----She stood in a place where gods gathered dust. Echoes danced where worshippers once knelt. At the centre of it all, beneath the dusk-lit sky and between the forgotten altars, an idol stood ever-proud. Taeva, the huntress, the patron goddess of these lands and of hunters in all lands beyond. Her legendary bow – dawn's reach – pointed towards the ground while her imperious gaze fixed upon those who knelt at her feet.
It wasn't the first depiction of Taeva that Ashtik had ever seen – even her father had whittled an icon of his own – but it was certainly the most extravagant... and exaggerated.
It seemed a late 'enhancement' had been made to the icon, no doubt by the great baron himself. Ash wondered how the goddess might stand up straight, let alone draw a bowstring past the new 'exaggerations'.
"The baron disgraces your patron," Satra reverently whispered.
"I'm sure she doesn't mind," Ash said with a forced laugh.
--"You would be surprised."
--"At what?"
"At the pettiness of scorned gods. At the wrath of the disgraced," Satra spat with a fresh venom. She swallowed the bile and turned to Ash with a downturned smile. "Are you devout, child?"
"Not to your gods," Ash answered. She knew the words were a risk. Heresy was not taken kindly by some in the clergy, and a heretic claiming Championship would be sure to make some enemies.
--"Good."
"Good?" Ash repeated. "I thought a Bishop would hope to convert me."
"You needn't worship the same gods as I, child. Taeva needs no worship from the wolves, yet they hunt all the same. Veytor needs no worship from the libraries, yet the tomes still contain the truth. It is enough to act in a righteous way regardless of whom you hold as divine. So long as you do not move to disgrace or depose them."
Fire lit behind her eyes yet again. She locked her focused wrath on Ash's steel-skinned hand and said, "Tell me, child. Are you a Champion?"
"I- I don't know," Ash admitted. "Everyone else seems so sure that I am, and I guess it's getting harder to deny." She didn't face the bishop, instead turning to her dusty patron. The hunt had always been her comfort, her calling. Maybe Championship wouldn't be so terrible if she were claimed by the huntress herself.
--"I warn you, girl, the gods may not notice a blasphemous relief, but a false Champion is the highest heretic and a vile mockery of all things divine. They will not abide you. This will be the last lie you ever tell."
"I'm no liar, Mother Satra," Ash replied with a feigned confidence. "I don't know what I am, but I'm willing to find out – whatever that entails."
"Very well," Satra darkly replied. "Kneel."
---The little huntress did so. She fell to both knees before the altar of the hunt. A burst of dust scrambled from beneath her and settled in the light.
The bishop spoke in words no tongue could form. She spoke with thirty voices from thirty directions in a chorus of human instruments. She sang as the sun must do. She bellowed as the most vile winds would. She chortled as the eager revellers did. She spoke every name and every word in every language before her eyes erupted in golden flame.
"My Goden," came a whispered voice from beneath the stones on which Ashtik knelt. "I beg thee, bless us, unworthy, with a single breath of your grace."
"To witness truth," Ash found herself saying without will. "Or avenge crime."
Spinning winds stripped the breath from her lips. Within the vortex, and past the fresh-sprung tears, the huntress could make out the visage of a man, or half a man, or a thousand men side by side. A power at his core, that shook at her very soul, sang an obvious and primordial truth: this was a god. Beyond the form of a mortal, and beyond the comprehension of her mind.
Whole armies, carved of thinking stone, stood upon his shoulders. Their sculptor had bestowed unto each, a passion and a hatred. A sneer of cold command and a grin of vicious joy. Spirits danced in the tiny miles between them. Ghosts of mortal men bound to the goden's starlight eyes. It was within his starry leer that the question was answered before words could even ask, though it didn't stop the bishop.
"My goden," Satra begged as she fell upon her knees. "This one claims divine choice! I beseech you, smite her as a heretic or claim her for her patron!"
The pale twin moons could have shone as eyes for she felt the gaze of an entire world upon her. This goden, wrapped in all the iron of the world, knew the truth before search had been made.
