Chapter 8: Chapter 8 – Mindful Of Divinity’s Dues

We walked in an almost companionable silence for a bit, which I recognized was a kindness I didn’t entirely deserve. I’d tried to follow up with a more genuine apology, but she refused it; she’d hear my gratitude after we visited the Thousand, she said, and that was that.

It gave me an opportunity to just… look around, at least. And there was a lot to look at, even in our relatively short walk; gardens full of trellised beans with various vegetables growing under them, rows of root vegetables, fruit bushes, and a scattering of fruiting trees. Even the open ground between the quints and the building ahead, about a hundred feet of uncountably many kinds of ground-cover mosses, vines, and inch-high grasses, was fascinating.

Shame I wasn’t in a state of mind to fully appreciate it.

The Hall of the Thousand was a modestly sized building, relative to its name; far from being a cathedral, the two-story structure seemed to be a single, intricately carved piece of stone. The decorations were stunning enough to break me out of my funk; veins of what initially seemed to be dark-red wood wound their way across the otherwise immaculately white walls, curling and curling inwards in fractal patterns that seemed to be actively wrapping themselves around triangular windows, ones that shimmered with intricate geometric designs in uncountably many colors. What seemed like wood turned out to be another kind of stone, so seamlessly integrated into the other stone that I couldn’t see a single seam or join even from inches away, and from up close I could see that they were glowing subtly, visible—if barely—even in the sun of the late afternoon.

The Hall—the Thousand, rather, based on what Kelly had called it—was set into a wall, less beautiful than the building but just as impressive. It was two stories tall, transitioning smoothly into the roof of the Thousand itself, and it curved gently for a bit towards our left before running straight for a while and curving again to meld into a second building maybe a few hundred feet away, too far for me to be able to distinguish much in the way of detail.

It probably did the same thing on the other side; I’d caught glimpses of another wall there, but with our angle of approach, we weren’t seeing much of it.

There were three doors along the east side of the building, and five along the south side. The path we were on split and re-combined in a looping, swirling pattern as it approached the building, and I followed Kelly as we stuck carefully to the seamless stone. It was just wide enough that the two of us could have walked side by side, but I hung back a couple of steps behind her, not wanting to crowd her in case some tension was lingering—my own hesitation to walk by her side might have been involved in making that decision, but it wasn’t the only factor.

The door she led us to opened at her touch, swinging soundlessly wide in its six-foot-wide span despite its hefty width and solid stone construction, matching the walls. But marvelous as that was—and that mass of stone moving with such fluid, silent ease was marvelous—once I stepped inside, all thought of it fled my mind.

The Hall of the Thousand was a hall of mirrors, and something more.

I took a weak step forward, and then another. There was a mat of sorts just one more step ahead, and I finished closing the distance haltingly, looking around in wonder and no small amount of terror. Kelly was nowhere to be found, and everything about the space was utterly impossible, from its vast size to the indescribable singing chimes that filled it softly and the physical and emotional pressure of a thousand pairs of eyes noticing me.

In a moment that lasted an eternity, nearly all of them studied me as much or as little as they intended and dismissed me from their sight. Some of them were not so kind, observing me with some degree of curiosity, an observation that threatened to both utterly define and utterly annihilate me, and that was fine, for certain definitions of fine.

Two of them looked upon me and knew me, and their weight crushed down on me.

They looked upon me from faces that I knew, faces that were mine. Down to the clothing we wore, the body type, the lines of their faces, every mirror but one superficially reflected me. It didn’t help or confuse matters in the slightest, though; these were the faces of Gods, and they had simply borrowed mine in order to avoid breaking me. The sole exception was Artemis, who bore the face I had known her by in that forest glade, beautiful and wild and both cruel and kind.

She drew back her bow, or perhaps her javelin; she breathed in the cool forest air, whistling sharply to her hounds. She was a study in a hundred different motions simultaneously, every one of her facets of divinity laid out before my eyes, and my knees threatened to buckle under me as I forced myself to remain standing.

Thank you, I tried to say, but there was no mortal speech in that place. I formed the thought more deliberately instead, making of it an encapsulated, self-contained thing, a mental construct, an abstraction made real in the mind. Thank you, Lady Artemis, it said, and I dutifully offered it up, feeling the thing coalesce and drift away with something like the same feeling I’d gotten interacting with the System.

I was prepared to be chastised, to be corrected. I had, after all, erred; when Kelly had told me that I should pay my respects, it took her mixture of pleading and gently beating me over the head with the you’re-clueless bat for me to come here. And if it was the expected ritual, I knew that the penalty for disrespecting it could be anything from forgiveness to my death, based on the capricious stories of Gods I’d grown up with and the equally capricious people who worshiped them.

Her indifferent dismissal, almost but not quite a judgment that I wasn’t worth her notice, was worse than I had expected. Her attention, the manifestation of her presence, had in it a proportion of disappointment that was as a droplet is to an ocean, but for a moment I was drowning in it.

I tasted it, and knew what my failure was, how much of the past day I had taken for granted. Breathing deep, I began anew; not a single thought, not an encapsulated message driven by duty, but an open mind and an open… heart, for lack of a better word.

