"Gods, you're disgusting."
"Realization often is," Halasar replied with a shrug, resuming his slow pace. "And besides, if I truly needed warmth at night, I'd sooner stuff my trousers with live embers than risk waking up beside you and finding a dagger between my ribs and a poem carved into my spine."
She rolled her eyes, but there was a genuine chuckle beneath it. "You're lucky I have a weakness for cryptic lunatics."
"And you're lucky I've already seen how this ends," he replied, smiling without mirth. "Otherwise I might've been tempted."
Another silence followed—but it wasn't awkward this time. It pulsed with something else.
Respect, perhaps. Or recognition.
Because for all her bravado and for all his riddles, they both knew how lonely it was to walk ahead of the world—he, because he had already walked through too much of it, and she, because she kept setting it on fire just to feel seen.
And somewhere behind them, far back at the tavern—where laughter had once peeled the paint from the walls and vulgar songs had danced through smoke—the noise had died.
All that remained now was Echo and Ember, the tavern's light reduced to a faint orange smear across the darkness. And in its absence, shadows stirred.
Not loud. Not fast.
But deliberate.
As if something had been waiting just beyond the edges of the merriment, biding its time like rot beneath polished stone.
Because when desire fails and the spectacle fades, destiny begins to whisper. And neither of them—not Veliranya, not Halasar—was walking away untouched by it.
The road stretched before them, winding like a scar through the low hills east of the village. Crickets hummed in the grass. The wind rustled through the skeletal trees lining the roadside—bare, blackened silhouettes that clawed at the moonlight.
Above them, the sky yawned open—an ink-black ocean speckled with silver. The moons hung in quiet vigil, one bright and full, the other a dying crescent, casting a cold glow across the land. Stars pulsed like old runes in a sleeping temple, unmoving, eternal, and uncaring.
Veliranya looked up, still walking, her voice softer now, drawn from something real and unguarded.
"Stars sure look clean tonight."
Her words drifted like fog. Not meant to impress. Just true.
Halasar did not look up immediately. He kept walking, the tap of his staff against stone counting time like a sacred metronome. Then, with a faint grunt, he paused, lifted his head, and finally spoke.
"Do they not even when they don't seem to?" He said, his voice as fragile and sharp as old paper.
She glanced sideways.
He smiled, barely.
"The stars are always shining," Halasar murmured, "even when the sky hides them."
The words fell between them like a prayer wrapped in quiet certainty. And for a moment, Veliranya didn't respond.
The wind picked up, brushing her sweat-dried skin, tugging at the frayed edges of her silks. She folded her arms beneath her chest, looking skyward again. The moon cast her in silver-blue, painting shadows beneath her collarbones, her jaw sharp as obsidian.
The sky was impossibly vast.
And yet it felt closer, somehow, with Halasar standing there.
As though the stars—those icy witnesses to history and sin—had leaned in just a little, curious about the old man with the crooked staff and the wild Greystone daughter walking under their indifference.
His presence didn't warm the night. It didn't chase away the shadows.
It bent the world.Slightly inward.As if the road itself leaned toward him.
Veliranya's steps slowed, her silks rustling in the breeze, frayed edges fluttering like torn banners behind her. She stopped mid-path, boots scuffing against a scatter of moss-dusted cobblestones, her arms crossed beneath her chest as she gazed skyward again.
The stars shimmered.
Not softly.
But coldly.
Diamond-hard. Silent. Endless.
"Even if I fuck it all up down here…" she murmured, the words nearly lost to the wind. "The stars still shine like they don't care."
Her voice wasn't bitter.
Not this time.
Just... hollow. Curious. Worn at the edges.
Halasar's head tilted slightly, beard rustling as the beads tied into its length clinked like wind chimes in a ruined temple.
His smile widened—not kindly. Not cruelly.Just… ancient.
"That's the secret, girl," he said. "They don't."
He tapped his temple with one long, knotted finger, the nail yellowed, the joints swollen with age and old magics that still whispered behind his pupils.
"And that is what makes their light honest."
Veliranya turned her head slowly toward him, eyes narrowing—not in defiance, but in search.
She wasn't angry.
Just uncertain. Like a knife unsure of what it should cut next.
Her lips parted, but she said nothing.
