Memoirs of a Fallen God

Chapter 27

The surroundings were strange, even by churchly standards. I’d spent a night in a Temple of the Watcher on my way to Kemu, and it had been a thing of spires and stained glass. Nothing like this.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised: Temples of the Seven, like this one, were not unheard of, but they were rare. And old. Most of the few that had withstood the ravages of time had fallen victim to the fickle nature of the devout; many priests considered their very existence to be something near to sacrilege, for Temples of the Seven were a remnant from a time when the gods were something closer to seven faces of a single god than separate entities unto themselves. A pantheon in truth, a coalition of true power and righteousness, united in purpose.

As I said, the place was very, very old.

Yet despite its age, the power remained, deep and undeniable. I could feel it lingering in the air as I stepped through the threshold, a sort of heightening of awareness. Like a chill wind on a warm night; like the sharp scent of blood from a bouquet of beautiful flowers. Unexpected, out of place, and all the more striking for it.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Great things had happened in this place. Terrible things. It was not cold, yet I shivered just the same.

Seven statues of marble towered around the room, each of the Seven given form and figure in an inward facing circle.

In the center of that circle stood a man. A man like none I had ever seen. He was not large, neither wide nor tall, and his skin was the dark hue of a native of the southern swamps, but it was not his figure nor his coloring that gave me pause. There was an undeniable aura of solidness to him. Of stone. Where Myara seemed airy and intangible, this man seemed solid beyond all reason, as though he were made from the very roots of the earth itself.

Had his eyes not sparkled, had his face not cracked in a wide grin at the sight of Myara, I might have thought him just another statue.

Myara ran towards him, matching his smile, and made it all of three steps before the man’s eyes drifted to me, standing in the shadows just within the Temple's threshold. His smile shattered like a slate slab beneath a hammer.

He took two thundering steps forward and thrust a hand out, grabbing Myara by the shoulders and shoving her behind him, placing himself bodily between the two of us.

“Tismet, wha-“ she began, but got no further, cut off by the man’s upraised hand.

“Who are you,” he asked, turning his granite gaze on me, his voice thick with all the threat of a pending landslide, “to tread within these sacred walls, unbidden, trailing behind such power that the very stones beneath your feet cry out in pain at your passing? What are you?”

“I’m just a soldier,” I said, drawing back from the menacing figure in front of me, too stunned for more.

Myara darted in front of the man. “Tismet, don’t be like that! He’s only here because I asked him. Please!”

“Myara,” the man said. “Stay behind me, child. This man is dangerous.”

But Myara wasn’t having it. “What are you talking about! He’s just…look at him, Tismet. Whatever you sense, it is not the threat you think it is. He is a friend, truly. I practically had to drag him here. And you are being horribly rude.”

Tismet really did look, then. And what he saw—I can only imagine how spectacularly unthreatening I was looking at that moment, half scared out of my wits as I was—seemed to ease his concern.

“It is not me. It is the stones,” he said, but at the same time the horrible menace left him. The edge of stone hardness faded, and for the first time I saw him as he no doubt was—a middle aged, bespectacled and balding man in a brown homespun robe.