed to?"

"Mythic gifted," the Mendicant replied. "Most of the Realm considers Master the highest limit of mortal power, which is for the best. Less than fifty Master level gifted currently dwell in the Realm. To even consider the next level would be a waste of time and thought for most people."

"Even I didn't know that Master wasn't the limit," Adeline admitted, surprised at the Mendicant's candor.

"I've found that to be true across the Realm. The Archon level is a bit of an open secret, held only by mythic gifted and those they've shared the information with. Most often, that is limited to other Master level gifted who may have the inclinations to walk the path of the Archon. That is, as a matter of fact, when I learned the information I'm now sharing with you all."

"That's why everyone closed up whenever I tried to chase down any information about the mythic gifts," Kenton mused.

"Then why exactly are you telling all of us?" Olivia asked. "Most of us are only at Apprentice level!"

The Mendicant inclined his head to Cadence and Tenebres. "Strictly speaking, I'm not telling you. I'm telling your friends, who each have a mythic gift of their own. You and Allana are here mostly because I know they'd just tell you as soon as I was finished in any case."

"And me?" Adeline asked.

"In some ways, you're here for the same reason as the others. But you've also now faced down a mythic gifted–as such, you deserve to know this as well."

Adeline's eyes went wide as she realized what the sage was referring to–her ill-fated fight with Brisann, the Chimera. The fight that had nearly ended in her death, and would've if not for Tobias's intervention. She had an inkling, from the half-remembered conversation between the Expert mage and the monstrous gifted, that they had been something special, but they hadn't understood it then.

The Mendicant nodded, acknowledging Adeline's realization, and turned back to the group.

"So I'm guessing mythic gifts are key to reaching this Archon level, then?" Cadence asked.

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"Exactly. Master represents a limit in the power our souls can handle, just as Initiate does. At Initiate, the addition of a third gift is enough to reinforce our souls, allowing us to progress further, but no simple gift will do the same at Master level. Only a mythic gift can allow a Master to progress further–but even that isn't enough alone." The Mendicant cast a look around the group, ensuring he had a rapt audience. Adeline heard Allana sigh, and she felt a smile tug at her own lips.

"Archons serve as the representatives of a specific archetype. Ascending Master level, therefore, requires not just a mythic gift, but the patronage of an archetype, only a few of whom are interested enough in the affairs of the Realm to bother cultivating a representative. While the Realm has previously hosted nearly a dozen Archons at a time, currently, we have only two–Storyteller, Archon of the Adventurer, and the King, Archon of the Noble."

Adeline blinked, the mirth that had been growing in her earlier wiped away by the revelation. She turned to look at Olivia, and followed her squire's own gaze–and, she suspected, her line of thought.

Storyteller and the King, two of the most powerful and influential people in the Realm. And Cadence and Tenebres were in line to stand alongside them.

Well. That was certainly something.

Tenebres, and even Kenton, looked just as stunned by the information, but Cadence didn't even look surprised. The celestial was just thoughtful, nodding to herself as if this had confirmed a suspicion she had already held.

"What happened to the rest of them, then?" Allana asked, the only one of the group who hadn't been struck speechless by the Mendicant's claim. Did anything shake that girl?

The Mendicant's face turned solemn as they considered that question. "In the past couple generations, the Realm has been besieged by a variety of threats. First was the Lich of Scales, a greater outsider of the Ruined World who managed to possess the corpse of a dragon among the towering peaks of the Divide. Then was the Pain Lord, an archon of the Tyrant who led an army of outsiders and outlaws out of the Verdant Wastes and besieged the Sister Cities."

"Then the cyclopes century," Adeline mused. That conflict had happened in her youth, and she had reached Initiate level in the midst of the battle with the ancient and powerful Feral World outsiders.

The Mendicant nodded. "Each presented a superior threat, and each required the intercession of one or more Archons to defeat. And with each conflict, the Realm's number of Archons shrank, leaving us in the precarious position we are now in. I am one of four candidates who is approaching Archon from the usual direction, but it is a long road to bring a mythic gift to Master. Even now, mine is only Apprentice–and on those rare occasions where I need to fight directly, as I did here, it is too weak to be of any use, making it that much harder to advance. The others in my situation are caught in a similar place."

"But we didn't come to our mythic gifts that way," Tenebres pointed out. "Mine was my first gift, and Cadence got hers at Novice level."

"I did the same," Kenton added.

