Rhetoric of Crimson

Chapter 1: The Religious Scholar

"Are you sure these reports are accurate?" Mika couldn't believe what he was reading. The scroll was as pale as he was under his tan coloured robes that he styled with a hood over his head. It hid the unkempt mess of black hair that he often refused to comb.
"They were delivered to us in the last hour by the Melbridge Guard," the rotund woman behind the desk stated. The library of Melbridge was the largest in the northern half of the empire. Thousands of scrolls, accounts and manifest littered the shelves thirty feet tall in a disorganized mess. Despite entrance only granted to those of the Church of the Aggregate or those with special permission, the library had never been organized The library's keepers sat behind a desk the size of a small boat, growing fat with the inactivity and the dereliction of their duties. The primary duties of the librarians appeared to be the collection and transcription of the reports that the city guard gave them for permanent records. Anything modern was given a special priority for record keeping while records from the different ages were left to wither and rot away. It disgusted Mika but he was only one man. It would take longer than a lifetime to organize these articles.
Mika flashed the badge that represented his priesthood, a fourteen pointed star, and took the scrolls from the lady. He wondered through the library until he found a spot where he believed he would not be disturbed. A small table sat in front of a stained-glass window that let in just enough melancholy light to illuminate the scrolls he would have to read. The glass depicted the fourteen gods of the Church of the Aggregate. He locked his eyes onto the god that was his ancestor, Dronska. He felt no connection to his godly forbearer, and so he had decided five years ago to become a priest of the Aggregate choosing to represent all gods over an individual deity.
Mika pulled out the first scroll and unrolled it onto his table. The penmanship of the writer of the report was awful. Missing punctuation and poor spelling were the least of his problems as the letters of the words bled together into borderline unreadable blobs of text. Mika clenched his fist, this would make his job significantly harder. The reports of a female she-wolf were as intense as the rumours on the street had made her out to be. Four brutal murders over the last three months. Limbs broken with the same force as a collapsing brick wall. All of their throats ripped open. The descriptions made Mika shudder. He knew it would be brutal, but the descriptions on the report left little to the imagination. The only witnesses were two old men who claimed that she had a womanly figure, but their testimonies were soiled by the fact that they had just excited a tavern on both accounts. She had only been spotted during the first and the third attack. Each time their was an assault it resulted in exactly one murder. Mika was surprised that someone with this kind of power and brutality kept their bloodlust in check to only murder one individual each time.
He believed what was detailed in the report bordered impossible. Even for someone touched with divinity like he was. Those without a god's blood in their veins often assumed an unlimited amount of power could be applied to those who did. This was a false assumption. Divinity had its limits. Perhaps in the days when the god's freely intermingled and copulated with the citizens of the empire it was possible, hells, it was probably easy for them. That was over a eight centuries of generations ago. Due to the dilution the powers that were left were a drop in the ocean in comparison.
He had to be sure before taking his next step. Picking up his scrolls, he started to wander around the halls of the library. For the second-largest building in the city after the castle where the ruling family lived, it was surprisingly empty. The emptiness and the lack of candlelight inflicted a gloomy curtain of depression to those who routinely frequented the library. The depression that Mika felt was a mouse compared to the lion of curiosity within him.
He eventually arrived at the only section that was well-preserved beyond the modern records. The Indexes of Divinity were large leather-bound books organized in the order of creation of the god. The paper was made from a different stock than the reports in Mika's hand. They felt more solid, near impossible to bend.
They was nowhere near alphabetical order, which he would have liked. The Indexes were required by federal law to be up to standard and updated on an annual basis. The law was said to be passed to make sure that each of the Divine Houses held the same amount of information on each other in an attempt to balance the scales of power. This was not successful as some houses were twice or thrice more powerful than the lowest of the divine. He sighed, clearing a table near the indexes and took out the first index, The Goddess of Fire and Passion, Vanora, founder of House La'Vor. He scanned through over eight hundred years of history, checking to see if the powers described in the criminal reports matched any known descendant of Vanora. Failing to see anything remotely close to the overwhelming strength or passion for blood, he closed the book and moved to the next one.
For the sake of his own interest, he next pulled the book of Dronska, god twelve of the Aggregate faith. He flipped to the back of the book where he found the names of himself and his siblings. Each year, the book was rebound and updated to include the records of everyone who had died and been born. This was typically how Mika found out he had new cousins. He read the passage written on his divinity.
Ahh, he thought. They don't know everything.
It took him hours, and he found no evidence of a similar blossoming of divinity in the last four hundred years. Augmented strength was not exactly uncommon but why the brutality if that was the case? Mika was exhausted and he had learned nothing. He stood up sighing as he put away the final index. Mika was fast running out of ideas to assess potential weaknesses to this monster. The promise he made to his brother was still fresh in his mind. If the she-wolf could be tamed, he would bring her into the mission. She would be part of the rebellion to overthrow the ruling house of Melbridge. If there was no information available here, he would have to ask her directly.