Thank you, Lady and Lord, Artemis and Hephaestus. I felt both their attentions on me now, a physical weight that threatened to drive me to my knees. He’d been there all along, and had just been so much more subtle, so much less obvious about his presence that I’d guessed. Exulting in having guessed right, I bent my knees, bowing until I was just past horizontal, and then straightened. I sing your praises, Lady and Lord; in word and deed, now and in days to come. Thank you for leading me to peace, and granting me this opportunity to reach for a better life, for gladness and ease.

The words came easily, but they always had. It’d been seventeen years since I’d prayed, but that wasn’t enough to erase the previous twenty two. Still, the words, despite my best meditative efforts, weren’t entirely heartfelt.

Twenty two might not erase seventeen, but it leaves its share of scars.

You rescued me from the life I had trapped myself in, and forbore to levy on me the punishments you might have; and instead, you blessed me with health and well-being and a chance at a better life, to a hundred and twenty or beyond.

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It didn’t even take much adapting, with most of the concepts of the prayer I’d dutifully mouthed applying comfortably to this new one, old words repurposed to more heartfelt use. In this new language, for this day, they were no longer ash in my mouth.

Mostly.

Lady and Lord, you have granted me favor in excess of my deserts, I have traveled far by your hand, and if here I live and love and learn, and travel no farther, may my deeds find favor in your eyes.

Bless you, Lady Artemis, Goddess of the hunt and protector of women and girls, who sees in me a woman made in your image. Bless you, Lord Hephaestus, God of all crafts and handiworks, bringer of light, who safeguards my body.

Blessed are you, Lady and Lord, who hear my prayer.

There was something… missing, and I felt it when I paused. Something expectant, like I was forgetting the last verse of a song, like I was missing one particular—ah. I hesitated for a moment, then remembered something Kelly had said, and began before I could second-guess myself.

It was only proper. After all, I actually had something to be thankful for.

Bless you, Abounding Gods in your multitude, and bless us also, whom you have created, and sustained, and enabled us to reach this day.

Their attention lifted from me with a blended sort of contentment, less even than the disappointment that had crushed me earlier. It still elated me beyond measure, flowing through me and leaving no true memory in its wake, only an intellectual understanding of what I’d felt.

I knew this to be a mercy, and still wept for it.

When I opened my eyes, Artemis was gone. She’d left behind an understanding, a fragment of knowledge that seeped into my… my soul, for lack of a better word. It was a whisper-quiet slice of an idle thought from just one of her thousand facets, but it hollowed me out as it moved through me nonetheless. It took long moments for sense to return to me enough to put what it said into words, and it was this: that she wasn’t displeased, and didn’t hold a grudge; that she had enjoyed that time in that place by the woods, and if I chose to dedicate my first arrow of every hunt to her until I made a perfect shot, that was up to me.

I won’t claim to have been a genius, but I wasn’t such an idiot that I’d ignore a hint like that.

Hephaestus was still there when I pulled myself back together. His presence was different from hers; where she was a facet of an unbelievably vast power, and still overwhelming regardless, he was a breath of fire and a swing of a hammer, a strike of a chisel and the scrape of a saw. All at once, they would be suffocating, a deafening clamor alongside a malodorous melange of glues, paints, pigments, and sulfur. But they came one at a time, fading one into the other, and he didn’t speak or wash away my self with a tidal wave of concepts so much as imbue each strike and stroke with meaning.

A flaw in iron, a flaw in glass, a flaw in wood. What are you?

I breathed in a ragged breath, awareness starting to trickle into my body. I’d sat down at some point, cross-legged, and my legs were sending pins and needles up to my brain, as were my fingers. I pushed all of that aside and attended to the sound of the forge, listening to the epiphanies it contained.

Flaws in materials differed per material. Hephaestus was the God of craft, of artisans, of masterworks, so he wasn’t suggesting that an uneven cast iron pan is still largely fine, an imperfect glass can still be drunk out of. To him, a flawed piece of wood was not something that you incorporated into your construction somewhere hidden, where the weakness wasn’t a structural problem; you cut it down, maybe, if the grain permitted and you could get something smaller but now perfect, or you disposed of it.

A flawed piece of glass could be re-melted, if you got to it early enough and there weren’t too many additives; iron, through fluxes and other means, could be purified in the working.

I’m a bunch of coping mechanisms in a trenchcoat, trying to reforge myself in mind and body to be better. I’d like to think I’m iron, Hephaestus Ærgastír.

There was, in the air from the bellows, a note of approval. It takes fire to change, because it’s fire that makes us malleable; but it takes more than that. It takes work and time and help, and you need more than fire; you need… whatever the equivalent of adding carbon is, and quenching, and around then is when I realized that the moment was gone, and the mirrors were dark in the Hall of the Thousand.

I stood, marveling at the ease with which I could move, and promptly lost my footing as the mat shifted out from under my feet. Laughing at myself, brushing the momentary pain off my hands, I stepped out into the light with a quiet contentment and a thrumming sense of purpose.

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