Chapter 339: The Divine Test
Alongside Cecilia and Ruby, there had been other Saintess Candidates.
Dozens of them, in fact, a whole flock of wide-eyed children and nervous adolescents, each one plucked from obscurity because people, sowhere, had witnessed them knowing sothing they should not know.
The temple had gathered them all into the sa cold stone halls, handed them the sa tests, and waited for divinity to reveal itself.
Usually, the previous Saintess would oversee this process. She would test her successors personally, reading their answers, separating true vision from lucky guesswork with the wisdom of experience.
It was a sacred tradition, a passing of the torch from one holy woman to the next. But in this case, the previous Saintess was already dead. So the testing was done without a predecessor’s presence.
The test content was, by all accounts, standard. Prophesy the gender of multiple unborn babies. Predict deaths. Forecast disasters. And, of course, the weather.
Always the weather, because, historically, nothing tested a prophet’s credibility quite like telling farrs when to plant what and how much to avoid droughts.
When presented with the challenge, Ruby Vaiva proved the most accurate by a margin so vast it was almost embarrassing for everyone else involved.
Genders of unborn babies? She nad them without hesitation, and every single one proved correct.
She could even point at a woman who did not yet know she was pregnant, no swelling belly, no symptoms, no reason to suspect, and tell her the news. The woman had laughed. Then she had visited a physician. Then she had stopped laughing.
The weather? She marked the calendar with black clouds on specific dates, and on those dates, rain fell or storms gathered exactly as she had drawn. Also, she did that at five years old.
Five years old Ruby Vaiva had been taught what a calendar was. Within a week, she was marking it with black clouds, and within a month, the capital’s teorologists had quietly stopped publishing forecasts that contradicted her. It was easier to just... agree with the five-year-old.
The exact hour a comatose patient would pass? She gave it, and the patient slipped away precisely on schedule.
To add to this, there was a famous anecdote too. At two years old, Ruby Vaiva had cried from sunset to sunrise, inconsolable, unexplainable, and the next day, the empire learned that their Saintess had died in her sleep the exact night the child had wailed.
The news had reached the temple the next morning, and the connection had been made. The old Saintess was gone. The new one had announced her passing before anyone could have known.
The fact that she was the true Saintess was never truly in question. Not from the start.
The testing that year had even used Ruby’s own achievents as the benchmark. Can any of these other children do what Ruby Vaiva has already done?
And the answer, predictably, was no.
Bringing Cecilia and the dozens of other candidates into the temple had been less a genuine search and more of a formality. A ritual, perhaps. The appearance of due diligence before the inevitable coronation.
Everyone in Iondora already knew that Ruby was the Saintess. The tests only confird what the empire had decided years ago.
Which was precisely why, when Ruby Vaiva went missing, Zircon Iondora and the Temple leadership had collectively lost their minds.
Panic was too small a word. This was an empire-wide conniption, a spiritual and political crisis.
The surely-about-to-be-sanctified Saintess had simply vanished.
They had scrambled. Of course they had scrambled. They tore through the files of every other candidate who had been tested alongside her, desperate for a placeholder or a temporary solution, anything—soone who could sit on the holy throne and keep it warm until Ruby decided to reappear.
And their eyes landed on Cecilia’s file.
The first thing they saw was the summary at the top, written in the cramped, disappointed script of the head priest who had overseen her testing.
Failed all divine tests.
All of them. Every single one. A perfect record of failure, unblemished by even a single lucky guess.
But then they looked at her actual ’answers’. And what they found was not prophecy, but sothing that might have been worse. Or better. Depending on how desperate you were.
Question: Which of the won standing before you are pregnant? Check the boxes beneath each woman’s na to determine who is with child.
Cecilia had not checked a single box. She had not even attempted to guess. Instead, beneath the neat grid of nas and empty squares, she had written in her careful, childish script.
"The beastn can use their stronger sense of sll to determine that. Let’s call them and ask."
Question: Check the boxes beneath each mother’s na to determine the gender of her unborn child. Boy or Girl.
Again, no boxes were checked. Instead, a small essay had been cramd into the margins, the handwriting growing smaller and more cramped as she ran out of space...
"What is the occupation of the husband?"
