chairs. Isaac scooted closer to the wall, but Alocar stuck a foot out and the drunk went down in a tangle of limbs, where his pursuers pounced on him. One of them punched the drunk in the side of his head. “Goddammit Rotiche, you gotta’ do this every time we have a beer? Getting to be worse than your old man.”
After they’d carried the drunk out the door, the room returned to its normal hum, and Alocar returned to his meal. “Okay, but what actually makes a Blessed, well, Blessed? And what kind of powers do they have? Some of my men used to tell me their source of power was blood, at least from certain types: babies, virgins, and the like.”
Crymson waved her hand. “More Cao Fen falsehoods. The records were pretty explicit on this. They said the whole ‘blood of the innocents’ rumor was just a bit of fabrication to help bring the common people over to the Cao Fen’s side of things. The types of power, though, I’m not sure. The Cao Fen kept track of that type of thing, but it didn’t seem to have much order to it.”
“Actually, there is a bit of truth in that first part,” Isaac said. “A Blessed draws her power from something, anything – air, blood, pain, animals – only the Blessed knows. What she uses as her source influences what she can do with her power, so it’s possible that at some point in time, there was a Blessed who used blood for her power.”
“Here you are, sir. Courtesy of the gentleman’s friends.” A barmaid placed a foaming mug in front of Alocar, and one of the men who’d helped the drunk raised his own in response to Alocar’s nod.
“When you say source, do you mean any type of blood, or any type of animal can be used?” Crymson put her elbows on the table.
“No, not necessarily. It’s like this: a human can eat just about anything, right? Even metal, provided it’s filed down properly. But a human can only get nutrients from certain types of things he eats, yes?” Nods of assent. “It’s the same thing with the Blessed. One that draws power from an animal needs something specific from that animal in order to use it as a source, and it’s going to vary depending on the Blessed: some might use the blood of the animal, while another might only be able to use the animal’s sense of well-being. Basically, the amount of things that can be used as a source are near innumerable.”
Alocar took a sip of the brew. “What’s your power? Obviously Angras knew of your talents, but the rest of us are still in the dark, and considering Fayne is less than two weeks out, it’d be in our best interest to let us know of your capabilities. Otherwise, we’re going in blind on one end.”
Isaac took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out. He’d weighed his answer a million times since his departure from Dradenhurst, but somehow, it never got easier. “It’s more complicated than this, but the term you’d be used to would be fire.”
“Fire?” Crymson asked.
Isaac put his back to the tavern and cupped his hands in front of him. He glanced to the stairs, and saw nobody coming down, so he snapped his fingers, upon which a blue flame sputtered and caught. He snapped his fingers again, and the flame went out. “My source is the biggest thing around us: the sun.”
“What can you do with it?” asked Alocar, wiping foam from his mustache.
“Similar things to what you saw in the forest. Beams of light, or fire, are the least of what I can do, but, when it comes to Blessed, the greater the strength, the greater the weakness. It’s kind of a balance thing.”
“The sun goes away at night,” Crymson said. “How much does that matter?”
“A lot,” Isaac ran his fingers along the wood, back and forth. “If I don’t have access to its rays, I’m fairly useless, although there is one thing that I can do to combat it.”
“Do tell.”
“Eh – imagine the canteen you pour water into. Now imagine the body as the canteen and magic as the water. There’s a threshold to how much magic the body can store, same as there is a limit to how much liquid you can put in a canteen. But filling a body with magic isn’t the same as dipping a canteen in a stream. Filling a