Chapter 55: Memories

Velykos was silent for a moment, processing Sev's words. He seemed to use gardening as a distraction as he thought, bending down to pluck weeds from the dirt with a delicate precision that Sev admittedly would not have expected from him. Every weed he plucked disintegrated as he clenched his fists, which...

...admittedly, Sev was a little worried about that part. He was relatively certain Velykos hadn't been disintegrating plants before. A larger part of him, though, was more relieved that there had been no apparent adverse reaction — no visible twitch from Velykos as he failed to process what Sev said, and certainly no unnatural drop in his own health.

"It does fit well," Velykos eventually said, his voice soft. It wasn't angry, exactly, which made Sev exhale a sigh of relief. "I am unsure how to feel about it. I have followed Nillea for such a long time, and you tell me now that I may have chosen to follow the wrong god..."

"Nillea may have done good for you regardless," Sev said. "I mean, I don't know her, obviously. But you're not powerless, you've got a skill that helps you remember things around infolocks... maybe she wanted you to know."

"If that is true..." Velykos' words trailed off as he thought on the matter, and then he nodded to himself, as if satisfied with whatever conclusion he'd reached. "Then I am grateful, I think. But I do not understand. You said he was those things; is he not any longer? And are you not a cleric yourself? If he is your bonded divinity, and you maintain your ability to use and cast skills..."

"I don't know all the answers," Sev said with a slight grimace, looking down. "I still have all my skills and I don't know why, yeah, you're right about that. I know Onyx isn't gone, and maybe that's why. Or maybe it's because the circumstances with my class are kind of fucked up to begin with."

"But there is more you wish to share," Velykos said, and Sev nodded with a sigh.

He'd pointed out to the Guildmaster that the idea informing the entire temple about what was happening would have been a bad idea — but informing Velykos? He didn't know the stone elemental very well, it was true, but he almost felt like he owed it to him. Velykos' god, if he was right, had already been erased; the connection he had now was a fake, a remnant forged from the connection he'd once had.

"He was a god, yes," Sev said quietly. "Whether he is now... I don't know. I don't fully understand what happened to him. But this is something you need to know, and something you need to tell only people you trust, because I don't know what kind of panic this might cause if it gets out."

"You have my word," Velykos said solemnly.

"The gods are dying," Sev said bluntly. "Maybe not directly, and maybe not in a way we understand. But every so often the system picks a god and begins to scrub it from existence. It erases that god's understanding of themselves, and it erases everything that god's followers remember of them. All paladins, clerics, anyone who follows that god and relies on them for power — they're prompted to choose a different god. And when they do, they forget everything about the one they followed before."

There was a long silence after Sev spoke. Velykos continued silently in the garden, his footsteps barely so much as blending even a blade of grass — but the rocks on his body were agitated, now, the pebbles trembling against him in barely-suppressed fury.

"This would explain a lot," Velykos said. "Though you understand that this is difficult to believe without proof."

"And proof is hard to provide for something like this," Sev said with a sigh. "Look, I understand if you don't believe me—"

"The strange thing is that I do," Velykos interrupted. "I know that I should be skeptical, and yet... a part of me insists that I accept your words no matter how little sense they make. [The Walls Have Ears] kicking in, no doubt. And so I must believe that you are in fact telling me the truth. That the god that Ramos originally worshipped was not Nillea, but this Onyx that you speak of. That the god that I followed in turn was originally Onyx, until that was taken away from me, and replaced with a different god..."

Velykos' voice trailed off, and then became more firm. "Yes. The more I speak of it, the more certain I am. I have lost something crucial to me in the exchange, I think."

"What makes you say that?" Sev asked tentatively.

"Because I remember a moment in which I changed," Velykos said bluntly. "My memories still say that I follow Nillea, and that I have always followed Nillea. But there is a marked change in my behavior — a marked change in the carvings on my body, if you follow them."

Sev paid attention for the first time. Stone elementals aged by carving and eroding away at their own bodies, the designs slowly becoming more intricate with time — he'd already seen that the first time, but until Velykos had pointed it out, he hadn't noticed the way the engravings changed.

