As it turned out, Lorgar was willing to push the punishment as far as it could go.

  Over the next two days, I was provided with ample evidence of human, or in this case, centaur, depravity. Not only was the punishment ongoing, I could watch and listen to Lorgar preach about the light of Lady Sunna multiple times a day, never repeating himself. Just driving home the message that Sunna was merciful, if people submitted to her light and allowed the light to purify their souls.

  With people getting roasted in the background, it was an incredibly macabre spectacle, though it truly drove home how deeply his influence ran. The ordinary people of the Blessed City didn’t complain, at least not where I could see it; they simply accepted that this was happening. No matter how insane it was to publicly torture people to death for a simple brawl, no matter how much damage the brawl had caused. Some punishment was to be expected, sure, maybe some forced labour to make up for the damage, or exile if that wasn’t possible, but to torture someone to death? That was an entirely different level of punishment, but it was precisely what was happening here. And nobody had the determination to do something about it.

  Once I realised that this might be a kink in the locals’ morale, I tried to push random people into acting. Quiet whispers into different ears to make them start questioning whether this was something right and just, ideas pushed into minds to the same effect, all for the purpose of having the current society come crumbling down.

  Initially, I thought it would be easy, simply because I had expected people to resist the moment Lorgar started to torture people publicly. I felt that the time since the change hadn’t been long enough to strip people of lifelong convictions and take away the morals instilled since childhood. As it turned out, I was completely and utterly wrong in that regard.

  Or maybe the wards around the community weren’t just there to protect the people from outside threats, but also to keep them following and obeying Lorgar, even when it wasn't necessarily in their best interest.

  Regardless of the reason, no matter how many minds and ears I whispered in, the people accepted Lorgar’s judgment and the punishment he decreed. They seemed utterly unable to question; they even joined in when he intoned a prayer, offering a fervent response to his words. All the while, people they had called friends and neighbours were slowly dying right behind him. Hel, one of the guys tied to those stakes actually died during one of Lorgar’s sermons, and the people barely reacted. Even when Lorgar picked up on the fact and preached about Sunna’s mercy, suggesting that she had taken the poor, lost soul into her arms where his sins would be cleansed, they didn’t react. To them, it was completely and utterly okay that Lorgar was publicly torturing people to death as long as it wasn’t them who got tortured.

  Hypothesising that there must be some effect keeping people under control, I started digging. Unless these people were a lot more cracked in the head than I thought, their free will had to be conditionally suppressed, which was something I wanted to understand.

  So, I started to gently poke and prod anyone coming close enough to the ward’s edge, slowly but surely experimenting with their mentalities. Testing which attempts bore fruit was a slow and somewhat arduous process, especially with the backdrop of people dying under the relentless light of Sunna. Just witnessing that from afar was enough to make me deeply uncomfortable, likely because I instinctively knew that getting exposed to that light would be agonizingly painful to me, and instantly lethal to Lia. In a way, it was the same as the wards protecting the Blessed City, only taken up to eleven. Or maybe eleven-hundred, it was hard to say. Regardless, I wanted nothing to do with it.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Still, my investigation into the mental effect of the ward around the city continued. My tests expanded, targeting different people, trying to affect them both within and outside the wards. Slowly but surely, I started to get a pretty good idea of the effect. While I didn’t understand them enough to break the effect, knowing how it worked was a step in the right direction.

  According to my investigation, the function was contingent on the mandated daily prayers to Sunna. Divine prayers could function as an exchange of power, that much I had learned already. The praying person was giving up their Astral Power, supplying it to the entity they were praying to, and in exchange received Divine Power.

  The ratio wasn’t fixed; I believed it to be contingent on divine preference and the attributes of the devout, but that part was incredibly hard to test, if not outright impossible. Mainly because most deities weren’t all that interested in letting mortals peek behind the curtain. My own investigation had only been possible thanks to Luna’s help and Lady Hecate’s cooperation, as She wasn’t all that uptight. Or maybe because she was curious what I could manage to learn, I wasn’t sure. Regardless, with only a single test subject, getting any real data on the ratio and what influenced it was quite tricky. We had a few data points gathered over the last few months, but those only went so far. Unless Lady Hecate was willing to expose her part of the puzzle, there wasn’t much we could do.

  However, in this case, the divine part of the puzzle, or really any part of that particular puzzle, didn’t really matter. The important part was that the divine energy exchanged contained a faint, but unmistakable, hierarchy. In other words, as long as the people here were infused with that trace of divine energy, they would always be submissive to those whom Sunna held in higher favour. I doubted that the people involved even noticed the effect; it was pervasive, making me wonder whether there was a way to exploit it.

  After all, I doubted that the people of the Blessed City had signed up for this. They were, if one wanted to describe their situation in the most charitable fashion, victims of a cult, unwittingly indoctrinated to the point that they overlooked their indoctrination. If one wanted to be negative, one could simply describe the situation as a divinely inspired mind control regime. Human history has had numerous examples of how badly something like this could go, though I doubted any of those examples had actual divine backing.

  And, no matter how much I disliked Sunna, I couldn’t deny her divinity. Disdain her existence, sure, but I was well aware that she was divine and had access to numerous powers and abilities I couldn’t match just yet. Maybe in a few decades, I could start to work on that, possibly match her in a few centuries, but I doubted it. If there was one takeaway from my conversations with Lady Hecate, it was that the road of divinity was neither short nor easy, and Sunna had quite the head start when it came to walking down that road.

  Still, I was nothing if not ambitious, though I was starting to wonder if I might want to redirect my ambition away from this place. Watching these people get roasted in the relentless light of Sunna was not something I would forget anytime soon.

  Whether redirecting my attention would ultimately be a good idea was an entirely different question. I had heard Lorgar mention me occasionally, though he had never connected the ‘Witch Morgana’ he spoke about with Jademoon Tower, making me wonder if the guy was that slow, or if he preferred to have me as some distant, ambiguous boogyman, a threat out in the night that couldn’t be addressed by anything other than faith in Sunna.

  After thinking about the question a little longer, I decided to keep the current course. Lia and I would continue to attack morale and mental stability within the Blessed City, slowly ramping things up until the Longest Night. Maybe I’d kidnap a few locals to experiment on in the newly built external laboratory; it might open a few interesting avenues regarding Mind Magic.

  Maybe I could use the longest night to strike a severe blow, given that the Sun, and thus a major aspect of Sunna, would be weakest then, possibly allowing me to achieve things I’d typically be unable to.

  If that blow didn’t work, we would have to reassess. But for now, we could stay the course and see what happens in the meantime. If nothing else, these were interesting data points and new chinks in the locals’ mentality. Eventually, they might start to question their own sanity, and at that point, things would get truly interesting.

  After all, Mind Control and Insanity had to be a fascinating combination.