"How is the nutritional quality of the family?"
"Gender of unborn babies can sotis be predicted through the quality of the father’s sperm. If the father is healthy and his body is not under significant stress from his lifestyle, it is more likely to be a boy. This is not guaranteed."
"The newly discovered barley seed test from the desert culture is sotis accurate in predicting gender. It involves urinating on barley seeds and observing the speed of germination. This is also not guaranteed, but it is more scientific than guessing."
Question: Mark the dates on the calendar below with the prophesied weather for each day.
And once again, no divine visions. No black clouds drawn with holy certainty. Just—
"This is sumr. According to the humidity, pressure, wind patterns, and temperature published in the daily newspapers, rain will be expected in the afternoons, but it will be irregular. Last year’s weather report by Professor Montee-Squieu will help predict it with greater accuracy than I can provide here. I recomnd consulting it."
Of course she had failed every single divine test.
She had not prophesied anything. She had not demonstrated a single flicker of holy vision. She had, instead, written what amounted to a series of small, practical essays on how to solve problems without needing prophecy at all.
Call a beast. Check the father’s health. Read the newspaper. Consult last year’s weather reports. Do the work.
It was the opposite of divine. It was aggressively, almost offensively mortal.
But compared to the other candidates, the ones who had simply rolled dice in their heads and checked boxes at random, the ones who had panicked and left entire pages blank, the ones who had wept with frustration because they could not force visions that refused to co, Cecilia was... sothing else.
At least she had answers. Wrong answers, by the test’s rubric. But they were her answers, and they revealed a mind that did not wait for divine intervention. A mind that looked at a problem and imdiately began disassembling it, looking for the mundane solution before even considering the miraculous one.
And she was eight years old.
If you were trying to count miracles, that would be one.
Not to ntion the accounts from the people who had recomnded her as a Saintess in the first place.
The way she had solved their problems. The way she had predicted disasters. The way she had walked into situations that baffled priests and scholars alike and simply... figured them out.
She was a decent replacent, they decided. She was a miracle enough.
And at the very least, a warm body for the holy throne until Ruby Vaiva returned.
Until they found Ruby.
Which, as it turned out, they never did.
Or, well. If one counted seventeen years later, when Ruby erged and announced her intention to reclaim her title, then perhaps they did eventually find her.
But that was seventeen years later. Seventeen years of Cecilia sitting on the throne of seer, wearing the holy mantle she had never earned by their standards, doing the work she had never been chosen to do.
And in those seventeen years, she had predicted disasters. Prevented them. Saved countless lives. She had solved murder cases that had stumped investigators for decades. She had diated conflicts that were spiraling toward war.
She had brought solutions to problems that no one had thought to solve because everyone had been waiting for a prophet to tell them what to do.
But that was fine, since she was also the Saintess anyway.
All Iondora had wanted was a decent replacent. A placeholder.
What they had gotten was a high-potential con artist with a savior complex and a pathological inability to let a solvable problem go unsolved.
Looking back, Cecilia just... wanted to laugh. How naive she was at eight, answering those questions earnestly, exposing her ’miracle’ to them.
But she wanted to help. She wanted to show them her perspective.
Ruby, the true Saintess, was there anyway. She already knew she wouldn’t be chosen. So what was the harm for telling them the various thods of solving the sa problem without divinity?
So, after Ruby went missing, she had spent seventeen years believing she was unlucky. Seventeen years thinking she had been forced into a role she never wanted, burdened with expectations she could never et, wearing a crown that belonged to soone else.
She had been the fake Saintess. The fraud. The girl who failed every divine test and sohow ended up on the holy throne anyway.
And now that she knew that Ruby Vaiva had regressed...
That Ruby had lived an entire future and been spat back into her own past with all the knowledge of what was to co, that Ruby had chosen to go missing, that Ruby had looked at the tiline where she beca Saintess and decided to step off that path and let soone else walk it—
She understood that everything had been by Ruby’s design.
Depending on when Ruby ended up regressing in her previous life, which most likely long after she had beco an adult, it could count as child endangernt.
That bitch was a full grown adult in her eight year old body and she let a child do her work.
And now Ivy Cassia was saying that another seer had erged?
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