Initially, they were artistic sworls and patterns, landscapes painted in impressionistic, abstract ways. Sometimes they were clearer and cleaner, but Velykos' markings there were filled in almost like it was at the whim of an artist; it changed with his mood and with the day.

And then after a certain point — new carvings were all in the same style. It was never the exact same image twice, but there was no variation, no change of mood; a lined capture of different natural landscapes, from cliffs and canyons to sunsets and forests.

"I recall being more adventurous in my youth," Velykos mused out loud. "At a certain point, I wanted to be an adventurer, rather than work in this temple. There was no real appeal to me when it came to plants and gardening... That all came after a certain point."

"After you lost Onyx, you think?" Sev asked quietly.

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"That is what I suspect now, yes," Velykos said. "What would you say Onyx was like?"

Sev squirmed a little. "He was just... a guy," he said. "He tried to encourage his followers into doing whatever they wanted to do, within reason. Told them they could sculpt the shape of their own lives. He was a big proponent of that sort of thing."

"Nillea is a goddess of slow change and eventual growth," Velykos supplied. "They are perhaps not too different in that regard, and yet... I remember a time when I wanted with far more passion than I have now. There was a time I wanted to explore the world, as Ramos had done; to find my own inspirations and make my own sculptures..."

"Do you still make them?" Sev asked.

"I do not," Velykos said with a regretful shake of his head. "Most of my efforts are focused now on potion making, so that the adventurers who come to the temple have something that will keep them alive. And I have found that many of the other priests do not have the... delicate touch that is occasionally required for potion making, shall we say. They require my assistance."

"You sort of fell into this life, huh?" Sev glanced around at the garden contemplatively. "Are you the one that takes care of this garden?"

"I am," Velykos confirmed. "It is the source of many of our ingredients, though not all of them. Some plants cannot be sustained here, and must be grown in the wild; for those, we set quests out for adventurers to harvest them."

"I wonder if this isn't a small part of yourself trying to express itself," Sev muttered to himself. The garden did strike him as that, in a way — one half strict, labelled, orderly rows, and the other wild and unkempt and beautiful. But that seemed like a bit of a stretch.

Velykos smiled at him anyway, like he knew what he was thinking. "The garden is something I am very proud of," the stone elemental said. "But perhaps it is time that I consider taking up the adventurer's mantle again. If I am to seek answers about the god that Ramos worshipped, and the god that I may have worshipped once upon a time."

"You could just ask me, you know," Sev said, though he felt a little embarrassed saying the words. Velykos chuckled.

"I am aware," the stone elemental said. "And as I mentioned, I believe that you are correct in that I once worshipped a different god. I do not know if that god is Onyx, and if it is, I would like to search for a way to recover those memories."

"I guess," Sev said, though he frowned slightly. All this time, and he hadn't considered looking into a way to help people recover their memories of their lost god...

Well, that wasn't true. He had. But the fact was that he had very little to go on, and at the time he had been practically falling apart from the side effects of trying to heal Onyx as he was being forgotten.

"I will have to make sure that the plants are well taken care of," Velykos said, this time speaking more to himself than to Sev. "I believe there are a number of priests that show potential in that regard... I do not suppose you would be willing to care for these plants in my stead?"

"What?" Sev blinked. "I have to leave, too. My team's headed over to Elyra in a day or two..."

Sev's voice trailed off slightly as he took in Velykos' expression. The stone elemental was, in his best approximation of the word, grinning at him — though it was difficult to define what he was doing as grinning. More like an amused roll of his shoulders, a slight quirk in the rocks that represented his facial expression.

"Oh. You were joking," Sev said lamely.

"I was indeed," Velykos rumbled, amused. "Though it seems my sense of humor is something I need to work on. I appreciate your candor in informing me of all this, however. There is something to be said for knowing the truth behind the matter... and I feel a drive that I have not felt in years. I will let you know of anything I find, and perhaps I can find a way to cure the affliction that has struck so many, while you search for a way to stop more gods from being consumed by this process."

"Of course," Sev said. He'd been intending to do that anyway. But his voice came out a little weak; he was distracted by a flashing notice that had appeared in front of him.

Attachment of coalesced entity complete. Finalizing...

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