A Small Price To Pay

Outside, Dante turned to both John and Ulrich who had been waiting and said. "First, the boy will be joining the seminary, no questions asked."

"Why?" John asked immediately.

"What did I just say?!" Dante snapped, turning away from them and leaving, knowing very well that they would follow.

He walked down the underground pathway, past a few more rooms just like the boy's and likely as old as the keep itself. The path they took was not straight, winding around corners and curves. There were paths branching off into other segments of the keeps underworld and they ignored them as though they were mere figments of their imaginations. These were parts of the keep that none had explored, at least not successfully, and all had been forbidden from them. More priests and seminarians than had the right to be had been lost to these dark paths over the years.

Dante led them up a few flights of stairs. The last flight was fashioned in a spiral without support to reach upwards. It led them out of the undergrounds and into the building blessed by the light of the moon.

No other words were exchanged through their journey but he could feel their curiosity eating away at their Baron cores. If they were told nothing, they would eventually throw a tantrum as most Barons do. They would not oppose him physically, though. He was the Monsignor for a reason. The respect of having raised them might not be enough to stay their disagreement, especially in the case of John, but while Barons were technically on the same plane of authority, there were levels to it. He was older, more experienced, and his way of the soul was far deadlier than they could ever begin to fathom.

After all, what was the power of a Baron painter in combat against a Baron fighter.

When they were safely tucked away in his office, him comfortably seated behind his massive desk, he spoke.

"His name is Seth Al Jabari." He gave them only the barest moment to digest it before continuing. "As I have said before, first, he is to join the seminary. Second, we will teach him everything he needs to know. Train him as though you were training the next Monsignor. This is important. But he must also suffer in learning it. He must struggle to attain whatever pass mark he is to get."

"Only him?" Ulrich asked.

"No. Let his peers suffer alongside him. It will be good for them as well while fostering a sense of fairness."

"You do understand that this will foster enmity towards the seminary in the children," John pointed out. "When they are capable of something truly powerful, they will not have the seminary's best interest at heart. We already push them hard enough."

"Then if you know a way to make him struggle more than them without feeling as if the seminary has singled him out for it, do it. How matters naught to the seminary, only that you succeed."

Ulrich looked at him skeptically while John committed himself to his thoughts. Both of them never knew why he had given them the position of confidants when they seemed so much like opposites. But he knew.

When Ulrich finally spoke, his words did not surprise him.

"Why?" Ulrich asked. "Why must he struggle more than his peers? They already struggle enough."

Dante offered him a fond smile, as a father would a son. The man had always been a thinker. His problem, however, was he had never been smart. He knew how to doubt and how to question, but finding the answers himself had never been his forte. While John only ever thought then acted, give Ulrich a task and he would question it before executing it. Give John a task and there would rarely ever be questions, he would bend his mind in search of all the ways he could carry it out. Never why he should carry it out.

Ulrich forced Dante to find the pathway of logic in his decisions. John gave him results.

His answer for Ulrich was simple: "Because he's a spy."

That caught John's attention. It pulled the Reverend from his mind so that he turned and stared aghast. "Why would we train a spy?"

"Because there was once a man who helped both I and the seminary. When the government and the Barons came for us we would not have won without his help."

"And what does that have to do with anything?"

"What it has to do with anything is that the child is the son of that man. The seminary was asked a favor on the day his help was given and our word was given. The time has come to carry it out."

They remained in the room a while longer, Ulrich and John bickering between each other as had become customary. Their disagreement was turned on how best to make the child struggle without breaking him, and Dante allowed them their noise.

They asked Dante questions he was willing to answer as well ones he was unwilling to. He gave them his answers as best he could, polished to a shine with concealed truths and embellished lies. He gave them just enough to be willing, but not enough to be motivated. They did not need to like the child or his decision. In fact, it would be better if they hated the boy. Knowing they hated the boy but would neither force him out nor kill him meant his promise to the man in black would be kept.

Eventually, after what seemed like hours, they left.

Alone in his office, Dante was left to the mercy of his thoughts. In it he found his mind in a remembrance of a time when he was no more than a gold, a few years before the Seminary had been attacked.

He was old when the world had gone to hell. The first crack was still vivid in his memory. His loss, his sacrifices, his failures. He was sixty years old when everything had gone to hell and had not expected to survive it. But he had. His first fragment had been black at the age of sixty-five. He had advanced to gold at the age of seventy-one. He knew soul magic would not grant him the immortality he suspected it would grant most after their advancement into Barony but each evolution had made him slightly younger, enough to live longer. And this was when he didn't even know how to make the evolution.

The man in black had come to him on one of his missions outside the seminary and had given him a road to survival. In the years after, it had proven itself to be a road to power. The technique the man had shown him was what made him a Baron feared by other Barons. The Blood Baron, they called him. And with good reason.

The man's only request was that someday a child would come to the seminary and he was to ensure the child got the training he required as best as was possible. At the time it had been a reasonable offer; everyone wanted their child raised in the seminary. The only downside that kept people from sending their children was that priests had no family. If they sent their children, it was as good as giving them up.

But what he had found illogical then and now was the clause attached. He could still hear the man's voice in his head after so many years.

"…Just make sure he struggles through it all."

If John and Ulrich could not ensure it, then he would intervene personally. After all, it was a small price to pay for the immortality he had been given; a small price to pay for the way of the Undying.