And there, beneath a sky so vast it had outlived empires, beneath moons that had witnessed gods die and rise again, Veliranya Greystone felt small.
Not powerless.Not broken.
Just small.
Like a spark trying to understand the fire that birthed it.
Halasar saw it. He always did. But he didn't gloat. He didn't comfort.
He simply breathed in the night air—deep and slow—then looked skyward with her.
His voice came next, soft but resonant, carried with that strange gravity only the very old and the very wise can summon.
"But it's all right that the stars are indifferent."
His staff thunked once into the earth beside him.
"Because once... a star burned with kindness. With compassion."
His eyes weren't on the heavens now.
They were distant. Inward. Remembering.
"He burned himself willingly, knowing he would never be thanked. Never be seen. Not really. Because the people he gave light to were too far below. Too limited. Too finite to even look up and recognize the shape of his sacrifice."
The wind grew still.
Even the branches in the skeletal trees stilled—thin and brittle like the broken fingers of dead gods. The breeze that had moments ago swept through the cracked stone path and tugged playfully at Veliranya's silks now went silent, retreating like an audience falling hush before a final act.
The stars didn't twinkle. They burned, quiet and remote, like cold witnesses to things too ancient to feel anymore.
And Halasar's voice hung in the air like a curse sung in reverence:
"He burned anyway."
He paused.
The kind of pause that came after memory, not before it.
"And even now, that star is still burning. Long after those he gave warmth to turned to dust and forgot his name."
Veliranya swallowed, but her throat caught.
Her hands, once confident and roaming with tavern-born charm, now rested still at her sides, fingers curling slightly as if grasping at something invisible—a tether she hadn't realized was there, fraying in the dark.
She didn't cry. There was no drama. No breakdown.Only stillness.
And that quiet, creeping cold that rises through the ribs like the breath before regret.
She looked back at the stars—those burning gods of distance—and spoke, not in jest, but as if something ancient inside her was finally allowed to speak aloud.
"Love is a fucked-up thing."
Her voice cracked on the edge of a bitter laugh."Beautiful… but fucked up."
Halasar didn't smile. He didn't mock. He simply walked beside her in silence for a few steps before answering.
"Yet it's greater than those stars we can't touch."
His voice was low, almost reverent, like he were reciting scripture written on the skin of the world.
"Love isn't good. Love isn't bad. Love is a force."He gestured upward with the gnarled tip of his staff, tracing invisible shapes in the sky."A gravity that pulls. That bends. That devours and gives. It doesn't ask for your soul—it takes it. Makes you forget what's right. What's wrong? Until you're no longer choosing."
The path beneath them dipped into a hollow where the moonlight pooled like liquid silver. Wildflowers—ghost-white and moon-fed—grew in cracked stone gutters, swaying not from wind but from memory.
Halasar slowed, planting his staff into the earth with a dull thunk.
"The greatest sin ever committed," he said quietly, "was not born of hate. Not greed. Not envy."His amber eyes found hers again, older than sand, deeper than gravewater."It was born of love."
Veliranya didn't speak. She couldn't.
"That star's will to keep burning?" Halasar continued, his voice low, dry like the pages of a sacred book sealed away too long."It never ended. Not because it was strong. Not because it was brave. But because it was cursed."
He came to a stop near the edge of the path, where the earth fell away into a gentle slope covered in whisper-grass—silver blades that shimmered like moonlit hair as the breeze stirred them into a soundless wave.
His neck tilted back, bones cracking slightly under the weight of centuries. His amber eyes lifted to the sky, scanning the constellations with slow, almost mournful calculation. As if he knew where that cursed light lived… but couldn't quite point to it.
"Cursed by love."
His voice thinned then, drawn out like a dying flute note echoing down a cathedral's hollow spine. It wasn't sadness. It was reverence, threaded with something rawer—regret, perhaps, or witness.
"But that love… made it the brightest in all the cosmos."
A beat passed.
"Even if no one ever stayed long enough to appreciate it."
The words dropped like ash from a sacred flame, dissolving before they hit the ground.
Veliranya's expression shifted—her lips parting as if to laugh, but something gentler, quieter, held the impulse back. The heat of the tavern, the sweat of skin, the sound of her name shouted in lust—it all felt like another life, another self.
She tilted her head toward him, her voice soft but edged with curiosity.
