Hestas looked at Winters with a smile that was not quite a smile, yet said nothing.
In this world, there exist practitioners of the Divine Arts, and many within the Church are such practitioners. The Spellcasters of the Alliance do not acknowledge the existence of these gods, yet the effects of the Divine Arts are undeniably real, which leads to the inconsistency of the Alliance Spellcasters' atheistic theories.
In response to this, the Magic Combat Bureau circulated a hypothesis: that practitioners of the Divine Arts are also spellcasters, merely using a different system from that of the Alliance Spellcasters.
But this hypothesis remained just that, a hypothesis, as the Divine Arts were sacred secrets of the Church, beyond the reach of the Magic Combat Bureau; they could neither understand the system of the Divine Arts nor procure the bodies of priests for dissection.