The Mendicant nodded. "This is where my knowledge, and even that of the King and Storyteller, begins to fall flat. It is not unheard of for a mythic gift to be acquired at lower levels, but it is still rare in the extreme. It is, in fact, most common for the Archons of the Forbidden Archetypes to come into their power that way, as the Chimera seems to have."

Adeline felt her side ache, the wounds the mythic gifted had inflicted on her returning as a phantom pain.

"We don't know the specifics of this path to Archon," the Mendicant admitted, "but it appears to be faster than the alternative. I think it is even possible that Storyteller gave you the gift of the echo in an attempt to bring about this very situation, to see if you'd be able to approach Archon more quickly."

"Can I ask a question?" Olivia interjected.

The group turned to look at the squire, surprised, but the Mendicant nodded for her to proceed.

Awkwardly, Oli cleared her throat. "What you just said, that Storyteller 'gave' Cadence the gift of the echo, I still don't understand how that works. Where do these mythic gifts come from?"

"A good question," the Mendicant replied. "If you are referring to their origin, I'm afraid I cannot provide that information. I doubt even Storyteller knows the original source of the mythic gifts. But in the modern day, they tend to come from two places: magical warps, generally created spontaneously and randomly, or gift inheritance. Kenton and Tenebres, to my understanding, obtained their gifts in the first way, when each was exposed to the unravelled magic tied to their respective planes.

"Cadence, on the other hand, inherited her gift, as I did. It's part of the mythic gifts that, at their highest level, they are able to replicate themselves, carving themselves into the soul of a new recipient. Storyteller did this to Cadence, while I inherited mine from an artifact left behind by the previous Archon with my gift."

"That would make it a relic, though, wouldn't it?" Olivia asked.

The Mendicant shook their head. "Not at all. In fact, I suspect that the practice of crafting ensouled items and tapping into totems may have originated as an attempt to mimic mythic inheritance. That method has its flaws, as you're all aware, but it allows a gift to be bestowed by a mortal, rather than an Archetype, just as the mythic gifts are."

"So…" Kenton said, pulling the conversation back on track, "Storyteller is hoping that we'll reach Archon quickly enough to help with whatever the next incident is."

"I believe that was the plan," the Mendicant acknowledged. "My peers and I are attempting to reach Archon as well, but we are all hoping that you'll get there first."

"Why the urgency, though?" Olivia asked. "The cyclopes struck only a dozen years ago. There must be some time before the next big greater threat, right?"

Adeline drew in a sharp breath, and she saw the same realization she only just had reflected in Cadence's heavy, thoughtful gaze.

"No, Oli," Cadence told her, "it won't be some time. We're living through it right now." Cadence met the Mendicant's eyes. "That's it, right? The coven is using power on par with an Archon, and Storyteller and the King are the only ones left to stop them."

"But there's no way any of you can reach Master soon enough to make a difference against the coven!" Olivia insisted, still missing the point.

Cadence shook her head. "No, we can't. But given what happened during the previous big fights, it's likely that whenever the next threat after the coven shows up, Storyteller won't be here to help us with it anymore."

Only now did Adeline begin to see the full picture. In the time she had known Cadence, she had noticed that the celestial was occasionally afflicted with some kind of existential malaise, particularly when Storyteller was brought up. Adeline was just starting to understand the fears that the young adventure had been grappling with the mere edges of.

Storyteller had ensured that Adeline's four young wards would come together: taking Cadence from Felisen; ensuring that Adeline would intervene in Oli's trial duel; pushing Allana and Tenebres into a conflict that would inevitably have them meeting the other two. He had even sent Adeline to help them when they needed it, ensuring that the four would both survive their first true conflict and giving them a mentor and protector to set them on the road to Adept.

It wasn't a mystery when the next threat would appear. Adeline had already stared down the Chimera, a mythic gifted already at Adept level. Maybe Brisann lacked an Archetype supporting them now, but she was sure the Blood Soaked would accept the monstrous outlaw happily.

Soon, another dark Archon would threaten the Realm, and it was all too possible that Storyteller wouldn't be there to face it, nor would the Mendicant and their contemporaries. Kenton was closer, but he was also a known factor, a renowned and respected sentinel even at Initiate. The Chimera, or whoever worked with them, would plan for him.

In just a matter of years, the fate of the Realm could very well hinge on the four young people Adeline found herself training.

"Well," Allana spoke for the group, "that's ominous."

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