"You seem quite fascinated by that star."
Her arms crossed, but it wasn't the old pose of seduction. It was the kind you used when you were trying not to feel too much.
Her eyes flicked up to the stars, blinking slowly."We're not talking about a big glowing sphere anymore, are we?"
Halasar gave a sound—half sigh, half chuckle, the kind old storytellers made when someone guessed too close to a truth they weren't supposed to hold yet.
"Maybe," he said, shoulders lifting slightly in a motion older than sarcasm. "Maybe not."
He turned, the beads and tokens in his beard clicking together like the counting of moments.
"Maybe you'll see it one day," he added, his voice dipped in mystery, "that star."
He glanced back at her then, and in that fleeting look, Veliranya saw it—a flicker of something deep in his eyes. Pain, maybe. Longing. Or memory.
A soul branded by something distant and no longer reachable.
A silence stretched between them as the wind sighed once more through the skeletal trees, lifting Veliranya's tousled hair just enough to brush against her jaw like a lover's hesitant touch. Stray strands clung to the corners of her lips, which she lazily blew away without raising a hand. The moonlight traced the angle of her cheekbones, casting her in silver and shadow, a queen dethroned and re-crowned by night itself.
She didn't answer at first.
She simply looked upward—into a sky that, only an hour ago, had meant nothing more to her than decoration. Now it watched her, cold and patient, each star a window she couldn't close, each glimmer a reminder that even the cruelest heavens never blinked.
Beside her, Halasar did not press. He stood as he always did—weathered, quiet, staff rooted to the earth like it grew from his hand, eyes watching her not like a father, not like a priest, but like a historian taking note of a slow-burning fire.
Then, at last, he asked—not unkindly.
"Did you not love someone?"
The question was a whisper more than a challenge. A thread in the wind.
Veliranya's brow twitched. Her lips quirked—not in defense, but amusement.
"My sister," she said, tone edged in dry velvet. "I love her, despite our... moments."
She chuckled low in her throat, shaking her head like a woman brushing cobwebs from memory.
"You could say we're 'Holy and the Hole.'"
Halasar raised one brow faintly. He didn't interrupt.
Veliranya pressed on, a smirk blooming on her lips as she stared out into the night, boots grinding lightly against the gravel.
"Oh, Mellirion. The saint. The ice queen. Lady Closed Legs of the North."Her voice became theatrical, almost singsong. "She walks like she's above sin, smells like rosewater and prayer scrolls... speaks like she never touched herself before her wedding."
Then the shift came—a tone quieter, heavier, less playful.Admitting without really meaning to.
"But I know her."
She looked down, biting gently at her bottom lip, then let the truth slip out in her particular way—painted with vulgarity, but carved from something real.
"I've seen the look on her face."
A beat. The wind held its breath again.
"When she walks to the academy through the city gates at first light... and sees the common men bathing at the pump. Dirty. Shirtless. Some of them with scars, others with mouths like back-alley thieves. Real filth."
Her laugh was a soft snort, but her eyes didn't glint.
"And she stops. Pretends to fix her glove, or admire the trees. But I've seen it. The tightness in her mouth. That little pause before she keeps walking. She wants it. Not the men. Not even the sex. Just..."
She made a small, helpless motion with one hand.
"The lack of control. She's always been tethered. Restrained. But inside? She's coiled like a storm."
And then, the dagger came—slipped between syllables like a sigh.
"If a throne were ever made of cocks, Mellirion Greystone may never stand from it."
It wasn't said with hate. Nor pure spite.
It was recognition. A sister knowing her sister.Mocking, yes. But beneath it, maybe even protective.
---
The chamber was silent, save for the faint scratch of ink and the low whisper of parchment turning beneath gloved fingers. Greystone Mansion's eastern library sanctum was lit by flame-globes suspended in arcane latticework overhead—glass spheres tethered to thin chains, each containing a slow-burning fire fed not by oil, but by residual mantra sparks, siphoned from old battlefield relics.
The air smelled of aged vellum, dried myrrh, and something fainter—metallic, like ozone.
Books surrounded her like walls. Endless spines of leather-bound scripture, scholarly volumes, personal grimoires from long-dead kings and heretic priests, stacked upon each other like layers of sediment. The shelves climbed up the stone walls to disappear into shadow near the vaulted ceiling. Tucked between the stacks were relics—fossilized mantra crystals, broken scribe-golems, and one ancient shrine sealed in obsidian glass, still humming quietly as if it dreamt.
