The temple stood in the city of Axiomera, a few hours’ journey from Theramon village, where his parents’ mansion overlooked the fields—close enough for rumours to arrive swiftly, and far enough that they reached the city already warped into something louder and less manageable.

  His parents brought him the following morning in a modest carriage that smelled faintly of dust and old grain. The ride passed in uneasy quiet, broken only by the creak of wheels and his mother’s restrained excitement. It had taken considerable effort to convince her that this was not an occasion to announce, celebrate, or invite witnesses.

  At least she had listened.

  Their destination was the main temple of Demerius.

  Its stone rose in severe, unadorned lines—no statues, no reliefs, no gestures toward inspiration or comfort. It was older than the city built around it, which was saying something, considering the city itself felt like it had been raised by people who fully intended it to outlive them.

  Demerius did not encourage artistry. The structure belonged to a simpler age, when temples were built to endure rather than impress.

  The newer temples scattered throughout the city told a different story. They swelled with ornamentation and authority, reflecting how the upper echelons of the faith had grown increasingly ostentatious—and increasingly fond of reminding the world who was in charge.

  Orestis entered the temple without ceremony.

  The doors opened because a clerk had been told they should. No bells rang. No incense was lit in his honor. His parents were guided away with practiced smiles and assurances that this would be brief and entirely routine.

  Routine. The most dangerous word in any institution that had survived longer than most empires.

  He was led through narrow corridors lined with records rather than statues. Scrolls and ledgers replaced icons and relics. The air smelled of dust, ink, and old stone—nothing sacred, just administrative.

  Eventually, they brought him to a small chamber off the inner nave. Not a sanctum. Not a cell. A room meant for conversations that were not supposed to matter later.

  A table stood at its centre. Three chairs. Two already occupied.

  In one sat the scholar-priest from the village, composed and faintly self-satisfied. The other held an older man dressed plainly, his presence heavier than his attire suggested.

  “Thank you for coming,” the older priest said. “Please, sit.”

  Orestis sat. His feet did not quite reach the floor.

  “Before we start,” Orestis said politely, “may I have a few minutes alone to pray?”

  After all, Demerius was the real reason he was here. A god could speak anywhere inside his own temple. And if the god accepted the deal Orestis had in mind, this entire conversation would become unnecessary.

  Unfortunately, they refused.

  “You can pray afterwards. This won’t take long,” the old priest replied.

  Of course not. Nothing ‘routine’ ever takes long. Until it does.

  Orestis suppressed a sigh and nodded.

  The scholar-priest smiled. “Let us begin with something simple. You performed a spell in your home three days ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “A divine spell.”

  These people were quite fond of repetition. So tedious. Still, he played along.

  “Yes,” Orestis replied.

  “Do you understand how unusual that is for a child?” she asked.

  Orestis folded his hands together and made a point of not swinging his legs. “I understand how unusual it is for anyone.”

  The older priest studied him in silence. Not his face—his posture. His stillness. The absence of fear where it should have been.

  “Which god did you pray to?” he asked.

  “I didn’t,” Orestis said.

  The priest tilted his head. “Everyone prays.”

  “Then I must have skipped that step.”

  The scribe’s quill hesitated for a fraction of a second before continuing.

  The older priest leaned back. “You drew divine power without invocation.”

  “Yes.”

  “That is not possible.”

  Orestis met his gaze. “It is. It’s just discouraged.”

  A faint tightening around the older priest’s eyes followed—annoyance, quickly masked.

  “You understand,” the scholar-priest said gently, “that unsanctioned divine workings destabilize faith. They create confusion. False expectations.”

  “Faith,” Orestis said, “has survived worse.”

  The older priest raised a hand. “This is not an accusation. We are determining what must be done.”

  “Of course you are.”

  Silence stretched, deliberate and evaluative, meant to make him fill it.

  He didn’t.

  “If the god had intended you as a champion,” the older priest eventually said, “there would have been signs. Visions. Mandates. We would have been informed.”

  Orestis almost laughed. He bit it back.

  “That’s not how all gods operate,” he said. And most definitely not how Demerius operated.

  “Demerius,” the scholar-priest said. “You worship Demerius, do you not?”

  Orestis hesitated just long enough to be noticed. “My family does.”

  “And yet the residue left behind was not his.”

  The words were casual. The implication was not.

  The older priest leaned forward. “So we ask again: whose power did you call on?”

  Orestis looked down at his hands. Small and uncalloused. A child’s hands.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “Does it matter?” he asked quietly. “You don’t want the source. You want the method. You’ll write it down, inform your superiors, and by tomorrow this won’t be a conversation.”

