"Do you know what 'Cecilia' means?"
"It means 'blind'."
"Wouldn't it be… heresy? To have a girl named 'blind' crowned as a foreseeing Saintess?"
These whispers had followed her for years, drifting through crowds whenever she appeared in public. She had heard it in temple corridors and market squares, in the hushed gatherings of nobles and the bold murmurs of commoners who thought themselves too far away to be heard.
Cecilia had heard those words so many times they had worn grooves in her memory.
When she was still the Saintess, the false Saintess, though no one knew it, she had trained herself to smile through them, to glide past them with the serene grace expected of one touched by the divine.
She could never admit the truth. Could never confess that the visions she reported came not from gods but from books, from observation, from the relentless grinding of a mind that refused to stop connecting dots.