At the long obsidian table, beneath a window glazed in frosted sigil-glass, sat Mellirion Greystone.
She wore a high-collared robe of deep pearl-gray, embroidered in gold mantra-syntax that glimmered faintly as her lips moved. Her hair was tied back in a braid that coiled around her left shoulder like a serpent of bronze silk. A crystal stylus floated at her right side, hovering steadily, awaiting dictation.
Before her, a thick volume lay open on its spine—its pages crinkled and scorched slightly at the edges, ink shimmering with resonant glyphs that rearranged themselves as the page was turned.
Her voice was low, deliberate, but laced with awe as she recited the passage aloud.
"Mantra is an energy that predates all… it is the source of mathematical possibility and impossibility—every entity that has ever existed, could exist, or should never exist."
Her eyes flicked across the page. Her breath fogged faintly in the cold.
"Mantra is formless, directionless, and unbound. It comes from beyond our local spacetime—from a source unreached, unimagined."
A pause.
"The Aetherian Theology calls this source 'برترین خالق'—the Supreme Creator of all."
She looked up briefly. Across the table, her father sat.
Lincoln Greystone, motionless in a tall chair of carved duskwood, robed in black and deep oxblood, sleeves rolled to the forearms. His face was lit only by the flickering fire-globes, casting half of it in warm light, half in stone-still shadow. He said nothing, but his fingers were steepled beneath his chin.
"But most acclaimed scholars outside the theology denounce this belief as 'possible propaganda.'"
She smirked faintly at that part, but kept going.
"Mantra is infinite. It contains not just all real infinities, but also imagined ones—ones that never were, or could never be, yet still shimmer just beyond perception."
Her voice grew quieter, almost reverent.
"And it comes from somewhere else. Somewhere not here."
The air in the room shifted.
Even the fire-globes flickered once.
"Everything comes from mantra," she continued, "and everything will return to it. All matter, all thought, all soul. When form is exhausted, it collapses inward—not into nothing, but back into the source."
She stopped.
The glyphs on the page shifted, coiling inward like ink bleeding through memory.
A silence followed—deep and deliberate.
Then she looked to her father.
He gave her a single, slow nod.
Not dismissive.Not automatic.It was a nod like a seal on a gate—measured, absolute, earned.
"Your nods are quite detailed," she said dryly, folding the page back with care.
Lincoln smiled faintly—barely enough to be seen.
"You've read the surface of it," he replied. His voice was a rough whisper, but it carried like stone dropped in water. "But mantra is not meant to be understood with the mind."
He raised a hand, and one of the glyphs hovering above a nearby brazier unraveled itself into a sigil of flame—not hot, but humming.
"It must be felt. Like regret. Or death."
The last glyph—an amber spiral twisting through layered flame—flickered one final time, then unraveled into smoke, its threads dissolving mid-air like breath in winter.
Mellirion sat back in her tall stone-backed chair, the weight of his words sinking into her like cold water soaking silk. She did not speak right away. Her eyes drifted over the page again—not to re-read it, but to measure the space between the lines. Where the silence lived.
Because what they studied in this room wasn't theory.It was trespass.
Mantra wasn't a tool. It was a presence.One that allowed itself to be borrowed. Never owned.
And no one who reached too far into its coils ever returned the same.
Lincoln remained seated across from her, the crackling of a mantra ember in the hearth casting long, slanted shadows across his robes. His voice cut through the silence again, steady as stone sliding into place.
"Most people…" he began, slowly, deliberately, "can only heal wounds. Create fire. Ice. Lightning. Sometimes illusions. A few of the more curiously blessed can influence fate. Disease. Pestilence."
He waved one long, ink-smudged finger, tracing an invisible thread in the air as he spoke.
"In a very minor way. But enough to, say… increase your chances of winning a game of Drent by ten percent."
Mellirion raised an eyebrow, the corner of her mouth twitching in restrained amusement.
"All that power. Just to cheat at dice?"
"You'd be amazed," Lincoln murmured. "Greed makes fools of kings. But even fools are dangerous when they understand enough."