  The scholar-priest’s smile thinned. “You presume to understand our process.”

  “I’ve seen similar ones. They end the same way.”

  The room tightened—not magically, but socially. Authority pressing inward.

  “You are not in trouble,” the older priest said. “Not yet. But miracles belong to the temple.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  The scribe stopped writing.

  The older priest’s voice remained calm. “Then others will decide for you.”

  There was no threat in it. Just inevitability.

  That was when the pressure in the room shifted. Not from the priests; but from elsewhere—from attention.

  And this time, everyone felt it.

  The older priest froze mid-breath. The scholar-priest went pale. Orestis felt it settle over him like an old, unwanted acquaintance finally taking a seat.

  Finally.

  Demerius had tired of waiting.

  The voice of Demerius was suddenly heard in the room. There were no deep echoes, no accompanying thunder. The god was many things, but at least he was not theatrical.

  “Orestis Stathis,” the god said. “You stole from Silio.”

  There was no condemnation; only casual curiosity.

  “Can we discuss this in private?” Orestis asked politely.

  Gods could speak selectively, but Orestis could not. He did not want anyone interrupting during the negotiations.

  “Leave,” Demerius commanded the priests.

  They fled.

  Ah, such wonderful efficiency.

  “So. How did you do it? Silio has never heard of you. I asked.”

  “Loopholes, mostly,” Orestis replied.

  A faint impression of amusement brushed his mind. “Hah! How embarrassing for him.”

  “You also have holes in your security.”

  The amusement vanished.

  “I can show you the loopholes,” he said quickly. “All of them. How to close them. How to stop people like me from siphoning divine power without permission.”

  “And in return?”

  The tone was mild. Gods never accepted gifts without payment. They simply pretended otherwise.

  “In return, I want you to ask Miera for a favour.”

  Miera, formally known as the Goddess of Dreams, was quite good with mind magic. But, more importantly, she also had no interest in mortal affairs.

  “I want her to remove me from their memories,” Orestis said evenly. “The priests. The scribes. Anyone who’s taken note of me as more than a curious child.”

  There was a pause. Not the charged, threatening kind—just the faint, drifting absence that followed while Demerius decided whether something was worth the effort.

  Then the reply came, dry and unhurried.

  “Or,” Demerius said, “you simply don’t tell anyone. Then I don’t have to fix anything.”

  Efficient. And minimally involved. Typical.

  Orestis resisted the urge to rub his temples. He kept his voice level, reasonable, and said, “I agree. In principle. But your followers won’t drop this even if I do. You know exactly how they are. Curiosity turns into doctrine remarkably fast. A memory wipe is the cleanest solution. For both of us.”

  Another pause.

  “You make a good point,” Demerius admitted.

  Orestis allowed himself a small smile. “So we have a deal?”

  “… Very well. I’ll speak to her.”

  Relief loosened something tight in his chest—but only slightly. Demerius had agreed too easily; that made Orestis uneasy. Being cooperative was seldom in the god’s nature. Still, this was the best outcome available, and Orestis had learned long ago to accept imperfect victories.

  “I have more questions,” Demerius added.

  Orestis’s smile faded. “Regarding?”

  Silence. Not hostile. Just unmotivated.

  Then—

  “Discussing this through messages will take too long.”

  Orestis felt his stomach drop.

  Is he thinking of—

  “Wait,” he said quickly. “That won’t be necessary.”

  Too late.

  The pressure vanished, leaving a brief, hollow absence. For half a heartbeat, nothing at all.

  And then the air in front of the table folded.

  Reality bent inward, compressing as though forced to accommodate something that did not belong there. Light dimmed, then steadied. Stone groaned, as if offended by the demand placed upon it.

  Divinity condensed, and an avatar took form.

  It was not grand or radiant—Demerius had never been one for ostentation. His avatar took the form of a tall figure in simple robes, features indistinct in a way that made the eyes slide away. Power radiated outward in slow, inevitable waves—not aggressive; merely undeniable.

  There was no hiding that kind of presence. The entire temple felt it. And so did the city beyond.

  No; it could have been hidden. But that would have required effort—which was clearly too much to ask for.

  Orestis sensed the ripple—bells ringing in distant spires, priests collapsing to their knees mid-prayer, scholars scrambling for records that would never again agree with one another.

  All triggered by a god who almost never bothered to show up.

  Demerius looked down at him, expression relaxed, posture loose, as though he had merely stood up from a chair rather than manifested in defiance of several unwritten cosmic courtesies.

  “This is faster,” the god said.

