A breath caught in a throat sharply. It always did when the first step was taken. At least, it always did for Niialaya.
The air was warm, and the fresh rich, sweet, and floral scent of ripened and beginning to ferment pulchritude Serrice grapes carried on the gentle spring breeze. Before walking up the steps of the temple, the young sixty-year-old Asari had halted, numerous times, to take in the scents of the locals' favourite harvest.
The grapes were the most essential economic item of the area, so much so, that the area was named after them. Serrice was famed for two things; its rich grape harvest, which was typically distilled into a globally renowned brandy, and the temple of Athame, home for the Asari's prophecies of the future.
Niialaya walked to the rows of vines every morning on her way to the temple to serve her duties. Each time, upon stepping from the top step, hewn by hand from stone, and landing on the benevolent chrome surface of the room within, the young Asari's breath caught.
She was standing on hallowed ground. Athame's spirit resided within.
Niialaya was a typical Asari in many ways. Her skin was a soft aqua, her eyes were a dappled blue-green, and her features were slender and delicate with a gently curving nose and a wide mouth accentuated by full and naturally glossy lips. She dressed in the manner of her rank in a long sweeping white dress which trailed along the ground with each step.
Niialaya was a priestess in Athame's temple, as her mother had been and her mother before, going back four generations. Her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, the only surviving of the hereditary line, spoke of Athame; they spoke of how Athame had changed.
There was a time when Athame was known as a celestial being who would save the Asari, who would teach, didactically, to the people and strictly guide them upwards. But several generations earlier, Athame had returned.
Unlike times in earlier history where Athame had never been recorded physically, beyond a magnanimous and vague Asari-like physical description, this time Athame had returned with no qualms on revealing her form.
But she didn't do so often, and she faded to think her aeons of thought. Niialaya's mother had spoken with joy at the kindness and compassion in Athame's words on the single time that she had witnessed the spirit of their celestial goddess of prophecy and fate speak.
There was to be a saviour in the future. The saviour would come from beyond the known to contest the monsters from the dark.
The saviour was a demon, a warrior, and a master of chiefs, according to scripts written to record Athame's words. The priestess's who recorded the words in the written text had said that Athame had uttered her words with loving reverence, that the choice of the name demon was to be interpreted differently to the other uses of the word in their culture.
Demon; only to the enemies of light.
Athame knew this saviour, he was a being of almost equally hallowed contemplation, but he existed without a true name in their legends, only with titles for prosperity. Only the descriptions of his golden face and iron form gave the priestesses anything to imagine him by. Whereas they knew Athame's description intimately.
She was like them, but not. She was blue but patterned. She was proportioned in the same way to their fellow Asari, but she bore no crest atop her head. Her eyes held no colour, only light, and scripts of prophecy would routinely run up and down her body.
It was said that there were times that Athame had been angered and her glorious blue had shifted a daunting malevolent red, but Niialaya wasn't entirely sure that she believed those rumours.