He stood now, slow and deliberate, robes whispering around his legs as he approached the glowing sigil-brazier beside the table. He held a hand over the flame—not too close, but close enough that the fire bent slightly in his direction, as if drawn to him.
"There are ways to increase how much mantra a being can contain," he continued. "One of the most significant… is by becoming a Local God."
That phrase rang through the chamber like a bell chime beneath the skin.
Mellirion's eyes lit, pupils narrowing slightly as her elven ears perked subtly at the word. There was something ancient in her bloodline that responded to that word. God. She sat forward slightly, fingers tightening around the edge of her chair.
"Hmm… what's that, Father?"Her voice was casual, but her breath had slowed. Measured.
Lincoln smiled faintly at her change in posture. He knew that tone—the tone of a daughter who knew how to draw blood from knowledge.
He turned from the brazier and stepped toward one of the glass cases at the edge of the room—a cabinet filled with religious tomes, sigil-bound theology books, and half-burned scripture scrolls stitched with mantra thread.
"Local Gods," he said, "are divinities formed not by birth… but by belief. They are gods only to some—tied to a region, a sect, a single nation or faith."
He opened the cabinet with a soft click. The scrolls inside glowed faintly, as though stirred by the air.
"Most are born when a prophet begins to spread a new religion… or when a person, living or dead, becomes so tightly associated with an idea that they become a symbol. And if enough people believe that symbol is divine… it becomes divine."
He turned to her.
"The power doesn't come from divinity. It comes from narrative. From consensus. From collective unconscious."
Mellirion exhaled slowly, her emerald eyes flicking toward the floating stylus still hovering nearby, now motionless in air. Her mind began to race—not with awe, but with possibilities.
Lincoln went on.
"The Aetherian Pantheon—Aerion, Aeron, Parvat, Nomolos, and the rest—they are all Local Gods."
He moved to the tall arched window beside the lectern, pulling back the velvet drape to reveal the valley beyond—Greystone Divide, buried in moonlight and silence. The faint orange glow of distant hearth-fires burned like scattered embers across the slopes.
"They're immortal. Ageless. Their bodies, if they even have them anymore, exist as pure narrative constructs. They are bound to concepts. Justice. Renewal. Memory. War. Each one associated with a sphere of reality. Some can create entire manifolds—pocket worlds that function according to their own rules."
His voice dropped slightly, more contemplative.
"They no longer carry mortal caps. No limits on how much mantra they can channel. Not because they're made differently… but because belief peeled the lid off their vessel."
He looked at her—direct, eyes glinting like polished obsidian.
"But every god has a weakness."
Mellirion's lips parted slightly.Her heart thudded once.
Lincoln turned from the window, stepping back into the firelight.
"They're tied to belief.Lose that, and you lose everything."
He gestured to the tomes scattered across the table.
"The Aetherian gods are the strongest of all the Local Pantheons because their worship is widespread. Their power is tied to numbers. Devotion. Memory. Story."
He folded his hands behind his back.
"Kill a god's name in the minds of its followers… and you kill the god."
Mellirion sat very still now.
Her eyes were unfocused—not lost, but calculating.A mind used to war, to politics, to legacy—*now considering godhood not as myth, but as strategy.
She leaned back slowly in her chair, the fire-glow catching in her eyes like shards of green glass.
"And here I thought the throne was the highest seat in the world," she murmured.
Lincoln didn't smile.
"The throne is for those who need to rule the living," he said."Godhood is for those who intend to outlive them."
The room went silent again, the flame-globes pulsing once like heartbeat echoes in the stone.
And outside the tall windows, the stars continued to burn—Unblinking.Unmoved.
Watching.
The words hung heavy in the air, drifting like cinders above the cold stone floor of the Greystone Sanctum.
"But Local Gods have a weakness," Lincoln said again, his voice low, as if even the walls might betray them if he spoke too loud. "They are tied to belief."He turned slightly, letting the firelight cast half his face in shadow, the other painted in orange flame that danced across the age lines under his eyes."The Aetherian pantheon is the strongest because of that—because their worship is wide. Global. Woven into language, law, custom, and time."
He paused. His gaze moved to the large arched window to the east, where the moons hung low, twin silver coins over the black velvet valley. The stars beyond looked impossibly far.
A faint smirk tugged at Mellirion's lips as she returned her eyes to her notes.
