FATE\Deus Decipit

Chapter 4: A Flash of Light

10:45pm, Friday, The Alghul villa overlooking Athens

Aisha stood in the basement of her villa, which had long since been transformed into her workshop. The fairly large room was dimly lit by candles sitting on scattered desks, tables, and shelves. The floor was made of a worn but laminated wood, while the walls were made of stone bricks, roughly cut for aesthetic, giving the room the air of a dungeon, or the inside of a castle's tower.

She stood by the cellar door leading up to the main room, wearing a women's suit and leaning on her personal writing desk to the door's left. She watched as her reanimated skeletons, four in total, shuffled around the room. Two were drawing an intricate magic circle on the floor in chalk, while the others rearranged furniture to make room for the aforementioned two. Though the drawing skeletons had been programmed to perform their task, Aisha dictated the others' commands herself: she wanted to maintain the room's elegance.

She would tolerate no messes, especially not in her workspace.

There was a reason she had waited until tonight. A violent storm had been predicted and now arrived; the rain and thunder could be heard even in the basement. Storms were an aspect of nature, so magic that harnessed natural leylines tended to function better as the energy of the Earth interchanged between the sky and the ground, but there was also a certain relevance to it, a catalyst of sorts.

Given the unique nature of the land that allowed for this War, it wasn't much of a logical leap to presume that the land of Divine Spirits, the Reverse Side of the World, could be reached with the right methods. It was also generally assumed that any sentient being that lived, was recorded in history, and then died could be summoned as a Servant, their legend encoded forever as a Heroic Sprit in the Throne of Heroes.

Her catalyst stood in the center of the fresh chalk, a relic stolen from an old place of worship underneath the Athenian Acropolis. The old stone figure stared back at Aisha. It was no more than a hand tall: a small satyr with large horns, a flute, and a simply inappropriate depiction of the male genitalia between its goat legs: an old idol for the nature god Pan.

Pan was perhaps the only god in the Greek pantheon to have canonically "died", a fact which would hopefully lead to him being received into the Throne of Heroes from which Servants were summoned. That said, she did know from her research that the idea of Pan's death was likely a complicated misunderstanding related to the cult of a Babylonian demigod, and so, if Pan existed at all, he likely never died, and was instead able to travel to the Reverse Side of the World after the end of the Age of Gods like the other gods and spirits. However, the Throne based its Servants in accordance with recorded history as much as actual history, and so as long as a figure was said to have died, they should be able to be summoned, at least theoretically. But all that didn't matter, it was an ancient relic tied to the land, and so whatever Servant would be summoned should be powerful regardless.

That said, there was a significant part of her that wondered if she wouldn't be better off going for a more conventional servant like Hercules or Odysseus. Great heights tended to precede great falls, after all...

-But a god was still a god, and the other so-called "Masters" would be so unprepared that they would likely be utterly incapable of summoning a powerful Servant, certainly nothing as powerful as a genuine Divine Spirit, even a relatively minor one like Pan. There were still other innumerable problems that could arrive, from his personality, to his powers, his nature and so on, but she had considered as much as she possibly could, and there wasn't any point in acting on hypotheticals. One can only act on what she knows, and she wouldn't know anything until after her Servant was summoned.

This was trial and error, the essence of all science and magecraft, but she only had one attempt. That was the key problem, the fact that kept pressure on her chest when she was so close to her goal.