She heard in the crackle of a far-off flame and the clanging of a blacksmith's hammer, "The last dreams have started; the victor shall be left empty-hearted. They bind their dreams to thee, and leave you in misery. Ashtik Sai-Weleg, Sparrow-knight or Black Heretic. Thou shallt hold a name for each star thoust darken, when the Champion of Black is made the greatest archon."
Then, with the thunderous grace of hellfire, it was gone, and the world was still again.
---"No," was all Satra could gasp. The awe of seeing her goden had dissolved into abject terror. She collapsed from her knees to her back with a fitful quiver. "No, no, no, no..." She dragged each ragged breath down with a visible stress. Ash thought the vein at her neck might burst at a sneeze.
"I- He didn't 'smite' me," Ash breathlessly whispered. She rose to her feet and offered a hand to the bishop – making sure not to offer her marked hand while the older woman was in such a frightful state. "Does that make me a Cham-"
Something new stole her words. Not divine majesty nor magic, just raw visceral pain.
Her steel flesh screeched out like a frightened child. Pain coursed through the hidden flesh. A blade, invisible and agonising, tore across her hidden hand, and then along her left arm up into her shoulder. She clenched as hard as she could while something bubbled up from within. The metal boiled and popped at the back of her palm. From within the molten black steel came forth a dark amethyst gemstone. It tore apart the flesh and set itself within the bones of her hand.
"Sparrow?" Satra called, reaching a hand out to the girl. No response, but a blood-curdling scream, was offered.
Ashtik refused to fall, though; she refused to allow the pain to bring her to her knees, even as her flesh melted and ripped. A trickle of blood came from beneath the gauntlet and ran down her arm. The drop's path carved a new tunnel for her mark to flutter along, finally escaping her palm and making it as far as her elbow.
"Sparrow?" Satra whispered once the screaming had stopped.
"I'm okay," she lied. Her chest heaved with each brutal breath. She scratched away at the amethyst stone, though it was of no use. It had fused into her skin more violently and viscerally than her gauntlet ever had. She could see where the skin had been torn apart to make room for it.
--"You know what this means?"
"I haven't a clue, Satra," Ash snipped, the last of her patience having been exhausted by the searing pain that had not yet faded.
"It means Hevestiel has vouched for you. It means you have been claimed by a Goden," Satra said with blatant awe. "It means you are the first Champion of Black."
Satra turned from Ash as she paced back and forth. She muttered uncontrollably to herself about 'implications' and 'prophesies.' The most Ash could glean was, "The conclave must know. The city must be summoned," before Satra slipped into some other language.
"There's a Black goden?" Ash frustratedly asked of the still pacing woman.
--"Yes... Father to She of Gold, mother of man. Third of the absolute trinity and long since forgotten by the realms of men."
"The Golden Goddess is like the most important one, right?" Ash asked. "Does that make her father just as important?"
"He is the grandfather of our world... Eldest of the pantheon," she answered, only half hearing Ashtik's words through her own apparent haze.
--"Then what's his domain? I doubt he's the goden of cuddles and summer rains."
--"He is the patron of dreams; the Goden of sorrow and memory."
--"That all seems unrelated?"
"He is the Goden of sorrow. Drowning, burning sorrow. We all face terrible pains of heart: he grants us our dreams that we might face the agony within ourselves, and he strips the memory of the battle come the morrow. He lets us remember and live in that memory as we slumber," Satra explained with unreserved reverence.
--"That all seems pretty good, right? Why the dread of him? Why title him the Black and Forgotten Goden?"
"It may be a mercy to dream of kinder days when trapped in the dark, or you might dream your only day in this world away," Satra said. "But they don't dread him; They dread you. They dread what you herald. Dreams can be good or bad. A dream can be of pure love, or unending nightmares. They fear that you are destined to be the latter."
"I am no nightmare," Ash swore.
"Not yet," Satra said with almost a laugh. "But the night is young, and the first dream is yet to truly begin."
"Well then... What happens now?" the Sparrow-Knight asked.
--"Now... I must send for the Conclave. Rest, Champion. On the morrow, we will prepare for our journey to Duke's Crossing."