But across the room, resting one leg over the other on a low reading chaise, Veliranya was sprawled, as usual, in a half-improvised version of leisure—her silks unfastened at the neck, hair loosely tied with a ribbon that had long since begun to unravel.
She raised a brow, eyes gleaming with mischief.
"Should I grow and become the Goddess of Books?" she said, stretching, her voice honey-thick and playful."Saint Veliranya, patron of papercuts and overdue scrolls."
Lincoln didn't even turn his head. His reply was dry as sand.
"Veliranya could more likely become the Goddess of Sex or something equally chaotic."
Mellirion snorted despite herself.Veliranya smirked wider, reclining backward like a cat who knew the world would burn for her amusement eventually.
"That's actually not a bad title." She laced her fingers behind her head. "Could start my own pantheon. A temple where moaning is prayer."
Lincoln gave her a flat glance—an expression carved of weathered patience.
The air within the Greystone library pressed in like a cathedral left to rot.
Dust lay heavy upon every polished surface, not loose but embedded, like old grief refusing to be brushed away. The windows, tall and iron-framed, trembled faintly in their stone sockets as the night wind scratched along their panes with the insistence of forgotten names. Somewhere in the rafters, something stirred—too heavy for a bird, too irregular to be the settling of timber. The silence was not quiet, but laden—pregnant with things unspoken and truths too old to scream anymore.
Beneath the flickering convulsions of the oil-lanterns, which cast their greasy light in irregular sways upon the walls, Lincoln's shadow wavered like a condemned man's reflection in holy water.
He stood before the eastward mural, and Mellirion—seated still, spine upright yet slowly unraveling beneath the weight of his words—could not help but feel that he, not the mosaic goddess before him, was the one judging the cycles of life.
The mural was old—older than memory, perhaps older than the faith it once served. The figure of Aerion, mother of forests and shepherdess of wombs, was rendered not in glory, but in inevitability. Her eyes—stone-chipped but still somehow aware—watched not forward, but down. Her expression was not divine. It was tired.
Around her danced a fawn in endless pursuit of itself—each pawstep aging it, the child becoming the stag, the stag losing its crown of horns, the beast fading to bone and gristle beneath the hungry jaws of wolves carved from black-veined obsidian. The wolves were stylized, but the red pigment of their eyes had not faded. They still glowed, even now, faintly, in the sputtering light.
Lincoln's voice returned—low, more exhale than speech. But it scraped across the walls like rusted shears cutting vellum.
"They hate themselves, Mellirion. The gods. Not for what they are, but for what they were… and what they can no longer stop becoming."
The air smelt of aged parchment, scorched oil, and the faint tang of copper—like old coinage buried too long in damp earth. A waft of myrrh, stale now, still clung to the folds of the old priest-robes stacked in the alcove behind her. The scent turned her stomach. Something about it always had. It reminded her of absolution bought, not earned.
Veliranya had gone quiet.
Too quiet.
She lounged—ostensibly. But Mellirion knew that posture well: relaxed limbs, alert fingers. Always listening. Always waiting to pounce.
And yet even she did not jest now. Not with the mural watching.
Lincoln's hand—scarred from ink burns and old glyph-channelling—lifted to touch one corner of the glass-tiled pillar where the stag's antlers turned brittle, curling like dead vines. His fingers paused there. Pressed.
"They call it Moksha, the release. A word sewn with hope, used to cover despair."
He turned now, slow and deliberate, the hem of his robe whispering like dry leaves against marble.
"And those who do not seek escape?" he continued. "Those who refuse to unravel?""They climb."
His eyes met hers—not like a father, but like a scholar delivering her the final page of a heretical thesis she had never been meant to read.
"They seek the Cradle of the Old Ones. Where narrative loses shape. Where time isn't memory, but hunger."
The words clung to her skin. She felt colder, though the flames had not dimmed.
"There they are reborn," he said, "not as gods, but as... something else."
He did not name them. He didn't need to.
Something in the back of Mellirion's throat tightened—not fear, not quite. But an ancestral dread. The kind passed not through blood, but through old languages written on bones beneath temples that no longer stood.
"And from that cradle…" Lincolin whispered, turning again toward the flame, "some rise further still. Their names unspoken. Their eyes never closed. Not even in sleep."