  “You just announced yourself to an entire city,” Orestis replied flatly. “Because you couldn’t be bothered to continue sending messages.”

  Demerius blinked, as if the criticism had only just occurred to him. “Yes.”

  Wonderful. All of my careful planning, undone because a god finds conversation inefficient.

  By manifesting so casually, Demerius had shattered Orestis’s last hope of obscurity. There would be no fading rumours now, no quiet corrections, no carefully constructed forgetfulness. A god had appeared. Demerius had appeared. That alone was enough to rewrite decades of temple doctrine and condemn Orestis to permanent scrutiny.

  Anything he did from this point on would only compound the damage; any attempt to mitigate the fallout would create fresh disasters. And even if he somehow survived the temple, both Demerius and Silio would always be watching him. What had once been an unavoidable risk—one he had been willing to endure—was no longer worth it.

  Looks like I’ll be starting over, Orestis thought. Not because he wanted to—but because staying was worse.

  He sighed.

  “I couldn’t even last a week,” he muttered. “Old age suddenly feels very far away.”

  Demerius waved a hand dismissively and sat in one of the chairs, which creaked in mild protest under the weight of divinity. “It’ll be fine. I’ll ask Miera to help.”

  Orestis felt a vein pulse in his temple as he fought the urge to shout. “She might have helped if it were a handful of people. But a whole city? Even at my peak, I couldn’t have persuaded her to bother with that kind of nonsense.”

  That made Demerius pause.

  He studied Orestis more closely now, the idle curiosity sharpening into something unyielding. “You seem to know her well. I suspected you were more than you appeared. So—who are you, really?”

  There was no point in hiding anything anymore. Nor was there any reason to answer.

  So Orestis chose to ask a question.

  “I’ll tell you. But answer me this first. Why did you bother paying attention to me at all? And why did anyone else?” He gestured faintly at the walls of the temple. “Surely they have better things to do than chase every rumour of a miracle.”

  Demerius shrugged. “Oh, that?”

  He smiled faintly. “Your mother’s cousin is a senior cleric here.”

  Orestis closed his eyes.

  Of course.

  When a senior cleric came forward with a firsthand account of a miracle, the temple listened. When the temple listened, the god eventually noticed—if only out of irritation at the noise. A god was always aware of what happened inside his temples. That’s why most of the top clergy were so fond of taking trips outside.

  Orestis saw the entire sequence unfold with brutal clarity: his mother’s excitement, her cousin’s concern, the quiet escalation through the hierarchy, the information reaching Demerius, and finally the god deciding to take a look.

  All of it. Set in motion by a single, careless spell.

  And a mother who can’t keep a secret. I should have accounted for that. I did account for that. I just didn’t account for her enthusiasm exceeding my precautions.

  Orestis heard the sound of hurried footsteps outside the chamber. Shouts followed—hushed, frantic, overlapping—then the door burst open. Several high-ranking priests crowded the threshold, faces pale, expressions caught between awe and terror.

  Demerius glanced over his shoulder and lifted a hand in a lazy wave. “Nothing to see here. Be on your way.”

  The effect was… mixed.

  Two priests dropped to their knees, foreheads striking stone hard enough to bruise. Another stumbled backward, pointing. One simply stared, mouth opening and closing in silent disbelief, as if hoping reality might reconsider if he didn’t acknowledge it.

  Demerius sighed. “Honestly. This is why I don’t visit.”

  As for Orestis—

  He raised his hands.

  Divine power stirred in response, flowing toward him in thin, eager streams. Not from Demerius. Not from Silio. That would have been pointless—both gods were watching now, and neither would tolerate being robbed under direct observation.

  Instead, he reached elsewhere.

  Demerius’s attention snapped back to him. “Another reservoir?” he asked, genuine curiosity sharpening his tone. “Just how many do you have access to?”

  Orestis finished tracing the sigils in the air, their geometry tight and precise. “Almost all of them.”

  The god leaned forward slightly. “I don’t recognize that spell.”

  “It’s an elemental one,” Orestis said calmly. “Very simple.”

  “And it does…?”

  “It causes an explosion.”

  For the first time since manifesting, Demerius looked genuinely surprised. “Oh.”

  Orestis released the spell. The world detonated.

  Light and sound tore through the chamber as the explosion ripped outward, shuddering through stone older than nations. The floor buckled. The walls screamed. The priests outside were flung backward in a storm of dust and shattered bones.

  Demerius stared into the blast, unharmed but stunned, robes whipping violently as the force slammed through the temple.

  White consumed everything. As consciousness slipped away, Orestis had one last, bitterly amused thought.

  Next time, no miracles.