Part Six

Chapter Four
1505 DR (ARK)
	The light was at its brightest by the time Linus finished his meal, feeling better than he had in years.  The Paladin walked slowly down the road from which he had come, still taking it all in.  It was barely noon by the timing of the artificial lights overhead.  He had the day to himself.  That was new.

	Linus ambled back towards his own building, idly following the path and trying as hard as he could not to flinch when the occasional passer-by looked his way.  Ten years in the Underdark and the searing Anauroch desert had not done wonders for his ability to interact with people.

	All thoughts of his grim past or bizarre present washed away when he saw who was holding court in the little garden beside his building, however.  Linus stopped dead when he saw the tall, red-gold skinned woman sitting there at the head of the garden, beside a stone fountain.  Roughly a dozen people were kneeling before her, listening attentively as she spoke quietly but with a focus and righteous air that would have been enough to prove her identity, even if she hadn’t had a sword of flame and silver sitting on the bench beside her.

	A Solar.  The highest ‘common’ clade of angel.  Magnificent, holy, wise, and the purest expression of the heavens beneath the rarefied stratum of the highest clades.  He had never seen one.

	The impulse to linger and learn at her feet and the impulse to retreat tore Linus at once.  Just as quick was the shuddering feeling of inadequacy, that he might sit beside the dozen wounded heroes that were learning from her and before her radiant goodness, and the surge of loathing he felt towards himself for feeling so dirty that he was somehow unwelcome in the presence of the servant of the gods that had invited him there.

	Thus, he stood, lingering unhappily before the spectacle at the edge of the garden, unable to quite make out her soft words and equally unable to come closer and sit there.  So it was for the next five minutes, sweat beading on his forehead, until at last the group of a dozen listeners rose as she bowed in her seat, and waved them all off with a smile.

	Panic gripped Linus’s throat as the various other beings who lived in his building walked past him, missing their exasperated or indifferent looks as he vacillated at the threshold of the garden.  At last, when the final one was gone, the angel looked him square in the eye and raised her eyebrow.  “Well, Linus, have you suffered enough in your indecision?” she asked, clearly and loudly enough to be heard.

	Linus flinched.  “S-sorry,” he managed.  He took a few hesitant steps forward.  “I didn’t… want to disturb you.”

	“Do not tell me lies,” she said evenly.

	Linus nearly gagged.  “I didn’t want to sit there with the others present,” he said instead, which was the truth.

	“I know.  I haven’t moved in three hours,” the Solar said, “as every time my assemblies disperse, a new one congregates, as large or as small as the body of passers-by that wanders past and finds themselves awe-struck may have been.”  She smiled at him, so slight it could have been mistaken for a trick of the eyes.  “But none gather here now, save you and myself.  No therapist am I, no Confidant of the Ark, yet here sits a veteran of the same certamen contra malum as every other warrior of good such as you, and to me are drawn the war-tossed souls who seek certainty in a world that has eroded it from them.”  She pointed at the bench beside her where her sword lay.  “A question, warrior of Torm.  Can you see my weapon here?”

	“I can,” Linus confirmed, looking over the magnificent magic weapon.  In the hands of a mortal, it would have been an absurdly-oversized horse-cleaver or some other monster, a vanity weapon never meant to be used by a person in conflict.  It was just large enough for the nine-foot Solar to wield in one hand or two as the need arose.

	It vanished.

	“And now?” she asked.

	“Er… no, holy one,” Linus said.

	“Good.  My name is Vanhaldiel,” the angel said.  “Sit.”

	Linus obligingly crouched before her, until she raised a finger.  “Beside me,” she corrected.

	Linus boggled.

	“Now.”

	He did.  He sat where the blade had been, feeling emotions he had not known more than once before in his life, when Cavria had come before him to grant him access to the Ark.  “Yes, holy one,” he said, feeling as if his fate were utterly beyond his hands, and was oddly comforted by the sensation, as his own attempt to control it had failed.

	“My name is Vanhaldiel,” the angel said.  “I did not impart my name unto you for you to avoid it.”

	“Yes ma’… Vanhaldiel,” Linus said.  He took a very deep breath.

	“Be at peace, hard as it may be to attempt it,” Vanhaldiel said.  “I assure you the dozen men and women you saw before me moments ago, nor the hundred before them over the past few days, held me in scarcely less reverence, yet all heard my words and opened their minds to my counsel and knowledge.  Could they have managed it were they as lost to panic and self-loathing as you presently are?”

	Linus took another deep breath, and then another.  “No,” he admitted.

	“Find the calm they did, or feign it well, and still thine pounding heart,” Vanhaldiel commanded.  “Were you unworthy of my presence, you would not have entered it, nor my blade would have thine eyes perceived.”

