She lit the incense, standing back and taking in the small glow. The room was dark around her, windowless and unlit, apart from the two candles and the pile of incense.
She clasped her hands together and nodded to the shrine, before turning and leaving. There were no pictures here, no paintings or offerings of food. Simply the two candles and the scent of winter.
She locked the door behind herself, unconcerned about the risks of fire or theft. The building was built of strong stone and not much else. The small… She hesitated to call it a temple, but that was where she was. The small temple was empty except for her and her companion, abandoned in the middle of a forest, long overgrown. She had to fly here on feathered wings to even find the place.
Worship of the Gods was not advised under most circumstances. When they had taken over from the previous pantheon several hundred years ago, they had made that clear. Worship was forbidden.
People still did it a little. Nobody would comment on the empty dog basket, sitting in the corner of a room that had never known a dog, or the twisted bundle of sticks in the back of the fireplace. If your grandma set an extra place at the table sometimes, well, that was just grandma.
When times were bad, nobody would judge you for calling out to the Gods for help, but it wasn’t spoken about out loud, apart from around campfires late at night.
And maybe in temples in the middle of the woods.
The building was made of white marble, and designed in a strange style, with fluted columns leading up to a bare, triangular roof. The bare roof still unsettled her a little, even after all these years. It wasn’t often you would see a roof that was un-planted, never mind sloped at such an angle, and the lack of greenery on it stirred a primal weirdness inside her. On top of that, it was untouched by the normal pitting you would expect on a structure like this, despite the fact she knew it to be hundreds, if not thousands of years old.
The front door was plain, untreated wood and was in the same condition as it had been the first time she’d found it, many years before.
It had taken her almost a month to work out the lock on the door, taking lock-picking classes in the shadier parts of town and consulting with locksmiths. She didn't doubt that she could have broken it down with force, but…
The Gods didn’t want worship, but that didn’t mean they didn’t watch what was going on, and desecrating a temple seemed like the sort of thing that might annoy them. They had left it for a reason, surely.
There hadn’t been any treasure in the room, much to the disappointment of those back in town who had helped her get it open. It had contained just the stone table, the stubs of two candles, and the scent of something she had taken years to track down. Beeswax mixed with a mixture of herbs and scents. She had searched perfumeries and soap shops for many years, coming up bare, but clean. It wasn't until she was passing through a small village, barely ten or fifteen houses, that she had found it.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The smell had been emanating from the kitchen of an elderly person. They had been sceptical of her enquiries, cleaning up what they were doing and pretending they’d been cooking dinner. But she had managed to draw it out of them, talking about what she had found, and after a long evening of talking, they had shown her the recipe and sold her a small box of candles and a handful of insistence. She had gone back the next year, and the year after that for more.
When they died, she had mourned. Then she had bought more candles from their grandchild. The recipe would never be lost, she had published it and sent copies to the great library of her childhood, but it would remain obscure and was far too much effort for her to make herself.
The old Gods weren’t spoken of much anymore, except in forgotten books. The new Gods hadn’t erased their memories or records, it was more like a new regime taking over. People rarely clung to the memory of an old leader, especially if the new one was better. They simply got on with their lives, and day to day life was enough that within a few generations they were forgotten by all.
She came back here once a year or so and left her offering. She was convinced that the Gods had saved her once when she was a small child, lost and alone, and this was her way of paying it back.
They didn’t want worship, but maybe they needed it. The Old Gods certainly had, insisting on chants and mnemonics and whispered prayers. It had taken a few generations and a number of small but public humiliations for those to die out, but they had.
She wondered if it had been better after they were gone. It was long, long before she was born, but she had read a lot of the older books, hidden in parts of the library that had been blocked off or forgotten about, where knowledge was still preserved, instead of being destroyed by lone fanatics and idiots. Reading between the lines, those books did not paint the divinities in a good light.
-
There was a screech from near the gate to the complex, and she walked a little faster. Ahead of the white marble building was a courtyard, clad in similar stone but not quite so untouched by time. It was covered in moss and lichen, but it appeared like local stone that had been cleared and left for a couple of years, not something abandoned for hundreds.
Around the edges of the complex were a few other buildings, none containing anything interesting, and surrounding all that, was a white stone wall. The gate to enter was carved to look like logs, two pillars with a third laid across the top, and if it wasn’t for the fact they were obviously not, she would have sworn they were real wood.
On the other side of the gate, her companion waited. A large white animal, with the legs, body and tail of a cat, but the feathers and the wings of a dove. Its face was that of an eagle, and she had no idea what sort of animal it was. She had rescued it from predators when it was only a few days old, lying broken at the base of a cliff, and they had bonded. He flew her to the unwalkable places, and in return, she gave him care and companionship.
She had tried to take him back to the place of his birth once, but it was obvious he didn’t understand, and she hadn’t tried again. For better or for worse, she had domesticated him, and he would never now be wild.
She slipped onto his back, locking her knees behind his front legs, and with a pat on his neck, they were off.
In a year or so she would come back and do the same thing all over again, but for now, her duty here was over.
-
Inside the house, the old man carefully blew out the two candles and snuffed the incense burner. He waited a minute for it all to cool, and then slipped the lot into his pockets.
No sense in letting it go to waste.