	Linus managed to stop his fingers from shaking.  “It, uh, goes invisible?”

	“And intangible, but only in this place.  Evil beings, and those bearing the taint of the Chaos Absolute, the Spawning Stone that creates the Slaad, cannot see it if I wish it so, as long as I remain in this plane.”  Vanhaldiel smiled and Linus felt his heart unlocking from panic.  “It would seem that the joint efforts of so many to forge this place allowed for certain, otherwise immutable laws of magic and physics to be comfortably bypassed for the sake of elevated security.”

	“Security, ma’am… Vanhaldiel?” Linus corrected, as he saw the Solar’s head start to turn to face him.

	She turned anyway, only to nod with patience and grace instead of whatever look of microscopic scorn she might have used instead.  “Yes, security, Linus,” she said.  “This is the congregation of every one of the most powerful and vulnerable beings in the armies of good from seven Primes and as many Outer Planes at least.  There is presently no higher target for the forces of evil.  Thus, my presence.  I serve here as a warrior on the retainer of El-Artoris, master of Ark Security.  I serve along with a host of lesser devas and Planetars, along with the mortal armies of Lok Dunsgirsdottir and Su-mat-har, masters of Garrison and Message, respectively.”

	Linus swallowed.  El-Artoris was a name he knew very well.  He was a hebdomadus of the Tome Archons, one of the rare and unique angels who served as seconds to the Celestial Hebdomad who governed the Seven Heavens.  “They reassigned him here?” he breathed.

	Vanhaldiel closed her eyes.  “How saddening, that the presence of the elder servants of your own god fills you with more trepidation than the observation that you rest within the highest priority target of the forces of evil.”

	Linus felt oddly defensive at that, but she pushed on.  “Yes, Linus, he is here, and glad of it.  At some point, he, and the other leaders of the houses of healing and wellness among the Outer Planes belonging to the gods and powers of good realized that they gain nothing with their widespread distribution, and consolidated a dozen of the places of rest and mending to this place.”  She raised one hand and generally indicated the single gargantuan chamber into which all the Ark was built.  “Axiopistos provided the planar bridges.  Torm, the guards.  Ilmater, the healers.  Paladine, the administrators.  Mishakal, the healing lights,” she said, indicating the rings of glowing energy set into the stone above their heads.  “Solinari, the wards and barriers.  Celestian, the gates and Paradox engines.  Pelor, the advisors and aides.  Zodal, the trainers, that others would follow.”  She lowered her hand.  “And, of course, my brothers and sisters of the castes of the divine servantry.  Angels, devas, asuras, archons, Couatls, and many more.”  Linus noted the soft silver light from her eyes lit up beautifully when she was speaking of her kin.

	She leaned back in her seat and smiled.  “I think the gods were surprised how many of we immortals among their servants relished the chance to come to such a place and make it real.  It’s so obvious an idea, I daresay some wondered why it had never been done before.”

	“Territorial impulse, perhaps,” Linus volunteered.  Most of the gods she had just mentioned were totally unknown to him.

	“Perhaps.”

	Linus cleared his throat.  “Who actually, uh… built it?”

	“Moradin and Naralis Analor, both of whom you know, I suspect,” Vanhaldiel explained, naming two gods of his homeworld.  “With aid from the others.  It exhausted them, however, and they have withdrawn from the affairs of the day-to-day.”  She turned to him and smiled, as gentle as dawn light on the crests of the mountains, and Linus felt like more of a person from the sight of it.

	“You sleep among exalted company indeed, Linus.  Every bed in the Ark will be full before the end of the month.  The whole Ark has been such a success, that dozens more deities and powers are clamoring for its expansion.”  The light in her eyes shone over Linus’s body as she glanced at him.  “Although I know not if they seek to ride its coattails or actually make it larger,” she added, “and anecdotes about cooks, their multiplicity, and soup come to mind.”

	Linus smiled too.  He couldn’t not smile.  “I admit, I’m apprehensive,” he said.  “This place… it’s so strange and amazing.  I don’t always feel like I deserve to be here.”

	His voice choked off as Vanhaldiel reached over and took his hand in hers.  She dwarfed it.  “And yet here you sit, your position unassailable and your mental mending well on its way,” she said, so quiet that he could barely make it out from the fountain’s sounds.  “People of your classic Paladin mindset, Linus, rarely feel they deserve any good things not wrested from conquered foes.”

	Linus frowned, surprising the angel, as his stomach resumed roiling.  “Intending your respect only, Vanhaldiel, that is not the case,” he said.  “I’m quite wealthy, and I earned every coin.  I don’t feel I belong here because of how badly I botched the most important job of my life.”